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 

The Lakshman Rekha

I have recently caught myself thinking about the Lakshman Rekha. When Lakshman went to look for Ram, he drew a boundary line in front of the hut and expressly asked Sita not to cross it. Staying within the boundary line would keep her within the circle of protection created  by her husband and brother-in-law and stepping outside it would expose her to the dangers of the  wild. Unfortunately, Sita urged by the kindness of her heart does step out of the Lakshman Rekha and is abducted by the evil Ravana, which sets the ball rolling for the great war that follows. So if Sita had not disobeyed her brother-in-law, we would have had another, maybe less thrilling version of  the Ramayana, watered down to Ram  spending fourteen years wandering around the forest with Sita and Lakshman, and eventually returning to Ayodhya to claim his throne. The fabulous leap of Hanumana over the ocean from Rameshwaram to Sri Lanka, the bridge of stones built by an army of monkeys and bears, the magical plant that Hanuman finds to restore Lakshman to life, all would have been unwritten story.

Now just for fun what if we imagine that Sita out of sheer curiosity wanted to step out of the circle of protection created by Ram and Lakshman and explore the dangerous world which lay beyond home and hearth? What if that is why she sent Ram to bring her a golden deer in spite of him telling her again and again that golden deers were unnatural and that he feared the trickery of a black magician? ? What if she chose to disbelieve Lakshman, who along with her heard Ram crying out in distress from afar, but unlike her had complete faith in Ram's invincibility and was convinced that it was an illusion, while Sita prodded Lakshman to go after Ram accusing him of being a coward and coveting her in secret. Of course, she had not bargained for Ravana.  But she had stepped out of the limits imposed by the patriarchy and had to pay her due. And she keeps on paying even when Ram eventually rescues her from Ravana’s clutches fourteen long years later.

To quote Valmiki, the author of Ramayana: “The heart of King Rama, as he saw Sita, (the beloved of his heart) near him, was torn for fear of public scandal.” (Book VI : Yuddha Kanda - Book Of War.) So Rama, God incarnate who was so heart-broken at losing his wife that even the animal world moved by the intensity of his distress joined ranks with him against Ravana, addressed the beloved of his heart thus:

"Let it be known to you that this endeavor in the shape of war, which has been successfully carried through, due to the strength of my friends was not undertaken for your sake. … This was done by me in order to keep up my good conduct and to wipe off the evil-speaking from all sides as well as the insinuation on my own illustrious dynasty." (Book VI : Yuddha Kanda - Book Of War.)

and

"You, with  suspicion arisen on your character, standing in front of me, are extremely disagreeable to me, even as  light is to one suffering from  poor eye-sight." (Book VI : Yuddha Kanda - Book Of War.)

and

"O Sita! That is why, I am permitting you now to go wherever you like. All the ten directions are open to you, my dear lady! ....(Book VI : Yuddha Kanda - Book Of War.)

Poor Sita! What didn’t she do when she stepped out of the Lakshman Rekha? Now I wonder why Sita is presented to us as the model of an Indian  woman’s aspirations when the major part of her life was a series of misfortunes. Though she is not weak, because resisting Ravana for fourteen years must have taken enormous passive strength, she never rebels against the role allotted to her,  that of a perfect wife, except at the end when she commits suicide by asking mother  earth to swallow her up. After having proved her mettle for fourteen years, she has to prove her authenticity and chastity as a model wife again by stepping into fire and emerging unscathed. And even that does not earn her her husband’s protection and esteem for long . When she is the queen of Ayodhya and pregnant, a washerman abuses his wife who did not come home at night saying that  that he is not like Lord Ram who took back Sita even though she had stayed with another man for fourteen years. This incident reaches Ram’s ears who instead of defending Sita’s honour asks Lakshman to take Sita and abandon her in a hermitage. This is apparently to maintain the morality of the kingdom.  What morality can there be  in a kingdom where a woman’s position is so insignificant that an illiterate washerman’s unthinking words can be the cause of banishing one’s pregnant wife. 

So why right from our childhood are Ram and Sita presented to us as the model couple and Sita as the perfect woman? What can be more ignominious than Ram’s treatment of Sita? And why does Sita accept and keep on accepting being humiliated and abandoned with such meekness?   The answer could be, “But if she had not stepped out of the Lakshman Rekha, none of all this would have happened. Or, the Ramayana is after all just a story, or, it was another era, you cannot apply all your new-fangled ideas in that context.” And I would counter-question these answers by asking, “If the Ramayana is just a story why is it presented as an eternal truth, existing out of time and space? Why have we deified imperfect mythological figures as beings  we have to emulate? Why is such a big deception being perpetuated through the ages and by whom? 

Many modern women and men may say that Sita as a role model is outdated, outmoded. But that is not true because the Ramayana holds as much sway over our imagination as it did a hundred years ago, otherwise why would a Bombay High Court Judge in the year 2012, in the context of a divorce case, opinionate that married women should follow the example of Goddess Sita and give up everything to follow their husbands as  Sita did. That a panchayat leader says this would be  understandable, but a High Court Judge!

As women we have choices either to stay within the Lakshman Rekha or not. Many women in spite of being enclosed in suffocating boundaries do not step out for various reasons;  perhaps because they do not have a choice, or perhaps  because the known is infinitely more reassuring than the unknown. Others do and face retribution and   are scathed in the process. But there are   others who confront and vanquish the multi-headed Ravana who is an apt metaphor indeed of the dangers of the world. So this Lakshman Rekha instead of being a circle of protection is actually a circle of restriction. And stepping out of it is stepping into freedom, though that freedom may be fraught with dangers. Now is it worth it, is a question, which, of course, every woman  who wants to step out must ask herself and the answer is not always obvious. 

Arunima Choudhury

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