Girish Karnad’s YAYATI (1961): A Note

Aparna Dharwadker
Professor of Theatre & Drama and English
University of Wisconsin-Madison

On Saturday, 24 October 2009, the Plenary Session with Girish Karnad (3:45-5:15 p.m.) will be followed by a staged reading of his first play, Yayati, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the lecture hall of the Madison Museum of Modern Art, the Overture Centre for the Arts, 227 State Street. Trained members of the UW-Madison Department of Theatre and Drama will perform the reading under the direction of Joan Brooks and Barbara Clayton. This event will mark the first performance outside India of Karnad’s own English translation of Yayati, which appeared from Oxford University Press, New Delhi, in 2007, forty-six years after the publication of the play in Kannada. Yayati clearly has a special place in Karnad’s oeuvre, since he has always promptly translated his other major plays into English, and published them individually as well as in a two-volume collected edition (Oxford UP, 2005). The dramatic reading will therefore allow the audience an opportunity to experience an unusual work and discuss it with the author.

The event is free, but due to limited space, conference participants interested in attending it must request a ticket when they register online. Tickets will be distributed on a first come, first served basis.

The story of the genesis of Yayati is equally fascinating. Written over the course of a few weeks as Karnad was preparing to leave India for a three-year stint as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, the play reflected the familial anxieties and resentments that centered on the potential implications of his departure, “the terrible choice . . . implicit in the very act of going away.” For the young author, the conflict was framed in idealistic terms: “Should I . . . return home for the sake of my family, my people and my country, . . . or should I rise above such parochial considerations and go where the world drew me?” Karnad’s literary ambition, modelled on the career of his friend and lifelong mentor, A. K. Ramanujan, was to be a poet in English, the lingua franca of urban life in contemporary India. To his own surprise, he instead found himself creating a drama in Kannada about Yayati, the Chandravamshi king in the Mahabharata who exchanged his body with that of his youngest son, Puru, in order to stave off the curse of premature old age.

The play also proved to be much more than a fictional displacement of the conflict between family expectations and personal aspirations. As Karnad noted with the advantage of hindsight, the myth of Yayati “enabled me to articulate for myself a set of values that I had been unable to arrive at rationally. Whether to return home finally seemed the most minor of issues; the myth had nailed me to my past.” In practical terms, the immediate attention Yayati attracted among readers when it appeared in Kannada under the imprint of G. B. Joshi’s Manohar Granth Mala in 1961 convinced Karnad that he had a future as a playwright in India, and prompted his return home at the end of the Rhodes scholarship period. The play itself resolved, as a literary work, the existential crisis that had generated and shaped it.

In the Adiparvan, the first major book of the Mahabharata, Yayati is a “mighty” and “invincible” descendent of the Kurus who has already achieved greatness as a king when he is cursed with premature old age for cohabiting with Sharmishtha, the Asura princess who is the rival and slave of his wife, sage Shukracharya’s daughter Devayani. The epic does not question or criticize Yayati’s motives when he demands that one of his sons assume the curse because he himself is “not yet sated of youth.” On the contrary, Yayati curses his four older sons for refusing the challenge because “the strict do not deem him a son who is contrary to his father,” and blesses his youngest son for accepting it. After a thousand years, Yayati assumes his old age again and gives the kingdom to Puru, because “like a true son, Puru did my pleasure.” The myth validates the father’s authority and the son’s obedience, reinforcing the counter-oedipal logic of filial relations in Hindu mythology.

Karnad refashions the story as an ironic drama of discontent, futility, and death, deriving his structure not from Indian models but from an eclectic synthesis of the Greek tragic playwrights, Jean Anouilh, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eugene O’ Neill. With modernist thoroughness, the play reshapes mythical material, redistributes thematic emphases, and invents new characters to complicate the dramatic potential of the story. Karnad’s Yayati is a self-centered epicurean who invites the curse because he cannot overcome his desire for Sharmishtha, although Devayani has warned him about the destructive consequences of his choice. Puru is a philosophical but self-hating “outsider” who feels unsettled by the questionable legitimacy of his birth, and oppressed by the weight of dynastic tradition. When the curse is pronounced, Puru accepts it because he thinks the sacrifice of his youth would counteract his feelings of unworthiness, and enable him to fulfil his destiny as a Chandravamsha prince. However, in deviation from the Mahabharata story, Karnad’s Puru has just returned home with a new bride, Chitralekha, who tries to accept his sacrifice but commits suicide in revulsion at the thought that her father-in-law Yayati is now her rightful husband. Too late, Yayati tries to atone for his actions by restoring Puru’s youth and withdrawing into the forest, but Sharmishtha points out to him the inescapable foundations of his future: “a corpse, a lunatic, a fallen woman” (Act IV). Puru, in turn, ends the play on a note of stark bewilderment, unable to comprehend the point of what he has endured.

Karnad’s portrait of an overbearing patriarch and a weak-willed son is a displaced expression of his resentment against the element of “emotional blackmail” in family relations. But the most memorable feature of Yayati—and a striking accomplishment for a twenty-two year old author—is its quartet of sentient, articulate, embittered women, all of whom are subject in varying degrees to the whims of men, but who succeed in subverting the male world through an assertion of their own rights and privileges. This chorus of unusual female voices, mixed in with the flawed male utterances, humanizes the myth and gives it ethical and dialectical weight. Yayati establishes at the outset of Karnad’s career that myth is not merely a narrative to be bent to present purposes, but a structure of meanings worth exploring in itself because it offers opportunities for philosophical reflection without the constraints of realism or the necessity of a contemporary setting. Like the characters of Greek tragedy, Karnad’s mythic figures have human depth even when they are caught in a predetermined course of action, and he does not hesitate to alter both character and event to create effective drama.