Summary
Act II (Continued)
Once Devadatta is gone, Padmini whispers to her child that she is going to take him to the forest, which he has never seen before. She paints a picture of its majesty and beauty, and once they are there, points out the tree of the Fortunate Lady.
Kapila enters, strong as he was at the beginning of the play. Bhagavata asks Kapila if it is really him, and how he can live here. Kapila shrugs that beasts do, and that he will never return to the city. Bhagavata tells him of his mother, and of Padmini’s son. Kapila is expressionless but Bhagavata knows he is angry. Kapila simply walks away, and starts cutting a tree.
Padmini enters and espies him. They are transfixed by each other’s appearance. Padmini says her son had never felt the wind on his cheeks or a thorn in his foot or seen the river, so she brought him out. Kapila says she should not have come so far, as it is dangerous. Padmini replies that hunters and villagers and pilgrims told her the safest way.
Kapila looks at the boy and asks if it is her son. She assents and says it is his too, as his body created it. He explodes in anger but then calms himself and says he is truly Kapila now.
The Bhagavata sings and Kapila asks if he can see the boy. He asks Padmini if she would like to sit, but she decides she does not need rest. When he asks how she is, she says she is well and has no illness. She tells him the boy has the same mole on his shoulder that he does. Kapila is surprised and does not know about his own mole; he does not look at this body much.
Padmini looks at him and asks why he has tortured his body so. He replies that it was once soft and a Brahmin’s body, but it was difficult to be so weak and he used his mindpower to make his body do what he wanted it to do. Padmini sighs that the head must seemingly always win. Kapila agrees and says he has a head that fits his body.
Padmini remembers the song she sang in Kali’s temple and muses that she has had four men in one lifetime. Kapila asks why she is here away from Devadatta. They freeze in discomfort.
Bhagavata says Devadatta changed slowly, not overnight, and Padmini must tell this to Kapila. But she does not, and all she says is she had to see him. He wishes she had not, especially just as he won this battle. He is now Kapila “without a crack between his head and his shoulders” (124). He orders and begs her to go back to her husband, the father of this child.
Padmini says she will if he wants her to, but she has a favor to ask, saying her son is tired and needs to rest a bit. And, she adds, he and Devadatta won—not her. It is her fault because she mixed the heads up, and she has suffered for it. She wishes she could stay and look at him and fill up for the rest of her life.
Kapila seems to not care about her despair, and says the damage has been done. He buried all the memories and now she has unearthed them. Padmini wonders why he must bury them at all, and he replies that he cannot tolerate “this mad dance of incompleteness” (126). He explains that he has beaten this body into shape but not its memories; he never knew a body has ghosts. His body recognized her touch just now but he has no memory of it, and this is terrible to him. She is sorry but he does not want her pity. Finally she caresses him and lays her head on his chest. They embrace and go inside his home.
Bhagavata sings of the river and its lack of memory, while the Female Chorus joins in to sing of the waterfall.
Devadatta enters with a sword and two dolls. He asks Bhagavata if Kapila lives here and Bhagavata is reluctant to reply. Devadatta asks how long “she” has been here and he says four or five days.
Devadatta has been wanting to taste the blood of his former friend, but now he stops before the hut. Kapila comes out and says he has been waiting for Devadatta. He is not fearful, only eager. They talk together, Kapila saying the body was not made for this life and resisted, but had its revenge. He explains that the body gave him new feelings to the extent that he even started writing poetry. They laugh and Devadatta says he wanted Kapila’s “power but not your wildness” (129). He then asks if Kapila loves Padmini and Kapila replies yes. Devadatta says he does too. Kapila wonders if they could all live together but knows it cannot be done. Devadatta says this is why he brought the sword. Kapila goes to get his own.
Bhagavata says a crack has opened in the earth’s face.
Kapila and Devadatta hold their swords before themselves. They know they both must die. They carry out a stylized fight, and Padmini comes to watch. Bhagavata sings as they wound each other and then finally die, collapsing. Padmini leans down to them and says they’ve “burned, lived, fought, embraced and died” (130). She wishes they could have lived together, but this was the only way.
Bhagavata asks her if he can help. She says that he needs to take the child away and give him to the hunters to raise him as Kapila’s son. Then when he is five, he needs to go to the Brahman Vidysagara of Dharmapura and be raised as Devadatta’s son. As for her, she will perform sati and die. She says to give the dolls to her son, and calls to Kali.
Padmini is on a palanquin covered with flowers. The flames consume her. The Female Chorus wishes her goodbye and says the Lord of Death will be pleased with her offering of three coconuts.
Bhagavata announces that she has become a sati, but no one knows where she carried this out. The hunters only point to the tree of the Fortunate Lady and say on the night of the new moon a song rises from the roots and the tree fills the air with fragrance.
Analysis
Devadatta, Kapila, and Padmini’s story comes to a tragic end, one that is not altogether unexpected given the unceasing and steadily growing tensions within their trio both before and after the transposition of heads. It appears that Devadatta and Kapila’s heads imposed their will upon their bodies, transforming them back to what they once were, and leaving Padmini frustrated with her husband again and longing for Kapila. The insolubility of this problem necessitates drastic action through the characters’ suicides and the relinquishment of the child to other guardians.
As aforementioned, it seems as though the heads have their way with the bodies and that indeed, the head is more powerful. Yet this is not the entire story, for, as Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker writes, “the original bodies also exert their own subversive power and change the heads indefinably.” William S. Haney agrees, suggesting that Karnad wants us to see that “Both head and body…carry their own memories, and these memories define incompleteness by obstructing access to the void of conception.” And Wendy Doniger also sees the play as arguing for the “somatic basis of memory” and how its emphasis on “body-memory over mind-memory is grounded in Indian philosophy…memory in India is located in the mind and in the body…[and] is sometimes located in the soul.” Given this fragmentation, it is no wonder Devadatta and Kapila have difficulty figuring out who they are and why they are not complete.
It is Kapila that most eloquently articulates this somatic memory and incompleteness, bemoaning his new body’s memories that derive from the old by asking Padmini, “Why should one tolerate this mad dance of incompleteness?” and then explaining “One beats the body into shape, but one can’t beat away the memories in it. Isn’t that surprising? That the body should have its own ghosts—its own memories? Memories of touch—memories of a touch—memories of a body swaying in these arms, of a warm skin against this palm—memories which one cannot recognize, cannot understand, cannot even name because this head wasn’t there when they happened” (126). It pains Kapila that his new body recognizes Padmini’s touch even though he never has, that “this body, this appendage, laughed and flowered out in a festival of memories to which I’m an outcaste” (126).
Kapila’s hope of returning to some sense of his “real” self is thus thwarted by the body’s recognition of Padmini’s touch and how she “dug [the faceless memories] up with [her] claws” (126). There is no way for either Kapila or Devadatta to reach their selves because they have reverted back to their original, binary sense of identity—and with the added complication of having each other’s somatic memories and “witnessing consciousness.” As Haney notes, “To reach the Self, then, one has to be prepared to lose everything, as do Devadatta and Kapila.”
With the conclusion of this main plot, Karnad leaves us with the overwhelming sense that hybridity and a unified identity through hybridity are not easy for humans to attain; even Padmini sees this when she sighs that “we are three,” which Arya B.L. interprets to mean that Padmini “understands that she, Kapila, and Devadatta are the different manifestations of the same spirit. They never had individual existences.”
