Summary
Act II (Continued)
Bhagavata notices Actor II rushing towards him. He is flustered, telling Bhagavata that he almost died from fright because he was coming down the road and he heard someone singing the National Anthem and assumed it was a true patriot, so he went to investigate. To his utter shock, he saw a horse singing. Before the Bhagavata can make sense of this, Actor I returns with a serious, sulky little boy of about five years old.
Bhagavata addresses Actor I, saying he was just thinking about him because of Hayavadana. Actor I says Hayavadana shooed him away as soon as they got to the Kali temple. Bhagavata asks who the child is but the boy does not reply.
The Actor sighs that children of his age should be “outtalking a dictionary” (134) but this boy won’t even talk, let alone smile. Actor I was passing through a village of hunters when a woman came out with the child and gave it to him, saying it belonged in the city.
Bhagavata wonders at this, and reaches to touch the child’s dolls. The child becomes incensed. Bhagavata has a glimmer of an idea as to who the child is, and asks to see his shoulder. The boy allows him, and Bhagavata triumphantly announces it is Padmini’s son.
Actor II has been shouting, and finally Bhagavata heeds him. Actor II says he saw a full horse, not a horse-headed man like Bhagavata thought.
Suddenly a voice is heard, and Hayavadana appears. He is a full horse now. He happily greets Bhagavata and Actor I. They all laugh together and the little boy does as well, to their surprise.
Bhagavata asks what happened when he went to the goddess. Hayavadana explains that he went to the temple and proclaimed he would chop off his own head and the goddess, peevish, asked what he wanted. He said he wanted to be complete, so she made him a horse. He had not even finished speaking to Kali, but yes, now he is a complete horse, not a complete man. He wishes he could get rid of his human voice, and that is why he has been singing the National Anthem, since it seems like people who sing it ruin their voices. He begins to cry.
The boy tells him not to cry so Hayavadana stops, and says he will not give up trying. He tells the boy if he comes onto his back, he will sing a song he knows. Bhagavata puts the boy on the horse’s back and begins a song at Hayavadana’s request. It is a sad song, Hayavadana notes, but Bhagavata replies the beauty is in the child’s laughter. Hayavadana disagrees and says this sentimentality has been “the bane of our literature and national life” because it promotes “escapism” (138).
The boy wants Hayavadana to laugh again, and as the horse dos so, he begins to lose his human voice and can only neigh. He leaps with joy and the child enjoys bouncing up and down on his back.
Bhagavata smiles that at last Hayavadana has become complete. He tells the Actors to tell the Brahmin his grandson is coming on a large white horse, and to throw away the dolls. He is happy with the fate of all, and thanks Ganesha for fulfilling dreams. It is time, he tells Hayavadana, to pray and thank the Lord for “having ensured the completion and success of our play” (139).
Analysis
Just as the audience thinks the play is over, Hayavadana makes his second appearance, similarly befuddling an actor and delighting Bhagavata. After his visit to Kali he ends up as a complete horse, not being able to finish articulating his request to be a complete man, and he desperately wants to lose his human voice so the completion can truly be finished. It is not until he meets the boy, who encourages him to laugh and sing and momentarily abandon his concern and discontent that he becomes a full horse. Whereas completeness was impossible for humans, it is possible for animals. Anand Mahadevan suggests that “Hayavadana and the boy in effect complete each other: the one, as a human child returned to the fold of society and the other, as fully animal.”
In this last part of the second act, Karnad reminds us that there are different levels of reality here—that he is speaking to the real audience, that there are actors playing roles, and that there are two plots, which are now converging thanks to the appearance of Padmini’s son in Hayavadana’s story. Amara Khan sees the theatrical techniques as intended to “constantly [remind] the audience that they are watching a play and not a slice of life, resulting in some amount of distance between the play and the audience psychologically. Therefore, the audience is able to think over the play for themselves critically. The theme of incompleteness, embodied by Lord Ganesha, Hayavadana, Padmini, Devadatta, and Kapila requires that the audience analyze their own incompleteness and accept it as a fact of life [actions and scenes are stylized] so as to increase the awareness of the audience about the problems faced by the characters in the play.” Karnad is not heavy-handed in his moralizing, but does suggest that his audience/reader meditate on how to embrace an identity that consists of both mind and body.
One of the most lauded aspects of the play is its fusion of Western and Indian elements. As discussed in the “About the Play” section, it is modeled heavily on Thomas Mann’s version of a Sanskrit tale, and contains dramatic elements from both Western and Indian folk drama.
Khan locates this confluence in the moment of the play’s conception—post-colonial, independent India—and writes, “although Hayavadana is certainly concerned with the conflict of Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of human nature and is strongly influenced by Mann's work in its exploration of this opposition, it is also a theater production in an India oscillating between its colonial past and its new independence within the framework of an over-arching tradition. Padmini represents the newly independent India, as yet unable to choose between tradition and its more recent Western history. Likewise, when the ‘horse’ Hayavadana sings the national anthem he evokes the empty regurgitation of nationalist feelings following independence. For Karnad the happy laughter that follows the reintegration of Padmini's boy within society is a crucial alternative to the idea of national pride. His characters finally seek happiness at whatever level of ‘completeness’ they are able to achieve rather than continue to seek one unified source of identity for themselves or the entire nation. When horses want to be men and women want brains and brawn in their husbands, then disappointment and disorder are in store. Resigning oneself to live as best one can in one's current circumstances is in Karnad's view the only road to happiness and contentment.”
By the end of the play it should be clear that Hayavadana’s story is not fully peripheral, not a throwaway plotline, and not just for laughs—it is central to Karnad’s message regarding identity. Mohit K. Ray points out that the title of the play is, indeed, Hayavadana, not Devadatta and Kapila. It is the horse-man’s story that “raises the identity question more dramatically and more authentically than anybody else in the play,” and the subplot allows Karnad to look at the problem both at “the metaphysical level and at the socio-cultural level…[he] handles the moral problem in the main plot and the philosophical problem in the subplot.” Hayavadana has consulted saints and magicians and fakirs, threw himself into patriotism, and lived a blameless life, but none of that could help him find completeness. Now that he is a complete horse and a unified being at the end, he can, Nand Kumar writes, take in the “responsibility by the Bhagavata” to tell the Brahmin that his grandson is coming home and that Ganesha offers “unfathomable mercy” and the fulfillment of those who worship him. Because of their flaws, the humans Devadatta and Kapila could not achieve completeness, but Hayavadana could as a horse and Ganesha could in his hybridity—thus we ought to heed the examples of the divine and the animal to learn how to live fully in our humanity.
