Table Of ContentCollected Plays
Volume One
Volume One offers four major plays from roughly the first half of
Girish Karnad’s career.
Tughlaq, an acknowledged classic of the contemporary stage, uses the troubled
reign of a fourteenth-century sultan of Delhi to presciently dramatize the
crisis of secular nationhood in post-independence India.
Hayavadatia combines a twelfth-century folktale about ‘transposed heads’
with indigenous performance traditions to offer a path-breaking model for
a quintessentially ‘Indian’ theatre in postcolonial times.
Naga-Mandala draws on the folktale about a woman with a snake lover to
explore gender relations within marriage. The play was presented by the
Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis as part of its thirtieth anniversary season.
Bali: The Sacrifice connects individual human sexuality to the historical
debate on violence in Indian culture, and received its premiere at the
Haymarket Theatre, Leicester.
‘These plays translated and performed in several languages during
the last three decades have greatly contributed to the enrichment
of contemporary theatre. Karnad’s plays have great performability;
he, in a way, is the director’s playwright.’
— Suresh Awasthi, The Book Review
‘Tughlaq is a play about the inevitability of corruption... showing
up Tughlaq’s cruel side. The play is full of allusions, resonant with
Shakespearan situations and Ibsenian modes. It combines a his
torical flavour with a contemporary relevance.’
— Ranjit Hoskote, The Free Press Journal
‘Girish Karnad makes this folk tale [Naga-Mandala] stand on its
head, letting it unfold dramatically... This is a fine play, powerful,
gripping, and exciting... It uses tradition creatively and sensi
tively... It is fast-paced, well plotted, coherent, and controlled.
The central conflict is sharply defined and brilliantly executed.’
— Makarand Paranjape, Indian Express Magazine
‘A multi-faceted personality, a man with many identities—Karnad
has been described in so many ways. Tughlaq [is]... an irreverent
look at men who ruled the destiny of people... offer[ingl parallels
with contemporary times—India after Nehru. Hayavadan... floored
theatre buffs in Germany, England, Australia and America.
Nagamandala.. .has not stopped being performed on stage round
the world since it appeared in 1988.’
— Sunday Times
\ .. There have been a galaxy of litterateurs in Indian languages
whose works can be classified as the world’s best and translated
not only in English but other languages. Girish Karnad is one of
them.’
— The Tribune
‘Hayavadana is full of humour, sly comments on politics, and
comic hyperbole... a richly layered play, intersperse[d] [with]
typical Indian elements like the folk tale... A notable achieve
ment.’
— The Hindu
Collected Plays
Volume One
Tughlaq
Hayavadana
Bali: The Sacrifice
Nàga-Mandala (Play with a Cobra)
G irish K arnad
With an Introduction by
Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker
OXTORD
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Published in India by Oxford University Press, New Delhi
Collected Plays Volume One © Oxford University Press 2005
Introduction, Volume One © Aparna Dharwadker
Three Plays © Oxford University Press 1994
Tughlaq first published by Oxford University Press 1972
Hayavadana first published by Oxford University Press 1975
Bali: The Sacrifice first published by Oxford University Press 2004
Ndga-Mandala first published by Oxford University Press 1990
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This collection of plays first published 2005
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
No performance or reading of any of these plays may be given
unless a licence has been obtained in advance from:
Girish Kamad, 697 15th Cross Rd., J.P. Nagar, Phase II, Banglaore 560 078
and no copy of the play or any part thereof may be reproduced for any purpose
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CONTENTS
Introduction by Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker vii
Tughlaq 1
Hayavadana 101
Bali: The Sacrifice 187
NàGA-Mandala (Play with a Cobra) 243
Appendices
Appendix 1: Note on Tughlaq, Hayavadana, and
Nàga-Mandala by Girish Karnad 301
Appendix 2: Note on Bali: The Sacrifice
by Girish Karnad 316
INTRODUCTION
i
Girish Karnad (b. 1938) belongs to the formative generation of
Indian playwrights who came to maturity in the two decades
following independence, and collectively reshaped Indian theatre
as a major national institution in the later twentieth century. The
work of these playwrights has a historical connection with the
modern theatre forms that emerged under the influence of Western
models in metropolises such as Calcutta and Bombay during
the colonial period. Their modernity, however, is shaped by the
unprecedented experience of political autonomy and new nation
hood, and entails a rejection rather than continuation of colonial
theatre practices. In modern Indian theatre, the years leading up
to and following independence in 1947 marked a period of
disjunction during which both the commercialism of the Parsi
stage (dominant until the 1930s) and the radical populism of the
Indian People’s Theatre Association (dominant during the 1940s)
became unsatisfactory models for the future development of
urban drama. This sense of disconnection from the immediate
past led the more ambitious post-independence playwrights to
rethink the issues of dramatic form and presentational style,
to forge radical connections with an older past as well as the
postcolonial present in India, and to put the resources of world
Vili INTRODUCTION
theatre (especially modern Euro-American theatre) to novel use.
Along with such contemporaries as Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan
Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar, Badal Sircar, Utpa! Dutt, Habib Tanvir,
G. P. Deshpande, and Mahesh Elkunchwar, Karnad is a play
wright whose work reveals a determined and self-conscious effort
towards a new Indian drama.
The members of Karnad’s theatrical generation therefore share
a number of important qualities that separate them as a group
from their precursors. In varying degrees, these authors approach
playwriting as a serious literary activity and drama as a complex
verbal art, potentially connected to, but also independent of,
theatrical practice: the play-as-meaningful-text is thus detached
equally from the genres of commercialized entertainment and
topical political performance. At the same time, they constitute
the first group of modern playwrights in India who belong
simultaneously to the economies of print and performance. All
of them have had notable success on the stage, while their work
has also circulated in print and become available for analysis,
commentary, and interpretation outside the boundaries of
performance. Each playwright is committed to an indigenous
language (rather than English) as his medium of original
composition, and hence to the literary and performative traditions
of the region where that language is dominant. But each has also
participated actively in the process of interlingual translation
that gives his plays national (and often international) visibility,
and establishes them as contemporary classics. In yet another
perspective, Karnad and his contemporaries have rendered the
role of‘dramatic author’ largely synonymous with that of‘theorist’
and ‘critic’. By advancing theoretical and polemical arguments
about form, language, style, purpose, and influence in a range of
rhetorical genres, they have offered the first fully developed, often
antithetical theories of dramatic representation and reception in
the modern period in India, and formulated competing conceptions
of the role of theatre in cultural and national life.
INTRODUCTION ix
With drama as his chosen literary form and Kannada as his
principal language of original composition, Karnad certainly
exemplifies the transformative practices of his generation, but he
has also carved out a distinctive niche for himself with respect
to subject matter, dramatic style, and authorial identity. The
majority of his plays employ the narratives of myth, history, and
folklore to evoke an ancient or premodern world that resonates
in contemporary contexts because of his uncanny ability to
remake the past in the image of the present. Karnad’s engagement
with myth (especially certain episodes in the Mahabharata)
begins with Yayati in 1961, continues in Hittina Hunja (The
Dough Rooster, 1980; rewritten in English as Bali: The Sacrifice,
2002), and culminates in Agni Mattu Mali (The Fire and the
Rain) in 1994. The line of history plays moves from Tughlaq
(1964) to Tali-Danda (Death by Decapitation, 1990) and The
Dreams of Tipu Sultan (1997). Folktales from different periods
and sources provide the basis of Hayavadana (Horse-Head,
1971), Naga-Mandala (Play with a Cobra, 1988), and Flowers: A
Monologue (2004). Anjumallige (literally, ‘Frightened Jasmine,’
1977) is the only early play by Karnad with a contemporary
setting—Britain during the early 1960s—and his most recent
work, Broken Images (2004) is the only one to be set in present-
day India. During the 1961-77 period, therefore, each successive
play by Karnad marks a departure in a major new direction and
the invention of a new form appropriate to his content—ancient
myth in Yayati, fourteenth-century north Indian history in Tughlaq,
a twelfth-century folktale interlineated with Thomas Mann’s
retelling of it in Hayavadana, and early-postcolonial Britain in
Anjumallige. In the later plays this quadrangulated pattern repeats
itself in a different order, creating a cycle of myth-folklore-history
in Hittina Hunja, Naga-Mandala, and Tali-Danda (1980-90),
and a second cycle of myth-history-myth- contemporary life-
folklore in Agni Mattu Mali, Tipu Sultan, Bali, Broken Images, and
Flowers (1994-2004).
