M A English IV Semester
Paper II
Indian Writing in English II
Unit III
Girish Karnad's Tughlaq: A Play in Thirteen
Scenes as a Political Allegory
Girish Karnad's second play Tughlaq was published in
1964. Tughlaq was an immediate success on the stage. It was
first produced in Kannada in 1965 and by the same time in Hindi by the National
School of Drama. Bengali and Marathi productions followed and in 1970 there was
a major success. The reason or the immediate response for the play is the
interesting story, intricate plot, and the scope for spectacle. Another reason
is that it is a play of the 1960s and pictures the political mood of
disillusionment which followed the Nehru era of idealism in the country.
The play, which is more than a political allegory, has puzzling
qualities, which reflects the character of Tughlaq.
All the other characters in the drama have complex personalities. This play has
an “elusive and haunting quality”. In spite of the fact that the theme of the
play is drawn from the history the author’s treatment is not historical. The
use of “Prayer for the Murder” in the drama reminds one of what Tughlaq did to
his father. The author has built up the play on opposites. “ideal and the real”
the divine aspiration and deft intrigue Karnad did his best to dramatize the
history of Sultan, Muhammad-Bin Tughlaq the fourteenth century impractical king
who become tyrannical and Machiavellian in its activities. The rude
stubbornness of the king negated the very basis of idealism. The author in this
drama clearly brings out the mental shift of the king from a “benevolent ruler
to a tyrannical shrieking head”. In this context it will be apt to point out
that “Karnad maps Tughlaq progressive
alienation from society, more significantly within the self in existential
overtones. He infers that the protagonist is liberalism is cramped because of
its alienation with time. Tughlaq was born at a wrong time and at a wrong
place. The existential angst that permeates the text as another is a geography
from an alienontology. The shift from an idealist king to a tyrant has the
mapping of Camus in Caligula, which voices concerns borne out of Camus’ own
lived in Algerian Experience”.
A political allegory is a story, fiction, drama or a painting that, on
the surface, tells one tale, but has a hidden political meaning underneath. An
allegory becomes political if it covers a political event or situation by
producing a subtle commentary using other symbols.
Muhammad Bin- Tughlaq, the protagonist and the title bearer of the
play Tughlaq is one of the most controversial and eccentric
rulers of India. He is a brilliant but spectacularly unsuccessful
fourteenth-century Islamic Sultan and is nicknamed as the 'Mad Muhammad' by his
citizens. Karnad's primary historical source is the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi
(1357), a chronicle history whose author, Zia-ud-din-Barani, spent seventeen
years at Tughlaq's court. Using Barani's narrative, his attitudes and portions
of his text, Karnad arranged the thirteen
scenes of Tughlaq as a sequence that articulate both
political and psychological ironies. Karnad in his own words says that,
"What struck me absolutely about Tughlaq's history was that it was
contemporary. The act that here was the most idealistic, the most intelligent
king ever to come on the throne of Delhi... and one of the greatest failures
also. And within a span of twenty years this tremendously capable man had gone
to pieces...."
The opening of the play is set in front of the Chief Court of Justice in
Delhi and there is a crowd of Muslims and Hindus. The drama sets into action
with an exclamation, "God what's this country coming to!" Though the
exclamation is addressed by an individual it is the one in every Indian minds
today seeing the present scenarios. Hence the play has a significant opening
and further on readers can come across a sound discussion of a Sultan, Tughlaq,
the central figure of the play. Tughlaq's uncompromising idealism is strongly
critiqued by the citizens and they seem to talk about a Brahmin, Vishnu Prasad
whose suit against the Sultan is claimed just and he is returned not only his
confiscated land but also given a job in "the civil service to ensure him
a regular adequate income." This decision of the Sultan baffles the
citizens and an old man reacts, "What folly is this! May Heaven guide our
Sultan."
In the beginning of Tughlaq's rein, when he is in Delhi, he is a man of
high ideals. He tries to introduce policies that would benefit his citizens but
it earned him only the nickname "Muhammad the mad". Karnad depicts
Tughlaq as one who sought to put aside religious differences in the hope of
embracing secularism is a powerful issue in the drama. Tughlaq wishes for the
unity between the Hindus and the Muslims stating, "Daulatabad is a city of
Hindus and as the capital, it will symbolize the bond between Muslims and
Hindus..." Tughlaq's vision fails here which has a sense of analogy of the
time the play has written. In 1964, India had been less than two decades
removed from Partition and Independence which led to a notion where direction
and transformative vision was hard to establish. A nation born from Gandhian
principles was tangled amongst secretarian violence and communal hatred which
are the very elements that Karnad's Tughlaq desires to overcome in the drama.
The theme of political aspiration being limited by temporal reality is
significant both in the drama and the historical condition in which it was
written.
Tughlaq's initial judgement upon a Brahmin and his emancipation of
Hindus praying the 'jiziya tax' is misunderstood by the citizens and they
oppose such moves. Tughlaq's policies and methods of political action are
formulated with far-sighted vision of establishing a secular kingdom, but are
instant failures as they fail to relate to the immediate reality of the
subjects.
Tughlaq is a historical play but while
writing it Karnad himself was struck by the parallelism between the reign of
Tughlaq and contemporary history. The political chaos, which Karnad depicts
in Tughlaq reminds many readers of the Nehru era in the Indian
history. Karnad finds this similarity a coincidence. At every step the play
reflects the chaos, disillusionment and corruption that followed the Nehru era
and this is one of the most important reasons or the popularity of the
play. Tughlaq ruled in the fourteenth century and Nehru in the 1950s and 1960s.
Striking parallels can be drawn between the two ages and this makes Tughlaq a
great political allegory.
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