Victims and Witnesses in Manjula Padmanabhan Lights Out: Trauma, Paralysis and the Ethics of Spectatorship

Abstract

 This article examines the dynamics of victimhood and witnesshood in Manjula Padmanabhan's play Lights Out (1984), a foundational text of contemporary Indian English drama. Set in an upper-middle-class Mumbai apartment from which the sounds of a sustained sexual assault are nightly audible, the play stages the deliberation of four educated, comfortable spectators as they decide whether to intervene. Drawing on contemporary trauma theory (Caruth; Herman, Felman and Laub), victimological scholarship (van Dijk; Naqvi), and the ethical-philosophical work of Judith Butler and Jean Baudrillard, this article argues that Padmanabhan's dramaturgy locates the moral crisis of the play not in the unseen perpetrators but in the seen, articulate, and rationalising witnesses. Through a close reading of the play's four characters Bhaskar, Leela, Mohan, and Naina the article identifies four distinct strategies by which the ethical demand of the suffering other is foreclosed: aestheticisation, philosophical deferral, gendered discrediting, and proceduralised inaction. The study further argues that the victim's facelessness in the play is not an artistic limitation but a deliberate dramaturgical strategy that converts a single woman's suffering into an emblem of systemic injustice, while simultaneously implicating the audience as the play's final and most uncomfortable witness. The article contributes to South Asian literary studies, trauma studies, and feminist criticism by reframing Lights Out as a sustained interrogation of bourgeois moral agency in late-modern Indian urban life.