ABSTRACT
Girish Karnad is one of India’s most important playwrights and writes historical plays, plays in Kannada based on mythology as well as those about contemporary social life. The chapter examines three of historical plays which are probably those most likely to survive. The plays selected for study are Tughlaq, Tale-Danda and his last play Crossing to Talikota. The first play is based on the doings of Muhammed-bin-Tughlaq a Muslim ruler in the 14th century who Karnad sees as a failed idealist who took foolhardy decisions based on a faulty vision. The second is based on the last days of religious reformer Basavanna, the founder of the Lingayat sect in the 12th century. Basavanna, although born a Brahmin, tried to create a casteless society. The last play is a re-examination of the Battle of Talikota, which marked the destruction of the Vijayanagar Empire at the hands of its Muslim adversaries. All three plays are explicitly political and Karnad takes a Nehruvian secular or anti-Brahminical line, virtually taunting the beliefs of the Hindu right-wing in the last play. He emerges from the works as someone connecting directly with national issues in the manner of English language writers rather than with regional culture as with most of the other writers examined in the book. A key aspect of the plays as literature is Karnad’s disinclination to philosophise historically/politically – as for instance on what might be ‘idealistic’ in a monarch like Tughlaq – but to rely on irony and scorn.
