The Gadhayuddha parva, Mahabaratha, unfolds its narrative. Duryodhana challenges any one of the Pandavas to a single combat. There is consultation, and predictably, Bhima is chosen. Krishna cautions, “No one can defeat Duryodhana in an honest fight. It is impossible.” The fight ensues, and an almost vanquished Bhima cheats, breaks his opponent’s thighs and earns himself a place in hell. Krishna is cursed. Duryodhana is elevated to heaven after dying a hero’s death.
“Urubhangam” or “Breaking of the Thighs” is one of my favourite plays from the Bhasa collection and tells the story of Duryodhana’s ignominy. I watched the performance in Sanskrit and in the Kutiayattam tradition, at the soulful Ranga Shankara, Bangalore. The play was performed to a packed house. Tickets were not available when I checked. I decided to drive down to the venue nevertheless, pleaded for tickets and got them. Sometimes, you have to reach out if you want something badly. If your intent is truthful, the universe does conspire. Now I don’t speak Sanskrit, but I speak theatre fluently. I breathe it. It is immanent in the human condition if we observe closely. You cannot escape it. After all, humanity is in a continuous state of performance.
The tragic hero is a beautiful thing. Aristotle dedicates ‘The Poetics’, his treatise on dramatic theory, to the tragic form as arguably the most sublime method in storytelling. The tragic hero inspires and terrifies equally, imbuing pity and fear in the audience, who find it difficult to alienate themselves from the circumstances of the tragic hero’s situation. The tragic hero bears witness to the truth.
In the narrative of Christ, Pilate asks rhetorically, “What is truth?” Socrates inconclusively debates ‘truth’ with Euthyphro. Gurcharan Das also ponders the idea of ‘truth’ in his thesis on the Mahabharata, ‘The Difficulty of Being Good’.
For Daniel Kahneman, each of our truths may be anchored in our prejudices and biases. Like the housefly searching for light in a place of darkness and imagining it to be the light.
When I reflect on Duryodhana, I am inevitably led to another tragic hero, Karna. There is a play in the south-Indian tradition, ‘Karna-Moksham’, or the ‘Liberation of Karna’. The play interprets the question of character even as it examines the absurdity of identity in the human situation. Karna, the underdog whom we count amongst the most celebrated archers and battle-worthy warriors, is preparing to fight the greatest battle of his life against his nemeses, Arjuna and Krishna. Karna-Moksham dramatises the difficulty of identity politics and highlights the lifelong distress of questionable birth that this great hero endures. Karna is ready to leave for battle and waits for his wife to perform the auspicious ceremonial ritual for a warrior before he goes to war. The play dramatises her refusal to come before him and perform this duty. The presumed low birth of her husband leaves her faltering. It takes the revelation of his royal birth for her to come to her senses and show him the respect he deserves. This scene puts on view the farcical nature of social identity that determines questions of identity and honour as the audience watches and shares the dejection of this prince, who should have been King.
The tragedy of Karna evokes a deeply compelling and emotional response in the collective psyche of the subcontinent, even as he struggles to be acknowledged for who he is. Spurned at birth, having to hide his identity to be accepted as a student to learn the art of war, Karna has been denied his regal birthright. His birth brings shame to his unwed mother, and since then, Karna has had to demonstrate an unyielding resolve as he travels through the hero’s journey. He defies his destiny even as he creates it. For Karna, the quest is to carve for himself an identity that the world will remember him by. He is undoubtedly a great warrior through his perseverance and the divine gifts that he carries on his luminous persona. Karna becomes ‘Daanaveera’, the generous one, who will deny to none what is asked of him. This is his self-gifted identity and personal virtue through which he seeks recognition. This is what he will treasure with his last breath. As with anything taken to the extreme, his generosity becomes the very tragic flaw that comes back to sting the celebrated hero and leads him to his poignant death, which through the thousands of years gone by, still has an entire nation mourning with him, even as they scorn the very Gods they would otherwise revere, for the tragedy that becomes Karna’s narrative. Karna’s script presents an internal discourse, wrought with twists and turns, that provides the primary material for examining questions of character and identity as a reflexive study through drama.
Gurcharan Das examines the ‘Difficulty of Being Good’. The idea of what is ‘good’ and how one incorporates this ‘good’ into the human experience has witnessed dramatic expositions from the beginning of recorded history. The Mahabharata enables an examination of individual character through the motifs each hero embodies; those that are visibly expressed and those that remain unexpressed. A good story provides reflective material with a nuanced fluence. Such a story helps us examine our humanity by offering an inside view of the mind of a leader, which challenges emotional resilience and human frailty. Since personal experience is narrow and skewed, lessons of personal experience can be costly and often learned too late. Through our reflections on the fallibility of our mythical heroes, we may investigate the ‘why’ of human motives and behaviour, thereby confronting our own. Such narratives provide renewed, forceful perspectives on the ethical dilemmas we confront through compelling stories in which memorable protagonists grapple with questions of character.
Drama does better than verbose rhetoric. The psychomotor and affective agencies are called to action along with cognitive and emotional aspects, which get woven into the language that drama as a dialectic imbues. The audience is now challenged to become a Spect-Actor waiting to emerge through this performative action. The intuitively human-centred design of the dramatic form prepares us to enter as audience members and leave the performance as those who have encountered ourselves in the Kurukshetra that makes up our social canvas. The good life is no longer an idealised, elusive aspiration but one that can be pragmatized into a renewed reality. The audience member is now empowered to act for herself. Life, after all, is inescapably performative action.
“Who am I, and what am I doing here?” one asks of oneself.
Duryodhana poses an existential question for many of us walking around with broken thighs. Karna endures a society which strives hard to erase him.
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