Gender issues seem to be suffused in most of the plays of Girish Karnad.

In his plays, Karnad very

dexterously pictures the condition of a typical Indian female, ruled by the patriarchal order bound by
tradition, but whose spirit remains unbounded. Although the playwright is not an out and out feminist
like Henrik Ibsen, the playwright of The Doll’s House, but the problems of a female in a prejudiced,
biased patriarchal society are referred to in most plays by the playwright. The issue of the gender-bias in
society and the oppression of women by the patriarchal order happen to form an important part of
Karnad’s plays. At the same time, Karnad depicts women enthused with feminism, fighting the unjust
norms of the patriarchal order.
Nagamandala is a folktale transformed into the metaphor of the married woman. It is a Chinese box
story with two folktales transformed into one fabric where, myth and superstition, fact and fantasy,
instinct and reason, the particular and the general blend to produce a drama with universal evocations.
The predicament of Rani as opposed to the name is deplorable than that of a maid. Rani’s latent power
as a wife and mother also remains unrealized. In the shackles of social conventions and bitterness she
gets habituated to act like a doll. Rani, if translated in English is termed as “Queen” dominant power but
all of a sudden she is thrashed in the tears and fears of Appanna.
In the dramatic world of Karnad, women, within and without wedlock, are subjected to various forms of
deprivation, humiliation, violence and torture in almost every walk of life in one way or the other. The
playwright not only exposes the arbitrariness of the system where women are considered as “second
sex,” “other,” “non- persona” but also questions the way women are socialized to internalize the
reigning hegemonic ideology and degrade their own position to perpetuate the on-going subordination
and subjugation. Man who is ruled by the mastery-motive has imposed her limits on her. She accepts it
because of bio-social reasons.
In the play, Rani, a naive and submissive girl, falls prey to the unjust social order through the institution
of marriage which impedes all the channels that can provide her with opportunities to have self-
discovery, self-growth and self-actualization as a human being. The patriarchal order uses marriage as a
coercive tool to exploit and oppress women on various planes - physical, emotional, intellectual, sexual
and social.
Rani is a creation of patriarchal social order which ignores the existence of women as human beings. In
the tight noose of traditional marriage, Rani finds it very hard to have healthy marital and social
interaction and articulate her grievances and grudges, as Appanna keeps her “locked up like a caged
bird”. Rani longs to have flight and freedom from the cruel clutches of Appanna. On the sexual plane,
she is neglected; on the physical she is bullied and beaten; on the emotional she is crushed; on the
intellectual she is hushed up, and on the social she is almost ex-communicated. As a result, she is left
with no voice and choice as a dignified member of human society. “Marriage is not only an honourable
career and one less tiring than many others: it alone permits a woman to keep her social dignity intact
and at the same time to find sexual fulfillment as lived one and mother”.
But here, in a patriarchal society Rani is always subordinated and treated as a “second sex” by Appanna.
The woman is portrayed as dependant in all three phases of her life - as a daughter (Rani's dependence
on her parents), as a wife (Rani's reliance on Appanna) and, as a mother (Kurudavva's handicap without
Kappanna). In Indian society, the woman is said to be complete only after marriage. However,
paradoxically she neither belongs to this world nor that: her parental home or her husband's abode. For
the woman, the home is said be anexpression of her freedom: it is her domain. However, Rani is
imprisoned in her own house by her spouse in a routine manner that baffles others with the door locked
from the outside but God opens a door for her in the form of a King Cobra. The king cobra gets seduced
by the love potion provided by Kurudavva to Rani to lure, pathetically, her own husband who turns a
blind eye to her. The snake assumes the form of a loving Appanna in contrast to the atrocious husband
at day. The climax is reached when Rani becomes pregnant and Appanna questions her chastity. Her
innocence is proved by virtue of the snake ordeal that the village elders put before her, and she is
eventually proclaimed a Goddess incarnate.
Appanna literally means “any man” and points to the metaphor of man in general, his chauvinistic
stance and towering dominance to the extent of suppressing a woman's individuality. Rani endeavours
to discover her individuality by seeking refuge in dreams, fairy tales and fantasies to escape the sordid
reality of her existence. At an age where the typical fantasy would be a Sultan or prince coming on
horseback, Rani's flight of the imagination transports her to a seventh heaven where her parents wait
for her. Critics show her body as a site of “confinement, violence, regulation and communication of the
victimized gender-self”
They also point out how she later uses the same body to rebel, to subvert and to negotiate her space in
society. Appanna poses her as an adulterous woman whereas he himself has an illicit relationship with a
concubine. He and his hypocritical society questions Rani's chastity and side-steps the validity of
Appanna's principles. This is just a miniscule cross-section of the patriarchal society that we live in. In
Indian myth, a miracle has been mandatory to establish the purity of a woman, while a man's mere
word is taken for the truth; whether it be Sita, Shakuntala or Rani in this instance. In a patriarchal social
order, “masculinity is associated with superiority; whereas 'feminity' is linked with inferiority” and while
“masculinity implies strength, action, self-assertion and domination, feminity implies weakness,
passivity, docility, obedience and self-negation”.
Leaving a life without any future and identity, she is in search of her love and identity as a wife. Being
thrown in the storm of isolation, she gets into the squall of Naga‟s love that comes to her in the form of
her husband. Getting away from remoteness and breaking her silence with the questions of Naga she
starts feeling comfortable and her fear and tear takes the form of ecstasy. Naga makes up all that Rani
had missed out in her married life. It is only society to judge the things and according to it the situation
through which Rani passes is against the laws and orders of society as well as tradition. All of a sudden
when she gets into trouble and her love-making becomes a pain for her as she tells Naga:
“Yes, there is. Give me poison instead. Kill me right here. At least I’ll be spared the humiliation. Won’t
the cobra bite me the moment I touch it? I’ll lie like your dog and your mongoose.”

As a mother, Rani is seen in the last part of the story to be in command of the household with some
authority and decision-making power. Appanna even agrees to her rather strange demand that their son
should perform an annual “ pinda-daan” in the memory of the dead snake. The woman in her might
have experienced the difference between the love of Naga and authority of Appanna. “The dichotomy of
lover and husband is in the tradition she has inherited. When she discovers in her experience in the end
the difference between Naga‟s love and that of her husband the feeling of experience hardly crosses the
threshold of her consciousness because her experience of her head or her conscience hardly matters in
the world of patriarchal hegemony”.

Folk tales in a patriarchal society represent primarily the male unconscious fears and wishesand is male-
oriented. In these stories the women’s experiences and inner feelings are not given importance. They do
not probe much light on women’s fears, anxieties and psychological problems. It is a remarkable
achievement of Karnad that he adapts this male-oriented folk tale in such a manner that it becomes a
representation of the experience of man and woman in the psychologically transitional phase. The
author also remarks of the identity of tales in general, about their reality of being and their continuance
only on being passed on. The objectivity leads us to perceive the story as a concept with its own
existence and identity; and to emphasize its individuality it is personified in the form of a woman. V.
Rangan says, “A story is born and grows; it has life. Each story has an independent existence, and a
distinctive character. All story tellers are ancient mariners cursed to keep the story alive.

The Story seems to echo that in order to live, a story has to be “told” and “re-told” i.e. the story has no
role without the listener or perceiver. One cannot help thinking that whether the author is stressing the
reader's role in constructing meaning or phenomenology. The reader-response theory questions the
endurance of the author's viewpoint that has no existence without the reader's perception. Being “told”
and “re-told” is nothing but “interpretation” and “re-interpretation”. Therefore, any literary piece is only
an object without the reader breathing meaning into it. So for the story to survive, it must be ultimately
“ passed on”. The backdrop of the flames emphasizes the idea of “passing on”.
Again the playwright is a man, and the story is personified as a woman. So does Man create Woman?
However, the playwright echoes that the story has an autonomous existence and lives by virtue of
interpretation and re-interpretation. Likewise, a woman has her own existence and lives by virtue of
meaningful procreation. Thus, the gist of the framework of the story runs parallel to the theme of the
main story. As Rani’s role gets inverted at the end of the story and Appanna turns into a mere
“instrument to prove her divinity”, likewise roles get reversed as the playwright (a man who tells stories)
“listens” to the Story (a woman).