Life & Background
Girish Karnad was born in Matheran, Maharashtra in 1938 and grew up in Sirsi, Karnataka, where he was immersed in the Yakshagana folk theatre tradition. He studied at Karnatak University then at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, where he wrote his first two plays. He wrote primarily in Kannada and was awarded the Jnanpith Award in 1998. He was a prominent public intellectual, frequently speaking out on communalism and intolerance, and returned his Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015 to protest the growing climate of intolerance. He died in Bengaluru in 2019.
Tughlaq
The play dramatises the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, the 14th-century Sultan of Delhi — brilliant, idealistic, and catastrophically erratic. Tughlaq moves his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in an act of visionary insanity and issues copper coins the economy cannot absorb. A young idealist named Aziz infiltrates the court and uses Tughlaq's chaos for his own corrupt ends. By the end, both the Sultan and the idealist have been destroyed by power.
Tughlaq is read as a political allegory for Nehruvian idealism and the betrayal of independence's promise. Karnad wrote it while at Oxford, shortly after Nehru's death and India's defeat in the 1962 war with China — a moment of national disillusionment. The play uses historical distance to speak about the present. The form — a historical chronicle play influenced by Brecht — is perfectly suited to the material.
Why Girish Karnad Matters
Tughlaq is arguably the most important play in the history of Indian English drama, and certainly the most widely taught. Karnad's use of Karnataka's Yakshagana folk theatre conventions in Hayavadana and Nagamandala created a distinctly Indian theatrical idiom. He demonstrated that Indian drama could be simultaneously rooted in Indian performance traditions and engaged with contemporary ideas in psychology, mythology, and philosophy.