Page 206 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Indian Writings in Literature

Notes society. Aparna Dharwadker specifies that Karnad “employs traditional Indian narrative materials
and modes of performance successfully to create a radically modern urban theatre” (in Karnad
1995:355). Indeed, Karnad has felt challenged by the tension that exists nowadays between these
2
two realities in India, the traditional and the modern, and has thrived in developing a credible
style of social realism.
Karnad shows a great interest in the theatre as representation as well as in the incorporation of
stories which come from popular wisdom. His interest in storytelling contributes to the success of
his plays in Indian villages, as he proudly admits (Karnad 1995: 368). Karnad looks for subjects in
traditional Indian folklore, is attentive to the innovations brought about by the European
playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century, and uses magical-surrealistic conventions to
delve into the situation of the Indian men and women of today, consciously giving expression to
the concerns of people. 3
Speaking of his own work, in the introduction to Three plays; Nâgmandla, Hayavadana, Tughlaq, the
playwright tells us how the cultural tensions which remained dissembled up to the moment of
India’s independence visibly surfaced afterwards and required authors to deal with those tensions
openly (1999:3). In each of his plays the tension caused by the drama’s major conflict progressively
4
disappears, and in the case of Nâgmandla different levels of knowledge are superimposed and
different theatrical techniques are used, which permit us to discover, or at least surmise, the
possibility of transcending the conflict to achieve wholeness.
Karnad says that to create his plays he holds up a mirror in which the present society can be
reflected. However, he also incorporates elements of the collective tradition of storytelling (in
Mendoca 2003:4). As he explains in the Introduction to Three Plays:
The energy of folk theatre comes from the fact that although it seems to uphold traditional values,
it also has the means of questioning these values, of making them literally stand on their head. The
various conventions—the chorus, the masks, the seemingly unrelated comic episodes, the mixing
the human and nonhuman world—permit the simultaneous presentation of alternative points of
view, of alternative attitudes to the central problem. (1999:14).
As a playwright, he thus combines conventional and subversive modes, as is clear in Nâgmandla. 5
This play is labelled as “story theatre”, that is , theatre whose action is based on folk stories.
Karnad found his source of inspiration for this play in stories that he heard from the poet and
academic A.K. Ramanujan. Karnad explains that this type of story is told by women while they
feed children in the kitchen, but that very often these stories serve as a parallel system of
communication among the women in the family (Nâga:16-17). Consequently, the purpose of this
analysis is to discover the meaning conveyed by the protagonist of the story and to study the way
in which the author structures the play and presents and solves the conflicts. I then propose to
show that the folk stories reveal the perception a woman can have of her own reality and that, in
this sense, these stories counterbalance the classical texts and serve as means of escaping the
orthodoxy of Indian epic stories.
Focusing on the four different stories which make up the play Nâgmandla , we see that they are on
four narrative levels. The frame story contains three other stories, each one of them inside the
previous story. On the first narrative level, the frame story tells of an author whose plays were so

2. In a recent publication of Girish Karnad’s Collected Plays, Dharwadker states that Karnad belongs to the
“formative generation” of Indian playwrights who “collectively reshaped Indian theatre as a major national
institution in the later twentieth century” (2005:vii)
3. In this respect, Veena Noble Dass says that Karnad has been influenced by Brecht, Anouilh, Camus, Sartre
and to a considerable extent, Pinter (1990:71)
4. In subsequent references the play Nâgmandla will be referred to as Nâga.
5. Nâgmandla means “snake circle”

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