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    Individual Needs & Desires in Girish Karnad's Nagamandala

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    Mihir Ujjainwal
    Nagamandala explores individual needs and desires, particularly those of women, in contrast with societal expectations. The play highlights how Rani's sexual desires go unfulfilled in her marriage, while her husband is free to pursue other women. She finds fulfillment instead with a shapeshifting naga. Though punished for appearing unchaste, Rani emerges victorious from a snake test, humiliating her husband and mocking social conventions that ignore women's needs. The play uses mythology to critique gender imbalances and assert women's right to their own sexual fulfillment and identity.

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    Individual Needs & Desires in Girish Karnad's Nagamandala

    Uploaded by

    Mihir Ujjainwal
    166 views3 pages
    Nagamandala explores individual needs and desires, particularly those of women, in contrast with societal expectations. The play highlights how Rani's sexual desires go unfulfilled in her marriage, while her husband is free to pursue other women. She finds fulfillment instead with a shapeshifting naga. Though punished for appearing unchaste, Rani emerges victorious from a snake test, humiliating her husband and mocking social conventions that ignore women's needs. The play uses mythology to critique gender imbalances and assert women's right to their own sexual fulfillment and identity.

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    Individual Needs & Desires in Girish Karnad’s Nagamandala

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    Nagamandala explores individual needs and desires, particularly those of women, in contrast with societal expectations. The play highlights how Rani's sexual desires go unfulfilled in her marriage, while her husband is free to pursue other women. She finds fulfillment instead with a shapeshifting naga. Though punished for appearing unchaste, Rani emerges victorious from a snake test, humiliating her husband and mocking social conventions that ignore women's needs. The play uses mythology to critique gender imbalances and assert women's right to their own sexual fulfillment and identity.

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    166 views3 pages

    Individual Needs & Desires in Girish Karnad's Nagamandala

    Uploaded by

    Mihir Ujjainwal
    Nagamandala explores individual needs and desires, particularly those of women, in contrast with societal expectations. The play highlights how Rani's sexual desires go unfulfilled in her marriage, while her husband is free to pursue other women. She finds fulfillment instead with a shapeshifting naga. Though punished for appearing unchaste, Rani emerges victorious from a snake test, humiliating her husband and mocking social conventions that ignore women's needs. The play uses mythology to critique gender imbalances and assert women's right to their own sexual fulfillment and identity.

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    Ujjainwal 1

    Mihir

    Dr Paulami Guhu Biswas

    A0706118063 (4-B)

    March 11th, 2020

    Individual Needs & Desires in Girish Karnad’s Nagamandala

    Nagamandala was written by Girish Karnad in 1987-1988, a story that is ought to be a typical
    mystical play from the cover but raises questions upon one’s individual needs and the idea of
    “faithfulness” and “justice”. The idea is more striking when the husband is given unrestricted
    freedom to fulfil his sexual desire, out of the wedlock. While a female; who is naive is given
    inhumane punishment of staying inside locked four walls. The tables turn when Rani’s repressed
    desire of love and conjugal bond comes from a Naga in the shape of her husband (Apanna),
    unknowingly.

    By mixing human and non-human characters, Karnad gives expression to the dark unconscious
    forces lying hidden in the psyche of human beings. Appanna has not had any physical relations
    with Rani and in this way, her physical desires remain unfulfilled. If she asks her husband to
    gratify her physical needs, she will not be seen in good light. The traditions of society will
    stigmatise her. On the other hand, if she ventures outside the marriage bond to fulfil her sexual
    needs, society will brutally punish and exorcise her. She finds herself crushed between the
    opposing forces of individual will of realizing her physical desires and the traditions of society
    which only want to see her following the commands of her husband silently. To give expression
    to the hidden desires burning deep within Rani, Kamad brings in the Cobra, which can be
    interpreted as nothing but a medium of fulfilling her sexual desires. She herself is not able to
    discover the identity of Cobra and takes him to be her husband. Karnad mixes mythical patterns
    with a real problem to give expression to the dark reality of the society, which never
    acknowledges the needs of a woman and frames its laws on the basis of the needs and desires of
    a male.

    Also, in the play, we see that both Rani and Appanna are actually as much victims of their
    sexuality as they are of this kind of social hypocrisy. The couple are physically and
    psychologically ill-adjusted and mismatched, whereby the sexually ignorant wife Rani is reduced
    to the position of a mere cook and housemaid, utterly ignored by her sexually experienced
    husband who continues visiting a harlot to satisfy his physical needs rather than take the trouble
    Ujjainwal 2

    of initiating his inexperienced or naïve, and thereby uninteresting, wife from ignorance to sexual
    awareness. The play thereby points towards the state of the Indian marriage system where the
    emotional and sexual needs of the wife are of little importance, and everything is measured from
    the point of view of the male need and satisfaction; sex is never meant for mutual satisfaction or
    fulfillment but is rather an expression of wifely duty. Society, which acts as the watchdog and
    upholder of culture, tradition and morality turns its face away from male aberrations and lets
    Apanna visit the harlot without inhibitions but allows the same man to raise a hue and cry over
    his wife’s chastity. In a dehumanized, cruel and gender-biased human society, endowment of
    human and humane qualities to a cold-bloodedd ‘naga’ who commiserates with Rani’s plight and
    eventually falls in love with and fulfills all her needs, leaving her a woman, is the indirect and
    bitter critique of Apanna and of husbands in general who find it beneath them to usher docile and
    ignorant young wives beyond the threshold of girlhood unto maturity.

    There are two endings, the first one as narrated by the ‘story’ itself: The Naga is killed by
    Apanna but Rani still knows about he was not just a Naga. But, as Girish interrupted that ‘a
    woman will know the difference between two lovers’ and states that they ‘must’ keep Naga alive.
    So, in the alternate ending, she hides him inside her tresses. Nevertheless, in both of the endings,
    Rani knew the reality of Naga and she had sexual relations out of wedlock. Which has raised
    many debates over her “faithfulness”.

    The ultimate scorn and mockery for Patriarchal mores and the male ego, which have devised
    such chastity-tests for women through the ages, is Rani’s snake ordeal. Sita or Savitri had
    emerged unscathed because they are truly chaste. However, Rani’s case is different. She is
    advised to opt for the most difficult and dangerous, and hence most attractive to society, snake-
    ordeal by Naga because she shares an adulterous love-relationship with the snake, and it is
    because she is ‘unchaste’, in the physical and not the moral sense, that she emerges unscathed.
    Rani’s emerging victorious and alive through it proves beyond doubt her chastity to the
    assembled Village elders who heap upon her the adulations of being nothing less than a goddess,
    but at the same time posits the terrible truth before Apanna who now has to accept Rani as the
    chaste, ‘pativrata’ wife, while knowing completely well that she has had a lover and a child that
    is definitely not his own! Thus the male prerogative of initiating the humiliating chastity-test for
    the wife backfires and humiliates the husband who has to bear his cuckoldry in silent and secret
    shame. Karnad’s use of the timeless elements of myth, which had hitherto always been used for
    establishing or reaffirming patriarchal powers, for mocking the male prerogatives and
    empowering the woman by recognizing her needs as an individual and as a sexual being, makes
    Naga-Mandala more than just a Postcolonial play with Indian elements of dramaturgy;
    Ujjainwal 3

    Works Cited

    Mishra, Dr S K. “Vacillation between Collective Unconscious and Individual Desire in

    Nagamandala” (2015). 11th March 2020

    <https://www.academia.edu/19762479/Vacillation_between_Collective_Unconscious_and_Indivi

    dual_Desire_in_Nagamandala>.

    Gosh, Oindrial. “Naga-Mandala: Mockery of the Ageless Chastity-Test and Triumph of Female

    Selfhood” (2015). 11th March 2020 <https://www.academia.edu/14202902/Naga-

    Mandala_Mockery_of_the_Ageless_Chastity-Test_and_Triumph_of_Female_Selfhood>.

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