I'm coming to realise what Appa wanted me to learn: Raghu Karnad, son of Girish Karnad, remembering the latter

New Indian Express

10-06-2025

The only book he had ever insisted that we read – putting copies in our hands – was the Mahabharata.' – Raghu and Radha Karnad, Afterword, This Life At Play.
In 1959, when Girish Karnad was about to leave for Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he felt compelled to read the epics and the Puranas before his departure. He had grown up watching these stories performed by lamplight, by Yakshagana and Company Natak troupes. Now he reached for C Rajagopalachari's concise but complete versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This is the decision that would eventually lead him to write his first play, Yayati.
Every aspect of this play took him by surprise, as Aparna Dharwadker notes, 'That it was a play and not a cluster of angst-ridden poems, that it was written in Kannada instead of English, and that it used an episode from the Mahabharata as its narrative basis.'
This choice 'nailed me to my past,' Karnad said. It set him on a path of drawing narratives from myth, history and folklore, which dominated his playwriting for the next four decades.
In the myth of Yayati, a king is cursed with decrepit old age, and Puru, his youngest son, agrees to bear the curse on his behalf. In This Life At Play, Karnad recalls, 'I was excited by the story of Yayati, where a son exchanges his youth with his father's old age. The situation was both dramatic and tragic. But the question that bothered me even as I was finishing the story was: If the son had been married, what would the wife do? Would she have accepted this unnatural arrangement?'
This imaginary character's response became the seed of his first play, written at the age of 22: 'This was the first scene that formed in front of my eyes: the confrontation between Yayati and Chitralekha. ... As I thought about it, the rest of the play began to take shape around this climax. I did not feel as if I was writing a play… It was as if a spirit had entered me.'
At the time, Karnad was a young man facing his own burdensome questions: Would he return to India when he was done at Oxford? What were his responsibilities, as a young man, to his own father, his family, or his country?
When Karnad wrote the play, he could relate to the son, Puru, and the weight of obligation he feels in the story. When he read the play again, much later in his own life, he found himself identifying with the desperation of the father.