Theme and Title of the Play Red Oleanders

Theme and Title of the play ‘Red Oleanders’

The play ‘Red Oleanders’ was begun during a visit to Shillong, Assam and inspired by the image of a red oleander plant crushed by pieces of discarded iron that Tagore had come across while walking. A short time later, an oleander branch with a single red flower protruded through the debris, as if, he noted, “created from the blood of its cruelly pierced breast”. It has been suggested that the play’s title might appropriately be translated as ‘Blood-Red Oleanders’ to indicate the beautiful but toxic nature of the flower and its association with beauty and death in the play.

Tagore’s play’Red Oleanders’ (Raktakaravi) was written towards the end of 1923. The title, then, was not Raktakaravi but Yakshapuri or The City of Yaksha (the demon king). Tagore further revived the manuscript and retitled it as ‘Nandhini’ after the name of the female protagonist of the story. In the final version published in Pravasi in 1924 the title was further revised to Rakatakaravi, the Red Oleander. The shift in emphasis, it can be noticed, is from the city (Yakshapuri) through a character (Nandhini) to a flower (Raktakaravi) and makes Raktakaravi essentially a symbolic drama.

Red Oleanders is a power and poignant play where commercial exploitation, oppression, power, love and obsession operate on different levels and manifest themselves in different shapes.

The play is built around the theme of unscrupulous capitalism, environmental exploitation and the importance of human relationships. The play ‘Red Oleanders’, according to Tagore, “is an expression of that truth to which we are accustomed that we have forgotten all about it”. It is a play about evil and good working side by side, about greed and human sympathy, about that which separate fellow beings and that which keeps us together. The play is based upon the principle that each must legitimately fight against the other, the oppressor and the oppressed. It is the story of Nandhini, a beautiful woman who appears at a time of the oppression of humanity by greed and power. The antagonist in the story is the king, who represents enormous authority but barricades himself behind an iron curtain. He transforms a town into a fort and the human into digging machines who grope in the dark searching for gold.

The people of the country of Kuvera are engaged in digging out with all their might precious gold, tearing out from the underground world. Driven by the covetous urge for cruel hoarding, the people have banished all the sweetness of life from the place. There man, enslaving himself within his own complexities, has severed himself from the rest of the universe. They have forgotten that the value of joy is greater than the value of gold; that there is no fulfillment in might but only in love. Into this soulless town where people were unaware of the beauty of nature, the green meadows, the dazzling sunshine, the tenderness and love between humans, Nandhini arrives to salvage humanity trapped behind mechanized tyranny. She eventually frees the oppressed souls who are toiling underground, but at a great sacrifice. The story ends in an unexpected climax after Tagore knits an intricate network of sequences that ultimately becomes a parable.

Red Oleanders is rather confused in its action and obscure in its dialogue, but there is no ambiguity either about the role of Nandhini or about the indictment delivered by the play or about the significance of the title.

From the delightful warm exchanges between Nandhini and the Professor and later from the transporting soliloquy of Bishu in the opening sequence of the play, it is evident that the import behind the symbol of the blossoming Red Oleander in its association with freedom and death, the bracelet of which is finally to ‘roll in dust’ as with freedom itself. The Professor tells Nandhini, “Perhaps your destiny knows”. In this blood-red luster (Red Oleander) lays a fearful mystery, not merely beauty, and the moment to the tragic suffering in the play, evoking all the poignancy of “King Lear’s” famous prison speech. Character of Nandhini

Red Oleanders is a play in one-act. It is a symbolic play based on certain essential truth of life. Tagore’s plays at all times have a woman at the centre, which manifests the spirit of defiance against the dictate of the powerful man. In this play, Red Oleanders, it is just a frail girl, the daughter of this earth symbolically suggested through the ripe corn- ears colours of her dress, who refutes to comply with the dictates of the Yaksha town. There is a hint towards the end that this refusal of Nandhini will finally snowball into a revolution that will shatter the walls of this demonic palace. Nandhini represents the negation of all the values that the Yaksha kingdom stands for.

Nandhini is the soul of the play. Her distinctive feature is the ‘red oleander’ she wears in her hair, round her neck and on her wrist which become the symbol of the all- powerful treasure – ‘freedom’. Her beauty mesmerizes men regardless of their position or rank. She exudes fearless love, care and belief in freedom. She challenges the king whose passion for her unlocks some humanity in him as she confesses that despite all he has, he is empty and envies her and the man she loves, Ranjan. The king dares not let her into his barbed realm as he fears her beauty and power may weaken his hold (she is after all the voice of love, beauty and allurement to freedom). But finally, his desire to ‘know her’ conquers his desire for ‘power’. She, in turn, fears his desire ‘to know her’.

Nandhini’s presence in the Yaksha town creates consternation among some of the slave miners and their masters. She begs them to return home, but her pleading falls on deaf ears – the man are addicted to gold and even if they were to return home they would eventually return to the mines.

Tagore describes Nandhini as the ‘treasure house in woman’s heart’ from whose pervading influence restores the human to the desolated world of man. She symbolizes ‘freedom’. She is the challenge of beauty and love to a world dominated by mere money and power values, and she is able to make man out of slaves and unnerve brute authority. In ‘Red Oleanders’, Nandhini, the lone woman who fighting against the king of the dark chamber, is presented as the embodiment of the benevolent of Nature. Tagore remarks:

“the entire play is an elaborate portrait of Nandhini, a woman. She represents the joy of life, the simple beauty and pristine purity of Nature”.

Nandhini represents the innocence and opulence of nature. The harvest song in Red Oleanders may be regarded as the theme song of the play which refers Nandhini to the cosmic harmony of nature. The song of nature is a song of selfless love. In the course of the play, Tagore repeatedly tells us that Nandhini is the embodiment of nature. She epitomizes the beauty and splendor of the earth. In midst of materialistic din, she is always serene, “a finely tuned musical instrument”. Sometimes her simple presence becomes a menace to materialism only because of the moral force that she carries about with her. Nandhini knows that she is a woman but the fact that she is a woman should not be underestimated. She is fully conscious of her full potential strength. She is like a lightening that contains the potential thunder, “I have brought the thunder, I shall strike the golden citadel”, she says.

By the end of Red Oleanders, we find that the king’s desire to posses Nandhini becomes futile and Nandhini succeeds in eluding him. His death heralds the dawn of life, love and freedom in the air. The harvest song heard at a distance signifies the renewal of life. Character of The King

The archetypal study of characters will throw light on the hidden aspects of the characters involved. In many of Tagore’s plays the character of the King, who is sometimes invisible, plays a major role in bringing forth the apocalypse. Like the King in “The King of The Dark Chamber”, who is not seen by anyone even his queen makes a futile request to make him visible, the Red Oleanders too has an invisible King. This invisible demeanor is the hidden humanity and represents the people of Yakshapuri who are buried in their work of digging and hoarding. The King’s tearing asunder the screen reveals the liberation of the mask from their collective selfhood. This is the greatest potential of the royal metaphor.

The plays central character of a Raja or King cruelly exploits nature as well as all possible human resources, of mind, of science, in order to develop a highly centralized bureaucracy and add to his wealth. He sits fascinated as he watches how his entire retinue continued mechanically to guard his fortress and his ever growing wealth.

The King symbolizes the growing power of the state which is run as a diabolically efficient machine by a Governor or Police Chief armed with absolute powers. The Yaksha King is the antagonist in the play ‘Red Oleanders’. Yakshapuri is ruled by this inhuman and brutal King who remains unseen for the most part of the play. This anonymous demon King remains inaccessible behind the hard metal walls of his Yakshapuri for his lust for gold. But he exercises complete control over his people, ruthlessly exploits them for more and more of gold, and grossly outrages nature in the process.

The King treats people as mere machines for the productions of gold. The workers in the gold mines are nothing but more than numbered automations. Their greedy urge for cruel hoarding has made them banish all life’s sweetness from the place. As a result, the society is vitiated by pervasive greed, mistrust and fear, and the harmony of life which was originally agriculture oriented and therefore, responsive to the rhythms of nature, also gets disrupted. In the preface to the play, Tagore calls our attention by presenting Ravana’s resemblance with the King. He says, Ravana in The Ramayana with enormous powers and ambition and greed captured many Gods and Goddess and make them work for his pleasure. But in midst, suddenly appeared a woman and the epic ended with the triumph of virtue. Like Ravana, the King in Red Oleanders is an epitome of lateral power and prosperity and evinces the evils of materialism. Nandhini, like Sita represents the benevolent of nature. She shows a remarkable spirit of defiance against the King. For Tagore, it implies the triumph of agricultural society over the industrial system through a lone woman’s integrity and moral protest.

Thus Tagore magnificently portraits the King as an epitome of consumerism, muscle power and man’s insatiable greed. Though the state of the King in the play is left apparently unconcluded, it is presumed that his greed gets punished and the life is restored in the Yaksha town. Minor Characters

The play Red Oleanders is set in a wasteland of the factious city of ‘Yakshapuri’, with an Indian or Bengali flavor where gold miners are being exploited by a tyrannical king.

Tagore’s plays never show the scarcity of characters. He always introduces an array of minor characters who plays their roles poignantly along with the main protagonists. Characters ranging from multiple sections of society pay their debts to the construction of the plot. The ruling community is represented by the Governor. He mindlessly accepts the domination of the strong and the oppression of the weak. It is the Governor who rules the omni competent state in the name of the king. He is superficially soft-spoken but privately ruthless in action. He controls the leviathan – state machinery which suppresses the people and forbids them to enjoy the taste of nature’s benevolence. At the end, the prison he controls is broken up and the cry is heard everywhere, ‘Victory to Ranjan’, ‘Victory to Nandhini’, - ‘Victory to Love’. It is permissible to hope for the victory of man over the tyranny of the machine.

The professor is the next interesting character in the play. He is the learned, scholarly personality who frequently utters some philosophical statements during his exchange with the protagonist Nandhini. He himself feels proud of his scholastic nature. He says, “I too live behind a network of scholarship. I am an unmitigated scholar”. His dialogues are packed with similes and metaphors. They provide amusement not merely to the characters in the play but also to the reader. The way the Professor is integrated with the sequence of actions in the play shows the dramatic skill of Tagore. The Professor, like any other character, is too curious in knowing the meaning and significance of Red Oleander flower which Nandhini wears in her neck. The reader needs not to be astounded by the fact that he woes Nandhini because like others he is also a human who gets naturally attracted by the beauty of her. When he sees her, his heart flies away swish like a bird. His attention, like the tidal wave, tears away from its anchorage of books. Thus, he is quite redeeming portrayed in the play as a man who is imprisoned in his own learnedness.

Bishu, also known in the mines as 69-U, deliberates on the meaning of existence. He is an educated cynic, a thinker and above all, a man desperately in love with Nandhini. He is called as ‘mad Bishu’ by Pagulal for his inexhaustible offerings of songs which due to the fact that he has been possessed by Nandhini. He is known for his songs, especially the ‘Boat-man’ song in which he associates himself with the boat-man and expresses his adornment towards the central figure of the play. Bishu, is originally employed as a spy but he gives up his job for the sake of Nandhini and for this he is punished. He stands for sorrow; the sorrow which purifies the heart.

Chandra, Phagulal’s wife, represents the pragmatic woman who cannot tolerate the effect Nandhini has on the local men. She begs to return home but her pleading falls on deaf-ears – the men are addicted to gold and even if to the mines. Her looks and demeanor superbly represents the image of the village Bengali woman.