Page 202 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Indian Writings in Literature

Notes 24.1 Introduction to Nagmandla

Nagamandala is a critically acclaimed Kannada movie released in 1997. The story of the film was
adapted from a play of the same name written by well-known writer Girish Karnad. The movie
was directed by award winning director T.S. Nagabharana, who is deemed to be one of the ace
directors in Kannada film industry. Music was scored by C. Aswath and Srihari L. Khoday produced
the movie.
The film touches one of the most sensitive issues of marital life. In folk style and form, the film
throws open a question as to who is the husband - the person who marries an innocent girl and
indulges in self pleasures or the person who gives the real and complete experience of life.
The film stars Prakash Rai, Vijayalakshmi (kannada), Mandya Ramesh, and B. Jayashri in prominent
roles. The film is centered on three people, Appanna (Prakash Rai), his wife Rani (Vijayalakshmi)
and Naga, a King Cobra, who can assume the form of a human being (Prakash Rai).
The strong points of the movie remain the amazing acting by the leading cast and an authentic
portrayal and command on story by the director. The director has made some change to the
original play in the climax.
Nagamandala is a folktale transformed into the metaphor of the married woman. It is a Chinese
box story with two folktales transformed into one fabric where myth and superstition, fact and
fantasy, instinct and reason, the particular and the general blend to produce a drama with universal
evocations. The predicament of Rani as opposed to the name is deplorable than that of a maid. The
name 'Rani' ridicules at the Indian ideal of womanhood as the Rani or Lakshmi of the household.
As Virginia Woolf asserts in A Room of One's Own, "Imaginatively, she's of the highest importance,
practically insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover, is all but absent from history."
The woman is portrayed as dependant in all three phases of her life-as a daughter (Rani's
dependence on her parents), as a wife (Rani's reliance on Appanna) and, as a mother (Kurudavva's
handicap without Kappanna). In Indian society, the woman is said to be complete only after
marriage. However, paradoxically she neither belongs to this world or that: her parental home or
her husband's abode. For the woman, the home is said be an expression of her freedom: it is her
domain. However, Rani is imprisoned in her own house by her spouse in a routine manner that
baffles others with the door locked from the outside. She does not shut the door behind her like
Nora does in "A Doll's House", but God opens a door for her in the form of a King Cobra. The king
cobra gets seduced by the love potion provided by Kurudavva to Rani to lure, pathetically, her
own husband who turns a blind eye to her. The snake assumes the form of a loving Appanna in
contrast to the atrocious husband at day. The climax is reached when Rani becomes pregnant and
Appanna questions her chastity. Her innocence is proved by virtue of the snake ordeal that the
village elders put before her, and she is eventually proclaimed a goddess incarnate.
Appanna literally means "any man" and points to the metaphor of man in general, his chauvinistic
stance and towering dominance to the extent of suppressing a woman's individuality. Rani
endeavours to discover her individuality by seeking refuge in dreams, fairy tales and fantasies to
escape the sordid reality of her existence. At an age where the typical fantasy would be a Sultan
or prince coming on horseback, Rani's flight of the imagination transports her to a seventh heaven
where her parents wait for her. So much for her aversion to the institution of marriage. Critics
show her body as a site of "confinement, violence, regulation and communication of the victimized
gender-self". And they also point out how she later uses the same body to rebel, to subvert and to
negotiate her space in society. Appanna poses her as an adulterous woman whereas he himself
has an illicit relationship with a concubine. He and his hypocritical society questions Rani's chastity
and side-steps the validity of Appanna's principles. This is just a miniscule cross-section of the
patriarchal society that we live in. In Indian myth, a miracle has been mandatory to establish the
purity of a woman, while a man's mere word is taken for the truth; whether it be Sita, Shakuntala
or Rani in this instance.
The author also remarks of the identity of tales in general, about their reality of being and their
continuance only on being passed on. The objectivity leads us to perceive the story as a concept

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