International Journal of Mechanical and Production Engineering Research and Development (IJMPERD) ISSN(P): 2249-6890; ISSN(E): 2249-8001 Vol. 10, Issue 1, Feb 2020, 797-804 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd. OMNIPRESENCE: AN INTRINSIC STUDY OF COMPOSITION OF THE CHARACTER KARNA IN KAVITA KANÉ’S KARNA’S WIFE THE OUTCAST’S QUEEN AND CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI’S PALACE OF ILLUSIONS ANAMIKA SAHA Research Scholar, Gurukul Kangri University, Dehradun ABSTRACT Every character is designed to nourish a rationale to validate the existence of something that breathes yet may or may not be visible. To give birth to a plot, the creator has to nourish its baby that develops into the boom of intellect and is compelled to go through a multi layered trauma. This idea and practice of impersonation has always been discussed and considered since the age of Plato. With the introduction of scandal, a term gifted by Claude Levi Strauss, the architecture of characters became more complex in the world of criticism. In Indian context, the recognition of scandal existed since the Vedic period. The grand epic The Mahabharata witnesses the existence of scandal in every character that preserves itself as a normal entity in the external world. Beginning from Shantanu, the true Kuru king to Parikshit, the last mentioned heir of Kuru clan, every character has built up a taboo that they seek inside but never accepted it. Because of Original Article the latter one cannot deny the fact of the preservation of the core that breathes inside the womb of scandal hiding its position in it. Due to this, the grand epic has been facing the wound of criticism since ages and passed the test of antiquity. This paper is an attempt to scrutinize the most type casted character Karna who carries the antagonistic characteristics in the main stream plot line. This paper walks through the path of the identity crisis that the character has dealt with throughout his life focusing more on the scandal that recites within it on the basis of the fictions Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions and Kavita Kane’s Karna’s Wife. Along with this the paper also focuses in the existence of the lack within the structure of scandal and hence presenting Karna as a paradoxical taboo. Received: Dec 27, 2019; Accepted: Jan 17, 2020; Published: Feb 27, 2020; Paper Id.: IJMPERDFEB202069 INTRODUCTION Karna was the offspring of Lord Surya and Princess Kunti before her marriage to King Pandu. He was an unwanted child and the result of his mother’s naivety. He was discarded as soon as he came to this world. “He was a beautiful orphaned baby, with bewitching kundals (earrings) and a golden kavach (armour) to protect him, who had mysteriously strayed into a river and into the lonely lives of Dhristarashtra’s charioteer, Adhiratha, and his wife Radha”( 12-13, Karna’s Wife). Karna’s life began with abandonment; a specimen that represents the complex practices of the social structure controlled by the hegemonic ideas and practices that were paradoxically hidden yet glorified. This abandonment has lead Karna’s life to shape up the choices he has made throughout his life though he had realized his doom even before its arrival in the later years. By birth he was a kshatriya and by nourishment he was a sutaputra – the journey of Karna being a taboo begins from here. His origin was concealed from the world for the sake of the structure to maintain its status quo. But this very concealment has brought a skeptical query to light: firstly, what does this concealment reflect towards the macro level in the text? Secondly how does the enveloping of this concealment settles with the absence of the knowledge of our own origin awakening the ‘Karna’ within every www.tjprc.org SCOPUS Indexed Journal [email protected] 798 Anamika Saha individual? Thirdly, how and why does the concealment as an archetype has been chosen to connect the character with the readers opening the door of the world of Karna’s myth for us? When Draupadi was examining every characters’ portraits in Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions, she was judgemental; just by listening the oral history from multiple mouths and scrutinizing their respective portraits she was trying to write up the entire book on each character. In that case does this book as a whole exist as a mere testimony of Draupadi’s judgements? Though she was trying to fix rather than solve the puzzle, as a woman she had studied the women characters too. In fact, she was trying to position as well as fit herself in the family of the Pandavas. The prophecy as well as the history was intermingling, repeating the idea of Eliot of the existence of the past within the present. Draupadi had probably understood this play of time and molding herself accordingly for the next play. As Flynn presents Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence in his book: “According to this theory, we are fated to do just what we do. Nietzsche calls this the thesis of ‘eternal recurrence’. He thinks it follows from the fact that our options are finite but time is infinite. Thus, as he interprets it, whatever can happen will occur again an infinite number of times.” (42, Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction) Probably her knowledge led her to the conclusion she was carrying within herself: “Perhaps strong women tended to have unhappy marriages?” Unknowingly she was trying to understand the pain of Kunti and Karna; she attempted to get into the shoes of Kunti to understand the fear and courage breathing at the end of the chapter births she had stated, “Inanger and regret, they’d both wish she’d had the courage to choose another way.” (79, Palace of Illusions) The conclusion of the chapter has been dedicated to Draupadi’s confession to her darkest secret which she “didn’t dare reveal this dark flower that refused to be uprooted from my heart.” (130, Palace of Illusions) The sceptic mind raises a basic question if she did not want anyone to know about her darkest secret then why did she confess in the text that may reveal her secret to the world? Draupadi is the only thread that connects the world outside the text to the world that breathes inside. She did not want the latter to know her secret due to the demand of her masquerade role she is playing. But she wanted to pour her secret out to someone or somewhere; hence she chose this world instead. And by this confession she has immortalized her secret to this world. The written words are permanent that would be read uncountable times in this world. Not only that every reader would nourish this secret within themselves either by reading, thinking or talking about it. On the other side, the world inside the text would never know of this immortality. This image is similar to C.S.Lewis’ The chronicles of Narnia in which an entire parallel world breathes and struggles inside a closet. The closet is the only door that connects both the parallel worlds. Similarly, in this case Draupadi is the closet that connects these parallel worlds. Love does not understand any caste or gender that can be proved with multiple examples in the epic, including Draupadi who had saved Karna within her heart and married the Pandavas. It is also similar to the promise Bheeshma did for the sake of his father. In fact, every play in this world carries the sense of eternity on one formula: displacement and replacement. King Shantanu married goddess Ganga, who left him when the former broke his promise. Later he fell in love with Satyavati, who has the daughter of a fisherman. Ganga was displaced and replaced by Satyavati; yet the position of Impact Factor (JCC): 8.8746 SCOPUS Indexed Journal NAAS Rating: 3.11 Omnipresence: An Intrinsic Study of Composition of the Character Karna in Kavita Kané’s Karna’s Wife The 799 Outcast’s Queen and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions her existence remained intact for eternity. In this way Draupadi’s use of the word “again” in her statement is more powerful: it reflects the nature of the loop of replacement and displacement that has made the event eternal. This similar nature can be seen in the statement below “The gods, who seem to like it when humans make unnatural sacrifices, gave him a boon for that: no one would be able to kill him (Bheeshma) unless he was ready to die” (132) Similar unnatural sacrifice has been glorified in Kane’s Karna’s wife where Karna has sacrificed his kavach and kundals to Lord Indra and received the vasabi shakti astra and a boon of being eternally remembered in the future: “Lord Indra was taken aback when I ripped them out and lay them in front of him. He said, “Karna, no ordinary mortal would have done what you did today, I am moved by your gesture and will grant you a boon in return…” (217-218, Karna’s Wife) Karna wanted to feel worthy throughout his life due to which he was expecting a comparison and justification with Arjuna, expecting a sense of clear justification and assurance of his worth from the structure conceived around him, that is creating individual yet collective construction of insecurity within him. As Eleanor E.Maccoby in her paper ‘Parenting and its effects on children: on reading and misreading behavior genetics’ stated in her abstract that: “… knowing only the strength of genetic factors, however, is not a sufficient basis for estimating environmental ones and indeed, that attempts to do so can systematically underestimate parenting effects.