Authors: Srinivasan, Dr. Pramod Rohidas Jaware
Abstract: Girish Karnad (19382019), who was one of the most acclaimed playwrights in India, created a dramatic world, where the roles of women characters are placed in a compilated and contradictory linguistic landscape. This paper explores the politics of feminine language, which includes silence, speech, coded language and bodily performance, in the greater works by Karnad such as Tughlaq (1964), Hayavadana (1971), Naga-Mandala (1988), Taledanda (1990) and The Fire and the Rain (1994). The article uses feminist linguistics, postcolonial theory, and performance studies to claim that the women portrayed by Karnad are not merely living in the silence of oppression, but they use it as an elaborate political tool. At the same time, when they do talk, they act on multi-registered levels of mythic, erotic, subversive, and transgressive discourse which extends and disrupts the normative systems of patriarchal and caste-based social structures. The article follows the manner in which Karnad employs the traditional theatricality like the Yakshagana and Bhuta Kola ritual as a way of encoding feminine agency into cultural grammar which would otherwise supress it and the implication of this textual practice to our conceptualization of subaltern voice, gender performativity, and politics of Indian modernity.
