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The adaptation of an eleventh-century indian parable, 'kathasaritsagara', by thomas mann in his novel 'the transposed heads' and by girish karnad in his play 'hayavadana'. The analysis focuses on the authors' subversion of traditional gender roles, empowerment of female characters, and the transformation of myths in different social and temporal contexts.
Typology: Schemes and Mind Maps
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Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of BACHELOR OF ARTS in ENGLISH BY KAVITHA .R 213311101019
Dr.M.G.R EDUCATIONAL AND RESEARCH INSTITUTE (University with Graded Autonomy Status) CHENNAI 600 095
This is to certify that KAVITHA .R (213311101019 ) is a bonafide student of the III B.A. English,
Dr. M.G.R EDUCATIONAL AND RESEARCH INSTITUTE (University with GradedAutonomy
Status) Chennai – 600 095 during 2021 – 2024 and his project work entitled CULTURAL
DIFFERENCES IN HAYAVADANA BY GIRISH KARNAD AND TRANSPOSED HEADS BY
THOMAS MAN is done by her.
Project Co-ordinator Head of the Department
Submitted for Viva Voce Examination held on
External Examiner
Girish Karnad is the most renowned personality in contemporary India, leading playwright and a very skillful practitioner of the performing arts. His plays are primarily written in Kannada. They have brought him international recognition as the pre-eminent contemporary playwright. He has enriched the Indian literary scene by his contribution to art, culture, theatre and drama.
But the most significant contribution which he has made to Indian English Drama is his attempt to retrieve the cultural and mythological rich tradition of the Indian past. In his plays we find that he returns to the roots and tries to revive the local culture and tradition. India is a postcolonial nation having its own distinct culture and colonial histories. It is also multicultural in character in that it has a strong presence of indigenous traditions, culture and ethos which are unfortunately submerged and subjugated by the imported culture of Europe. He makes an attempt to retrieve the treasure of culture and tradition.
Thomas Mann and The Transposed Heads
Thomas Mann, a novelist, essayist and cultural critic, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. He was one of the greatest German novelists of the 20th century and by the end of his life, his works had acquired the status of classics both within and outside Germany.
Mann was born in Lubeck. He was the son of a wealthy father, who had been elected twice as the burgomaster of Lubeck. His mother, Bruhn da Silva, came from a German – Portuguese-Creole family. Mann was educated at the Lubeck gymnasium and he also spent some time at the University of Munich. Mann, then, worked with the South German Fire Insurance Company. His career as a writer started in the magazine Simplicissimus. Mann’s first book, Der Kleine Herr Friedmann, was published in 1998. During these years Mann become immersed in the writings of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as in the music of composer Richard Wagner.
Mann was also firmly rooted in German culture and increasingly drawn into political conflicts. When the evidence of Nazism’s atrocious regime mounted, he became one of Hitler’s sharpest and most tireless critics throughout his exile, first in Switzerland and then in the United States. Mann underwent the deep conflicts, suffering and ambiguities as a spokesman for German politics during the 1930s and Second World War.
Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads (1941) adopted an eleventh-century Indian parable by Somadeva in his Kathasaritsagara about a woman who switches the heads of her husband and her brother. In the novella, two young men, the Brahmin Shridaman and his lower caste friend Nanda, see a young girl performing her ritual bathing, as they rest in the shade. Nanda, who has seen her at the village festival, recognizes her as Sita. Shridaman tells Nanda he is suffering from a mortal illness and asks him to help build his funeral pyre. Nanda is willing and even prepared to join his friend in death, but, in view of the seriousness of the undertaking, asks the nature of the illness.
He is amused when he learns that Shridaman is sick for love of Sita, assuring him that she is not betrothed and that Shridman is such a good catch that there is sure to be no difficulty getting her family’s consent for a wedding. He offers to be the go – between.
Nanda has accompanied the newly married couple on a journey. In a clearing they come upon a ruined temple to the goddess Kali and Shridaman, going inside to pray, is overcome with religious awe and the desire for the annihilation of his personality, and beheads himself with his sword.
Going to look for him, Nanda is overcome with guilt at the sight of the body, feeling sure that Shridaman has killed himself because he has become aware that Nanda is in love with Sita, so he takes the sword and beheads himself. Sita, finding both bodies, thinks they have killed one another for her sake, though she is puzzled as to how they have managed with only one sword. Reluctantly, she decides that she, too, must die. She tries to hang herself with vines; but she is stopped by the voice of the goddess Kali, who orders her to stop and ridicules the suggestion that they have killed one another over Sita.
The goddess decides to restore the two to life and orders Sita to place the heads back on the bodies. What she does is to put the heads on the wrong bodies. Although each man professes himself honored at receiving the body of his friend, each claims Sita as his wife. To resolve the difficulty Nanda suggests that they consult the guru Kamadamana. The guru first decides in favor of the Nanda head/Shridaman body combination on the grounds that the right hand is tended in marriage and must prevail; but immediately reverses this decision, saying that the head is the important thing.
He awards Sita to the Shridaman head/Nanda body combination. Nanda decides to become a hermit. Sita comes to Nanda’s hermitage, looking for the combination she doesn’t have. Shridaman follows her. All agree that they cannot continue as they are and decide to die and join their essences to the universal all. Nanda builds a funeral pyre; but as Shridaman points out that Sita cannot ascend it until she is a widow, the two men kill one another with their swords and fall in the pyre together. Sita joins them and all are consumed.
From a sensitive and intelligent ruler who sets out to do the best for his people, Tughlaq, misunderstood and maligned, suffers an increasing sense of alienation and is forced to abandon his earlier idealism and end up as a tyrant.
Karnad’s another famous play is Naga-Mandala which tells the story of a cobra’s irresistible love for a childless woman and the woman’s unconscious entry into a twilight world of Para physical experiences. Western playwrights like Bertolt Brecht and Jean Anouilh inspired Karnad’s retelling of this folktale.
Karnad’s most famous play, Hayavadana, begins with Kapila, who finds his best friend Devadatta despondently dreaming about Padmini. Kapila goes to arrange Devadatta’s marriage to her. Although Kapila is attracted to her, he nonetheless finalizes the match, and Devadatta and Padmini are married. Padmini is herself attracted to the strong-bodied Kapila and Devadatta is consumed by jealousy.
A few months into the marriage, the three travel to Ujjain to a fair. On the way, the two men behead themselves in the Kali temple. The pregnant Padmini, afraid that she might be blamed for their deaths, then, decides to kill herself. However, Kali stops her and offers to bring the men back to life. Padmini rearranges the heads so that Devadatta’s head is on Kapila’s body and vice versa, and asks the goddess to do her magic.
Kali brings the two men back to life. An ascetic who mediates the conflicting claims from both men to be her husband grants her wish. The ascetic’s decision is the same as that given by the king Vikranaditya in the Kathasaritsagar and by Kamadamana in The Transposed Heads.
The dolls reveal that Padmini has given birth to a disfigured son and that she has now begun dreaming about Kapila again. Back in the forest, Padmini finds the rough and muscular Kapila again. He is surprised to see Padmini, and she reveals her desire for his well-muscled body. Devadatta, armed with a sword and two new dolls, finds the lovers, and the two men decide to kill each other since their love for Padmini cannot be reconciled Padmini then decides to commit sati. She entrusts the boy to Bhagavata and leaves instructions for him to be raised both as Kapila’s son and as Devadatta’s son.
Myth
Myth is the underlying universal pattern of man's understanding of life. Man's right understanding of life and the world within the broader parameter of universe is his understanding of myth. There are countless gods, heroes and demons who represent men, and are the manifestations of man's quest to the unknown, sacrifice of the hero, transformation of energy liberation of self, and so on. Myth of one culture at one time is myth of all cultures of all the times. It is not merely of the past. Nor is it of only of future, but the past and non-past together and thus eternal.
Myths are traditional stories, prevailing beliefs and conceptions in the society and its authors are unknown. By nature these stories differ from one place to another but usually they describe the actions of Gods. Gagley says regarding myth:
Myths are stories of anonymous origin, prevalent among primitive people and by them accepted as true, concerning supernatural beings and events, or natural beings and events influenced by supernatural agencies. Myths are born not made. They are born infancy historical individual but to the imaginative efforts of generations of storytellers. (1)
The definition of Gagley about myth suggests that myths are primarily certain types of story. Myths are stories in which some of the chief characters are gods and other supernatural beings. They are larger in power than humanity because very seldom, myths describe the historical events too. The action takes place in a world above or prior to ordinary time. Hence, like the folktales, myth has an abstract story pattern. It also presents the writers with a readymade framework that allows them to devote all their energies to elaborate its design. Myth also helps the writers to express their feelings and attitudes towards life.
Myths are universal. They are found in every part of the world. Despite their bewildering variety they share certain common characteristics. For instance, they create gods in the form of man.
Likewise, myths not only arouse highest intellectual interest but address the feelings as well. Myths now are the sources for art, culture history, poetry, etc. Every ideal dwells in them. Linking myth with culture, Irmtrand Stellrectht says:
In myth, the main characters are superhuman figures. Gods or cultural heroes appear who turn into protagonists of culture; or, there are extraordinary persons who lived at the time of the creation of man and culture. Myths are bound to persons and localities, yet they are connected to a timeless past..
. they may change over periods of time in form, function, and meaning. The myth told by one group as a message of a serious nature, may be told by a neighboring group in the slightly changed form of a profane and entertaining tale. The cause of such a change in meaning is to be seen also in the change of faith: an original epoch of faith is followed by later times, in which myths serve different purposes and hold different meanings. (84-85)
In this way, the mythical conceptions are the universal beliefs. Myths from different cultures tell the same story of creation, quest, descent and resurrection. Some myths are global in nature and tell the stores of origin of earth or of humankind and destruction. Some myths tell the personal journeys of life and miseries. As a whole, myths are concerned with describing the stories of humankind concentrating on the idea of birth and death. Plato was the first who discussed about myth, saying it fictional stories. After few decades a Sicilian philosopher named Euthemerus called myths the fictionalized accounts of historical events.
Myth shouldn't be understood as something false. It is not the concept obviously contrasted from reality. Myths are the narratives that give meaning of human life, men's behaviours and relation with others. For example, invulnerable Achilles, meditative Amitabh, beautiful Helen, passionate Paris, hunting Diana, beautiful Venus, strong Apollo, frenzied Dionysus and others are the heroes and heroines of the occidental myth.
Likewise, the powerful female Durga, the Invincible Indra, genius Krishna, enlightened Siddhartha Gautam Buddha, wise Yudhithira, intelligent Arjuna and others are the heroes and heroines of the oriental myth. They are men, gods, demigods and god's men who bring together humanity and divinity.
The themes of quest, creation, love, death, regeneration, heroism, transformation, adventure, etc, essentially retain the universal pattern in the form of myth. Understanding myth is the right process of understanding life in the universe.
Myth criticism is an interpretive approach to literature that analyzes mythic structure and themes as they are recurrently manifested in literary genres and individual works. Myth critics argue that certain basic mythic figures and situations both permeate and transcend individual cultures; they find such universal patterns in works from cultures throughout the world. Northrop Frye is perhaps the best known myth critic.
Because many writers use the old stories or myths in their works, criticism shows the identification of recurrent phenomena and the explication of the ways in which they function in library works. Myth happens to be a powerful story as ornamental overtones and as narrative structure of the literary work. Myth provides writers with a world of total metaphor in which everything can be identified with everything else.
There are many writers who relate their writing with the mythical ideas. In their works, we can trace clearly the structural principles of myth. They always present the mythical beliefs. Literature helps to describe the mythical beliefs in a lively way. Their works give us the sense that many literary works are derived directly from specific myths. But, the study of myth and literature is not confined to such one to one relationship. At first myth being a structure describes a society's religious beliefs, historical traditions and cosmological speculations. In short, the whole range of its verbal expressiveness is the matrix of literature and major works return to it.
At first, to describe the relationship between myth and literature, it is necessary to mention a name associated with the study of myth in this century that is Sir Jame Frazer. He describes the conception of myth in his famous book, The Golden Bough, "Myth is the principal habit of mind that person conceives from the preexisting ideas, it is an addition to magic" (120). Malinowski the follower of Frazer is not so much disposed to insist on the distinction between pre-existing and current ideas. He assumes that myth-making function is universal.
This structure of the psyche is to be found universally as an inheritance of evolution. Like Freud, he does not view literature as a disguised form of libidinal wish fulillment that parallels the fantasies of whose patterns recur in diverse culture, an expression of the archetypes and describes the four stages of human life: birth, maturity, death and rebirth and argues that these lie in the collective form of human unconscious. He describes in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, "Archetypes are instinctual and primordial. They are the radical elements of all myth and for all the fantasies and dreams of men" (78). Therefore, myths are a mirror of the diverse development experiences of the peoples.
In other words, myths are the means by which archetypes, essentially unconscious forms, become manifest and articulate to the conscious mind. Jung indicated further that archetypes reveal themselves in the dreams of individuals, so that we might say that dreams are "personalized myths" and myths are "depersonalized dreams." Northrop Frye is perhaps the best-known critic who puts the typical form of myth on the conventions and genres of literature. Frye writes about myth, in his book Anatomy of Criticism:
As a type of story myth is the form of verbal art, and belongs to the world of art. Like art and unlike the science, it deals not with the world that man contemplates, but with the world that he creates. The total form of art, so to speak is a world whose content is nature but whose form is human, hence when it imitates nature, it assimilates nature to human forms. (659)
In terms of narrative, Frye states, "Myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desires, these desires may or may not be attainable" (136). These are sometimes fulfilled and sometimes not, and, thus, our area of activity is very much related with the mythical world. We try to interpret it sometimes from the allegorical point of view. In allegorical view, myth is an expression of the realities of relationship among man, nature and universe. Mythical stories move from fantasy to life-likeness. The problem is that the structural principal of literature in myth is isolated. According to Frye, there is a solution for making the myth plausible. He says, "the device to solve these problems is Displacement" (136).
With the device of displacement we make the myth acceptable, for instance, the story about Persephone says that once Pluto was inspecting his dark realm and was seen by Venus and Cupid. The mother asked her son to dart with his arrow. Cupid included Pluto in his dominion. He was shot right into the heart. Consequently, Pluto carried Persephone away. Demeter, mother of Persephone, cursed the soil when she saw the fallen flowers dropped by her daughter on the way. Thus the fertility was lost in the land because Persephone had taken nothing with her but pomegranate. In this context, Bullfinch says:
This story of Persephone and Demeter is now an allegory. The mythical story is displaced that Persephone signified the seed corn. She is carried off by the god of the underworld, it re-appears, that is, Persephone is restored to her mother. Spring leads her back to its light of day. The allegory is that of death and revival. (85)
Moreover, Frye identifies myth with literature, asserting that myth is a "structural organizing principle of literary form" (341) and that an archetype is "essentially an element of one's literary experience" (365). He further claims, "Mythology as a whole provides a kind of diagram or blueprint of what literature as a whole is all about an imaginative survey of the human situation from the beginning to the end, from height to the depth, of what is imaginatively conceivable" (102).
Frye postulates the whole realm of literature as an almost self-contained universe, a unique and massive product of the imaginative world. He identifies the human with the non-human world and its most typical result is a story about the God. To understand this, it is necessary to describe two terms: analogy and identity, which Frye has described to this effect. The first term, analogy establishes the parallels between human life and natural phenomena of the world. And, the second term, identity describes the action of individuals with the common experiences of humankind. In his view, the narrative aspect of literature is a recurrent act of ritual. In this connection he delineates in his essay, "Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols": Narrative is studied by the archetypal critic as ritual or imitation of human action as a whole and not simply as a mimesis praxeos or imitation of an action. Similarly, in archetypal criticism, the significant content is the conflict of desire and reality, which has for its basis the work of the dream. Ritual and the dream, therefore myths are the narrative and significant content respectively of literature in its archetypal aspects. (1062)
Recycling of Myth in The Transposed Heads
Thomas Mann has adopted an eleventh-century Indian parable of Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara about a woman who switches the heads of her husband and her brother in his novel, The Transposed Heads. By manipulating the traditional meaning of the parable, he has removed the parts of the Hindu culture from the context that defines them. He has recycled the Hindu myth portrayed in Kathasaritsagara for his own purpose. He wants to strengthen the case against the Hindu claim that they and their culture are pure, original and superior, dealing with the real Aryan invaders and their interactions with the indigenous people of India. Similarly, Mann has empowered the feminine in the Hindu divine circle through the characters of Kali and Sita. Again, he slightly reverses the Brahmanical claim that the mind is superior to body.
Before analyzing the novel, it would be better to state what is in the original story. It describes how a washer man, Dhavala, falls in love with Madansundari, the beautiful daughter of another washer man, and marries her. While he is enjoying the fruits of a happy marriage, Madansundari's brother visits them and requests that all three make a trip to the festival of Goddess Paravati. Dhavala enters the great temple of Pravati empty-handed and in a feet of religious excess beheads himself with the sacrificial sword as an offering to the goddess. Madansundari's brother discovers the beheaded corpse and in his grief beheads himself with the same sword. Madansundari becomes anxious when both men fail to return and enters the temple. Confronted by the horrific sight before her, she, too, decides to end her life and fashions a noose from vines in order to hang herself. However, the Goddess, pleased with their devotion, stops Madansundari from committing suicide and allows her to bring the two men back to life by reattaching their heads to their bodies. Unfortunately, in her haste and excitement, Madansundari puts her brother's head on the husband's body and vice-versa. The story ends with a riddle the king must answer correctly: Which of these two mixed up people is now her husband? The king replies that the one with the husband's head is her husband because the head rules the limbs and personal identity depends on the head, thus, affirming the superiority of intellect over emotion and spirit over body.
Mann drops the entire frame story of king Vikramaditya and treats the mythical tale as a
narrative. In his story, Shridaman, the frail Branmin, falls in love with Sita, the lovely daughter of Sumantra. Nanda, a cowherd and close friend to Shridaman, arranges his marriage to Sita. Distinct caste and racial differences, thus, appear for the first time. Following their marriage, the couple and Nanda travel to Sita's village and enroute, come across an abandoned Kali temple. Here, as in the Indian version, the two men behead themselves and Sita prepares to hang herself. The divine voice of the Goddess Kali interrogates Sita and we learn that Sita, although married to Shridaman, is attracted to the strong-bodied Nanda. Apparently, Shridaman's suspicions regarding her illicit desire caused him to commit suicide.
Following this confession, the Goddess allow Sita to bring both men to life and then, in her excitement, Sita transposes the heads. Unlike all the previous versions, Mann does not stop immediately after the transposition of the heads. Sita, Shridaman and Nanda ask the ascetic Kamadamana to mediate and describe who will take Sita home as his wife. The ascetic, after some doubt, decides as King Vikramaditya decided in the earlier versions, and Sita begins her life anew with the Shridaman head on the phisically attractive Nanda-body.
However, under the influence of the Brahmin head, the well-forged cowherd body slowly withers into the frail Shridaman body over time. Sita, now the mother of a near-sighted son, Samadhi runs away from Shridaman back to Nanda. Shridaman confronts the two lovers and the three decide that the only solution to their troubles lies in death. Shridaman and Nanda strike each other dead and Sita immolates herself on their burning pyre leaving Samadhi as the only remnant of the triangle of lovers.
To illustrate the interwoven strands of Aryan and Dravidian in the story, Mann depicts the discussion between Shridaman and Nanda about a previous incident at the village in which the worship of India, King of Aryan gods, was displaced by a pre- Aryan worship of the lands and Mountain, Bright Peak over looking the village. In the novel, it is not Nanda who proposes the worship of Bright Peak.
It is, in fact, the Brahmin Shridamann who advocates the worship of the mountain and pastures, while the simple minded Nanda, fearful of Indra, votes against the abandonment of the Aryan rituals. In course of their conversation, we see Nanda claiming the fact that Indra, god of the
