I felt I should read our epics and puranas once before leaving for England, and so I picked up C. Rajagopalachari’s concise Ramayana and Mahabharata. He had managed to pare down the Mahabharata to three hundred pages, and that too without leaving out all the side stories. Some of the important ones are included and narrated beautifully. Among them, 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 was the first scene that formed in front of my eyes: the confrontation between Yayati and Chitralekha. Here, the essence of Antigone and the manner in which Alkazi’s young heroines had resisted injustice came to life again. 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. The characters came to life in front of me, and all I had to do was take down what they were saying to each other like I was a stenotypist. It was as if a spirit had entered me. Never again in my life did I experience this kind of loss of control while writing a play.
Though the eminent dramatist Sriranga would later write in his critique of Yayati that ‘the eight-page-long argument between Yayati and Chitralekha, who makes her entrance in the last act, feels contrived’ (Prajavani, 9 October 1961), the play was born from that argument.
When I reflect upon the play now, I see Puru as a personification of my own angst at the time. I was leaving the country and going to the West. It was an uncommon experience at the time, and certainly so in my family, where I was the first to do so. It was not a simple journey either. It would take me three weeks to reach, and then I would not be able to return to India for three years. My parents were worried that in those three years I might decide to settle there. Aayi even feared that a white woman might ensnare me and keep me there. I was eager to come into my own in the West and make that world mine, but my parents had told me that they expected me to return to India. I had started to feel resentful that my parents were imposing a limit to my freedom, that they wanted me to circumscribe my future for their sake. It can perhaps be said that Puru embodied the serious misgivings I had about the demands of my elders.
Yayati manifesting itself suddenly in this manner was disorienting in several ways. First, in preparation of my victorious march upon the West, I had decided that I was only going to write in English. The play had come, without warning, in Kannada. When I was returning from Varanasi, Ashok Kulkarni met me on the platform of Belgaum station. He was astonished to hear about the play. ‘You wrote it in Kannada?’ he asked incredulously. ‘How? You didn’t write it in English?’ Second, I had lost touch with puranic stories since leaving Sirsi. I could never have imagined that this umbilical cord would sprout again, and that too through the medium of Western influences. Third, it had been my ambition since childhood to become a poet. With the arrival of this wretched play, I began to realize that I was not a poet but a playwright. I was greatly disappointed.
On returning to Dharwad, I revised the play. (I still revise my plays endlessly.) I ran to the Manohara Grantha Mala atta and asked GB to read it. He said, ‘Come back after two days.’ When I went, he returned the manuscript and said, ‘The dasi’s monologue in the final act has come out well.’ That was all.
I don’t recall now just how dejected this made me feel. I was rushing about, getting ready to go abroad. But when the publisher returned the play, I decided: ‘My connection with India is now broken. I will go abroad and dedicate myself to England.’ I left India.
Excerpted with permission from ‘This Life At Play’, the first part of the autobiography of one of India’s greatest cultural figures, Girish Karnad. It was translated from Kannada to English partly by the late author and partly by Srinath Perur. Published by Harper Collins, this book is available on Amazon.in for Rs 506.