Subverting Brahminical Patriarchy Through Myths and Folktales: Karnad’s Hidden Polemic

Abstract

The history of India’s engagement with colonial rule shows a startling collusion between colonial and nationalist patriarchal discourses, especially with regard to the idea of some lost golden age of brahminical glory, which served to consolidate patriarchal subjugation in post-independence India, especially by erasing the idea of female sexual desire. The plays of Girish Karnad, despite going back to traditional narratives and performance traditions, serve to challenge and subvert such discourses through several dramatizations of myths and folktales, involving adulterous women. While both Sanskrit myths and regional folktales are part of the Indian tradition, they are often entangled in a dialogic relationship in which we see that the pan-Indian, Aryan and Sanskritized myths are interrogated, challenged and problematized by regional folktales that exude a subversive energy of their own. In the process, the patriarchal and brahminical construct of feminine identity, as enshrined through either scriptural diktats or characters like Sita, Savitri or Ahalya, is subverted by the foregrounding of female characters that not only have agency but also display either aggression or sexual vigour to break free from the constricting moulds of sustained misery. While plays like Yayati and The Fire and The Rain repeatedly emphasize this sense of abject suffering that women are exposed to, by refashioning episodes from The Mahabharata, his two other plays, Hayavadana and Nagamandala, based on folktales, radically alter the state of affairs by foregrounding subversive female characters that break free from patriarchal constrictions. These plays, in the process, operate in the form of a Bakhtinian hidden polemic against patriarchal, Sanskritized traditions. The article explores these issues and analyses how they serve to clear the space for alternate paradigms of female identity suitable for the imagined community of a postcolonial nation.