Girish Karnad's Flowers

Two Monologues

Rukhaya MK, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Dec 10, 2008 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."

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?

Again, sexuality has always been a taboo topic when associated with religion, whereas it has always been an inherent aspect of religion with respect to the love Krishna and Radha, Pre-Hindu Tantra: Shaktiism and Shaivism. Tantra is a Sanskrit word meaning 'woven together' which reminds one of the flower garlands in the play. 'Tantra' is a term "loosely applied to several divergent and even contradictory schools of Hindu Yoga in which the sexual unioun of the male and female is worshipped either in principle or in human practice. It has come to be applied to sex-based religious practices developed in other religions including Bon, Taoism, Christianity, Judaism and Transcendentalism."

The playwright renders 'worship' a verb with purely instinctive attributes. He utilizes the word the 'flowers' to signify worship-as it is there as long as it lasts; and is fragrant, fleeting and innocent as worship is. The man worships the body of the woman just as he reveres the linga; the passion for both is manifest. Both types of love are basic, instinctive and raw. There is no afterthought in both, no calculation. Donne declares in "The Canonization" that through their earthly love of sexual worship he and his love will strive to attain the divine stature of heavenly saints. Similarly, Karnad merges the identities of religious adoration and sexual devotion, marginalizing social boundaries and conventions.

Besides, the female body/sexuality has always been a concern for shame as compared to the male physique that is conspicuous in the emblematic linga and the images of Buddha. However, the playwright inverts places in the play. As the prostitute is supposed to adulate the priest, it turns out that he starts venerating her body, relegating male sexuality to the background, and states:

"And even as a whole new world of patterns was opening up to me, thoughts of the linga kept passing through my mind. I pitied it, felt exasperated at its unimaginative contours. Why did its shape have to be so bland and unindented that one had to balance garlands precariously on it and improvise superfluous knots to hide some ungainly strings? Why didn't the Lord offer a form which inflamed invention like Chandra did?" (250)

In the original folktale, the Goddess intervenes to save the face of the priest who has hitherto never deterred in his devotion for her. When a lapse occurs, the priest is guilty of the Goddess' magnanimity and the smallness of his deed. He kills himself revealing his immense self-respect. The playwright replaces the image of the Goddess with a phallus deliberately, as according to popular perception, religion is essentially patriarchal and God has masculine attributes.

-In Hinduism, we have Brahma, the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer.

-In Christianity, God sent his Son, Jesus Christ to the earth and not his daughter.

-In Islam, there are one lakh twenty five thousand prophets and not even one among them is a woman.

Karnad foregrounds gender by inverting it here. Jasbir Jain avers: "Karnad's choice of a priest as the narrative voice, the centrality of the temple as a place for his trial, the worship of the lingam-all represent the male principle." The playwright highlights the male principle, and then inverts it, harmonizing both.

Thus the folktale is a pointer to the original folktale when the chieftain questions: 'Does God have long hair?' Nevertheless, Karnad subverts both these theories and renders God a neutral experience in his spiritual quest through this monologue:

"As a boy, I used to shove my head into the hollow to test how long I could hold my breath. I shall do so again now, but not to test my lungs. I shall seek in the narrow confines of that hollow the answers that God has denied me."(260)