From Silence to Speech: The Politics of Female Storytelling in Nagamandala

Girish Karnad’s Nagamandala occupies a crucial place in modern Indian drama as it reimagines oral folklore to interrogate the politics of gender, power, and voice. At its core, the play stages the silencing of women within patriarchal structures and the radical possibilities of storytelling as a mode of resistance. The protagonist, Rani, trapped in a loveless and oppressive marriage, finds agency not through direct confrontation but through the transformative act of narration, myth, and the performative imagination. This paper examines how Karnad employs the folktale form as a subversive space where silenced women articulate their suppressed desires and rewrite their social destinies. Through the interplay of myth, performance, and narrative layers, Nagamandala highlights the tension between silence and speech, body and voice, tradition and transgression. By analyzing Rani’s storytelling as both survival strategy and political intervention, the study situates Nagamandala within the discourse of feminist literary criticism and performance studies. In doing so, it underscores the play’s significance as a cultural text that dramatizes the reclamation of female voice, thereby contributing to broader conversations on gender, power, and the politics of representation in Indian theatre.