Chapter VIII

CHANDALIKA

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 CHANDALIKA

Rabindranath Tagore discovered the real image of the Indian woman.

He is the first to depict her as an intellectual personality. The heroines of

Tagore are not weak or humble. They have their own pride and self respect.

They have the knowledge of their own self. His female characters like Chitra in

Chitra, Prakriti and her mother in Chandalika, Nalini in Red Oleanders, have

their own voice. The title of the play Chandalika, itself shows that the heroine

of the play is a woman belonging to the lowest class of society. The

protagonist, Prakriti is a girl who belongs to the untouchable class. She falls in

love with Budhist bhikshu, who makes her aware of herself. Prakriti gets her

spiritual comfort. This journey of an untouchable girl from self-ignorance to

self-knowledge is shown in Chandalika.

A Brahmo-Hindu Rabindranath Tagore had a lasting regard for the

Buddha. The rational and humanistic aspects of the teachings of the Buddha

had attracted the creative genius of Tagore. "Only once in his life, said

Rabindranath, did he feel like prostrating himself before an image and that was

when he saw the Buddha at Gaya".1 He found the Buddhist principle of man’s

social equality particularly alluring to his own concept of ‘divinity in man’.

Chandalika is a dramatic expression of this ideology. The play is a visual

presentation of the age-old struggle of the marginalized section of Indian

society to attain the status of equality. It is based on a Buddhist legend

associated with one of the Buddha’s disciples named Ananda. In this legend,

Tagore found readymade material for the propagation of this idea of equality

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and humanism through an intense conflict between marginality and spirituality.

The play is also a criticism of the worst vice of the Vedic religion, namely,

casteism. John Wilson, in his celebrated work, Indian Caste Volume I,

observes: “Buddhism in its most important social aspect was a reaction against

caste, the tyranny of which multitudes had begun to feel to be unbearable. . .” 2

Rabindranath Tagore realized that Indian society was “permeated by

religion and living myth, endowed with a psychic landscape having its own

concept of time and space.”3 He tried to portray this unique reality through

modes and methods indigenous to Indian culture. According to Indra Nath

Choudhuri, Tagore’s central idea was:

“...to free the present- the now, and make it part of the eternal

time; and in his dance dramas this is fully realized. Tagore’s

increasing interest in dance in the last phase of his life reflects his

deepening sensitivity to the ecstatic, spiritual aspect of dance,

exemplified by the transcendent rhythm of dance which

constitutes the flux and the timeless, eternal order of the

universe.”4

The story of an untouchable girl Prakriti is told in Mitra’s book,

Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal. According to the story, Prakriti once

gave some water from the untouchables’ well to the Buddhist monk Ananda

because he asked her for it. The girl fell in love with Ananda. She went to her

mother and asked her to use magical powers to make Ananda fall in love with

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her. Under the influence of the magic spells Ananda returns to where Prakriti

lives. Tagore made use of this small part of the tale which in the original, the

Shardulakarna Avadana, runs into dozens of pages.

The location of the story is at Sravasti. Lord Buddha had been staying at

the garden of Ananthapindad. One day his favourite disciple Ananda, while on

his way back from lunch at some house felt thirsty. He saw that a daughter of

the chandals, Prakriti by name, was drawing water from the well. He asked for

water, she gave. The girl became charmed at his beauty. Finding no other way

to have him, she sought help from her mother. Her mother knew magic. She

smeared her courtyard with cow dung, prepared an altar, lighted a fire and

chanting a magic spell offered 108 sunflowers in that fire. Ananda could not

resist the power of the magic and arrived at her house in the night. As he sat on

the altar, Prakriti began to spread the bed for him. Then Ananda felt remorse

and fearfully prayed to Buddha to rescue him.

Lord Buddha had in the meantime come to know, by means of his divine

power, of the condition of his disciple and cited a mantra. Under the impact of

that mantra, the magic spell of the chandal woman became weak and Ananda

returned to the monastery.

So far the original story underscores the orthodox idea of the superiority

of the monk and the lure of lustful women; but the conclusion of Avadana story

adds the information—supposedly given by Buddha himself—that in her

previous birth Prakriti was the daughter of a Brahmin who had contemptuously

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declined the offer of marriage from Sardulakarna, the accomplished son of the

scholarly and wise chandal Trishanku, and after being defeated in the

prolonged debate the Brahmin had at last give his daughter in marriage to the

chandal boy. Trishanku was Buddha himself in the previous birth. Thus the

anecdote also highlights a radical attitude to casteism.

In 1933 Tagore wrote a small play Chandalika on the basis of this tale.

All the dramatic action in this play is revealed in the dialogues of Prakriti with

her mother. After much deliberation and prodding by Prakriti, the mother

consents to use her magic powers to draw Ananda back to their hovel. As the

mother is engaged in this magic, Prakriti reports to her mother how Ananda is

fighting the urge to go back to Prakriti’s home but in the end is giving in. In

1938 Tagore rewrote the story, but now peopled with more characters, in the

form of a dance-drama which is also called Chandalika. Marjorie Sykes

translated Chandalika into English.

Tagore's play Chandalika is a short two act play. The story of the play

revolves round only three characters – Prakriti, a chandal Girl, Ananda, a

Buddhist monk and Prakriti's mother who has magic powers. The play is a

story of very sensitive girl condemned by her birth to a despicable caste.

"Tagore presents a psychological study of young woman who suffers on

account of her vanity and self-consciousness. Tagore highlights the enigmatic

character of a woman, the character of being all dominating over possessive to

devour all that stand before her precisely, her excessive materialistic approach

that ultimately fails".5

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 The play begins at the confrontation of Prakriti and her mother over the

topic of Ananda’s inspiration of Prakriti as a living, breathing human being and

not as an untouchable, despicable, socially neglected chandalini. Prakriti was

born in a chandal family; and, like all chandal children, she has been brought

up in the belief that she was inferior to all other people and that even her touch

would pollute a member of the other classes of society or of the other castes.

As usual Prakriti went to the well to fetch water, finding her nowhere to be

seen the mother of Prakriti calls out to Prakriti who should by now come back

home. However, hearing her mother’s shout, Prakriti comes and tells her that

she was sitting near the well. The mother scolds her saying: “Past noon, and a

blistering sun, and the earth too hot for the feet! Why, the very crows on the

amlok branches are gasping for heat. Yet you sit in the Vaisakh sun for no

reason at all!” (Act I, 147)*.

Prakriti in reply to her mother’s scolding and questioning, says that she

had really been doing penance. When asked for whom she had been doing

penance, Prakriti tells her that a few days ago someone had come to the well

and asked her to give him water to quench his thirst.

Mother asks: Did you tell him that you are a Chandalini?

PRAKRIT: I told him, yes. He said it wasn’t true. If the black

* All the references in the parentheses are from Rabindranath Tagore.

Chandalika in Three Plays translated by Marjorie Sykes. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1975.

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 clouds of Sravana are dubbed Chandal, he said, what of it? It

doesn’t change their nature, or destroy the virtue of their water.

Don’t humiliate yourself, he said; self-humiliation is a sin, worse

than self-murder (Act I, 147-148).

Prakriti feels thrilled and delighted by the Bhikshu’s words and she then

pours water into his cupped hands. The Bhikshu drinks the water and leaves;

but his words have made a powerful impression upon the girl’s mind. She has,

for the first time in her life, been told by someone that she is a human being

like any other. The Bhikshu’s words have brought an awakening in her and

have given her a new awareness of herself. At the same time she has fallen in

love with the Bhikshu, and in fact begun to be haunted by the thoughts of him.

On hearing this account of Prakriti’s experience, the mother tells her that

she had behaved like a stupid girl, and that she had been too reckless in her

behaviour. Prakriti would have to pay a heavy price for such misconduct, says

the mother, because Prakriti had forgotten the caste into which she was born.

Prakriti ignoring her mother’s warning says: “Once did he cup his hands, to

take the water from mine. Such an only little water, yet the water grew to

fathomless, boundless sea. In it flowed all the seven seas in one, and my caste

was drowned, and my birth washed clean” (Act I, 148).

The mother says that even Prakriti’s manner of speaking has changed,

and that it seems that the Buddhist monk had cast some kind of spell upon her.

She then asks Prakriti if she really understands all that she has said. Prakriti

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replies that the Buddhist monk had come to her for water when he could have

got water from any other place in the city of Sravasti through which he had

been walking all day. He had come to her at this well instead of going to any

other well. It was on her that he had bestowed the honour of quenching his

thirst. It was truly a new birth for her. The Buddhist monk had performed a

highly commendable act by asking her for water and thus conferring an honour

upon her. Evidently he wanted to fulfill some sacred purpose by coming to her,

though he could have gone to some sacred stream to quench his thirst. Prakriti

quotes Buddhist monks example of how Chandals have served water to the

priestly people. He said that Janaki bathed in such water as this, at the

beginning of her forest exile, and the Guhak, the Chandal, drew it for her. My

heart has been dancing ever since, and night and day I hear those solemn tones-

‘Give me water, give me water’ (Act I, 149). Prakriti has now become

conscious of her status as a human being, on no way inferior to any other. A

feeling of self-respect or self-esteem has now taken roots in her heart.

Prakriti shows herself to be a very sensitive kind of girl and she proves

to be a sensual one too. When the Buddhist monk happens once again to pass

the well where Prakriti had given him water to quench his thirst, he does not

even look towards the well because he is not thirsty and because he had

completely forgotten the incident of his having met a Chandal girl to whom he

had imparted the knowledge of her identity as a human being. Prakriti

misinterprets the Buddhist Bhikshu’s forgetfulness of the whole incident as an

insult to her; and she now becomes even more determined than before to have

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him as her lover. With that object in her mind, she becomes even more insistent

that her mother should use her maximum strength as a sorceress to compel the

monk to come to her. She even says that her mother’s magic is something

ancient, as old as life itself, while the Mantras of the Buddhist Bhikshu’s are

raw things of yesterday. These Bhikshus can never be a match for her mother,

she says, and that this particular Bhikshu is therefore bound to be defeated by

her magic.

Infact, Prakriti goes so far as to say to her mother: “No matter where he

goes, you must bring him back. He showed no pity to me. I shall show none to

him. Chant your spells, your cruelest spells. Wherever he goes, he shall never

escape from me” (Act I, 151). Driven by her desire for the Bhikshu, Prakriti

entreats her mother to chant her magic spells in order to bring the Bhikshu to

her door to seek her love. The mother demurs on grounds of religion and

morality, but gives way when pressed hard by Prakriti.

Prakriti’s mother gives Prakriti a magic mirror in which Prakriti would

be able to see where the Bhikshu is and what is happening to him as a result of

the magic spells which the mother would begin to chant. The mother then

begins her magic operations, while Prakriti looks into the mirror. The magic of

Prakriti’s mother begins to take effect. Prakriti sees Bhikshu showing

symptoms of a change in his look and behaviour. Soon, a conflict begins in

Prakriti’s mind. This conflict shows that Prakriti is not merely a creature of lust

that she is not a brazen woman seeking merely the gratification of her sensual

desire, and that she is devoid of all moral scruples. Prakriti sees Bhikshu

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experiencing the agony of a struggle which has begun to take place within him.

As a consequence of the magic spells being chanted by Prakriti’s mother, a

sensual desire to hold Prakriti in his arms and to satisfy his craving for his flesh

has risen in his heart, but he is stoutly resisting this desire and trying to

overpower it. As the magic spell continues, the sensual desire in Bhikshu grows

stronger and stronger, but the resistance increases too at least in the beginning.

A conflict between sensuality and spirituality then begins to take the shape of a

storm in his soul and the onslaught of the sensual desire has begun to distort

and twist his face which is fast losing its radiance and its serenity.

Prakriti’s mother asks Prakriti to look into the mirror and tell her where

the Bhikshu is at this time. Prakriti looks into the mirror, and then throws it

away. She asks her mother to stop and to undo the spells at once. In a tone of

great distress, she says to her mother:

Mother, mother stop! Undo the spell now—at once—undo it!

What have you done? What have you done? O Wicked, wicked

deed! Better have died. What a sight to see! Where is the light

and radiance, the shining purity, the heavenly glow? How worn

how faded, has he come to my door! (Act II, 165).

She tells her mother that Bhikshu is very near their house but a great

change has come over him. All the light and the radiance, all the shining purity,

and all the heavenly glow, which he originally had, are now gone completely.

He looks worn-out and faded. It seems that he carries on his back the heavy

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burden of his defeat. His spiritual self has completely been overwhelmed by his

passion and his lust for her. He is coming to her door with his head hanging

downwards in shame. Prakriti tells her mother in a categorical manner to put an

end to her magic operation and kicks away all the paraphernalia of magic.

Then, addressing herself, Prakriti says that, if she is really a human being and

not a chandalini, she should not degrade a heroic man.

The mother feels only too glad to undo the magic that she has been

working and she, of course, pays the price for having misused her magic

powers. At this point Bhikshu appears at the door of Prakriti’s house. Prakriti,

overcome by her feeling of remorse and repentance, falls at Bhikshu’s feet,

seeking his forgiveness. She apologizes to him for having pulled him down into

the dust by the force of her mother’s black magic, but she also says that this

visit by him would become the means of her going to heaven. She then says:

“Victory, victory to thee, o Lord!”(Act II, 165).

The Bhikshu now released from the effect of magic, becomes aware of

his surroundings and begins to sing a song in honour of his master, the Buddha.

The song runs thus:

To the most pure Budha, mighty ocean of mercy

Seer of knowledge absolute, pure, supreme,

Of the world’s sin and suffering the Destroyer—

Solemnly to the Buddha I bow in homage.

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The Bhikshu has been restored to his original self with all his spirituality and

his dedication to a life of purity and worship.

Prakriti is a combination of beauty and rare intelligence. Throughout the

play reader can experience her intelligence which is revealed by her speaking.

It is because or her intelligence that she quickly imbibes the lesson which the

Buddhist monk has tried to teach her. The advising words of the monk

inculcate a sense of her identity as a human being. She thinks that the monk's

words have caused her to be a reborn. She tells her mother that for the first time

she had heard the kind of words which the monk had spoken to her and that

ordinarily, she would have not dared even to touch the dust under the feet of

that man to whom she had given water and who had actually drunk the water.

She had so deeply been influenced by the monk's words while pouring water

into his cupped hands. She had felt that the water was growing to a bottomless

sea and that into the water were flowering all the seven seas of the world,

drowning her caste and washing her clean of the stigma of her low birth.

Of the three plays Muktadhara, Chandalika and Natirpuja, Chandalika

is the shortest play, but the most powerful. It is a poetic drama. Imagery and

symbols play a vital role and all the conflict takes place in the theatre of the

soul. The Buddhist monk Ananda awakened self-awareness and self-respect in

Prakriti by saying, “Give me water” and accepting it in his cupped hands.

Prakriti is transformed. The simple words “Give me water” acquire an

incantatory effect and run through the fabric of the play as a silver thread. They

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symbolize her “awakening” and freedom from bondage. “My birth is washed

clean” says Prakriti. The new “birth” she refers to is her “self-knowledge”.

In Chandalika the central operative symbol is that of ‘giving’. Prakriti,

the Chandala girl, gives water to Ananda. Ananda gives her the awareness of

self, her new birth. Prakriti, in turn, longs to give herself (her ego-bound

physical self) to Ananda; but this kind of giving goes with possession.

Prakriti’s mother offers to give her life for the sake of her daughter by

undertaking to work her magic spell to drag Ananda to Prakriti. Through

sympathy, pity, and love, through her identification with Ananda’s suffering,

Prakriti realizes that after all this what she had desired to give him is nothing

but her ‘wretched self’. The play ends with three different ‘givings’: Prakriti

gives Ananda his freedom; Ananda gives her deliverance, a spiritual rebirth

which is superior to the ego-birth that he had given her earlier; Prakriti’s

mother gives her life itself, her sacrifice helping to bring about the spiritual

union (which is but mutual giving of ‘mukti’) of Prakriti and Ananda.

There are innumerable small and great symbols throughout the drama.

The King’s son, “hunting” for the “beast” symbolizes all those who see only

the flesh of the women but not her soul.”The house of darkness”, is the state of

ignorance of the self. “Water” is the symbol of love. “Black stone” (on my

heart) is the weight of caste label. “Fire” is a great purifier and a symbol of

purity; dust symbolizes lowliness, flower symbolizes women, bloom

symbolizes full development of soul, light symbolizes self-knowledge or love.

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Autumnal clouds symbolize free floating things, detached persons like the

monks.

Why hurt will I bathe

In the deep waters of my pain’s immensity (Act II, 162).

This “pain’s immensity” refers to the suffering heart of Prakriti and her

unbounded oceanic love. “His suffering and mine are one today. What holy fire

of creation could have wrought such a union?” says Prakriti. This is a complex

symbol. It is a union of souls. Souls unite through the fires of suffering. She

also speaks of the fusion, of “gold” and “copper” in the great fire. Gold stands

for Ananda and copper for Prakriti, for spirit and earth, for heaven hood and

earth hood. That is why she tells him boldly in the end. “I have dragged you

down to earth, how else could you raise me to your heaven?” (Act II, 164).

Thus Chandalika is a cosmic drama. Prakriti stands for Nature. Mother

stands for the earth, a place of patience, suffering and understanding. The

primal spell may be taken as the “force of attraction: in Nature. Particularly of

sex, Ananda stands for spirit, the awakening and bliss. Even the word

“Chandals” is made to represent people with “mean spirits.” The union of

Ganga and Jamuna is the union of the white and the dark.

Prakriti has become conscious of her status as a human being, in no way

inferior to any other. A feeling of self respect has now taken roots in her heart.

She is changed. She is no more Chandalini. She has got the knowledge of

herself. She supposes herself equal to all the human beings. She got the

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knowledge of her own. Now she is a woman, more than woman she is human

being. Till she was Chandalini, she was not having any expectation from the

society but now she is the part of society. She got this knowledge from Ananda.

In Chandalika, Tagore avoids the glorification of traditional male

heroes like Lord Buddha or Ananda. The narrative is woven around the play of

emotions primarily within Prakriti. Tagore’s poetry brings out both the strength

and the excruciating inner dilemmas of his protagonist. It is highly significant

that Tagore made his central character an untouchable girl who not only

dominates the narrative through the strength of her personality, but also shapes

the course of action through her own choices. Prakriti, like Shyama, and

Chitrangada, is a fractured self who is denied legitimacy due to her caste and

class and banished from the life of a normal human being. Her arrival at an

understanding at who she really is occurs through various forms of rebellion

against sexual and social codes.

Prakriti is a real woman not an idealized one who is at once strong and

tormented, confident yet deeply conflicted – she is a divided self, torn between

her intense yearning for Ananda and her intense guilt at making him suffer at

the mercy of Maya’s Nagpash Mantra. She only arrives at a true understanding

of her own self and the world by journeying through experience, through

making errors in judgement, asserting herself and making active choices. It is

the autonomous self development of the woman (atmasakti) that Tagore hints

at in narrating the story of an untouchable girl. In her search for the true self, as

Prakriti transcends from darkness of social degradation into the light of

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signifying her own self as a woman, she travels through the three states of life –

the ignoble discriminations faced in her material life, the world of memory in

which Ananda has shown her respect as a human being, as well as the ultimate

dignity of her Self that she acquires at the end by understanding the true nature

of her desire – she is liberated when she comprehends the unified pattern of

these closely intertwined three worlds. As Purkayastha opines that in choosing

Prakriti to occupy the central space in his narrative, “Tagore’s preference for

focussing on the human rather than the spiritual attributes of his protagonists is

clearly manifest.”6

This is a sensational twist to the dramatic rendering of Ananda legend. It

now becomes a wonderful and studious portrayal of female psychology by

Tagore. The dramatist seems to be aware of the general belief that a woman,

longing to give away everything to a man, can go to any extreme if her female

pride is hurt. “Her extreme anxiety to possess the monk is the external

manifestation of her latent desire to offer her best”.7 But Ananda is too far

removed from these worldly desires to accept her offering. So Prakriti has no

other options but to resort to violent means unacceptable in any religious or

social ethics. She asserts: “If my longing can draw him here, and if that is a

crime, then I will commit the crime. I care nothing for a code which holds only

punishment and no comfort” (Act II, 155).

Therefore, Prakriti intends on rousing similar lust in her enamour’s

unresponsive heart. However, it is a mental torture for the mother to fulfill this

unworldly demand of her daughter. Conventionally bound in the caste web of

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her orthodox temperament, she neither can commit such a religious and social

sin to force a Buddhist monk to break his celibacy nor can she tolerate her only

daughter’s outrageous demand. She is afraid that it would bring a curse upon

the unhappy girl and certain death for her own self, if committed the sin of

forcing the holy monk to fornication. If undone halfway, even then, the spell

would kill her. Therefore, she tries to instill some practical sense into the

enraged head of Prakriti. But blind in revenge, the stubborn girl pays no heed

and forces her mother to chant the ‘magical spell’ to bring Ananda full of lust

to her.

This is an outrageous idea for the moral and ethical cannons of the

world since the Buddhist monks in their pursuit of ‘nirvana’ follow the vow of

celibacy strictly and so are beyond the reach of any common individual in

terms of worldly pleasures and familial obligations. The well-known

Bangladeshi academic and religion scholar, Azizun Nahar Islam, rightly

remarks: “The Buddha pointed the changes, vicissitudes and tragedies of life.

He condemns the charms and temptations of body” 8

Accordingly, every Buddhist monk is bound by the divine vow of

celibacy and strict morality. In turn, the common folks are in awe of their

holiness and, therefore, respect their divinity. But, blindfolded by the awakened

consciousness of liberty and overpowered by the freshly sprung need of

equality and spiritual union, Prakriti oversteps this morality and ethical

boundaries. That results in her spiritual tragedy in the end. K.R. Kripalani calls

it a “tragedy of self-consciousness over reaching its limit”9. His further remarks

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regarding Chandalika’s reaction point out to the drawback in such extremes

when he says: “But self-consciousness, like good wine, easily intoxicates, and

it is difficult to control the dose and have just enough of it”.10 In the play,

Prakriti loses all sense of fear for the holiness and social and religious codes of

conduct in her newly awakened state. Hence, she declares: “I fear nothing any

longer, except to sink back again, to forget myself again, to enter again the

house of darkness. That would be worse than death!”11 In doing so, she forgets

that Ananda is not an ordinary human being to exercise her passions upon but a

divine mortal working for the cause of upliftment of human dignity. She says to

her mother: “I’ll send my call into his soul, for him to hear. I am longing to

give myself; it is like a pain at my heart”12 This pain of longing for the

beautiful and magnificent monk becomes even more intense when, later in the

play during her second chance citing of him, Ananda, immersed in his inner

spiritual self, totally ignores her presence and moves on chanting the hymn of

Lord Buddha. That crash-lands her illusionary flight of worldly longing. It is a

great shock to her sensitive mind. Her female ego gets crushed and the newly

awakened woman feels deeply hurt. So in rage, she orders her mother to cast

her ‘magical spell’ on the male heart of Ananda to force him to beg for her

conjugal company. That way she could satiate her feelings of revenge upon the

entire manhood of the earth for neglecting the urge of the hitherto marginalized

individual.

In Chandalika, Tagore uses an ancient Buddhist legend for his play, but

treats it in a highly imaginative way, giving it a modernist interpretation. In

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Tagore’s dance drama, the central protagonist is Prakriti, the untouchable girl,

not Lord Buddha or his disciple Ananda as in the original story. In Tagore’s

hands Prakriti becomes a woman living on the fringes of human society – a

marginalized figure of Hindu society discriminated against for her social

background in a caste- segregated world view. By addressing the theme of

untouchability through this dance drama Tagore was making an extremely bold

socio- political statement against the discrimination of untouchables that in a

way supported Mahatma Gandhi’s pro Harijan campaign in the late 1930s

India. In Tagore’s Chandalika, Prakriti becomes obsessed with Ananda as he is

the first and only person outside her caste who treats her as a human being of

equal standing instead of shunning her as an untouchable. For Prakriti, Ananda

embodies liberation, a person who has shown her a way out of the stultifying

darkness of self negation, who has created a revolution in the way she

perceives the world and the way the world perceives her. Prakriti now

desperately wants to possess the man who has given her the taste of freedom

from the chains of social degradation that bound her soul.

It is through Ananda that Prakriti first learns to see herself as a human

being in her own right, she learns the meaning of dignity – she learns what it is

to be a woman, to serve others as an equal. With her awareness of herself as a

woman comes the first awakening of desire, which turns into obsessive passion

for the man who has shown her respect as a human being for the first time in

her life. By giving water to the thirsty monk, it is as if Prakriti has satisfied her

own thirst for self respect. It is a kind of self ablution as it were, cleansing her

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from the self negating stigma of being an outcaste. Ananda has given her the

power to serve others, the power to give life (water), nourishment to thirsty

travelers. It is in his eyes that Prakriti has seen herself as an equal to all the

other human beings. She now gains an understanding of her selfhood; an

awareness of her identity as a woman, and an acknowledgement of herself

worth. Her desire for the monk is the elemental desire of the woman, Prakriti,

for the man, Purush, and it comes only with her awareness of her still nascent

womanhood. With her desire as a female comes courage, a daring even to bring

Ananda back to her at any cost, by any means. Prakriti now takes the help of

Maya, her mother, an exponent of black magic

at the end of the play Prakriti gets the knowledge of her true self. Tagore has

depicted woman as a wife, daughter, sister, mother beloved and so on. But

Prakriti is different from all these. Tagore depicts Prakriti as a woman who is

asking for her own identity and the authorized recognition of her identity by

others, which is denied by the society all along.

Tagore is aware of the fact that orthopractical Hinduism owes its

existence to the observances of Brahmins who do not touch anything ritually

impure. Tagore often lampoons the Brahminical strict taboo on touching

outcastes. Untouchability, as we have seen, is an important theme in:

Chandalika. It depicts the discrimination of the outcastes, exemplified in the

main character of the play, the untouchable girl Prakriti, by the higher castes. It

also shows a way out of this perpetual humiliation. The Buddhist mendicant

Ananda asks the untouchable girl to give him some water from the ritually

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impure well. This single question of Ananda: jol dao ‘give me some water’

becomes the liberating magic spell for Prakriti. She begins to imagine another

possible way of life, a life outside obedience and self-depreciation before

persons of a higher caste. Thus Prakriti shows in her newly found self-

confidence not only that she has lost her fear of discrimination, but also that

she is capable of taking her destiny into her own hands. In other words, she

emancipates herself, while the source of her emancipation is in fact the

message of Buddha – conveyed to her by Ananda – that nobody is born impure

and nobody needs to undergo social ostracism and discrimination. In

Chandalika Tagore visualizes the Buddhist teaching of universal love.

Chandalika exemplifies Buddhist individualist self-emancipation. It is a play

about personal choices and self-fulfillment.

Tagore’s introduction of the psychological revolt, against the age-old

caste suppression overreaching its limits and resulting in tragedy, lends it a new

meaning. S.R. Sharma writes:

Against the abomination of untouchability he, of course, wrote

his moving play Chandalika. Since that abomination continues

with us, in fact assuming formidable proportions not so

infrequently, the play acquires new relevance. 13

This realization of Prakriti’s selfhood is intermingled with the conscious

negation of her socially imposed caste and class as well as an

acknowledgement of herself as a woman proud of her self worth. In her

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obsession to possess Ananda, Prakriti makes an erroneous choice. She implores

her mother, Maya to use magic to bring Ananda back to her. The magical

powers of Maya contest with Ananda’s spiritual powers until he is forced

against his will to come back to Prakriti. Seeing her desired man in painful

agony, broken and defeated in spirit, his soul entrenched in darkness under the

spell of the black magic that Maya uses, Prakriti understands her error in

dragging Ananda, her symbol of light and truth, to a baser level where he

becomes a mere shadow of his former self. When Maya’s black magic forces

Ananda to her door, Prakriti realizes that her desire is not for the person that the

monk represents but for the affirmation of her own identity as a female self

equal to others in all respects. Through material desire Prakriti reaches a

spiritual desire. Ananda's request, "Give me water," besides indicating his

physical need symbolizes water's regenerative image common in many

religious traditions. In the Indian context, a holy man asking for water from an

untouchable violates a social as well as a religious norm. To receive and to give

food or water were sacrilegious for both. The monk's extraordinarily radical

request awakens Prakriti's awareness of her own innate Self. Through the

universal image of water, Tagore intertwines the ideological revolution

reflected in the social, religious, and political scene of his own time. Prakriti's

self-assertion imbued in desire is manifested in her love for the young monk.

Infused by Eros, Prakriti's love ascends to agape through dedication and

repentance to liberation. It is through love that Prakriti transcends her socially

imposed caste and ultimately signifies herself as a radical human being.

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 The Hindu concept of caste distinction based on one’s birth is inhuman.

It should be completely wiped out and equality tinged with humanity should be

established. This is the order of the day. Yet, for the better functioning of the

social order, some moral and ethical restraints should also be exercised by the

newly awakened human beings. This could be the idea of Tagore in

dramatizing the Ananda legend through Chandalika. In the words of K.R.

Kripalani: “. . . a new consciousness after ages of suppression is overpowering

and one learns restraint only after suffering”.14 That’s what happens to the

protagonist of Chandalika, Prakriti, the Chandal girl, at the end of her tragic

experience. She realizes the necessity for ethical values in her new birth.

Eventually, she corrects the mistake of overhauling the human ethics she had

committed earlier and turns a better and spiritual woman in the end.

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1. Agarwal Beena. The Plays of Rabindranath Tagore. New Delhi:

Satyam Publishers, 2003. 24.

2. Wilsin John. Indian Caste. Vol, 2. Delhi: K.K. Book Distributers, 1985.

278.

3. Indra Nath Choudhuri. Theatric Form of Tagore’s Dance Drama and

its Symbolism. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1988. 130.

4. Indra Nath Choudhuri. Theatric Form of Tagore’s Dance Drama and

its Symbolism. 130.

5. B.R.Agarwal. Insight into Feminine Mind: A Study of Tagore’s

Dramatic World. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2004. 132.

6. Prarthana Purkayastha. Warrior, Untouchable, Courtesan: Fringe

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Publications Ltd., 2009. 267.

7. Agarwal Beena. The Plays of Rabindranath Tagore. New Delhi:

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8. Azizun Nahar Islam. The Nature of Self, Suffering and Salvation.

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9. Rabindranath Tagore. Three Plays. Trans. Marjorie Sykes. Madras:

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10. Rabindranath Tagore. Three Plays. Trans. Marjorie Sykes. 145.

11. Rabindranath Tagore. Three Plays. Trans. Marjorie Sykes. 153.

12. Rabindranath Tagore. Three Plays. Trans. Marjorie Sykes. 152.

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13. S.R. Sharma. Life and Works of Rabindranath Tagore. Jaipur: Book

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14. Rabindranath Tagore. Three Plays. Trans. Marjorie Sykes. Madras:

Oxford University Press, 1970. 145.

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