Hayavadana Essay Questions

What is the purpose of Hayavadana in the play?

Hayavadana's main purpose in the play is to exemplify the importance of being complete, and to demonstrate incompleteness. From his entry onstage, all he wants is to be a complete man, but he has the head of a horse, and feels the want of unity. Although Kali makes him complete, she does not care enough to pay attention to what it is that he wants and so she makes him completely a horse—almost. He still speaks with the voice of a man, which prevents him from feeling totally complete. It is not until he is able to "neigh" like a horse that he achieves full completeness, and also happiness.

This is in stark contrast to the gods, who are always complete even when visually they are the very opposite. Ganesha, the god who oversees and represents success and perfection, is a boy with the head of an elephant. This would not seem to be either complete or successful, and certainly not perfect, but it is a lesson to the human characters that gods are perfect in whatever form, whilst humans are rarely complete.

Why do Devadatta and Kapila kill each other?

The friends kill each other because they are both in love with the same woman and, more importantly, because they are themselves suffering from incompleteness. They have each other's heads on their own bodies, but their bodies have now returned to their original condition. Thus, Kapila is now muscular and physically strong again, but he is not as cerebral as Devadatta, who is newly soft and pudgy. They realize that they will forever be feuding over Padmini, forever fighting with "their" body's deep memory, forever warring against fragmentation.

What might the play suggest about marriage?

There is a lot going on in Hayavadana on the philosophical and moral levels, but there is still a core tale here about marriage and its concomitant disappointments. Padmini marries Devadatta but lusts after his best friend; she is discontented with her husband's brain and lack of brawn, and finds what she thinks she wants in Kapila. However, even when she miraculously ends up with what she thinks she wants, she is unhappy. Devadatta is not enough of Kapila, and he begins to lose even that small vestige. She is left wanting the "real" Kapila, but even at the end of the poem she is wondering why the three of them cannot just be together even though it defies all social norms.

Marriage, then, is a contract that is not necessarily fulfilling. Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker writes that the play shows how "conjugal passion dissipates invariably into disappointment and creates the desire for other unions, however hard the individual male self may try to preserve its ideal nature. Women do not have the power to prevent this downward slide, but they do have agency in the drama of discontent."

Did Padmini mix the heads on purpose?

The short answer is we don't know, but we can certainly speculate! The text says simply, "Eagerly, Padmini puts the heads—that is, the masks, back. But in her excitement she mixes them up" and that she has her "eyes shut tightly," at least when she does namasakra and walks away with her back to the goddess. She seems full of consternation when she and the men realize what's happened, and claims she didn't know she was mixing them up. On the one hand, her surprise seems legitimate. It is dark, it is a tense and terrifying and portentous moment for her, and she is flustered. On the other hand, this is what she wanted deep down, and Kali knew it and did not stop her. It may have been unconscious, but it does seem possible, maybe even probable, that she did this to some degree on purpose.

What might the play convey about India's independence from Britain?

On the surface, the play doesn't look like it has much to say on this subject. It seems too fanciful, too stylized, too unattached to a particular time and place. However, as Ngozi Udengwu suggests, it is a metaphor for the fracturing of Indian identity after British colonial rule. There are "situations of mind/body dichotomy within an individual as well as within a social group," and intimations of India's problems coming out of colonial rule, which affected most aspects of Indian life. So while Indians "have won independence from the colonialists, they have discovered that their cultural identity has been fractured." Devadatta and Kapila struggle with the same fragmentation, as well as Hayavadana, and only the child who literally and figuratively comes from all the characters and all the places (the woods, the city, the "real" world of the actors, the religious milieu, etc.) offers a glimpse of how India can achieve unity.