Girish Karnad - Nāga-Mandala (Play with a Cobra)
- Musleh Saadi
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Girish Karnad’s Naga-Mandala (1988) occupies a significant position within postcolonial Indian drama for its innovative fusion of folklore, myth, and modern theatrical self-reflexivity. Written in the aftermath of colonial rule, the play resists Eurocentric dramatic realism by reclaiming indigenous narrative forms, thus enacting what Homi K. Bhabha terms a “counter-narrative of the nation” (Bhabha 1994). Through its frame narrative and folktale structure, Naga-Mandala interrogates identity, gendered power relations, and cultural hybridity in postcolonial India. Karnad’s dramaturgy foregrounds how marginalized voices particularly women negotiate agency within oppressive patriarchal and colonial legacies.
At the thematic core of the play lies Rani’s fractured identity, shaped by silence, confinement, and patriarchal domination. Appanna’s cruelty is immediately established through his act of locking Rani inside the house “I put a lock on the door so those with sight could see” a line that symbolically equates marriage with incarceration. This enforced muteness reflects Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s argument in Can the Subaltern Speak? that patriarchal structures systematically deny women discursive agency (Spivak 1988). Rani’s initial existence is one of invisibility; she is denied companionship, sexuality, and speech. Yet her identity begins to transform through the nocturnal visits of Naga, the serpent-lover, who paradoxically grants her emotional recognition and desire denied by her lawful husband.
The figure of Naga functions as a powerful symbol of cultural hybridity and resistance.
Rooted in indigenous folklore, the serpent embodies precolonial epistemologies that colonial modernity sought to suppress. When Naga tells Rani, “The husband decides on the day visits. And the wife decides on the night visits,” the line subverts patriarchal authority by redistributing power along gendered and temporal lines. Day and night operate symbolically: the “day” represents rigid social law and colonial rationality, while the “night” signifies indigenous myth, desire, and alternative truth systems. This duality aligns with Bhabha’s concept of the “third space,” where new identities emerge through cultural negotiation rather than binary opposition (Bhabha 1994).
Folklore and myth in Naga-Mandala are not escapist devices but political strategies. The play’s opening frame where the Story escapes captivity and demands to be retold metaphorically critiques colonial epistemic violence. The Story’s declaration that suppressed narratives inevitably find expression echoes Frantz Fanon’s assertion that colonized cultures resist erasure through symbolic regeneration (Fanon 1963). By allowing the Story to “tell itself,” Karnad decentralizes authorial authority and privileges oral tradition, challenging the dominance of Western literary forms imposed during colonial rule.
Gender politics reach their climax in the snake ordeal, where Rani proves her chastity by holding the cobra. Ironically, the patriarchal community validates her purity only through a supernatural intervention. Although Rani gains social power, she becomes revered as a goddess-like figure this empowerment is deeply ambivalent. As critics note, her authority is contingent upon myth rather than systemic change. This reflects postcolonial feminist concerns that symbolic victories often mask enduring structural oppression (Mohanty 2003). Rani’s “triumph” thus exposes the limits of agency within patriarchal and postcolonial frameworks.
Power dynamics reach a climax in the snake-ordeal scene, where Rani is publicly tried for adultery. Her declaration “I have not touched any man except my husband and this cobra” (Karnad 52) is both truthful and subversive, yet it is interpreted within patriarchal logic. Her survival elevates her to divine status, revealing society’s contradictory treatment of women: they are either demonized or deified, rarely human. This moment exemplifies postcolonial feminism’s critique of symbolic empowerment, as Rani gains authority only by conforming to mythic ideals imposed by male-dominated structures (Loomba 192).
Symbolism and language play a crucial role in articulating these themes. The Mandala, traditionally a symbol of harmony and order, paradoxically represents cyclical entrapment rather than liberation. Similarly, the snake embodies repressed desire, fluid identity, and subversive knowledge. Karnad’s language oscillates between realism and lyricism, reflecting the tension between social law and mythic imagination. Such stylistic hybridity mirrors the cultural hybridity of postcolonial India, where tradition and modernity coexist in uneasy negotiation.
Karnad’s use of self-reflexive narrative structure further reinforces the play’s postcolonial stance. The playwright figure in the frame narrative, cursed for making audiences sleep, mirrors the anxiety of the postcolonial writer negotiating tradition and modernity. His survival depends on listening an ethical imperative suggesting that postcolonial art must attend to silenced voices. Language, too, plays a crucial role: Karnad’s English translation retains the rhythms of Kannada oral storytelling, producing a linguistic hybridity that resists colonial linguistic hierarchy.
In conclusion, Naga-Mandala emerges as a profoundly postcolonial text that reimagines identity, power, and resistance through myth and folklore. By centering a silenced woman’s transformation and privileging indigenous narrative forms, Karnad challenges colonial aesthetics and patriarchal authority alike. The play does not offer utopian resolution; instead, it exposes the contradictions of empowerment within postcolonial society. Through its symbolic complexity and cultural rootedness, Naga-Mandala continues to advance scholarly conversations on gender, hybridity, and narrative resistance in South Asian postcolonial literature.
Girish Karnad’s Naga-Mandala (Play with a Cobra), first performed in 1988, stands as a seminal work of postcolonial Indian theatre that strategically deploys indigenous folklore to interrogate the enduring psychological and social architectures of power. Moving beyond simplistic nativism, Karnad utilizes the folk tale not as a relic of a pristine past, but as a dynamic, critical apparatus to dissect the intertwined legacies of colonialism and patriarchy. Through the allegorical narrative of Rani, Appanna, and the mythical Naga, the play engages with core postcolonial concerns: the fragmentation of identity under hegemonic systems, the subaltern’s search for a discursive voice, and the complex negotiation of cultural hybridity. This analysis argues that Naga-Mandala employs a sophisticated, multi-layered narrative structure and potent symbolism to dramatize the postcolonial condition as one of internal conflict and strategic performance, ultimately proposing a model of agency that emerges from within, and in cunning negotiation with, the very traditions that seek to contain it.
The play’s meta-theatrical frame narrative immediately establishes a postcolonial critique of cultural production itself. A playwright, condemned to death for boring his audiences to sleep, must stay awake to receive a story that has literally escaped from an old woman—a story personified as a woman in a vibrant sari. This framing device performs several critical functions. First, it allegorizes the creative sterility that can result from a disconnection from vital, indigenous narrative sources, a pertinent concern in a postcolonial context where Western dramatic forms often overshadow local traditions. Second, it elevates oral, folk narrative—specifically that transmitted by women—to the status of a life-giving force. As Karnad himself notes, such kitchen tales function as a “parallel system of communication” among women, a subaltern discourse operating beneath the radar of official, patriarchal culture (Karnad, “Introduction” x). This resonates with Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of the “inner domain” of national culture, where spiritual sovereignty was preserved under colonial rule; here, the inner domain is distinctly gendered, positioning women as custodians and subversive agents of cultural memory (Chatterjee 120).
Karnad maps the psychic violence of the postcolonial condition onto the gendered dynamics of the domestic sphere through the central triad of characters. Appanna, whose name translates to “any man,” embodies a sterile, tyrannical patriarchy. He incarcerates his wife Rani, policing her body and speech with commands like “Do as you are told” and “I don’t like idle chatter” (Karnad 254). His domestic tyranny functions as a microcosm of any absolutist regime colonial or native that operates through enclosure, surveillance, and the systematic suppression of desire. Rani’s consequent abjection and fragmentation are rendered through her retreat into fantastical self-narration: “So the demon locks her up in the castle… Then the big whale comes to Rani and says: ‘Come, Rani, let us go…’” (263). Her subjectivity splinters, a phenomenon Frantz Fanon links to the colonial alienation of the native, who is “forever in combat with his own image” (Fanon 250). In Rani, this combat manifests as a struggle between the self as a speaking subject and the self as a confined object.
The intervention of the Naga, or King Cobra, catalyzes a profound destabilization of this oppressive order, introducing the theme of cultural and psychic hybridity central to postcolonial thought. In Indian mythology, the Naga is an ambivalent symbol of fertility, unconscious knowledge, and chthonic power. By consuming the magic root intended to bind Appanna, the Naga becomes the embodied return of the repressed—the instinctual, erotic, and poetic energy that Appanna’s tyrannical rationality excludes. This creates a radical duality in the male figure, representing a psychological split that Homi K. Bhabha might identify as the uncanny doubling produced by the colonial encounter, where the self is haunted by its disavowed other (Bhabha 162). For Rani, the Naga’s nocturnal visits facilitate an awakening of agency and desire. Their relationship is linguistically marked by a lush, metaphorical discourse starkly opposed to Appanna’s barren commands. Crucially, the Naga proposes a new contractual logic: “the husband decides on the day visits. And the wife decides on the night visits” (Karnad 272). This statement formally acknowledges Rani’s jurisdiction over a domain of existence, symbolically redistributing power and validating female desire—an act of discursive resistance within the marital economy.
The public crisis of Rani’s pregnancy forces this private, hybrid reality into the panoptic arena of communal law, staging a pivotal postcolonial trial. Dragged before the village elders, Rani’s body becomes a public text upon which patriarchal authority inscribes its definitions of truth and chastity. The snake ordeal is the ritual culmination of this disciplinary spectacle. However, in a moment of brilliant subversive literalism, Rani performs a speech act that dismantles the court’s binary logic: “My husband and this King Cobra. Except for these two, I have not touched any one of the male sex” (Karnad 292). Her testimony is empirically true yet hermeneutically catastrophic to the established order; it forces the community to acknowledge a reality that exceeds its legal and moral categories. The cobra’s subsequent embrace, which transforms her into a perceived goddess, represents a “miracle from below.” It is the suppressed, folkloric unconscious of the culture—the realm of the Naga—rising to overthrow the juridical-patriarchal superstructure, enacting what critic Dolors Collellmir terms a “transcending [of] the conflict to achieve wholeness” through mythical means (Collellmir 2).
Karnad resists a conventionally liberatory resolution, opting instead for an ending that embodies the ambivalent, negotiated agency characteristic of the postcolonial subject. The play’s famous triple ending underscores this. The first, a stereotypical folktale conclusion of deification and harmony, is rejected as narratively insufficient. The second, in which the Naga strangles himself in Rani’s hair, suggests the tragic cost of assimilating or eradicating the disruptive Other. It is the third ending that encapsulates a strategy of sustained hybridity. Rani discovers the Naga alive in her tresses, secretly shelters him, and whispers, “This hair is the symbol of my wedded bliss. Live in there happily, for ever” (Karnad 300). This resolution exemplifies what Bhabha calls “sly civility” a performative compliance that masks a space of hidden autonomy (Bhabha 99). Rani does not escape her social role but hollows it out, creating within the very symbol of her feminity (“wedded bliss”) a sanctuary for the transgressive knowledge and desire the Naga represents. Her identity becomes a palimpsest, a site of continuous, cunning negotiation.
In conclusion, Naga-Mandala is a profound postcolonial text that utilizes the folk form as a critical, rather than conservative, instrument. Through its meta-narrative framing, symbolic characterizations, and structurally ambiguous resolution, Karnad demonstrates how the materials of tradition can be recalibrated to critique the power dynamics both colonial and indigenous that that tradition often upholds. The play moves beyond a binary opposition of colonizer/colonized to scrutinize the internalized hegemonies of gender and social orthodoxy. Rani’s journey from silenced bride to a figure who commands a hybrid space of existence outwardly the revered wife, inwardly the guardian of a transformative, serpentine power offers a powerful allegory for postcolonial agency. It is an agency conceived not as revolutionary overthrow, but as a resilient, improvisational, and ongoing process of making room for one’s complex truth within the interstices of the structures one must inhabit.
1.Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. Routledge, 1989.
2.Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
3.Karnad, Girish. Naga-Mandala: Play with a Cobra. Oxford UP, 1990.
4.Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Routledge, 2005.
5.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, U of Illinois P, 1988, pp. 271–313.
6.Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton UP, 1993.
Amazing 👏
Interesting ⭐
Well said 👍