The 2013 Ranga Shankara theatre festival, in Bengaluru, commemorated Girish Karnad’s 75th birthday with nine Karnad plays.
On the last day, at a symposium on ‘Politics in Karnad’s Plays’, I had attempted a critical evaluation of his works, suggesting they lacked political force as they insufficiently interrogated the nation state, unlike, say, the plays of Heisnam Kanhailal. That they remained insulated in a bourgeois despair of the “O God, what’s this country coming to?” variety — the opening line of his 1964 play, Tughlaq.
At the party that evening, Girish avoided me. Then, past midnight, as we were parting in pouring rain, he memorably said, ‘Sadanand, it was good knowing you!’ He had heard about my presentation, seriously disagreed, and was now indicating that we might never meet again.
It’s a tribute to the man that a few months later, we were across the table again at Koshy’s, sharing a laugh over something.
I’m referring to this to point out the absence of serious critical evaluation of Girish’s oeuvre, despite his pre-eminent position among modern Indian playwrights. He has, perhaps, been accorded the greatest amount of academic enquiry among them, but hardly any critical evaluation.
Why did he work with myths, fables or older histories to signal the present? It was a technique used during the latter part of the colonial regime to beat the censor through allegory – for example, Khadilkar’s Keechakavadh , a veiled attack on Curzon. However, after 1947, why did the playwright not confront the state head-on? Failing this, Girish’s theatre lent itself to being spectacularised rather than being politicised – at a time when the industrial labour movement was consolidating, sub-national dissent was emerging, and student unrest and the Naxalbari peasant uprising was imminent.
Why did his sutradhar, as a dramatic device, not have a sharper critical voice? The recurring ‘sacrifice’ motif in his plays seemingly endorses an existing value structure. The absurdist endings or non-resolutions of Hayavadana or Naga-Mandala don’t seem to address the complexities and challenges of conjugality they take up.
Who was the playwright addressing? A specific constituency or an abstract, individualised ‘Indian’ sensibility, soaked in narcissistic self-preoccupation and a sense of post-colonial inadequacy?
Girish was too much of an individual to be absorbed into the system. His independent spirit endured and grew stronger as the times grew harsher. But, to genuinely celebrate the playwright, we need to be able to pose sharper questions of him. More so, since Girish was the most influential of the Big Four playwrights of the 60s, with his sheer pan-Indian reach. Only a few scholars like Aparna Dharwadker or Samik Bandyopadhyay have come close to this. The larger work that will resurrect Girish is awaited.
(As told to Vaishna Roy)
