The pain of a Mother: Gandhari (Urubhangam: A Kutiyattam Performance)
Sun 26th Jan ’20 at Ranga Shankara
Among all the Bhasa plays, ‘Urubhangam’, has an eternal relevance cutting across centuries. In ‘Urubhangam’, the hero is Duryodhana, usually regarded as the anti-hero, or the villain in all the traditional renderings of Mahabharata. Not only that, the play maintains a unique objective perspective while approaching the great battle of Mahabharata that almost criticizes the whole exercise of the war. In that way, this could even be described as a strong anti-war play. However, hardly any documentary evidence except for some unconfirmed reports exists of the staging of Urubhangam as part of the repertoire of Kutiyattam in the olden days. Neither the Kramadeepika nor the Attaprakaram for ‘Urubhangam’, were available from the tradition even to this day. While doing homework to produce this one-act play on the stage of Kutiyattam we have read the text over and over, and many possibilities of performance started to emerge. We, the team of Abhinaya Kalari of Natanakairali, prepared the Attapraprakaram by deciding to present the whole play through just four of the characters, namely Balarama, Duryodhana, Gandhari and Aswathama.
The performance was breathe taking, but one part caught my attention. After the great battle is over Gandhari goes to Krishna and she curses him for not ending the battle when he had the power to do so. The whole monologue where Gandhari talks about her emotions and of the women who lost their husbands and sons, kids who lost their fathers in the battle are still so relevant. Once the war is over, the pain does not end. The trauma of losing the loved ones changes lives, it gets hard to start a life without them. Most women don’t have the resources.
The last act of the play Gandhari got to know about the death of her hundred sons. Some of them had broken necks, some with smashed skulls, some with open chests, and one with a broken thigh. The sound of cries of her widowed daughters-in-law filled her ears. She was aware of her children's’ past and knew that Dharma was not with them. She knew they were greedy and she blamed herself for being blindfolded and her husband for not having the ability to see and not after her kids. She says, “We are paying the price of poor parenting.”
Her being aware of her kids being villains, she still feels the pain of a mother who lost all her children. This part of the story shows no matter whose side you are on during the war, people go through pain, they lose people, they go through trauma and war does not leave anyone, especially in today’s time where the wars are not on battlefields but in the cities, around the citizens and they are the ones who get affected by the wars directly.
Gandhari refused to leave the battleground strewn with corpses of her children even when the sunset. “Go home,” she told her husband and her servants and her daughters-in-law, “Let me be here alone with my children. Their presence comforts me.” She waved her stick to keep the wolves and vultures from getting to the rotting flesh of her sons. Krishna came and tried to persuade her. “They are gone,” he said, “Why do you cling to their bodies.” And she replied, “You will never know a mother’s pain.” And he said, “A pain remains until another pain comes along.” And she retorted, “This pain is permanent. It is a mother’s pain. It will not pass.” Krishna left.
It was night now and the hungry wolves waited for the mother to get tired. She waved her stick and wouldn’t let anyone get to her sons. Suddenly, Gandhari felt a pang of hunger. A kind of hunger she had never felt before. A great hunger that it caused her to bend and bind her stomach. It was as if she had not eaten for a thousand days. She could not think or feel anything. All she wanted suddenly was food. Suddenly, the smell of a mango entered her nostrils. It was the sweetest of smells and it came from above her. After hundreds of failed attempts at getting the mango, he finally got hold of the mango. She plucked it and sucked on it: it was the sweetest richest succulent fruit she had ever eaten. She ate it quickly, even the skin, licked her fingers and felt the hunger pass away. With the hunger gone, the pain of the horror of her children’s death returned. She felt the stones on which she was sitting, they felt softer and wet, almost like flesh! She recoiled. These were not stones on which she sat; these were the bodies of her children. She sat on them and ate mangoes. Then she remembered Krishna’s words, “A pain remains until another pain comes along.” This was his way of teaching that her pain, though very deep and very valid, was like all pains impermanent. This was a cruel lesson of a ruthless god. Gandhari howled at the truth of her insight. Then she screamed a curse, “May you Krishna witness the death of your children and your children’s children. And may you die alone in the forest, hunted down like a beast.”
Even though the story ends with Gandhari cursing Lord Krishna, it does teach all of us that the pain is impermanent. But that does not mean it is not there, people need support and love to get through a trauma like this and they need a reason to forget about the pain and move on in life. But the process of moving on is not easy. It takes time. Some women have to move to different places with their small children in search of jobs and money so that they can feed their kids now that their husbands are dead.
