It is both apt and reductive that two images dominate others as Girish Karnad is remembered on social media: one, with Gauri Lankesh, protesting the killing of Karnad’s fellow Dharwadian, Prof. M.M. Kalburgi; the other, wearing the #MeTooUrbanNaxal placard, at the memorial to mark the first anniversary of Lankesh’s own killing. Over the past few years, Karnad was seen as one of the most consistent, fearless and principled defenders of freedom of speech, cultural diversity and democracy. In the face of death threats, he remained unfazed, and even in his frail health, he made it a point to attend protest gatherings.
Even though Karnad, unlike his older contemporary and fellow-Jnanpith awardee U.R. Ananthamurthy, did not belong to a particular political tendency (Ananthamurthy was an avowed socialist, inspired by Lohia), his commitment to democratic values meant that he often took vocal stands on issues. While many tributes to Karnad have noted that he was Director of the Film and Television Institute of India in 1974-75, not everyone noted that he resigned after the Emergency was imposed. And his taking vocal stands against the Hindu Right didn’t start in the last few years; he spoke up at least from the early 1990s onwards.
Remarkable pre-eminence
Karnad was perhaps India’s most pre-eminent playwright. He was certainly something of a prodigy. It is a truism that Mohan Rakesh, Badal Sircar, Vijay Tendulkar and Karnad form the quartet that shaped India’s post-Independence theatrical canon. Karnad was the youngest by a decade. Rakesh’s first great play, Ashadh Ka Ek Din , appeared in 1958, Sircar’s Ebong Indrajit in 1962, and Tendulkar’s Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe in 1967. Karnad’s Yayati dates to 1961, when he was a mere lad of 22. Generally, playwrights take a little longer to mature as compared to other writers. Good dramatic writing is almost impossible to achieve without the experience of working in, or writing for, a real, active theatre. Having a director take your text apart and reassemble it, hearing actors speak your lines, observing scenographers imagine the setting, having a live audience respond to your text, all teach you as much, if not more, about playwriting as watching or reading plays.
That he wrote Yayati without virtually any previous theatre experience is remarkable enough, but that he wrote it in Kannada makes it doubly remarkable. As Karnad recalled, when he set sail on a Rhodes Scholarship to England, he had fancied himself a poet who had ‘trained myself to write in English, in preparation for the conquest of the West’. Karnad knew at least five languages — Konkani, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi and English — but in a sense it did take some ‘unlearning’ for him to re-discover the language of his childhood. But clearly the ambition to conquer the West never quite left him — he not only translated his own plays into English, he also wrote original plays in English and translated them into Kannada.
And yet, for most of his playwriting career, Kannada purists scoffed at Karnad’s writing, considering it, and the author, too Anglicised. It was only when he wrote Talé-Danda , about the medieval poet revolutionary Basavanna, in a north Karnataka dialect, that finally the murmurs went down.
Karnad’s playwriting oeuvre is so substantial and varied, both in form and content, that it is impossible to reduce it to neat generalisations. For instance, he is generally thought of as someone who worked with material drawn from mythology and folklore, as well as history, initially, and only turned to an entirely different style with contemporary urban settings in his late work. However, he wrote Anju Mallige , set in England and about an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister, in an entirely naturalistic style, early in his career.
Many of Karnad’s plays are acknowledged as masterpieces. Yayati is the story of a king who pleads with his son to take on a curse given to him, the curse of old age. The son, then, for no fault of his, becomes an old man, older than his own father. Tughlaq is a study of a king so far ahead of his time that he is considered mad, and who ends his reign in bloodshed and chaos. In a sense, the play reflected the confusion that Karnad’s generation felt a decade or so after Independence, and in some ways it also presaged the Emergency. Hayavadana is the tale of a woman with a jealous husband who beheads himself, his friend who also beheads himself fearing that he will be suspected of murder, and the woman preparing to behead herself when the goddess takes pity on her and grants her a boon. She can get both men back to life if she only attaches the heads to the bodies. In her confusion, she mixes up the heads, attaching them to the wrong bodies. Which of the two is her husband, now? The man with the head, or the man with the body? Nagamandala is a story of a woman with an uncaring husband, who is visited by a cobra at night, who takes her husband’s form. The woman is surprised to find her husband loving, tender and erotic at night, but brutish and apathetic in the day. She has to prove her fidelity to the husband, and the cobra again comes to her rescue.
Student of power play
Two overarching themes stand out in Girish Karnad’s playwriting career. One is power — how it opens possibilities but also corrupts, how men fail to use it for the greater good, how it leads to brutality. The other is female desire, women’s aspirations, and the inability of men to come to terms with it. Both are political themes, and today more charged than ever.
Girish Karnad stood up and spoke out against the Hindu Right. It would only be fitting if his plays are now re-interpreted with contemporary sensibilities by younger theatre makers to fight the good fight.
Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch, Delhi, and an editor with LeftWord Books
