Performed a few months ago by Navodaya, a Mysuru-based theatre group, Prasanna’s Ayodhya Kanda, the first of his planned trilogy of Ramayana plays, was absolutely delightful, and profound and moving. It lifted the spirits amidst our cheerless and sullen present. In continuation of the theatre director’s efforts at making tradition move through the present in responsible ways, this play makes the old epic resonate with new moral concerns without hurting its narrative integrity.
Rama isn’t seen in the play; his persona is sensed through the recall of the other characters. Early on, Dasharatha complains about Rama’s unwillingness to sport a moustache as that connoted arrogance, pride and authority. We learn later that Rama smilingly agreed to go on exile to the forest. He, along with Sita and Lakshmana, leaves the palace through the backdoor to avoid putting the grieving people assembled outside in the front to inconvenience.
When Dasharatha despairs that Rama now had to do without servants, ghee, betel nuts, and hot bathing water, Sumantra, his chief minister who accompanied Rama, Sita and Lakshmana until they reached the forest, assures him that none of them missed the luxuries of the palace. Rama, he recalls, burst into a song about the forest’s beauty: “Oh, the different kinds of wonder.” And Sita and Lakshmana revelled in the variety of birds they saw inside the forest.
Rama’s dislike of authority-mongering, his ready abdication of power, his sensitivity towards the people, his happy embrace of a life without privileges: these qualities, the play affirms, are part of what made him an honourable person.
Prasanna weaves in several other everyday moments to make the epic more alive to the contemporary moral imagination. Mantare, for instance, remarks that the work she, a lower caste servant, had had to do to manage the three-hundred conniving wives of Dasharatha had made her hunch-backed. She also calls out the deep damage done by patriarchy: these queens, she says, stayed within the dark indoors (‘like termites’) and turned into child-bearing machines instead of blooming like flowers.
Two new characters appear in Prasanna’s Ayodhya Kanda: Shambuka’s wife, Ganga, who is a palace servant, and his unnamed father. Both of them Panchamas, or Dalits in modern usage -- their presence puts a new moral energy to work in the play. At one point, Ganga likens her husband to Rama, since he too left unhesitatingly for the forest, to do penance, to gain knowledge.
The characters in Ayodhya Kanda speak ‘chaste,’ ‘colloquial’ as well as Dharwad-style Kannada in the most unselfconscious manner, the way conversations are so naturally multilingual in the country. In a delectable moment, Dasharatha recalls the joyful exclamations made in Hindustani, Bengali and Telugu by different visitors in his court when they learn of Rama’s anointment as his royal successor.
The new elements are masterfully fused into the play without them appearing forced or contrived. However lofty the aims, an activist play, of course, needs to work as a play first. Ayodhya Kanda succeeds spectacularly here. Using the stage aesthetic of a Yakshagana play, with a background chorus and a narrator (bhagavatha), but with the actors in simple costumes, it is aimed at a general audience, routing its serious aims through numerous comic moments, dramatic dialogue, and haunting songs. The stage energy stays high the entire time.
Ayodhya Kanda entertains while evoking the sentiments that can be expected to arise over the exiling of Rama while letting newer concerns surface alongside. Superlative performances by Prashanth Hiremath (Dasharatha), Padmashree (Mantare) and Rajalakshmi (Kaikeyi) and the evocative, minimalist music score of Anush Shetty help carry the play magnificently.
Prasanna’s Ayodhya Kanda belongs in the long legacy of Ramayana retellings driven by the humanist priorities in the present. Recalling his grand predecessor in this tradition, Kuvempu’s telling remark (“Rama is great; but the Ramayana is greater”), he wishes that the epic be seen for what it is: a story about civility. I eagerly await the two sequels to his valuable effort: Sundara Kanda and Aranya Kanda.