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
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