Modernising tradition through the stage, modernising the stage through folk tales: Karnad’s Nāgamaṇḍala and Agni mattu male

Abstract

As Girish Karnad said in a famous interview: “theatre has always been parasitical. It has always drawn on other forms: on epics in ancient India or Greece, for instance, or on folk tales and novels”. (1995. “Performance, Meaning, and the Materials of Modern Indian Theatre”. New Theatre Quarterly, 11, pp 355-370). But this parasitic way in turn offers to narrative traditions a new fictional configuration and in particular new ambiguities. We shall examine the dialectic of narrative performance in Karnad’s own work, in Nāgamaṇḍala (Play with Cobra, 1988), based on a folk tale related to him by A. K. Ramanujam, and premiered at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis; and in Agni mattu male (The Fire and the Rain), based on the rather neglected story of Yavakri in the Mahābhārata, which the Guthrie Theatre commissioned from him afterwards. To what extent the adaptation of narrative to the economics of theatrical genre bridges the gap between traditions of varying prestige by reactivating their oral dimension? The two Kannada plays, translated into English by the playwright, offer a rich material for thinking about the circulation between genres, languages, historical periods and cultures in contemporary Indian theatre.