Hayavadana is a 1971 play by Indian writer Girish Karnad. It tells the story of best friends Devadatta and Kapila, and their love, Padmini, as well as that of a man in the story with the face of a horse (the title of the okat means “one with a horse’s head”) who is seeking to become human.
When Karnad was a boy, in 1947, India became independent from British colonial rule. Among other things, this changed the face of Indian theater, which had previously consisted of performances of the works of William Shakespeare. Indian playwrights and directors wanted to break free from the constraints that colonization had put upon them and consequently theater became more about classical dance, long-held religious ritual and legend, and Sanskrit. This era of Indian theater became known as the "theater of roots" period. Karnad's Hayavadana is from this period and as such contains the religious and ethical Sanskrit elements of the movement, but it also contains westernization in the form of Greek chorus and masks.
Karnad was inspired by Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads, which in turn was inspired by an eleventh-century Sanskrit text called the Kathasaritsagara. He also adopted the performative model of Yakshagana, the theater from the region of Kannada, where Karnad was born.
Hayavadana was originally written in Karnad's second language, Kannada, and he translated it into English himself. It was originally published in Enact, and came out in an edition by Oxford University Press in 1975 in the New Drama in India series.
The play was first produced in Madras, India by the Madras Players. Karnad said that “the idea of my play Hayvadana started crystallizing in my head right in the middle of an argument with B.V. Karnath...about the meaning of masks in Indian theatre and theatre’s relationship to music.”
Hayavadana won the Sangeet Natak Akaddemi Award and the Kamaladevi Award of the Bharatiya Natya Sangh for best Indian play.
