Naga-Mandala by Girish Karnad

Naga Mandala is a play within a play. The curtain lifts upon a failed playwright in a broken down temple who’s trying his hardest to stay awake, because he has been cursed with death if he’s unable to keep awake one whole night in the month, lamp flames which have been extinguished in the village and who have gathered at the temple to spend the rest of the night gossiping about the juicy happenings in their respective homes, and an untold story which has escaped its creator in the shape of a young woman. Voilà the stage is set, there is a story to be told, there is an audience on stage eager to be entertained, and an audience off stage equally eager to step into another world.

And when the story begins her tale we understand why it was suppressed for so long. She narrates a secret,  passionate  love affair between Rani a young, married woman in the village, and Naga (a king Cobra). Appana ,the newly-wed Rani’s husband is a brute. Day after day he locks up his bride at home and goes to meet his mistress. He only comes home for lunch when he orders her roughly to serve him food. Rani is on the point of going mad when an old village woman who was Appana’s mother’s friend gives her some roots, asks her to cook them and serve him. She assures Rani that Appana will not leave her side for an instant after having consumed them.  Rani follows her advice, but at the last moment petrified by the blood-red colour of the brew throws it into an ant-hill in front of her house, or down the throat of Naga, because it is where it/he lives.  The root does it trick, the infatuation is immediate. When darkness cloaks the earth and Appana is busy with his concubine, assured that his wife is locked up at home out of any man or woman’s reach, Naga slips into the house in Appana’s guise. Rani is nonplussed  and hopeful at his unexpected appearance. But the change in Appana’s personality, his loving words, his gentle teasing, his admiration of her beauty,  his passion for her makes her believe that she has indeed gone mad, that she is dreaming, hallucinating. The day time Appana only enforces the conviction that the night’s happenings were a dream. The night visitations continue though and Rani reconciles herself with the irreconcilable personalities of her night-time husband and her day-time husband; two different people having the same body.

Doesn’t Rani know the real nature of her nocturnal husband. She tells Naga,” Father says, ‘If a bird so much as looks at a cobra, the cobra looks into the bird’s eye with its own sight. The bird stares-and stares-unable to move its eye. It doesn’t feel any fear either. It stands fascinated watching the changing colours in the eyes of the cobra.’ But Rani’s knowledge of Naga like his visits is secret, subterranean. We have glimpses of it through certain words, sentences she says, otherwise she continues to speak to him as if he were her husband and Naga continues to pretend as if he were Appana. Their relationship is possible only in such a framework.

The play is taut with the tension created between knowing and not knowing, the uncanny and the ordinary, the day and the night. The conversations between Naga and Rani are  playful, passionate, terse, poetic, fraught with love and mystery. The climax is reached when the two worlds Rani inhabits are forced into a confrontation because of Rani’s pregnancy. Naga Mandala is wonderfully subversive. Rani unlike many Indian heroines of mythology who are virtuous till their tragic end, steps out of the framework of patriarchy, commits adultery , has to face the consequence of her actions, and finally contrary to all precedents triumphs over the system. The king cobra in India is an object of veneration and terror. It is perhaps the same ambivalence that the patriarchy feels about feminine desire and sexuality

Girish Karnad writes in the preface that the play is based on a folk tale recounted to him by K. Ramanujan. I have read Ramanujan’s collection of folk tales gathered from different corners of India. Some of them are extremely naughty, challenging the often highly moralistic and  stereotyped  images of  female sexuality, and  man woman relationships presented to us since our childhood.  

Arunima Choudhury 

Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

I usually don’t write book reviews because at the very outset I am stumped by this feeling, “Why would anyone want to read my impressions or critique of a book when he or she can access the real stuff?” But recently I read a book which I liked hugely and came across a blog called At Pemberley Life Between Pages where because of book reviews I’ve been introduced to books I’ve added to my reading list. And the combination of both makes me want to present to you Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s a book I relished because Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing is limpid, light and poignant, because Lowland like all her other work moves back and forth between different continents and cultures , though ultimately the movement is away from India and towards the  United States, and because I find in her characters reflections of my own upbringing, experiences and conflicts. And when I say I, I am just one amongst many Indians or citizens of today’s world, whose identities are the result of moving away from one’s country to another,  of growing up with diverse cultural inputs, of speaking one language at home and another with the world, of experiencing  solitude and nostalgia for a country left behind, of adapting, making space for the alien and eventually of coming to terms with the multi-faceted nature of one’s being.   

In Lowland we get to know two brothers with about a year of age difference, growing up in Calcutta. They are very close to each other and can be mistaken as twins. They do everything together. The younger brother Udayan is more daring, impulsive while the older Subhash is more cautious and patient. Their ways start diverging during their college days.  In 1967 tribal peasants in Naxalbari, a village in the north of West Bengal revolted against the feudal system of wealthy landlords who forcefully evicted them from the fields they cultivated, thus cutting them from their only source of subsistence and revenue. Their armed uprising was brutally suppressed . Udayan deeply upset and enraged by this turn of events joins the Naxalite movement which sought to empower tribals and peasants,The movement eventually turned extremely violent. People who were considered to represent the state and consequently oppressors were ruthlessly assasinated. The government's retort was equally if not more ruthless.   It was greatly influenced by the ideology of Mao Zedong.  Subhash is sceptical about its success of this movement and  would like to go the United States to continue his studies. So their ways part.  Subhash goes to a university in Rhode Island in the States and Udayan stays back in Calcutta. Udayan gets married to Gauri, a girl of his choice and Subhash has affair with an American woman separated from her husband,with always the thought that his parents would never approve of a liaison with a foreigner. And three years after Subhash’s stay in the States he receives a telegram: Udayan Killed. Come if you can.  I feel tempted to tell more but that would be like my aunt who always told me the ending of a film when curtains went up.  

One of the strongest points of this novel is that it doesn’t cease to surprise you and yet the surprise is never forced. The unfolding of the plot seems a natural outcome of the evolution of the characters.  

 The different geographical, cultural and emotional spaces the characters inhabit , constitute the depth and breadth of the novel. Through Subhash’s and Udayan’s childhood and parents, through Udayan’s activities and his relationship with Gauri, we live through a tumultuous period in Bengal. Along with Subhash and Gauri  we move from Calcutta to the States and have the first generation immigrant’s experience.  And finally through their children we are at home in America. It’s a long journey; nobody is spared from separation, disillusionment, heartbreak, and death. It’s a journey I felt completely involved in. And the end is graceful, holding the promise of reconciliation, appeasement, and the beginning of other stories.  

The only critique I have after reading the story a second time is that Subhash seems lacking in some vital element. We don’t witness his torments, the battles he wages with himself. His character in my opinion would be more real if he had more rough edges.

Arunima Choudhury