Cultural Appropriation and Adaptation: Mann’s The Transposed Heads’ and Karnad’s ‘Hayavadana.’

Abstract

The ontological interrogation of being and becoming has been always evoked curiosity in human psyche. An Indian folklore posing the existential dilemma was taken by Thomas Mann  in his novella ‘The Transposed Heads’  with a western’s orientalist fascination and exoticism; while the same story was developed in to a drama proclaiming the thoughts of post-colonial India as critique of its cultural ideals and of the spiritual enlightenment by Karnad in his two act play ‘Hayavadana’. This article proposes an exploration of the mode of presentation of the same narrative in the light of different consciousness. For a European the Orient has always been their ‘… invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experience…’ as Edward Said words it, while Karnad seizes the mythological themes to blend it with coeval era of postcolonial India