272 In spite of the reservations expressed at the beginning of this paper about critical conclusions, a final word should be said about the over-all technical or esthetic quality of these plays. In an article relating his experiences as one of five judges for "The Sultan Padamsee Award" {Enacts January-February 1969), which offered Rs. 5000 "for the best full-length play in English by an Indian," and drew eighty-three entries, Ezekiel noted: Reading the plays had provided invaluable insight into the minds of a representative cross-section of Indians who speak, read and write mainly or exclusively in English. It had also revealed in a drastic way the complex difficulties of play-writing, the technical hurdles to be crossed, the relentless exposure of weaknesses in the writer's inner knowledge of the stage and its conditions, the extensive demands on the author's familiarity with the speech habits of the prototypes of the characters in real life. One could apply all this in regard to Ezekiel's own plays, though they would come out, I'm sure, far stronger in regard to his criteria than the vast majority of the plays submitted for the award. For that matter, on the whole they would rank high in comparison with other Indian plays available in English, whether written in it, or translated from other languages.