Rewriting the Mahābhārata: Myth, Memory, and the Marginalized Perspective in Kailasam’s The Curse or Karna

This assignment examines how T. P. Kailasam’s The Curse or Karna rewrites the Mahābhārata by shifting its moral and dramatic centre from the Pāṇḍavas and Kṛṣṇa to Karna, the abandoned son of Kuntī who is raised by a charioteer. Drawing on scholarship on the epic’s plurality, on subaltern theory, and on contemporary retellings, it argues that the play treats myth not as fixed scripture but as contested memory whose silences can be given a voice. Kajal Kapoor’s reading of Karna as a subaltern figure, Brian Black’s account of marginal voices of subtle dharma, and Hawley and Pillai’s emphasis on the epic’s many versions provide the framework. João Pedro Oliveira’s and Chinmay Sharma’s studies of neoliberal retellings serve as a foil that clarifies what is distinctive about Kailasam’s tragic, rather than aspirational, Karna. The assignment concludes that the play’s value lies in refusing both the epic’s dismissal of Karna and the market’s celebration of him as a self-made success.

Research Question

How does Kailasam’s The Curse or Karna reshape the myth and memory of the Mahābhārata by placing a marginalized figure at its centre, and how does this rewriting differ from other modern retellings of Karna?

Hypothesis

It is hypothesised that Kailasam converts Karna from an ambivalent ally of the Kauravas into a tragic subaltern protagonist; that this conversion draws legitimacy from the plural, self-revising nature of the epic itself; and that, unlike later commercial retellings that turn Karna’s suffering into a lesson in individual merit, the play keeps the social injustice of caste and rejection visible as the true cause of his fall.

Introduction

Few narratives in world literature are as capacious as the Mahābhārata. Kajal Kapoor reminds us of the old belief that whatever is not described in the epic does not exist, since even the Rāmāyaṇa and the Purāṇas are said to be summarised within it (15). Yet a text that claims to contain everything has also, inevitably, left people out. The story that most of its audiences carry in memory is a story about a great war, about the Pāṇḍavas’ sufferings at the hands of their cousins, and about Kṛṣṇa’s protection of them at every turn (Kapoor 15–16). Karna, the eldest son of Kuntī, born of the Sun God before her marriage, abandoned in a basket on a river, and brought up by the charioteer Adhiratha and his wife Rādhā, stands at the edge of that story. He is remembered, Kapoor notes, more as the loyal friend of Duryodhana than as the eldest Pāṇḍava (16).

Karna’s marginality has made him one of the most productive figures for modern rewriting. Oliveira finds that, among adaptations centred on individual male characters, Karna is the most frequent subject (361). The Kannada and English dramatist T. P. Kailasam belongs to an earlier and more serious moment in this tradition. His play The Curse or Karna takes the curse that finally destroys Karna as its organising image and, in doing so, turns a minor strand of the epic into a tragedy.

This assignment reads the play against the scholarship supplied by the sources above. It proceeds in five movements. The first establishes that the Mahābhārata has always been a plural text, so that rewriting is an act of inheritance rather than betrayal. The second sets out the subaltern theory that makes Karna’s marginality intelligible. The third turns to Kailasam’s dramatic strategy. The fourth contrasts that strategy with the neoliberal Karna of recent popular fiction, and the fifth considers how gender and media complicate any single account of the epic’s margins. Because the argument concerns myth and memory, the discussion keeps returning to a single question: who gets to be the protagonist of the story, and who decides?

1. The Mahābhārata as a Plural Text: Myth, Memory, and Retelling

1.1 Many Mahābhāratas

Any argument about “rewriting” the Mahābhārata must first ask what is being rewritten. Oliveira summarises the position of the volume Many Mahābhāratas: the epic is not a single text but a transhistorical, translinguistic, and transmedial genre that has been constantly recreated across South Asian society (347). Hawley and Pillai explicitly place their volume in what they call “the spirit of Ramanujan’s model” (14, qtd. in Oliveira 348), a reference to A. K. Ramanujan’s celebrated essay on the many tellings of the Rāmāyaṇa. They also remind readers that the so-called vulgate version was compiled only in the seventeenth century and the critical edition in the twentieth, which makes the search for one authentic Sanskrit original a modern project rather than an ancient fact (Hawley and Pillai 16, qtd. in Oliveira 348).

Sohini Sarah Pillai’s later monograph demonstrates the same plurality in the premodern period. Between roughly 800 and 1700 CE, poets in Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, and many other languages produced regional Mahābhāratas, and Pillai argues that Vaiṣṇava authors transformed a poem about a bloody war into an expression of devotion centred on Kṛṣṇa (Pillai). The point for this assignment is structural. Each of these retellings chooses a centre and rearranges the epic around it. In the devotional tradition the centre is Kṛṣṇa; the war becomes a stage for divine grace. Kailasam’s play makes a difference and, in the context of this long history, entirely legitimate choice: it places at the centre a man whom the devotional tradition could only treat as an adversary of the God’s favourites.

Rewriting, then, is not an aberration but the epic’s ordinary mode of survival. To write The Curse or Karna is to join a lineage of authors who understood that the Mahābhārata is kept alive by being retold from new positions.

1.2 Memory, Ideology, and the Claim to the “True” Epic

If retelling is normal, it is also never innocent. Oliveira shows that retellings carry the ideological pressures of their moment. He observes that Indian mythological fiction can be read as an attempt to forge a link between the precolonial past and the neoliberal present, and that such writing participates in what Barbie Zelizer calls collective memory, in which present actions are synchronised with a constructed past (351). Many contemporary authors, he argues, present their work as the recovery of “lost secrets” hidden in the canonical text, while quietly advancing a nationalist and market-friendly ideology (Oliveira 347).

The Sanskrit term for the epic’s genre is itihāsa, usually glossed as “thus it happened,” a word that blends what academic discourse would separate into history and fiction (Oliveira 364). Raquel Ferrández Formoso’s study of itihāsa as “narrative reason” is helpful here. She argues that such stories, like Plato’s epode, persuade in situations where emotion would otherwise disable argument, and that we should ask “who the real protagonist of the story is” (Ferrández Formoso 1). The question is more than a rhetorical flourish. It names the exact manoeuvre by which a retelling claims authority: by deciding who the story is really about.

Myth and memory therefore work together. Myth supplies the narrative; memory decides which part of it is carried forward and which part is allowed to fade. Karna is the character in whom the epic’s selective memory is most painfully visible, and this is why his story repays being rewritten.

2. The Subaltern Question: Karna at the Margins of the Epic

2.1 Defining the Subaltern

The term “subaltern” entered literary criticism through Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies collective, drew on Antonio Gramsci, and was famously interrogated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Kapoor’s essay summarises this genealogy and then applies it directly to Karna (20). In her account the subaltern are the unrepresented, those regarded as unfit to contribute to society, and she adds that the problem is not an absence of speech: “subaltern can speak but others do not have the patience to listen to them” (Kapoor 20).

This formulation is useful because it moves the burden from the marginalized to the audience. The epic does not fail to give Karna a voice because he has nothing to say. It fails because its dominant narrative has no framework in which to hear him. Kapoor goes on to make the connection explicit: Karna is capable, yet he is, in the eyes of the court, only a sūta-putra, a charioteer’s son (20).

A further nuance is needed. Subalternity in South Asian contexts is commonly expressed through caste and gender as conditions acquired at birth and difficult to change (Kapoor 20). Karna’s case is peculiar because his birth is double. He is a prince by blood and a charioteer’s son by upbringing, so his subalternity is imposed by perception and not by lineage. Oliveira makes the same observation from a different angle when he notes that Karna was not really of low caste but grew up without knowing his true condition (361). Karna is thus a subaltern by social judgment, which makes his exclusion more, not less, instructive: it shows that the hierarchy operates on appearance and upbringing, not on any intrinsic worth.

2.2 Birth, Caste, and Rejection

Kapoor’s narrative of Karna’s life reads as a catalogue of refusals. His mother abandons him at birth to protect her reputation (Kapoor 19). Droṇācārya, according to the account she follows, initially refuses to teach a charioteer’s son, agrees to give only basic training after royal intercession, and lodges Karna apart from the princes and the higher-caste students (20). Karna’s response, quoted in her essay, is a series of questions about why scripture should sanction class-based discrimination and where his own fault lies (20). The questions are not answered. His foster father can only offer counsel: the divisions are man-made tools of those who hold power, but neither he nor Karna can change the system, and the boy must therefore earn recognition through effort (Kapoor 20).

The pattern continues. To study under Paraśurāma, who admits only Brahmins, Karna disguises himself, an act of deception for which the sage later curses him to forget his weapon-lore at the decisive hour (Kapoor 21). At Draupadī’s svayaṃvara, Karna rises as the likely winner and is refused because he is a charioteer’s son (Kapoor 16–17). In the war, Śalya serves him as a reluctant charioteer (22). Every humiliation traces the same fault line of birth.

Kapoor’s summary of the human cost is important. A life lived amid relentless injustice and insult leaves its mark on the psyche, and the stigma of Karna’s perceived lineage never left him (22). The play’s subject, in other words, is not an isolated misfortune but a structure of exclusion that produces suffering at every stage.

2.3 The Silenced Voice and the Subtle Dharma of the Margins

The epic itself offers a resource for thinking about marginal wisdom. Brian Black’s study of sūkṣma dharma, or subtle dharma, begins from the scholarly consensus that this ungraspable understanding of right conduct is central to the Mahābhārata. By examining three embedded substories (upākhyānas), he shows that subtle dharma is often associated with subaltern characters who display moral knowledge through “intuition and spontaneity in everyday situations” (Black 37). In other words, the epic’s own interior structure already credits people on its social margins with an ethical insight that its kings and warriors lack.

Karna’s conduct, as Kapoor narrates it, fits this pattern. He breaks the sandalwood panels of his own palace to satisfy a Brahmin’s request when the Kaurava and Pāṇḍava princes had pleaded helplessness (22–23). He knowingly surrenders his natural armour and earrings to Indra, though his divine father has warned him against it, because he cannot turn away a petitioner (Kapoor 21, 22). These acts of generosity come not from calculation but from something closer to instinct.

Yet the epic dramatises Karna’s moral life in action and almost never in speech. When Kṛṣṇa taunts him at the stuck chariot wheel, asking where his respect for dharma was when Draupadī was humiliated or when Abhimanyu was killed, Karna has no answer and hangs his head (Kapoor 22). The scene is both a moral reckoning and a silencing. A rewriting that gives Karna sustained speech, which is precisely what drama can do, is therefore not merely inventive. It supplies the answer the epic withheld.

3. Kailasam’s The Curse or Karna: Rewriting the Tragic Hero

3.1 The Tragic Frame

One Bangalore edition of Kailasam’s play carries the subtitle “an impression of Sophocles in five acts” (Kailasam). The phrase signals the playwright’s decision to read the Indian epic through the grammar of Greek tragedy: a hero of exceptional capacity, undone by a combination of fate, circumstance, and a flaw that is itself half-forced upon him. The choice is apt. Oliveira notes that, given the stark contrast between Karna’s perceived and actual social origins, he has long been regarded as a tragic hero (361). Kapoor, working in a more celebratory register, calls him the epic’s “unsung hero” (22–23), and the two labels are compatible. Tragedy is, after all, the form that honours greatness precisely by showing its destruction.

Drama also changes what retelling can do. A narrative poem can summarise Karna’s inner life in a line; a play must give him words, and an actor must say them in front of an audience. By moving the epic into dramatic form, Kailasam makes it impossible for the audience to treat Karna as a function of other people’s plots. His grievances have to be spoken aloud, in his own cadence, and the scene of silence at the chariot wheel becomes a scene the audience has been prepared to hear differently.

3.2 Curse, Fate, and Social Injustice

The play’s title directs attention to the curse. In the epic, as Kapoor retells it, Paraśurāma’s curse is the consequence of Karna’s deception: the sage, angry and hurt, declares that Karna will forget the lessons he gained through deceit when he most needs them (21). At the climax, the curse takes effect: Karna cannot summon the Brahmāstra, and his chariot wheel sinks in the earth (Kapoor 22). Read conventionally, the curse is a form of poetic justice. Karna lied, and his lie destroys him.

To make the curse the centre of a tragedy is to ask whether that reading is adequate. Why did Karna lie? Because the teacher accepted only Brahmins, and Karna had been excluded from every other avenue to the training he plainly deserved (Kapoor 20–21). If deception was the only route open to a man of his ability, then the curse that punishes the deception is the final act of the very discrimination that produced it. The play can therefore be read as a re-assignment of cause. Myth locates the fault in the individual’s dishonesty; the marginalized perspective locates it in a system that left him no honest path.

This is a characteristically tragic movement. The hero’s fall appears at first to be deserved, and then, as we see more of the circumstances, to be partly inflicted. The pity and terror that Aristotle describes arise from the gap between how the fall looks from the outside and how it feels from within. Kailasam’s achievement is to close that gap for an audience trained by centuries of retelling to see Karna from the outside.

3.3 Re-centring the Marginalized

Ferrández Formoso’s question, “who the real protagonist of the story is” (1), becomes a dramaturgical principle in Kailasam. In the canonical retelling that dominates popular memory, the protagonists are the Pāṇḍavas, accompanied by a god. Kapoor notes that Karna is remembered as Duryodhana’s friend and not as the eldest of Kuntī’s sons, and that Yudhiṣṭhira learns his brother’s true identity only at the funeral rites after the war (16, 18). The recognition arrives too late to matter, which is itself a perfect tragic irony.

By re-centring the narrative, Kailasam inverts the epic’s moral geography. Kṛṣṇa, who in Pillai’s account stands at the devotional centre of so many premodern Mahābhāratas, appears from Karna’s position as the strategist who urges Arjuna to take advantage of an opponent in distress (Kapoor 22). Neither reading cancels the other; the epic can bear both. But the play’s decision to look from below makes visible a moral cost that the bhakti tradition tends to absorb into divine purpose.

The result is a shift in the relation between myth and memory. Myth is not discarded. The curse, the armour, the chariot wheel, and the war remain. What changes is the memory attached to them: instead of an adversary’s deserved defeat, the audience is asked to remember the death of a man who was denied the world he earned.

4. Competing Retellings: The Neoliberal Karna

4.1 The “Unsung Hero” and the Market

Kailasam’s Karna should be distinguished from a different Karna that has become dominant in contemporary popular fiction. Oliveira’s analysis of 140 English-language adaptations sold through Amazon India shows that most are written by authors from corporate and technological backgrounds and that their narratives tend to follow what he calls the “rise-fall-rise” trope, in which a prosperous order falls into crisis and is restored through the efforts of a charismatic individual (358–59). Karna is the male character most often associated with this trope. Oliveira reads him as a figure who must depend on individual talent instead of birth or advantage and who therefore functions as a kind of neoliberal model (361).

This recasting has a telling effect on how caste is treated. Oliveira observes that the summaries of these novels do mention caste, but that they tend to emphasise abstract, non-human forces such as destiny, fate, and circumstance, which can be easily translated into the language of a modern urban career (361). His broader finding is bleak for anyone interested in margins: the authors’ biographical notes reveal “neither social preoccupations nor empathy towards subaltern groups” (354). Titles proclaiming the “unsung” or “untold” hero (368) turn the language of marginality into a marketing device while stripping it of its political content.

Chinmay Sharma’s reading of Devdutt Pattanaik’s Jaya supports the point from another direction. Sharma argues that Pattanaik foregrounds the multiplicity of the Mahābhārata tradition while “reinscribing centre-margin hierarchies” upon that multiplicity (41). The lesson is that plurality is not the same as justice. A retelling may celebrate many versions and still reproduce the structures that decided who counted as marginal in the first place.

4.2 Tragedy Against the Success Narrative

The contrast with Kailasam is instructive. The neoliberal Karna is a case study in resilience: he suffers, strives, and, even in death, serves as a role model. The tragic Karna is a case study in injustice: he suffers, strives, and is destroyed, and the audience is not permitted to mistake his greatness for compensation. Oliveira notes that the canonical Mahābhārata ends on an ambiguous note, rejecting simple moral dualism, and argues that such an ending would struggle to resonate with the materialistic mindset of the contemporary middle class (359). Tragedy, with its refusal of consolation, is likewise resistant to the success narrative.

Kapoor’s own essay stands interestingly between the two modes. Its title yokes the “unsung hero” to “the voice of the subaltern,” and its analysis does take up Karna’s exclusion from education, marriage rivalry, and tournament (22). Yet its conclusion leans toward celebration, praising his principles and generosity and declaring him “undoubtedly” the unsung hero (23). The tension is revealing. The heroic idiom is easily absorbed into the neoliberal script, while the subaltern idiom insists on structural critique. Kailasam’s tragic form keeps the second idiom in play.

Oliveira’s title, borrowed from Homi Bhabha, offers a useful summary. Retellings that claim radical novelty but follow familiar discursive strategies are “almost different, but not quite” (369). The phrase might serve as a test for any Karna-centred rewriting: does it change who is heard, or only who is marketed?

5. Intersecting Margins: Gender, Media, and Public Memory

5.1 Draupadī and the Counter-Text

No account of Karna’s marginality can ignore the woman who rejected him. Kapoor records that at her svayaṃvara, Draupadī declined to accept a charioteer as her husband (16–17). She later suffers her own public humiliation in the dice game, when she is dragged to the court and insulted before the elders (Kapoor 17). Karna, as Kṛṣṇa’s accusation at the chariot wheel recalls, was implicated in that humiliation (22). Two forms of marginality, caste and gender, thus collide in the same set of scenes, and a responsible rewriting must hold both.

Hans-Georg Erney’s study of Draupadī-centred fiction offers a model for such double vision. Analysing Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions and Trisha Das’s Ms Draupadi Kuru, he reads these novels as “counter-texts to a traditionally patriarchal epic” that express a search for vernacular feminisms (Erney 486). The logic of the counter-text applies equally to caste. Divakaruni’s Draupadī answers the epic’s silence about a woman’s inner life; Kailasam’s Karna answers its silence about a charioteer’s son.

The parallel is not exact, and the difference is productive. Oliveira finds that female-centred adaptations emphasise women who resist and overcome hardship through individual strength, and that Draupadī is the most commonly represented female protagonist (362–63). The danger he identifies, the translation of structural oppression into personal grit, threatens both kinds of rewriting. A Karna-centred play that wished to remain faithful to the subaltern perspective would have to resist exactly this temptation, and tragedy is the form most equipped to do so.

5.2 Stage, Screen, and the Memory of the Epic

The epic’s public memory is shaped as much by media as by texts. Oliveira lists literature, comics, and television serials as the media through which modern versions circulate (348), and Hawley and Pillai’s emphasis on the epic as a transmedial genre points the same way (Oliveira 347). Sujala Singh’s article on the television serialisation of the Mahābhārata proposes a paradigm for viewing that serial, framing it as a way of plumbing the depths of history through the epic form (Singh). For most viewers in India, that serialisation was the Mahābhārata, and the Karna of the screen occupied a position inside a spectacle designed around the central war.

Seen against such a background, a play like Kailasam’s performs a modest but real act of counter-memory. Theatre cannot compete with television’s reach, yet it can slow the narrative down and keep a single face in the light for the length of an act. In a media culture that tends to convert every figure into a character type, the stage retains the capacity to make a marginal figure unavoidable.

The broader point follows from the arguments of the preceding sections. Memory of the epic is formed by competing institutions: devotional poetry, scholarship, television, commercial fiction, and drama. Each privileges some characters and lets others recede. A rewriting from the margins is therefore less a correction of the epic than an intervention in this contest, an attempt to alter what the culture chooses to remember.

6. Conclusion

This assignment began by asking how Kailasam’s The Curse or Karna reshapes the myth and memory of the Mahābhārata by placing a marginalized figure at its centre. The sources suggest a layered answer.

First, the act of rewriting is authorised by the epic’s own history. Hawley and Pillai’s volume, as Oliveira reports it, shows the Mahābhārata to be a plural, transmedial genre, and Pillai’s study of premodern Krishna-centred retellings demonstrates that choosing a new centre is the oldest strategy of the tradition. Kailasam’s decision to centre Karna belongs to that history.

Second, Karna is not an arbitrary choice. Kapoor’s reading identifies him as a subaltern figure whose voice is silenced not by its absence but by the audience’s unwillingness to listen, and Black’s analysis shows that the epic itself associates marginal characters with a subtle, intuitive moral knowledge. By turning the curse into the centre of a tragedy, the play reassigns cause: the fall that myth ascribes to deception is traced back to the discrimination that made deception his only option.

Third, this tragic reading differs sharply from the neoliberal Karna described by Oliveira and Sharma. Contemporary popular retellings recast his hardships as a path to personal success, translate caste into destiny, and make the vocabulary of the “unsung” into a commercial label. Oliveira’s observation that such narratives show “neither social preoccupations nor empathy towards subaltern groups” (354) and Sharma’s warning about reinscribed centre-margin hierarchies (41) suggest that the market’s Karna is almost different, but not quite. Kailasam’s tragedy withholds that consolation.

Finally, the intersecting margins of gender and media complicate any single claim of redress. Draupadī’s rejection of Karna and her own humiliation, together with the competing authority of television and print, remind us that every rewriting speaks from a position and leaves some figures in shadow. The hypothesis advanced at the outset is therefore confirmed in a qualified form. Kailasam’s play does convert Karna into a tragic subaltern protagonist, and it does so within the epic’s own tradition of re-centring, but its lasting significance lies in the question it keeps open: who gets to be the protagonist of the story, and what must be forgotten for the answer to seem natural?

Works Cited

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Erney, Hans-Georg. “Draupadi Returns with a Vengeance.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 55, no. 4, 2019, pp. 486–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1566160.

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Kailasam, T. P. The Curse or Karna: An Impression of Sophocles in Five Acts. B. S. Rama Rao, 1969.

Kapoor, Kajal. “Karna (The Unsung Hero of Mahabharata: The Voice of the Subaltern).” International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Culture, vol. 2, no. 4, 1 Nov. 2016, pp. 15–25. Neliti, www.neliti.com/publications/281255/karna-the-unsung-hero-of-mahabharata-the-voice-of-the-subaltern.

Oliveira, João Pedro. “Almost Different, but Not Quite: Neoliberal Discourses on the Mahābhārata.” Journal of Dharma Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2025, pp. 347–72, https://doi.org/10.1007/s42240-025-00203-5.

Pillai, Sohini Sarah. Krishna’s Mahābhāratas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative. Oxford UP, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197753552.001.0001.

Sharma, Chinmay. “Parables for Neoliberalism: Devdutt Pattanaik and the Mahabharata in Post-Liberalisation Indian English Literature.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2025, pp. 41–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2024.2410131.

Singh, Sujala. “The Epic (on) Tube: Plumbing the Depths of History. A Paradigm for Viewing the TV Serialization of the Mahabharata.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 16, no. 1, 1997, pp. 77–101, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509209709361454.

Sandip Jethava

Monday, October 19, 2026

Paper no. 201 Assignment