Paste your essadifferences they have considered relatively common issues and their ideas and characters show a unique resemblance, while at the same time present different world-views.
Karnad’s Bali: The Sacrifice was published in 2004. It is a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence. The play argues against the custom of offering animal sacrifices to God, considering it as an unethical act. The conflict of the two different ideologies and the beliefs of two different sects is presented through the Queen Mother of Brahminical order, believing in sacrifice, and the Jain principle of non-violence, represented by the queen. Veena Noble Dass states for Karnad, “For this play he makes use of a Jain myth to reinterpret for his modern audience the dichotomy between thought and deed. The theme of the play deals with marital fidelity and violence” (150). The orthodox and traditional Queen Mother believed in superstitions and in the continuance of the ritual of animal sacrifice. Against the wishes of his mother, the Hindu King married the Queen, who is a devoted follower of Jainism. Out of love for his wife, the King converts to Jainism. The Queen Mother considers her daughter-in-law a rebel since the latter defies the royal family and its traditions. The Queen develops a fascination towards the Mahout, an elephant-keeper, for his frankness and melodious voice and gets physically involved with him. The King feels devastated when he discovers the Queen’s infidelity. He feels divided and vacillates between the beliefs of his mother and his wife and does not gather enough courage to kill the Mahout and the Queen. He, therefore, plans to sacrifice a cockerel made of dough to God in order to avoid bloodshed. The underlying belief for this kind of sacrifice is that by doing so he can punish his wife and avoid further evil happenings in the family. The dough cock suddenly becomes alive and the sacrifice of the dough turns into the Queen’s sacrifice and she dies. The audience is urged to speculate in the end whether the mock-sacrifice is equivalent to the actual sacrifice and whether artificial violence is as real as actual violence.
Karnad’s The Dreams of Tipu Sultan, a political play, was published in 2004. It was initially written as a radio-play and later on rewritten and developed for stage performance, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence. The rewriting of the plays highlights its distinguishing elements. Jasbir Jain states “It is the ‘spectacle’ which makes the performative play what it is: not the spoken word alone” (33). The Dreams of Tipu Sultan is based on the story of a Sultan (monarch) Tipu Sultan who ruled a major part of India from 1782 to 1799. The play is centred on the dreams seen by Tipu Sultan. The plot is introduced by Sultan’s loyal employee Kirmani in the play. Tipu Sultan’s dreams were taken by him as an indication of the harm that was going to be done by hypocrites and evil-doers and by the British as well. These dreams worked as predictions that took shape of reality and inspired him to raise wars against the rebels. The dreams as guides helped him to distinguish and choose between right and wrong. Karnad has recreated history after much research and has delineated the characters with verisimilitude. Tipu’s dreams as presented in the play reveal the psychological depth to the protagonist’s mind.
Karnad’s dramatic monologue Flowers, is based on a folktale that originates from Chitradurga in the state of Karnataka. It questions duty and morality and the complexity of human desire. The plot revolves around a pious priest who gets attracted to a courtesan and falls into a relationship with her. He is torn between his duty as a priest towards the king, his love for God (bhakti), his loyalty towards his wife (dharma) and on the other hand his love for the courtesan Chandravati. The priest shares the story of his life when the matter reaches the head of the temple and the priest’s love and duty collide on a single night. By reworking a folk tale, Karnad once again explores the moral dilemmas experienced by individuals and refreshes his play with a contemporary sensibility that embraces the issues of love, loyalty and honour.
Another dramatic monologue by Karnad titled Broken Images marks a departure from his earlier practice of borrowing his plots from mythology, history or folk tales. In this monologue he creates a world dominated by the use of technology and expresses it through language. Broken Images is set in a TV studio and has a multi-layered theme.
The play highlights the issues of the dominance of English language over other Indian languages especially in literature. It exposes the hollowness of the media which bestows greatness on a work that lies unnoticed in its original language but when translated into English becomes the toast of the global literary world. It also deals with the psychological repression of an aspiring author. The story is about a successful Kannada-turned-English writer Manjula, the protagonist who had a handicapped, wheelchair-bound sister, Malini. Disabled Malini not only wins the love of Manjula’s husband Pramod but is far more happy and caring than her caretaker sister, Manjula. After her death, it is Manjula who steals Malini’s unpublished book and acquires all her fame and success. During a live interview of Manjula on television, the conversation ends with her revelations of her betrayal to her sister when her image just does not leave the monitor. It is not her but her delusion talking to her sister Malini. The conflict is between herself and the image, between her as the writer and the inner truth that emerges on the screen.
In appropriating the stolen novel, the defiant Manjula shouts: “I wrote the novel in English because it burst out in English….What baffles me – actually, hurts me – is why our intellectuals can't grasp this simple fact.” We see Manjula Nayak subjected to an interrogation that teases, taunts and finally strips the secrets from her soul. The TV image reveals the sordid truth about Manjula's marriage, her far from easy relationship with her dead sister Malini and the mysterious circumstances in which the best-selling novel that was written by Malini (with the help of Pramod who, too, was always at home) and now published by Manjula, finds her conceits punctured and her deceptions gradually unravelled.
Finally she is forced into anger, confession and emotional collapse.
Broken Images takes many a side swipe at all those writers in English who are constantly in the news, for fat advances from foreign publishers, for works that are many years away to seeing the light of day, for invitations to foreign colleges, lecture tours and autograph signing sprees. There are also the questions that stare in the face: are the Indian English cut off from the “smell of the soil,” have they sold out to a market-driven economy, have they struck a trade-off with their conscience by not writing in their native language, etc. etc.
Imagery is a writing technique that consists of descriptive language, which helps to create an image and capture the mood of the reader and the audience. It clarifies a concept by immediately helping to draw a picture in the mind according to the kind of setting in which the story takes place. Chris Baldick in Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines imagery as: “those uses of language in a literary work that evoke sense-impressions by literal or figurative reference to perceptible or ‘concrete’ objects , scenes, actions, or states, as distinct from the language of abstract argument or exposition” (164). Imagery can be expressed through major devices like metaphors, similes, personification and hyperbole.
A Metaphor is referred to a word or expression comparing two unlike things. It describes something that is unknown to the reader compared to what the reader already knows. It is taken as an imaginary identity rather than stated directly. For example, In Bali: The Sacrifice, the queen is attracted to Mahout’s melodious voice although she has never y in here…