The Divided Sultan: A Psychoanalytic
Reading of the Protagonist in Girish Karnad's TughlaqKrishna
Krishna Kunjikuttan K
ABSTRACT
Girish Karnad's Tughlaq (1964) tells the story of
the fourteenth-century Delhi Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq, a
brilliant and idealistic ruler whose twenty-year reign collapses
into tyranny and madness. This article reads Tughlaq's decline
through two psychoanalytic traditions that have rarely been brought
together in criticism of the play: Freud's account of the id, ego,
and superego, and Jung's account of the persona, the shadow, and
individuation. In Freudian terms, Tughlaq's arc is the slow failure
of an ego that can no longer mediate between a founding act of
violence and the guilt it produces. In Jungian terms, the same arc
is a failed individuation — an idealistic public self that survives
only by disowning, and eventually being consumed by, everything in
Tughlaq it cannot admit to. The two readings are traced scene by
scene through the play.
Keywords: Girish Karnad; Tughlaq; psychoanalytic criticism; Freud;
Jung; shadow archetype; Indian drama.
