Catholic nuns in Kerala continue to demand a ban on a controversial play two months after it was staged at an international theater festival in the southern Indian state.
The play allegedly depicts them as lesbians and sexual partners of priests.
“It is so painful to see our religious life is being portrayed so nastily in a play creating suspicion about our life,” bemoans Sr. Shirly Angelos, the secretary of the Kerala state unit of the Conference of Religious India, the national association of religious major superiors in the country.
The play — “Kakkukali” — in Malayalam, Kerala’s local language, was staged Feb 5-14 at the International Theatre Festival of Kerala organized by the state government.
The play draws its title from a game played by girls in Kerala and portrays the ordeal of a young woman, daughter of a communist, after she joins a convent to become a nun, primarily to escape her family’s abject poverty.
The play is the dramatization of a short story written by Francis Noronha, a Catholic, in 2018.
Angelos, a member of the Sister Handmaids of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, says the nuns want the play banned “as it has tarnished the image of us so badly.”
Kerala, a Christian stronghold in India, accounts for nearly one-third of the country’s 103,000 religious women.
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