VALORISATION OF THE MARGINALIZED CULTURE IN GIRISH KARNAD'S THE FIRE AND THE RAIN
Dr. Pratima Chaitanya
Associate Professor
Department of
English & Modern European Languages
University of
Allahabad
Uttar Pradesh,
India
Abstract:
Girish
Karnad is an Indian playwright who picks up themes and techniques from the
folklores, mythology and history and accords contemporaneity to them. The Fire and the Rain (1995)
originally published in Kannada as Agni Mattu Male is based on a mythical tale
in The Mahabharata which after improvisations made by the playwright,
touches significant modern day concerns such as the rigours of religion versus
faith, the simple forest life as against the intricacies of city life and the
immanence of love over futile rites and rituals. The present paper explores how
the marginalised culture and people have been valourized in The Fire and the Rain. The paper also
seeks to analyse how Karnad, without being didactic, subtly weaves contemporary
ideological issues in the play and presents with objectivity the pros and cons
of two diverse ideologies and leaves it for the audience to contemplate on the
situation.
Keywords: Indian English
Drama, Myth, The Mahabharata, Marginalisation, Valourization,
Syncretic theatre
The Original Myth and Deviations from it in
the Plot
Girish Karnad is a practitioner of syncretic
theatre in which themes and techniques from folklores, myths and history are
merged with contemporary concerns. The
Fire and the Rain, like several other plays drawn from mythical tales, is
based on the myth of Yavakri which he had come across decades ago in prose
retelling of C. Rajagopalachari’s Mahabhararta.
In the original myth, the story is about two learned sages, Bharadwaja and
Raibhya and their sons. Karnad digresses from the original tale and makes the
sages brothers to intensify the impact of sin committed. When the king
appointed Raibhaya as the royal priest,
Bharadwaja’s son Yavakri was furious. He already had a grievance against
Raibhaya's family and felt his father was not given due respect by not
appointing him as the royal priest. In protest, Yavakri retires to the forest
to do penance and is finally granted universal knowledge and invulnerability by
Indra. Drunk on power, Yavakri in order to take revenge tried to molest
Raibhaya's daughter-in-law, Vishakha. Karnad here alters the story line to
introduce a pre-marital love story between Yavakri and Vishakha and projects
that the latter willingly submits to Yavakri because of her desperation due to
the seven year long separation with her husband, Paravasu. When Raibhaya came
to know of Yavakri's sin, he invoked a kritya spirit through his spiritual
power from which sprang a demon, the Brahma rakshasa who was sent
out to kill him. The consecrated water
of invulnerability was seductively stolen by the revengeful Vishakha, bitter
and heart-broken at the realisation that Yavakri had used her to avenge the
insult of his father, and emptied out. The Brahma-rakshasa then
pursued the vulnerable Yavakri and killed him with a trident. Paravasu incensed
by killing of Yavakri which caused subsequent disturbance in the yajgna
being conducted for the king, kills his father and tells his younger brother
Arvasu--“In the dark, I—I mistook him for a wild animal—” (The Fire and the Rain 34) "The
intentional killing of one’s blood relation in Karnad’s play seems to be a
pointer to the speedily and remorselessly growing sins in the contemporary
world" (Chaitanya 2143). He asks Arvasu to observe the last rites of their
father. After doing so Arvasu returns to the fire sacrifice only to discover
that Paravasu accuses him of the murder of Raibhaya. He charges him of patricide
and asks the king's guards to push him out of the yajgna out else his
presence would desecrate the area. Arvasu pleads his innocence to no avail.
Then Aravasu goes to the forests and prays to the Sun God. When Sun God appears
he asks them to restore Yavakri, Bharadwaja and Raibhya back to life and make
Paravasu forget his evil act. The gods granted him the boon. To the original
mythical tale, Karnad makes improvisations and introduces the character of the
simple, tribal girl Nittilai who is in love with Arvasu and who finally becomes
a victim of honour-killing due to caste-based conflicts.
What makes the play even more interesting is that there is a reference
not to one myth but also to another which parallels and reinforces the first.
The second myth used in the play is the Indra-Vritra myth. Indra, the king of
gods, the lord of rains and the wielder of the thunderbolt slays the demon
Vritra. Indra-Vrita myth is one of the archetypal myths of India. We find it in
the Rig Veda; it appears again with
variations in the Mahabharata nearly
a thousand years later. Indra has two step sons, Vishwarupa and Vrita.
Vishwarup born of Brahma and a woman becomes extremely popular. The jealous
Indra treacherously invites him for a yajgna and kills him. Infuriated
Vrita who was stopped from entering the yajgna place on account of being
born of the union between Brahma and a demon woman, is also killed with wrong
means by Indra. "Fratricide and the fear of brother destroying brother
form the crux of both the Indra-Vritra myth as well as the Paravasu-Aravsu
episode" (2143).
The Tribal versus the Brahminic Culture
The Fire and the Rain
extensively contrasts two cultures, two ways of life, two approaches to
existence and two varied value systems—the Brahminic and the Tribal:
Whereas
the Brahminic culture, represented by Raibhaya and Paravasu, is rigid,
ritualistic and life-thwarting, the Tribal culture is community-oriented,
accommodative and life-giving. As the title indicates, the Brahminic culture is
Fire, which destroys everything; the Tribal culture is Rain, which gives and
sustains life (Ramachandran 27).
In a very subtle manner, the play insinuates
at the prevailing practice of gross exploitation of those belonging to the
lower strata of the caste system by the privileged castes. The schism between
the two castes is hinted at the very outset of the play, when the Actor-Manager
enters the very precincts of the sacrificial area with his proposal to enact a
play, “the latter is made to stand at a distance from the fire-sacrifice since
as an actor he is considered low-born” (The Fire and the Rain 2). The
Courtier enters the protected area of the fire sacrifice to inform Paravasu and
the King of the Actor-Manager’s arrival and proposal. The Actor-Manager is not
allowed to face the sacrificial area and the Courtier says to him--"You
may shout out whatever you have to say, but please face away from the
sacrificial enclosure so you don’t pollute it" (2).
The people of the lower castes are looked down upon by the upper caste
as no less than animals or demons who may desecrate or profane a ritualistic
sacrifice and so they are supposed to keep away from pure and sacred places.
The fact has been hinted at by Karnad in the Note to the play:
The
conduct of the participants is regulated by stringent rules. They cannot go
outside the sacrificial precincts. They cannot indulge in sexual dalliance.
They cannot speak to “lower-caste” people etc (Karnad, "Note" 294).
The playwright appears to be highly critical
of the mysterious rites and rituals of the high castes which hold no real
significance in the sense that they do little good to the human cause. Through
Nittilai he voices his views and openly ridicules the meaningless customs of
the high castes and upholds the simplicity of worship and way of living in the
Tribal caste:
You know, their fire sacrifices are conducted in covered enclosures.
They mortify themselves in the dark of the jungle. Even their gods appear so
secretly. Why? What are they afraid of? Look at my people. Everything is done
in public view there. The priest announces that he will invoke the deity at
such and such a time on such and such a day. And then there, right in front of
the whole tribe, he gets possessed...You know
it’s there (The Fire and the Rain 11).
The meaninglessness of such rites and rituals which detach one from
his/her loved ones is hinted at by the playwright in the following words of
Arvasu which he utters when the sacred duties of obsequies expected of his
caste stop him to achieve his lady-love:
...but I had just cremated a dead body. I couldn’t bear the thought of
touching you with those unclean hands. An untouchable wouldn’t have cared. An
outcaste wouldn’t have cared. But my cursed caste wouldn’t let me go…To think
you would have been mine. Half an hour (34)!
In the play Karnad not only criticizes the brutal system of caste
prevalent in contemporary India but also wishes to make people realize that
one’s caste is determined not by one’s birth but by one’s abilities and
profession, which was the basis of Varnashram
dharma and the concept of which deteriorated with time. The Actor-Manager,
while talking about the art of theatricality brings this point to the fore:
The
sons of Bharata were the first actors in the history of theatre. They were
Brahmins but lost their caste because of their profession. A curse plunged them
into disrepute and disgrace. If one values one’s high birth, one should not
touch this profession (3).
He even
casts off the fear of his elder brother for opting to become an actor for the
love of Nittilai— “Paravasu himself has ostracized me. I’m an outcaste now. He
can’t stop me from acting”(49). As Budholiya says
This
change of caste brings the postcolonial perspectives into this play. The novels
like Nachyo Bahut Gopal by Amrit Lal
Nagar and The God of Small Things by
Arundhati Roy also exemplify the postcolonial perspectives of social change.
Nirgunia, a married woman in Nachyo Bahut
Gopal breaks off all the shackles of high-caste family and marries
willingly an untouchable against the injustice of society….(155).
Even Nittiali quotes the words of her father
to show the double standards of the high caste men. She says— “These high caste
men are glad enough to bed our women but not to wed them” (The Fire and the
Rain 8). Arvasu thus becomes a “low caste actor”. Again he unveils the
conspiracy of his father and brother— which is symbolic of the conspiracy of
all the pundits and believers in caste-system— which was aimed at withholding
him from his profession and from Nittiali’s love. A hunting girl of the Tribal
clan attracts Arvasu more than the snobbery, hypocrisy and egoism of high-caste
society. As a secular writer, Karnad weaves the myriad ideologies and groups of
society together.
By
way of the traditional theme of the Purusharthas,
Karnad again subverts the hierarchy of caste and privileges simplicity over
religiosity, the Shudra over the Brahmin. The Purusharthas—Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha, forms the
centre on which the play seems to revolve. Purusharathas
form a very important aspect of Hinduism. The theme has also got a mention in
the Note on the play by the playwright himself. To take a cue from that we can
say that Purusharthas are conceived
to be the four ethical goals of human existence: Dharma, which relates to spiritual sphere, Artha: that belonging to the economic realm, Kama, which denotes sexual pleasure and the fourth is the goal
which is attained after crossing these hurdles—Moksha (redemption). Karnad wanted to give the concept of Purusharthas, a modern interpretation
and so he conceived the idea of the play. As he says in an interview with Tutun
Mukherjee:
During this time, I also met Dr. K.J. Shah who used to teach that the Natyasashtra mentions the four Purusharthas
as themes for theatrical enactment and wondered whether a modern drama could be
written to exemplify them. I contemplated these issues for several years….I
knew that the myth could show both the centrality of yagnya with parallel drawn from theatre and also dramatise the
interplay of dharma—as ritual,
tapasya; artha—power; kama—love, sex; moksha—redemption, sacrifice. I struggled for nearly thiry-seven
years to organize the ramifications of the myth and did an enormous amount of
research (46).
In The Fire
and the Rain, the upper-caste Brahmins do not achieve the final bliss which
is Moksha. Even Yavakri, with his
Universal knowledge, leads to no good and is stuck up in his viciousness. It is
only the loving, spontaneous Nittilai who gets release from the endless chain
of birth and death and thus is completely emancipated. She is the only
character in the play who achieves the final, the ultimate, the Moksha or Nirvana or the supreme salvation.
In a play entitled Live Like Pigs
(1958), John Arden too privileges the gypsy life-style over the hypocrisy
involved in the notion of respectability and morality. The play leaves us with
the feeling that the official guardians are ultimately far more hurtful to the
society than the unusual mores of the nomad gypsies.
Demons/ Outcastes Valourised Over Gods
Throughout The Fire and the Rain, we find that Karnad has played on the
privileging of the deprived against the bestowed. Shudras are privileged
against Brahmins, rural/ natural life against urban setting of city life,
secular against ritualistic and demons against gods. The Brahma Rakshasa,
even though a demon, fulfills his duty of killing Yavakri while the gods appear
to be unreliable. Gods, as we can see from the Indra-Vritra affair as also from
episode of granting of boon to a selfish man like Yavakri, appear not only
indifferent (as Kali in Hayavadana,
or the “absent god” of Naga-Mandala or
the broken idol of Bali) but also
treacherous. As Nigam says—“Whereas Gods and Brahmins represent treachery and
evil, Nittilai though an outcaste, is full of human attributes and beauty
(39).” Hers is the only meaningful existence amongst all other characters who
spend their lives searching for meaning and purpose.
Conclusion
The presentation of strain and conflict of opposing forces, values and
ideologies seems to be Karnad’s supreme interest in his plays. The Fire and the Rain presents the
strain between two ways of life, the Brahmin, laden with rites and rituals and
the Tribal/ Dalit with its simplicity and spontaneity. As has been already
discussed, chiefly through the character of Nittilai, an outcaste woman, Karnad
privileges the latter over the former and makes an appeal to the audience to
shed all differences and believe in one religion, from which all religions of
the world ensue, which is the religion of humanity, of compassion, oneness and
selfless love. What Karnad wishes to portray is that blind adherence to
stringent rules and regulations, rites and rituals will serve no good. It is
only through the religion of humanity that the redemptive “rain,” regenerating
the parched land of our spiritual selves, can be achieved. The playwright,
without being didactic, subtly weaves contemporary ideological issues in the
play and presents with objectivity the pros and cons of two diverse ideologies
and leaves it for the audience to contemplate on the situation.
Works
Cited
Arden , John. Three Plays: The Waters of Babylon, Live
Like Pigs, The Happy Haven. Grove
Press, 1958.
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An Interpretation of Girish Karnad’s The
Fire and the Rain.” Reflections on
Indian English Literature, edited by
M.R. Verma and K. A.
Agarwal. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002. pp. 147-158.
Chaitanya, Pratima. "Creative Interpolations in Mythical
Narratives: A Study in Girish Karnad's The Fire and the Rain." Mukht
Shabd Journal Volume IX, Issue V, May 2020.
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Fire and the Rain." Collected
Plays: Volume Two. Tale-Danda, The Fire and the Rain, The
Dreams of Tipu Sultan, Two Monologues. Oxford University Press,
2006. pp. 289-302.
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---,Three Plays: Naga-Mandala, Hayavadana and
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