Journal of Advances in Developmental Research

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Body, Myth, and Metaphor: Symbolic Constructions of Womanhood in Karnad's Plays

Author(s) Dr. G. Yadagiri
Country India
Abstract Girish Karnad's plays repeatedly stage womanhood not through direct social commentary but through the mediating vocabulary of myth, folklore, and bodily symbol. Drawing on Naga-Mandala, Hayavadana, Yayati, and The Fire and the Rain, this paper examines how Karnad translates inherited Indian narrative material — serpent lore, transposed-head folktales, Puranic legend, and Vedic ritual — into a symbolic language for exploring female desire, chastity, fragmentation, and agency. The paper argues that Karnad's women are constructed at the intersection of the body as a site of surveillance (chastity ordeals, arranged marriage, ritual purity) and myth as a resource for imaginative escape or subversion (the serpent-lover, the divided self, the silenced wife). Employing frameworks drawn from Simone de Beauvoir's account of woman as Other, Mary Douglas's anthropology of bodily pollution and boundary, and Sherry Ortner's nature/culture paradigm, alongside existing Karnad scholarship, the paper traces a recurring pattern: female bodies are the terrain on which patriarchal order inscribes its anxieties, while myth simultaneously offers Karnad's heroines symbolic routes toward self-articulation that realist drama forecloses. The paper concludes that Karnad's mythic method is neither escapist nor merely decorative but constitutes a deliberate strategy of indirection through which contemporary gender critique is smuggled into traditional form.
Keywords Girish Karnad; myth and folklore; body politics; symbolic feminism; Indian drama; Naga-Mandala; Hayavadana.
Published In Volume 16, Issue 1, January-June 2025
Published On 2025-01-08
DOI https://doi.org/10.71097/IJAIDR.v16.i1.2098
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Crossref DOI prefix of IJAIDR is 10.71097/IJAIDR

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