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ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
I must also recount my encounter
with the pioneering scientist Jagadish
Chandra Bose who, 100 years ago, in a
letter to his friend Rabindranath
Tagore, argued that by modern
criteria—individualism, irrepressible
achievement drive, emphasis on
acquired rather than on inherited
social status, and defiance of social
hierarchy—the real hero of the
Mahabharata was Karna, and that the
poet should therefore take the
initiative to identify Karna as the
modern hero of an ancient epic. For
Karna, all said, was a self-made man
who rose from the bottom of society,
defying an entrenched aristocracy keen
to humiliate him and deny him his
due. In response, Tagore wrote his
brief verse play, Karna-Kunti Samvad,
perhaps the first modern reading of
the story of Karna, in the first decade
of the twentieth century. (Tagore’s
rendering was not as one-dimensional
as Bose might have wished. That,
however, is another story.)
Everyone did not agree with that
reading; some sought to deny Karna
his new heroic status. Irawati Karve’s
essay on Karna in her book 2
Yuganta
is one of the more impressive, lastditch
efforts to fight the tendency to
find a hero in Karna. She did not live
to see the full impact of the
influential, highly imaginative Marathi
novel Mrutyunjay by Shivaji Sawant.
But she probably anticipated the
emergence of Karna as the new hero
of the Mahabharata in modernising
India.
Irawati Karve’s ‘dissent’ did not go far.
Hundred years after Tagore
wrote Karna-Kunti Samvad, as if in
reply to her, things have gone farther.
In popular Indian cinema one finds
how the discovery of Karna as a
modern hero with modern qualities
has been pushed to its logical
conclusion. His story no longer ends
in tragedy: he is triumphant, and wins
his mother’s acceptance, too. In
popular cinema, in films such as
Maniratnam’s Dalapathi and Rakesh
Roshan’s Karan Arjun, the life of
Karna has a happy ending. The tragic
has been erased.
The aggressive, martial qualities Rama
has acquired in recent times are also
new and, by now, well known. The
Ramjanmabhumi movement went to
town with the new image of Rama,
forgetting that Ayodhya, where the
grand Ram Mandir was to be located
after vandalising the Babri Masjid, was
a Vaishnava city and its reigning deity
was not Rama the king but Rama the
incarnation of Vishnu. The latter had