Chandalika – Class 12 English Chapter 20 Notes & NCERT PDF

Section Introduction: What is Drama?

Kaleidoscope defines drama as "a composition in prose or verse presenting in dialogue a story of life or character, especially one intended to be acted on the stage". Its essence is make-believe: an actor impersonates a character. We even accept that a room on stage has "one wall 'missing'" so the audience can watch.

Drama is traditionally divided into tragedy and comedy. It also includes the tragicomedy and the modern problem-play about middle-class life. Today film, radio and television produce vast amounts of drama, "from 'soap opera' and farce to serious new works".

The section has two plays:

About the Author

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a poet, novelist, short-story writer and dramatist. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. His family wrote and staged plays, and music in his dramas brings out "the delicate display of emotion around an idea". His central interest is "the unfolding of character; of the opening up of the soul to enlightenment".

Background: The Buddhist Legend and Tagore's Change

In the legend, Ananda, the Buddha's disciple, asks a chandal girl for water. She falls in love, and her mother's magic drags him to their house. Ashamed, he prays, the Buddha breaks the spell, and Ananda leaves "as pure as he came".

Tagore turns this "crude plot" into "a psychological drama of intense spiritual conflict". His heroine is not wicked. She is "a very sensitive girl" awakened to her human dignity by a monk who accepts water from her. The introduction calls it "a tragedy of self-consciousness over-reaching its limit". She learns that "love does not claim possession, but gives freedom", and that "wisdom is not happiness and renunciation is not fulfilment". The play is not divided into acts in the original; the two acts mark suggested stage intervals.

Characters

Summary

Act I

It is noon in blazing Vaisakh. The mother finds Prakriti sitting by the well, "doing penance". A monk in yellow robes had come as she washed a motherless calf and said, "Give me water". She told him, "I am a chandalini, and the well-water is unclean". He replied: "As I am a human being, so also are you, and all water is clean and holy that cools our heat and satisfies our thirst." He said that self-humiliation is "a sin, worse than self-murder". He compared her to the black clouds of Sravana: calling them chandal does not change "the virtue of their water". He also reminded her that Guhak the chandal drew water for Janaki (Sita).

Prakriti calls this her "new birth": "Such a little water, yet that water grew to a fathomless, boundless sea... my caste was drowned, and my birth washed clean." The mother warns her: "You are unclean... keep to your own place." Prakriti sings of the flower "who belong to the earth". She rejected the prince who came deer-hunting, because he "forgot that I was a human being" and saw only game to bind "in chains of gold". The monk, she says, is "the first who ever really recognised me".

Prakriti refuses to call him "from outside" and demands her mother's spells. The mother is terrified: "They draw men by the strength of their virtue. We drag them with spells, as beasts are dragged in a noose." Prakriti declares: "A religion that insults is a false religion." "I respect him who respects me."

The monks pass by chanting, and Ananda does not even look towards the well. Humiliated, Prakriti beats her head in the dust: "This dust, this dust is your place!" Wounded, she insists: "He showed no pity to me, I shall show none to him." The mother gives her a magic mirror to dance with and watch Ananda's approach. She warns that once the spell peaks, "it would cost me my life to undo it".

Act II (fifteen days later)

The spell drags Ananda from Vaisali, seven days' journey away. In the mirror, Prakriti sees mist, fire, black clouds and lightning. Ananda stands "fenced with flame" in torment, his eyes reddening as if to curse until his anger turns "upon himself". She feels a strange union: "his suffering and mine are one today". Later he looks dazed, "neither true nor false, good nor evil—only a blind... compulsion". At Patal village by an old peepul tree where the Buddha preached, he nearly breaks free.

The mother is failing: "there is no breath left in my body". Prakriti performs the ritual:

Then doubt strikes her: "Only this at the end of the weary, difficult road?—only me?"

She looks in the mirror and is horrified: "Where is the light and radiance...? How worn, how faded". She kicks the magic apparatus to pieces: "Prakriti, if in truth you are no chandalini, offer no insult to the heroic." Ananda enters. She begs forgiveness: "I have dragged you down to earth, how else could you raise me to your heaven?" The mother says "My sins and my life lie together at thy feet" and dies. Ananda chants the Pali praise of the Buddha, "mighty ocean of mercy".

Themes & Arguments

Dramatic Technique & Style

Word Power

Board Exam Focus

Common Mistakes