ANAND MAHADEVAN

                    SWITCHING HEADS AND CULTURES:  TRANSFORMATION 
                    OF AN INDIAN MYTH BY THOMAS MANN AND GIRISH KARNAD

IT IS A RARE EVENT in cross-cultural study, when a text is removed from its original context, manipulated in another
cultural setting, and then returned to its native milieu with the novel manipulations generated in the other culture still attached. In this essay, I shall document the interesting journey of an eleventh-century Indian parable that becomes the source of Thomas Mann's Die vertauschten Köpfe through Heinrich Zimmer's and Goethe's influence. In Mann's story a woman switches the heads of her husband and his friend creating confusion and a moral dilemma. I will show how this story, based on a very simple ancient Indian parable, effectively subverts the Aryan milieu in ancient India and, through this subversion, conveys Mann's reaction to the myth-making machinery of Nazi Germany. I then examine the manner in which Girish Karnad, one of India's foremost contemporary playwrights, brings the parable "back" to India in the 1970s as the play Hayavadana. This play, which has been awarded India's highest literary prize, is, by Karnad's own admission, heavily influenced by Mann's novelle.  In it Karnad expands Mann's subversion of Aryan culture to address problems of class consciousness in modern India that have their roots in ancient caste differences. In both works, the focus shifts from the abstract masculine philosphical concerns central to the myth to concrete feminine agency.  Indeed,  Mann's subversion of the original textual motives of the parable provides the Wendepunkt for the regeneration of the myth in the twentieth century.