Page 225 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 27: Girish Karnad: Nagmandla—Themes

Man-Woman intimate relationships, the question of chastity being imposed on married women Notes
while their husbands have a merry-go-round with other women outside their wedlock, married
women's earnest desire for the love of their husbands in spite of the shortcomings of their husbands,
the throbbing of secret love that Naga demonstrates by his killing himself on the passionate and
warm body of Rani, and, above all, the result of the sexual communion being a male child, the
"son" lighting funeral pyre and so many other potent and hidden meanings, make this play a very
complex play. The village judicial system also comes to be portrayed with ease, and with this the
process of deification in Indian society also gets revealed. Demonstration of unusual power and
tolerance is sure ground and an essential step toward deification.
We Wonder - The Audience Is Alive, and Not Dead!
In the backdrop of a folktale, which includes flames, snake, avatars, performance of impressive
ordeals, cremation of the dead snake, and the background chorus, Nagamandala comes alive with
numerous symbols, hidden meanings, and explicit and implicit lessons, even as the play bewitches
the captive audience, scene by scene. The play started with a curse of dead or non-responsive
audience, but we complete reading the play certainly as active and live audience! At the end of it
all, we still wonder whether it is the magic, characters, events, conversations, or simply the ambience
that takes us far from our mundane life even for a few hours. A master piece, indeed, from a
reluctant Master.
Girish Karnad: Nagmandla-Themes
Galaxy Identity Crisis in Girish Karnad's Nagmandla.
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

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