Feminism in Girish Karnad's "Nagamandala"

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. The name 'Rani' ridicules at the Indian ideal of womanhood as the Rani or Lakshmi of the household. As Virginia Woolf asserts in A Room of One's Own, "Imaginatively, she's of the highest importance, practically insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover, is all but absent from history."

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 or that: her parental home or her husband's abode. For the woman, the home is said be an expression 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. She does not shut the door behind her like Nora does in "A Doll's House", 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. So much for her aversion to the institution of marriage. Critics show her body as a site of "confinement, violence, regulation and communication of the victimized gender-self". And 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.

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 o 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. And 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'.

Otherwise, the flames in the story were attributed with 'not having' the qualities of 'passing on'. However, this is what they were precisely doing at the outset. Therefore, 'passing on' has wider ramifications here, than merely physically transmitting.

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).