From Pulwama to Galwan Valley, the Greek tragedy unfolding in India

The Greek dramatist Sophocles knew that slain warriors presented rulers with challenges as well as opportunities. The action of his play Antigone, first performed in 441 BC, is driven by the disparate treatment accorded to two dead combatants. The nearly 2,500-year-old tragedy feels contemporary enough to have been adapted by a number of modern writers. Jean Anouilh’s stripped-down play, also called Antigone, opened in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944; Stephen Spender’s Creon toured India in 1989 after its London debut the previous year; and Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes was published in 2004 with the Iraq war still fresh in people’s minds.

At the start of Antigone, a civil war has just concluded, with two warring brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, having killed each other leaving the throne to their uncle Creon. The new king declares Eteocles a hero to be buried with honours, and Polynices a traitor whose corpse is to be left to scavengers. Jean Anouilh’s version accentuates the arbitrariness and cynicism of Creon’s choice, having him call the brothers “a pair of blackguards, both engaged in selling out Thebes”. He informs their sister Antigone that wounds made it impossible to tell the two men apart but, needing a martyr and a villain to satisfy the rabble,...

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