Mainstreaming gender: Challenges in girish Karnad's Naga-Mandala

Mainstreaming gender is a main concept gaining importance in the present century whose ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality through planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. But because of the patriarchal nature of the society, the objectives of mainstreaming gender seem to be far away. Kate Millet in Sexual Politics (1970) sees through the game of patriarchal politics that the sexual domination is the most pervasive ideology and fundamental concept of power. The sexual politics of patriarchy situates man as the sovereign subject while a woman is required to find her total fulfillment in submissive drudgery. Male bias has been spread in the culture to such an extent that women never have a chance to see themselves through their own eyes as individuals. Mary Wollstonecraft as early as in 1792 in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women pleaded that women were not endowed with less intellect than men and therefore women's suppression was uncalled for and unjust. John Stuart Mill's famous essay The Subjection of Women (1860) generated much heat all over the world. It became almost a manifesto for the feminists. In India, too the double standards of males are quite common. On the surface level women are called ‘goddesses’ and ‘devis’ and underneath are hidden their mal motives. Suppression, oppression, cruelty and mal-treatment to women are quite common. The three and a half millennia that have followed the ‘Laws of Manu’ have taken their toll on women and left them as second class citizens in desperate need of ‘Gender Mainstreaming’. Literature is replete with such examples as it shows the society its own face in the mirror. Girish Karnad's Naga-Mandala is one such example where an innocent girl experiences and suffers the life of hell because of her husband's callousness and infidelity and in the end she is given the status of goddess by the same insensitive husband and society.