Caste in fire and the rain

The caste system in Indian society is one of the themes dealt with in Karnad’s
The fire and the rain. The play highlights how caste politics serves to maintain
the upper caste, especially Brahmminical supremacy in society. The issue is
particularly problematized through the love episode of Nittilai and Arvasu, and
the down gradation of the performing artists in the caste hierarchy.

Caste in Indian society is determined by ancestral vocation and is irreversible.

Thus Nittilai is a low caste girl as she belongs to a hunting tribe, and is not
acceptable as a bride for the upper caste Brahmin Arabasu. The hypocritical
irrationality of this system is ironically exposed by the contradiction between
the social ostracism of the lower cast (referred to by Arabasu when he resents
that he couldn’t touch his beloved because “Brahmins don’t touch other castes”)
and the private practice of the higher caste, referred to by Nittilai’s faher, as
quoted by Nittilai: "These high-caste men are glad enough to bed our women
but not to wed them". Such contradictions are in plenty in the Mahabharata. A
famous examples is the great Brahmin sage Parasara’s coitus with Satyabati of
low caste fishing tribe, veiled under a mythic fog.

Arvasu revolts against this caste system that puts social barrier in human
relationship. He is determined to break this barrier. “I would rather be an
outcaste”, he says. He prepares to appear before the tribal marriage council at
the prefixed time. But he is delayed, symbolically by the dead of his caste
relations: following the convention of his caste he has to cremate Yabakri’s
body and then his father’s (both undone by their pervert Brahmminical
supremacist ego), and finally he has to “purify” himself of the contamination of
the dead.

Nittilai’s father, impatient of waiting for Arvasu, eventually gets her married
strictly in accordance with the tribal customs and to a boy from the same tribe.

Arvasu finds himself intrigued, conspired and trapped by the false paradigms of
caste hierarchy and for Karnad, naturally, he becomes the mouthpiece
demolishing the curse unleashed on man by this hypocritical caste
consciousness. “I am not a Brahmin” he asserts.

In the caste system all accesses to learning, whether from a preceptor or from
Godhead through ascetic penance, are the sole prerogative of the high caste
Bramins, and understandably so because knowledge is power and power is to
dominate, even over the Khatrya kings, as we see in the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata. In Karnad’s play too, the chief priest at the fire sacrifice, and not
the king, has the final say. Karnad has Nittilai question such learning: “what is
the point of any knowledge, if you can’t save dying children and if you can’t
predict the moment of death”.

The same motive of upper caste supremacy prohibits low-castes from the so-
called sacred holy rites like the fire sacrifice, because such rites are believed to
have power to propitiate Gods and extract boons from them.

The performing artists too, whatever their original caste status, become outcaste
because of their profession. Yet ironically enough, the higher castes, even the
priests at the royal fire sacrifice, clamour for entertainment by a theatrical
performance to break the dreary monotony of “endless philosophical
discussions, metaphysical speculations, debates”, and “freshen” their minds.

Arvasu’s choice to be a performing artist makes him an outcaste and is therefore

ordered to stand at a distance from sacrificial enclosure so that he, as an actor,
will not “pollute” it.

The play-within-the play in the Epilogue shows how even the heavenly world of
the gods is not exempted from casteism: Indra bars his half-brother Vritra from
entering the sacrificial precincts, as Vritra is an offspring of a demon mother by
his father Brahma. The very fact that Brahma, the supreme father God of the
Brahmins, mated with a low caste demon girl (actually a mythic representation
of the non-Aryan other) is another instance of hypocrisy in the caste system.
That Arabasu, as actor in the role of Vritra, forcefully enters the sacrificial
precincts, possessed by the spirit of the mask of Vritra, and plays havoc with
the whole affair of fire sacrifice, followed by the villagers, is Karnad’s
subversive take on casteism.