58 | ROLLING STONE | J U LY 2 0 1 9
GIRISH KARNAD
And what a presence. He had the power to command
attention with his impeccable diction, resonant voice
and intrinsic dignity. It spelt integrity; uncompromising
whether it was his writing or expressing his opinion
on matters of literature, current political situation
and freedom of expression. There are so many sides
to this multi-faceted genius. Among the most
influential playwrights of modern India — along with
Vijay Tendulkar, Mohan Rakesh and Badal Sircar all
older by little more than a decade — Karnad made
reinterpretation of mythology, folk tales and history
the most significant part of his oeuvre. Mining myths
and history can be an uncritical exercise, pandering
to popularly held blind beliefs and entrenched biases.
Karnad found stories in epics that sparked his
imagination balanced by rationality, to find deeper
meanings that would be relevant then and now. It is as if
he had been handed a tight bud of flower and felt it was
his duty to separate the whorls to release its fragrance
carefully.
This fusion of imagination and rationality, the ability
to give a dramatic structure to the play gave him an
authentic voice from the very beginning. His first play
was not just about recreating the tale of a young Puru
sacrificing his youth for his father, King Yayati, to
continue to enjoy the sensual pleasures of life. Yayati
had been famously cursed to premature ageing by
Shukracharya, the guru of the demons. And later told
that he could regain his youth if he exchanged his old
age with one of his five sons — Puru, the youngest was
the only one who agreed to help his father. The play
raised an existential question: how youth is conditioned
by patriarchy to give up individual liberty as a matter
of dut y.
Yayati comes back to haunt the reader decades
later after Karnad published his memoir Aaadadtha
Aayusha (roughly translated ‘A Life Spent Playfully’)
in Kannada. “I am now 73 [in 2011]. The last event in
this autobiography is when I walked out of the Film
and Television Institute of India (FTII). I was 37 then,”
Karnad writes. That was his reaction to the Emergency
even though he was among the select intellectuals
who enjoyed the patronage of the government. The
longish dedication (as dedications go) of this memoir
shocks us with its unsparing honesty. Karnad narrates
an anecdote that happened after his first directorial
debut Vamshavriksha (co-directed with B.V. Karanth)
won critical acclaim and awards; he was completing
his second film, Kaadu and had just been appointed
Director of FTII. “And we thought we didn’t want him,”
mused his mother proudly about Girish while his father
didn’t lift his face as they were having dinner. “Why rake
up all that now,” mumbled Dr. Karanth, a government
doctor. When Girish probed further, his mother told
him how they had contemplated abortion when she was
pregnant with him. They already had three children.
They went to a clinic in Pune, and the doctor was late.
After waiting for more than an hour, they went back
and never returned. A stunned Girish wondered: “The
thought that the universe would exist, whether I existed
or not, depressed me.” So he dedicated his autobiography
to the doctor Madhumalathi Gune, the Pune doctor who
was delayed in arriving at the clinic that fateful day.
This connects to Puru’s existential angst in Yayati
and also to Jean Anouilh whose Antigone influenced
Karnad. He saw a lot of theater in London and knew
that the living room for the emotional stripping of
characters, like Strindberg’s Miss Julie, could not be
is far ahead of his times, a visionary
misunderstood by contemporary
society and ending as a spectacular
failure. The play’s staging has become
part of Indian theater’s legendary
lore: Ebrahim Alkazi set it against
the ramparts of Delhi’s Purana
Quila and Alyque Padamsee’s
stunning introduction of Kabir Bedi
in a loincloth before he is garbed in
royal accoutrements. Tu g h l a q was
read as disillusionment with Nehru’s
lofty goals in the rebellious ‘60s, but
that is too limited. Like any great
work of theatre, Tu g h l a q lends to
contemporary readings over time.
Karnad’s other oft-performed
favourite, Hayavadana, uses dolls to
interpret the interiority of Padmini’s
dilemma: which is more important,
the head or the body for a human
being? The heads of two friends who
love Padmini — a wise scholar with
a weak body married to her and
the muscular, strong man with not
much to boast of intellectually —
have been transposed on the wrong
bodies in her panicked confusion.
The story is taken from the medieval
collection, Kathasaritsagara and
borrows from Thomas Mann’s
Transposed Heads to be told against
the framing story of a man with a
horse’s head. This creature finally
evolves into a stallion while Padmini
ponders over who her husband is.
The head might dictate, but the
body remembers touch. So who will
she choose? The use of dolls gives
the staging a lively folkloric feel,
enhancing its function as a means
to express a person’s innermost
thoughts.
Nagamandala is another brilliant challenge to a
director’s stagecraft. Stylisation and realism are woven
together for an immersive experience, which ends with
a choice of different endings to questions that are ethical
and emotional. This play drawn from a Karnataka folk
story, of a serpent visiting a locked up wife at night in
her husband’s tender loving form who is otherwise rough
and brutal during the day, explored and validated female
desire, just as Hayavadana does. Women’s sexuality and
its repression is a recurring theme in Karnad’s work. He
also wrote Anju Mallige in his Oxford days, of a brother-
sister living in contemporary England. It invokes a
Vedic story of a sister’s sexual desire for her brother,
to depict an older sister’s yearning for an incestuous
relationship with her brother. An impasse that ends
in suicide. A play rarely performed, but it indicates
Karnad’s determination to work on a taboo theme that
preoccupied him.
With Broken Images, (Odakalu Bimba in Kannada),
Karnad shows how innovatively modern technology can
be used to delve into the mind and troubled memories
of a writer: as a woman who always had to compete
with a charismatic younger sister, and a writer finally
finding greater success by writing in English instead
of Kannada. The setting is a studio surrounded bythe setting for the plays he would write. Emotional
interaction and cathartic outbursts occur elsewhere in
the Indian home. He was working towards a structure
that would use Indian classical dramatic elements,
the informality of folk tales and oral tradition that
seemingly allows spontaneity and his understanding
of the human psyche. At one point, Karnad says, his
study of mathematics (as an undergraduate student
in Dharwar, choosing it over philosophy as a scoring
subject to apply for the Rhodes scholarship) helped him
devise the structure to contain the theme and convey
its epic layers.
Again, to quote a ref lective passage from his
autobiography: “I began to understand its rhythm, its
pitch, its progression, and crescendo. Its beauty
danced in front of my eyes. A character in Aldous
Huxley’s novel weeps at the beauty of the Binomial
Theorem. Nothing is surprising about this reaction
when numbers unravel their mystical attributes wave
by wave, branch by branch. I realised the impact that
mathematics had on me when I started writing Tughlaq
in Oxford. I solved the structural issues like I would
while working on theorems. I first figured out what
internal network and relationships different aspects
and characters of the play had, what its balance at
various points was, and what happens to that balance
if the play progresses in a certain direction, just like
it happens in a theorem. The technical training I
needed to write plays came from mathematics.” (from
the translation by Sugata Srinivasaraju, journalist and
author in her essay on Karnad).
This kind of rational analysis of his creative process
is something rare in Indian literature. The result
was Tu g h l a q, a seminal landmark in Indian theater,
not just Kannada. Translated into many languages
including English (by Karnad himself, as was his
practice), Tu g h l a q made Karnad an international
name. An eminent scholar of Indian drama, Prof.
K. Marulasidappa had this to say: “There was never
a play before Tu g h l a q that had such Shakespearean,
epic-tragic proportions. Most importantly, it brought
to the fore the disciplined structure that would go on to
become one of Karnad’s greatest hallmarks.” The play
envisages the use of shallow and deep spaces, to give it
historical context and interiority of the protagonist whoThe fusion of
imagination and
rationality, the
ability to give a
dramatic structure
to the play gave
Girish Karnad an
authentic voice
from the very
beginning.