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> A Twist in a Tale from India
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A Twist in a Tale from India
As in most cultures, written compilations of stories of yore often signal a hoary oral tradition. In India, such compilations are often collections of frame stories, each of which has several shorter stories – often parables – nested within. This is a story of a story, its journey through time and the twists in its telling and retelling. From its ancient roots to its modern incarnation the same tale has been made to speak of different things, to serve different purposes. Variously called “The Heads that got Switched”, “The Transposed Heads”, or “Hayavadana”, the life of this tale begins in the early years of the last millennium.
The original written version is recorded in the Kathasaritasagara (lit. “The Ocean of the Streams of Stories”), a compilation from 1070 C.E. by Somadeva. It has several frame stories, and one of them is that of King Vikramaditya who is asked to fetch a corpse for a religious ritual. The corpse he carries back with him is possessed by a demon, who tests the king’s wits by recounting a series of riddle-tales and demanding an answer to each. This parry and thrust between king and corpse-demon has a catch to it: every time that the king answers correctly, the corpse-demon escapes his clutch and returns to the cremation ground; yet, were the king to keep his silence when he knows the answer, he would be killed. After twenty-five such tales, the demon acknowledges the king’s intellect, patience and virtue, and rewards him with prosperity and divine wisdom. One of the twenty-five riddle tales in this frame is the story of “The Heads that got Switched” and it goes thus:
A washerman called Dhavala falls in love with Madanasundari, the beautiful daughter of another washerman. He approaches her father for her hand in marriage. The father accepts the proposal for his daughter, and a wedding is duly performed. They live happily for a while. One year when Madanasundari’s brother visits them, they go on a trip to the festival of the goddess Parvati, consort of Lord Shiva. Dhavala enters the temple of the goddess and, overcome by a fit of extreme piety and religious sacrifice, beheads himself with her sword – an ultimate offering to the goddess. Madanasundari’s brother discovers the beheaded body of his brother-in-law when he comes looking for him and, in his grief, beheads himself with the same sword. Madanasundari grows anxious as time goes by and both men fail to return. She enters the temple to a gruesome sight and decides to end her own life rather than live on. The goddess, pleased by the devotion displayed by all, reveals herself and stops Madanasundari from taking her own life. She also blesses her with the ability to bring the men back to life by reattaching their heads to their bodies. Unfortunately, in the rush of excitement and possibility, Madanasundari puts her husband’s head on her brother’s body and vice versa. The story ends with the riddle that the king must answer correctly, or die: “Which of these two mixed-up men is now her husband?” The king replies unhesitatingly, “The husband’s head is her husband because the head rules the limbs and one’s identity depends on the head.” This answer affirms the superiority of the intellect over emotion, and of spirit over body. The demon accepts the verity of the reply and escapes – swoooooshhh – to return to his abode in the cremation grounds.
Paul Thomas Mann (1875-1955), German novelist, social critic, essayist, and Nobel Laureate, retold this story from an early twentieth-century translation by another German, an Indologist named Heinrich Zimmer. Mann’s retelling, entitled “The Transposed Heads” reworks the short riddle-tale by removing it from the frame story of King Vikramaditya and treating it as a narrative in its own right. In his story, a frail Brahmin by the name of Schridaman falls in love with Sita, the daughter of the cowherd Sumantra. Another cowherd, Nanda, is a close friend of Schridaman and carries his proposal to the girl’s father. The marriage is duly arranged and performed. Differences of caste which appear nowhere in the original tale give this story its initial twist. Following the marriage, Schridaman, Sita and Nanda travel to Sita’s village. On the way, they come across an abandoned temple of the goddess Kali. This is the more ferocious incarnation of Lord Shiva’s consort and, perhaps a more fitting recipient of the gruesome sacrifice that follows. After the two men behead themselves, as in the original Indian version of the story, and Sita prepares to take her own life, the divine voice of the goddess interrupts and interrogates her. Sita reveals that she is attracted to the strong-bodied cowherd, Nanda, although married to the Brahmin Schridaman. When bestowed with the ability to bring them both back to life by reattaching their heads, Mann’s story implies that the switching in this instance is deliberate, her action a response to her desire for Nanda.
The story continues beyond the original tale, and the three protagonists now go to an ascetic by the name of Kamadamana to mediate between the mixed-up men. The ascetic answers as King Vikramaditya had, and Sita begins her life with the Schridaman head on the beautiful, toned body of Nanda. She has the best of both worlds, but only for a while. They have a son they name Samadhi, and life goes on. However, the Brahmin head of Schridaman slowly drives the body to its earlier frailty, and Sita back towards Nanda, whose head has helped transform the frail body he was given into a physically attractive form. Schridaman confronts the two lovers and the three decide that the only solution to their problems lies in death. The two men strike and kill each other, while Sita immolates herself. Samadhi is the only remainder in this tale in which Mann has invented the second half and, by empowering Sita in ways that the original neither intended nor needed, made her the fulcrum of the story, the driving force of its plot. Mann uses this tale to question the implicit patriarchal frame of the story, and to reveal the dilemma and dissatisfaction inherent in King Vikramaditya’s answer, which was also the ascetic Kamadamana’s considered solution to the problem. The birth of the child takes place after the men’s bodies have been mixed up, highlighting the genetic ambiguity inherent in the person of the son, Andhaka. It has been argued that Mann, who wrote this story in 1940, was also responding to the charged political climate in Nazi Germany, and ridiculing the Nazi myth of the Aryan and the superhuman – the ideal combination of fine intellect and physical attraction that marked the rhetoric of that time and place.
The third and final incarnation of the story was written by the Indian playwright, Girish Karnad, and produced as a play in 1972. It is called “Hayavadana” – the horse-faced one, and is based not on the original eleventh-century story but, rather, on Mann’s reworking of it. The one thing he brings back from the original is the idea of a frame to the story of the transposed heads. As the play of this story is about to begin, Hayavadana, a man with a horse’s head, comes stumbling on to that stage, desperately trying to get rid of his strange head. The story-teller of the stage-play guides him to the temple of the goddess Kali where the incident of the transposition of heads takes place, and he views the unfolding of the story from that vantage. The main characters are Kapila and Devadatta, who are friends. Seeing Devadatta pining for Padmini, Kapila goes to arrange their marriage. He is attracted to Padmini, too, but finalises the match for his beloved friend. The marriage is an unhappy one as, so it turns out, Padmini herself is attracted to the strong-bodied Kapila. Devadatta is consumed by jealousy, but the friendship persists. A few months into the marriage, all of them travel to a fair in a nearby town. On the way they stop to rest near a Kali temple where the two men behead themselves, as in the earlier versions of the tale. Padmini, who is pregnant, and afraid of being blamed for their deaths, decides to kill herself. Kali stops her and offers to bring both men back to life. Padmini rearranges the heads so that Devadatta’s is on Kapila’s body and vice versa, and asks that the magic be performed. This is as in the Mann story, where her action is deliberate, not accidental. The three of them then make their way to an ascetic in a nearby forest who mediates the conflicting claims of the men in the same way as King Vikramaditya did in the original story. Now Padmini has the intellect of Devadatta and the body of Kapila for her husband, but it, too, slowly undergoes the transformation induced by the head. Devadatta grows pot-bellied again, while Padmini longs for Kapila and runs away to the forest to be with him. Devadatta follows, and the two men confront each other, resolving their dilemma by killing one another. Padmini immolates herself, leaving behind a son mute with grief and horror.
Karnad’s story does not end here, though. He returns to the frame story of the horse-faced man, Hayavadana, who had stumbled on to the staging of this nested story about Devadatta, Padmini and Kapila. He prays to the goddess Kali to relieve him of this dual nature, and his body is now entirely the body of a horse, although he can still speak like a human. The little boy, mute and disconsolate, is finally consoled and made to laugh by the talking, singing, complaining horse. As the boy begins to laugh, the horse loses his ability to speak and begins to neigh, all his characteristics now entirely those of the animal. The child and the horse complement one another; the play seems to suggest that it is only when one uses best what is one’s essential nature does laughter and contentment follow.
The is the journey, so far, of a story worked and reworked through different contexts at different times, pointing to the persistence and value of myth and myth-making, its ability to reflect and recast social statement and sentiment.
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