Female Identity and Conflict in Girish Karnad’s Naga-Mandala

Abstract

One of the most powerful theatrical interrogations of gender, desire, and social agency in Indian theatre is Girish Karnad’s Naga-Mandala. The play responds to these wooden storytellers through folk narrative, oral storytelling and symbolic dramaturgy contemplating the structures that determine female identity is regulated, silenced or at times salvaged within patriarchy. The article suggests that Karnad presents female identity in Naga-Mandala not as a fixed quality but rather a contested state affected by domestic enclosure, sexual desire, social exposure and religious sanctification. The central female figure, Rani, passes from passivity and exile to a difficult power; still her emergence is neither easy liberation nor total freedom. Her agency is exercised indirectly, through secrecy and ambiguity, and by the same patriarchal institutions that limit her. Taking a close reading of the play through feminist lenses, the article demonstrates how Naga-Mandala draws attention to the opposition between real female experience and socially permissible concepts of being a woman. Karnad manages to showcase the many ways women negotiate identity, not in liberation from power, but within systems consistently trying and failing to contain and rewrite them. Rani becomes legible to her world only when her private experience is publicly translated into the patriarchal languages of chastity, divinity, and motherhood. The play’s feminist force lies not in a simple emancipation plot but in exposing how women negotiate power through ambiguity, performance, and compromise within institutions that first silence them.