Girish Karnad's "Flowers"

FLOWERS

Girish Karnad reinvents a folktale from Chitradurga in Karnataka that deals with a Brahmin priest who is lost in his spiritual adoration of Shivaand the sexual worship of the courtesan Chandravati. By juxtaposing two complementary entities pertaining to "sophisticated" culture, the playwright appears to voice: If the first is divine and the second beautiful; cannot the divine be beautiful and the beautiful divine?

The priest who lives with his wife and two children is dear to the chieftain of the region, thanks to his prowess in arranging flowers on the linga. The act is the most sacred and engaging for the priest: it is never a mechanical routine for him. The priest always devises newer and newer ways to adorn the phallic structure symbolic of Shiva. The protagonist is besotted with the linga to the extent of talking to it, singing to it and discussing political matters with it. His obsession for the linga is so immense that his wife terms it his "step-wife".

One day, the Courtesan Chandravati pays a visit to the temple and like never before, the priest finds himself getting addicted to her presence in the temple. One day, when she fails to show up at the temple, he visits her house to find out the reason for her absence. She informs him of her menstrual seclusion; and requests him to come again after she has had her cleansing ablution, so that he can embellish her body with flowers. The priest becomes a regular visitor to her house where the act of worshipping her body with flowers always becomes a prelude to the act of love-making.

One fine night, the chieftain of the region, owing to an urgent engagement shows up at midnight at an unexpected hour for the pooja. The priest has to settle for second-hand flowers, in haste, that have already been 'experimented' upon Chandravati. The chieftain does not fail to notice a long hair conspicuously sticking out from the arrangement of flowers that obviously does not belong to the priest's wife. The priest puts forth a question (that is rhetorical for him and the perceivers): 'Does God have long hair?'

The question is highly suggestive as Lord Shiva (obviously) does wear his hair long. So the connotation here is to definitely ascertain God's identity in terms of gender. Cannot God be a woman? Moreover, the term 'linga' also refers to the grammatical concept of gender and the word 'linga' without any prefix is neutral here. This is precisely the implication here -God is beyond the concept of gender. The priest replies to the chieftain that if one strongly believes that God has long hair then God will. The priest ultimately proves his stance to the chieftain. After a week's rigorous penance the linga is found to have luscious feminine tresses flowing out of it. By juxtaposing a phallic symbol with feminine hair, the end-product is something neutral and genderless. Does God create gender for man, or man create gender for God? By constructing a figure for God, does God crate man or man create God?