Chatterjee 1

Abhinaba Chatterjee
M. Phil (English)
Delhi University
The Absurd and the Classical Theory of Drama:
A comparative study of the plays of Girish Karnad and Samuel Beckett
The ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ has been said by Martin Esslin, Peter Brook and others as
representing a way to live in a world deprived of generally accepted ultimate values. Faced with the
loss of confidence in the traditional narratives that explain the mysteries of the human condition, the
Theatre of the Absurd presents its audience with what Esslin calls a double absurdity: that of ‘the
deadness and mechanical senselessness of half-unconscious lives’ and that ‘of the human condition
itself in a world where the decline of religious belief has deprived man of certainties.’ The so-called
Absurd playwrights, such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter, write in a context
where traditional narratives can no longer inspire confidence. Yet, society is still confronted with
anguish and wonder for the ultimate realities of its condition. Regardless of whether or not the
ultimate mysteries of reality are explained by grand narratives or recuperative metaphysical systems
such as Platonism, religion, the Hegalian dialectic of Spirit, Marxism or a hermeneutics of meaning,
the grand mysteries themselves stubbornly persist. They don’t disappear when people choose to
ignore or repress them, if anything they manifest as the repressed returned in disguised form.
In this paper, I undertake a study of the plays of Girish Karnad and Samuel Beckett in order
to explore the emergence of a composite conception of postmodern subjectivity in light of
existential and absurd philosophies. It also examines the nature of this subjectivity and its cultural-
political implications.
Girish Karnad holds a historically as well as artistically significant position in the
development of postcolonial Indian literature. He is one such playwright who has rejected the
imitative pursuits of the West and has stuck to the native tradition for the themes and techniques of
his plays. The reason why Karnad chooses myths or legends is not very difficult to discover. Myths,
legends and folklores form the bedrock of any culture or civilization from which comes out its basic
values, modes and customs. These cover, as Carl C Jung points out, in the form of motifs and
symbols, certain recurring patterns of collective human behaviour and certain archetypal human
experiences. The Indian theatre had a strong tradition in mythological and historical plays. Karnad
is deeply aware of the fact and firmly believes in the potential of the Indian theatrical tradition.
Bharata’s Natya Shastra works out the theory of ‘Rasa’ as the nucleus for the art of drama
and dramaturgy. The treatise is the most complete work of dramaturgy in the ancient world. It
addresses acting, dance, music, dramatic construction, architecture, costuming make up, props, the
organisation of companies, the audience, competitions and offers a mythological origin of theatre.
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Karnad has tried to preserve the oldest treatise on theatre, focusing on the codes of caste by
favouring Arvasu in his play The Fire and the Mountain; through the mouth of an actor-manager,
regenerating the ancient incident related to the performance of Bharatamuni’s Natya Shastra.
Bharata’s Natya Shastra defines Rasa thus: “The sentiment or aesthetic pleasure (Rasa)
arises as a result of harmonious blending of the appropriate vibhavas, anubhavas and
vyabhicharabhava.” The Rasas evoke in the audience an emotional climax accompanied by a sense
of joy. This is the aesthetic pleasure of Rasa. The Vyabhicharabhavas are temporary or transitory
moods that tend only to develop the sthayibhava or dominant mood. The dominant mood could be
love, anger or pathos.
Since the freedom of knowing the whole gamut of possible responses (the known), situates
the experience of pure awareness or the self (the knower), rasa (the process of knowing) produces
the experience of the threefold unity of the knower, the known and the process of knowing.
In terms of comparison to ‘Western’ criticism, one can say that the idea of unity of
impression, ‘emotional unity’, ‘total response’ and several other formulations are similar if not
identical with that of the dominant rasa. The closest is perhaps the Greek concept of ‘pity and fear’.
According to Aristotle, in a tragedy, a hero’s suffering on stage makes the audience undergo
catharsis of such emotions, i.e. pity and fear. Pity and fear should be aroused in the audience on
seeing the protagonist’s trials and tribulations in the tragedy. It is tempting to equate pity and fear
with the karuna and bhayanaka rasas, but what Aristotle meant by emotions is clearly different from
what the Indian critic Anandavardhana meant by rasas.
Pity and fear are not emotions present in the play. They are emotions which should be
evoked in the reader or audience by what the play presents – these emotions are the audiences’
reaction to the play. Whereas according to the rasa theory, the emotion which the audience
experiences is the same as the emotion presented in the play or poem – a heightened version, but
essentially the same emotion. For example, in Kalidas’s Sakuntala, love is the master motif, i.e.
Sringar rasa, though sorrow, tenderness, serenity and laughter are also there. Thus, the principal
rasa, itself rich, diversified and complex is fed by a multiplicity of minor incidental feelings.
Bharat Gupt explains that it has been customary to say that catharsis and rasa are worlds
apart. Most arguments on the topic boil down to saying: “Catharsis is a restorative process, it frees
the spectator of emotional imbalance; it is a negative achievement as it merely provides relief from
emotional stress. Rasa, on the other hand, is a positive achievement – a sense of enjoyment to yogic
bliss in rapture and intensity.” Such a comparison is a simplification. The purgatorial aspect or
aesthetic enjoyment is covered not only by catharsis but by rasa as well. Similarly, the area of pure
enjoyment, the declared aim of rasa, is interlinked with the concept of catharsis. Whatever the
worldview, catharsis and rasa both begin with purification and end in delight.
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Karnad’s play Tughlaq is the first New Drama in India in many ways. The innovative
treatment of history and striking contemporaneity of the play has shot Karnad into fame.
It is the sense of absurdity and the presence of existential overtones in the play that make it
modern. The major concern of Karnad in exploring the history of Muhammad bin Tughlaq is a
probe into his transformation from an idealist emperor, who is afraid to be human and invites
people ‘to confide their worries in him’ into a ‘mad Muhammad’ and ‘the Lord of the skins’. An
analysis of his transformation brings out an existentialist in him. Tughlaq shares this element with
its European counterparts, for example, Camus’ Caligula, Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The tension emerging from Tughlaq’s determination to discover purpose and order in a
world that steadfastly refuses to audience either makes him an absurd. He lives in an entopic world
in which communication is impossible and illusion is preferred to reality. He is left with no scope
for action. His recourse to cruelty is the result of the divorce between the mind that desires and the
world that disappoints, his nostalgia for unity that fragmented his universe and the contradiction
and binds them together. The unbridgeable gulf between aspiration and fulfilment or the
impossibility of communication and the futility of human relationship is a feature of the theatre of
the absurd. Tughlaq’s suffering emanates from an unbridgeable gap between his aspirations and the
utter failure he meets, from the impossibility of communication, from the realization of futility of
human relations and actions.
Repeatedly, Tughlaq is made to realize the vast gap between his aspiration and its
fulfilment, ideal and reality. Cruiskshank puts, “Intellectual awareness of the absurd is the
experience of a person who has expected a rationally ordered cosmos, but finds instead a chaos
imperious to reason.” The Sultan’s journey is from idealism to madness via alienation and cruelty.
His exercise of tyrannical power can be seen as a release of his displaced metaphysical anguish. His
cruelty arises from this anguish, which he pours over the scapegoat. His cruelty and tyranny are
almost seen as vehicles to help him overcome existential alienation and the sense of absurdity of
human existence. He begins to console himself that his actions are justified. The realization that his
orgy of killing has not solved the problem and his knowledge of people’s anxiety about his death
bring him remorse and frustration. His inability to admit that he has gone wrong pushes him on the
verge of madness.
In Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, the absurd is seen as the relationship between the individual
and the world of existence. The absurd is the encounter between the individual’s longing for order
and rational explanations and the absolute chaos and irrationality seen by him in the universe.
Tughlaq just cannot find a rational explanation for the treachery of Shihab and his courtier’s
incomprehension of his idealistic measures. The absurdity of the human existence impresses him in
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such unreasonable act of treachery. He appears absurd and his vision of absurdity cultivates the
context of meaninglessness and chaos of Tughlaq’s existence. As David Chatmers says in The
Conscious Mind:
“We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be being, to use a
phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel. Similarly, a mental state is conscious if there is
something it is like to be in that mental state. To put it another way, we can say that a mental
state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel – an associated quality of experience. These
qualitative feels are known as phenomenal qualities, or qualia for short. The problem of
explaining these phenomenal qualities is just the problem of explaining consciousness. This
is the really hard part of the mind-body problem.”
The devices used by Beckett to break through temporal, discursive barriers toward the trans-
temporal experience of pure being are well known to theatre-goers, even though they may find the
effects of these absurdist devices difficult to explain. Beckett dispenses with narrative sequence,
character development and psychology in the conventional sense in order to convey the qualia of an
experience within a specific historical context that nevertheless takes the conscious mind beyond
the limits of space and time. These devices are intended to convey an intuitive experience of what it
is like to be in a single moment, as opposed to what it is like merely to follow the discursive
patterns of thought that substitute for being. The primary device used by Beckett to express this
intuitive moment is the poetic image. In Waiting for Godot, the juxtaposition of a series of poetic
images, which substitutes for a conventional plot, results for the audience in a series of epiphanies
related to the nature of experience itself. These poetic images and the flashes of consciousness they
induce resemble the ‘total experience’ or ‘feeling of wholeness’ that results from the ‘polyphonic
montage’ in the film theory of Sergei Eisenstein. In Kantian terms, the poetic image, as distinct
from the linear rationality and coherence of a narrative sequence, takes the conscious mind of the
spectator from the experience of a phenomenal world to a suggestion of the noumenal or intuitive
realm beyond. Through an intersection of these poles of experience, Beckett’s drama results in a re-
discovery of ultimate realities, whether or not these realities can be logically interpreted. Indeed,
Beckett is less concerned with meaning than with the structure of experience. Even in the absence
of ultimate meaning, the Theatre of the Absurd can confront the spectator with the presence of
ultimate realities by taking the conscious mind beyond the limits of space, time and causality. This
alienation effect – the ideal of Brecht, the Russian formalists, the Natya Shastra in Indian
aesthetics, and Keats’ negative capability – does not simply replace one set of mental contents to
another, but rather empties the awareness of all contents to elicit an experience of what is known as
pure consciousness.
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From a thematic perspective, the metaphysical and practical uncertainties of Beckett’s play,
with its pseudo-climaxes and non-arrival of Godot, do not necessarily render it nihilistic or totally
pessimistic. As Peter Brook says, ‘Beckett’s dark plays are full of light.” In fact the uncertainties of
the play provide a vehicle for going beyond the conceptual boundaries that characterize the contents
of awareness and glimpsing the freedom associated with the ‘I’ as awareness. In the play-within-
the-play, the speculation on Godot’s identity, when Pozzo says, “Godin…Godet…Godot… anyhow
you see who I mean.” suggests that one’s true identity does not reside in the level of thought or
language, which are effective only for identifying and reporting the qualia of human experience.
Godot will never be apprehended through cognition or through discursive language, which unfolds
in time. As Beckett was well aware, the notion of any ultimate, non-reality can only be rendered at
best through the suggestion of a poetic image and apprehended intuitively in an instant of time.
Hence, the play can allude to the possibility of being saved by Godot, since no explicit rendering of
what it means to be saved is possible. As Beckett shows, the ultimate reality of the subjective mind
is beyond logical meaning and cannot be known.
Similarly, Karnad takes his story ahead of both his Sanskrit as well as Mann’s version by
adding the frame of Hayavadana, who, like the two male protagonists in Act II of the inner play,
has a head incompatible with his body, and makes several attempts to be rid of his horse’s head.
Possessing a human body, he desires a human head, so that he can be a complete being. In a
perhaps predictable ironic twist, he does achieve completeness as well as compatibility of body and
head – unlike Devadatta and Kapila – by becoming a complete horse, instead of a complete man.
The two plots of Hayavadana, the outer that narrates the frame story of the man with a
horse’s head, and the embedded one that recounts the story of Devadatta, Kapila and Padmini, are
linked in a self-reflexive manner. The frame play in fact discusses the issues of enacting on stage
the story of Devadatta, Kapila and Padmini : thus a self-conscious reading is already inherent in the
play. The play opens with the Bhagavata or the Sutradhar beginning to introduce the main or
embedded play, when he is rudely interrupted by scream after scream of terror, coming from the
petrified actor who has just encountered a ‘talking horse’. This horse gives the play its eponymous
title: “Hayavadana” – the being with a human body and a horse’s face.
Here then is a play about to begin, interrupted before it can even move into ‘illusion mode’.
The interruption takes the form of a digression, which eventually becomes another play, within
which the ‘real’ play, the original story of Devadatta, Kapila and Padmini, is contained. This
intrusion into the world of actors delays the beginning of the inside play: more significantly, since
the story of ‘Hayavadana’ explores the theme of identity through the same riddle of half-head and
half-body that is raised in the story of the Devadatta-Kapila-Padmini triangle, the appearance of the
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horse man Hayavadana spotlights the role of the riddle and adds to the dimensions of ambivalence
and self-reflexivity in the play.
A token gesture towards the incompatibility of head and body is added by Karnad in the
play’s traditional innovatory address to Lord Ganesha, who has the head of an elephant and the
body of a human being. Only a ‘god’ is able to accommodate this conflict, or so the narrator of the
play, the Bhagavata/Sutradhar, indicates: ‘Could it be that this Image of Purity and Holiness, this
Mangalamoorty, intends to signify by his very appearance that the completeness of God is
something no poor mortal can comprehend?’ In his Note on Tughlaq, Hayavadana and Naga-
Mandala, Karnad elaborates on the riddle in the context of Ganesha:
“It seemed unfair, however, to challenge the thesis of the riddle by using a god. God, after
all, is beyond human logic, indeed beyond human comprehension itself. The dialectic had to
grow out of gossamer ground and I sensed a third being hovering in the spaces between the
divine and the human, a horse-headed man.”
The idea of completeness raised by the invocation is mirrored by the frame tale that deals with the
incomplete horse, Hayavadana, and later by the main plot of Devadatta, Kapila and Padmini.
Karnad thereby enlarges the scope of the riddle for the plot of the play right from the innovation,
when he locates the spirit of the riddle in the paradox generated by Ganesha, who is worshipped as
the God of completeness, despite such attributes of incompleteness as a broken tusk, or half-human
body. By doing this, Karnad also extends the scope of conjecture which is a potentially dynamic
space in any riddle.
Briefly indicated in the invocation, and resolved simplistically in the frame tale, it is the
main plot of the love triangle in Hayavadana that the riddle plays a subversive role. It operates
significantly upon the plot, and divides the play into two parts, of a question and an answer, by
occurring in the middle. Act I ends with the posing of the riddle, and Act II begins by promising
what seems to be the answer. But as the plot develops, we find that this answer does not suffice its
fissures widen as the plot traces the fates of Padmini, her “new” husband Devadatta, and the “new”
third man, the new Kapila.
The principal features of the riddle consist of (a) a two part structure comprising a question
and an answer; (b) an intent to defer the answer and strategies (ambivalence, multiplicity of
potential answers) deployed towards this intent, and (c) an unequivocal answer that seems self-
evident and yet novel. A fourth characteristic is that the answer to the question posed by the riddle
remains the same, irrespective of the contexts within which the question is raised.
And so, the solution that works in the case of Hayavadana becomes unusable in the case of
Devadatta and Kapila. By showing the failure of logic behind the answer that the head determines
identity, the riddle not only fails to be unequivocal in this plot, but also acquires overtones of irony
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where Padmini is concerned. After the exchanged heads have changed their respective bodies to
status quo, the question becomes irrelevant, with other questions, taking its place, such as: ‘Whose
head? Whose body?’ In the words of Kapila: “With what confidence we chopped off our heads in
that temple! Now whose head – whose body – suicide or murder – nothing is clear.”
Karnad also prolongs the mode of conjecture generated by the first part of the riddle, by
examining the question: “Who am I?” within two different contexts in his play. In sum, then,
Hayavadana subverts the sealed nature of the riddle principally by making context a way of
generating meaning, making that meaning provisional, and making ambivalence central to meaning
making.
In his famous essay “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense”, Nietzsche questions the
ability of language to be a medium through which human beings can authentically express their
experiences, both to themselves as well as to others. He describes all languages as being merely
‘metaphor’, and every application of a world to a thing or concept as a process whereby
fundamentally diverse experiences are grouped together and made common in order to facilitate
social cohesion and stability. In questioning language in this way, Nietzsche is also fundamentally
questioning our ability to formulate ‘truth’, which can be seen both as an attack on tradition as well
as on established Englightenment values connected to modern modes of thinking, and thus this
particular mode of though can be associated with both modernism and postmodernism. In the same
essay, Nietzsche defines truth as “A movable host of metaphors, metonymies and
anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically
intensified, transferred, and embellished.”
This critical, ambiguous approach to the question of language is also present in the work of
Beckett, where key themes include the inability to communicate, a general sense of alienation, loss
of meaning, loss of memory, deconstruction of traditional modes of narrative and storytelling etc.
Through these means, Beckett calls into question not only our ability to communicate truth but also
the coherency of our very self-consciousness as a thinking subject.
Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow,
when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my
friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo
passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that
what truth will there be?
Who are “the others” Vladimir is referring to? It is possible to interpret this is a reference to
Vladimir’s prior states of consciousness, rather than to other people. Nietzsche was also concerned
with issues pertaining to the plurality of the subject and the fragmentation of the self, going so far
as to state, in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, that there was no such thing as a coherent, thinking subject,
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with an integrated consciousness and free will, in a sense no ‘I’, but merely a constantly fluctuating
Will to Power, inevitably expressing its full quantum of force at any given moment. In “Beyond
Good and Evil”, Nietzsche attacks the notion of the integrated subject by deconstructing Descartes’
famous slogan: “I think, therefore I am”.
“When I analyse the event expressed in the sentence ‘I think’, I acquire a series of rash
assertions which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove – for example, that it is I who
think, that it has to be something at all which thinks, that thinking is an activity and
operation on part of an entity thought of as a cause, that an ‘I’ exists, finally that what is
designated by ‘thinking’ has already been determined – that I know what thinking is.”
Nietzsche follows this line of argument by launching into a critique of the linguistic notions of
subject and object and cause and effect, claiming that “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, not when
‘I’ want, so that it is a falsification of the facts to say: the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate
‘think’.”
The world Beckett presents us with in Waiting for Godot is a world that has seemingly
passed on. The play’s two main protagonists inhabit a post-apocalyptic milieu where time seems to
stand still. The only scenery is a leafless tree and a country road. Vladimir and Estragon are tramps,
dressed in rags, subsisting on turnips and carrots while they wait for Godot to arrive. We are never
told where they are or indeed when they are, or why they are waiting, although there are some clues
which suggest that they are somewhere in France, perhaps during the German occupation. The play
was originally written in French, its title, in that language being En attendant Godot. The word
‘attendant’ evokes associations to the term ‘attentisme’, which was commonplace in Vichy France
and referred to the attitude toward the Nazi occupation of those who “did not believe ‘the Pitain
experiment’ would succeed, but argued that there was no possibility of an immediate return to the
battlefield.” The attitude of attentisme could conceal mild support for the Vichy regime, or simply a
hard-edged, practical outlook, or even outright cynicism or moral confusion, but it could also mask
an apathetic, cowardly stance, adopted by those who wished someone else would take care of the
dangerous business of liberating France without having to get involved themselves. Despite these
various manifestations of the attitude, attentisme “involved a particular kind of ambiguity, and a
particular disposition towards it.” It was an attitude that both Beckett as well as his original Parisian
audience would have been aware of, and vestiges of it are certainly discernible in the play itself.
The protagonists of the play are decidedly unheroic, which ties in with the concept of attentisme
and provides a sharp contrast to the Nietzschean Overman ideal.
Use of masks & translation
Mask as a theatrical device is probably as old as theatre itself; and dramatists constantly turn
to the device in their technical experiments. Even the modern drama, with its entire technical
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prowess still finds mask relevant to their theatrical experiments. It will be interesting to see how far
the device actually works in the context of a theatre contemporary in approach and exploration.
If translation is seen as performance – the performance of a written text has also been
considered as translation. According to Susan Bassnett, the process of transposing a written text
into a performance is often called translation, within theatre studies in English.
Reflections on translating for the stage have always been rich in metaphors. Theatre
translation, embodied in the performers’ bodies, voices, and attire, is very visible and physical, in
contrast with other forms of text-transfer, where the translation is only made visible in its written
aspect. These metaphors will be analysed in connection with performability to investigate what
they may bring to the specificity of stage translation.
The mask metaphor has frequently been used in visual discourse in theatre translation, since
the mask itself has become a visual icon representing theatre. The mask metaphor, applied to stage
translation, makes a forceful connection between translation and theatrical practice; and it is in this
context that we can understand the translators’ comments on the need to find specific voices for
their translations, or to read them out themselves, or to listen to the actors reading them out in
rehearsal, thus establishing a connection between translation and characterization.
Karnad finds a special interest in the rich wealth of Indian mythology which offers him
ample threads to weave his stories where he is not just narrating a tale but constructing, exploring
narratives at various levels. The richest in these multi-layered narrative explorations is his play
Hayavadana.
The play seems to proceed by defying the norms of the society and it’s most powerful and
fundamental unit, the Family. Makarand Paranjape observes, “the outcome of the shape-shifting in
Girish Karnad’s plays is tragic in a modern sense.”
But the pity and fear are dissipated in reckless dialogues that pour out from instincts without
giving heed to societal restrictions.
Thus, the lack of melodrama is like a mask that intends to scatter the viewer’s attention from
the most familiar and projected face of any event or emotion.
The technique of masks as employed in Hayavadana is not to be seen in isolation with
reference to the plays of Girish Karnad. He has been well versed with the dramatic structure of
dramatists including Sartre, O’Neill, and the Greeks. While talking about the experience of writing
Yayati, he says:
“The play owed its form not to the innumerable mythological plays I had been brought up
on, and which had partly kept these myths alive for me, but to Western playwrights whom I
had read only in print…”
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The transposed heads in the play lead to a conflict in which the head is also an identity put
on by the character. Kapila and Devadatta yearn to be each other. Kapila wishes to be Devadatta so
that he can express his love to Padmini while Devadatta wishes to be Kapila so that he can charm
his wife, and win her life. O’Neill says in “Memoranda on Mask”:
“…the use of masked will be discovered to be the freest solution of the modern dramatists’
problem as to how with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means – he
can express those hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of Psychology continue
to disclose to us.”
Karnad’s idea behind using the mask, more than merely to portray the change of face was to
depict a similar kind of conflict. Hayavadana begins not with the story of Padmini but with the
incident of the horse-bodied boy which gives the play its name. Here the horse is a symbol of
conflict that is produced by the identity that is not a natural part of the being but put on from outside
and at the end of the play the creature loses even the human face and becomes a horse altogether,
leading to a resolution of the conflict. The plot is built in the style of story within a story. Both the
story of the horse bodied boy and that of the lovers explore the same theme of an adopted identity
growing into the actual identity.
But in the case of Kapila and Devadatta their conflicts of identity cannot be so simply
resolved and the end as their death is the only feasible solution to the situation. There is no other
way in which they could have accepted a resolution of their crisis. Going back to their old bodies
could only have made the situation more complex. The chaotic state creates the problem of identity
and after serious deliberation, it is decided that “the head is the sign of man.” Bhagavata solves this
problem:
“As the heavenly Kalpa Vriksha is supreme among trees, so is the head among human
limbs. Therefore, the man with Devadatta’s head is indeed Devadatta and he is the rightful
husband of Padmini.”
Devadatta and Padmini return to Dharampura and Kapila goes to the forest. Padmini whose
existence depends on the realisation of selfish pleasures, is happy with Devadatta, who now
combines intellectual vigour with masculine virility. She is now very happy, but she is under a
delusion that she has searched the real identity of transformed Devadatta. Head governs the body,
and hence Devadatta changes.
Padmini, who does not undergo change, finds herself in an existential crisis which results
from a confusion of identities revealing the ambiguous nature of human personality. She says:
“What are you afraid of, Devadatta? What does it matter that you are going soft again, that
you are losing your muscles> I’m not going to be stupid again. Kapila’s gone out of my life
– forever. I won’t let him come back again. (Pause). Kapila? What could he be doing now?
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Where could he be? Could his body be fair still, and his face dark? (Long pause). Devadatta
changes. Kapila changes. And me?”
Padmini again falls in love with Kapila whose Brahmin’s body changes and becomes virile. She is
bewildered. She does not know how to solve the tangeled web of existence:
“Yes, you won, Kapila. Devadatta won too. But I – the better half of two bodies – I neither
win nor lose. No, don’t say anything.”
In Hayavadana, Girish Karnad’s aim is to highlight the absurd in the accepted norms of
social behaviour. The reinterpretation of folk-tale in the light of contemporary concerns and
existentialism is a great and monumental achievement in Indian English drama.
O’Neill comments in “Memoranda on Mask”:
“…what, at the bottom is the new psychological insight into human cause and effect but a
study in masks, an exercise in unmasking?...this insight has uncovered the mask, has
impressed the idea of mask as a symbol of inner reality upon all intelligent people of today,
and I know they would welcome the use of mask in the new theatre as a necessary,
dramatically revealing new convention, and not regard them as any ‘stunty’ resurrection of
archaic props.”
Karnad’s experiments with mask echoes similar ideas although he points out to the
difference between the western and the Indian concepts of the masks. In the light of the statement of
O’Neill, it can be seen that though “Memoranda on Mask” is not directly related to Hayavadana,
but the idea of mask as a false identity comes very close to the play and helps in coming to a better
understanding of the mask as used in the play.
Interestingly, Bharat Gupt in his “Dramatic Concepts in Greece and India” observes that
Greek plays could make use of masks “because they depended upon broad exaggerated features to
convey the images of things larger than life. Indian theatre on the other hand, focussed on ‘Sathiska
Abhinaya’ based on bhavas, and movements of eyes and never considered the mask as a dramatic
device. Gupta argues that there is no word in Natya Shastra for a mask other than Pratisirsha,
which means “headgear” and not mask. Thus, for the Indian dominant culture and spectator habits,
the focus becomes the living face of Padmini, the only one available during the course of the
enactment of the main plot. The centrality of the female gets reiterated through the unmasked face
of Padmini.
The subplots of the horse-headed Hayavadana or of the Bhagavata contribute nothing much
to the text from such a vantage point. Sure enough, Bhagavata’s preparation before the staging of
the play and his cautioning the actors involve a slight deal of autobiography of the playwright.
Karnad is also a scholar from Karnataka with considerable exposure to theatrical and literary
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traditions of India and abroad. More importantly, Karnad is a male. The male positionality coupled
with the writing and reading practices structure his views along certain lines.
Beckett’s mastery of the poetic image and other devices that stop the flow of thought and
objective observation moves the spectator beyond the spatio-temporal limits toward a direct
experience of pure consciousness. The features of the anti-play such as the lack of logical
movement, the digressions and nonsense, the fact that “nothing happens, twice”, the repetition of
endless cycles of action in non-action, and Vladimir’s circular song at the opening of Act II have
the effect, as Andrew Kennedy observes, of conveying a sense of “eternal return”. This cyclical
self-referral of the text can also be seen in the ironic reference to what is happening in the theatre,
especially in Act II. The self-referral portrayed when Estragon says, “That wasn’t such a bad little
canter”, or when Vladimir looks out into the audience and says, “There! Not a sould in sight.”, or
later when he asks “What are we doing here, that is the question”, creates a series of conceptual
gaps through which the conscious mind can witness its cognitive activity. With a gap between word
and referent, the self-referentiality of the text also induces a corresponding self-referral in the mind
of the audience. As Harold Bloom says, “Self-consciousness is one element in Beckett’s vision of
our vertigo” and, “excessive consciousness negates action”, as with Hamlet. While Bloom is
referring more to a daily consciousness on the level of discursive thought rather than to a witnessing
of thought from pure awareness, any subjective reflexivity highlights the ‘I’ of the awareness over
the contents of awareness and thereby conjures up in the audience a taste of “extra-daily”
consciousness. This noumenal being, though typically rendered absent by the failure of language, is
suggested on the stage and even rendered present through the self-referral embodiment of Beckett’s
characters.
The extent to which the play arrives to the waiting spectator, and in turn the spectator to the
waiting play, depend finally on the degree to which the actors and audience have access to the
ground of consciousness. This relation between the actor and the spectator is the subject of the
Natya Shastra, which holds that there are several levels of the mind involved in the transformation
of the audience. The word ‘mind’ is used here in two senses: the diverse levels of consciousness on
the one hand, and the thinking mind within that structure on the other. The overall levels of the
mind comprise the senses, the thinking mind, the discriminating intellect, feeling and intuition, the
individual ego, and pure consciousness. For the Natya Shastra, aesthetic rapture (rasa, defined as a
taste or flavour of pure consciousness) affects the audience primarily through the emotions, and the
actors whose performance can evoke the strongest emotional response are the most effective. Since,
however, the emotions are closely linked with pure consciousness, the more the actors can tap into
this silent witnessing faculty underlying all mental activity, the more transformative the effect of
their performance. Godot surely does not arrive for the waiting audience if interpreted as a
 Chatterjee 13

transcendental signified experienced merely as a thought by the thinking mind. He may possibly
arrive, however, if interpreted aesthetically as an emotional flavour (rasa) of the observer knowing
him/herself that is, of the awareness moving from the boundaries of sensations and thoughts
through the aesthetically evoked emotions toward the experience of the extra-daily. If Godot
arrives, therefore, it will be most likely through the spectator’s experience of aesthetic rapture, as
induced through the medium of Beckett’s art, with its self-referral gaps, pauses and ever-repeated
moments that precede activity. What happens in the play, then, depends ultimately on the quality of
the interaction between the actors and the spectator’s in each performance.
Girish Karnad’s Tale Danda describes the evil effects of the Indian caste system. In doing
so, a strong feeling of karuna is evoked for the people of the lower caste, through the interaction
between the actors and the audience. The feeling is at its peak when king Bijala tells his queen that
“his majesty king Bijala is a barber by caste. For ten generations my forefathers ravaged the land as
robber barons. For another five they ruled as the trusted feudatories of the Emperor himself. They
married into every royal family in sight. Bribed generations of Brahmins with millions of coins. All
this so, they could have the caste of Kshatriyas branded on their foreheads.”
The only people who had tried to do away with the caste-system during king Bijala’s time in
twelfth century Karnataka, were the ‘sharanas’ a group of poets, mystics, social revolutionaries and
philosophers, whose leader was Basavanna. His words echo the pain, every right thinking Indian
feels when one witnesses fanaticisms and unreasonableness in the name of caste and religion. He
writes a beautiful poem on the futility of fighting over the construction of a temple. The beauty of
the play reveals its contemporariness:
Basavanna: The rich/ will make temples for Shiva/ What shall I/ a poor man,/ do?/ My
legs are pillars,/ the body the shrine,/ the head a cupola/ of gold:/ Listen, O lord of the
meeting rivers,/ things standing shall fall,/ but the moving shall ever stay.
But when the ‘sharanas’ actually take it on themselves to break the case system, and a
shudra, a cobbler, decides to marry a Brahmin, hell lets loose. Basavanna’s initial reaction of Hasya
or joy to see the practical fruition of his philosophy is clouded by the fear, Bhayanaka rasa at the
consequences of such a marriage. He is worried about the young couple, their safety. Basavanna
tells his followers that ‘we are not ready for the kind of revolution this wedding is. We haven’t
worked long enough or hard enough!’
A person recognizes as a human being when his identity remains secure completely, his
body and mind work collaborate. A combination of these two parts forms the personality of a
person. When we take a glance on society, we baffle. Modern man especially confronts the loss of
identity. After two world wars, most of the people suffer from meaningless of life and existential
dilemma.
 Chatterjee 14

Identity is a passport for social recognition. The person having no identity or having shifting
identity has to suffer with the problems of loneliness, frustration and remorse of one’s despondence.
The issue of identity and impersonation becomes the main motif of Yayati, Hayavadana, and Naga-
Mandala. In Yayati, impersonation takes place between the father and the son. In Hayavadana and
Naga-Mandala, the characters are involved in this problem. Hayavadana himself is the combination
of a horse and a man whereas the Naga in Naga-Mandala takes the shape of a man.
The 20th century marked a dramatic change in the way performance was perceived and
carried out, from a text-based representative act, it turned into a self-sufficient reality, where
emotions and ideas were transmitted through metatextual elements, like voice, body movements,
and breath. This change, that allowed the evolution of performance as a form of visual art,
independent of its theatrical progenitors, has its roots in the nostalgia for the origins of theatre and
the interest in ancient and primitive rituals.
According to Aristotle’s Poetics, theatre is rooted in the pagan rituals to honour god
Dionysus in Greece. In these rituals, there was no form of representation, apart from the chorus, that
was dressed as satyrs. The nostalgia of these rituals is evident in the 19th century. The quest for
primitivism and ritualism lies at the roots of performance art. Surpassing theatrical tradition and
word, postmodern performance has broken the bonds with reality and representation; performance
artists use their bodies as a vehicle to explore consciousness and to have a direct impact on the
public with very little or no reference to text or action.
Postmodern performance is characterized by “aesthetic of impermanence”, where the
qualities of memory, inheritance and repeatability gives way to immediacy and uniqueness. In
performance art, the art work is not some text or image, but the happening or event and the way it is
perceived by the audience.
What is interesting to see here is how visual arts had been fermented by rituals, not as a
nostalgic tendency towards the origins of theatre, but in a much more substantial manner, with a
different perception of reality and representation.
However, it is not uncommon in rituals preceding the genesis of theatre, that are still
performed in certain cultures, that the performative act does not imitate reality, but produces reality:
for example, it can bring about rain or earth fertility. Likewise, performance art does not imitate
reality, but is a real art. Generally, in performance art, there was no representation of a character or
event; the artists sought to blur the limits between art and life, creating a single event that was not
restaged, not rehearsed and not taped – any photos or videos of the events were simply for
documentation purposes.
The artists who create time-based art often share an aversion or a disinterest for leaving
behind an “art object” with an aesthetic and commercial value. Therefore, it is easy to see why
 Chatterjee 15

theorists and artists that sought to bring about a change in theatre and a distancing from the idea of
representation evoked images from primitive rituals. As the influence from primitive arts in the
early 20th century liberated the canvas from the Renaissance perspective and the obligation to be a
mirror of the seen world, the inspiration from rituals would help performative arts discover a
different way of communication between the performers and the audience, which went beyond the
narrative potential of the text.
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 Chatterjee 16

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