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"Hayavadana" - Girish Karnad

After a long hectic schedule, this Sunday I spared some time in reading an interesting play “Hayavadana” by Girish Karnad.

Girish Karnad’s plays have always fascinated me. Last year, got a wonderful chance to see Karnad’s “Nagamandala” performed by college students during Youth Festival 2015. Click here to read the review of the play.

Girish Raghunath Karnad (born 19 May 1938) is an Indian actor, film director, writer, playwright and a Scholar, who predominantly works in South Indian cinema. He  rise as a playwright in 1960s, marked the coming of age of modern Indian playwriting in Kannada, just as Badal Sarkar did in Bengali, Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi, and Mohan Rakesh in Hindi. For four decades Karnad has been composing plays, often using history and mythology to tackle contemporary issues.(Wikipedia)

Some of his well-known plays are “Hayavadana”, “Tughlaq” , “Nagamandala” and many more.






The plot of Hayavadana comes from Kathasaritsagara, an ancient collection of stories in Sanskrit, but Karnad borrowed this theme from Thomas Mann’s retelling of the story in the Transposed Heads.

Karnad’s play poses a different problem of human identity in a world of tangled relationships. The play opens with the closest friends Devadatta and Kapila – ‘one mind, one heart’. Devadatta, a man of intellect, and Kapila, a man of body. Their relation gets complicated when Padmini marries Devdatta. Kapila also falls in love with Padmini and she too gets attracted towards him. The friends kill themselves in a scene and Padmini transposes their heads, giving Devadatta Kapila’s body and Kapila Devadatta’s body.
This results in a confusion of identities which reveals the complex nature of human personality. Devadatta and Kapila suffers identity crisis and incompleteness.

The sub-plot of Hayavadana, the half horse man, deepens the significance of the main theme of incompleteness.
Karnad uses the conventions and motifs of folk tales, mythical aspects, folk theatre – masks, dolls, curtains, and the story-within-a-story – to create a strange world. It is a world of incomplete individuals, indifferent gods, world indifferent to the desires and frustration, joys and sorrows of human beings.
The horse in the play symbolizes the powerful, but monotonous rhythm of life.

Here we can also refer to Existentialism. The absurd way of life and, how we give meaning to everything meaningless around us. Existentialism implies the quest of the individual for the assertion of the self despite his limitations and failures. In the play, identity and impersonation have been played up leading to conflicts between the mind and the body. (Bala) The theme also reveals the Upanishad principle that visualizes the human body as a symbol of the organic relationship of the parts to the whole.

In India’s cultural and socio context, mind is given more importance. It is reflected through Devadatta’s dialogue in the play,
“According to Shastras, the head is the sign of a man.”

Karnad represents India’s past socio- cultural practices like Sati when Padmini commits Sati in order to prove her chastity, which was a tradition in olden days. Padmini reflects ‘Sita’ and actually all the women.

Karnad reveals the religious feelings prevalent in our society, by showing the presence of Goddess Kali. Hayavadana begins with an prayer of Lord Ganesha, who is generally worshipped first among the gods. In the beginning, Devadatta worships Kali in order to win Padmini’s hand for marriage. Later, he offers himself to the goddess by beheading himself and his friend Kapila follows suit. The Hindu rituals and superstitions are very well portrayed by showing people offering themselves to Kali. This was a practice that was followed a few eras back. Now people offer goats and animals to Goddess Kali, who is also known as the goddess of Destruction.

Karnad presented a cocktail of issues such as love, identity and sexuality with folk culture and his imagination. Karnad provides us with a sight of the past as well as its significance of understanding the contemporary world.

Works Cited

Bala, Vaishnavi. merinews. 07 01 2010. 10 10 2016 <http://www.merinews.com/article/hayavadana--a-tale-of-love-identity-and-sexuality/15793428.shtml>.


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