Acrobating between the traditional and the modern

Author(s): GIRISH KARNAD

Source: Indian Literature , MAY-JUNE, 1989, Vol. 32, No. 3 (131) (MAY-JUNE, 1989), pp.
84-99
Published by: Sahitya Akademi

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Girish Karnad
spoke at Meet the Author programme,
organised by theļļ)Sahitya Akademi
and the India International Centre,
on 16 November 1988.

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 Acrobating between
the traditional and the modern

GIRISH KARNAD

THE andandsubject
it is anit easy
is ansubject
that interests subjectButmost
to talk about. to talkitwriters
you know, is about. is, of But course, know, themselves it is
always easier if you are a poet or a novelist because at least you
are used to talking in your own voice. You spend your whole
life talking as writer directly to the audience. The problem in
being a playwright is that everything you write is for someone
else to say and then if, like me, you also happen to be an actor,
everything you say happens to be written by someone else. So
one spends most of one's life, sort of meeting one's dialogue at
a tangent; one's dialogue is being said by others and what one is
saying is written by someone else. It is quite a pleasant existence,
actually; it is not surprising that some of the origins of theatre
at least are covered in mask.
I thought I would just start off with one, only one little point.
The point is that, of course, I wanted to be a poet: the greatest
ambition in my life. At the age of 22, I realised, I would not be
a poet, but only be a playwright, then I almost wept. I am
sorry to autobiographise, but I think that will at least set off
some of the terms on which we can talk about later. When I was
about twenty, I got a scholarship to go abroad. It was a very
tense moment because I came from a traditional family. I was

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 ÍNDIAN LITERATURE

the first member of the family to go abroad and although the

present generation won't understand it and I am sure many of
you who have been through it will understand how difficult it
was to come from a traditional family and to go abroad because,
although everyone was thrilled that I was going to England, it
involved lots of decisions: Will one come back? Will one stay
abroad? Will one get married to a foreign woman, you know,
problems like that. One was very tense and one found ultimately
that suddenly on the eve of my leaving for England, I started
writing and writing a play rather than a poem and it surprised
me for three reasons. One thing that it was a play, because I just
said I wanted to be a poet. The second thing that surprised me
was that I wrote in Kannada because I spent all my teenage
years preparing to be an English poet. I wanted to go abroad,
and be in England, the country where Auden and Eliot lived,
and shine there etc., and it seemed to me there was nothing to
do in India and therefore I trained myself to be an English
writer. But when it really came to expressing one's tension it
came off in Kannada and I suddenly realised that I wasted some
years of my life practising the wrong language. The third thing
that surprised me was that it was a play about a myth, Yayati
from the Mahabharata. All these three things came as a surprise
because, I just said, one thought one was modern, alienated from
one's background, from one's language.
I think, to some extent, looking back, one romanticises the
context in which one writes, but I think it is true by and large
that in the last hundred and fifty years or two hundred years, if
you think of playwriting as a profession in which someone sits
down and writes, it is the art form that has attracted the least
number of people in this country. There have been more poets,
there have been more novelists, there have been more practioners
of other arts. It is also I think by and large true that there have
been very few good playwrights and very few good plays. In fact,
when I look to what inspires me or what excites me one automa-
tically goes either, which is of course fashionable these days
but one does, to the folk theatre, or to Shakespeare or Ibsen or

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 AĆROBATING BETWEEN . . .

something like that. And it is by and large true. Certainly in the

last thousand years, I would say certainly after the Sanskrit
period or Sanskrit drama was over, there is little that really
excites one, as an Ibsen would excite one or a Shakespeare
would excite one.
My childhood was spent, if I may mention this briefly
because I think it will provide a context for some of the discus-
sion, in a small town called Sirsi which had a population of
nine to ten thousand in the forties and I grew up there. I think
this is why I found ultimately theatre was my medium despite
the fact that there really was no theatre when I started writing
in Karnataka. Those were the last days of forties, the last days
of the touring Natak Companies in South, Many of them were
flourishing in Maharashtra in the thirties, but by forties most of
the touring Natak Companies, the offshoots of the Parsi theatre,
were coming to an end and I was lucky enough, to be young
enough, to see them with my father. There were two kinds of
theatre that were going on in Sirsi. One was this finer dying
shape of the Parsi theatre and the other was of course Yaksha-
gana which was in those days considered a very low form of art.
It hadn't become purified or acknowledged or accepted as an art
form yet and I remember that these two theatres occupied two
different kinds of universe. I went with my parents to see the
Company Natak plays, there were chairs, you sat in chairs. We
were invited, my father was a Doctor and in a village like that
it was essential for the Natak Companies to keep the Doctor at
their place because if an actor fell ill the play could come to an
end. So my father always got a pass, and we sat in the front row
and we watched these plays. I always went to the Yakshagana
with the servants because my parents would rather be dead than
be seen watching Yakshagana in those days. It was just con-
sidered too low brow and one had to sit with the servants. The
Natak Company plays were on proscenium and they were lit by
gas lamps, while the Yakshaganas were lit by lanterns and very
often by torch lights because Sirsi didn't have any kind of electri-
city then. In fact the whole aesthetics of the two forms was so

Ç7

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 Indian literatuře

different and one grew up without trying to relate both of them

and feeling that both of them were dying. I survived in this kind
of a sense of theatre until I came to Bombay. Practically I ju
saw the last of the Company Nataks dying and I thought at th
time the last of the Yakshagana groups were also dying becau
in forties and fifties, until Shivaram Karanth and others came to
its aid, it really was in a very bad shape.
In the early sixties one of the most tremendous experiences
which I have talked about elsewhere, in Bombay was to s
Strindberg's Miss Julie , produced by Alkazi. Since then I ha
been told that it was one of Alkazi's very bad productions an
that it was not his best production and none of his colleague
liked it but to me, someone who came from Sirsi and Dharwa
to see it, it was the most extraordinary production. One thin
had never seen , either on stage or in families, was people stri
ping themselves in such a fashion, to the innermost violence
their being. That two characters could actually stand on stag
and strip themselves bare and tear each other to pieces seem
to me almost obscene, because I came from a lower middle cla
background, where you didn't say things, certain things we
not mentioned, and so on. And the other thing which alway
struck me as fascinating about that production was that for t
first time I saw lights dimming. I had never seen it befo
because I had lived in a town where there was electricity, yo
could switch on or tone a fan down, reduce its speed. You cou
also do that with lights was an idea that had never occurred t
me till that moment and that you could actually control ligh
and go into darkness, put lights off, and, this other notion th
you could actually stand there and talk about yourself and tal
about the innermost horrors one suspects. Both of them seem
to me at that time somehow related just as the flat lighting o
Company Nataks related to its exteriors, this interior of Strin
berg seemed very closely related to the kind of lighting tha
went into it and the way Alkazi had played it. After that on
went abroad and saw a lot of theatre but to me three kinds
theatre, the three kinds between which I swivelled and mov

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 ACROBATING BETWEEN . . .

and written have been symbolised in a sense by these three kinds

of theatre: the Company Natak on one side, the Yakshagana
with mask-like appearance, its ritual atmosphere, and thirdly the
kind of theatre which really is a naturalistic theatre, the Western
theatre as one came to see it, hate it, dislike it but was impos-
sible not to be possessed by it.
What is surprising and what is upsetting for a playwright is
the total lack of plays in India, although the Company Natak
tradition was flourishing since the eighteen thirties - even in
something like the Marathi Natak tradition which was a very
flourishing tradition - I don't know the Bengali tradition-
certainly I have not come across any texts. The Company Natak
tradition which flourished as the form of entertainment for the
first hundred years produced great music, but did not produce
any plays worthwhile. Of course, in Marathi you occasionally
get to talk about a play like Ekach Pyala , which is considered
great or Khadilkai's play Kichak Vadh for its political references.
The whole problem to me as a playwright has been - I am sure
this is true of other playwrights as well - I have talked to Vijay
Tendulkar sometimes - where do you look for the sources? Why
do you write plays in the first place? One thing, is, of course,
there is no theatre. Sometimes I feel it is unjust for a playwright.
I wish I had been a poet or a novelist or a singer or just an
actor, then it would be simpler. I probably got into films in an
effort to find some kind of a living audience. One is a playwright
and finds a need to write plays.
There is no theatre and not only is there no theatre but there
is no really meaningful tradition of theatre within which I have
grown up. Yakshagana at that time seemed moribund, Natak
Company tradition was also dying and the Urban theatre, that
is the Sangeet Natak tradition has really left very little in terms
of drama, it has left marvellous music. I think if Marathi Sangeet
Natak tradition is remembered tomorrow it will be entirely
because of its tremendous music. For a hundred years it seemed
to go from stage to stage to stage, at each stage giving expres-
sion to what the country felt and what the audience felt, in

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 INDIAN LITERATURE

terms of its musical capability, as somehow the texts were unable

to. So is it purely a personal expression? If it is personal expres-
sion, what kind of form does one express it in?
As I said, my first play Yayati was about myths. What is
interesting, looking back on it, how strongly it was moulded on
John Anouilh play and I think part of the reason why it was
modelled on Anouilh is just as I pay compliments to Alkazi for
the tremendous influence that Miss Julie had on me, part of the
reason was also that Alkazi was tremendously influenced by
Anouilh and used to produce Anouilh's plays. And really the
kind of theatre Alkazi opened up to me - I came to approach
John Anouilh through him! And the first play I wrote on my
way to England, Yayati is very much like Antigone , although at
that time it seemed to me that I picked up the theme from no-
where. Now I find it had a certain relevance. The relevance was
that it is about adults, the elder generation demanding of younger
generation that the younger generation should sacrifice itself,
should give its use. Yayati is a king who in the prime of his life
is cursed to old age and he goes around asking people, will you
take my old age? Will you take my old age? No one accepts,
except his own son, Puru. Ultimately the son becomes old and
the father becomes young and I think, looking back at that
point, perhaps it seemed to me very significant that this was what
was happening to me, my parents demanding that I should be
in a particular way, even when my future seemed to be opening
up in another. So you see, it was the play, where the myth in
some ways gave exact expression to what I was trying to say but
the form is entirely borrowed from the West.
Another interesting example is Andhayug. Andhayug is one of
the most resonant plays written in India- this is by Dharmavir
Bharati and it was written in the early fifties and captured, in
early fifties, exactly what the partition and all the holocaust of
the post-Independence period meant to India. But it was written as
a radio play, it was not written as a stage play. Bharati has never
written again. This is interesting. He has never made it again. I
think this lack of a stage is a very problematic experience to

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 ÀCROBATING BBTWEËN . . .

many playwrights and Bharati himself wrote it as a radio-play.

I don't think it was an accident because, ultimately, the living
stage could not be imagined by any of our generation, who just
lost touch with it, the living stage that had come down to us
was fairly dead.
The tradition that we borrowed from the West was not the
tradition of Shakespeare, was not the tradition of Ibsen, so much
as the tradition of Shaw. Even when Ibsen is imitated it is Shaw
who comes from it and surprisingly what comes through Shaw
to us, many of the notions that come from Shaw to us are
entirely wrong. For instance, what is called, what would be
called, a contemporary play in the West is always referred to in
India as a social play or a film is referred to as a social film and
I don't think it is an accident. Once the 19th century theatre
started, once naturalism started in the West, once it became the
major force, from Ibsen to Chekhov, to Strindberg, to Shaw, the
four major playwrights, the dominant theme on the 19th century
European stage was the individual. You know individualism
becomes the major thing and this you find even in a play like A
Doll's House , the first play which made an impact on that gener-
ation. When Nora walks out on her husband she is not walking
out because of a feminist rebellion, she is walking out because
she wants to be seen as a person, she is just sick of being treated
as a housewife or whatever else. You know it really can be seen
also as the first individual rebellion against social role play. But
while the form has been imitated in India endlessly, what is true
of Indian society is that individualism hasn't developed. I don't
mean in theatre, I mean in society itself. We still play roles, are
expected to play roles, and therefore our naturalistic theatre
always remained a social theatre: let me put it this way, a social-
problem oriented theatre. But the forms that were borrowed,
even the way the dialogue was worked out, were very Western.
Let me give just one example. All naturalistic plays in the
West take place in the drawing room and this was a great tradi-
tion handed down by Ibsen; the living room of the house is the
central point for the individual. This is the house which he has

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 Indian literaturë

got, from which the individual faces the world outside as wel
the tension inside, in this living room. So from A Doll's Hous
through all these playwrights that I mentioned until Ibsen act
ally gives up naturalistic theatre, everything happens in the livin
room. This is because the living room has a very importa
place in the West, not only in theatre, but in society itself, it
where the person belongs. But in India living room is really
place, where you keep the external world out. The only funct
of a living room in India is to meet guests and to give them
It is not a place where the family meets and discusses, I me
the traditional family. Cities have brought in a different ge
graphy. But the point is geography of an Indian society is su
that right from the gate to the kitchen the approach of a m
and where he is met are graded by his situation in the ca
system. In the South this is literally true: an untouchable wo
be met at the gate; if you belong to a slightly higher caste, p
bably you would be admitted into the courtyard; if you a
admitted into the house you would be given tea in the livin
room. That is where the line is drawn, Lakshmanrekha, beyon
which the outsider would not be allowed. The family really meets
inside the kitchen or talks in the kitchen or in the eating pla
There is a complete hierarchy of speeches as to who in fron
of you speak and in front of who you do not. You talk to yo
husband probably in the bedroom but not in the living room
front of your parents and so on, and so on. I need hardly expl
the very intricate speech patterns none of which are followed by
any of our naturalistic writers because we have learnt that in the
West everyone comes into the living room and pours out his hear
and women just come and speak and this is true even in plays
Adya Rangacharya and I have said it to Vijay Tendulkar and
have said it to G. B. Joshi, one of our great Kannada pla
wrights. I said how poeple talk in places! So marvellous to h
them!! I have never heard them speak like that in my family,
any families, because as soon asa guest comes, everyone ju
freezes, everyone puts on his great front of everything bei
right. Give him tea and get rid of the guest first before anyo

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 ACROBATING BETWEEN . . .

wouldstart speaking and all this happens in the living room. So

what I am saying is that even our geography of the living room,
even our understanding of our own home, is very often condi-
tioned by the theatre we have learnt.
This is an example of what I was saying of how we borrow
from. It is not that we do naturalism and therefore it's wrong.
That is not what I am saying. While learning from Ibsen
and Shaw, we also learn many bad things: wrong socio-
logy, wrong understanding of how we live. And it is not
amazing we are unable to write about our own home. This I
find again and again. I mentioned G.B. Joshi, who is now
eightythree and has written about traditional Kannada society,
marvellously, but all his characters, including women, come out
in the living room and speak. Because when he was young, in
his twenties and thirties, he read Shaw, where every one came
out in the living room and spoke. He admits that this is wrong,
but he says it is too late now to correct it. The close relationship
of an audience, this is where I think the playwrights have read
the audience down. This is why naturalism has not produced
anything worthwhile. Even our talking of social plays, even our
talking of social problems, the two major problems that have
been handled by all these people, from the way the caste system
has worked and the way the untouchables and what are called
the lower castes are handled and the way women have been
exploited - they cannot be talked about if you adopt the
Ibsenised form of theatre. If you adopt a system in which a
woman from the kitchen comes out in the living room and
speaks her mind openly and thunders and goes out, then
there is no problem. The point is we have a society where
it can't be done. I mean that is where the beginning of
the problem is. This is equally true if your living room is a
place of open debate where people from any section of the
society can come and express their opinions and go. This again
doesn't happen. The point is that the man who is aifected is
not even allowed inside the paramétrés of your play: if your
play takes place in the living room the untouchable will be out,
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 INDIAN LITERATURE

he is not permitted. If you ask me questions, my answers ma

be confused, I am sure they will be confused because, I said
when one writes plays and one tries to understand these
problems, one tries to feel one's way about. The only naturalis-
tic play I have written, Anjumallige , has been placed in England
because I just can't think in naturalistic terms in the Indian
context, because I just can't think of a stage that is complex
enough, and I am unable to master a speech pattern that is
complex enough, to express the kind of family life that I would
like to talk about. I think it is a weakness on my part.
Let me give an example of how the audience reacts honestly
and this is an example of a play we did in Madras, Arthur
Miller's A View from the Bridge . It is about an Italian worker
called Eddie Carbone, a dock-worker. Eddie hides two illegal
immigrants in his house. He has a niece living with him and
he is looking after her. One of the illegal immigrants falls in
love with the niece. Eddie has an incestuous passion for the
niece and he is so possessive about her that he betrays one of
the immigrants to the authorities and is killed in the end. So
this is in a way Arthur Miller's attempt to bring Greek tragedy
into the twentieth century. And everything is right: there is a
tragic flaw, Eddie has an incestuous passion for his niece,
hamartia, he betrays, the whole thing happens quite correctly as
per Aristotle. We staged this play in Madras years ago and to
me the experience was quite extraordinary. The play was a
great success. Most of our audience was Western-oriented, they
had been abroad, they know Western society very well. They
saw the play, there were tears at the end of it. I did Eddie Carb-
one. But the funny thing is that where as in whatever Western
productions I have seen Eddie Carbone comes out as a very
unpleasant person, whose incestuous relationship is unforgivable,
in our production as we played, not because we played it like
that, but because of the audience, he came out as a very sympa-
thetic person and most of the audience couldn't understand
what the incest was doing in the play because the general
response of the audience was different. Herę is an Uncle, he has

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 ACR0BAT1NÛ BETWEEN . . .

an orphan niece staying with him. He is quite right to look after

her. What's all this fuss about and here are two illegal immi-
grants who are coming into the house, they don't have a future
and one of them is up to marry the niece, he is quite right to
stop it. So, you know, in fact, what came through to most of
the audience is that the illegal immigrants were not quite right
to do what they did. Which is to fall in love. They had been
given a house to live in a crisis. You don't fall in love with a
girl where you get hospitality. So in fact the whole set of values
got topsyturvy. It was a different play that the audience was
watching, quite different from what we were playing.
Since then I have found this again and again and again.
With Miller it happens beautifully, because he is in the tradition
of Ibsen and Chekhov, in the naturalistic tradition, hence all kinds
of interpretations. For instance, when China opened its borders
to America and they invited a play, the first play they invited
was Death of a Salesman . In America it was felt that this was
because Death of a Salesman attacked capitalism; in America it
is seen as critical of capitalism and that's why the Chinese must
have invited the play. But when I heard it I said you are mad!
I mean if you think they think Death of a Salesman was attack-
ing capitalism. You know the man has a car and goes out in a
car and all that sort of thing. What they had seen was probably
a good family drama; the man has no future, is trying to build
up a future and ultimately the play shows that he has failed in
terms of his two sons. He has let his wife down and what he
can't keep alive is his image in the eyes of his son: he is a failure
in the eyes of his son. He can't keep his family going and this is
probably what makes it so attractive. And you think it is for an
ideological reason that they are inviting it! They are probably
inviting it for a purely melodramatic reason: they love the play.
You know one saw it in Bombay, because one became aware of
this kind of interpretation. I was talking of A View from the
Bridge in that sense.
What happens is the audience interprets the play and I think
an important work, a really important play or important drama

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 INDIAN LITERATURE

is created. Something that Shakespeare and Ibsen have created.

Then the audience and the playwright somewhere hit upon a
common point of expression. The audience may not accept it
immediately, it may become a controversial play. Ibsen, you
know, was hounded for a long time because his plays were
misunderstood by the audience. But somewhere a truth is touched
upon. I do not know how to express it any better. And I often
feel that a play like Andhayug has managed to do it even in our
generation, a play like Ghasiram Kotwal has done it or Sakharam
Binder. Tendulkar is one of the great playwrights of our gener-
ation and probably of the last hundred years. Our problem with
playwriting in India is that this hasn't happened very often. The
playwrights have either written in such a traditional manner
which has lost relevance to their urban existence or they have
written in such an urbanised manner, Westernised manner, that
it has lost relevance to the traditional part of that personality.
We keep acrobating between the traditional and the modern and
perhaps we could not hit upon a form which balances both.
After Ghasiram Kotwal , Tendulkar has gone back to the drawing-
room plays.
1 have written only about five, six plays in the last twentyfive
years. The reason simply is that once I write a play I feel that is
the end of that. Now I better go back to acting or something
else to make a living because I just feel that everything is fini-
shed, I mean everything I have to say and there is nowhere
to begin again. And that is what happened to me after I had
written Yayati. I had written this play when I was going
abroad and I did not know what to do. So I read all kinds of
books in an effort to find a plot, some plot that would inspire.
Then a major Kannada critic, Kirtinath Kurtkoti, had at
that time written the history of Kannada literature. He writes
that what Shakespeare has done with Richard III or with British
history or what has been done with the history in the West again
and again, or even Brecht with all his historical plays, particu-
larly Galileo , we have not been able to do. This is a categorical
statement. He says there is no Indian playwright who has been

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 AĆROBATING BETWEEN . . .

able to handle history. All we have produced are costume

plays. So here is something we have not been able to do. I
did not know what to write about. So then literally I picked up
a second standard book of Indian History and started from
Mohenjodaro to read, to see whether one would not hit upon
some subject which one could say, as Kirtinath Kurtkoti had
done, to make it relevant as it were. And when I came to
Tughlak I said Oh! Marvellous! That is what 1 wanted. In those
days existentialism was very much in the air. To be considered
mad was very much fashionable. Everything about Tughlak
seemed to fit into what I had read was the correct thing to do,
which was to be mad and do impossible things and so on. So I
started reading about Tughlak. I am sorry to be facetious, but it
is not I am not trying to be facetious but that is how it started.
But as I started reading about Tughlak, I suddenly realised
what a fantastic character I had hit upon. I started with Ishwari
Prasad and then went on to all the contemporary material and
suddenly felt possessed, felt this character was growing in front
of me. Certainly Tughlak was the most extraordinary character
to come on the throne of Delhi: in religion, in philosophy, even
in calligraphy, in battle, war field, anything we talk about, he
seems to have outshone any one who came before him or after
him. After that, writing the play was not difficult at all. What
was difficult was how to leave out what one liked. I mean, I
really feel that, although the play has been very successful and
had tremendous success on stage and so on, particularly because
actors have liked doing the role. The second reason was by then
I was sick of John Anouilh, I was sick of Sartre, although they
had led me to Tughlak. And, therefore, the play was deliberately
written in the convention of the Company Natak. At least the
attempt was there. In a Company Natak what used to happen,
at least in the Company Nataks that I had seen, was there was a
proscenium and all scenes were divided and alternated between
deep scenes and shallow scenes. The shallow scene was usually a
street scene and was kept for comedy. While the shallow scene
was on, the deep scene was prepared, for a garden, a palace, a
97

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 INDIAN LITERATURE

dance, whatever, the sets were being changed. While the set-
change was going on, in the shallow scene you had comical char-
acters. This is what I attempted there, because in a shallow scene
you have comical characters, crowds. It is actually a degeneration
from Shakespearean kind of playwriting, really. And then the
curtain opens and you are in a palace. The characters of the play
were clearly divided into those which came into shallow scenes
and those which came into deep scenes. At least the first half of
the play was written like that, but as I went on writing the play
the form developed on its own and in the end Aziz, one of the
characters meant to be comical, ended up in the palace, which
seemed to be right, given the political chaos that one was writing
about. I did not consciously write about the Nehru era. I am
always flattered when people tell me that it was about the Nehru
era and equally applies to development of politics since then.
But, I think, well, that is a compliment that any playwright
would be thrilled to get, but it was not intended to be a con-
temporary play about a contemporary situation. I think if one
gets involved with one's characters or one's play, then it should
develop into some kind of a true statement about oneself. I
think a play can be only as contemporary as the playwright is.
If the writer does not have contemporary convictions or is not
committed, the play will not be contemporary. You cannot be
fashionably committed or fashionably involved. If you are
involved, the issues will come: what are not involved don't
emerge.
About Hayavadana. By the late sixties any seminar you went
to in India, the question was what to do with folk theatre
and this problem was endlessly debated and people said this
was relevant and this was not relveant, what to do with it,
etc. I heard of Shanta Gandhi's production of Jasmaodan
about which every one talked, although I never got a
chance to see it, until much later, until Naseer did it. All
this meant that folk theatre was very much in air and one
day I was telling the story of transposed heads to my
friend, B.V. Karanth. I said here was a beautiful story, and
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 ACROBATING BETWEEN . . .

why don't we make a film and he said why a film, it would

make marvellous theatre. The moment he said it I knew that it
would make a very good play. It was actually theatrical. It
would probably make a bad film, but good theatre. At that time
I think, to some extent, Badal Sarkar did himself great injustice
by claiming that he was not influenced by folk theatre. Probably
he was not interested in folk theatre, but the form of Evam
Indrajit has a lot of fluidity, I had just translated and produced
Evam Indrajit. But I must confess that the fluidity of Evam
Indrajit had a lot to do with my writing Hayavadana . So, while
one confesses that one went consciously to some of the folk
theatre, Yakshagana and others, one cannot deny that Brecht
as well as Badal Sarkar were haunting one, and that went some
way in the shaping of Hayavadana .

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