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The time loop
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Girish Karnad’s first play Yayati is out in English, five decades after it was first written. Do we seek answers to the present through such revisitations to the past? asks DEEPA GANESH
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Nothing is static: how we see the future, and the manner in which we re-perceive our past. While some changes are forced, thrown as we are into a gamut of experience, some are organic. Standing in the present, a crisis of the past may not revisit in
its complexity. Also, referring to the past isn’t always on a note of loss; it could well mean an evolution, a gain. At 70, going back to a play written at 22 is a return to the past in more than one sense.
Girish Karnad’s “Yayati” has been published in English and was recently released by the Oxford University Press. “While I was writing the play, I saw it only as an escape from my stressful situation. But looking back, I am amazed at how precisely the myth of Yayati reflected my anxieties at that moment, my resentment with all those who seemed to demand that I sacrifice my future. By the time I had finished working on Yayati – during the three weeks it took the ship to reach England and in the lonely cloisters of the University – the myth had enabled me to articulate to 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.”
Yet again, with the English translation, the myth has nailed Karnad to his past, but with a deeper engagement. “There was more than one temptation to go back to it. All people who had done this play had given me their feedback. C.R. Simha always complained I had rendered Yayati’s character weak, Lagoo had something to say and so had Dubey. And then there was my own lived experience. From 22 to 70, I have grown and my perceptions have changed. For instance, when Yayati tells Sharmishta, “I’ll make you my queen”, she is so overwhelmed by the offer that she bursts into tears. This is something that didn’t occur to me when I was 22. Also, when the newly-married Pooru says he wants to be left alone in his room… they were exactly my feelings when I went to my home in Dharwar with my wife. I wanted to be left alone in my room, it was my private space…,” explains Karnad.
Girish Karnad’s Photo: Murali Kumar K.
The celebrated version The first production Yayati directed by Satyadev Dubey featured Amrish Puri, with Tarla Mehta
Apart from these, Karnad was also conscious he was taking it to a new audience and had to reload the play with fresh insights. “Therefore I keep changing it; I go on sharpening my lines. I’m unlike playwrights like Beckett, who don’t like to modify a word after they’re done with it.”
In trying to breakaway, going away to foreign shores to study, and writing “Yayati”, did Karnad also have parental aggression on his mind? He did to an extent, though he says he had no clue about it in theory. But with Sudhir Kakar’s psycho-analytical studies on the subject, it did put things in place for him. If the West has its obsessions with the Oedipus complex, in India the engagement works in the reverse, which could perhaps be described as the Yayati complex. Karnad cites the Shantanu-Bheeshma story, Ganesha story, and the story of Rama from mythology as examples. “The most recent one is of course, the Devegowda – Kumaraswamy story I suppose…,” he laughs.
By taking nearly five decades to bring it out in English, was he then trying to keep off from another kind of hegemony, of language, if not parental? “When I wrote the play, I didn’t believe in translation. But having been married for 28 years, there’s so much English spoken at home that I have come to feel translation is important.” That’s not all; Karnad feels since a play needs to be acted, the language has to breathe. He recalls the famous soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To be or not to be…” and says it’s remarkable not only for its sheer literary brilliance, but also for the manner in which the lines breathe. “Therefore I choose to be my own translator. Also, as you translate you can do new things.”
Karnad, known for his preoccupation with history and mythology, has written two contemporary plays in the recent times, “Odakalu Bimba” and “Maduve Album”. Unlike in Maharashtra and West Bengal, where theatre picks up contemporary issues, why are the instances in Kannada theatre few and far between? Don’t we have the idiom to accommodate contemporary experience? Or are we a people comfortable living in the past? “Including me, it’s true that most of our senior writers are comfortable writing about the past, about the world of their childhood,” agrees Karnad. In fact, he even explains that it took an enormous length of time for him to handle contemporary experience, which did slow down his writing process. This, he thinks, is also because Karnataka till Unification, never had any geographical entity called the city. Even those that were labelled as cities (like the laidback Mysore), have assumed the characteristics of a city very recently. And therefore, “we have never been exposed to an authentic city experience. But Maharashtra and Bengal have had cities for almost 150 years now.”
Why do we constantly throw ourselves between pasts and present? Why do we tinker the past with our understanding from the present? Do Karnad’s deeply eloquent lines in “Yayati” hold an answer? “We turn to ancient lore not because it offers any blinding revelation or hope of consolation, but because it provides fleeting glimpses of the fears and desires sleepless within us. It is a good way to get introduced to ourselves.”
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