Subverting Gender Norms in Folktales: A Feminist Reading of Nagamandala

Girish Karnad’s Nagamandala serves as a bold reimagining of traditional Indian folktales through adistinctly feminist lens. This research paper offers a critical reading of the play, focusing on how itsubverts normative gender roles embedded in folk traditions by foregrounding female subjectivity,agency, and resistance. Drawing on Kannada oral tales collected by A.K. Ramanujan, Karnad constructsa layered narrative that places a silenced woman—Rani—at the center of the dramatic experience.Trapped in a patriarchal marriage with an emotionally distant husband, Rani's inner world istransformed through fantasy, myth, and magic. The play uses the folktale medium not to uphold socialnorms, but to question and dismantle them. Through devices such as shape-shifting, magical realism,and metafictional storytelling, Karnad explores themes of desire, identity, and empowerment. Rani’srelationship with the mystical serpent challenges traditional notions of fidelity and virtue, suggestingthat female desire and self-expression can exist beyond societal confines. By reconfiguring the roles ofwomen in folklore from passive recipients to active narrators of their fate, Karnad reclaims oraltradition as a space of subversion and possibility. This paper argues that Nagamandala is not merely aretelling of a folk myth but a political intervention that uses indigenous narrative forms to challengepatriarchal discourse and reclaim the feminine voice.