Indian Fok Theatres (Theatres of the World)

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Author: Juli Hollander

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Indian Folk Theatres

Indian Folk Theatres is theatre anthropology as a lived experience, containing detailed accounts of recent folk theatre shows, as well as historical and cultural context. It looks at folk theatre forms from three corners of the Indian sub-continent: • • •

Tamasha, song and dance entertainments from Maharastra; Chhau, the lyrical dance theatre of Bihar; and Therukoothu, satirical, ritualised epics from Tamil Nadu.

The contrasting styles and contents are depicted with a strongly practical bias, harnessing expertise from practitioners, anthropologists and theatre scholars in India. The book examines how folk performances have influenced ‘modern’ work in the cosmopolitan urban theatres, and the manner in which folk and modern theatres intersect. Keeping a firm focus on the legacy of East–West theatre interactions, Hollander places her subject in its ever-widening contemporary setting. Indian Folk Theatres makes these exceptionally versatile and upbeat contemporary theatre forms accessible to students and practitioners everywhere, and considers the ways in which theatre artists worldwide can enjoy and understand one another’s work. Julia Hollander is a British theatre director, teacher and writer. She has staged operas all over the world, including three acclaimed productions for English National Opera in London. Her study and artistic collaboration with Indian folk theatre practitioners began in the early 1990s.

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Theatres of the World Series editor: John Russell Brown Series advisors: Alison Hodge, Royal Holloway, University of London; Osita Okagbue, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Theatres of the World is a series that will bring close and instructive contact with makers of performances from around the world. Each book looks at the performance traditions and current practices of a specific region, focusing on a small number of individual theatrical events. Mixing first-hand observation, interviews with performance makers and in-depth analyses, these books show how performance practices are expressive of their social, historical and cultural contexts. They consider the ways in which theatre artists worldwide can enjoy and understand one another's work. Volumes currently available in the series are: African Theatres and Performances Osita Okagbue Indian Folk Theatres Julia Hollander Future volumes will include: Performance in Bali Indian Popular Theatres Indigenous Australian Theatre Practices Polish Ensemble Theatre Shamans in Contemporary Korean Theatre

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Indian Folk Theatres

Julia Hollander

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First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Julia Hollander All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hollander, Julia. Indian folk theatres / by Julia Hollander. p. cm. – (Theatres of the world) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Performing arts – India. 2. Folk drama, Indic – History and criticism. I. Title. PN2881.5.H65 2007 792v.0954 – dc22 2007005427

ISBN 0-203-94528-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 10: 0–415–30455–5 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0–203–94528–X (ebk) ISBN 13: 978–0–415–30455–9 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–203–94528–5 (ebk)

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For Imogen

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Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: first encounters

viii x 1

1

Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces

22

2

Expanding Chhau: beyond masks and Maharajas

56

3

Rediscovering folk theatre

65

4

Tamasha: escape

75

5

Re-working Tamasha: from socialism to social mobility

111

6

More discoveries

125

7

Therukoothu: coalescing worlds

132

8

Modern Therukoothu: survival

163

9

The global village

181

Therukoothu appendix Postscript Glossary of terms Notes Bibliography Index

192 193 194 197 206 211

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Illustrations

0.1 0.2 0.3 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 2.1 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 5.1 6.1 7.1

Tamil crowd gathered for the battle between Duryodhana and Bhima Suddhendra dancing in the corridor Ima Manimacha Prasanna Mahapatra making a mask The Chhau Mahotsav site by day The Kharkai river by day Bhaktas and jarjara pole on the rock Chhau Mahotsav musicians Tapan Pattanayak plays Ratri Tapan Pattanayak coaches two girls Krishna and his gopis in street parade Chandrabhaga (performer unknown) Seraikella palace crowd Krishna and Radha (performers unknown) Moon (performer unknown) Ileana Citaristi performs Echo and Narcissus Tamil village street Tamasha singer (performer unknown) Vijay Borgaonkar and colleagues Borgaonkar company technicians unload Lata putting on ghungroos The author, making prasad, with Narayangaon officials Maushi and Tamasha girls Tamasha dancers Baburao salutes his father Technicians strike the set Meena Nerurkar and company Paddy fields Kulamanthai villagers listen to storytelling

5 8 16 27 30 32 33 37 40 45 47 48 50 52 53 63 69 78 89 91 94 96 98 100 102 108 123 129 135

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7.2 Thevarasan 7.3 Potters at their Duryodhana statue 7.4 Therukoothu stage at Kulamanthai 7.5 Subramaniya plays Krishna 7.6 Female roles prepare 7.7 Draupadi Kuravanchi (ensemble) 7.8 Jothi plays Duryodhana 7.9 Kanniyappan as Draupadi with Meghanattan as Kattiayankaran 7.10 Villagers and cattle wait for action 7.11 Running over hot coals 8.1 Sambandhan performs Arjunan Thapasu 8.2 Sambandhan performs Panchali Sabadam 8.3 Koothu-p-Pattarai ensemble in England 9.1 The author and Prince Braj Bhanu Singh Deo, Seraikella Palace All photographs © Julia Hollander

137 139 140 143 145 150 155 159 160 162 164 170 173 183

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Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the generous collaboration of numerous individuals in both India and the UK. As I reveal in the introduction, my own experiences as a theatre director collaborating with folk theatre artists in India needed support and substantiation from those based in the field. Over the years, it has been my privilege to come in contact with countless gifted and dedicated people – many more than can be mentioned in this brief homage to those who helped specifically with the book. In Orissa, dancer Ileana Citaristi catalysed my initial study of Chhau, the way she balances practice and scholarship an inspiration; her ongoing work accounts for itself in the contemporary Chhau chapter. Tapan Pattanayak has been a very practical teacher, providing a fascinating interface between the Chhau festival events and the inner workings of his art, and helping to refine the book’s technical material. For historical and socio/religious background in Seraikella the royal family have been unstinting in their support – most significantly, scholar and practitioner Prince Braj Bhanu Singh Deo. In Tamil Nadu, playwright Muthuswamy’s infectious enthusiasm was the starting point for my Therukoothu work, and indeed for my love of folk theatre in general. His intelligence and sensitivity have inspired performers and writers from all over India and abroad. Tamil folklorist Muthukumaraswamy has been a strong influence throughout the book, especially in exploring the deepest areas of village beliefs and social mores. His analysis of the Draupadi Kuravanchi show was the basis for the first Therukoothu chapter (Chapter 7), and contacts made through his institution, the National Folklore Support Centre in Chennai, were extremely important for the book as a whole. I would also like to thank Muthuswamy’s son, M. Natesh, for all the help he has given me, especially in his account of Koothu-p-Pattarai’s work which forms the bulk

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of the second Therukoothu chapter (Chapter 8). See also the appendix on p. 192. For Tamasha, British academic and theatre manager Nick Hill provided generous up-to-the-minute information that enabled me to witness the most interesting work in the most exciting conditions. His careful reading of the Tamasha entries and guidance through extended research proved invaluable. Meena Nerurkar in the USA has been a lively and efficient correspondent. In Pune, two people with whom Nick put me in touch were particularly important: journalist Gauri Warudi (an excellent translator and guide) and playwright Sushama Deshpande. I am glad that our collaborations have been so mutually beneficial. Institutions without whom writing and researching this book would have been impossible include the Indian Institute Library of Oxford University, the District authorities in Seraikella-Kharsawan, Pune University Drama department and Sangeet Natak Academy in Delhi. The Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation generously funded the writing and research work. My travel was paid for by INTACH UK – the International Council on Monuments and Sites, and the British Academy. Thanks also to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, whose earlier research grants proved essential in gathering such a body of knowledge.

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Introduction First encounters

If you go close to Indian theatre you may never return. Edward Gordon Craig In 1991, when an invitation came to lead workshops for a small theatre company in the metropolis of Mumbai, I eagerly accepted. Since leaving university a passionate enthusiast for music theatre, in love with its emotional expression, its vibrancy and its explosiveness, I had quickly grown disillusioned. After only three years directing operas in the UK, professional work had expanded my knowledge of politics and money and competition, but I had lost touch with any artistic vision. I cast my mind back to Peter Brook’s epic production of Mahabharata, the extreme reverence it had aroused in me and so many other young theatre enthusiasts during the 1980s; I remembered reading about Edward Gordon Craig’s visionary design innovations and his passion for Indian theatre. So many dedicated and innovative British directors had found inspiration in India. They had entered its mystical nature, its exotic, seductive powers – qualities so opposite to the prosaic commerciality I had come to know as professional theatre in the UK. It was a simple enough assumption that I might do the same. Of course, it didn’t turn out like that. The theatre world in Mumbai was disarmingly similar to my own; even smaller and more inwardlooking than the UK opera industry, it struggled with the same sorts of political machinations and problems of cashflow. I soon found that its aesthetic also resembled my own – hide-bound by the ‘well-made play’, the actors were resorting to all the same clichés of naturalism to animate the deadness of their scripts. The company’s director, Veenapani Chawla, was feeling just as stuck, just as lost as me. But there was another Indian theatre scene, Veenapani explained. Away from the cities, in the rural hinterland that makes up the major part of the sub-continent, there existed a radically different type of performance

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2 Introduction: first encounters art. In recent decades it had started disintegrating, threatened by the accessibility of other entertainments and a general trend towards Westernisation. But if I wanted inspiration, then I should go in search of it. Soon.

Therukoothu Inserted into my 1991 Mumbai diary is a letter from a playwright friend of Veenapani’s based in the south-eastern state of Tamil Nadu. In his perfectly balanced calligraphy Muthuswamy writes to let me know that the Draupadi Amman festival is currently taking place. ‘I can arrange for you to go to a village and see a Therukoothu performance,’ he writes. ‘You will have to travel at least 110 kilometers from Chennai. It is a tenday, day-and-night ritual and performance of the whole Mahabharata.’ Veenapani warned me that the overnight train to Chennai followed by the long journey across country by bus would be quite some undertaking. Few people would speak English, and I would not be able to read even the place names in their curly Tamil script. Some of her actors were appalled at my plan to stay more than a week in a remote and doubtless dirty village, sleeping on the ground, eating off plates made of leaves. But for me it was just the sort of adventure I craved. I remember walking along the crowded street in central Chennai in search of Muthuswamy’s office. I was so hot that sweat poured down the backs of my legs as I climbed the steep dark staircase up to his room. Muthuswamy sat cross-legged beside the desk, wearing a hand-woven cotton shirt and twiddling his moustache distractedly. He was impatient to reveal his plans for me – once it was a little cooler, he would accompany me on the afternoon bus; we would arrive at the village after sunset, in time to catch the second night of the festival. He needed to return to Chennai, but would leave me at the village with one of his actor colleagues as translator and guide. The operation had clearly been performed many times before – Muthuswamy had mediated for years between eager outsiders (scholars and practitioners) and the village performers. I don’t remember what sort of payment I gave, but I’m sure I was concerned about doing the right thing. It was awkward – my custom was to pay to see a show, and I was acutely aware of my economic status – a Westerner in a poor developing country. As a playwright living and working in the city, Muthuswamy had access to funding for his theatre work from various foundations and sponsors, but the rural actors had none. He was doing me a favour because he was friends with Veenapani (herself receiving at least some funding; her actors supporting themselves

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with daytime jobs in their lucrative city). Yet the festival shows were free of charge to anyone who happened to come to the village. The actors would welcome me because that was their custom, and perhaps they hoped that a British lady like me might find them work in her own country. I was aware that the scholars and practitioners who preceded me had come under the accusation of, at the very least, bad manners if not out-and-out exploitation. At the same time, there was no obvious way to recompense the villagers for my gate-crashing their festival. I think I probably solved the problem on this occasion by paying Muthuswamy for the bus tickets and giving him a donation to pass on to the village actors. On subsequent visits, when Muthuswamy’s theatre school1 had become established, as payment for seeing the rural shows I offered free workshops to his young urban trainees, and brought books and videos for their library. This form of barter seemed the best compromise in a culture so in need of money and yet so generous in its artistic production. My diary of those ten days in the Tamil countryside is full of visual details – yellow and red stripes painted on the cottage doorpost; the beautifully intricate kollam patterns squiggled in rice-flour at the threshold of each hut; a huge silk loom strung up between two tamarind trees. Then there are descriptions of my life with the Therukoothu company – I was their guest of honour, a white woman seldom seen in these parts. The actors took me wherever they went – from house to house on their social rounds, accepting cups of frothy coffee and delicious little dosas,2 smoky and moist from the open fireplace. I quickly learnt the Tamil words for essential food and drink, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. Rather than constantly call on Muthuswamy’s colleague to translate, I preferred to communicate in a primitive mixture of sign language and repetition of what was said to me. The actors were amused at my parroting. They sat me in the front row for the evening shows, letting me snooze backstage on the straw when I was too tired to watch any more. During the day I sat on the row of mats side by side with them as our hostesses handed round the plates made of dried leaves – beautiful artefacts sewn together with tiny cotton stitches. We were served mounds of tasty food from great steel buckets of dhal and rice, and when we could consume no more, our plates were crumpled up and thrown outside to rot. Then we would lie stretched out on the mats, comatose, coping with the midday heat. I still have the photos taken by a village boy who shinned three metres up the striped pole in the middle of the village square (erected especially for the performance rituals). The pictures show a huge crowd gathered for the final day’s thrill of a dramatisation of the battle between Duryodhana and Bhima3 that is the climax of Mahabharata. In the

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4 Introduction: first encounters background, hundreds of bicycles are propped against one another in the shade of a tree. Whole families had arrived across country since early morning – dad on the bike seat, a couple of children propped on the cross-bar, wives side-saddle clutching babies on the rack behind. The Hindu priest is in the middle of the photo, seated next to the garlanded little god statues beneath a fringed parasol, laughing up at the camera. Others who push forward against the rope will later go into what I remember thinking was an epileptic fit – frothing at the mouth and flailing in the dust. The first was a middle-aged woman just behind me in the crowd – supported around her waist by a young man (her son, perhaps), she shuddered and screamed out her ecstasy. Then people across the square began to do the same, and even one of the actors had to be held down as his violent possession took hold. The crowd cheered in support. Later photos show an evening crowd gathered in a haze of smoke, the low angle of the sun lighting up the bright green branches they hold above their heads. They are waiting for the coals to heat up before running over them, again in ecstasy. It is these scenes, fixed by my camera, that I relive most vividly as my introduction to folk theatre. I was there to watch the actors perform, and

Figure 0.1 Tamil crowd gathered for the battle between Duryodhana and Bhima.


I am sure they did so most brilliantly, with all their slapstick virtuosity. The female impersonators must have strutted and pouted; the male characters roared and stamped. The ensemble sang at the top of their voices, hour after hour. But mainly I remember the whole community throbbing with excitement – children and dogs, old and young, men and women, all milling around while performers sang and danced and shouted, at a party dedicated to the gods. There was such elasticity in the people’s relationship with their shows, such ebullience in their interactions. I could hardly bear to cast my mind back to uptight audiences back home. This audience would never accept the formalities and coldness of my modern theatre; they wanted their drama to be rumbustuous, accessible for all the family and foreigners too. Through it, they were celebrating throbbing, kicking, laughing life.

Chhau Back in the UK, I went around telling anyone who would listen about the thrill of the Therukoothu shows, and plotting ways to return to it. In a second-hand book shop near the British Library in London, I discovered Balwant Gargi’s Folk Theatre of India (written in the 1950s). The book describes numerous local folk theatres across the whole of India. I was particularly drawn to the black and white photos and descriptions of Seraikella Chhau, a dance form from an area near Orissa in the east of the sub-continent. I was attracted to the beauty of the masks – something esoteric and dreamy about their staring eyes and arched brows, the brush lines reminiscent of a Beardsley ink drawing. Effeminate, elusive, this type of indigenous Indian theatre reeked of Orientalist romance, and I was smitten. Back to India I went, this time to Kolkata in order to meet theatre scholar Rustom Bharucha. He recommended that I visit a dancer in Bhubaneswar (capital of Orissa) – Ileana Citaristi, an Italian Philosophy graduate who had been embroiled in theatre and dance in the north-east region for many years. She sent me to visit the royal Chhau expert living in the little state of Seraikella. The early morning bus dumped me in the main street and I made straight for the shabby palace gates. In the courtyard I called out, hopeful that a servant might respond, but nothing. So, choosing left rather than right probably because of some now-ingrained habit of circling temples clockwise, I came to the front door of Rajkumar Suddhendra Singh Deo, the last surviving royal proponent of Chhau. There he stood, wrapped in an old Kashmiri shawl, his willowy figure still recognisable

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6 Introduction: first encounters from Gargi’s photos of fifty years ago. Suddhendra was charmed that I recognised him, and moreover that for the sake of Chhau I had crossed the notoriously dangerous state of Bihar by night. He gave me a cup of tea warmed at a little gas stove in the corridor, and reassured me that his ‘boy’ would be along later to cook chapattis. We would start work right away – he would teach me out here in the corridor, and I could sleep in the living room. There were no other areas of the palace available to us, the rooms being either occupied by other family members or completely uninhabitable. The grandeur was more than faded; it had well-nigh disintegrated. At night rats rampaged all over the furniture around my bed, enjoying mite-infested flour and shredded papers left strewn around the room. Black dust melded their food with undecipherable rags and discarded old gadgets. On the living room wall hung an out-of-date calendar picturing a fat, white baby Krishna and next to it two heraldic shields that Suddhendra proudly pronounced had been given to his family on their visit to England before the war. Had I gone anticlockwise around the building I would have arrived at a slightly smarter section of the palace, home to the other side of the family – a cousin who wrote about Chhau and was researching a book on its heritage. Instead, I found myself guest of honour to an elegant and really rather charming dance master. He called me ‘the Angel’: ‘You have come to save us,’ he said. ‘You will take news of our work to England and tell them the royal Chhau dance is still in existence.’ He used to tour abroad with his Chhau company, and remembered his trip to London in 1938 very clearly – a private council with the king, transport around the capital in glistening Morris cars and, most memorable of all, the deepest, warmest baths in the world. He regarded the British as highly civilised – able to appreciate the finer things in life, including his beloved Chhau. And as for me – a Londoner, I could pay the boy a few rupees per day and he would drum out the talas in order for Suddhendra to coach me in the footwork for Ratri – the dance of the Moon. And then we would dance together in the palace grounds – he as Night and me as Moon. No matter that the tradition was exclusively for men, times were changing and with modern Western interest they could no longer keep it pure. Anyone who felt the spirit of Chhau should be initiated in its disciplines. We would have a mask made especially for me, and a suitable costume could easily be found in his collection. Despite my inhibitions about performing, I was caught up in the romance of having discovered the ultimate proponent of a dying art. I remembered Veenapani’s advice about catching the folk forms soon, before they were lost forever on the tide of Westernisation. Perhaps I was flattered that Suddhendra thought I might be capable of dancing his


lissom steps. Perhaps the unanticipated opportunity of becoming his pupil, offered after such effort in getting here, was reason enough. I was prepared to jettison my cerebral director persona and give myself to the rigours of practise. For a week I did not leave the palace grounds, and every day I practised the stamps and kicks and punishingly balletic movements. By no means a trained dancer, I felt more confident about my musical training and so concentrated on the talas, trying to master the complicated rhythmic structures. The patterns made by my feet should correspond to what the drummer was doing. I would complete one short phrase and then retreat to my notebook to write down the ‘script’ in my own phonetic form – a series of sounds that my muscle memory should then translate into footwork. I felt heavy and clumsy opposite my seventy-something teacher who sat patiently waiting for me to master just a little of his art. My greatest fear was the encroaching day when I would have to don my mask and dance with my guru. Fortunately, my manifest limitations as a dancer put paid to the performance idea. It soon became clear that this British Angel was not going to make the necessary performing grade. Without discussion, the pattern of my days changed. The mornings were still for coaching, but in the afternoon Suddhendra sent me on visits to interesting Seraikella sites – the temples, the holy river, the homes of Chhau dancers and martial artists. As the day of my departure came closer he handed over papers – his biography and publicity leaflets, articles about Chhau, and some names and addresses of old English friends he would like me to contact (Lady this and Lord that). On my final evening Suddhendra agreed to dance. There in the corridor, without mask or costume, accompanied by the bald thud of the drum, he lifted his tall body upwards and outwards, dancing the Peacock dance with supreme lightness. There they were, the beautifully balanced poses I had seen in Balwant Gargi’s photos, bent limbs creating perfect right angles as they depicted the haughty majesty of the bird. The joy of this elegant man performing sinewy, delicate movements took us far away from the grime of our surroundings. His peacock transported us to some magical place, some Golden Age, a time of innocence and dreaming, of polished cars and enamel baths and Great British gentlemen. I wonder if Edward Gordon Craig ever saw him dance.

Sankirtana Northwards, towards the Himalayas, I wanted to experience the Sankirtana of Manipur because it was performed not by men but by

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8 Introduction: first encounters

Figure 0.2 Suddhendra dancing in the corridor.

women, and because its central sung element made it truly operatic. After my hopeless inability to master the elements of Chhau dance, I trusted that my training as a singer would enable me to study Sankirtana to some satisfactory standard. Manipur (meaning ‘land of gems’) is one of the north-east territories of India, right up on the Burmese border, a region devastated by poverty


and heroin trafficking (it is the entrance to the Golden Triangle for the whole of the Indian sub-continent). As if this is not enough of a curse, since the Raj pulled out in 1947 the different tribes of both the hills and the beautifully oval central valley have been fighting over land rights. Insurgent groups have risen up as offshoots of the civil war armies, fighting for independence from the Indian government whom they see as oppressive and insensitive to their uniquely different culture. It took me six months to procure an Inner Line Permit to enter the area – central government said it feared that some insurgent group might kidnap me to bring attention to the Independence cause, just as they have taken tourists in Kashmir. Through an official invitation from a group called the ‘Forum of Laboratory Theatres of Manipur’ (FLTM) and by negotiation through the British High Commission in Delhi, I was granted permission to study for four weeks with severely restricted access to anywhere other than the capital, Imphal. No foreigner had visited in months, and no one could remember a time when someone had stayed for more than a few days. I knew it was a special privilege to come to this little-known place and fancied I might extend my work there, using my camera not just to research the theatre but also to gather film evidence of the human rights violations going on. I had met exiled Manipuri writers and actors in Delhi – they all said the Indian Government pursued a vicious military regime in their country, and a particular initiative – Operation Sunnyvale – had recently been introduced to crack down on insurgent activity once and for all. Some people talked about imprisonments and killings, about the ruthless invasion of homes and places of worship. Entering their theatre world would be sure to put me in contact with all this. The small plane from Kolkata landed on a grassy runway and we retrieved our luggage left in a pile near the little airport building. The director of FLTM was waiting in the gloomy concourse with three men who were introduced as my bodyguard/driver, bodyguard/Sankirtana expert and bodyguard/translator respectively. They struck me as an extremely well-educated lot, all of them young and enthusiastic. With 80 per cent unemployment among the men in urban Manipur, a month’s work looking after an English woman must have had a lot of applicants. The jeep was soon meandering along the main street of the ramshackle town, the sight of nonchalant soldiers leaning their machine-guns out of the back of the truck in front reminding me of a visit to IRA-decimated Belfast in the 1980s. For a capital city, Imphal was surprisingly unimposing, its low, makeshift buildings looking as though the two years of bombing it suffered in World War II had only recently ended. The traffic was dominated by bicycles and cycle rickshaws, the riders’ faces

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10 Introduction: first encounters masked by scarves – to keep out the dust, or to prevent their being recognised? Corrugated iron fences and scrubby trees divided up distinctive family plots, often with an old, colonial-style mansion at their centre. One of these was the home of Ima Manimacha, my new Indian theatre guru. In the neat family room, behind four-poster beds hung with lacy mosquito nets, a clutch of laughing women replaced my Indian sari with traditional sarong and shawl. ‘How fat you are’ they congratulated me, stroking the roll of white skin protruding above my petticoat. With a special blade, they carefully stamped three vertical yellow chandan lines (symbolising Lord Krishna) onto my forehead. Then I was led out onto the veranda to kneel in front of Ima who gently guided me in a ceremony offering incense and sweets to the gods, and repeating many prayers and invocations. The Meitei tribe who dominate Imphal and the fertile valley around it practise a Vaishnavist form of Hinduism, with Gouranga4 as its central god. At the same time, the pre-Hindu Meitei faith has been preserved and homes generally contain one shrine dedicated to Krishna/Radha and another to the Meitei god Sanamahi. The older religion is based on ideas of Mother Earth and fertility rites and is unique to this area at the foothills of the Himalayas. Meitei religious practice does not make much use of iconographic images, but instead entails Tantric meditation and prayer and the power of dance and song. Ima Manimacha’s home, like every other, faced eastwards onto a sanctified front yard with a sacred tilusi5 tree at its centre. As Ima’s pupil I was expected to rise, like her, at 5.30am and go out onto the veranda facing the yard to pray. We would gather flowers from the garden and light incense sticks which were presented at various locations around the house, including the Sanamahi shrine hidden in the corner and the shrine to Ima’s guru near her bed. From that time until curfew and bed around 9pm, I was strictly Ima’s follower. I would help the family prepare food on the fire in their little back kitchen – dried fish and curious underwater vegetables from the surrounding lakes, fermented soya and bamboo, and black rice. I tried to observe strict habits such as washing and changing into clean clothes before each meal. Every day, young women would come to the wooden shack on the far side of the courtyard to learn Sankirtana. They would each bring with them their kirtan – a pair of hand-held cymbals with long colourful tassels hanging down. These created the rhythmic basis of the performance and their technique was the first thing to master – the cymbals were clashed together, then circled in opposite directions to create a strange scraping resonance before being opened out again for the next percussive gesture.


The kirtan were an important part of Ima’s teaching, unique to her particular style of performance. More than half a century earlier, she had studied with a male Sankirtana guru who played these sacred cymbals, but it had been hard. Her father and, later, her husband were not keen on her learning the then male-dominated form and insisted on accompanying her to every lesson. Even once she was fully proficient in the whole repertoire and gaining popularity for her fine singing, for ten years her husband forbade her to appear in public. When it became clear that she was not going to bear children, her husband allowed her to practise her art again, and since his death six years before she had become increasingly successful. However, she had encountered problems with the kirtan. In holy places, though there was not strictly a taboo against female performers, the Hindu authorities had only recently allowed women to perform ritual ceremonies, but under strict terms – they must perform in all-female groups and were expected to accompany themselves on little mandila cymbals rather than the larger, sacred kirtan. When Ima’s male colleagues discovered she was using kirtan they thought she was threatening their domination of the market. There was a furore and eventually the men took her to court over the matter. She won her case and her use of kirtan was officially sanctioned, but many people were superstitious and she felt their prejudice marginalised her from the mainstream of Sankirtana. Even now, she said, people often refused to pay her a proper fee, insisting instead that her income be accumulated from tips donated by the audience. At the same time as twisting the kirtan, Ima’s group stepped carefully in rhythm, bending their knees with heels deep down and then lightly up onto the toes, their dance creating a symbolic snaking pattern across the floor. And on top of this they sang, sometimes a devotional chorus, sometimes long semi-improvised ballads. The other students seemed to be able to learn all three aspects – instrument, dance and song – at once. I found that these skills had to be broken down into the component parts for me to get anywhere. For a while I would follow the steps, and then stand still in order to concentrate on the sound my kirtan were making. When the group sat down to sing, I was relieved to join them in an area where I felt confident. In unison it was easy, but I was expected to learn the songs in order to sing alone. This part of the work we saved until the cool of the evening when Ima and I would sit opposite one another on the terrace and she would teach me my devotional song one phrase at a time – ‘Lengbi-irao Gau-ura Hare’. When I had repeated a phrase to her satisfaction she would proceed, building up the song bit by bit. It was no good listening to anyone else – Ima has a particular technique, a unique style, and as her pupil I was expected to imitate this and only this.

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12 Introduction: first encounters Manipuri is a tonal language, its words difficult to differentiate for the Western ear. Often I would think I had imitated a line absolutely exactly and she would shake her head and repeat it, again and again. Just one vowel sound might be wrong and I couldn’t hear it. While my Western ear made me deaf, I was painfully aware of how much I depended on my sight to learn. As a child, a major part of my musical education had been through reading – the knowledge my singing and instrumental teachers imparted was objectified through the written symbols I was taught to interpret. Now I discovered how stupidly slow I was without a written reference point. Then there was the question of vocal technique. It seemed that all the singing skills I had accumulated in England would have to be jettisoned. Rising to a top note, for example, I had been taught to use more breath and push the sound upwards into the head where it resonated, creating vibrato. To avoid any tension in the larynx I would lift the soft palate of the mouth in an internal yawn. But for Ima’s top notes I had to keep the resonance down in my chest, deliberately pushing the sound into my throat and larynx. My English singing teacher would have warned that this was bad for me and that I would be sure to lose my voice. But my Manipuri teacher was able to sing three ceremonies, one overnight and two in the daytime, and exhibit no signs of vocal stress. Ima was not paid for her teaching, either by me6 or by the local girls who came to her classes. This was in keeping with the gurukkal tradition in which she herself had studied, inherited through generations. However, during the period I was her student she was contracted to perform at numerous ‘life-cycle rituals’, as they were called. Though the terms of my permit prohibited me from accompanying her to many out-of-town gigs, I nevertheless witnessed her local performances at a wedding, a funeral and a cremation. These family occasions in people’s front yards were her main type of show, and her family’s main source of income. Elaborate affairs lasting many hours, they included prayers and rituals, mimed gestures from important figures in the family, all led by the Sankirtana performers. The host family would put together their own unique event chosen from Ima’s vast repertoire of songs in praise of Krishna and Radha. Sometimes there would be a male Hindu priest present; sometimes it would be Ima’s job to lead the prayers. Always there was a Meitei monk, called Meiba, to carry out Meitei rituals at the same time that the Hindu ceremony was being conducted. The congregation was seated on all four sides of the yard, the performers in the central area around the tilusi tree. A dozen female Sankirtana singers were accompanied by a couple of male drummers with


Figure 0.3 Ima Manimacha.

the double-sided pung drum hung horizontally around their necks. While the women sang the drummers kept quite still, waiting for the moment where they might perform elaborate solos, twisting and leaping high into the air, drums held tight against their naked bellies. The truly operatic nature of the performance was in the sections where the singers moved from choral hymns or prayers to solo ballads – narrative depictions of Krishna and Radha in their legendary pastoral home of Brindavan. As the leader of the group, Ima took this opportunity to shine – depicting the dialogues between God and his consort, her voice would soar up, ecstatic with their love for one another and hers for them. Sometimes at night, despite the curfew, there was another local show to see and I would be draped in ritual lace and taken in the jeep to a house or temple site where the same sort of performing area had been

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14 Introduction: first encounters set up – a square bound on all sides by the audience. Old men and children were seated on the ground with a group of instrumentalists at the front, and behind them stood the animated crowd. The dramas were called Gourlila, and they depicted stories from the life of Gouranga. The role of the god was performed by a small child whose family put up most of the money for the show, with others volunteering their children for the roles of Gouranga’s brothers or other gods in Brindavan. The children were trained to dance and sing by professional Sankirtana artists like Ima who took the adult roles in the final performance. The training might well take several months’ intensive work, with time for little else. But the effort was significant, for parents believed that by depicting the god early on in life a child and its family would have good fortune. For the eight hours of performance, the whole community (including the parents) must treat this child as the god himself. They draped the little Gouranga in strings of five-rupee notes and scattered offerings at its feet. Some worshippers, particularly the old men in the front row, would prostrate themselves in front of the performer and weep with joy that the god was manifested on earth. The sacred element of the show was equally matched by the profane. Glittering bunting hung from the rafters, and in one comic interlude, a pantomime monkey Hanuman bounded around the yard on all fours until he caught little Gouranga, lifting him high onto his shoulders. From here the tiny god could stretch up into the bunting and take down hidden jars of puffed rice and sweets that he threw out into the crowd. ‘Ima’ means ‘mother’ and though she was childless it seemed to me that she fulfilled that role in the broadest sense. Her work was an intricate intermingling of religious practice, social responsibility, teaching duties and the rigours of professional performance. I was allowed to share in everything she did. With only a couple of days’ warning, my month of study culminated in my taking part in a performance with her. It was a thread ceremony for a Brahmin family whose teenage sons were being initiated into adult life. The father was clearly nervous about my taking such a prominent role in a significant family event. It must have seemed quite risky, allowing a clumsy Westerner to take the position of spiritual spokesperson. He came to the house on several occasions before the big day, and after his detailed planning meetings with Ima would take me aside and advise me of all the ‘dos and don’ts’ of the ceremony: when to enter the sacred space, when to kneel, when to stand, how to take offerings of money, how to relate to the sacred tilusi tree, the priest, the different parts of the congregation. On the day itself, we arrived well in advance and spent a good hour backstage in the front room making up and arranging our ceremonial


dress. Ima was quiet and gentle. The local television station personnel had turned up and were even allowed into the green room to film me – the big white VIP performer. The performance itself went off without a hitch. Ima carefully supervised my every move and utterance, so that there was no moment when I was left stranded and unable to take her lead in any subtle action. I sang with as much devotional passion as I dared, and stepped carefully so as not to make a fool of myself in the dance. Much of my time seemed to be spent prostrate on the ground as I bowed gratefully to receive yet another donation, or clashing my kirtan to punctuate the ecstatic pung interludes and Ima’s heady solos; the hours passed by in a haze. As we sat down afterwards to a giant feast laid out on rows of bright green palm leaves, I saluted our beaming host and knew I had done well. And while I was immersing myself in the rigours of Sankirtana where were the human rights abuses? In my closed domestic environment infused with music and ritual, it was easy to forget the gruesome reality of political Manipur. But with my trio of assistants, I did go out to meet a few political groups during the weeks I was there. One was a wellknown students’ union demonstrating against the draconian activities of the Assam Rifles and eager to get their message out to the British public. They held an official meeting sitting in a circle of metal chairs in their shabby classroom, and talked to my camera in educated English about the complicated history of their country and its problematic links with Burma and the drugs trade. I tried to explain that my film might not necessarily be featured on mainstream British television, ashamed that my country probably cared not a jot whether Imphal, such an important site during the culmination of our last World War, needed an independent government or not. An old descendant of the Manipuri Maharajas (Cambridge educated) invited me to tea in his crumbling palace and talked fondly of the Raj and polo (invented in Manipur and ‘discovered’ by the English aristocracy). His nostalgic picture of my country, so elegant and well-mannered, was (like Suddhendra’s) completely at odds with my contemporary experience. These old men had created an idealised version of England, just as their English contemporaries like Gordon Craig must have created one of their country. I reminded myself that I wanted to be as realistic and as clear-headed as possible in my encounters with modern-day India. One night I ventured outside Ima’s house and met a group of mothersturned-vigilantes who were policing the streets by night to stop their sons becoming involved in the violence. I was moved by their bravery, and felt furious that their voices were not heard outside this tiny region. But the women advised against my getting involved; they thought it

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16 Introduction: first encounters would be reckless for me to spend time filming or campaigning with them, and to what end? Better to cherish my time with Ima and take positive news of Manipur back to my country. Sankirtana was an amazingly powerful force, essential to the life of the community and by all accounts thriving. It entered every Imphal household, it told stories that appealed to every age group and every class. Such a demanding performance art, it rose out of the cruelty and suffering of this land as a triumphant assertion of the human spirit, of the life-affirming force of artistic expression. I wanted to explore its intricate and invisible links with the ancient traditions of the region. I wanted to learn more about the Tantric thinking that informs the spirals of the dance, the improvisatory meandering of the songs, the gossamer fragility of the ceremonial dress. I wanted to search out other Sankirtana exponents and compare their work to the style that I had studied. Most of all, I would be happy to apprentice myself to Ima Manimacha for as long as she thought necessary to make me really stage-worthy. But all this would have to wait – my Inner Line Permit had run out.

Back in England Back home, I started applying for grants to return to Manipur. I thought perhaps I would follow in Ileana Citaristi’s footsteps and dedicate myself long-term to learning an Indian performance tradition. Though I might never attain the standards of those for whom a lifetime was dedicated to learning Sankirtana, I might gain serious skills nevertheless. But getting funding for such things takes time; meanwhile there were shows for me to direct in London. When at last I had the opportunity to return to Manipur, the political situation there had worsened so much that no outsider, even someone with an Indian passport, was allowed in. It seemed that the closer I had got to Indian theatre, the more elusive it had proved itself to be. Instead, my Indian folk theatre experiences needed to be assimilated and internalised. I cast my mind back now and can locate all sorts of ways in which my experiences in India influenced my work, sometimes quite trivial, sometimes fundamental. They seem to fall into three broad areas – aesthetic, interpretative and organisational. Examples of aesthetic borrowings – a handheld curtain in my production of Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, and even some Therukoothu-type kirki;7 there was a lot of throwing sweets and other treats to the audience. Was this a Gourlila or an old English panto influence? The production in general was in the spirit of a piece of folk theatre, staged on a catwalk with a wild and eclectic style of performance and design. I think I had become


generally freer in my directorial approach as a result of my Indian experiences, more inclined to concentrate on the inner life of each character and leave the blocking open, so that the performers depended more on an improvisatory interaction with one another and the audience. However, this was not always feasible. Sometimes there were just too many people on stage for improvisation to be practical, or the rehearsal period was just too short for performers to feel confident without a basic physical structure, or the stage picture needed quite precise lighting and couldn’t accommodate a vague staging. I did find myself in environments where I might be liberated from the most formal conventions of Western opera – outdoor shows or shows where the stage space exploded (such as a production in the Barbican Pit Theatre where the audience stood on the stage area and actors and singers performed on the raked seating). Whether I would have directed like this before I experienced Indian folk theatre I have no idea; I rather fancy I would have. Ideas come from all sorts of unexplained areas and my theatrical experiences extend far back, even (like Edward Gordon Craig) to theatre that I have never seen. Some things come about simply through a negative reaction – for example, it was an opera composer, Wagner, who turned off the lights in the auditorium and hid the audience. In his quest for some perfect form of entertainment he cut off the links that made theatre live and people seem to like it that way; they like to hide in their padded seats and ingest, not interact. I have always reacted against this division and the Indian folk theatres reminded me that I could. The styles went into my imagination’s melting-pot, mingling and often overlapping with all the rest. In some instances my Indian experiences changed, or at least strengthened, the interpretative angle of my shows. In an operatic version of Euripides’ Bacchae, my main focus became the East–West tension, epitomised in the relationship between King Pentheus and the stranger, Dionysus (half man, half god and, ironically, Pentheus’ cousin). The stranger is said to have come from the East, and his crazed female followers have been picked up somewhere between southern Asia and Thebes, where the story takes place. The threat that these foreigners pose to Western civilisation seemed to me significant and very contemporary. We created a vertiginous, walled space as Pentheus’ monumental power base, invaded from the dark earth at its roots by Dionysus and his followers. Pentheus and his henchmen wore greys and beige colours in keeping with the set, the clothing a mixture of Ancient Greek and modern urban dress. The Bacchae were the Oriental element – exotic and animal, they were desired and also feared. We gave them green costumes, long dark wigs, and hands and faces daubed with red paint – influenced in part

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18 Introduction: first encounters by my photos of Therukoothu actors. Dionysus’ physicality was based on the principles of Tai Chi, the Chorus’ more generally derived from improvisations on their emotional states. The libretto of this opera was in ancient Greek, the contemporary score full of contrast, moving suddenly from terrifying violence to seductive sensuality. We were all utterly uncompromising in our intention to present something foreign and disturbing. The critics’ response was to celebrate the show for its exoticism. Some of them assumed, because of the look of the design, that the choreography was ‘Asian’ (presumably Bharatanatyam, India’s best-known dance export). By slotting it into this category, they seemed to be shying away from the frightening energy of the play. They were making Bacchae into a safe piece of exotica rather than face Euripides’ disturbing exploration of racial prejudice. Finally, my experiences in India revealed themselves in the external life of my shows, the way I organised my work. It might well have been Ima Manimacha’s example that led me to employ an all-woman production team for my next big opera. On the first night, as my five-woman team stepped onto the gigantic stage for the curtain call, we sensed we were something different, quite a shocking image of female assertiveness in that narrow, male-dominated world. When I set up my own small-scale contemporary opera company, I think my ability to work in an extremely small and low-budget way was in part because of what I had learnt from these Indian practitioners. I was sure that a passion for the work must override financial aspiration, and that live theatre depended not on money but on people. I had found a new confidence from seeing the difficult circumstances in which Ima Manimacha and her colleagues created popular small-scale opera. Most importantly, my enthusiasm for music theatre as a whole had been revived by these practitioners’ work. I had seen the most vital, most alive form of live theatre imaginable and I carried its spirit with me in all sorts of ways. And every other year I got together enough money to make brief trips back to India. Wanting to immerse myself as closely as possible in the artistic life there, and eager to offer what I could of my own abilities, I found myself involved in all sorts of projects, leading workshops and full-blown productions for companies and schools across the subcontinent, but also involved in more tangential activities. Of these, there are two that stand out. First, in order to witness performances in orthodox temples in the south I underwent a full Hindu conversion at the Arya Samaj in Mumbai and took the name ‘Sweta’. Second, while hanging around in Kolkata waiting to meet theatre practitioners and see shows, I spent a few exhausting and exhilarating weeks working as a volunteer nurse at Mother Theresa’s Kalighat hospice. I would never


have had these dramatically life-changing experiences had it not been for Sankirtana, Chhau and Therukoothu.

The book Planning a literary introduction to this fascinating world, I cast my mind back to my first encounters. Whatever excited me at the beginning is a forceful starting point for a reader coming fresh to the subject. But I am aware that a book about contemporary Indian folk theatres must be more than a simple collection of accounts. The scholars and practitioners who pick it up want their questions answered; they want to place their reading in a context of other studies. In the past decade or so, new material has been published that brings fresh perspectives to the study of Indian folk theatre forms. Folklorists have been hard at work integrating ideas about folk performance into their analyses of village social and cultural activity. As an artist rather than a social scientist, and a non-Indian who has gained inspiration in her interactions with the rural shows she has seen, mine is a world-theatre context. I originally witnessed these theatres as a welcome foreign guest, and however much I immersed myself in their world, I can never lose that status. What I bring to Indian folk theatre is always going to be an outsider’s and an artist’s perspective. In the final chapter I will expand on this theme of the foreigner and the outsider, putting it in context with the history of folk theatre and its study. For now, suffice it to say that I mean to utilise what assets I have. I am an opera director; I am used to working in other countries with people from foreign cultures. My skill is in being the linchpin of a creative endeavour, bringing disparate voices together. These characteristics should be useful for a project that intends to introduce Indian folk theatres to a foreign audience. What I can do is unite a number of experts, gathering their expertise under the umbrella of my own outsider perceptions. But which ones to choose? In Jacob Srampickal’s 1994 book, Voice to the Voiceless: The Power of People’s Theatre in India, he cites more than seventy forms – every region has one, with its own language and a distinctive style of staging. They have grown up over centuries to satisfy the tastes and needs of their particular communities, and with differing attitudes to the society around them. An introduction to folk theatres needs to cover communities with utterly different languages involving myriad cultural and economic phenomena. But trying to cover so many theatres would be completely superficial, so I must carefully select just a handful to illustrate the diversity. Then there is this label ‘folk’. What exactly is it? What nature do the shows share that makes them all distinctly folk theatres? The process

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20 Introduction: first encounters of revisiting and studying them will no doubt throw up all sorts of answers. u Bt the most obvious one was given in my very first experience of the Therukoothu festival –the audience, or f‘olk’, was what made it distinctive. Were you to see one of these shows staged in L ondon or Chicago, it would, of course, be without its home audience –the folk element. In this book I can describe the forms along with their life-giving context. I am able to bring the local crowd along too, giving it a place equal to the artists’ and thereby relaying a more complete picture of the form –perhaps its essential nature. There are numerous practical considerations in making my choices. I have to jettison plans to revisit Sankirtana –the political situation in Manipur has degenerated so much that there is no way I can return to the region. In the eastern region of Seraikella, Suddhendra Singh Deo died in 2001, and there is no one in the royal family continuing to perform the Chhau dances. u Bt there is an international school teaching the form to local and foreign practitioners. Such an institutional centre for the dissemination of knowledge about a folk form is exceptional, and worth looking into. There is a considerable amount of scholarship about the Seraikella Chhau form, generated by members of the royal family and latterly all the practitioners and scholars who have studied it. I am still in contact with Ileana Citaristi, who is creating interesting modern reworkings of the Chhau. I choose Seraikella Chhau as my starting point. Therukoothu has long appeared to me the complementary opposite to Chhau –it is masculine, confrontational and verbal, where the other is feminine, mysterious and non-verbal. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, the head of the company I originally saw has died, and Muthuswamy’s funding for his theatre school severely diminished. u Bt I have kept in touch with many theatre friends in the region and they are willing to collaborate on this project –they want the world to come to love Therukoothu as much as they do. A group of three contrasting folk theatres satisfies the book’s need for breadth and depth, so the final form of the seventy we could choose from must come from the remaining corner of the continental triangle –the west. The capital of Maharashtra, Mumbai, was the place where I first began my love affair with India, and I have friends there still. They have described the increasingly popular Tamasha folk form, repeating its songs and introducing me to its film offshoots. Tamasha contrasts with Therukoothu and Chhau in being largely secular, without the predominantly devotional characteristics of the other two. It is famous for its female performers –again, a contrast to the male-only performing traditions of the others.


For each of the chosen forms, I will concentrate on one particular performance in order to evoke its intensity and immediacy, feeding in facts about the history, techniques and practice as they relate to the live show. I will then go on to trace these theatres as they have mutated and assimilated into recent theatre events in the big cities. Rural actors have always taken inspiration from alternative styles of performance, including the cosmopolitan urban drama. Likewise, city practitioners like Muthuswamy’s actors in Chennai have long regarded their country cousins’ work as a source of inspiration. This interaction between urban practitioners and those in the villages is one illustration of the extended life of folk theatres, their ability to move through different cultural contexts and fulfil extraordinarily diverse demands in the world at large. If only Edward Gordon Craig had been able to get on a plane and see for himself the ever-changing Indian theatre and its audiences. Surely then he would not have been afraid.

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1

Seraikella Chhau Competing spaces

From the heart of all matter Comes the anguished cry – ‘Wake, wake, great Shiva, Our body grows weary Of its law-fixed path, Give us new form. Sing our destruction, That we gain new life.’ Rabindranath Tagore1 In June 1938, during the week that Jewish refugee Sigmund Freud arrived in Hampstead and Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted The Ring Cycle at Covent Garden, a small group of ‘Hindu dancers’ performed at the Vaudeville Theatre, London. The Maharaja of Seraikella’s sons had been brought there by ship by the Kolkata entrepreneur, Haren Ghosh. Their six-month tour would continue on to Rome and Belgrade. Suddhendra told me they filled their West End venue every night, and certainly the British press responded enthusiastically to ‘their extraordinary beauty, at once remote and passionate’ (The Times, 8 June 1938) and the ‘sumptuousness of their costumes’ (The Stage, 9 June 1938). Many reviewers found the masks very beautiful, and published photographs to prove it. The Daily Telegraph of 8 June 1938 stated: ‘There is an especial fascination to some of us in the mask convention, so impersonal yet so satisfying.’ ‘Extraordinary’. . . ‘sumptuousness’. . . ‘fascination’. These reviewers inhabited a blissfully ignorant world before World War II, before Indian Independence. They could relate to the Maharaja of Seraikella’s dancer sons who spoke Her Majesty’s English and displayed such elegance and refinement. You didn’t even have to be an Orientalist to enjoy the event, as there were clearly similarities with more familiar dance styles. Indeed

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a Spectator article immediately saw a relationship with the home brand – having discussed the artistic merits of Western Classical ballet at length, identifying Nijinsky’s ‘Après-Midi d’un Faune’ as the ultimate in ‘pictorial movement’, Dyneley Hussey went on to celebrate the same qualities in the Seraikella show: ‘Their dancing, besides having the attraction of the exotic, has the essential quality of artistic ballet’ (Spectator, 17 June 1938). If some were bewildered, they expressed themselves with tantalised humility: ‘The body and the limbs tell a story that every native at the feast of Shiva . . . seizes, but no Westerner can guess’ (The Observer, 12 June 1938). Now, some seven decades later, and as far in time from Edward Said’s Orientalism as that book was from the ‘Hindu dancers’, ignorance is not an option. It is simple enough for a Westerner to get on a plane and witness these dances in their native place. And once such first-hand experience is attained, they have access to all sorts of literature and other expert communications to fill out their understanding of what they have seen. In many ways, Seraikella Chhau has become the most accessible form of Indian folk theatre available to foreign scholars. As I approach Seraikella southwards from Ranchi airport, I am struck by the lushness of the landscape. I see rolling plateaus broken by flat-topped hills, rivers and lakes. This is a forested region, scarred by the mining of coal and iron in its vibrantly red earth. The complementary green of palms and paddy-fields shines out against the colour of the soil, asserting the great fecundity of this land. I am visiting Seraikella (now part of south-east Bihar)2 at the beginning of April 2003 to join in the celebration of Chaitra Parva. Chaitra is the first month of the Hindu calendar and the community rejoices (Parva) because it is the New Year. Spring is turning to summer, the crops are at their height and the great fertility of nature is to be celebrated. Chaitra Parva takes place at a time when the productivity of agriculture is at its height, in the waiting period before the harvest. All the neighbouring regions mark this important period with one long party, and dancing forms part of their festivities.3 For Hindus, the ritual aspect of Chaitra Parva is a ‘feast of Shiva’ – it is said to celebrate the god Shiva in a form combined with his consort, Shakti, named Ardhanariswara. Shiva has lain dormant; Shakti, the Earth Mother, rouses him from his Yoga-nidra (slumber) and makes him Shiva of the Nataraja, the divine dancer of the cosmos. Shiva Nataraja sets in motion the cyclical dance of the universe. The combining of Shiva and Shakti – supreme male and female forces – symbolises the zenith of creation, the climax of fertility.

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24 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces

The royal legacy The car hurtles along, slowing down suddenly and pulling onto the sandy roadside when two or three big vehicles bear down on us. The road is newly tarmacked, straight and smooth, with the odd rough patch where a bridge is yet to be built; we are cutting through a region that was once inaccessible, encircled as it is by the Saranda and Bangriposi hills. Uncolonised by Moguls from the north or Marathas from the south, the now-extinct local area called Singhbhum (meaning ‘the land of the Singhs’, or ‘Lions’) managed to retain a unique and independent identity, ruled over by the one Simha Dynasty for fifty-six generations.4 In the 1700s, when Singhbhum dissolved under pressure from tribal factions, only the smaller portion, Seraikella, remained, protected by the British East India Company (see T.N.N. Singh Deo 1954). In 1820 the Maharajas, or kings, of Seraikella signed a security treaty with the British colonial rulers and were given complete autonomy. It was during this period of undisputed safety that they began to show a keen interest in the ancient martial art and dance forms of the region. The main royal innovator, to whom most of Seraikella Chhau’s current characteristics are attributed, was Bijoy Pratap Singh Deo, the great-great grandfather of the present king. Bijoy was educated in Kolkata between the wars where he is said to have met many great thinkers and artists including Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. He visited Tagore’s Shantiniketan Centre for the Arts outside Kolkata – a cosmopolitan place bringing influences from all over the sub-continent and abroad. The dances devised at Shantiniketan were essentially dancedramas, often with a poem as the starting point. Tagore and his collaborators saw no problem in combining Manipuri dance style with Keralan Kathakali, Hungarian and Russian folk dances with versions of English ballet he had seen on his visit to Dartington in Devon. Some shows were reworkings of mythological subjects, often with a focus on the woman at the centre of the narrative; others celebrated the cycle of the seasons or the powerful romance of nature.5 Those were the days when the British colonial presence brought huge opera and ballet companies to the big Kolkata venues. Bijoy was deeply affected by what he saw in Bengal and returned to Seraikella determined to infuse the dance of his region with a similar cultural poise. He wrote pieces for the Chhau repertoire, choreographing themes from Hindu mythology, aspects of nature and abstracted human experiences – among them Chandrabhaga (Moon Maiden), Mayura (Peacock) and Banaviddha (Injured Deer). His older brother, the Maharaja Aditya Pratap Singh Deo, worked on refining the masks, and went to great


lengths to collect the most beautiful gems and fabrics with which the performers were adorned. Three of Aditya’s sons continued the tradition of directing, designing and performing the Chhau dances: Suvendra, a much-lauded practitioner who drowned at the age of twenty-four; Brojendra, his younger brother, who also died young, and the youngest, Suddhendra, who took over the great performing responsibilities when his brothers died. With Rajkumar Suddhendra’s death in 2001, the family’s involvement as Chhau practitioners ceased.

Competition From the 1930s onwards, the royal family introduced their innovations in the dance form into the Chaitra Parva festival, during which a fourday Chhau competition was staged with the Maharaja acting as chief judge (J. B. Singh Deo 1973). According to Tikayet Nrupendra Narayan Singh Deo, writing in the 1950s, Seraikella was divided into two separate areas, each training and presenting dancers at the competition in the palace courtyard. Dancers from the area north of the palace, Bazar Sahi, were patronised by the royal family and those from the south, Brahmin Sahi, by leading Brahmin families. They were amateurs, agricultural labourers whose spare time and enthusiasm were harnessed by the royals and their Brahmin friends. There was clearly a strong tradition of practising martial arts and dance in the Seraikella community, and skills passed down from generation to generation. Bijoy Singh Deo quickly succeeded in introducing his new vision to the local people. For the festival competition, each Sahi was subdivided into four groups called Akharas (T.N.N. Singh Deo 1954, p. 96)6 and dancers would enter and exit from two separate corners of the dance floor, depending on their Sahi allegiance. The winning group was presented with trophies of a flag with golden tassels and a silver staff. But times were changing for the Maharajas. When in 1969 Indira Gandhi withdrew all their constitutionally guaranteed privileges, they no longer possessed funds enough to sponsor the competition. Despite this, the impecunious royal family has managed to keep something of their tradition as patrons going, and the village families kept passing on the repertoire to the next generation. Each year, the Singh Deos get together just enough money for a cut-down version of the festival, for one night only. And in recent years the Government in Seraikella has started to revive the big annual competition – the local Departments of Tourism, Youth, Sports and Culture, Public Relations and others banding together to sponsor a Chhau Mahotsav (meaning ‘The Great Festival of Chhau’). This year’s 2003 festival is the biggest

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26 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces ever, employing judges from all over India, and I have been invited along as guest of honour to the District Government Administration. I am told that almost fifty ‘rural teams’, chosen by important people within their village (village Heads, panchayat elders and so on) have already taken part in an ‘Inter Village Chhau Dance Competition’– ‘a humble effort towards preservation and promotion of this unique dance form’, reads the official programme. These amateur dancers perform not only the Chhau dances of Seraikella, but also those of other regions nearby.7 Five teams have now been picked to perform on each of the three nights of the Chhau Mahotsav festival, with winners declared at the final show. ‘Attractive cash prizes are being given’ states the programme, in total amounting to a huge Rs.150,000 (though how this is divided up is not explained8). The financial incentive is important, as this is one of the poorest regions in the Indian sub-continent and the festival organisers admit that ‘acute financial shortage’ threatens all the performers’ livelihoods. At the official festival site, carpenters are erecting huge wooden cutouts of drummers and dancers on the 1.5-metre-high stage. Behind the stage is the whitewashed building of the Government Chhau Dance Centre. According to the official 2003 programme, the Bihar government established this school in 1961 ‘to preserve and promote the cultural heritage of Seraikella’. They hold workshops and part-time training programmes here (local students pay minimal fees), and members have participated in festivals in France, Japan and the former USSR, as well as events in India. The Dance Centre’s 2003 advertisement claims that ‘about 1,500 students have successfully been trained by the Centre so far’. They are proud of the diversity of their students’ backgrounds, stating that ‘tribal students of Seraikella have joined the Centre in scores to receive intensive training’. Women first studied here officially in 1995, when it became clear that the traditionally male-only dance should expand to accommodate enthusiasts from abroad who were knocking on their doors. In fact, foreigners like me had been coming to study with private gurus since the 1970s. Of the numerous private centres in Seraikella established to accommodate this trend, the best known is the Sri Kedar Centre, established in 1988 by Guru Kedarnath Sahoo, ex-director of the Dance Centre. He is in his late seventies and said to be ailing, but his school still attracts students from all over the world. In contrast, the royal family’s school, Sri Kala Pitha, once affiliated to the National Sangeet Natak Academy, had its assets frozen by the Bihar government back in the 1950s.9 The state grant was withdrawn and diverted to educate locals in other performance skills such as tribal dance and music. A grubby sign


outside the palace advertises ‘Classes 10–12 and 6–8’, but from my personal experience I am sure no real classes have taken place in decades.

Masks In a large, echoey room in the Government Chhau Dance Centre, a mask workshop is going on. The famous mask-makers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were all men from one family called Mahapatra who had originally been tutored in their art by the high priest of the royal temple (J.B. Singh Deo 1973).

Figure 1.1 Prasanna Mahapatra making a mask.

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28 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces I met Prasanna, the last of the direct line of Mahapatras, during the 1990s and commissioned a set of beautifully moulded masks from him. But he died a few years ago and his tight heritage has now been forced to expand. His nephew, Susant, is now teaching the mask-making techniques, and girls and boys from all sorts of families are learning the skill in the hope of earning a living from it. Under the supervision of the school mask-maker, the students sit on the floor moulding models out of clay from the local river. They draw finely stylised features in perfectly flowing curves with a sharp steel instrument called a karni. In an hour or two,10 the clay model will be dusted with ash before being layered with old cotton sari fabric and papier mâché, then bonded and given a smooth surface with clay slip. Once dry, the completed mask is removed from the mould, then polished and painted in a uniform shade, according to the conventional symbolic hue of the character it depicts. The mask-maker is able to vary the design according to the tastes of the dancer, but generally he uses standard colour coding – blue for Krishna, red for Ganesh, darkest blue-grey for Ratri. On top of the monochrome base, elegant black brush strokes are painted around the eyes and mouth. There is a dispute as to how the particular stylisations of flat colour and flowing black lines came about. Some regard their evolution as originating in Aditya Pratap Singh Deo’s artistry and the international influences he and his brother enjoyed at Tagore’s Shantiniketan Centre. Other scholars associate the design with Indonesian masks11 and point out that trade and cultural links between the East Coast of India and Indonesia have existed for thousands of years, possibly as far back as 3 BC.12 These are celebrated every year in the Orissan festival of Bali-Jatra.13 The masks are stylised, dreamy human faces, the designs for specific roles instantly recognisable for an audience tutored in the Chhau conventions. If they depict animals then they are given anthropomorphic form, the most important characteristic being the obviously human emotional state. For example, in Mayura, the exaggerated length of the peacock’s nose is more nose than beak, giving it a haughty expression, intended to signal vanity combined with exuberance. Despite the rigid iconography of the design, a mask will be created for one performer only, the lightweight papier mâché fitting tightly against the face. It has holes at the eyes to look out, but these are small and severely limit the wearer’s range of vision, often forcing the head awkwardly downwards. This limitation leaves the dancer acutely sensitive to sound and touch, ears and feet exaggeratedly alert as they make up for the loss of sight. There are holes at the mask’s nostrils to breathe through the nose; the mouth must be held shut in order for the curve of the mask’s chin to fit snugly


around the face. The breath control required to accommodate this limitation is similar to the contained breath of yoga meditation. In order to minimise the wearing time, the dancer puts on the mask at the last possible opportunity before entering the dance space (and removes it immediately on exiting). In this way, the moment at which the performer enters the dance is the moment they lose their own identity, instantly morphing into their fixed character. Gargi recounts a popular legend about the origins of Chhau that entails this hiding behind the mask: it is said that soldiers from the imperial army stationed in the region during the sixteenth century created an entertainment out of their martial art. In order to protect their identities they donned masks, ‘for they did not want the lower ranks to recognise them’ (Gargi 1991, p. 170). J.B. Singh Deo points to another kind of egality provided by the masks: ‘Masks conceal the identity of all the dancers from the audience, neither the personal beauty nor sex determines the capability of the dancer’ (J.B. Singh Deo 1973, p. 5). The experience of wearing a Chhau mask is claustrophobic and disorientating. Yet as you surrender to the power of the static icon that encloses you, so your performance can be liberated. The body is made open and expressive by the fact that the face is contained and hidden. Rajkumar Suddhendra famously expressed how attractive this was for him as a dancer: When I put on the mask I become impersonal. It is easier to slip into the body of another character. It passes its function to the body. Expression does not follow from my face to body, but is transmitted from my body to my face. (Quoted in his personal leaflet and elsewhere, e.g. J.B. Singh Deo 1973)

Ritual In the field beyond the school (a stadium for an audience of 10,000, the District Administration guide proudly announces) there are numerous carpenters putting together a complicated maze of alleyways using bamboo fencing. The fencing is high, but a grown man could easily ease himself between the lower rungs. One of the makeshift alleys has a red carpet laid along it – the VIP entrance; the other one, longer and uncarpeted, is clearly for the lesser public. Beyond the fences is an open area where the general crowd can come and go freely, and behind this rises the white mass of solid arena seating, held up by scaffolding. I am given my VIP entrance invitation and a timetable of events, and informed

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30 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces that I am part of a group of at least 120 foreigners scheduled to arrive tomorrow for the festival; next year there will be even more. Clearly, the presence of outsiders is considered an important part of the modern-day Chaitra Parva – the organisers of Chhau Mahotsav are aiming at international tourism. To this end there is no expense spared – the whole event is thought to be costing the authorities a vast Rs. 3 million. When the royal family used to run the festival, astrologers would be employed, consulting the royal horoscope to determine the day on which festivities should begin, and these were linked to a long series of rituals. Throughout the preceding month there should have been rituals taking place called Mangalaghat. Maha Mangala is a version of Shakti, the Earth Mother who brings prosperity, and a central figure in Chaitra Parva. During the daytime, women from the scheduled caste community would have carried on their heads decorated pots filled with holy water, the presence of the pots infusing them with the power of Maha Mangala as they danced in a shuddering trance along the streets of Seraikella. The women’s thrusting, stamping dance would be accompanied by drums and flute playing melodies symbolising a journey from anger through joy to sanctity (J.B. Singh Deo 1973). While the spirit of Mangala was within their bodies, they might perform rituals for the benefit of the community

Figure 1.2 The Chhau Mahotsav site by day.


– leaping over prostrate children (an act believed to protect the children from diseases) or giving advice about family problems and making predictions about the future. The women would eventually arrive at a designated site just outside the palace walls where a mountain of flowers, sweets and other offerings had been placed in honour of Maha Mangala. Depositing their pots with the other offerings, they are said to have fallen down in exhaustion, the spirit of the god disappearing until the next time (Natih 1985, p.49). When I enquire about Mangalaghat, my hosts say there is no evidence of such rituals taking place, no pile of offerings to be found outside the palace. They don’t know anything about the Chaitra Parva rituals. All they know is that their three-day dance festival begins tomorrow. These days, the dates of the festival are organised for the convenience of busy Government officials and the local tourism itinerary. Checking scholarly accounts of the dates, I am convinced that tonight is the beginning of the most important festival period – the four days leading up to New Year. According to the literature, an important ritual is due to take place tonight called Jatra Ghata (Jatra means ‘the start’, Ghata ‘a water-filled pot’), this time performed by men. It is said that the ceremony must be performed wherever Chhau is performed, even in the smallest village (J.B. Singh Deo 1973). An earthenware pot representing Maha Mangala has been painted with vermilion (red being the colour of Creation), filled with holy water and buried next to the river. Tonight it should be dug up, its top decorated with flowers and a spray of five mango leaves representing five deities – Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh (Shiva), Shakti and Shiva/Shakti or Ardhanariswara. It should be carried through the streets in vivid procession. Now it is dark, someone thinks there may be something happening down by the river, but without involvement from the Government officials. While they busy themselves at the Chhau Mahotsav site, I take myself off to find the Jatra Ghata. I am directed through the unlit streets down to the banks of the river and the royal bathing place. At the end of the empty road stands a white Shiva temple flanked by straggling mango trees – I recognise it from my regular visits more than a decade before. Beyond the temple loom smooth grey boulders, framing a dark expanse of water – the holy Kharkai River. This is where the royal star of Seraikella Chhau, Suvendra Singh Deo, was mysteriously drowned in 1944. It is also where the clay for the Chhau masks comes from, and the holy water used in traditional Chaitra Parva ceremonies. Many people from the town come to take daily baths in the sacred river and numerous rituals are played out here throughout the year.

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Figure 1.3 The Kharkai river by day.

I spot a little burning fire and a scattering of gas lanterns in the distance, and slither across the rocks towards them. Circled round the fire, thirteen men of varying ages are performing a puja. This unassuming ceremony is what I have been searching for – the ritual element of Chaitra Parva. These men are the devotees called bhakta, all specially chosen from castes below Brahmin to carry out this year’s rituals. Despite the official ignorance of their work, a government representative (possibly the head of the Seraikella Chhau school) is said to have assembled this particular group of individuals and paid them ‘modest cash’ (Khokar and Saryu 1982, p. 76) in return for their ritual obeisance. This year it is rumoured that each man is receiving Rs.500 for five nights’ work – a good wage for casual labourers used to an income of only Rs.50 a day. The bhaktas wear white dhotis and faded red shawls under which we can see sacred threads strung diagonally across their torsos. For the length of the festival they have been given these threads as signs of their conversion to Shiva-gotra (the clan of Lord Shiva); they should be fasting all day, eating and drinking only after their last ritual each night. The leading devotee crouches on the rock, throwing incense and other offerings onto the flames, roughly reciting Vedic chants. He is a young man, chosen as pujari from the Teli (oil-man) caste and given the name ‘pat bhakta’. Next to his sacred fire lies the pole of the jarjara (the flagstaff associated with ritual


performance), pointing downwards towards the water. On each of the four nights, this bamboo pole crested with red cloth and mango leaves will be carried from here either to the temple or to the palace in town. Some equate the pole with the Shiva lingum.14 In the ancient dramaturgical text, Natyasastra (see pp. 66–68), it symbolizes the triumph of good over evil, and its presence consecrates the ground for dancing. Wherever there is a dance in heaven or on earth, says the author of Natyasastra, the jarjara should be used to ward off evil spirits. Also crouching there on the rocks are an enthusiastic young film director and his cameraman (carrying a heavy old 35mm camera). They tell me they are covering Chaitra Parva for a Mumbai archive unit. There are noisy discussions as the bhaktas dress one of their group in the red frock and elaborate jewellery of Mangala.15 This bhakta is an old man, his cheeks sunken, his eyes deep-set and seldom open; he seems already to be in a trance, his hands held in front of his nose, fixed in prayer. His whole face has been painted bright, shining red, and from his ears hang big, round earrings like those worn by the women in Orissan villages. The little sacred pot is strapped on his head with red cloths, and he is thus named ‘ghatwali ’ – the ghat man.16 Around this pot sits a jewelled headdress – cone-shaped with three points crowning the front like a jester’s cap. Each bhakta is draped with garlands of Shiva’s favourite flower, ark mali (little white blooms like jasmine), and the man carrying the jarjara leads off up over the rocks towards the Shiva temple. A small crowd of

Figure 1.4 Bhaktas and jarjara pole on the rock.

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34 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces men is waiting there and they watch the strings of bells being wound around Mangala’s ankles. Then suddenly out of the darkness comes the roar of a generator as the camera crew’s lights are turned on. The men gathered around the bhaktas are cheering ‘Maha, Maha, Maha De’. The drummer begins with a long buzz (called gudgudi) expanding into regular rhythmic meters that become increasingly complex. This is said to represent the evolution of Cosmos out of Chaos (T.N.N. Singh Deo 1954 and J.B. Singh Deo 1973). He is accompanied by the oboe playing a twisting melody above his talas. The dancing flag of the jarjara moves off briskly, followed by the crowd. Mangala’s headdress rises high above our heads, glittering silver in the darkness of the night, as he is led up the road into town. The little van carrying the generator drives slowly to our side, its huge light held aloft by one of the film crew in front of us. I get glimpses of Mangala’s Jatra Ghata movement – said to entail a particular choreography ‘of great antiquity . . . a blending of Tandava and Lasya’ (J.B. Singh Deo 1973).17 The old bhakta is dancing a strange half-dance, half-march – one step forward, then a little hop back onto the back foot, wobbling sideways, his whole body lurching. The bhaktas on either side hold him firm, assisting his uncertain advance. His face is completely static, with the hands held up, always in prayer. The procession starts to be dominated by men who come out of their houses to march and chant alongside the bhaktas, ending up outside the Shiva temple in the centre of town. There, another puja is held, crouching in the dirt of the street. The young bhakta holding the jarjara suddenly becomes possessed, jumping back and forth uncontrollably. An older man comes forward to hold him still while another sprinkles him with holy water. He soon calms down and stands, eyes lowered, recovering consciousness. The high point of the puja comes with the sacrifice of a small black and white goat whose head is severed with a long sword. Its headless body will not acknowledge death and the determinedly kicking limbs pump blood out onto the ground, exactly the same colour and viscosity as the red of Mangala’s motionless face. A bhakta pours the blood from the flailing goat’s body into little leaf bowls, for distribution among the devout crowd who disperse rapidly, bearing their gory trophies.18 During the sacrifice, the ghatwali has been hustled inside the temple where the sacred pot is removed from his head and placed on one side of the sacred lingum of Shiva.

Official festival My official car waits until I have had enough, then drives me through the night back to the government guesthouse, surreally positioned (and well


guarded) in the middle of the huge electricity power station. The following night is the launch of the Government Festival. The programme lists numerous different Chhau performances in strict ten-minute slots, scheduled to start at 6pm and finishing around 10.30pm. Someone thinks the river ritual will probably begin at 8pm, bang in the middle of the Chhau Mahotsav show. Clearly my generous hosts are not aware of the clash, and I feel I must be polite and remain at their gig, forgoing the ritual for this first official evening’s entertainment.19 When I arrive at the festival ground after dark, around 6.30pm, there is a scattering of people sitting on red plastic armchairs in the central layer of the audience. In the VIP chamber at the front is an interesting assemblage of empty seats – the front two rows are deep red velvet sofas, good enough for a few hours’ snooze in this heat (still well above 30 degrees centigrade); behind these are a few rows of more upright benches with stainless-steel frames and red velvet upholstering. Only beyond the fencing do the plastic seats begin. And then, beyond these and another fence, quite a crowd stands waiting for action. No sign of any of the ‘120 foreigners’. On the stage, the official Chhau Mahotsav banner has been decorated with long garlands of fresh marigolds and above it hangs a huge pink Seraikella Chhau mask, its high hair adorned with a crescent moon. In front of this backdrop is a row of tables covered with a long, pale-blue tablecloth and lines of glasses and bottled water. At either side of the stage, alongside the cut-out performers, are extravagant flower arrangements and downstage stand two garlanded podia adorned with numerous microphones. It has all the semblance of an official conference, not a performance. I sink into a soft sofa and watch the press cameras being assembled, placing my camera tripod next to the local TV station’s. After 45 minutes’ waiting, I wander off to look at what is going on outside the arena. Lining the roadside are male performers dressed in pink-and-green-striped turbans and dhotis and each holding an identical long-armed instrument (with one string for plucking), clad in the same stripey fabric. A man with an official badge steps forward to proffer information – these tribal men are performing dances to welcome the Chief Minister, who is himself a member of the Munda tribe and whose arrival is imminent. The Chief Minister heads a region granted independence from the state of Bihar only a few years ago – the state of Jharkhand20 whose cultural and administrative centre is situated here in Seraikella (recently officially named Seraikella-Kharsawan). This region has always been known for its tribal identity. We recall that more than 300 years ago, the antique culture of Singhbhum dissolved because tribal factions rebelled. During the colonial period there were regular pleas for

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36 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces independence for the tribal folk, the Jharkhand Movement evolving to campaign for ‘the betterment of the tribal people’ (Prakash 2001, p. 20). Its leaders argued that ‘the region, with its unique tribal heritage and culture, had been an autonomous political actor in the past and, hence, should be created an autonomous state under the present system’ (Prakash 2001, p. 293).21 Before the area was granted independence in the year 2000, it contained 91 per cent of the total tribal population of Bihar. Now, inevitably Jharkhand ‘draws its political symbolism from tribal culture and tradition’ (Prakash 2001, p. 21).22 It will be interesting to see how this regional identity combines with the local Chhau cultural heritage. The tribal dancers begin to play – a two time marching beat with the unison twang from perhaps fifty instruments creating a deep thudding noise. The men rock from side to side with the rhythm, stamping their welcome, and as the noise goes on the tension rises in expectation that the next set of vehicles along the road will bring the Chief Minister and his entourage. A bus arrives containing policemen, then a big white jeep. Suddenly the players halt their performance and relax. Still no sign of the Minister. I wander away to the Chhau school building, eager to see what is going on backstage. The dancers (there must be more than 100 of them) are lazing around, all fully costumed and made up. Some sit patiently; many are curled up on the cool ground, asleep. At last, two and a half hours late, the Chief Minister has arrived. His tribal welcome must have been short, for I missed it. Suddenly his Ambassador car and accompanying vehicles (including a fully equipped ambulance) are parked next to the red carpet. The Chief Minister is there on the stage, shaking hands with numerous Government officials and a clutch of Chhau artists and gurus. These must be the official competition judges, amongst them the heads of the Government Chhau Dance Centre, here to judge the musical, visual and physical presentation of the teams. The festival is inaugurated by lighting a silver oil lamp, and then they all sit down at the long table to listen to the Chief Minister make his address. He is a young man, impressively tall with a disarmingly expressionless round face. The microphones from at least three TV companies frame his podium, and he is amplified well in order to compete with the loud throb of the generator and the general hubbub of hundreds of impatient audience members thronging at the back of the arena. The speech is in formal Hindi. The Chief Minister begins slowly and carefully, ignoring jeers from a small group in the crowd who seem to be heckling. The TV cameras pivot enthusiastically to catch this little insurrection. The Chief Minister talks of the need for independent


tribal identity, the ‘unique culture’ of Seraikella and Jharkhand, and the difficult socio-economic conditions in the new state. His rhetorical flourishes increase and the audience appears impressed – even the hecklers, who slip underneath the bamboo fence and enter the VIP area in order to listen more closely. The Chief Minister steps down from the podium, and we all cheer as he is escorted towards the sofa at the front, his minions seated around him. With great efficiency, white-shirted young men appear from all directions with large plastic sandwich boxes and huge bottles of Coca-Cola for us VIPs. Onstage, the tables are cleared and the performance begins – three and a half hours late.

Performance The instrumentalists sit to the side, cross-legged, close to their standing mics. Their instruments are similar to those used for the Oriyan Classical dance form, Odissi.23 There are four melodic instruments: the harmonium – that ubiquitous colonial import; flute; shenai – an oboe-like instrument said to be very auspicious; and the mahoori – a rougher form of oboe with a bulge at the bottom. The tunes played by the woodwind instruments are often based on ragas from Hindustani Classical music; the most commonly used are Desh and Malkauns. However, some tunes

Figure 1.5 Chhau Mahotsav musicians.

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38 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces are recognisably local folk melodies, and others well-known songs by eminent Oriya poets (Vatsyayan 1980, p. 78). Kapila Vatsyayan conjectures that there must once have been a sung element in Seraikella Chhau.24 In a way, there still is. Hearing the melody of a song known since infancy, this local crowd is singing along in their heads, silently supplying the lyrics. It is interesting for those of us who do not possess this knowledge to consider how the removal of the stage singer affects our response to the show. The words are concealed from us, but they are not entirely absent. They are like the hidden faces of the masked dancers soon to enter the stage. We sense that things are being kept from us, and we are tantalised. Alongside the pitched instruments is a large number of drums: dhol – the ‘tom-tom’, a barrel-shaped drum with a resonating skin at each end, placed horizontally on the floor, played with the palm and fingers of the left hand and either a blunt stick or the fingers of the right; nagara – a small hemispherical drum played with two thin sticks; chadihadi – a short cylindrical drum played with two little sticks; dhumsa – a huge, bowlshaped kettle-drum played with two heavy blunt sticks. The dancer’s steps are determined by patterns of rhythmic syllables played on the drums – talas ranging from ‘normal tintala to 14-beat dhammara pattern’ (Vatsyayan, 1980). J.B. Singh Deo (1973) states that the Classical talas have been adapted for open-air performance, to be played on big drums (very different from the little Classical tabla). For this reason, the rhythms are simpler and bolder than their Classical originals. There are three tempi in each dance sequence – slow (vilambit), medium (madhya) and fast (drut). A sequence can be repeated several times, depending on the judgement of the dancer. To change tempo and melody, the dancer gives a subtle nod to the drummers and they respond with the katan – a rhythmic flourish played three times – before moving on to the next sequence. The first piece of the 2003 Chhau Mahotsav is Ratri, originally created by Bijoy Pratap Singh Deo and based on verses from the Rig Veda. An official steps onto a podium and announces tonight’s dancers – senior artists from the Government Chhau Dance Centre, Tapan Pattanayak and his brother Rajat. She then reads the florid English prose of J.B. Singh Deo (1973, p. 68):25 In majestic strides Night descends on Earth, spreading a pall of Darkness, inspiring awe in the mind of man and creatures. Human activities and drudgeries have ended . . . the Moon peeps in. Night sports with Moon and pours down nectar: the Moon does likewise in response. The stars and the Moon bathe Nature in hallowed


sublime light: the heart is reassured and seeks repose in the Mother’s lap. The all-pervading Night lulls everybody into sweet oblivion, feeding them with sweet nectar from her loving breasts. Cares and worries vanish . . . The dance depicts all aspects of Night – its terrifying, tranquillising and its serene sublimity. I see the performance only fleetingly, with waiters and officials bobbing busily about in front of me. The raised stage is far away, even from my VIP vantage point, and the footlights light up the performers only erratically. Perhaps the Chhau masks were meant to be seen in this fashion – before the introduction of electric lights fifty years ago, murky oil lamps would have illuminated performances; the boldness and clarity of the masks fulfils a need to be seen in such circumstances. Throughout the ten-minute performance the dancers use a little door upstage where a couple of assistants guide them in and out. The flute (miced) plays a lissom melody while a white-masked dancer enters carrying a lamp and circles the stage. This is Arati – the offering of Light by the Priest. To the beats of the drums, he steps very low, forward and back, offering up his flame in blessing. He then crouches at the upstage doorway for the entrance of Tapan Pattanayak as Ratri – an imposing dancer, Tapan is swathed in dark, silky fabric. From his pointed glittering head-dress, a long, black wig hangs down his back and at the front golden gauze covers the dark-blue, sleepy-eyed Ratri mask. His dhoti matches the colour of the mask, while from his shoulders flows a long, star-spangled cloak, attached at the wrists so he can manipulate the fabric. The shenai and flute play a long, slow melody in unison, and the dancer swings from low to high along one diagonal and then along the other. As the announcer anticipated, Ratri is ‘spreading her pall’, though there is scant chance of ‘inspiring awe’ in the Chief Minister and his entourage who are busy chatting over their sandwiches and fizzy drinks. Their political drudgeries are far from ended; they are clearly using this opportunity to discuss Affairs of State. Ratri floats upstage to welcome a second white-masked dancer who represents Moon (played by brother Rajat). On top of Moon’s tightly bound, spangly white costume he wears a little pointed silver hat and perfectly symmetrical, curved wings. Moon is shy; gradually he is wooed into entering the space by the confident Ratri and begins to circle as Ratri takes him round the waist centre stage, and the two sidestep together high up on their toes. Moon runs off to the side and Ratri gently pursues, the high-pitched sound of their ankle bells a perfect rhythmic accompaniment for the drums. The flowing movements are suddenly halted by a strangely suspended pose, the pretty masks of Moon and

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Figure 1.6 Tapan Pattanayak plays Ratri.


Night facing out front. Are they stopping in order for our cameras to get a good shot? Press and TV are extremely important for the commercial success of the show – a few good pictures will be great publicity, proof for the Government sponsors that the tourism enterprise is working. Ratri enfolds Moon from behind with her spangled cloak. They join hands and hop from one foot to the other, sideways again in lilting fashion, to the centre of the stage. Moon’s arms are raised in an arc above his head, his hands resting up on the curved points of his wings. From behind, Night rocks him – this must be the lulling, and is it the breastfeeding? Moon crouches down and interlocks fingers with Ratri’s; their hands twist down and up. Ratri then releases her hands and begins a fluttering movement up and down around the crouched figure in front of her. Now the flute’s tune is at its most high-pitched; the drums are beating fast. Moon jumps up and circles round anticlockwise and Night follows, the two of them exiting rather suddenly, leaping as they go. As the crowd behind us applauds, the Chief Minister stands up. Presumably he is going to make some sort of congratulatory speech or donation. But no, he is leaving. His officers also stand, and there are many politic bows and scrapes while the next performance begins. Again, my view is obscured. By the time the Chief Minister’s entourage has left and the soft drinks distribution completed, the third dance has already begun. But there are no more Seraikella Chhau numbers scheduled in the programme for a while – instead, a martial art demonstration and battle scenes from glittery-clad groups performing other Chhau styles. These other dances have a communal dynamic, a collective bombast that contrasts starkly with the touching solos and duets of Seraikella Chhau. The crowd seems to enjoy the spectacle.

Workshop demonstration Seraikella Chhau is said to be part of the one regional Chhau family, sharing its origins and inner structure with several other forms. Over the years, the dance gurus have codified its constituent elements into a strictly ordered pedagogy. This schematised approach and the ‘ancient origins’ shared by all the Chhaus are being demonstrated in a ‘festival workshop’ taking place next day. My Government hosts are keen for me to attend. At the community centre around fifty children are seated on the floor, girls on the left and boys on the right. There is a clutch of adults sitting on chairs at the back; I seem to be the only foreigner. The old guru from the panel of judges the night before begins his demonstration with a long peon of praise to Chhau, describing the ‘six elements’ (he says this in English) combined within it – Kam (lust), Krodh (anger), Lobh (greed),

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42 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces Mad (pride), Matsarya (jealousy) and Moho (attachment). How exactly they relate to the dances is not explained. The children fidget, but their attention is caught by the arrival of martial artists. The guru gets the two young men to demonstrate some exercises (‘for body fitness’ he says, in English) with swords in their right hands and circular shields in their left. They are accompanied by the dhol player who is ordered to play ‘slow’, ‘fast’ and ‘very fast’ rhythms (again, English words) while swords are wielded and feet swing about. Sometimes a kettle-drum and flute join in. The young men move in parallel lines from one side of the stage to the other, forwards, backwards and to the side, exhibiting their thrusting martial gestures. They demonstrate ways to lead and ways to follow. Later the men perform some circular movements that are reminiscent of the sinewy contours of the Chhau choreography. Their feet are light but firm, with quite a lot of weight in the toe, not the heel; often the toes are pointed, exhibiting great strength and agility. These exercises are designed for power and suppleness in preparation for armed combat. A lowered centre of gravity, head moving always in conjunction with the upper body and power generated from the diaphragm are qualities shared with many martial art forms. Two dancers are then brought on to demonstrate the similarities between Seraikella Chhau and Manipuri dance. These dancers are members of the large Manipuri dance community in Delhi, and eager to show the martial-art basis and graceful beauty of their own dances. Their gentle alertness and rounded, flowing movements do indeed have much in common with Seraikella Chhau movements. There are similar sequences of steps to be repeated. These are controlled with the breath – inhaling with an inward movement and exhaling with the outward gesture. The sequence is remembered with the help of mnemonic syllables recited with the guru to control rhythm and order. No one explains how the two forms, geographically so distant from one another, can be related. Perhaps Tagore’s Shantiniketan dancers would have had an idea. Now Tapan Pattanayak, last night’s Ratri and a senior teacher from the Government Chhau Dance Centre, takes the stage. He asks the children what the props in his hand are – ‘A sword and a shield,’ they chant in Oriya, the language of nearby Orissa and the most common one round here. Yes, sword (‘pari’), shield (‘khanda’). This is the name given to their martial art: Parikhanda. No further explanation of the origins or associations is given. Accompanied by drums and flute, Tapan Pattanayak demonstrates the basic poses called pranam, meaning ‘a salute with military arms’. These begin with dharan pranam, a closed position with


sword and shield held vertically in front of the body, then opening out with the sword held aloft and shield to the side. The body is always kept low, legs bent and hips pushed out. This basic stance is known as tribhangi, or ‘three bends’ (referring to the right angles made by the legs at hip, knee and ankle) and is used as a pivotal pose in Odissi. In that context, the tribhangi is said to depict the female deity, personified female energy. Many people claim that there is a strong Odissi dance element to Seraikella Chhau, and certainly the shapes of the kicks and turns in the two forms seem to echo one another.26 As we have seen, they use similar instruments and some of the same talas, leading to a similarity in the rhythms made by stamping feet and jangling ankle bells. How exactly the two forms came to influence one another, however, is complicated by history. Odissi dance traces its origins back to the second century BC, performed as a daily ritual by female temple dancers (maharis). During the British Colonial rule, the maharis were disapproved of, their practices banned, and with their demise the dance form was forgotten. It is only since India’s Independence in 1947 that Odissi has been revived, through the painstaking research of practitioners who took inspiration from temple sculptures, palm-leaf manuscripts and Gotipuo – a temple dance form that had survived, performed by young boys dressed as girls. In the official festival leaflet – ‘The Art of Chhau’ – we are told that Seraikella Chhau also shows influence from Gotipuo. No one seems able to demonstrate where exactly this influence lies and Tapan Pattanayak insists there is none.27 Having set aside his sword and shield, Tapan then demonstrates Parikhanda movements used in Chhau dance training: one leg well forward, the other back, he trots from one foot to the other, swinging his torso back and forth. His arms rotate as if they are holding a skipping rope and his head flings back with the movement. This pendulum swing develops the leg and back muscles to perform the characteristic hipswinging style of Chhau dance. The movements require great agility and suppleness from the whole body. Now he jumps forward, well centred at the hips, legs open, throwing his torso forward and then back as he lands. There is something of the leaping deer in his light-footed abandon. Sometimes, he says, the exercise concentrates on the upper body (topka) and sometimes on the lower (ufli). 28 Tapan Pattanayak then gets the dhol player to accompany him with a new and more complicated tala as he performs some steps coming downstage towards the audience. The different styles of movement in Seraikella Chhau, some of them high kicking, most of them low, are called chalis.29 Most are named after the manner in which they are performed – crosswise, backwards, three at a time, etc. Some are named after animals or other moving things – the

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44 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces walk of the crane; the walk of a cow; the leap of the tiger; the gait of a demon; the waves of the sea. Tapan demonstrates the goumatra chali, a zigzagging movement taken from the action of a cow urinating. Beginning with the dharan pranam, he moves in straight lines, taking two and a half steps forward before turning 45 degrees onto the opposite diagonal. After four zigzag lines, he returns to his closed position again, with the sword upright in front of him. In the bag chali (the walk of the crane), the first position is the open aspect of dharan pranam – sword held aloft. The dancer steps forward on his toes, knees lifted high up to the chest, then straightening out completely as the foot touches the ground. Tapan Pattanayak now introduces us to another element of the Chhau dances – upalayas, or mimetic gestures with the feet. He lifts his leg high, his knee held at waist height at a right angle to his body and his lower leg dangling down; he stretches his toes forward and dips, stroking them back and forth. This is gobar-gola, mixing cow dung with water. The same toes then descend and crunch up, as if they are lifting a small pebble. In another movement, he mimes putting a sacred vermilion mark on his forehead by swinging up his right foot and touching his third-eye centre with his toe. Upalayas come from the everyday activities of an Oriyan housewife.30 The gestural use of the feet is an important component of Chhau dance – not only does it supply a rhythmic basis for the rest of the body in dance, but it also provides a highly original element, making the feet instruments of feeling, actors in themselves. While the dancer has sacrificed facial expressiveness to the stasis of the mask, he has gained a sophisticated vocabulary of expression through his feet. Examples of upalayas from J.B. Singh Deo’s (1973) comprehensive list of thirty-six are: cleaning anklets/bracelets/toe rings/heels; catching a fish and piercing a fish; winnowing; grinding; pounding; sprinkling; lifting a pebble; and throwing a pebble. All of these would, in real life, be performed with the hands, yet here the action has been relocated in the feet. There is something very moving about the male dancer’s feet performing a woman’s hand gestures – normally clumsy and unspecific toes carry out the detailed tasks of fingers. Transposed from hands to feet, from female to male, commonplace actions become fascinating and beautiful; the ordinary becomes extraordinary. In order to create a Chhau dance, the two elements, upalaya and chali, must be ‘woven into a phrase’ (Pani, Sangeet Natak 13, 1969, 35), becoming a bhangi or ‘picture’.31 The muscular martial art elements of chali are married to the flowing gestures of upalaya, masculine and feminine conjoined. Names for some of these bhangi units are ‘action’, ‘shyness’, ‘dejection’, or ‘looking at the moon’. The dance is evolving


from descriptions of movement in terms of animals and natural elements (the chalis), accompanied by illustrations of women’s gestures (the upalayas), into blocks of choreography – what Vatsyayan calls ‘a cadence of movements’ (Vatsyayan 1981, p. 78). Like the anthropomorphic masks, everything serves Chhau’s central focus on heightened states of emotion, and thereby on human relationships. Tapan Pattanayak stands elegantly on one leg like a crane as he engages the children. He is inviting some of them to come and try it. There is much consternation among the girls as they decide who should represent them in front of the audience. Eventually two thirteen-year-olds are pushed onto the stage. The boys take longer to dare to slope up there. Once they are lined up to copy the teacher, the boys are horribly clumsy, wobbling on one leg. The girls do pretty well, their Classical dance training enabling them to stamp and kick to the strict rhythm of the drums.

More ritual That evening at the Chhau Mahotsav, I leave the sweaty comfort of the velvet sofas and walk round the back of the arena. There, where the crowd is obliged to stand, a large area of rough grass has been given over to fairground stalls. It seems that thousands of people have been bussed in to support the show, and the authorities have taken it upon themselves to educate as well as entertain. In the first marquee is a photographic

Figure 1.7 Tapan Pattanayak coaches two girls.

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46 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces exhibition of Jharkhandi politicians at work – earnest discussions with farmers and factory workers. On the opposite wall hang simple, childlike paintings of idyllic tribal life – mud huts and grass skirts. Standing in a corner is a tall glass museum cabinet that might conventionally be used to display a stuffed animal. It contains a shiny brown three-foot statue of a man in dhoti and turban. He is garlanded with multi-coloured tinsel and above him swings a pink light bulb, which constantly flashes on and off. I wander on to the next exhibition tent, this time dedicated to low-cost housing techniques, with diagrams of special brick walls to repel rats, latrines that are easily maintained and kitchens with good ventilation. There are food stalls – puri and samosas and a ‘Chinese Dinners’ bar, plus various stalls containing home-made products. Next to an ayurvedic herb stall is one selling Yamaha motorbikes, their engines continually booming. As I make my way back past the Government tent, a film projector is being switched on and a crowd is gathering for tonight’s TV soap, projected onto a suspended sheet. Across the field, in the distance, blue-faced Krishna is dancing with gopis in red dhotis. Their amplified ankle bells ring out against the drums and flute as they make great leaps and turns about the stage, coming together for displays of acrobatic skill that invite applause. The soap opera crowd is completely oblivious. At the river the bhaktas are quietly beginning their third-night Krishna ritual – Gharia Bhar (meaning ‘The Whole Family’). They all wear white dhotis and red shawls. On the smooth, dark rocks, lit up by the film crew’s lights, the young pujari is intoning Vedic chants in a disinterested fashion. He burns offerings of flowers and incense, chatting to the others in between. The puja includes the filling of little leaf bowls the size of a cupped hand with oil and burning wicks; these are floated out into the darkness. Another young man has been chosen as Krishna and dressed up in a long-sleeved black dress with silver strips decorating its gathered skirt. There is a Victorian feel to the dress, and perhaps also to his red cap – a row of pointed cotton knots sticking out horizontally from his forehead. The man has shiny black paint daubed on his face and receives garlands round his neck, chatting and smiling as this is done. Two older men, both wearing spectacles, dress themselves as Radha and Ruckmini – Krishna’s gopis, or milkmaids. They are not made up and wear loosely tied saris – one red, the other orange – with their palus drawn up around their heads.32 The crowd’s chant rises again: ‘Maha, Maha . . . De.’ Up on the road, Krishna receives his ankle bells and a glittering head-dress is attached to his crown. On his shoulders is placed a short pole clad in red fabric, with little red pots (also fabric-clad) hanging from either end.33


Figure 1.8 Krishna and his gopis in street parade.

He is now in trance, eyes downwards towards his already dancing feet. The steps are echoed by Radha and Rukmini who walk on either side of his swinging pots. Theirs is a rocking dance: flat feet placed at right angles, heel to heel, the dancer rocks forward and then back, kicking the front foot into the air. The movement is similar to the Mangala’s, but lighter and more controlled, shared as it is between the three performers. Periods of this lilting movement, going nowhere, are broken by lurches forward into the crowd, who shout, goading them. Some people come forward to jeer at the vulnerable drag figure’s perpetual dance; but Krishna is locked in his movement, oblivious. The atmosphere is more sinister than joyous – this Krishna, though young, is certainly not the usual divine lover cavorting in pastoral bliss. As the jarjara carrier leads him and his followers through the palace gate, the upbeat crowd disperses, clearly not keen to enter the royal grounds. There in the courtyard stands the tall young king, hands behind his back, bathed in all the lights the film crew has been able to rig. Krishna and his consorts continue their rocking, perfectly in time with the drums and one another, as a couple of bhaktas come forward to remove their costumes and make-up. The pat bhakta gathers his group together under a frangipani tree in front of the temple (dedicated to

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48 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces Rama, a devotee of Shiva) and makes another puja. This time he is blessing a triangular wooden frame covered in red fabric, at the base of which two swords are slotted horizontally, their blades pointing upwards. The young man who played Krishna now has a clean face and wears only a pale dhoti. Quite calm, perhaps still in trance, he is led forward to the wooden structure. With a sudden roll from the drums, and a shout from the group, he is helped up onto the frame; he holds the top of the wooden struts and stands, naked feet across the double blade. As he does so, his colleagues lift the frame up onto their shoulders and revolve it around in front of us. Just at this moment, the film crew’s camera runs out of film – the director is swearing and throwing his arms up in despair, but no one seems to notice. In a few seconds the frame is down again, and the lead performer makes obeisance to the blades before receiving a donation of new cloths from the king – the ritual has somehow sanctified this royal courtyard space and temple.

Last night The final night of the Chhau Mahotsav festival begins with the famous Seraikella Chhau dance, Chandrabhaga. In nearby Orissa, where the River Chandrabhaga meets the sea, stands Konark, the famous temple to the sun and a popular tourist destination. This story is the legend behind its creation: the innocent daughter of Sage Sumanya, Chandrabhaga, is

Figure 1.9 Chandrabhaga (performer unknown).


dedicated to the Moon Goddess. One night she is playing on the seashore when she is caught unawares by the Sun God who makes ‘odious advances’ on her (Khokar 1979, p. 135). She escapes by committing suicide, drowning in the ocean. The dance is said to celebrate ‘the sanctity of chastity which cannot be violated even by the Gods’ (Khokar 1979, p. 135) and is considered a pièce de resistance of the Chhau form, originally conceived by Bijoy Pratap Singh Deo to a famous Odissi melody. The masks and costumes are particularly valued for the extravagance of their design. In this performance, a male dancer enters wearing a green dress, crowned in a head-dress with a half-moon at the front and a fan of golden rays at the back. The mask is pale pink – the same as the big one suspended above the stage. Chandrabhaga dances solo, lifting up her skirts and swinging in quarter circles to a slow three-time drum tala. She mimes playing on the beach, perhaps winding in fishing nets. The Sun’s entrance initiates a new, faster two-time rhythm. Bearing his cumbersome, round sun symbol on his back, he stamps and kicks back and forth like Krishna in last night’s ritual. Then he is up on his toes, swaggering, trying to catch Chandrabhaga, who scuttles away across stage. As she hops into the air, legs splayed, the Sun echoes the movement. He chases the maiden off-stage (to her suicide?), then returns for the third section of the dance which expresses his frustration – with his head down, his body swings forward and back, again like Krishna of the street dance. A little later, I make my way across town to see what else is going on. On this, the final night of Chaitra Parva, the whole community is out celebrating. And the royal family has organised its own low-budget show in the palace temple courtyard where last night’s final rituals took place. Now I have the opportunity to observe the Chhau dances performed in the same space as the rituals. Over the preceding days, local Santhali tribal girls have prepared an earthen dance floor (asara) in one corner of the courtyard using a mixture of cow dung and clay. It is a similar size to the Government floor – a generous 7 metres square or so, warm and springy for dancing. The tribal girls have painted white lines around the four sides and in the centre is a blue cross circled with white. Above the dance area hangs a large, coloured canopy (shamiana), with multi-coloured glittering tinsel tassels hanging down, and round the edge are bamboo poles, fencing off all four sides of the square. A crowd fills the courtyard, with the royals seated on plastic chairs along one side, and the musicians on the floor opposite. Above the musicians is a banner declaring this to be the Chhau festival of ‘Sadhei Kala’(a name to replace ‘Seraikella’, meaning ‘Sixteen Arts’) – the royals are keen on their arts heritage,

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50 Seraikella Chhau: competing spaces however diminished. The film crew is there too – guests of honour to the royals, jumping up once in a while to follow a performer round the space with bulky equipment. Everyone finds somewhere from which to view the performances – sitting or standing, perched on parapets and walls or simply walking around. Unlike the Government arena where family groups stick together, men and women here choose to be separate – the place is small enough to keep an eye on one another even if families split up to be with friends. This space feels much more accessible than the Governmentraised stage, the height of which formed a communication barrier between audience and show. There, the dancers were cut off, museum artefacts like the little tribal figure in his glass case; here they perform on the same level as the audience, without having to compete with other forms of entertainment. The courtyard space, in the round rather than front-on, allows the movements to flow round 360 degrees, rather than fixing the focus front-on. This event is a coming together of all Seraikella inhabitants to perform and witness something they love and in which they are all expert. This audience has a working interest in the performances: each of them has probably studied Chhau and therefore knows the dances from the inside, with precise technical knowledge; their children are here on-stage,

Figure 1.10 Seraikella palace crowd.


displaying the results of months and years of training outside the hard work of family life. The crowd is proud and also critical, expecting the most from each dance. Though there is no longer any competition element and no incentive of cash prizes, serious judgement nevertheless goes on – with less than ten minutes in which to dance, solo or duet, the performer has only a brief opportunity to exhibit their skill. There seems to be little hierarchy in the gathering – as host, the royal family takes the front-row seats, but this presence is distinctly low profile. The community appears to have lost its definitions of rank in the embrace of the event.34 Here is a young dancer performing Chandrabhaga. Her head-dress is cone-shaped, without rays coming from it, and the rest of the costume is blue. Her long, silky sleeves create the movement of water around her as her hands, palms together, dip up and down in a version of swimming. Now the hands separate and she is up on her toes, crawling through the ocean. Her dance becomes increasingly animated as she begins to spin, one hand held high, palm heaven-wards, the other palm earth-wards. The river is drowning in the sea. Here in the palace courtyard the young prince Suvendra once starred as Chandrabhaga. Like her, he drowned. And the same water in which he drowned is carried each night by the bhaktas in their crazed processions from river to palace temple. Sacred water, death, chastity; past and present, fact and fiction, the dancer and the dance; they are all intertwining in this enclosure. Now Krishna is entering sideways, running in little steps, arms held in a big circle in front of his chest, flute in his right hand. His ankle bells jangle loudly; his mask is brightest blue, his glittering head-dress the same as the one worn by his bhakta cousin. The madal drum plays a tala called Boll – Da go da tin, traditionally associated with the Santhali tribal dances, and a slow, twisting melody from flute and shenai rises above it. Krishna moves upstage to welcome Radha, her head covered in a sparkling red sari palu, and they dance in circles, contrary-wise – a coy mating dance. They come together sideways-on, back to back, rocking like the street Krishna and his mates, one step forward and one step back; then they cross one another, running, and spin away to opposite corners of the floor. Together again in another version of Krishna’s rocking, they take two steps forward, up on the toes, and then one flat-footed stamp backwards. The mating ritual continues with twisting movements of the torso from the hips. Now Radha is crouching; Krishna joins her in a low squat and, for the first time, they are facing one another. They swing up and down together, from crouch to standing position and back. With hands conjoined they come downstage towards the seated royal family, twisting their arms in figures of eight. The wind instruments keep their melody solid, but the drums increase speed. The two dancers circle the

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Figure 1.11 Krishna and Radha (performers unknown).

space presenting a final image of perfectly united male and female, God and Beloved, before they back up, hopping towards the exit. All around the courtyard the music is amplified through speakers; yet, despite its great volume, there is a competing noise going on – another Chhau band playing somewhere nearby. I tactfully extricate myself from the row and mingle with the crowd moving through the stone archway of the palace gates. Outside, in the square opposite, is another dance floor, another awning held aloft with bamboo poles. Under it sits a group of musicians, this time with a plain backcloth behind from which dancers enter and exit. I recognise some of the dancers who just performed in the palace show and am told they are all pupils of guru Kedarnath Sahoo. Perhaps this performance outside the palace derives from the original Brahmin Sahi,35 while the royal show is the Bazar sahi; they use exactly the same repertoire of dances. Backstage, there is an atmosphere of great intensity – gurus are psyching up their performers, but Kedarnarth himself is not in evidence, most likely due to ill health. People at the front are hustled out of the way while a chair is placed for me. They don’t seem in the slightest bit bothered, much too interested in what is going on onstage. The music accompanying Kedarnath Sahoo’s troupe seems particularly beautiful, the flute player’s lilting melody perfectly at one with the


dancers’ movements. There are syncopated rhythms in their steps, moments of abrupt posturing and sudden changes of direction that cut into the sinewy lyricism of the dance, creating a fascinating counterpoint. These performers, often men playing women, have much in common with martial artists in their fleetness of foot and strong physique. The muscular body contrasts with the curving delicacy of the mask, the conjunction of the two making the dancer appear instantly both male and female. When the Chhau dances are performed with such skill, one sees an inherent dramatic tension within one solo performance – combining strength and softness, the dancer is able to morph instantly from love to hate, from hope to fear. The last of the royal dancers, Suddhendra Singh Deo, danced with just such freedom.36 His willowy limbs seemed to float out of his twisting torso, his shoulders and upper back somehow joining with the mask so that its frozen expression seemed to melt into life with the movement. At one moment it might retreat, pensive and introvert; at the next it thrust forward, intensely aggressive. For Suddhendra, the combination of Tandava and Lasya, masculine and feminine dance, was the Chhau’s intrinsic power. The dancer behind the Chhau has entered an alternative level of physicality where he no longer bears the burden of male or female, master or servant. Leaving the noise of the perpetual dances, I walk to the silent riverside for tonight’s ritual, Kalighat.37 On the final night of Chaitra Parva (always after midnight), the Ghata is filled with water and painted black. It is carried by a bhakta representing Kali,38 to be left at the temple altar. The royal family says that it is inauspicious for its members to witness this procession, and if they wish to have a Chhau performance on this night, they must make a special request and a payment to the bhaktas.39 Gargi points out that religious ritual therefore takes precedence over regal rite: ‘The law insures the superior authority of the temple and the law-abiding tradition of the royal household’ (Gargi 1991, p. 169). Like the Government show, the royal performances continue while the ritual is going on. Perhaps this coinciding of dance and ritual is not a clash after all, but a complementary relationship – are we intended to elide our experience of the street ritual and the street performance? Is this drifting from field to courtyard to street, the true way to experience Chaitra Parva? Rather than sit still and watch a sequence of short dances following one after the other, one can take advantage of the fragmented structure to see other events happening simultaneously. Here in the street there are many things going on; if you keep moving you can feel the way in which they intersect, their interdependence on all levels – spatial, temporal and spiritual.

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Figure 1.12 Moon (performer unknown).


Kali has been dressed in the same black dress that Krishna wore, and her face is shining black. No garlands tonight; no extended puja with chanting; neither the film crew nor the drummers have turned up. Perhaps they, like the royals, are frightened of the Goddess of Destruction and her dance. Kali is led up the slope and adorned with bells and jewellery, though the ghata is nowhere to be seen. Then the men set off up the street, lit by one gas lamp and accompanied only by the jangle of Kali’s dancing ankle bells. One step forward, one step back – again, the rocking lilt of one possessed. Only a small, quiet crowd accompanies us to the central town temple, though on the way a goat is brought on a lead, trotting along like an obedient dog. On the steps outside the temple a little fire is built by the pujari who burns offerings and then blesses the ground and the goat, daubing sacred ash on its forehead and flicking holy water on its face. The creature seems mesmerised by it all and tips its head charmingly to the side in order for the pujari to lift its floppy ear and whisper sacred prayers. The drummers have now joined the group, and they intensify the atmosphere with chanting and a crescendo of beating as the goat’s trust is rewarded with a sudden clumsy slicing of the sword blade at the back of its neck. Suddenly the drums are still; the crowd has wandered off. One of the bhaktas rescues the still flailing goat’s body and, holding its back legs together, starts to march down the street. A couple of bhaktas are shouting at him – there is some argument over who should have the carcass. The pujari thinks it should be him; the man who wielded the sword thinks it should be him. But as their colleague disappears into the darkness, they are not bothered enough to pursue him. Their devotional job is over for this year,40 with or without the meat bonus.

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2

Expanding Chhau Beyond masks and Maharajas

Everything we have seen and heard in Seraikella has harked on the past – the martial art heritage, the ancient and mysterious rituals by the river, the sad demise of the dedicated Maharajas. In its festival presentation, it takes on the trappings of modernity with the microphones and the lights and the television cameras, but essentially Seraikella Chhau seems stuck in its ways, with little potential for expanding and reworking. In this chapter I will attempt to explain why this is, and try to expand my search in order to uncover the best of Chhau in its innovative, expanding form. The corpus of material performed as Seraikella Chhau has remained pretty well unchanged for more than half a century. No one has introduced new repertoire since Bijoy Pratap Singh Deo died. This means that the form itself is infused with the spirit of the past. The delicate sensibilities of a pre-Independence elite, the influence of Rabindranath Tagore and European ballet (Schechner 1983, p. 190), all seem to be preserved there. What does the gently expiring deer or the elegantly strutting peacock have to do with the modern world? It is difficult to see what Bijoy’s repertoire has to do with the contemporary zeitgeist. Nor does it have anything to do with contemporary Jharkhand, except as the recipient of new Government funds. Now that Seraikella Chhau is well and truly freed of its association with the Maharajas and the new Government has appropriated it as part of its ‘tribal culture’, it may well receive increased funding. But the new patrons are not interested in new repertoire, of course. They are interested in two very specific things – presenting a solid cultural (read ‘political’) identity, and attracting tourists. The idea of a cultural identity to be found in the Maharajas’ old entertainments seems very strange, though I suppose anything that invites a crowd can be construed as mass cultural identity. From our brief experience, it seems uncertain whether foreign tourists will pour into Jharkhand for the Chhau Mahotsav festivals of the future. Perhaps the

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general expansion of tourism across the sub-continent will sell a few more masks in the shopping malls of Delhi and Kolkata. But they are no more than heritage export. Like many Indian dance forms, Chhau is taught as a traditional form, fixed in its style and repertoire. The fact that it is practised by amateurs might be another reason why it has not moved on creatively. These dancers are hard-working locals, without the ambition or the financial incentive to develop their skills beyond the tradition they inherit. Amateurs are by nature conservative. It is hard to find an amateur group anywhere in the world putting on a devised piece of theatre or one that explores new staging techniques. Amateur theatre in general is an enthusiastic replication of well-tried and tested popular repertoire. It is hard to engage any of the Chhau teachers or performers in discussion on the potential for moving beyond the inherited conventions, either by developing the work within the tradition or by its being used elsewhere in innovative ways. It is difficult to trace how foreign theatre practitioners who have studied Seraikella Chhau dance have taken it into their own work. As Richard Schechner has said, the exercises devised by Guru Kedarnarth Sahoo and his followers do not help the student grasp the underlying logic of the performance. That can come only after years of experience as the student deciphers for himself what he is doing. Many excellent performers never come to this kind of theoretical knowledge. Schechner 1983, p. 216 Rather than becoming centres for creative experimentation and transformation, the dance schools have concentrated on attracting interest (and therefore money) from abroad. The foreign student is encouraged to indulge old prejudices about India’s ancient culture and esoteric heritage, rather than study Seraikella Chhau as a living, breathing art form. In searching for a modern-day Chhau free of the shackles of heritage culture, we need to look further afield. The Chhaus of the other regions nearby have much in common with Seraikella Chhau, but they do not suffer from all of the same problems. Scholars have tended to study three forms,1 all taught and practised to some degree by amateurs within their small region. Each is named after its locale – Seraikella, Purulia and Mayurbanj. Most of the groups come together sporadically – for competitions or possibly for village performances in New Year celebrations immediately following Chaitra

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58 Expanding Chhau: beyond masks and Maharajas Parva. All are presented at their local festivals as traditional, authentic dances whose repertoire and techniques appear locked in time, unassailable. But some are more so than others.

Purulia Chhau (Manbhumi) According to the Chhau Mahotsav programme, these group dances originated in the Baghmundi dance from Purulia district, with patronage from the local agrarian community. They do not seem to have had any link with the Maharajas, and there is no formal pedagogical system. Ashutosh Bhattacharya, the Bengali professor who ‘discovered’ the dances in the 1960s and has revived the form with Government sponsorship for competitions, thinks that it originated in the local warrior caste called dom who are now an outcaste group and beat the drums for Chhau dances. The dancers wear huge masks, displaying their athleticism with high circular jumps and extravagant leaps. The pattern of their steps imitates trees, animals, the gods or ‘primitive man’ (Chhau Mahotsav programme). The masks represent mythological characters – animals, demons and gods – topped with big, fanning head-dresses and vibrate with a violent shaking of the upper body. The Purulia Chhau dances can become quite violent and out of control (Natih 1985, p. 20). Roma Chatterji has written extensively about this form, its Government patronage and its ubiquitous presence as a showpiece of Indian tribal culture at international festivals (Chatterji 1995). She is interested in the way contemporary performances incorporate modern interests, Hindi film music and naturalistic elements (for example, a new style of mask with a human face that is created for the mass tourism market but has been integrated into the dances). Contemporary Purulia Chhau performed in the villages incorporates all sorts of extraneous popular elements to woo the crowd. PhD student Prakriti Kashyap describes the following: Besides costumes, headgears and masks which have become heavier and more gaudy, during my field work I came across a group which had employed a nautch 2 to dance at special junctures to cheap Hindi film songs. The regular drummers stopped playing while the eunuch danced to a popular film song. He repeated the banal gestures as the crowd cheered and whistled. On inquiring about this sad trend, the leader of the troupe replied that in order to have more shows he had to introduce such devices.3 Small contemporary theatre groups in Bengal are using some of the ecstatic group movements from Purulia Chhau in their experimental


productions. However, these largely amateur shows are under-resourced in all sorts of fundamental ways and do not last long enough to enter the repertoire of accessible public performance

Mayurbhanji Chhau This style of Chhau originates in Baripada, Orissa (also called Eastern Singhbhum in the new Jharkhand geography). This region was once the seat of the Maharajas of Mayurbhanj who cultivated the form, encouraging its eclectic combination of tribal dances, martial art movements and Classical dance style. Schechner tells us that dancing masters from Seraikella were imported at the beginning of the twentieth century to train the Mayurbhanj dancers (Schechner 1983, p. 200). Performers have no mask, though the face may be heavily painted and held stiffly in masklike stylised expression; costumes tend to be light and simple in basic colours of yellow, green and red. Within this visual language, however, there may be extravagant innovations such as a full lion costume in Durga’s dance or the popular hairy bear in Jambeb (Natih 1985, p. 12; Gargi 1991, p. 181). Movements tend to be linear rather than circular, often jerky and aggressive but then melting into more lyrical, fluid steps and acrobatic poses. The group dances can be simple tribal dances, illustrative hunting rituals or more mysterious representations of Hindu epic stories. Gargi states that the two royal families of Seraikella and Mayurbhanj were rivals with their different styles (Gargi 1991, p. 180). They seem to have set out similar schemes of training using Classical dance terms and Parikhanda exercises. The Baripada Government authorities have been staging their big Chaitra Parva Chhau festival for many years, with even greater pomp and ceremony than Seraikella’s. Mayurbhanji Chhau shares its pedagogical rigours with Seraikella Chhau. However, it is free of one of Seraikella Chhau’s contemporary problems – the mask. Even if Mayurbhanji Chhau is appropriated by Government tourism initiatives, it cannot market itself on this simple visual attraction. Nor is it hampered by quite such a narrow repertoire or over-refined sensibility. Professional Bengali theatre artists Daksia Seth, Bharat Sharma and Santosh Nair have all used Mayurbhanji Chhau for contemporary theatre work, usually combining it with other folk performance styles. Choreographers Ranjana Gaur and Sonal Mansingh have created Odissi-Mayurbhanji Chhau dance combinations in the past, inducing a fair amount of interest from the modern Indian dance fraternity. However, such interest tends to be merely in superficial technicalities and even the contemporary dance world still pigeonholes the work as ‘ancient’ and ‘ritual’.

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60 Expanding Chhau: beyond masks and Maharajas

Ileana Citaristi The contemporary performer who has worked longest with Mayurbhanji Chhau is Ileana Citaristi, a dancer originally from Italy who has lived in Orissa for the past twenty-five years.4 It is tempting to speculate whether her ability to experiment and expand the form is related to her European origins, particularly her training in the theatre of Grotowski. However, she sees her work as part of the legacy left us by the Maharajas who moulded and perpetuated the present repertoire. As a performer, she has dared to own the form for herself, to internalise it to such a degree that she is able to create something fresh with it. Her life is now entirely assimilated in Orissa; she is living proof that the Chhau form can, after all, move on.

Ileana: ‘Exploration of Mayurbhanji Chhau dance for non-Indian myths and experimentations’ 5 During the early 1970s in Europe I was trying to develop a form of theatrical expression not confined to the articulation of words and sounds but involving the plasticity of body movements and gestures as well. Without any codified grammar, we were proceeding by way of improvisation, utilising as many variations and combinations of movements as possible prompted by all sorts of stimuli and incentives. From this kind of background I landed in India in search of a technical vocabulary, and after years of rigorous training and discipline of the body within the direction of a particular dance style the challenge became now to be able to be free and creative in spite of the conditioning to which the body had been subjected. It was in I985 when I was commissioned to create a new choreography for the East–West Dance Encounter to be held in Bombay [now Mumbai] that the challenge really emerged. The choice fell on a Greek myth that I had in mind for years: the story of the tragic love of Echo towards the beautiful and vain Narcissus who could not love anybody except himself. The Classical idiom of the Odissi style had given me access to the highly symbolic language of face and hands; it would not have been difficult to narrate the story of the two lovers through appropriate mudra6 and facial expressions through a process of word-by-word visualisation of the text. But my past experience and urge to find a full body language would not have been satisfied by this kind of solution. I needed to be able to speak not only with my hands and feet but also with my torso, legs, thighs, elbows, with the potential expressiveness of the entire body.


The Mayurbhanji Chhau style of dance attracted me from the very beginning for the modernity and freedom of its technique and conception of body movements. Here ample scope is given to dynamic oppositions as well as synchronisation between the upper torso and the lower part of the body; contractions, expansions and sideways motions of the torso are used in highly eloquent relation with a variety of legs movements. What gives the style its vast expressiveness is essentially this ample use of leg expansions and elevations; keeping the knee as a pivot and bending the hip as a balancing point, the calves can rotate, stretch, bend, kick, contract, jump in each and every direction high or low, front or back, sideways or oblique. The highly evolved language of the lower limbs is the real strength of the Chhau dance. The names have been given to the movements following the principle of simile and are a mnemonic device; it does not mean that when I execute one particular movement I mean to depict that particular action. But the movements in themselves are so expressive that I have been tempted to find other analogies beyond those already fixed by the Classical nomenclature. In other styles of dancing a certain mudra of the hands has a name and also a list of viniyoga – all the possible meanings conveyed by the utilisation of that mudra. I thought the same could be done with the basic steps of the Chhau technique. Let me give an example: when we perform a circle in the air with a shank while keeping the other leg on the ground we make a movement which resembles the action of the arm while mixing cow dung and water into the bucket – the Oriya name is gobar-goola. But the same movement could also suggest the action of delimiting a well or a pool of water on the ground or if performed while turning round accompanied by circular movements of the arms it could suggest swimming in the water or flying in the air. In this work of dramatisation the arms play an important role. Usually they are kept in the position of attack and defence – one arm simulating holding the shield and the other the sword. If we break this opposition of movements we will be able to create imagery according to what we want to express. For example, if while performing the dheu topka or wave-like-motion of the torso and legs we keep the two hands close to the ears and keep on moving the elbows in and out in synchronisation with the movement of the legs, we can give the idea of a desperate effort to escape from something that is trying to hold us back. Or again in the same motion if the hands are alternately grasping the air in front accompanied by the contraction and expansion of the torso, we can simulate climbing a slope with the help of

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62 Expanding Chhau: beyond masks and Maharajas a rope. By enlarging in this way the technique available we are able to go beyond the usual mythological subjects and include in the repertoire contemporary themes and situations as well.

Echo and Narcissus Echo and Narcissus is a piece of contemporary dance accompanied by an electronic soundscape. Ileana dances solo on a bare stage, wearing simple Punjabi dress, without ankle bells or any other adornment. Her hair is scraped back to reveal the full expressiveness of her face, soft and naturalistically full of feeling. Her movements are recognisable as chalis yet freed of conventional associations, creating wholly original bhangis for this particular story. Ileana steps carefully, stealthily, her feet arched, toes rolling her weight into the ground; often her steps are slow and wide, with knees lifted high, punctuated by more flamboyant hops and high kicks. The whole body curls and stretches as she moves about the small stage, and her arms compliment the flow, sometimes suggesting swimming movements, sometimes flying. The whole physical language is one of lightness and suspension. Sometimes Ileana is clearly illustrating an event, such as the careful, suspended repetition of taking an arrow and shooting it from a bow, or the open thrill of Narcissus admiring himself in the water below. Much of the time, however, the body expresses an abstract, emotional relationship with the space, perfectly in keeping with the theme and its musical expression. The whole is beautifully and expertly rendered. Ileana: ‘Exploration of Mayurbhanji Chhau’(cont.)7 Another basic element inherent in the style is the possibility of balancing the entire weight of the body either on one or the other leg leaving the second one free to suggest different dimensions. Besides giving the movements a quality of lightness and gracefulness this is also a very useful element in choreography, especially when abstract meaning has to be conveyed. Apart from the intrinsic dynamic of each single movement, the entire structure on which the style is built is also very interesting, it consists of an alphabet of single and combined elements ready to be utilised for as many types of combinations a creative choreographer would dare to attempt. Forward locomotion with its symmetrical counterpart in the backward direction, together with diagonal and circular patterns offer the possibility to cover the space in all possible ways.

Expanding Chhau: beyond masks and Maharajas 63 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 Figure 2.1 Ileana Citaristi performs Echo and Narcissus. 7 8 The attempt which started years ago with the choreography Echo 9 and Narcissus continued in my recent piece called The Journey. While 40111 in the first show the narrative plot of the Greek myth was transformed 1 21111 and reinterpreted through the Chhau movements and the vibrations

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64 Expanding Chhau: beyond masks and Maharajas of the electronic music, in the latter piece the theme is elusive like the message behind the cryptic lines of Japanese haikus. In the group choreography Pancha bhuta, I explored the Chhau style in all its richness while keeping it intact. In this production, the theme of the pancha bhuta has been expressed through a variety of choreographic patterns, without the help of any written text. While I was learning alone, in the class, I could not fully realise the vast potentiality of the style. But when I started to conduct workshops and I had in front of me a number of people whom I could divide into different formations I realised how many choreographic patterns I was able to create even by utilising the basic steps and simple rhythmic sequence. The high degree of concentration required in this kind of group choreography, together with a sense of direction and capacity to relate to others, turned out to be very useful not only to dancers but also to people involved in theatre or other physical disciplines. The theatre workers found the experience especially stimulating for their own research on body awareness and expressivities. Lightness, flexibility, sense of balance and coordination are all developed and put into use by practising the Chhau technique. The flexibility of the style can further be experienced while choreographing to pre-composed musical scores other than the ones belonging to the traditional Chhau music. In one of my compositions on the myth of Icarus the style moulded itself very easily to the notes of the sitar and the Western violin to express the yearning of man for infinity. In this item an attempt has been made to combine the jumps and expansions of Chhau with the whirling movements of the Kathak form; the Kathak dancers with whom I worked enriched their physical vocabulary by coming in contact with the leg movements of Chhau which could be combined with the extensive use of the arms utilised in their own style. While giving more importance to the movements in themselves as a medium for conveying different situations, the body should be made free from many extra elements that are now part of the costume on stage so as to be able to utilise all its potentialities. The Classical repertoire should be kept along with the contemporary one. In this way the work of the enlightened Maharajas of Mayurbhanj who between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth transformed what was an exercise of attack and defence into a performing art by expanding the repertoire, the music and the technique, can be kept alive by continuing this work of transformation.

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3


Having considered the particular nature of Chhau, its artistic character and socio-religious setting, we can begin to assemble some general characteristics that might define the nature of Indian folk theatres as a whole. The big thing about the Chhau industry seems to be its focus back in time – perhaps this process might reveal the roots of an Indian folk theatre aesthetic – where it comes from and what sort of traditions it holds on to.

Classical legacy Scholars have long sought to find common ground between folk theatres like Chhau and the refined Classical theatre form. The two types of performance must have run in parallel for hundreds of years, but Sanskrit theatre died out in the eleventh century with the Muslim invasions because of its dependence on royal patronage. In contrast, folk theatre has survived. Farley Richmond claims that the Seraikella royal family exaggerated the Classical status of their dance, ‘often denying any tribal origins for the form’ (Richmond 1990, p. 361). Others simply assume that an art created by and for kings should be classed as Classical: ‘Since the art developed under the patronage of the royal court, it has a gilded, Classical flavour’ (J.B. Singh Deo 1973, p. 47). In keeping with the royal family’s enthusiasm for the British Raj (who granted their Privy Purses) they would have wanted to exaggerate the ancient dignity of their dances, the heritage that linked contemporary dramatic events to the Sanskrit age so popular with the English. Many people equate the name ‘Chhau’ with the ancient Sanskrit word ‘chaya’ meaning ‘shadow’ or ‘mask’, and assert that the name describes the most important visual focus of Chhau dance – the mask. However, Durugdas Mukhopadhyay thinks the ‘chaya’ derivation ‘seems farfetched’ (1989, 123) and following on from Oriyan poet Jivan Pani

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66 Rediscovering folk theatre (Sangeet Natak 13, 1969, p. 35), states that ‘in Oriya, “Chhau” means to hunt or attack stealthily’. He cites ‘three colloquial Oriya derivatives: chhauri (armour); chhauni (military camp), and chhauka (quality of attacking stealthily)’. Regarding the first of these, chhauri, it is thought that the martial artists of the region originally wore headpieces – woven bamboo face shields or visors made from a single block of wood. These might later have evolved into the stylised human masks of Seraikella and Purulia Chhau. The Sanskrit ‘chaya’ therefore signifies the same thing as the Oriya ‘chhauri’. The significance of these etymological differences is not so much in their meaning, but rather in their differing cultural bases – the first originating in the high-art realm of Classical Sanskrit culture and the second in a local grass-roots heritage. Presumably, the present royal family still prefer the Sanskrit association, while the Jharkhand Government officials might go for the latter. Another way to claim the Classical roots of folk theatre is by citing the ancient Sanskrit text of Natyasastra by Bharata Muni.1 Variously dated between roughly 200 BC and AD 200, ‘Natyasastra’ means ‘drama text’ and is the most complete book of ancient dramaturgy in the world, describing the origins and nature of theatre in the widest sense. Its thirtysix chapters contain information on acting technique – the specific sentiments, gestures and mental attitudes required, and there is extensive material on verbal delivery, language and verse forms. None of these can be applied to the dramatic dances of Chhau, nor can they be easily pinpointed in the acting style of folk theatres in general. However, in the realms of dance and music there is more material to consider. Bharata’s detailed accounts of the talas and ragas, and the techniques employed in playing all sorts of instruments and songs, have strong links with Classical Indian music as we know it today. These in turn can be found in the repertoire of music utilised by Bijoy Pratap Singh Deo and his followers. However, Seraikella Chhau also uses folk songs, tribal dances and more contemporary Oriya poems, and the instruments include tribal drums and the European harmonium. Bharata’s text celebrates the beauty and power of dance as part of dramatic expression, detailing the repertoire of bodily movements that should be used in dance and stage fighting. Many writers and practitioners have been eager to stress the associations between Chhau and Classical dance. For example, Kapila Vatsyayan has analysed the Classical associations of the bhangi movement pattern: Although it by and large discards an essential element of Natyasastra tradition – i.e. the nasta abhinaya and mukhaja abhinaya – it con-

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tains certain movements which are unambiguous survivals and continuations of a few cadences of movement called the Karanas in Natyasastra, especially the group known as Vrschika karana. Vatsyayan 1981, p. 78 The teachers of Seraikella Chhau use a schematic approach to dance training, using Bharata’s technical terms to describe its elements, but this is not necessarily a sign that the Sanskrit culture has ‘survived’ in their dance form. The complicated relationship between the resurrected Classical Odissi dance, the local martial art form Parikhanda and Seraikella Chhau (see Chapter 2) suggests that there is constant symbiosis, a sharing of elements but no straightforwardly linear relationship. Having studied Seraikella Chhau in the 1970s, Richard Schechner conjectured whether his guru, Kedarnarth Sahoo, might have created a rigidly ‘grammatical’ pedagogical method precisely because of extensive contact with foreign students and their European methods of tuition (Schechner 1983, p. 218). It may well be that in recent times the Chhau teachers have appropriated Classical dance terms in order to attract customers. In Natyasastra’s 2,000-year-old theatre, a small curtain held by two attendants (yavanika) is recommended to mask entrances – this is seen in numerous folk theatre forms, though not in Chhau. Bharata says a dramatic troupe should include a jester-type actor called vidushaka and the comic ‘holder of the strings’, or sutradhar, along with others including the bard and the maker of crowns, the dyer and the conversationalist. Vidushaka and sutradhar often crop up in folk theatres, but the other parts do not. In many conventionally male folk traditions like Chhau, Bharata’s female singers and dancers would be positively frowned upon. The fact is, even if the comics in folk theatre shows appear and do their turns and sometimes get given the Sanskrit title for what they do, they certainly do not behave exactly as Bharata dictates, nor do they look as he stipulated.2 Many scholars have noted the intersecting of stage archetypes, but no one can say which form invented what and whether one took directly from the other or if the archetypes evolved independently. Some people see Sanskrit theatre as the influencing party in the religious context of folk theatres like Chhau. The first chapter of Natyasastra tells the story of the gods creating drama for the good of mankind and ordaining Bharata himself to carry out their wishes; the final chapter reiterates this, with the pronouncement that the Gods are more pleased with dramatic performance than by worship with flowers and sandalwood. The worship of gods as a preliminary part of performance

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68 Rediscovering folk theatre (purvaranga) is part of extensive rituals described by Bharata in Chapter Five of his text. Perhaps when such rituals appear in folk theatres they are a remnant of ancient Classical theatre, or perhaps simply a habitual gesture in common with any other concert or dance show across the sub-continent. The absence of a devotional setting would be very rare, suggesting the performance was simply not Indian – for example, a piece of secular modern theatre performed in a cosmopolitan urban venue (we shall visit the secular folk theatre, Tamasha, later and discover how even that form is imbued with religiosity). Religion is famously important to the average villager in a way it is not in, for example, the USA or UK. For most people religious ritual is an integrated, everyday event, inherited from their forebears and a core part of their identity. The Hindu housewife will make regular puja offerings and prayers at the family shrine (maybe situated in the corner of the kitchen), and visit the temple with the children several times a week. A brief prayer to Ganesh (remover of obstacles) or Saraswathi (goddess of art and learning) is therefore taken for granted as the necessary opening of a performance. The highly schematised and formalised performance conventions described in Natyasastra were intended for an elite audience of cultivated Brahmins, and indeed the Maharajas of Seraikella are part of this legacy. In their dancing, they applied strict rules both to themselves as practitioners and to others through their pedagogy. This tradition has now been taken on by the schools who perpetuate a teacher–pupil relationship as part of the production of Chhau. However, most folk forms reject such a hierarchy – they have always sought to keep their work free of rules and definitions. Both practitioners and audiences are likely to be illiterate, so the written dictates of Bharata are irrelevant. As we have already seen in our brief introduction to the Tamil village shows, the folk in a folk theatre form like Therukoothu need to escape the repression of their poverty. Why would they seek formalities for their theatre entertainment? Perhaps the only certainty in a search for common ground between the Classical and folk traditions of Indian theatre is that the elements that tally are proof of folk theatre’s resilience. Sanskrit theatre did not survive for long; perhaps its aesthetic was too rigid. But folk theatres have been able over the space of millennia to use whichever artistic influences they need, whenever they need them. Like theatre-makers all over the world, folk performers are good at holding onto things that work, but they also know how versatile they must be to survive.


Environment: festival Moving on from purely aesthetic considerations and into the present, let us now consider environmental aspects of Chhau that might pertain to other folk theatres. Chhau performances are integrated into the lives of the villagers in a manner specific to their agrarian roots. This is traditionally so for all folk theatres – they happen in festivals at a specific time of year, appropriate to the traditional timing of agricultural work. Festival time is a rare opportunity for families to come together. All the economic strata of the community, all castes will attend.3 Even if the show contains Hindu iconography and storylines, there will be representatives from other religions present, onstage and off. The festival season occurs in the hot season, when the monsoon has not yet arrived and it is too hot to work. These dates are less certain than they used to be: the effects of global warming mean that monsoon weather can hit at all sorts of odd times; modern fertilisers and seeds can create two or even three harvests per year. Nevertheless, festival time is still determined by the local calendar, each region’s months being divided up in a unique form determined by the seasons, the phases of sun and moon. This point in the year when agricultural labour is impossible means that people can relax, committing themselves wholly to their entertainment. The way

Figure 3.1 Tamil village street.

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70 Rediscovering folk theatre in which actors and audience connect is informed by this – it is a concentrated period exclusively put aside for entertainment, the rest of the year survived without any live theatre at all. This gives the events an intensity they would not have if their audiences had access to them at any time, more regularly or when they were not high on sleep deprivation as they inevitably are for this one festival.

Environment: street All the folk theatres described in this book take place in their first home, the street. We have seen how the Chaitra Parva festival brings together differing and sometimes competing elements in that public space. When the festival is not on, the Indian village street is much more than simply a conduit for traffic; it is an organic part of everyday life for the community, an extension of the very public nature of their lives in general. The street is where chillies are laid out to dry or paddy sifted. It is where boys will play long games of cricket or a small child runs about with a stick, rolling an empty rubber tyre. Shade is offered by the temple building or some tall trees, so elderly villagers can sit and ruminate or (as in Seraikella) the lawyers can ply their trade. Goats and free-ranging cattle will shelter there in the heat of the day. This is perhaps too idyllic a picture. Like any village anywhere in the world, it is easy for an outsider from a busy metropolis to idealise it. We should mention the rubbish, especially the empty plastic bags that accumulate in corners and sometimes kill off a scavenging cow. The odd vehicle – a jeep or bus from the city – will sometimes disturb things. Gypsies who camp there, setting up a stall selling plastic trinkets, might create temporary consternation. For some, the loud hailers regularly blasting film music or political propaganda are an intrusion. But this street is a focal point, a shared space, the centre of the community. Work and play, religion and gossip all take place where the folk theatre happens. Sometimes the temple is an important building on the street and religious events will spill out of it. Sometimes there is a solid stage platform for folk theatre, utilised throughout the rest of the year for numerous activities – for example, people can place a television there once in a while and play movies together. Where there is not a permanent structure, a folk theatre stage will be erected or marked out only in time for the annual festival. Lights and sound systems then assert the actors’ ownership of their part of the street, inviting attention from the public at large whose communal space they have appropriated. Inhabiting as they do the everyday space of their audience, the actors’ status is necessarily different from that of an actor


in an indoor theatre, designated exclusively for performance. It is far from elevated. The very impermanence and makeshift quality of the stage allows for a merging of audience and performer, in some cases very literally with the actors moving in and out of the crowd, or members of the public invited on stage. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of villagers gather around the performing area, witnessing performances from all sides and able to come and go with relative ease. In some cases, chairs are provided for the most important audience members, but in general the public is expected to find comfort seated in the dust around the stage. At home they may well not have furniture, the floor being the coolest place to sit and sleep. People of all ages are there, from the tiniest baby to the oldest granny. They are quite likely to turn up in family groups, though in the more intimate space of the palace courtyard, we saw how they split up and sit with friends of the same age and gender. The idea of family is very different here than it is in a Western society. Responsibilities and intimacies across generations and extended family are much more complicated than those in an individualistic community, where the norm is the nuclear family. Village people are probably living three or four generations together, the housewife sharing her home with her in-laws. Men and women in one household might well lead quite separate lives, the women sleeping with the children and the men in another room or on the roof. They might well want to continue this sort of division during their annual live entertainment.

Environment: poverty As we initially recognised, the unique character of all folk theatres lies in its ‘folk’ audience. We are gradually coming closer to understanding what these people’s lives are like. One big aspect of the agricultural community’s life in India is its lack of money. More than a quarter of the population of India live below the poverty line, with the vast majority in rural areas. Jharkhand is a particularly poverty-stricken region, with all the problems that go along with this – illiteracy, malnutrition, and a general lack of sanitation. Despite national educational reforms, many Indian people do not have access to quality schooling, particularly in rural areas. On average, across the continent, only 48 per cent of women and 70 per cent of men can read and write; in most villages it is much less. For a community where written words are largely inaccessible,4 both performers and audiences are attracted to visual and aural entertainment, not books or magazines. Even television can often prove inaccessible, with so many programmes using subtitles for the regional language.

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72 Rediscovering folk theatre Village life is hard, especially for women. In some villages there is only one source of water, at the main pump, so mothers and daughters must get up at 4am when a sleepy relay system is performed in the dark, passing huge pots of water down the street. For most families there are no servants and no machines to help with the chores, so running a household is hard work. Rice might be available on Government tokens, but vegetables and dhal need to be bought daily at the market or local shop. Quite possibly money will have been saved over months for a television shared between a few houses, but the toilet is still the sugar cane field. If you need to urinate during the all-night folk theatre show, you join a group of people with the same gender and crouch together in the dirt round the back of some building. In such a poor community, theatre must be cheap. There is no fancy packaging. Publicity and marketing – the major chunks of a budget for a conventional urban show – are unknown to performers who rely simply on word of mouth for gathering their audience. In many cases, the community depends on external forms of patronage to keep its theatre going. In playwright John Arden’s account of seeing Purulia Chhau in 1971 (Arden 1977, pp. 139–152), he discovers that the villagers take money from their traditionalist Hindu landlords in order to pay for their masks (some costing more than an actor’s annual income). What is in it for the patrons? Arden points out that the religious structures perpetuated by the performances uphold the social structures that keep the landlords rich. In today’s Seraikella it is the local government that sponsors the dance school and finances the performers’ costumes and masks, in the hope of attracting tourist interest. Their Chhau Mahotsav prizes are enough to galvanise amateur village groups from all around to rehearse and perform in the annual competition. In the case of Purulia Chhau, a similar annual competition staged since the 1960s at Matha, provides other incentives. The prize for the winning performers is the opportunity of a trip to perform in New Delhi in front of ‘very distinguished Indian and foreign invitees’.5 This, rather than direct cash payment, is enough to persuade them to perform. Richard Schechner, visiting Matha in 1976, says, ‘To me it felt like a rodeo in a backwater town’ and describes how Bengali academic Bhattacharya (see p. 58) sat in judgement over the villagers, chastising them for not wearing ‘authentic’ costumes or adhering to a strict repertoire of Hindu Classical subjects. Schechner also points out that the foreign tours organised by Bhattacharya have created economic and social problems back home; having travelled to Europe, or Australia or North America, groups will bill themselves as ‘foreign parties’, thereby gaining additional status and earning power, but making them lose touch with the poorer strata of society (Schechner 1983, p. 207).


Artistic qualities Coming back to the intrinsic qualities of folk theatres for a moment, independent of the audience and its problems, we can appreciate why rich patrons have wanted to get involved. There is no escaping one of these shows – it stands up in the grime of a street corner and presents itself; it meets the practical demands of an open-air festival event with boldness, ebullience and flamboyance. In many ways it manifests the characteristics of what Peter Brook and others have chosen to call ‘Rough Theatre’. At the same time, it could equally be titled ‘Holy Theatre’, or ‘Community Theatre’ or even ‘Opera’. Folk theatres are operatic because they take music for granted as part of their entertainment value, their accessibility. Live musicians are an integral part of the ensemble, mixing together all sorts of musical influences, but (as we have seen in Seraikella) there is always a local flavour to instruments and folk songs, tunes that come out of well-known texts and are part of a common regional culture. Music is a constant presence; no show can be performed without it, as it is part and parcel of characterisation and narrative. However, the mimetic storytelling of the Chhau dance drama, doing away with any spoken or sung text, is exceptional, and the majority of folk theatres include a strong verbal element. Generally speaking, the acting style in all folk theatres is declamatory, the dialogue rapid and strident. There is no fourth wall in these shows; in fact most of the actor’s focus will be out towards the audience even during extended dialogue. The outdoor acoustic means that his voice does not carry as it would in a formal theatre; it requires some sort of amplification, whether through a big sound system or simply in exaggerated projection and vigorous musical accompaniment. So let us now leave the little eastern region and its silent masks to travel southwards in search of declamation.

Tamasha The Maharashtrian folk theatre is opposite to Chhau in many aspects. Its enthusiastic use of speech is just one aspect of its overt extroversion, its urgently outward energy. Where the Chhau artistry seemed so often to create a sense of elusiveness and mystery, Tamasha shamelessly invites its audience in. There is a clue to this dynamic in the meaning of its name: ‘tamasha’. A word originating in the north (both Hindi and Urdu) meaning ‘fun’ or ‘play’, it is used nowadays across all the languages of India, often pejoratively, to describe an escapist entertainment, a farce, a

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74 Rediscovering folk theatre ludicrously extravagant political rally or chaotic public event. In the global village, the name can pop up all over the place. In the UK there is a highly successful London-based theatre company called the Tamasha Theatre Company, which claims in its mission statement: ‘As our name suggests, Tamasha aims to “create a drama” out of the untold stories of people’s lives.’6 For an ‘indie jam rock’ band based in Raleigh, North Carolina, ‘Tamasha’ is simply ‘cool’. Founder member, Tim, says: ‘One day, Mick pulls out a dictionary and says, “Hey, look at this word.” There it was: Tamasha – a show, spectacle, or gathering . . . we like to have fun on stage and it’s cool to get the audience involved too, so the name really fits us.’7 People can get quite passionate about their own language’s specific tamasha associations. In the UK it is not difficult to track down personal preferences. An Iranian friend insists it should only be translated as ‘fun’, especially the kind that entails a sumptuous spectacle; for him there are no negative associations. In contrast, a Pakistani acquaintance talks of tamasha as a ‘commotion’ – especially one created by some family feud or uproar. In Swahili, when the Maasai talk of tamasha they mean ‘to celebrate with music’. The popular African girl’s name Tamasha is said to mean ‘pageant’. But in Maharashtra, for the local Marathi speaker, tamasha means one thing only – ‘very specific, very Maharashtrian’8 – Tamasha is the muchloved traditional folk theatre form. These days the rural community feels under pressure, it is looking for a way in which to identify itself against the larger cultures of Western commerce and pan-Indian politics – the forces of Westernisation that Veenapani Chawla referred to when she originally described the demise of indigenous Indian theatre (see p. 2). Far from disintegrating, the Tamasha folk theatre has become one very important way for Maharashtrians to assert their identity. Let us go and see it.

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4

Tamasha Escape

Alone at home, I’d hear the rhythmic roll of the dholki and halgi over the loudspeaker system and it would invariably make me restless. I couldn’t possibly sit at home quietly while that seductive beat beckoned! So I devised a way out. I learnt how to bolt the door of our room as if from inside and escape. When my uncle came to check on me, he’d assume I was fast asleep inside. That’s how . . . I saw some of the best and most well-known Tamasha artistes perform . . . The Tamasha meant excitement of every kind – the percussion, beginning with that first arresting slap on the dholki that sets every Maharashtrian’s blood racing; those wonderful traditional lavani melodies; the dance. Waman Kendre, Marathi stage director1 The early morning bus from Mumbai’s International airport lumbers up the brand new highway towards Pune. We are a mixed lot of travellers – well-heeled, animated Indians from all over the sub-continent, and at the back a clutch of sleepy Westerners, preparing for meditation and hugs in Bhagwan Rajneesh’s famous ashram gardens. This three-hour journey is made twice a day by numerous commuters who live in Pune but go to the metropolis for work. Their shiny little cars jostle with overloaded lorries. The state of Maharashtra is the most urbanised region of India, and its economic status is evidently high compared to the poor Jharkhandis’. Once the highway finishes, there are still a few hours of meandering to be done as the bus drops off its charges at their separate suburban destinations. Many live in plush (and well-guarded) garden complexes or smart blocks of flats – brand new homes for Pune’s burgeoning population. The city’s booming computer software industry has recently attracted a crowd of cosmopolitan young people to live there. In the centre of town, dressed in jeans and Gap shirts, they gather before work outside pizza restaurants and coffee shops, chatting in Hindi,

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76 Tamasha: escape Marathi or English. Tonight they will be out in the discos and nightclubs celebrating Western New Year. And what of traditional old Pune? The early home of the Maharashtrian warrior hero, Shivaji (1630–1680), this city was made the Maratha capital in the eighteenth century, cultural and economic centre of a powerful military regime. As part of the New Year celebrations, I am taken by my Pune friends to see an outdoor theatrical extravaganza depicting the life of Shivaji (with real camels and elephants). Perhaps 5,000 people in lively family groups enjoy one battle scene after another, intercut with some solos from female vocalists – ‘traditional lavanis – folk songs’ my hosts announce proudly. Maharashtrians love the traditional lavanis, they sing along to them when they feature on the local television station. They say lavanis embody the essence of their culture – lyricism, romance, fun. The word lavani is associated with the Marathi word for ‘transplantation’ – the songs might once have been harvest working songs; or perhaps the composers of lavanis were inspired by the sight of women transplanting their rice plants, bent over in the paddy fields, bare legs wading through water. Gargi calls the lavani a ‘narrative poetical composition expressing vigour and love’ (Gargi 1991, p. 80). This suggests a highly wrought piece of writing, probably by a male poet, and fits in with a Marathi literary heritage thought to have originated in the sixteenth century.2 Local playwright and journalist Sushama Deshpande describes its character a little differently, saying, ‘lavani is a musical performance which unravels various shades in a man–woman relationship’.3 This fits with the association of a male poet watching women at work; lavanis are sung and danced by women for the pleasure of men. Sushama Deshpande says lavanis are the root of all Maharashtrian folk theatre, performed every day in the Sangeet Bari (meaning ‘song troupes’) at Aryabhushan Theatre on Pune’s Lakshmi Road.4 In 1995 she did her research there for a play based on the lives of the singer/dancers (Gokhale 2000, pp. 353–359).5 At Aryabhushan there are eight companies, known as phuds, performing each night, one after the other in 20-minute slots. With the prospect of such a large number of performance styles represented, I am excited to begin my Maharashtrian folk theatre research here. ‘But no, there isn’t Sangeet Bari in Pune; definitely not; no one goes any more; the theatres have closed’, say my hosts. Next morning, we visit the dusty old Lakshmi Road in search of the Aryabhushan Theatre but there is little sign of life, let alone evidence of a thriving theatre venue. Sushama says the theatre does not advertise its performances but is nevertheless very active, with audience numbers swelling to 2,000 on any night of the week. Our friends, well-heeled Brahmins, are surprised at this information but are afraid to accompany us into the area at night-time.

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The song troupe Their surprise turns to intrigue when we unearth a Sangeet Bari advertised in the local newspaper. It is taking place this afternoon at the main theatre in town, Balgandharva Natyamandir. Seating around 500 people, the venue puts on all sorts of local and touring theatre entertainments and the cosmopolitan classes are quite at home there. Our friends agree to come along to the Sangeet Bari, taking care to dress down, ready to mingle with a lower class of audience. Around the box office outside stands a crowd of young and middle-aged men; they look rather shabby and perhaps even shifty, though on New Year’s Day they could simply be hungover. Most seem to have come on their own. We buy our Rs.206 tickets at the little booth outside and hang around waiting for the gates to open. My well-disguised Brahmin friends are quite excited at the prospect of seeing authentic Maharashtrian entertainment, though worried that the show will provoke excessive vulgarity from this audience. The posters appear less than titillating to a Western eye. In fact, they are really quite chaste, with a dominance of print and hazy colour photos of the company’s lead dancer – a lavishly made-up Lata Punekar. When we get inside, the auditorium is not even half full. As the striplights over our heads shudder off, the shabby velvet front-cloth swings back to reveal an open white lighting state on an undecorated stage. The male compère enters without ceremony and welcomes us informally before the keyboard player joins him for a brief song in praise of the god Ganesh. This man and his two moustachioed colleagues will appear regularly throughout the show to introduce the dance numbers, often covering the women’s lengthy backstage costume-changes with comic banter. Their repartee is light-heartedly provocative; they must keep the audience hot for the female dancers – commenting on their talent and beauty, yet reminding us that these are forbidden fruit. Their status is respected as controllers – standing guard over their female objects of desire. A couple of percussionists are now seated with the keyboard player at the side of the stage. One man plays the traditional dholki – the doublesided drum – here placed horizontally on the floor in front of him. The other has a range of percussion instruments including a shiny tambourine with bells around the wooden rim, and the little metal cymbals called manjeera. Both lean forward towards their microphones in order to get maximum volume out of their playing. The sharp sound of the dholki sets an upbeat rhythm and the electronic keyboard, set to a harmonium sound, embellishes. The women enter one by one with the palu of their long nine-yard saris drawn up over the backs of their heads and hanging

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78 Tamasha: escape down across their faces and torsos. Each covered figure circles round and round, her hips thrusting against her tightly bound sari, only her bare feet exposed. Her kicking and stamping make the heavy metal bells around her ankles jangle over the amplified music. It is a much freer and more naturalistic style than any Indian Classical dance form; there is no set pattern to the movement, though perhaps some of the curling arm and hand gestures, and the stamping feet suggest a distant relationship with the popular Kathak style. Each woman dances solo for a while, head down and demurely covered, before lifting the veil and revealing her laughing face out front. This moment is met with audience cheers and whistles.

Figure 4.1 Tamasha singer (performer unknown).

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Once revealed, the dancer backs upstage and takes up a sideways standing position, hands on hips, weight on one foot, beauty-pageant style. This allows the next woman to enter and perform her opening number. Soon the line-up of four women is complete. Could the tallest one be a man, beautifully made-up?7 In the corner upstage of the band a demure female singer enters holding a microphone, and her first, almost melancholy lavani begins. Sweta, the youngest girl, dressed in a white nine-yard sari, comes forward and her colleagues exit. As the vocalist in the far corner sings ‘I have lost my nosering’, Sweta mouths the words. Her playful gestures mime finding that the little ring is gone and searching about for it, her expressions are of petulance and surprise, their faux innocence intended to delight and charm. Men who call out and cajole are rewarded with a flashing of her pretty eyes. As her colleagues take over for their solo numbers, it becomes clear that each woman’s performing style is unique. It could be said that they represent the female archetypes of virgin, whore and mother; the fourth, male, one introduces an element of drag into the erotic pile. While they vary so exaggeratedly in sexual flavour, they all share an acute audience awareness, their focus only ever out front into the darkened auditorium. One man’s yell from the house is immediately met by a special, focused attitude – a wink, a swirl, a big laugh or simply an overt move downstage in the direction of the call. Most likely the dancer cannot see any individual out here, but she works at demonstrating the converse – the focal point established by a shout becomes an integral part of her performance, particular gestures or lines in the song repeatedly pointed to her special friend. He is flattered, he whistles his appreciation, and the men around him join in, competing for the attention. ‘Lata, Lata’, they keep calling. People stamp their feet, but Lata Punekar does not appear. Perhaps she is having a diva tantrum backstage and will not tread the boards for her fan club. Or perhaps she is off with another section of her company, performing at another venue. Lata is a popular dancer, but she has a special status in the world of Sangeet Bari – she owns and controls her own company. Her sister, Surekar Punekar – the most successful Sangeet Bari performer around, works within the traditional system, with three men to control her – a jejman (her patron, effectively her owner), a shrewd agent and a renowned manager. Any night of the week you can catch Surekar singing favourite lavanis on Marathi TV. She is every taxi driver’s pin-up, has issued numerous recordings and apparently charges Rs.80,000 a night, a considerable proportion of which goes straight into the pockets of her controllers. But Lata is different – an independent operator who, unlike her sister, gets to keep her income.

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80 Tamasha: escape This afternoon’s star, dressed in scarlet, is Medha. She has a much more explicit choreography than Sweta’s, with broad hip gyrations and laughing open mouth. She spends a lot of the time throwing herself onto the ground, stretching out sideways with her weight on one hip, then flipped onto the other. Her lyrics are ‘If I remove my veil, I will blush’, and her gestures echo this, with her hands coming up to cover her whole face as she laughs. Later she stretches forward, eyeballing one particular man in the crowd, and mimes pulling in her catch on a rope. During the band interludes, Medha resorts to the general choreographic tricks of all the dancers – to the beat of the drum, she skips fast in a circle, she spins on the spot with one hand raised high, palm upwards; then she gallops around with hand on hip, elbow thrust out sideways and leading. There is lots of finger pointing, then backing upstage, beckoning. The hands constantly draw attention to her physique – framing the smile, the big eyes, the high, round breasts. Her energy and speed is relentless, never a moment to take a breath; clearly it would be physically impossible for Medha to sing and dance at the same time. But for a couple of later numbers she does sing, taking the microphone from the upstage singer and sitting on the ground at the front. Suddenly there is stillness, almost intimacy, though she is still using the demonstrative hand gestures, and keeps winking towards a man who had shouted earlier. An extremely popular ensemble dance is about travelling on a careering bullock cart. A man dressed in simple tunic and trousers joins two women facing out front, and they mime driving the cart, reins in one hand and whip in the other. They easily slip from being drivers to being the driven beast – their legs pound the ground like the runaway bullock, and, in keeping with the lyrics, they point their forefingers, warning ‘don’t come near’. The music halts and all three dancers freeze, suddenly becoming drivers again, their hands raised to whip the bullock. Then on they charge. All through the number, the man is using exactly the same gestures as the girls. His pouting provocations invite as many approving shrieks and whistles as the women’s, as if the audience regards him as another female. The rushing speed and vigour of the music keeps the eroticism light-hearted. For her final number, Sweta has changed into a purple sari for ‘I have an ant bite on my bottom’. She dances sideways on, stamping, her downstage thigh ‘protected’ with her flowing sari palu. Her fans in the audience whistle appreciation. Rhythmically, she lifts the end of the palu, drawing attention to her bitten buttock (well covered, of course, in layers of fabric), then coyly replaces it again. We don’t have time to think before the tabs are in and people are wandering away without even waiting to applaud. There is no curtain call.

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My overriding recollection of the event has been the dynamic between the female performers and their male audience. It is not simply the overtly presentational performance style. The material itself contains an inbuilt drama, a dialogue between singer and auditor. The performer must locate an external party in order to make the second-person lyrics work. Thus, some ‘you’ out here in the auditorium is part of the scene created around the nose-ring, the bullock cart, the ant bite. There is always an implication that one man in the auditorium has a large part to play in the drama – it is he who might have hidden the jewellery, he who provokes her blushes. But his status is ambiguous; he is both controller and controlled – the jewellery search might just be an excuse to draw him into Sweta’s intimate space; she knows that her blushes excite him. In the more overtly highstatus bullock-cart flirtation, the rampaging group of dancers is both animal and human, both out of control as they run away, but also totally in control because they are running after someone. That person is here in the auditorium, desired yet also warned not to come near. Built into the Sangeet Bari performance is a fascinating dynamic of female power – the ability to attract men through submission and dominance combined. The dancer’s playful rhythms constantly alternate between concession and withdrawal. Her power up there on the stage, cut off from us by the lights, the proscenium, the male controllers, is to exploit our desire. In a teasing combination of vulnerability and defiance, she caricatures the characteristics of female sexuality that will most please her audience. Her gyrating, shuddering, stamping body excites them to an extroversion they could not experience elsewhere. This particular environment sanctions, nay encourages, their vulgarities, and they feel safe enough to indulge themselves. The well-known tunes and lyrics help this feeling of safety – people have come together here to share something with which they are all familiar. The parameters of behaviour are controlled by the fact that the subject matter is part of the audience’s everyday life and they themselves sing the songs. They know and love them from endless TV, film or sound recordings. This feeling of the audience owning the music is enhanced by the fact that the dancer is not actually delivering the lyrics herself. Her sexual provocation is less dangerous partly because all she is doing is miming – were she singing too, her voice would be exposed, perhaps creating too much of a link across the fourth wall. In the pre-microphone days, the dancer always sang. But her choreography must have been far less breathless, less overt. In the old days the dancer/singer would have had direct physical contact with the punters when they wanted to give her money. They would have stood right at the edge of the stage, able to pass cash donations up to the dancers and make direct requests for favourite music or

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82 Tamasha: escape dance. Here in the Balgandharva Natyamandir a pit divides the stage from the auditorium, making such intimacies impossible. We have bought our tickets at the box office, and this transaction makes life much simpler for the company to divide up the funds. Apparently the offering of gifts to performers is a tradition that continues at places like Aryabhushan, but is illegal according to the Maharashtrian authorities. It is thought to derive from an old Moghul practice (called daulat jadda), and must have given the performers much more opportunity to communicate directly with individual fans. They say that under the Tamasha spell a man might succumb so completely that he would give up everything for the love of a dancer. For this is what we are witnessing – one version of the Maharashtrian folk theatre form we seek – the Tamasha. Tales of Brahmin men falling fatally in love with the wild Tamasha women are a popular part of Tamasha mythology.8 Patthe Bapu Rao (1868–1941) is one of many such men who, from the eighteenth century onwards, are said to have run off with the Tamasha troupes. The story goes that the high-caste Brahmin Patthe fell in love with a woman from one of the lowest castes, a beauty named Pawala, and eloped with her, ostracised by his own family. Patthe taught Pawala to sing and dance and the two formed a highly successful troupe, performing refined, poetic lavanis specially composed by Patthe. The story ends in sorrow with Pawala being tempted away by a rich patron and Patthe, brokenhearted, dying in penury (Gargi 1991, p. 75). However, he left behind him a body of literature still harked on today as the finest of traditional lavani compositions. Pawala’s legacy is to have introduced the idea of women performing in the shows. Until her time, only 100 years ago, the female roles in Tamasha had always been played by boys – the nachya (‘boy who plays a girl’) is thought to have originated in the eighteenthcentury Peshwar period when there was a flourishing of Tamasha entertainments (Nadkarni 1969, Sangeet Natak 12, p. 20). Perhaps the dancer at Balgandharva Natyamandir who looked like a man in drag was part of that tradition.

Castes Though people are enthusiastic about Patthe’s romantic tale, they are very sensitive about current caste associations in the Tamasha. The Brahmin friends with whom we visited Lata Punekar’s show are insistent that their caste is no hindrance to their enjoying and integrating themselves in the entertainment. They admit that the audience was made up of working-class and lower-middle-class men, but say that only economic differences divide what is otherwise a homogeneous Marathi

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audience. As far as the performers are concerned, Tamasha supporters claim that ‘the only caste is talent’; companies are created anew each season, they say, with different combinations of castes and creeds, so they never have a consistent caste identity. They are keen to assert that there is a wide cross-section of society represented in Sangeet Bari. For example, a good proportion of the managers are said to be Muslims.9 There are also Muslim musicians and dancers. The association of Islam with the Tamasha goes back a long way, to its very roots: many people think that the performance form originated when the late sixteenthcentury Moghul invaders introduced their bawdy entertainments to the locals as a diversion for the troops. Urdu singing styles brought to the Deccan plain by the Muslim soldiers are thought to have combined with indigenous forms of entertainment to produce the first Tamashas. However, others think the origins of the form date back much further to medieval times when annual village performances called khel-tamasha brought together different hereditary professions – the barber in charge of make-up, compositions by Brahmins, dholki played by a Muslim butcher and daf (another drum) played by the carpenter (Nadkarni 1969, Sangeet Natak 12, p. 19). This synthesis of Moghul and Marathi, Muslim and Hindu, high caste and low is thought to have been led by one particular group – the nomadic Kolhati tribe (Gargi 1991, p. 73). The Kolhatis were traditionally acrobats, originally a Rajasthani tribe that migrated to western Maharashtra and soon turned their skills from acrobatics to the more lucrative business of dance. The girls were conventionally not allowed to marry; instead they were sold for their virginity at puberty and usually abandoned when they got pregnant (Kale 2000). Some say that the Kolhati women invented lavani, which were deliberately ‘designed to attract male attention’ (Kale 2000, p. 21). Sushama Deshpande’s play is based on stories from the contemporary Kolhati women who perform at Pune’s Aryabhushan Theatre. Their way of life appears to be very much determined by their tribal origins. A Kolhati girl is still thought lucky if she gains independence in a paid job with a touring Tamasha troupe, yet she soon finds herself supporting her whole extended family: ‘A Kolhati family survives on the money earned by the women of the family. The men consider any labour below their dignity’ (Kale 2000, p. 24). The author of Against All Odds, Kishore Shantabai Kale, campaigns for an end to the employment of Kolhati women in Tamasha companies, because of the way in which they are exploited. Kale is the son of a Kolhati Tamasha dancer, a qualified doctor and passionate performing arts practitioner who has set out to change the lives of the poor in Maharashtra. His autobiographical book is part of a whole

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84 Tamasha: escape raft of projects from an AIDS awareness programme to the setting up of schools for children of the Tamasha women. He is adamant that caste and tribal associations are as strong as ever within the performing troupes. Traditionally, the Mahars are the best-known Tamasha caste. They were once village servants with no particular craft. Their position in the community was secure – they might be made watchmen, well menders, street sweepers or messengers. Other less savoury jobs were foisted on them – the removal of cattle carcasses, taking care of the cremation ground or simply scavenging. They lived apart from others in the village and the temple was closed to them. Some Mahars turned their duties to the production of entertainment – singers, dancers or comedians. In medieval times, they were celebrated for their satirical dramatic poetry (bharud, literally meaning ‘long-winded tale’), and the Mahar saint-poet Eknath was noted for the power of his verses. In them, he satirised highstatus archetypes like the village head-man (patil) and his shrewish wife, the money lender and other officials. In the 1600s, under Shivaji the Mahars became renowned for their military prowess.10 Later, they successfully served in the British colonial forces and since 1947 the Mahar Regiment has taken part in all India’s major military operations. The men who received military training also gained an education they would not otherwise have had. This privilege enabled twentieth-century Mahars to move out of their traditional caste work into the professional fields (Zelliott 1996). The famous founder of the Dalit movement, Ambedkar (1891–1956), was one such person.11 However, upwardly mobile Mahars have been loath to take their performance traditions with them: As for folk theatre forms, Dalits have naturally wanted to distance themselves from those. Dr. Ambedkar had called upon his followers to shed all their old practices; and this included the Tamasha. The women who danced and sang in Tamashas and the men who played the musical instruments were, as often as not, from Dr. Ambedkar’s caste. In their eyes, now, the Tamasha was not so much an outlet for their artistic talents as a means of exploitation which they were only too happy to leave behind Premanand Gajvi, playwright (Gokhale 2000, p. 330) The Mahars and the Mangs form the root of the Dalit identity in Maharashtra. Mangs were traditionally agricultural labourers though, like the Mahars, they turned their skills to all sorts of artistic professions, and soon became indelibly associated with the Tamasha. The Mang writers Anna Bhau Sathe and Vasant Mun are considered the best-known

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Dalit writers in the second part of the twentieth century. Sathe did not turn away from the performance traditions of his caste, and became well known for his Tamasha collaborations with D.N. Gavankar’s ‘Red Flag Cultural Squad’ (see p. 109). One member of the Mang caste, Bhau Bapu Mang, managed a highly successful Tamasha troupe in northern Maharashtra during the mid-twentieth-century. He was a disciple of Patthe Bapu Rao, and an exponent of his refined style. Though Patthe’s company had established the tradition of women in lead roles, Bhau Bapu Mang was the nachya in his own company, often doubling up male and female roles in the same show. Only when he married did he hand over the job of performing women’s parts to his wife. Bhau Bapu Mang’s daughter, Vithabai, took over his company and became one of the most celebrated performer/managers of recent times. Writing in the 1950s, Gargi tells us that Vithabai was ‘a slim, indestructible dancer’, but is critical of her ‘modernised rhythms’ and ‘dancing of a hybrid nature’. Nowadays she is a heritage symbol for traditional Tamasha, her superior skills celebrated as the high point of her art. Interviewed on film (Sparrow Films 2001) the year before she died, Vithabai voices some of the ambivalence felt by Tamasha performers about their art. She is disapproving of the audiences who do not appreciate true artistry and Tamasha dancers who simply ‘expose themselves’ in order to please the crowd. Demonstrating a typical gesture (one of Sweta’s), she lifts her palu from her hip: ‘The true lavani is finished and a strange lavani has come into being. They have to reveal themselves. They should not do this.’ Yet Vithabai is proud of the innovations she herself introduced into the Tamasha shows, particularly the addition of Hindi film songs: ‘We always got the “Once More” call for them.’ The most important factor has always been to please the public: ‘In Tamasha, the songs depend on the audience . . . they prefer light-hearted, happy songs. We have to keep in mind there are old and young in the audience.’ This tailoring of the repertoire to accommodate a variety of tastes seems central to the nature of Tamasha. The performers may talk of artistic integrity and tradition, but these qualities are inextricably linked to the task of fulfilling public demand. Vithabai is clear about the different tastes and backgrounds of her fans, and thrives on the challenges presented by the Tamasha crowd: I liked the tent audience more than the theatre. Because we can show the real art to them. The upper class audience will like whatever is shown to them – Classical style, tarana and lavanis, and all that is there for the theatre audience. In Tamasha we have to act, dance and sing in front of a huge audience. We have to draw the audience to us.

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86 Tamasha: escape We have so far joined only the ‘upper-class’ Pune crowd in their urban theatre. There is another type of Tamasha for Vithabai’s ‘tent audience’. It is designed, as Vithabai says, to appeal to a huge crowd who are not afraid to voice their needs and opinions. Staged on special occasions in big outdoor arenas, this type of Tamasha is named after the dholki drum that traditionally provides the show’s rhythmic base. Dholki Phat, like Sangeet Bari, gives a central position to the lavanis, but it includes other performance conventions in order to please its vast local audience. If we want to see this, what Vithabai calls ‘the real art’, we must travel 90 kilometres north of Pune on the Nashik road, to her home town of Narayangaon.

The big Tamasha With a population of around 50,000, Narayangaon lies in a mountainous, largely agricultural region. As the bus approaches from the south, I see a variety of crops – maize, potatoes, sugar cane, mango; milk factories and sheep factories, but no paddy. There have not been adequate monsoon rains here for three years and the soil is especially sandy, the hillsides rocky. Nevertheless, the area has recently become famous for its wine – vineyards contour the easy slopes around the town. The local New Year in this region is called Gudi Padwa and occurs on the first day of Chaitra, or Chaitrashuddha – towards the end of March. From this date, the little town holds a six-week festival, one long street party, or jatra, with noisy fairground rides and stalls bursting with trinkets and treats. At the same time, the town asserts its identity as the maherghar, or maternal homeland of Tamasha, by hosting the biggest Tamasha bazaar in Maharashtra: this year, thirty-five12 Tamasha companies are vying with one another to show-case their latest production, in the hope of gaining bookings to perform in nearby villages. They have pitched their tents in a field in the centre of town in the hope of being invited to perform whole-night shows in the outdoor performing area. Towards the end of the jatra period, at the beginning of May, there is a week-long harvest thanksgiving festival, Ashta Venaika, traditionally devoted to the local Hindu deity, Vignesh Wara (remover of obstacles, a manifestation of the elephant god Ganesh). I am here to experience this climactic week when the partying and performance elements are brought together on the outdoor stage, the seven best Tamasha companies invited to put on shows that attract crowds of 10,000 people or more. This year’s high point, the final night of Ashta Venaika, is a performance from one of the most successful Tamasha groups, the Borgaonkar Loknatya Tamasha. Baburao Borgaonkar, the leader of this company, is forty years old and celebrated locally for his skill as both a writer and performer. His brother,

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Vijay Kumar, is the company booking manager. They are the sons of Shivram Borgaonkar, who came to the region from Karnataka in 1948. While the convention of female artists performing in and then managing Tamasha companies is relatively recent, leading male artists have, of course, been around a long time. Figures like Shivram Borgaonkar and his sons link directly with the shahir tradition of Maharashtra – medieval singer-poets who once travelled around the region reciting legendary tales of Marathi heroes and heroines. In their ballads, or powadas, the shahirs narrated vivid dramatic episodes using rhythmic verse. They were highly skilled in mixing familiar refrains with vernacular, conversational exposition. The powada is a tradition held in high esteem by many Maharashtrians who regard it as a vital part of their communal heritage. The origins of the word lie in an old Marathi word, pawad, meaning ‘a chant sung in praise of a deity’ (Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, 2003) and it traditionally served to reinforce group loyalties and integrate disparate social and territorial groups (O’Hanlon 1987). As a modern-day shahir, Baburao still retains the honoured status of his ancient predecessors. The term ‘Loknatya Tamasha’ used by Baburao to describe the company means ‘people’s theatre’. It seems to have been invented in the 1970s as a title for the new Tamasha style that had grown up after Independence. Brandon tells us that this type of Tamasha is ‘cleansed of obscene remarks and actions’ and provides for those ‘who want wholesome family entertainment’ (Brandon 1993, p. 112). In the 1950s, central Government under Pandit Nehru was keen to initiate social reformation through drama. A programme was planned to educate villagers, dramatising issues such as prohibition, eradication of untouchability, family planning, rural health schemes and agricultural technologies. Research was commissioned and published, and books appeared celebrating the communal power of village theatre and lamenting its moral shortcomings: ‘The general decay which percolated into our lives through a thousand years of work by codifiers and grammarians of emotions and moods has tarnished the humanity of even the village players . . . To such depths of degradation has the great theatrical tradition . . . sunk!’ (Anand 1950, pp. 13–14). They determined to alter both the form and the content of local entertainments. Not everyone regarded this as entirely appropriate: ‘Social reformers are striving to improve the Tamasha moral code by removing its vulgarity. Driven by bigotry they are taking the very guts out of the Tamasha’ (Gargi 1991, p. 88). Nevertheless, in 1954, the Song and Drama Division of the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (SDD) was launched ‘utilising live entertainment media for creating an

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88 Tamasha: escape awareness among the masses in rural India’ (Mukhopadhyay 1978, p. 163). The SDD financed a total of 40 full-time theatre troupes nationwide, using them to disseminate Government messages and broadcasting them on radio and TV. The Borgaonkar company was not part of this official body, but grew up at the same time and clearly associates itself with the same movement. Quite possibly, the term ‘Loknatya Tamasha’ serves them well in garnering any grants and tax breaks available from current Government bodies, and might even raise their status in the minds of the general public. Certainly, they have made themselves extremely popular. Fifty years ago, they toured with just ten people on a bullock cart, performing without make-up or amplification, the stage lit only with gas lamps. Nowadays, they bring along the following: sixteen female dancers and singers twenty-five male actors and singers ten (male) instrumentalists six technicians one bus for company members two jeeps for managers and general use four tents for accommodating the company two trucks for technical equipment, including full proscenium stage.

Organisation It is true to say that modern-day Tamasha companies own at least one truck, and technicians are part and parcel of it all. But this is a distinctly extravagant affair, even by today’s standards. The Borgaonkars also have four managers (bandari) – one for the artists, one for finances, one for legalities and one for bookings. On the day of the show, Vijay Kumar Borgaonkar sits on the ground in his sales tent (called rahuti, or ‘dwelling’) alongside the managers of finance and law; the artists’ manager is 100 kilometres south of here, supervising a lunchtime show. Of the thirty-five rahuti at the Tamasha bazaar, the Borgaonkar one seems the most extravagant, with a large coloured awning and an entrance area arrayed with potted plants and fancy brick decorations. Inside the tent, Baburao Borgaonkar’s awards are displayed, some of them wrapped in plastic for protection. A large poster hanging on the back wall has a portrait of Baburao in the centre with musical notes floating around his head; to the left of the bold company logo he is pictured again, standing with his microphone; to the right is Lata Solapurkar, the company’s lead female singer. We sit cross-legged on the blue cotton flooring and are offered cold drinks – bottles of lemonade

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and coke. There is a duck-egg-blue plastic telephone on the floor that rings regularly but never seems to connect – perhaps someone is trying to make a booking. Vijay shows us his booking book. On the cover is a bright Chinese print of a house in a watery landscape – about as far away as you can get from this sandy field with the midday sun blasting down. Inside it is a neat grid system locating every company booking on each day of the season; it is already pretty full. Before this jatra, the Borgaonkar company visited the towns of Akluj and Jalgaon. Tomorrow they will move on to Phaltan, south-east of Pune. Vijay says the company is forbidden to solicit buyers except through the formal show-case events in these four locations. Here in Narayangaon, each village from around about has sent a jatra committee (a panchayat) to attend the festival. They inspect the boards outside each rahuti that display prices, storylines, star performers and so on. Baburao’s company is in demand, and village panchayats must compete with one another for popular dates; they will barter over the price of a show. Sometimes, the committee is looking for something for this season, requesting a date during this six-week festival period. Minor changes might be made to the current show in order to suit their specification. In the majority of cases, however, a sale is clinched for a new show, as yet unrehearsed, to be performed next year in the village square. It is not unheard of for a village to book itself more than one company,

Figure 4.2 Vijay Borgaonkar and colleagues.

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90 Tamasha: escape just in case one does not turn up, creating mayhem for the artists. Only recently has a system been introduced whereby the village representatives must provide a down payment when they book the company. Padlocked to a metal hospital bed in the corner of the rahuti is a suitcase containing the advance payments and contracts, signed on official stamped paper. Despite such formalities, Vijay says it is common for them to arrive in a village and find the panchayat has not collected enough money from the community to pay the agreed fee. If this is the case, they tend to do the show nevertheless for whatever reduced fee is available. This attitude is in keeping with Vithabai’s company, which often used to perform without asking for a fee, simply accepting a meal and tips for company members as remuneration. In her interview for Sparrow Films (2001), Vithabai says their generosity was amply rewarded as she gained welcome exposure and people started paying her performers large amounts of money. The finance manager shows us his large red accounts book. He says that here at the trade show, the company receives a mere honorary fee of Rs.7,000. However, the villagers pay a minimum of Rs.25,000 fee for the same show, probably performed for a much smaller crowd. In a good season, when the harvest is successful, they might pay Rs.50,000 or Rs.60,000. This is the best money available. If the company does an indoor ticketed show (for example, in Pune at Diwali), the money is never so good. They must pay rent to the venue and do their own publicity, giving out handbills and sticking up posters at least two weeks before the show. Once the actors arrive in town, they are sent out to walk around bazaars and fairgrounds, summoning up a crowd. Local newspapers and a jeep with a loudhailer on the top add to the advertising extravaganza. Now that daulat jadda is illegal, their only revenue is from ticket sales (at Rs.20 a piece) and out of the total must come company running costs, the actors’ salaries, a performing licence from the local authority of Rs.1,500 with an accompanying bribe of Rs.5,000–10,000. The performers are apparently on a salary of about Rs.5,000 per month13 for the seven-month tour, a female singer/dancer getting more than a male musician or actor. They get an advance of Rs.15,000–20,000 at the beginning of the season and all their touring expenses are covered. They pay no state tax and have no pensions (the 1970s Government initiative to provide such things came to nothing). The Borgaonkar Company is successful; it says it has a decent standard of living. However, many companies are down on their luck and severely in debt. The people to whom managers owe thousands of rupees turn up at the shows and heckle, demanding their money. It is said that the money lenders expect

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sexual favours from the Tamasha women – and get them. No wonder they have so many managers.

Preparations The trucks arrive in the performance area just off the main street at about 9pm. There has been a show staged here in the same place for six nights, yet each company must build its own stage from scratch. The Borgaonkar Company is used to it; it can get its stage unloaded and rigged up in a couple of hours. The basic structure is built using steel scaffolding, with canvas covers for walls and rectangular proscenium. There is room for the audience on three sides (a generation ago, they watched from all four sides), but the proscenium frame feels very much front-on. The floor of

Figure 4.3 Borgaonkar company technicians unload.

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92 Tamasha: escape bare wooden boards is raised about a metre off the ground; it must be at least 20 metres square. There are four or five painted drops on hemp lines, along with a couple of hung front-cloths. The vast lighting rig includes footlights and fancy chasers, and is operated manually from a bank of switches. To supplement the big onstage amplification, blue trumpet-shaped speakers have been rented from a local supplier and rigged out in the field for extra stereophonic effect. Modern Tamasha companies all want to be absolutely contemporary in style, and are continually introducing bigger and better technical elements. Vying for attention in the market, the competition is tough – if one company purchases a set of chasers for its lighting rig or a new set of speakers for its sound system, the others must follow suit. Audience members have been wandering in since the trucks started arriving. They sit on the ground in the large, dusty field, watching the technicians assemble their stage. At the front sit the young men – most of them look well inebriated; someone says they have been drinking for several hours, though they have clearly left their bottles somewhere else. Someone else says most likely they are supporters of the right-wing Hindutva movement in Maharashtra; they go regularly to city rallies and extravagant shows promulgating the purity and heroism of Shivaji.14 We saw lads like this coming out of the New Year show in Pune chanting slogans for the Shiv Sena political party. There is a long tradition of political parties using Tamashas to perpetuate their ideologies, their messages being made to stand out boldly in the drama. This show has not been sponsored by Shiv Sena, but it will be interesting to see how the tastes of these front-row punters are accommodated. Just behind them is a camera on a tripod and a small crew getting equipment sorted out. The local television channel has been filming the whole festival and tonight’s show will be relayed into every home in the region. A nationwide programme for the rehabilitation of folk theatre through television was introduced in the 1980s as part of the Government initiative begun by SDD (see pp. 87–88). Writing at the start of this new movement, Government employee Durugdas Mukhopadhyay stated: ‘The use of media will help in spreading the message of national integration and motivate the people to put in their best for achieving the national objectives’ (Mukhopadhyay 1978, p. 147). Mukhopadhyay complained about common stereotypes in TV soaps: ‘Authoritarian fathers, rebellious sons, affectionate mothers, dumb sisters, etc. . . . an eclectic mixture of commercial vulgarity and cannibalisation of all manners of aesthetic modes . . . a means of keeping masses narcotised, ineffectual in political process’ (Mukhopadhyay 1978, p. 148). He claimed that folk theatre was an opposing force, with its ‘deep religious

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and ritualistic overtones . . . it can surely project social life, secular themes and universal values’. Unlike his 1950s predecessors paving the way for the SDD, Durugdas Mukhopadhyay and his sympathisers in the 1970s now saw the Tamasha as free of emotional and moral degradation. It had the power to surpass the artistic limitations of television drama. No one knows how many people are watching the show at home on the box tonight. What they do know, like theatre companies all over the world, is that competition with television is now their greatest problem. Until about a decade ago, Borgaonkar says, people would travel 20 kilometres to get to a show. Now they have television drama at home, audiences are lazy, they will not even come 5 kilometres. Narayangaon Tamasha artist Mahadev Khude, Vithabai’s nephew, says things have changed recently in terms of audience ‘satisfaction’ (he used the English word), and companies are desperately trying to accommodate their customers’ new tastes. Rather than provide an alternative to the popular TV soaps, live shows these days imitate them as closely as possible. In the tent behind the stage, the actors are getting ready – the women at one end, the men at the other, with a curtain separating their allocated areas. This is their space while they are on tour, a shared tent in which they work, eat and sleep. The men look relaxed in plain dress – white cotton tunics and dark trousers; they wander about chatting and smoking. They do not don the traditional long silk turban (Gargi 1991, p. 77) and the only make-up around is a little powder dabbed on sweating faces. In the other section, the women are hard at work painting their faces with the thickest of pale foundations, darkest black kohl on the eyes, ruby lipstick. They sit on the ground, lined up under bare hanging light bulbs, a row of little mirrors propped up on trunks in front of them. Each performer has her own blue steel trunk containing everything she will need for the tour. During the show it will be firmly padlocked, but now it is opened and unpacked. The dancers take out heavy jewellery, over a dozen changes of costume, and little images depicting a god or a goddess, a spiritual guru or two (Sai Baba seems particularly popular). The unwieldy nine-yard saris are unfolded, revealing every bright silk hue imaginable. Though some women need help putting the saris on, most tie theirs dexterously; they tuck the thick wedge of pleats up between their legs and into the waist at the back, giving their buttocks an exaggerated lift, like the Victorian bustle. The very profusion of fabric exaggerates the parts of the body that it covers, drawing attention to them. Only the flesh of arms and head is left exposed. The floor-length palu is carefully pinned in place at the shoulder, everything securely fastened so there is no danger of its coming undone during the dances.

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94 Tamasha: escape

Figure 4.4 Lata putting on ghungroos.

Heavy strings of bells (ghungroos) are wound laboriously around thick brown wadding at the ankle. The women are quiet and alert as they prepare. I ask Lata, the lead singer, if she is tired after this afternoon’s five-hour show. No, she answers; with her make-up on she feels fresh again and ready to perform. She is used to doing a couple of gigs a day. Tomorrow morning, after finishing this show around 4am, they will be on the road again. Lata married into the Borgaonkar family and has been doing this job for twenty years. For seven months of the year they tour far away from home, often more than 500 kilometres. In July, when the festival season is over and the monsoon begins, they return home and may

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do piecemeal jobs: field labourers, market stallholders, housewives. I ask Lata if she has a family. She proudly describes her teenage son back home in the village who will matriculate this year. She is not particularly flattered when I say she looks too young to have a teenage son. He has never been interested in the Tamasha, Lata declares, and she did not encourage him. He needs a proper education and a career. The other women agree – gone are the days when their craft was passed down through families, from mother to child. Children do not tour with their families, but they may learn the songs and dances during the monsoon period when their parents are home. After matriculation, at the age of sixteen, a child can join the troupe if they really want to (these mothers would clearly prefer not). As preparations are completed, the side areas adjacent to the stage are cordoned off for VIPs. These guests plus a couple of policemen are ushered in and given red plastic chairs to sit on. People behind us have to stand up to see the show, though the young men in the main area at the front are still able to sit on the ground. Right at the back sit families and older people, men and women, many of them already asleep in the dust. There are now perhaps 10,000 people assembled in the dusty field. These families are most likely to be local to Narayangaon town. They may well be farmers, but there is also likely to be a range of other occupations such as shopkeepers, factory workers and even the local academic fraternity, some of whom publish work on contemporary Tamasha. Many of these people will have family working in the metropoles of Mumbai or Pune, or even further afield. They are familiar with all sorts of entertainments, though probably limited to Marathi as their only language. Around the edge of the audience area are stalls selling snacks, their gas lamps incongruous antiques in the face of all the stage technology. The popular samosa stall is run by a woman and her teenage daughter. Suddenly, from nowhere, a very drunken man is spotted lurching towards the women, bullying them for cash. When he is refused, he slaps first his wife and then his daughter, hard across the cheek; no one intervenes. Later, the drunkard crashes out in the dirt next to the stall. His daughter lays a blanket over his undignified body. At about 11pm a couple of officials from the Narayangaon authorities invite me onto the stage to bless the event. One of the officials makes a short speech to the young men sitting at the front, urging them to behave, especially because there is a foreign lady here tonight. As the VIP foreigner, I am draped with garlands of marigolds and directed to make the prasad – cracking open a coconut on the boards downstage centre. I am aware that a clean cut is necessary – it will be inauspicious if I take too many goes for the shell to burst. The audience applauds as the coconut spurts its milk, and I stand up to the microphone to fulfil my next

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96 Tamasha: escape

Figure 4.5 The author, making prasad, with Narayangaon officials.

VIP duty – an impromptu speech. My Marathi is not up to it, so in slow English I make some pronouncement about preservation and the success of Tamasha being evidenced by the huge crowd gathered here in Narayangaon; no one steps forward to translate. I retreat out of the lights in as dignified manner as possible with the posse of officials at my heels. One of them asks politely what I said; most likely 10,000 others have not understood, but maybe they felt good about my being there.

The dance show A clutch of male actors accompanied by two horizontal dholki drums and the large tamborine-type halgi take over and do a perfunctory bit of singing. They are performing the Gan, the invocation to Ganesh that also took place at the beginning of the Sangeet Bari show. The Gan is traditionally sung by men only and retains exactly the same form from one year to the next. It is part of Hindu cultural heritage and certainly appeals to Hindu traditionalists, but audience members of all religions will regard it as a familiar introduction for all sorts of performances (including secular ones). Borgaonkar’s show rapidly moves on to the next section, following the traditional Dholki Phat five-part structure inherited from the eighteenth-century Peshwa period.15 This is called

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Ranga Deratha – a big company dance number with all sixteen female dancers ranging in age from small teenagers to a couple of women who might be in their fifties. As they enter, they pay homage to the framed photo of the company’s founder, Shivram Borgaonkar, hung on a scaffolding pole downstage-right. Upstage, the dholki and halgi players accompany the two women singers; they flank the man playing harmonium and his colleague on the tuntuna – a one-stringed, plucked drone. Lata had a throat operation some time ago and is unable to sing the high bits, so she frequently passes her microphone to the harmonium player who sings in falsetto for her. The ensemble choreography consists of simple steps forward and back to the beat of the drums, heals stamping and ghungroos jangling. The platform is crowded and the dancers are unable to move far from their initial positions in two straight lines facing out front. The girls in the middle know the swinging arm movements well and lead the others as they turn on their heels and swing from one side to the other. From my VIP vantage point, close to the side of the stage, I can spot the young girls who do not seem to know what is going on. They are doing a feeble imitation of their leaders’ movements. Their training consisted of a mere month’s rehearsal with the rest of the company at the beginning of the season (in October/November). In the 1970s there was a Governmentsponsored scheme to provide dancers with a formal training through workshops and training camps, but it was soon dropped. ‘The Vithabai Memorial Ashram’ – a group of local men intent on preserving the high status of Narayangaon in the Tamasha world – say they are planning training schemes and some sort of hostel in Vithabai’s name. Elsewhere, there are plans for folk art gurukkals – schools were people can learn all sorts of indigenous performance forms. But there is no Tamasha Academy; in this industry, you learn on your feet. The company line-up soon gives way to three central dancers who are clearly the most expert. They turn the focus inwards towards one another as they swing about, with curling arms and swivelling hips. They seem to be dancing more for their own pleasure than that of their noisy, inattentive audience. At the end of the number, the rest of the women return onstage and stand waiting to be called into action. A male comic actor, Maushi (meaning ‘auntie’), appears wearing a loosely tied sari, the palu draped over his head in exaggerated modesty. He speaks to the audience in regional dialect, from a central standing microphone, calling forward a couple of young, pretty girls to introduce them. There is comic repartee concerning their names, double entendres, raunchy humour; it seems semi-improvised. The girls are facetious and get enthusiastic wolfwhistles and cheers from the lads at the front.

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98 Tamasha: escape

Figure 4.6 Maushi and Tamasha girls.

This section is named Gaulan, meaning ‘milkmaid’, and in the traditional Dholki Phat it entails songs and farcical skits on the theme of Krishna and the milkmaids. Perhaps it derives from the old Marathi religious dramas, lalits, satirising village affairs (Nadkarni 1969, Sangeet Natak 12, p. 20). Its religious character is an anomaly in what is a predominantly secular entertainment, but Krishna is a popular character. It is his qualities of flirtatiousness and cheekiness that appeal to this audience. After another musical ensemble number, Maushi has a dialogue with a bearded man (the traditional songadhya, or buffoon) concerning well-known Krishna tales. The songadhya, meaning ‘player with many faces’, (Nadkarni 1969, Sangeet Natak 12, p. 27) says Krishna has arrived in the village and is preventing girls from fetching water at the well; he is taking the girls’ clothes and hanging them from a tree. Says who! They gossip about Radha and her infidelities. Ostensibly the dialogue takes place in the world of Hindu mythology, but it uses the rough local vernacular and is overtly raunchy. This material is well known, varying little from year to year or from place to place. The front-row audience looks bored, but those at the back respond appreciatively, with fond familiarity. Suddenly, the fancy chaser lights are activated and to thunderous musical declamation a group of girls appears onstage to dance a popular

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film song, ‘Radha krisnavari bhalagi’ (Radha has gone crazy for Krishna). Like the Sangeet Bari dancers, they mouth the words while the actual singers remain with microphones in an upstage corner. The girls will have used video and audiotapes to learn this number as exactly as possible. Ironically, the film choreography is a parody of an oldfashioned folk theatre form, Ras Lila, where the god cavorts with his milkmaids.16 Krishna here is played by an enthusiastic girl in a gold headdress. His flute is represented by a stick struck against a similar stick carried by a white-clad Radha (in the style of the popular Maharashtrian folk community dance Lezim). The lighting operator plays in time with the music, using all his fingers to manipulate his on/off switches. The number seems a success with the crowd, but there is no applause when the front-cloth suddenly flies in and Radha waves farewell. This is the first time we have seen the front-cloth – it fills the proscenium and is painted using exaggerated perspective to show a formal garden with fountains, an antique domed building and some sort of arcade. The expensive elegance of the image is in stark contrast to the real-life modern buildings all around the field where we sit and is far removed from the traditional folk theatre pati – the rectangle of cloth that used to be held by a couple of actors. Now comes the popular Lavani section – three hours of live singing and big dance numbers. At this point, the show moves right away from the traditional material to present really up-to-date entertainment – more sex, more violence and possibly more politics. The young men at the front sit quietly, concentrating hard, chins propped in hands. This is why they sit so close to the action – their chance to have fun, to dominate the show. As the Tamasha girls enter, the lads compete to make eye contact with the most popular ones, often standing up and waving to attract attention. Sometimes they spontaneously rise as a group and dance along to a favourite Hindi film number, shouting out the lyrics in their enthusiasm. The women dance barefoot on the wooden planked stage but there are no bells on their ankles. Their nine-yard saris have been discarded – the new costumes are clearly derived from naturalistic film originals. Some of these songs derive from lavanis, but these are forgotten now they have been assimilated into populist movie numbers. For this more modern section, the lead dholki player has transferred to an electronic ‘active pad’ that he beats with sticks. The harmonium player uses an electronic keyboard and its numerous sound effects. There is an eclectic array of percussion instruments – among them, standing drums, maracas, kettle-drums. No sign of the traditional Tamasha instruments.

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100 Tamasha: escape

Figure 4.7 Tamasha dancers.

The choreography is based on film originals, adapted for the proscenium stage, freer and more naturalistic than the lavani dances in the Sangeet Bari. They perform a new title number for this season, a patriotic song medley centred on ‘Vande Mataran’.17 It splices together a song from the film Haqeeqat with a traditional Maharashtrian folk song, then the well-known ‘Ae mere wotanke logo’ by Lata Mangeshkar. The performance is less a dance number and more a small piece of nationalistic music theatre. The compilation is used as backing music to a long, mimed sequence where women in white saris bless their men folk who march about in army combat fatigues carrying little national flags. Lata appears draped in a huge Indian flag, and upstage centre stands a pretty girl draped in another, her right hand raised in blessing – Mother India inspiring 10,000 of us to patriotic fervour. The dramatic storyline is taken from a recent box-office hit film about Shaheed Bhagat Singh. The

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company mime gives way to a scene with an evil soldier lip-synching to a BIG voiceover from offstage. The tone is melodramatic and serious. At the centre of the drama are three innocent men in a forest landscape – trees painted on a flown drop which hangs above their heads, so the musicians can be seen upstage of them. They have black sacks put over their heads and are then ‘hung’ with the bench beneath their feet suddenly, shockingly crashing down. The young men at the front are pleased, intently focused on the drama and its message to them. Light-hearted relief is now provided by Maushi and his comedy colleagues in a short comic interlude, music-hall style. The actors appear downstage of the front-cloth, dressed naturalistically as everyday rural folk. These interludes will occur throughout the Lavani section, dividing one musical number from the next, and are called Rangbaji (meaning ‘slapstick’). With Maushi acting as village gossip, the actors discuss men’s infidelities, someone’s ganja addiction, someone else’s irreverence. The jokes clearly refer to contemporary lifestyle, though they are general and surprisingly a-political, not encroaching on any specific local person or situation. There is a popular slapstick sequence on the subject of religious piety, where the songhadya is asked to say ‘Ram, Ram’ (in respect for the god) and he replies ‘No’. Each time he replies, his face is slapped, over and over again. The young male audience rolls about. We are already one hour into the show when a smoke machine and lots of flashing coloured lights hail the star entrance – at last, here he is – Baburao in person. The whole audience applauds that the great singerpoet has arrived. Clutching his own personal microphone with a big, red head, he bows to the photo of his father before singing the Hindi film song ‘Geet Gaata Chal ’ (meaning ‘Go on Singing’), striding about the space. Baburao is the company choreographer, yet his own choreography consists simply of striding midstage from one side to the other. In his spectacles and brown suit, he looks more like an office clerk than a music theatre star. But Baburao need not be sexy, he is no one’s object of desire. Perhaps there is an element of the old shahir tradition (see p. 87) in the way he presents himself. Rather than recite his own, challenging verses as the old shahirs did, Baburao is simply repeating the lyrics of a popular film song, but he is still this company’s controller, the man with the vision. This modern version of shahir is clearly much respected by the crowd as a whole. His backing vocals are provided by Lata and another younger woman, both obscured behind the backcloth. The starlet singing alongside her has a high-pitched voice that completely drowns out the older singer’s low tones. Clearly Lata’s throat is letting her down. It is surprising that, in such a commercial environment, a singer with a technical problem as bad as this is kept on. But, of course, she has married

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102 Tamasha: escape

Figure 4.8 Baburao salutes his father.

into the family who owns the company. Quite possibly her own family paid her dowry to the company itself and effectively hold shares in it. They continue to expect profits from their investment. When Baburao’s number finishes, a plain front-cloth comes in and there are announcements from officials – thanks for a Rs.51 donation, a search for a lost child, general felicitations and, finally, light-hearted chastisements towards the front-row lads for getting out of control. The boys cheer and wave at my film camera – pleased to be in the limelight. Next, the company performs a song by Dev Das from the film Hum Tumhare Hai Sanam. A girl plays the lead male role wearing specs, a yellow striped T-shirt, jeans and a red baseball cap. The female lead is the

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same girl who had sung along with Lata earlier. She is clearly the main attraction of the number and invites much cheering and whistling from her fans. In contrast, the boy–girl tends to hang back in the shadows as much as she can, seemingly without enthusiasm for her central role. In a repeated bit of choreography where the two must kiss, the boy–girl performs stiffly, as if demonstrating her personal embarrassment. Perhaps the nachya boys who played women in the Tamasha a century ago had this same awkward presence. The girl–girl becomes increasingly playful through these same sequences, flirting with her crowd as she mimes the kisses. Finally, there is a full kiss on the lips downstage centre. The young men cheer elatedly and cry out ‘More’ (in English) as the girls cut upstage under the descending front-cloth. A short lavani dance is now performed by one of the older women. Its musical setting is termed ‘cocktail lavani’, meaning the traditional piece has been re-mixed with contemporary rhythms and electronic effects. As in the Sangeet Bari show, the staging is low-tec, with open white light state – a stark contrast to the previous flashy numbers. The dancer wears a dark-blue nine-yard sari and begins in traditional fashion with the palu shrouding her head. She responds eagerly to audience whistles from around the field, and as she exits the whole crowd cheers. Despite its old-fashioned nature, it has been a popular number.

The play At the end of the Lavani section (after approximately three hours), Baburao dons a saffron turban and makes a speech of thanks, stressing the importance of this Narayangaon festival in the perpetuation of Maharashtrian theatre. He announces that his company is particularly well known for its straight theatre (vag natya) performances, and his play, Ai Tuze Lekroo (‘Mother, Your Dear Child’) is to follow. As the stage is changed for the play, most of the audience members get up to leave. The crowd of excitable lads at the front takes off into the night. Those who remain are a mixture of ages, though mainly over forty, all of them male. They come and sit in a tight group at the front – perhaps a couple of hundred of them, watching the technicians change the set. At the back of the vacated field some audience members – men, women and children – continue sleeping. The empty space is strewn with cigarette butts and plastic wrappers, like any post-festival arena. The refreshment stalls remain open – it is now 2.30am. On stage, the borders and rolled hanging drops are removed, as is the majority of the hung lighting rig. Two drops are suspended, both painted in red and green – the first depicts the interior of a poor house, with hand-painted windows and doors; the

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104 Tamasha: escape second a perspective painting of a rich public hall with pillars and fancy murals. The architectural front-cloth remains. During the ensuing show, the technicians will be busy taking down the set – lights and drops will be packed into the trucks along with most of the musical equipment. One technician spends the whole two hours of the vag crawling around under the raised stage, silently unscrewing the floorboards with spanners, ready for a quick getaway. The lighting operator remains at his switchboard to operate flashes and changes when required. The script for this show is written by Baburao and owned by the company, though other companies may buy theirs in. It must have been vetted by a State Government office (Culture Ministry), the Tamasha Board of Maharashtra, and any perceived vulgarity or obscenity excised. This play received its official ‘No Objection Certificate’ some years ago and is regularly performed; it is part of a set of five or six scripts written by Baburao. Each season the company rehearses in a new script that becomes part of the repertoire, and they can choose any one at short notice, depending on circumstances (for example, the size and nature of audience, a village panchayat’s perceived taste, company members’ availability). The vag element of Tamasha was first introduced in the Peshwar period,18 but only developed as fully scripted drama much later with the intervention of Government officials in the British colonial period. Until that time, scripts were not such strictly controlling and controlled events. Actors might be given a storyline or even simply a scenario, set out by the troupe leader, with which to improvise. A male chorus, or the shahir, would open the show and then provide plotadvancing accounts along the way. The audience was expected to take an active part in this process also, with lively heckling and requests. The improvisatory and audience-participation nature of the original vag is thought to derive from two Maharashtrian traditions: one, the kirtan, where one man performed an hour-long sermon with devotional songs in unison with the spectators; the other, the improvised minstrel songs, ghondals, where itinerant troupes used to be judged on their inventiveness and linguistic suppleness. When the vags were first introduced into Tamasha, they depicted mythological and historical characters.19 In contrast, this modern show uses contemporary archetypes with no aspirations to historical or mythological grandeur. The characters are presented in an Indian television soap-opera style. Costumes are realistic modern, make-up still the exaggerated Tamasha style to cope with the lighting rig. The acting tone is exaggerated, the pace of the show energetic – quick scene changes provided by hand-manipulated drops. Music accompanies entrances and exits and there are a few song and dance numbers (sometimes with pre-

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recorded sound-track, sometimes live). The musicians are hidden upstage and they provide melodramatic sound effects with synthesiser and miced drums. There are runs on the keyboard for extreme gestures or in anticipation of laughter; percussion effects for slapstick. These effects remind one of circus clowning, or the more exaggerated traditions of panto. They exhibit the same bold aesthetic as the previous musical sections, despite the fact that the audience is now so much more intimate. The show begins with a brief downstage dialogue between two women – a doctor in a white coat and a poor middle-aged mother. The mother is played by a young woman who took a prominent role in the comic interludes with the Maushi; powder in her hair and a shabby grey sari serve to age her forty years. The scene takes place downstage centre, as most dialogue will, because the three hung microphones are situated there. We learn that the doctor had delivered the woman’s son, Bansi, many years ago and that she herself has a son of the same age. Exit the doctor. Bansi (played by Baburao) enters ‘disguised’ as an old postman to deliver a telegram. When the mother reads that her son has died, she breaks down in tears. Bansi promptly wipes off his painted white beard and reveals that it was just a joke. An enthusiastic dance from him reassures her that he meant no harm. The scene finishes with a musically accompanied sequence where the mother feeds her son the local bhakri bread, while he hurriedly gets ready for college. Clearly, the show is a vehicle for Baburao; he is taking advantage of his status; we are not expected to judge his character, rather we already recognise him as a force of good in the show. Next, downstage of the front cloth, we are introduced to the evil heroine of the show – the leading dancer, Lata’s starlet upstager no less. She now plays Anju, a spoilt little rich girl, whining to her father. Perhaps this upper-class father harks back to the old powadas (see p. 87) with their caricatures of evil Brahmins, or the medieval bharud poetry that used to satirise the upper classes. This contemporary dad is arrogant and stupid, but not as much as his daughter; during their conversation, his servant regularly interjects, pointing up Anju’s obnoxiousness and her father’s gullibility. In panto style, chords from an offstage keyboard punctuate the servant’s comments, cueing the audience to laugh. This servant clown links up with the songadhya buffoonery of earlier on, with its overt asides and raunchy popular appeal. The Narayangaon audience loves the low-class character who sees and speaks the truth when his upper-class master is blind to it. Later, the same character will create much hilarity in a Punch and Judy fight with his nagging wife.

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106 Tamasha: escape The big stage space now opens up for a college debate between the two young protagonists. Their competition is about which love is better – a mother’s or a father’s. Bansi leads the pro-mother side, Anju the profather. This scene seems directly related to the traditional Tamasha convention of sawal-jabab (‘question-and-answer form’), originally developed during the Peshwari period. Shahirs from different Tamasha groups are said to have competed in a verbal tug of war, or intellectual debate, using all their performing skills to gain the audience’s approval. Nadkarni calls it ‘musical repartee’ and it must once have been an extremely impressive event, with extensive musical and verbal improvisation on esoteric matters. ‘This had a decisively mystic orientation and centred round the alleged dichotomy between Shiva and Shakti . . . intricate conundrums would be posed and answered’ (Nadkarni 1969, Sangeet Natak 12, p. 20). Vithabai says the question-and-answer sessions that she used to perform lacked any mysticism, but still used the male force of Shiva versus the female Shakti. They would debate the different strengths of men and women – for example, which gender was the stronger, which more innocent. From her description, it seems the focus of the two disputants was always outwards, as if encouraging debate and even conflict between audience members. It was done with a flirtatious attitude, as provocative as the lavani dance style. Here, the war of wits around Shiva and Shakti has become a debate about father-love and mother-love. The contemporary secular discourse begins as dialogue between the two leads (as one imagines the two shahirs originally bantered) and turns into an ensemble dance number with pre-recorded sound-track (including singing). There does not seem to be any improvisation. The company (the men led by Bansi and the women by Anju) stride back and forth across stage to the music – as one team advances, the other retreats and vice versa. Both sides are enjoying themselves immensely. A group of judges at the college debate eventually votes Bansi (and mother-love) the winner. The next scene sees Anju plotting with her father to revenge herself on Bansi. The evil girl is proving to be the popular centre of the show – the actress capitalises on her popularity, already well established in the lavani dances, encouraging the audience to jeer and hiss. Anju and her father decide to teach the boy a lesson (a moment accompanied by sudden crashing chords on the synthesiser) and a climax is reached with Anju’s declaring that she will marry Bansi in order to take control of him. The plot continues with her father visiting the mother; he makes it clear that she has no choice other than to marry her son to his daughter. Bansi had been accepted into the college under special dispensation from the governors (including Anju’s father); strictly, such a poor boy should not

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have entered their elite establishment. The mother accepts that she owes Anju’s father a favour in return – she promises her son’s hand in marriage to his daughter. Bansi throws a tantrum when he learns of his fate, but respect for his mother overrides his feelings. After the wedding ceremony we have a couple of scenes in which Anju behaves badly, bullying Bansi into throwing his mother out. The male audience is attentive to this mother versus daughter-in-law theme – a common problem in a society where new wives move in with their inlaws. The plot then moves on in true melodrama style to Anju’s killing Bansi with poisoned food. At Bansi’s death, in his mother’s arms, the doctor appears and introduces the mother to her long-lost son – Bansi’s twin whom she had stolen at his birth because she herself had no child. The sudden plot twist seems clumsy and incongruous, but perhaps it is not wholly unexpected for this audience – the separated twins story is a very popular theme in Hindi films.20 Interestingly, no judgement is made of the doctor who had stolen away the twin. Perhaps the real-life stigma of childlessness is so great that the audience (and the mother in the story) instantly understands the desperation that led to the doctor’s crime and forgives her. Or perhaps this is so much a men’s show that they have no interest in what was essentially women’s business. Together, doctor and mother plot to revenge themselves for Bansi’s death, using this second brother (played, of course, by Baburao again). When the brother is presented before her, Anju is so shocked at her husband’s apparent reappearance from the dead that she confesses to feeling remorse for the murder and asks forgiveness. All ends happily with a little concluding speech from the doctor to round things off. It is past 4am.

Political background The Vithabai Memorial Ashram members are tut-tutting at the lack of seriousness in Borgaonkar’s play; they say the vags used to be so much better, with a serious educational content; even the lyrics of the lavani used to carry a message for the audience. They regard the ‘social awareness’ period of Government-supported shows as a Golden Age of Tamasha. Even before Independence there were people creating Tamashas that were intended not for escapism but for education, especially of a political nature. The drama element of Tamasha has often been appropriated by people who wanted to reach the mass public through their most popular medium. In the nineteenth century Tamasha was used by the Sathya Shodak Samaj (Truth Seeking Society) for anti-Brahmin propaganda. Established

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108 Tamasha: escape

Figure 4.9 Technicians strike the set.

in Pune in 1873 by Jyotirao Phule, the SSS was formed to encourage lower castes to challenge the superiority of the Brahmins (Srampickal 1994, p. 73). The SSS united all non-Brahmin castes, identifying the whole group with the Maratha warriors (kshatriyas) of seventeenthcentury Maharashtra who had defended their land against Moghul invaders. The Maratha warrior Shivaji was resurrected as a symbol of national (and kshatriya) pride and leader of all the lower castes. In the SSS Tamashas, the shahirs would recite propaganda ballads extolling the bravery of Shivaji the Great and urging political uprisings in his name against Brahmins.21 The overriding political message necessitated a few changes to the actual Tamasha form itself – for example, the traditional Gana opening with an invocation to the Brahmin god Ganesh was re-

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interpreted with the new etymology of gan = people and pati = leader. One of the pioneers of SSS Tamasha was Ramachandrarao Ghadge of Kale; by 1915, he had twenty-nine troupes spread across Maharashtra. The most popular elements of these shows became farces in which Brahmins cheated the poor and innocent peasants. During the very same period, however, there was another propaganda use of Tamasha going on. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) was a Maharashtrian Brahmin, a journalist and political leader of extremist nationalism who used an aggressive, warlike style to encourage his followers. He appropriated Shivaji not as anti-Brahmin, but as a symbol of anti-British military rule. Tamasha performances under Tilak’s influence were ‘loaded with double meanings aimed against the British. Poets and singers committed to Tilak’s Hindu nationalist ideals wrote and performed works which attracted even the upper classes’ (Abrams 1990, p. 289). In 1893, Tilak’s Ganesh Festival was founded in Pune, a grand public event staged over eleven days with ceremonies, lectures and debates on current local issues. People were encouraged to take part in a celebration of their heritage, and to unite against British colonial dominance. It soon became an important forum for the acceptance of folk performing arts, with high standards of literary refinement and lyricism inherited through Brahmin artistic tastes. Ironically, the Brahmin writers were strongly influenced by English and European drama, by now well established in Maharashtra.22 For more than thirty years, the Savoy operas, Verdi and Rossini had been playing to vast houses in Pune and Mumbai, and their structural and musical inspiration could be found in the new anti-British Pune Tamashas. In 1941, another political movement came along to appropriate Tamasha dramas – the Communist Party. Inspired by Romain Rolland’s book People’s Theatre (1926), they formed a national organisation, IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association), for the ‘defence of culture against fascism and Imperialism’ (Oxford Encylopaedia of Theatre and Performance 2003). Its best-known Tamasha company was Shahir D.N. Gavankar’s ‘Red Flag Cultural Squad’ (Abrams 1990, p. 288). Anna Bhau Sathe (see p. 84) and Omar Shaik (a Muslim singer) joined D.N. Gavankar in his touring shows, putting on contemporary vags that presented the real-life drama of the villages. Gargi talks of Shaik as having ‘a thunderous voice, [he] has thrilled huge gatherings of workers with his lavani singing’ (Gargi 1991, p. 88). In the 1940s they produced a very popular Gogol-like satire – ‘Bandya the Accountant’, which showed a crooked village accountant’s double-dealing and come-uppance; it ran and ran. Another successful D.N. Gavankar vag was about a grain horder being cornered by starving villagers.

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110 Tamasha: escape The social archetypes of Borgaonkar’s show might well adhere to an SSS or a Communist play. The hypocrisy and ruthless power of the rich, and the vulnerability of the poor, are constant, unquestioned themes in Ai Tuze Lekroo (‘Mother, Your Dear Child’). The simplicity of characterisation might well be associated with a previous, propagandatype show where the inner life of the character must serve the greater significance of the political message. But here it seems there is no such vision. The spoilt little rich girl’s come-uppance is an inevitable, satisfactory ending for a schematic plot, but serious final messages are nowhere to be found. While the men from the Vitabai Memorial Ashram grumble about the demise of a great legacy, the crowd has had a vulgarly great night out. This seems entirely in keeping with the idea of Tamasha originating as an escapist diversion for the military: men, after a hard day’s work, enjoying the spectacle of women at play. It also adheres to the ancient agricultural associations of the Tamashas being performed after the harvest is in. For the diverse modern community in Narayangaon and elsewhere, Tamasha must first and foremost fulfil its meaning – ‘fun’. The managers state earnestly that they are forced to do vulgar shows – that the audiences demand television soap acting style and endless film music. And indeed, to a great degree, this is evident. What we are seeing is unashamedly commercial theatre; the Borgaonkars have no state subsidies. Their audiences’ needs are pretty clear – tough, hard-working folk, they need a break from the grind of everyday life. They are poor; their lives are burdened by all sorts of material and physical deprivation – strictures the average Westerner finds it hard to imagine. Naturally enough, they come to theatre for a few hours’ escape. If the show were to lose its overt entertainment value, why would they come and see it? Though the young men dominate the front of the crowd, their families are also present in thousands, hidden in the darkness beyond the flashing lights. The whole community sits here in the dust, ready to be entertained. The Dholki Phat sets itself quite a task, keeping them all there all night. It achieves its aim by delivering an eclectic repertoire with relentless ebullience. Not for one moment can the performers allow the energy to drop; they move rapidly and often noisily from one piece of fun to another, determined that no one should get bored and wander off. There is no time to think, no opportunity for analysis, as we roller-coaster from one extravaganza to the next in communal escapism. And while we wait for another gag, another great dance number, we might reflect, just for a moment, how vital this sort of fun is.

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5

Re-working Tamasha From socialism to social mobility

Maharashtrians love live entertainment; in the cities as much as the countryside, in rich communities as much as in poor. So let us now go in search of Tamasha in other parts of this performance culture. Because Maharashtra is such a modern and urban state, let us return to the city. As well as the Sangeet Bari-type entertainments, there are many other shows going on in all sorts of venues in even the smallest town. In many of these, the status of the written text is particularly evident, with an exceptionally strong playwriting tradition. Modern Marathi playwrights have been translated into numerous other languages and performed all over the world.1 The majority of these have judiciously avoided any association with Tamasha and its text-based vag section, regarding it as irrelevant to modern life. But since an enthusiasm for folk theatre took hold of the sub-continent for a while in the 1960s and 1970s, all sorts of late twentieth-century Maharashtrian theatre practitioners have been inspired to experiment and revivify their work with Tamasha influences.

Brechtian theatre To start with, there were the socialist writers. As Marathi writer Girish Karnad puts it: The theatrical conventions Brecht was reacting against – characters as a psychological construct providing a focus for emotional identification, the willing-suspension-of-disbelief syndrome, the notion of a unified spectacle – were never a part of the traditional Indian theatre. There was therefore no question of arriving at an ‘alienation’ effect by using Brechtian artifice. What he did was to sensitise us to the potentialities of non-naturalistic techniques available in our own theatre.2

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112 Re-working Tamasha One of the first experimenters of this generation was director Vijaya Mehta who founded the theatre laboratory Rangayan. The Rangayan functioned as a centre for theatre study, contextualising and analysing each play it produced, and Mehta brought Tamasha performers there to demonstrate their skills. She staged Brecht plays in her early experiments utilising Tamasha performing style – first, novelist Vyankatesh Madgulkar’s version of The Good Person of Schezuan, then C.T. Khanolkar’s translation of Caucasian Chalk Circle, the latter containing extensive folk music put together by composer Bhaskar Chandavarkar. Now the controversial head of the directing programme at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai, Mehta says these days she regrets having appropriated Tamasha style, though she still sees the performers’ work as a process from which her actors could learn. Humorist P.L. Deshpande’s adaptation of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera – Teen Paishacha Tamasha (directed by Jabbar Patel in 1967) is the best known of the earliest group of mainstream Brecht productions. The rough Tamasha community, its sense of danger and potential violence, was used to express the street world of the original with its prostitutes and con men. Marathi folk tunes and pop songs took over from Brecht and Kurt Weill’s ballads, giving the show a totally contemporary satirical relevance for post-colonial Maharashtra. Vyankatesh Madgulkar’s 1968 play Pati Gelega Kathewadi (‘My Husband’s Gone to Kathiawad’), a Boccaccio-type costume comedy, was one of the first wholly indigenous plays to use a strong Tamasha influence. A Maratha warrior-husband leaves home, loading his wife with some impossible tasks designed to test her fidelity. His wife’s wily stratagems fulfil the challenge. The plot is invested with a Tamasha narrative frame (Nadkarni 1969, Sangeet Natak 12, p. 28) and Tamashastyle gags are repeated in surprising and delightful ways (Gokhale 2000, p. 151).

Ghashiram Kotwal The real watershed in the assimilation of Marathi folk forms into an urban play was Ghashiram Kotwal by Vijay Tendulkar. Tendulkar is the ‘winner of several national and international awards and fellowships, he is both a venerated and controversial figure in the country’s theatre scene’;3 he is the author of more than twenty full-length plays, numerous one-act pieces, plays for children, film scripts and other pieces of nondramatic writing. In the 1960s Tendulkar started writing plays that broke away from the urban Marathi theatre tradition of middle-class family melodramas and contemporary realism, and focused increasingly on the

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machinations of power and the effects of oppression. His Ghashiram Kotwal, first staged in 1972, has proved to be a major influence in the Marathi theatre world, introducing dramaturgical and linguistic ideas that have been much emulated. The ensemble play is set in Maharashtra in the late eighteenth century and depicts cruel power games played out in terms of caste ascendance in local politics. The central character, Ghashiram Savaldas, is a north Indian Brahmin who comes to Pune in search of work and suffers humiliations at the hands of the local people (including a prostitute for whom he works). Of this central character, Tendulkar has said: Ghashiram in the play is a combination of various details, historical and contemporary. His visual image and his speech come from images from a few folk forms I had casually seen in my part of the country, his character is a combination of real life Ghashirams of my time.4 Vowing to revenge himself on the people of Pune, the Ghashiram gets in with the powerful court of Nana Phadnavis. Nana is an historical figure, a cult hero often referred to as the Marathi Machiavelli. The royal Peshwa’s chancellor in Pune, Nana was the only Maratha leader to escape the carnage by British troops that ended the third battle of Panipat in 1761. He remained in power until his death in 1800. In Tendulkar’s play, Nana does a deal with the hero – in exchange for sexual favours from the Ghashiram’s daughter, he makes him the Kotwal of Pune, able to wield great power over the city. After exploiting his position to the limit, cruelly persecuting the people, Ghashiram Kotwal is eventually tortured and killed by them. The director of the first production was Jabbar Patel, the same man who had directed P.L. Deshpande’s Threepenny Opera. His assistant was playwright Satish Alekar. Accounts of the rehearsal process for this show give an insight into the way urban theatre companies function all over India: for more than three months, young actors with very little training in dance and music ‘came to rehearsal after a full day’s strain of work’.5 Rehearsals began at 9.30pm and went on till 2.30am, with one night a week off. The musical element was tackled first (involving the whole cast) and the distribution of more than fifty roles took time. After a month’s initial work, details came into play, ‘namely the merging of abhinaya, music and dance’.6 A trial performance in a Pune suburb refined the show to the point where it could be staged in a public venue – at Bharat Natyamandir, Pune (12 December 1972) under the banner of the Progressive Dramatic Association (PDA).

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114 Re-working Tamasha In his depiction of the historical figure of Nana, Tendulkar had uncovered a vulnerable spot in the Maharashtrian psyche. For the Nationalist movement, Nana and the Peshwa regime as a whole were characterised as something to be proud of, noble people who had managed to hold the British colonialists at bay. The play presented a different picture. After ninteen performances to huge audiences in Mumbai and Pune who saw only its theatrical power, the production was banned by the President of the PDA. He claimed it was historically incorrect, anti-Brahmin, and had the potential for inciting violence in its audience. In January 1974, the same group of actors revived the show under a new company name – The Theatre Academy – and performed it more than 300 times. However, there was a second protest by Shiv Sena who regarded the play as ‘scandalous and obscene’ and tried to stop it being taken on tour abroad. The cast went into hiding and were eventually taken under police escort to be flown out of the country.7 They toured France, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Italy to great acclaim. Tendulkar always countered attacks on the play by saying that Ghashiram was not an attempt to write an historical play. In response to the accusations from officials and political parties, he has consistently stated: Although based on historical legend, I have no intention of commentary on the morals, or lack of them, of the Peshwa, Nana Phadnavis or Ghashiram . . . The decadence of the class in power (the Brahmans, incidentally, during the period which I depict) . . . was incidental, though not accidental.8 The form that evolved in the original production process was suitable for Tendulkar’s satirical and subversive needs. It was a fluid one, using the quick-fire energy of a strong ensemble, and it harked on a theatrical model associated with strong community traditions – folk theatre. The playwright takes elements of Tamasha along with other Maharashtrian folk idioms9 and integrates them into a fun, rumbustuous script about a serious historical subject. The play begins in folk theatre style with twelve men performing an introductory invocation to Ganesh: Ganapati dances the Ganapati dance. We the Poona Brahmans bow and prance. Tendulkar uses this ensemble again at the end of the show, reminding us that the cycle of events we have witnessed comes around continuously; the terrifying force of communal power that drives the story is still with us. The fact that this is a community of Brahmins is brought into focus


by the first solo voice in the show – the traditional jester figure of Sutradhar.10 Sutradhar: These are all the Brahmans from Poona. Who are you? One man: A Vedantic scholar. Sutradhar: You? Second: A Vaidya doctor. Third: A logician. Fourth: An astrologer. Fifth: A linguist. Sixth: I am a baron. Others: I come from Shringeri. I come from Tanjore. I come from Rameshwar. I come from Kumbhakonam. I come from Banaras. We’re Poona people. Sutradhar: Good Good Good!11 Like Maushi in the Gaulan section of the Dholki Phat, Sutradhar here conducts the stage action for our benefit, his repartee introducing us to chosen individuals. This device of exposing individuals through persistent questioning is used throughout the play, often creating comic irony. Here, the individual Brahmans announce that they are ‘Poona people’ and yet they come from different places all over the sub-continent. The theme of foreign-ness and the hypocrisy involved in communal allegiances will become increasingly important as the play proceeds. This group of pious Brahmans forms an image at the end of this opening scene that has become almost iconic in its influence – a singing, dancing, miming line of men known as the ‘human curtain’. It echoes the line of dancers in the Tamasha shows, standing shoulder to shoulder as they wait for their next number. Tendulkar and his collaborators use their human curtain as a highly effective stage device – like the hand-held curtain, it is a versatile means of masking and revealing action, but it also depicts normalised behaviour – a line of doors on a street; the wall of a prison cell; lines of soldiers or pious worshippers. They are the backdrop of safe, group neutrality against which the anguish of the protagonists’ individual struggles is played. Towards the end of the play, the human curtain becomes a crazed mob that stones Ghashiram to death. The Brahman line crouch like hunters. Once in a while they give a shout or mime an action such as throwing stones.

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116 Re-working Tamasha Ghashiram: Hit me. Beat me. Beat me some more. Hit me! (Suddenly Ghashiram shields his face as if a stone hit him) Why stay so far away? Come on, you cowards. Still scared? I spit on you. Beat me. Come on, beat me. Come on. Come on. Stone me, cowards. Pig shit! Come on and beat me. I dare you. Hit me. Look – one of my hands is tied. And you’re scared! Come on, beat me, crush me! (The mob yells.) Ghashiram Savaldas! Ghashiram Savaldas! I danced on your chests but I wasted the life of my little daughter. I should be punished for the death of my daughter. Beat me. Beat me. Hit me. Cut off my hands and feet. Crack my skull. Come on, come on. Look! I’m here. Oh, that’s good. Very good. The mob shouts. The drums beat loud and fast. Ghashiram begins to move in a sort of dance as if dying to the beat of the drum. Falls, gets up, falls, growls like an animal. Crawls. Jerks in spasms. Falls and falls again while trying to rise. Death dance. The crowd’s shouting continues. Finally Ghashiram lies motionless.12 Dance is used throughout the play to great dramatic effect – here in a dance of death, earlier a solo war dance for Ghashiram from the auditorium where he has been banished by the Poona community. When Nana chases Ghashiram’s daughter, Gauri, through the Poona gardens, they become Radha and Krishna dancing in the gardens of Mathura. Tendulkar has said: ‘The music and dance numbers are not embellishments to the narrative. The changing musical notes express the changing mood.’13 The structure is episodic, creating the same sense of freedom and eclecticism as the Dholki Phat, with exaggerated contrast between intimate dialogues and big ensemble scenes. The language is often rough, vulgar street slang contrasting with high-caste refinements. Also emulating the Dholki Phat format, some of the individual roles only speak (like Maushi), while the main body of the company dances and sings. The songs are traditional, familiar to a Marathi audience. Lavani are sung throughout the show, associated with the decadent erotic world of Nana and the prostitute, Gulabi. Religious and devotional song is perverted in this world, so that the kirtan14 mode is used in sacrilegious juxtaposition to describe the Brahmans going to the whore-houses. Sutradhar (to the beat of the dholki drum): Night comes. Poona Brahmans go To Bavannakhani. They go To Bavannakhani.


They go to the cemetery.15 They go to the kirtan. They go to the temple – as they have done every day. The Brahmans go to Bavannakhani.16 Sutradhar is the embodiment of the upbeat, flexible folk form used so effectively throughout Tendulkar’s play. He sings and narrates, he reports on incidents and comments on them; he makes contemporary allusions. Sometimes he morphs into a character and takes part. Sutradhar: Gauri dances, Nana dances, Ghashiram’s reign has come. Others: Has come. Sutradhar: Without permit, nothing can be done. Others: Nothing means nothing! Ghashiram enters accompanied by two lamp bearers and two patrolmen. The police call out the time of night. The twelve Brahmans stand with their backs to the audience. The Sutradhar tries to escape. Ghashiram: (grabbing his neck, laughing) Idiot! It’s a good thing I caught you. Where are you going? Sutradhar: Nowhere, my lord. Ghashiram: To steal? Sutradhar: No, sir. Ghashiram: To whore? Sutradhar: No, no, sir. Ghashiram: (slaps his face) Tell the truth. Sutradhar: No, no sir. Ghashiram: Then where? Sutradhar: Home.17 This example demonstrates how Tendulkar makes use of the convention of repartee between a Maushi figure and a songadhya. Bold characterisation and humour depict the brutality of play’s world. The questionand-answer format has now taken on a sinister character, the Ghashiram’s megalomaniac power making it into bullying interrogation rather than flirtatious play. In Ghashiram Kotwal Tendulkar wanted to make a serious political statement about his society. But it has proved effective in very different societies, all over the world. The play has been translated into many languages, including English, and staged in all sorts of places, sometimes

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118 Re-working Tamasha without the musical element. In retrospect, Tendulkar felt that his original Marathi audience had been seduced by the music (especially the lavani). I have not used music in any play after Ghashiram because I realised the dangers of doing so . . . The music [by Bhaskar Chandavarkar] is attractive, but it is the words and the visual component that carry the import . . . if a lavani expands beyond its given space, it dilutes the impact of the rest of the play.18

More influences Later, in the 1970s, Ratnakar Matkari utilised Tamasha form with his experimental theatre group at the Sutradhar Theatre Institute in Mumbai. They were trying to find a way to cut the division between stage and auditorium, bringing experiences to the audience as directly as possible. Lokkatha ’78 (‘Folktale ’78’) was a docu-drama based on a topical news report – a village atrocity against a Dalit woman. Matkari, an experienced playwright who has experimented with many different forms, set out ‘a chain of dramatic actions’19 with which his actors improvised to find a true language for the story, both dialogue and music. The non-naturalistic solutions they evolved in order to represent the village world derived from folk-theatre performance idioms – for example (as in Tendulkar’s play), a company chorus from which individuals emerged. The idea of devising a show using actors’ improvisations had never been tried before in modern urban Marathi theatre, and its success has spawned many imitators. Despite having been based on a topical news story, the show has been translated into many languages and is still regularly revived some thirty years later. During the 1970s the study of folk performance forms came into its own with the research programme of the Indian National Theatre. Promod Kale from the Ford Foundation and All India Radio led a huge research programme to assess the theatre being performed in Maharashtra under the Tamasha banner. They sent urban actors out into rural areas to study and document theatre forms and idioms. Some scripted shows were produced out of these actors’ assimilation of indigenous forms combined with traditional devotional songs and rituals. The rural performers would be brought into a city venue to do the first half of a show, the second half being the new INT folk drama. The best-known examples of these collaborations in Maharashtra are Vasudeo Sangat (performed in collaboration with the hereditary singers of devotional songs) and Khandobacha Lagin (using the folk jagran form) (Gokhale 2000, p. 168).


For the younger generation of playwrights, folk theatre is a notion with an ever-increasing field of associations. It is quite possible for a twenty-first-century writer living in Mumbai or Pune to have seen numerous Indian folk-theatre forms demonstrated in performances at educational establishments and other cultural venues. They may also have visited them a bus-ride away in their remote village home. A Marathi playwright might well have witnessed the touring shows of Manipuri director Ratan Thiyam or Bengali Habib Tanvir. These directors have made their name internationally, assimilating and re-working folk forms from across the continent. Despite the strong Maharashtrian identity of Tamasha, the modern liberal playwright may no longer feel deep affinities with the form. Tamasha is simply another folk theatre among many. Shaafat Khan is one of this younger generation whose experience of theatre is extremely wide-ranging. He has used traditional forms to explore modern problems in his plays. In his satire Mumbaiche Kawale (The Crows of Mumbai) he depicts a bizarre and meaningless world of Government administration and one-upmanship in a village where communication has broken down. The dynamic of this community is depicted using folk idioms. One way for Tamasha to still have meaning for a contemporary playwright is not by appropriating its form, but by entering its world and discovering characters and relationships there. For journalist turned playwright/performer Sushama Deshpande, it was the lives of the Tamasha women that fascinated her and led her to create Teechya Aeechi Goshta (‘Her Mother’s Story’). It is a one-woman show, a monologue that describes the life of a Sangeet Bari performer, her relationships and the complicated form of independence her performing life gives her. The play concentrates on Hira and her relationship with her daughter Ratna (educated with funds from her mother’s earnings and now a successful journalist). Hira tells us that, rather than giving her life story to her daughter for a piece of journalism, she has chosen to tell it to the audience here and now – this actual, assembled, urban crowd. Why is Ratna interested in her mother? Hira tells us: Ever since I received the national award from the Government, every Tom Dick and Harry is talking about preserving this culture, tradition, folk dances, this art etc. You too, Ratna, are doing the same . . . If a woman like me will start talking about herself, you are going to listen eagerly, your ears will become big to listen properly. If Ratni will write my life she will become well known at my cost. She will put her flag up. But I am holding my own flag.20

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120 Re-working Tamasha Teechya Aeechi Goshta includes anecdotes from Hira’s experience as a Tamasha singer – clients, men who fell in love with her, her dancer mother, her father with his other ‘married’ family elsewhere and bailed out by his Tamasha wife when his business goes bankrupt. She challenges modern independent women (epitomised by her daughter) to compare their lives to hers: Tell me, women who go dolled up to the offices, to what category do they belong? What about the actresses who strip their clothes off for a living? We perform our art, clothed from head to toe and yet men go crazy and hover around us. One glance from us is enough to drive them crazy. We do not charge for what we don’t do. That is our style. You do one thing and charge for something else . . . Our life is under our control, we are on our own, we deal with our life and don’t allow others to take control. We are not like the middle class women of society, who feign to be careless about men’s interest in them. We are Tamasha women who attract the attention of males, and are proud of the fact.’21 Despite its simple, intimate studio-theatre style, exploring one woman’s inner world, Deshpande’s script goes straight to the heart of Tamasha performance aesthetic – the dynamic relationship between the viewer and the viewed, the area where voyeurism and exploitation enter the contract between performer and spectator. In contemporary Maharashtra, Tamasha shows are still being staged in order to disseminate issue-led information or political debate among the Maharashtrian poor. The fundamentalist political parties are not averse to financing a vag or two in order to get their message across. Thousands of illiterate people are taught about contraception, female emancipation, even taxation in UNESCO-sponsored Tamashas. UNESCO researchers22 have understood that more expensive media like television tended to bypass the illiterate and the poor, and that live theatre is the most powerful way to relay a message. ‘Folk entertainments are familiar to audiences, who are disposed to attend performances and to have positive feelings about what they see and hear’ (Ranganath 1980, p. 16). New information can be communicated through familiar regional dialects, regional dress and local music. UNESCO has seen Tamasha entertainment as ideal for its uses, defining its strengths as: low cost and mobility; a lively audience participation; flexibility (the potential for improvisation and changing content) within a firm, familiar structure; the potential for repetition (endless tours reaching thousands of people).


Shahir Sable’s ‘educational group’ is an example of a Tamasha troupe touring educational events; the Chhaabildas school in Dadar a longstanding experimental venue for serious reworkings of Tamasha format. In the academic realm, it is now possible to study Tamasha performance techniques and historical and contextual characteristics. Rustom Achalcamb, drama tutor at Aurangabad University, is an exTamasha performer. He did a PhD on the role of the shahir, and lectures on Tamasha conventions and experiments as well as being involved with agit prop versions of the form. On the commercial scene, there are some interesting innovations happening. For example, big producers like the Punekar sisters23 stage Sangeet Baris for women in venues like Balgandharva Natyamandir. These shows are an opportunity for women to enjoy lavanis and their favourite Hindi film music in live performance without the intrusion of excitable males. This sort of evolution of the Sangeet Bari extends into the wider community, with companies creating special performances tailored to the needs of private sponsors. For example, as part of a middleclass family’s wedding celebrations, Tamasha artists are invited along to a hall to sing and dance for the private audience. The bride and groom may well have flown in for the wedding from their far-flung home in the USA or UK, where they are earning a good living before perhaps retiring to Pune like their parents. The atmosphere at such shows is of fond nostalgia; families enjoy half-familiar lavanis performed by rural singers. The Tamasha artists, carefully dressed in old-fashioned khadi cloth, remind everyone of their traditional Maharashtrian culture. At the opposite end of the social scale, Tamasha girls may leave their villages and go to the suburbs of Mumbai where they perform in ‘Star Bars’. Tamasha expert Nick Hill says these girls will often claim to be Muslims in order to free themselves from the constraints of Hindu caste identity.24 They do lap-dancing, or they might even be out on the streets, attracting men into the bar. Some of these girls find themselves taking their clothes off for popular nude dance routines, and then on to the Mumbai pornography scene, producing films for the vast Middle Eastern market.

American Tamasha Finally, Tamasha has reached as far as the Maharashtrian diaspora will carry it. Here is Meena Nerurkar, working in the US: I have been living in the States for the past twenty-eight years. I am a gynaecologist, practising in the suburbs of Philadelphia; dancing

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122

Re-working Tamasha is my hobby. I am formally trained in the Indian Classical styles Bharatanatyam and Kathak. I had seen lavanis in India but was never trained in them, but after coming to the US I learnt more about lavani dancing. I did a play which used lavani (I had never done lavani before this). I liked that form of folk dance very much because of the rhythm, the meaning of the words and the way gestures and expressions are used to explain the meaning of the words. So I decided to do a complete three-hour show, a full-length play explaining and using all the popular lavanis from Peshwa times to current times. I took the help of Professor Vasant Bapat from India to write me a script, which I modified to suit the American venue since the original was written to suit an Indian audience. I wanted all the musicians and singers for my show to perform live. I took the local talent and trained them. I have trained a lot of girls, all free of charge. I translated the meaning of all lavanis into English for the girls since they did not understand Marathi. In lavani, there is a great emphasis on expression so I had to teach them the meaning of the songs. There were seventeen dances in the show. I selected them, choreographed them and presented the show – Sundara Manamadhe Bharali (‘Her Beauty has Bewitched Me’), in various cities of the US. In 1994, Madhav Gadkari, the former editor of Marathi newspaper Loksatta, saw the show in Chicago and told us there had never been anything like this presented even in Maharashtra. He invited us to Maharashtra and Goa where we did nine shows in different cities. Another producer from the Chandralekha production house put us on the Indian commercial platform in Mumbai. All the shows were packed. People, who never would step in the theatre to see lavanis as it was considered disgraceful, flocked to see our cleaned-up version of lavani – an ancient folk dance form of Maharashtra. Among them were stage artists whom we used to look up to when we were growing up, ministers, famous writers, poets and the celebrities from all strata of Mumbai. In short, Sundara had become a status symbol. We had become celebrities. I won many awards to resurrect lavani and make it popular once again. We did three more tours in India – venues in all the major cities of Maharashtra – Mumbai, Pune, Kolhapur, Goa, Nashik. After we stopped our production, 150 or more shows like it cropped up all over Maharashtra. I was ecstatic as I had been instrumental in making this form popular again. It was something like giving back to the country I was born and brought up in. But none of our followers had our appeal. Our speciality was that we attracted an upper-middle-class crowd. Up until then only


lower-class people used to go for Tamashas. All of us are well-placed professional people from the US doing this as our hobby. This fact attracted all the full houses.25 The songs in the first part of Sundara Manamadhe Bharali are famous old lavanis by Patthe Bapurao and Ram Joshi. These are performed against a painted palace backdrop; the drop for the second half depicts an old world village hut against which the company of girls sings the more modern lyrics of P.L. Deshpande, G.D. Madgulkar and Vasant Bapat. These girls, on-stage from the beginning, wear matching nineyard saris and they change them regularly through the show. Live musicians (including a Classical tabla player) and singers sit neatly to one side. The music is tastefully miced sound, compared with the excessive boom of the big rural show. The traditional Dholki Phat structure is used, beginning with the gan invocation, then gaulan and rang baji. The Sutradhar/Maushi is played by a computer engineer, his Songadhya by a bank clerk; they improvise at length for their delighted Maharashtrian audience, though the non-Marathi-speaking US audiences got less of the comic dialogue in favour of romantic music. Theirs is a simple plot with Songadhya as an American man becoming integrated into the fun village world. High production values and well-rehearsed choreography in a smart indoor venue give this Tamasha a disarmingly air-brushed look. The

Figure 5.1 Meena Nerurkar and company.

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124 Re-working Tamasha audience is mixed, pretty equal numbers of men and women, though there was also a show for women only in India that received particular acclaim. At this performance, recorded live on video, there is no heckling, but lots of appreciative applause and laughter. Cleanly blocked dialogue scenes are punctuated with moments where the cast freeze in tableau before moving on to another number. The choreography is Bharatanatyam-based and quite formal, not nearly so provocative as its working-class cousins. After all, Bharatanatyam itself is now a high-art dance style performed by all sorts of middle-class girls around the world whose families wish to engage with the finer aspects of Classical Indian arts. Here in Sundara Manamadhe Bharali, the unacceptable vulgarities of erotic performance (for a long time shunned by the colonial and postcolonial middle classes) have been toned down to just the right level of charm. This show is not quite high art, certainly not low. It has its own authenticity in a rural-kitsch sort of way – it must make complete sense for nostalgic ex-pat Maharashtrians and their offspring. For the crowd living in India, I think Nerurkar is right when she says people were attracted to her cast’s American identity. There is some sort of aspirational pleasure going on – rather than engage with the dirt and degradation of the rural poor, they are getting their lavanis spruced up and repackaged from the First World. This is the answer for our Pune Brahmin friends who had to dress down and skulk about at the shabby Sangeet Bari. Here they can assert their economic power by paying high ticket prices and dressing up for a proper night out. Here they are part of the glamorous (American) global village, flattered that lavanis are becoming a significant part of world culture.

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6

More discoveries

Versatile and rumbustuous, Tamasha can survive all sorts of transitions to new theatre contexts, even far outside the sub-continent. Unlike the refined Chhau dances, its aesthetic is able to expand in all sorts of surprising ways. However, the two forms we have so far examined share many folk-theatre characteristics. Experience of the Maharashtrian form leads us further on our journey in search of qualities common to folk theatres across the sub-continent.

Foreign imports There is no end to the influences possible within a magpie art form like folk theatre. As we have seen in the two forms illustrated so far, they are able to assimilate old traditions like Parikhanda martial art or the Maharashtrian kirtan sermons, alongside modern technical innovations or foreign imports such as the European ballet influence in Seraikella. One major source of inspiration for folk theatres is the old Parsi theatre (and its recent progeny, Bollywood).1 The nineteenth-century Parsi community in Mumbai had a taste for Victorian melodrama and farce and sought to emulate their sentimental excesses and musical spectacle. Community members established their own stage companies of both amateur and professional actors, producing shows first in English and Gujarati, later in Urdu, Hindustani and other languages that might make them accessible to an expanding audience. Their audiences (mostly the middle and lower classes) were charged reasonable ticket prices. From the early productions that took their plots from English novels, plays or fairy stories, the repertoire expanded vastly to include Hindu epics, Muslim tales of devils and wizards, or new plays on patriotic or devotional themes. The Parsis built their own British-style playhouses, darkened the auditorium, stuck up a fancy proscenium arch and used a plush frontcloth to control what was seen. Numerous big backdrops painted with

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126 More discoveries perspective scenes hung from hemp pulley systems; there was always a well-used street scene, and other pictorial indulgences such as the palace, the garden, the jungle. Stage machinery was elaborate, utilising all sorts of flying apparatus and understage revolves and trapdoors for popular magical effects. Gradually gas lighting replaced simple candles and oil lamps, and in turn electricity took over with complicated lighting plots. By the second half of the century companies were touring around with scenery and props to different city venues in all parts of the sub-continent, and non-Parsis were inspired to establish imitation companies. Many troupes were influenced by the exciting technical innovations and fed them out into all sorts of performance realms. Technological paraphernalia has always been a significant part of folk theatres like Tamasha, and much of what we see today reminds us of Victorian melodrama (mediated historically by the Parsi theatre). The fancy painted drops behind a makeshift proscenium arch probably come from the Parsi heritage. Tamasha’s eclectic, populist stance, its enthusiasm for song and dance and sentimental storylines are all in keeping with the Victorian heritage. To a modern urban theatregoer, many of these features may seem old-fashioned, but for the folk-theatre audience they are now part and parcel of how a local show should be staged. Another essentially British import now fully assimilated into folk theatre conventions is the script. Such a thing would once have been anathema to the profoundly oral tradition of folk theatre and is still impossible in regions where illiteracy is common. But in the more affluent state of Maharashtra most people will have enjoyed a certain level of education, so a script is a feasible way of presenting a show to its cast, and is now part and parcel of the vag convention. A company director like Baburao Borgaonkar writes down his play and presents it first to the censorship officials at the Culture Ministry in order to attain their ‘No Objection Certificate’. This process is a hangover from colonial times (during which plays at home in the UK also came under such bureaucratic scrutiny) and is the major reason why the vags started to be scripted. Once the script is licensed, photocopies go to Borgaonkar’s actors who can go away and learn their lines. There are many commercial benefits of such a process – it minimises rehearsal and employment costs. Unlike an improvised show, or one laboriously created in rehearsals with actors learning their lines by rote, the written play can be rehearsed quickly; new cast members can easily be introduced – actors who might never have worked with the company before and never seen the show can still go on at short notice. Having a script does away with the need for highly skilled performers who can improvise like the old shahirs in their sawal-

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jabab discourses. Finally, the village representatives who buy the event can read it beforehand and know exactly what they are getting.

Television Television is another huge influence on folk theatre, both in terms of competition for audiences and also in its aesthetic. It has been around in some Maharashtrian rural households for almost twenty years. When the village communities began being able to afford it, television was top of the State’s list of priorities in serious telecasting. Satellite technology for national television was first conceived in the late 1960s by the founder of the Indian Space programme, Vikram Sarabhai, who envisioned his rural audience being informed about ‘fertiliser, seeds, insecticides, cropping patterns, new technology, new findings and discoveries in all fields, new goods and services, new living patterns’ (Quoted in Rajadhyaksha 1990, p. 35). By 1987 there were 186 TV transmitters covering about 70 per cent of the population, and INSAT (Indian National Satellite) had even begun transmitting extensive coverage of local folk theatre – something that still continues today, as we saw in Narayangaon. These days such serious enterprises have been subsumed by the gigantic global television networks. This new type of global entertainment tends to be in English, presenting a huge language barrier to a villager. Even if a channel transmits entertainment in one of the major Indian languages, village people are likely to speak local dialect and will still not be able to understand.2 For many, television presents an image of the world utterly different from their own, as Bharucha explains. What we confront today on the foreign networks is nothing less conspicuous than our absence as a people in the map of the world, except in the context of disasters, plagues, riots and the occasional miracle. In the meanwhile, our knowledge of the lifestyles relating to Baywatch or to the developments of the European Union increases, but we continue to remain ignorant of what is happening at cultural levels in our neighbouring states or within the boundaries of our own state. Bharucha 2000, p.134 Though many households have a television, regular power cuts in the countryside mean that you can never be sure it will be working. In order to accommodate such a problem, you simply have to leave the TV on all the time and snatch a look whenever it is working. Music and soap channels tend to be the most popular, and regional soaps increasingly so.

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128 More discoveries In the case of Tamasha, and many other folk theatres in regions where television is ubiquitous, the influence of this form of entertainment is evident on the stage. It can be seen in the acting style of the Tamasha actors, who emulate the stylised naturalism of television drama, nevertheless managing to project across their huge space. It is seen in the choice of musical repertoire – with well-loved Hindi film hits from the music channels taking the place of original folk songs. Up-to-the-minute Hindi film tunes are the most important part of their huge repertoire of music.3 Themes and storylines will often pop up that are lifted directly from popular television or film dramas, as we saw in Borgaonkar’s vag. Like contemporary plays all over the world, the episodic structuring and quick-fire scene changes emulate celluloid storytelling. But the tele-copy stops at the choice of subject matter, which remains distinctly local. Folktheatre actors have no problem combining soap style with high melodrama, vernacular slang with English words, but they still tend to stay regionally specific, steering clear of the more international television material.

Local knowledge The local relevance of folk theatre, even in this world of global television, is very important. During the festival period, the Tamasha artists are touring in quite a small area, and they use their knowledge of local particulars to establish the necessary feeling of familiarity with their audience. In fact, there are specific conventions in the ways audience and players may interact that prove absolutely specific to individual regions.4 The comic characters like Maushi use the regional dialect, and refer to local politics and regional mores. The immediacy and fun in their performance is akin to the stand-up comedian in a British club. Shared knowledge between performers and audience gives a unique vitality and sense of danger to the show. With this feeling of being understood and integrated in the drama, the spectators are given the confidence to interact – they are unembarrassed about involving themselves with the stage persona, participating in whatever way they can. Part of this is the strong star system in all these folk forms. Performers come to the festival with certain reputations and certain specialities. They may be known for performing a unique role, one the audience knows from previous renditions by other actors at previous festivals. When star actors turn up on stage they are expected to display all their skill. The details and development of one particular characterisation are much cherished by the fans who reward them with overt shows of appreciation (as in the daulat jadda of the Sangeet Bari).


When the monsoon comes and the touring Tamasha artists go home to alternative ways of earning money, it may well be far away from the area where they were performing. In contrast, the Therukoothu folk actors of Tamil Nadu tour in a very small local region. By and large, the families associated with the tradition have an intimate relationship with the agricultural way of life. When their festival period is over, they are likely to be out in the paddy fields working alongside the folk who make up their audience. Through this piecemeal work the Therukoothu actors gain intimate knowledge of the community and are accepted as members of it. When it comes to performing up on stage, this gives an added frisson to their interaction with the audience, as they know individuals by name and can converse with hecklers or people with special requests. Their improvisatory material is extensive, as they can refer directly to up-to-theminute local issues or gossip. They might satirise a local dignitary, comment on the price of rice, or awaken an inattentive audience member by calling out his name. The actors’ ability to support themselves with part-time work resembles many actors’ lives all over the world, giving them the economic freedom to subsidise their acting work. But for the folk performers it is more than this; their jobs in the field alongside those who will sit in their audiences is integral to their art, giving them the knowledge to be effective entertainers.

Figure 6.1 Paddy fields.

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130 More discoveries

Community As we have seen, the shared communal event is a distinctive characteristic of folk-theatre organisation. The situation in Seraikella, where first the Maharajas and now the Government authorities sponsored a competition, is unique. For most rural communities, it is the job of a representative committee to consider each year whether they want, need or can afford a festival show. The committee is normally chosen afresh each year from a cross-section of male members of the community: richer and poorer, educated and less educated come together to decide on the dates and the company to book. They are responsible for paying the fee to the actors. They have to collect money from the villagers in the form of donations accumulated over many months or even years. Through such committee representation, the rural festival is an assertion of the network of lives knitted together in the village – social and religious, political and family. Just as these things intersect in individuals, among families and neighbours, so they will interweave in the show itself. Once the event eventually arrives in the village street, it is free to anyone who turns up. There are no tickets or allocated seating. Though some villagers may have donated far more than others, they are not given any special status during the performance as they would were they sitting in the expensive seats of a conventional indoor venue. Those who are interested stay longer, finding a comfortable post to settle, but no one feels obliged to be silent and constantly attentive. If they have work to do, or other more pleasurable pursuits to follow, then off they go. Despite such seeming informality, no one would claim that the occasion is not highly significant for the community. The festival context of folk theatre is seen at its most integrated and most significant in the Draupadi Amman festival of Tamil Nadu. For the farming communities of north Arcot district, this particular festival is linked to their superstitions and religious practices. Over a period of ten or sometimes even twenty days after the harvest is in, Therukoothu actors are employed to perform long night-time shows lasting until dawn, plus important daytime rituals. In the heat of the day, the villagers will gather to hear a storyteller narrate the same stories dramatised in the stage shows. These tales come from the great Hindu epic Mahabharata, already well known to the audience through generations of memorising and listening. Like the Jharkhand villagers, the audience may not be literate but when it comes to their theatre they are intensely discriminating.


Therukoothu Similar in meaning to the word ‘tamasha’, the urban colloquial usage of the word ‘koothu’ refers to ‘commotion’, ‘fun’ or ‘melodramatic situation’. According to contemporary Tamil–English dictionaries, the Tamil ‘therukoothu’ literally translates into ‘street drama’. The villagers of northern Tamil Nadu use the word ‘koothu’ interchangeably with the word ‘natakam’, meaning ‘drama’, applying it specifically to their local theatre form. Performances of Therukoothu resemble Tamasha in their upbeat nature – extrovert and generally comic, they contain a large element of improvised dialogue alternating with instrumental and sung sections. At the same time, like the Chhau shows, they contain a significant devotional element for their audiences. This can be seen even in the etymology of the word ‘koothu’, which goes back to the ancient Sangam Tamil literature of the first century AD, meaning ‘ritual enactments involving sacred possession or trance’ (Frasca 2003, p. 31). Its root, ‘kuvu’, meaning a ‘calling out’ or a ‘summoning scream’, is directly associated with states of ecstasy, beyond consciousness. Letting go in this way is a regular feature of Therukoothu performances with possession or trance being a much desired state for both actors and public. Therukoothu was the first Indian folk-theatre form I ever saw, more than fifteen years ago. In the meantime the company I originally visited, and many others, have struggled to make a living in an increasingly deprived agricultural economy. When they get the contracts, their work is extremely important to their audiences, their dramatisation of Mahabharata as vivid as ever.

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7


The short story of Mahabharata1 Conflict begins when King Drtharashtra hands over his crown to his younger brother Pandu; after reigning for a brief period, Pandu renounces power and goes into the forest, leaving his sons and those of his brother to contest the kingdom of Hasthinapura. The five sons of Pandu, the Pandava brothers (Dharmaraja,2 Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva), grow up in the court along with their 100 cousins, the Kauravas, sons of Drtharashtra. Most prominent among the Kauravas are the eldest son Duryodhana and his loyal demonic brother Dhucchasana. When Pandu dies, the Pandavas are forced to leave their home. During their exile, Arjuna wins a competition to string and shoot an impossibly stiff bow; his prize is the hand of Princess Draupadi. Before this beautiful girl’s birth, a sage saw her image in a sacrificial fire, and the heavenly voice of Krishna predicted she would cause terror to the Kauravas. At the bidding of the Pandavas’ mother, Arjuna shares this marriage with his brothers. Their cousin Krishna brings precious gifts to their wedding, then stays with them as their friend and companion. They return to Hasthinapura for some years of prosperity in a divided kingdom, during which time the eldest brother, Dharmaraja, loses all his worldly wealth in a game of dice with Duryodhana. His final pledge is his wife, Draupadi, who is pawned away and sent to the Kauravas’ court, Dhucchasana forcibly dragging her there by the hair. Duryodhana orders him to disrobe her in front of the Pandavas and, in a concealed sexual invitation, asks her to sit on his thigh. Draupadi clasps her hands above her head and prays to Lord Krishna to help her. Recognising Draupadi’s moment of ultimate surrender, Krishna magically makes her sari grow so that as Dhucchasana unwinds it she remains clothed. After this attempted violation, Draupadi vows that her hair will one day

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be doused with blood from the thighs of Duryodhana and Dhucchasana. She returns to the Pandavas and they are again forced into exile in the forest for twelve years. At the end of this period, they spend one year disguised as servants of King Virata in Matsya. The Kauravas come and steal the King’s cattle and Draupadi suggests sending Arjuna (disguised as the eunuch Brihannala) as the prince’s charioteer to take revenge; he wins back the cattle. The Pandavas return to claim their kingdom, but Duryodhana refuses to give them anything. Draupadi approaches Krishna and reminds him of her vow to have her hair smeared with the Kauravas’ blood. The ensuing battle fills almost half of Mahabharata’s verses. At a moment of crisis as the war commences, Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna as Lord of the Cosmos, and he teaches him Dharma, one’s duty and meaning in human life. Hindus revere this portion of Mahabharata known as Bhagavat Gita as the holiest of the sacred texts; it preaches the philosophy of surrender to Krishna, saying that he is Universal Time, destroying and recreating everything. Draupadi is seen to be Kali (the Goddess of Time), born out of fire, a feminine vehicle of Krishna. In the ensuing battle, Krishna participates as a charioteer for Arjuna and ensures the Pandavas’ victory. The Kauravas are annihilated and Draupadi triumphantly ties up her hair with the blood of Duryodhana and Ducchassana, before Dharmaraja ascends the throne.

Festival Scattered across the arid lands of northern Tamil Nadu are hundreds of temples dedicated to Draupadi Amman (Goddess Draupadi). She is the focus of the villagers’ daily worship, her little image polished, freshly decorated and carefully enshrined. Her story in Mahabharata enters their lives from early childhood and is carried within every individual as an intimate part of their life. One survey records as many as 225 temples in the two northern districts (Hiltebeitel 1991b, p. 25). During the summer months, the villagers worship her through the communal telling of her story in Mahabharata. Usually the festival season starts immediately after the Tamil New Year (mid-April) and lasts until the end of June. The ritual power of a Mahabharata festival in honour of Draupadi lies in the firm belief that the ascendance of Dharmaraja to the throne is the restoration of justice; it empowers the Goddess to safeguard and nourish the fertility of the land and people. Traditionally, the harvest would be completed by the end of January, and then the paddy would be husked and sold. January, the harvest month, is the time to pay worshipping

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134 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds tributes to the Sun God and the cattle by celebrating Pongal; the postharvest season is for rest, contemplation and anticipation. The clarity of all this has recently been upset by strange weather patterns and also the fact that modern fertilisers and tractors enable the farmers to plant new crops more than once a year, even immediately after they have harvested. However, the traditional festival time still survives, even if threatened by extra work pressures. By February and March the villagers should have enough money from the sale of rice to organise their festival, preferably consisting of the three significant parts – rituals, storytelling and theatre. An invitation poster from the remote north Arcot village of Kulamanthai announces the exceptional occurrence of a full twenty-day event: ‘The big festival of Mahabharata in the temple of Draupadi Amman.’ A bold photograph of the storyteller, Muthuganesan, in the centre of the poster suggests that his art is the one that will dominate. The second person cited, in order of importance, is his musician companion and reader of poetry, Thevarasan. Third comes the local Therukoothu company: Purisai Kalaimamani Natesa Thambiran Therukoothu nataka manram (broadly translating as ‘Purisai Street Theatre group of Natesa Thambiran’). The storytelling will happen for ten days, and from the evening of the eleventh day will be complemented by all-night shows and daytime rituals performed by the Therukoothu actors. The only ritual advertised on the poster invitation is the fire-walking ceremony on the penultimate day of the festival, but there will surely be others. Kulamanthai is roughly 135 kilometres north of Chennai via the town of Cheyyar. From our base in Chennai we are privileged to have access to information about an up-coming festival like this. Generally, the venues, dates, programme schedule and festival calendar in north Arcot district do not reach the Tamil press or television channels headquartered in Chennai. Despite the large number of Draupadi Amman temples and performances, knowledge remains scant in urban areas, the rest of Tamil Nadu and the media. Hiltebeitel points out that drama enthusiasts in the cities do not come in contact with this tradition despite the fact that Mahabharata lends itself naturally to drama, public presentations and tragic modes (Hiltebeitel 1991a, p. 396). Deploring the urban lack of knowledge, Hanne M. de Bruin writes: ‘Complex theatre traditions such as Kattaikoothu3 which carry the label ‘folk’ require a similar degree of exposure as “high culture” art forms, termed “Classical”, in order to understand them, develop a “taste” for them and to appreciate their nuances’ (De Bruin 2003, from the programme to her seminar). It is not simply a lack of artistic interest that keeps the upper classes of Chennai away from their folk festivals. There may well be a fear that the experience of a Mahabharata festival will upset the delicate balance of civil society.


A belief prevalent among conservative Hindus is that Mahabharata should not be read in homes as it arouses family conflict, whereas Ramayana should be, as it portrays ideal family conditions. Quoting Gustav Oppert, Hiltebeitel states that whereas the Ramayana is favoured by the Brahmins, Mahabharata has been adopted by non-Brahmin castes (Hiltebeitel 1991a, p. 396). With the sprawling suburbs of Chennai at last behind us, we see a dusty landscape dotted with small rocky hills and isolated palm trees. At the busy Cheyyar bus stand, there is no escaping the summer temperatures. Men and women squat in the shade, as still and calm as possible in order to bear the morning heat. Overcrowded buses vie with carts loaded high with vegetables and fruit being pushed down the centre of the street by barefoot traders. They will have come into town before dawn, bringing their produce from the fertile farmlands where the river Cheyyar winds down the valley. But as we travel out of town again we see the wide riverbed is absolutely dry; trucks criss-cross its surface, quarrying sand for urban construction companies. During monsoons, the flow of rainwater should be channelled to surrounding lakes and ponds, carefully stored by the villagers for irrigation. But since1996 the rains have been sparse and the lakebeds are also dry, black and cracked like the feet that walk on them. The villagers of Kulamanthai must be desperate. The failure of monsoons

Figure 7.1 Kulamanthai villagers listen to storytelling.

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136 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds year after year threatens their livelihood. And this is why they have organised the full Mahabharata festival – perhaps Draupadi Amman will be grateful for the extravagance and the rains will come.

Storyteller When we arrive in Kulamanthai the villagers are already gathered in the shade of a tiled shed in front of Draupadi Amman’s shrine, listening to the telling of the Mahabharata. The audience, sitting motionless on the cool ground, is made up of women, old men, and children. The conspicuous absence of young men does not seem to be an issue, as loudspeakers amplify the storytelling and carry it to wherever they may be. On a raised platform sits Muthuganesan, along with his companion, Thevarasan. Surprisingly, he does not wear Vaishanavite 4 holy marks on his forehead like Thevarasan and many of the Draupadi devotees. His brow displays the prominent horizontal ash stripe of a Saivite 5 worshipper. He sits cross-legged, high up on his platform in front of smart new microphones. By his side is a container covered with a yellow cloth with a slit on top for audience donations and a little ritual offering of betel leaves, nut and coconut. Thevarasan has a flask of hot water next to his harmonium, Muthuganesan one of the distinctive green soda bottles with a marble in the top so beloved of British bottle collectors and so ubiquitous hereabouts. The little polished silver statues of Vishnu, Balaram and Lakshmi are given front-row seats beside the storyteller, facing out into the audience. To the side stands Bhima, guarding the threshold of the inner shrine where Draupadi Amman sits in state. The villagers believe that the practice of reciting Mahabharata in the region is as old as the very presence of the epic itself. Hiltebeitel dates the storytelling tradition in Draupadi Amman temples to circa AD 600–700.6 He also argues that the present practice of using a Classical Tamil text by Villiputurar for the storytelling sessions probably goes back to the fourteenth century (Hiltebeitel 1991b, pp. 14–15). Muthuganesan’s high-pitched narration alternates with Thevarasan’s sober song, accompanied on the harmonium. Thevarasan’s performance is in accordance with the Tamil music tradition of ‘Pann’, or ‘melody’, whose moods are classified and named after the types of landscapes. In this style of music, the singing is in recitative style, the meaning of the poetry taking precedence over musical interpretation. Thevarasan sits meditatively as he waits his turn and uses his harmonium judiciously and minimally as pure accompaniment, without any extended cadenzas. This type of word-dominated singing is a characteristic of religious music in Tamil Nadu, and Muthuganesan makes use of the association,


letting the song take over at poignant moments in his story. He has learnt the entire Mahabharata by heart and has no need of a script. His use of language is versatile and assured. For indirect speech, reportage, and the descriptions and dialogues of heroic characters he uses a literate high Tamil. This he alternates with colloquial local Tamil for everyday experience and speech. The transition between the two languages is highly dramatic in its effect, and audience members nod their heads appreciatively. His facility in handling colloquial Tamil seems to be limited in comparison to the amazing repertoire of literary jokes that he has at his command – allusions that cover the entire gamut of Tamil Classical literature. However, jokes executed in contrived colloquial still get the

Figure 7.2 Thevarasan.

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138 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds audience applauding. They clearly want to be actively involved in the story – this is an opportunity both to imbibe good literature and display their faith. Via the storyteller’s art, the villagers’ knowledge of the epic and its incidents is being shared communally. Their unconditional devotion to Lord Krishna and to Draupadi Amman is being affirmed and invigorated. When Muthuganesan tells the story of the five Pandava brothers performing the Rajasooya (horse worship) with a sacrificial fire, he sends around the donations box, and everybody contributes coins to finance the sacrifice. They eagerly take up the opportunity of participating directly, in order to bring the fictional event into the actuality of their lives. When the storyteller diverges mid-narrative to announce a list of those whose donations exceed Rs.10, his tone is exactly the same as if the epic recitation were still going on. The main thread of the story resumes with ease, as if nothing has happened. The money will go towards the temple, or even to the storyteller as a supplementary gift. Any money earmarked for the temple goes to offset the enormous cost incurred by the festival organisers (see p. 140). To encourage such donations, the committee has arranged a lottery system by which single donors who give more than Rs.100 are eligible for prizes distributed by drawing lots on the last days of the festival. The prizes range from stainless steel vessels to a bicycle and an electrical rice grinder. They sit there next to the deities on the storyteller’s platform. Just as the language of the sacred texts merges with the language of the streets, divine icons jostle with everyday objects. In the same way, the actual location in which this Mahabharata performance is taking place is able to combine fiction and reality, the epic and the everyday. Muthuganesan calls this simple shed where we sit on the ground the ‘royal assembly of Mahabharata’ (Bharata sabai). Throughout the year the villagers go about their day-to-day routines in this precious piece of shade, next to the temple icons of Draupadi and Bhima. Beyond, the dazzlingly hot open space of the village square where a few weeks ago they dried and husked their paddy, the storyteller now refers to as ‘the war field’ (Kalam). To one side of the square lies a brightly painted relief statue, measuring a hundred feet at least, made by the local potters out of mud and sand. It is the prostrate figure of Draupadi’s enemy, Duryodhana – a reminder of the end of the war in Mahabharata when he is slain. The statue, recently repainted in fresh, bright colours, is a permanent fixture in the street. All year round, the villagers run their cattle over the figure and the children play on his contours. Opposite is the raised stage for Therukoothu performances. Rectangular in shape, the platform is a solid cement and stone structure with a space at the back serving as its green room. This


Figure 7.3 Potters at their Duryodhana statue.

permanent spatial arrangement of the street alongside the Draupadi temple is typical of villages throughout northern districts of Tamil Nadu.

Preparations The rituals and preparations leading up to a big festival like this one are also common to all. Once the village panchayat (administration) decides to hold the Mahabharata festival, on an auspicious day (determined by close attention to the Tamil calendar) the villagers take the idols of the Pandavas, Kali and Potharaja7 in procession to the village pond for a ritual bath. They carry a yellow flag, the sword of Draupadi, her Veera Jatti (another weapon), her anklet and a pot of water back to the performance arena and erect the flag there, to the accompaniment of pampai and parai (drums), ankle bells and nathaswaram (a long pipe). In front of the erected flagpole, the people elect a committee to run the festival. In the case of Kulamanthai, since the village contains a predominance of Agamudaiya Mudaliar caste, all the five festival committee members this year come from that caste. These men decide on the festival calendar, the storytellers and the Therukoothu troupe to be invited. Once the temple flag is hoisted, the residents of Kulamanthai are not supposed to go outside the village even for one single night. With donations collected,

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140 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds

Figure 7.4 Therukoothu stage at Kulamanthai.

the committee pays an advance to the storytellers and the Therukoothu troupe leader and offers them thamboolam (betel leaves and nuts – a token of respectful invitation). For this festival, the Kulamanthai committee will pay Rs.30,000 to the two storytellers for twenty days, and Rs.20,000 to the troupe of fifteen actors and musicians for ten days.8 When the storyteller and troupe leader receive the advance and thamboolam, they negotiate with the festival committee on which Mahabharata episodes will be played. Such negotiation will continue throughout the festival period, as the committee mediates between storytellers and actors, trying all the time to represent the needs of the community. The relationship between storyteller and koothu group in the presentation of Mahabharata is an interesting and not always complementary one. Sometimes things are organised so what is narrated in the afternoon is then performed on stage that night. Sometimes the two performance forms are integrated, for example, with the storyteller alluding to things his audience has witnessed in the staged performances, or even appearing in a ritual alongside the actors. At other times they are completely out of sync. Departures from the agreed schedule are normal, and performers and audiences must accept last-minute changes without any protest. There are also instances of actors performing extra dramas


without payment after the last day of the festival in gratitude for the festival invitation (Mu. Ramaswamy 1999). To be prepared for such eventualities both the troupe leader and the actors have to be versatile in playing various roles and should have the entire Mahabharata play texts committed to memory. The villagers repeat their ritual procession to the pond every day of the festival, in the mornings and just before the evening performances. On the first day of the storytelling the storyteller is brought ceremoniously to the temple shed and there he ties yellow twines around the wrists of all the five festival committee members. From then onwards the men, dressed in yellow, are believed to be the personification of the five Pandava brothers of the epic story, and they are expected to follow several observances. They should not sleep in their regular beds, go to their houses or shave or cut their hair. They must sleep in the courtyard in front of the Draupadi Amman shrine till the end of the festival and eat only vegetarian food in the premises. Each morning they must lead the storyteller in procession through the streets, holding a respectful umbrella over his head; if they cross a threshold, their feet are washed by the housewife. In the evening, they hand over a ritual pot of water drawn from the pond to the leader of the Therukoothu troupe, authorising the actors to perform. As the Pandava brothers, they are symbolically transferring the right to assume the roles of epic characters to the actors. This transfer of rights is a pact between the villagers and Therukoothu troupes – the right to perform and the obligation to invite constitute and determine the choice of troupe (see below). These rights need to be recognised by the villagers who participate through acts like the washing of the Pandavas’ feet. From the pond to the performance space the procession halts regularly at street corners for the men to dance, accompanied by drumming. Like the bhaktas’ dances in Seraikella, retrogressive steps characterise this dance and backward-bending movements suggest an inclination towards trance – a state that is thought to authenticate their assumption of sacred roles. Although we do not see any of the five committee members going into a trance during their journey from the Kulamanthai pond, the villagers assure us that such possessions do occur. The Agamudaiya Mudaliars who make up the Kulamanthai festival committee come from a land-owning caste that traditionally employs non-Brahmin priests (pujaris) to lead its religious rituals. The Thambirans running this festival’s Therukoothu company belong to one such priestly caste, the Pandarams,9 whose occupation was once to make flower garlands for the gods in the temple. Their funerary rites confirm their priestly status – they are not cremated but buried, unlike

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142 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds other caste Hindus. It is believed that because of their lifelong engagement with ritual performances they attain salvation (samadhi) with their bodies.10 Different castes all over Tamil Nadu attempt to claim the monopoly of genuine Therukoothu. The Thambiran family comes from the nearby village of Purisai and has been performing Therukoothu for at least 150 years (Mu. Ramaswamy 1999). The group has travelled just a few miles from its village on local buses, carrying with it props and costumes. According to the late Purisai Kannappa Thambiran, renowned guru of the Therukoothu tradition, his cousin Natesa Thambiran and he himself followed a tradition initiated by their grandfather, Veerasamy Thambiran, who taught Bharatanatyam and brought this training to Therukoothu (having previously performed as a puppeteer). The Purisai koothu performers hold onto this technical link with the Classical dance form, and are known for their musical prowess.11 After the death of Natesa, factional fights within the family led to a split in the professional troupe and his son, Subramaniya Thambiran, became the leader of Purisai Kalaimamani Natesa Thambiran Therukoothu nataka manram. Kannappa’s son, Sambandhan, runs a separate group in his father’s name and competes for the same performance contracts with local communities. The fights between the Thambiran cousins are well known to local people, adding another dimension to the Mahabharata story of family rivalry presented in their shows. Incidentally, the Agamudaiya Mudaliars’ lives are also full of family feuds over the ownership of agricultural wetlands. There are non-family members in Subramaniya’s group, but they cannot become the group leader and they are generally not given ritually important roles. They have joined the training in the vattiyar’s (guru’s) house, but they come and go while the family continues the tradition through its male progeny generation after generation. On stage the non-family members of the troupe will remain minor characters in the epic. In his pujari status, Subramaniya Thambiran receives the symbolic pot of water from the Agamudaiya Mudaliar villagers clad in yellow. It is then handed over to the actors who take the pot to the Draupadi Amman shrine and bring back a lamp to the green room at the back of the stage. With the lamp soot the actors draw auspicious signs on their doublesided drum, the Mirudangam: ohm in Tamil with Ganesh marks,12 and the Vaishnavite symbols of Chakra (wheel) and conch shell. A curtain is drawn over the green room for privacy and secrecy, and the actors begin their lengthy preparations. First, each performer takes a little mirror and by the light of one bare bulb, he paints his face, sharing the pots of makeup with his colleagues. The brightly coloured powders, ground from local substances, are mixed with coconut oil and water, and finished with


a dousing of talcum powder. The make-up is intended to symbolise specific qualities, and its application serves to ritually charge up the performers, helping them to fully inhabit their characters. Meghanathan, the actor playing Kattiyankaran (literal translation – ‘announcer’, but also known as ‘the buffoon’ – much like the songadhya of the Tamasha), has the easiest job. He dons a pale pink base, signifying the neutrality of his character, with little white circles on forehead and cheeks, and a thick white moustache that curls up and out across his jaw. His costume is a pair of pink, flowery pyjamas – the look as a whole, pretty and strangely endearing. Subramaniya Thambiran is becoming

Figure 7.5 Subramaniya plays Krishna.

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144 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds Krishna. His is a more comprehensive job, with the characteristic blue colour of the god painted thickly on face, neck and hands. With a pointed stick, Subramaniya carefully draws the vertical stripes of a Vaishnavite from the bridge of his nose up into his hairline. He paints his lips darkest red, eyes and brows black. His dangling earrings, and a jasmine garland attached to his jaunty feathered head-dress feminise him, though perhaps the chunky modern watch that remains on his wrist is a reminder of his true masculinity. The actor playing Duryodhana, Jothi, has the most time-consuming preparations. As a main epic character, his look is known as kattai vesham (kattai = wood, vesham = make-up), referring to the wooden ornamentation that will be attached to his costume. Actors playing kattai veshams are the ones that use elaborate facial motifs. Jothi wears the palepink base on his face; along the line of each eyebrow flows a heavy black stripe, another arching down below each eye, and up to meet the upper line at the temple. Along each of these is painted a dark red line and then a row of bright white dots. The same technique is used to dramatise the arch of his nose. These lines are called mal and are associated with physical power and a capacity for violence. The thicker and bolder the mal, the more powerful the character. On Jothi’s forehead and cheeks are the same circles as the Kattiyankaran’s, though exaggerated in bright red and white. Most eye-catching of all is the big plaited moustache Jothi attaches to his upper lip, and the thick black paint he applies in blocked curves across his chin. Inside this black frame, the mouth is painted in vibrant carmine. Each actor uses a colour scheme that codifies the traditional interpretation of his characters – here, the black moustache is a sign of virility, the red signals valour and also evil. They confirm that Frasca’s meticulous description of the facial make-up scheme is valid for their group and it remains unchanged over the years (Frasca 1984 and 1990). Like other kattai vesham characters, Duryodhana wears layers of brightly coloured, sparkling clothing. Most distinctive is his flared silk skirt supported with numerous stiff petticoats to give it a horizontal thrust. The petticoats are pleated using industrial-strength plastic bags from a nearby sugar mill. Such things used to be made of dry grass and straw, but Mani (the most senior actor in the group) says that the plastic is ‘modern’ and more ‘convenient’ for withstanding wear and tear. Around the bottom of his black trousers, Jothi winds heavy strings of ankle bells that will provide an aural boost to his fearsome presence. The actors playing female roles also don bells, though their costumes are much less extravagant than the men’s. Draupadi is given a green face to signal her good character, but the others simply wear naturalistic makeup derived from popular Tamil film heroines. In the old days, their


costumes were more ornamental but today’s trend is for the women to appear quite unflamboyant. It is still the accepted norm for female roles to be played by men – a traditional company like this one being made up of only male actors and musicians. Colleagues help the women characters pad out their blouses and pin together their sari pleats, and they in turn help Duryodhana, placing the bulky wooden ornaments on top of his ensemble. Only the princely cousins wear full-fledged crowns, kreetam, with the sizes indicating hierarchy. Here, Duryodhana wears a huge gold head-dress inlaid with chunky gems. The central cone-shape supports curved wings on either side and a big arch with a glaring red mask on top. His wooden shoulder ornaments (called puja keerthi, literally meaning ‘pride of the shoulders’) match the crown, their curve echoing the shape of the helmet wings. From behind the curtains, children and others constantly peep through, giggling, much to the annoyance of the actors, especially those dressing up for the female roles who light up their beedis in assertion of their manliness. After several hours’ preparation, the actors now have a whole night’s show ahead of them, during which some will change costume several times for different roles. A series of wooden poles has been erected around the stage dais, with fluorescent lighting tubes attached vertically on the inside and strings of little coloured lights hung between. The thrust

Figure 7.6 Female roles prepare.

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146 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds of the stage, lit up in the darkness, is now the focus of the village square and a couple of hundred people are gathering around; even the young village men, conspicuously absent for the storytelling, are now out there in the darkness, their bicycles propped up against the statue of Duryodhana. At the back of the audience arena, a luminous figure of Krishna stands forty feet tall, hovering over his prostrate clay enemy. In his light, stalls have been set up selling snacks, tea, trinkets and tobacco. Loudspeakers blast popular Tamil film music, and the air is thick with the smell of palm toddy and dust.

The show The musicians and the vattiyar take their places at the very back of the stage, seated on a wooden bench against the curtain that hides the actors. They face onstage towards one another. The instrumental ensemble comprises one mirudangam, cymbals, harmonium and mugaveenai. The two-sided mirudangam drum and the cymbals provide the talam (rhythm) and a high-pitched pipe called mugaveenai complements the choral singing, sometimes taking over in a solo melody. Some of the performers on the bench are young actors, not yet ready for a stage role but watching and learning from their seniors and singing along in chorus unison. The songs and talas are the basis of the show, determining the actors’ expressions, their characterisation and dance movements. Clapping his little cymbals, Subramaniya Thambiran leads the singing when he is not playing any roles, and as he sings the first line the others immediately join in unison, lifting their voices in a half-shout, half-chant. This troupe does not use microphones – something in which they take much pride, as they consider it a sign of purity and vocal prowess. Their voices are trained to project using head resonance and a rich palate of effects from chest growl to high-pitched scream. After the traditional invocation, asking for Ganesh’s blessing for a successful performance, and the choral introduction of tonight’s play, there is another invocation to the Goddess of art and learning: O Saraswathi, come before us right at this moment We worship you again and again. Give us blessings! Bring us to the height of glory! O Saraswathi, you who are embodied in the syllable ‘Om’, Which contains all the blessed stories of the Universe Bless us so that we may properly perform them here . . . Praise to beloved Mother Saraswathi.


The background singing continues for a long time before segueing into the first character’s entry. To a new tala Kattiyankaran strolls onstage and announces himself in short bursts of song. He has a jaunty look, a twinkle in his eye that invites excitement from the crowd. He turns back upstage at the end of each verse to cue the musicians sitting on the bench to repeat what he has sung. The actors who are still preparing themselves offstage join in with the ensemble. Here comes Kattiyankaran One who guards The doors of Dharmaraja. (chorus repeats) With a crooked stick in the hand With a crooked shake in the walk Silencing the ones who shout Calming the ones who trouble With a leap in the air With a shake in the stick Here comes Kattiyankaran . . ., etc. Like a lion cub With worldwide fame Here comes Kattiyankaran . . ., etc. To conduct the play properly Announcing his own name Here comes Kattiyankaran One who guards The doors of Dharmaraja. (chorus repeats) Thanikachala 1997, p. 613 Kattiyankaran is the conductor of the play, a jester and also representative of the audience; as such he enjoys immense liberties in his performance style. The readiness and spontaneity required in this tricky role, its strong and fluid link with the audience, teaches an actor all he needs to perform any of the other Therukoothu roles. After the entrance song, he suddenly halts the music with his arms held high, and facing out front he shouts ‘Silence!’ (in English). The children in the front row who had been shouting immediately shut up. Then he strolls about the stage again, making his introductory speech. His language is burlesque, half-prose half-nonsense verse, full of comical alliteration. The alliterations are nonsensical, as are the playful end-rhymes, such as latti:

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148 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds vatti, mutti: putti, potti: sotti. Meghanathan delivers the words deadpan, then suddenly announces (in Tamil): All the people who have gathered here are ‘very good’. In Thiruvannamalai district, Cheyyar taluk, Purisai village, lives a ‘set’ of the late K. Natesa Thambiran who was awarded ‘Kalaimamani’.14 The owner of this set is Kalaimamani N. Subramanya Thambiran. Today, this night, in this village of Kulamanthai at the event of Draupadi Amman fire-walking festival on this stage we are going to perform one part of Mahabharata called ‘Draupadi Kuravanchi’. If there are mistakes in word, meaning, music, thalam, mirudangam and in several other aspects, please forgive them as you would forgive the mistakes of your own children. Translation of audio recording, Kulamanthai performance, 6 May 2003 The words ‘very good’ and ‘set’ are in English and rhyme with colloquial Tamil words. Throughout the show, Kattiyankaran will use a wide variety of high and low Tamil as well as caste dialects and borrowings from Hindi and English, freely mixing them to achieve dramatic effect, double entendre and nuance. His colleagues in the company provide backing vocals not only in the musical numbers, but also with simple echo effects throughout the dialogue. At the end of Kattiyankaran’s phrases, he is supported with an assertive ‘Huh’ from the chorus, and sometimes with a repetition of the final few words. This stylistic quirk is used later with other characters, its communal energy punctuating and buoying up the often-lengthy dialogue and encouraging similar group assertion (or contradiction) from the audience. Although Kattiyankaran tells us that Draupadi Kuravanchi is a part of Mahabharata, Villiputurar’s Classical Tamil text does not in fact contain Kuravanchi. Instead, tonight’s drama is an imaginative extrapolation from the epic tale. The only printed versions of Kuravanchi available as a source for this play are in chapbook form sold by local street pedlars. Published by individual entrepreneurs and written by local vattiyars, these little chapbooks have been around ever since printing technology was introduced into the region.15 Cheyyar town still has a number of vattiyars who specialise in composing plays. Sometimes they will simply recommend an already published chapbook and procure it for the group who take it away and rehearse in an informal fashion over a period of months, well in advance of a festival. The leader of the Therukoothu group functions like a modern theatre director and mediates between the playwright and the actors. He is the one who can read and must help the others learn their parts by ear. He also owns all the costumes and sets.


If Therukoothu performances mix a wide variety of languages, the chapbook plays mix a wide variety of literary styles. For Draupadi Kuravanchi, the three styles used in the printed version of the play are ‘Viruttam’, ‘Tharu’ and ‘Pattu’ (or ‘Kavi’). ‘Viruttam’, like ‘Tharu’, is the name of a Tamil prosody consisting of verses of four, eight or sixteen lines (De Bruin 1998 p. xv). The ‘Viruttam’ verse form finds an entry in A Dictionary of Tamil Literary and Critical Terms, which defines it as ‘a poem dealing with the bow, sword, spear, sceptre, elephant, horse, country, capital city and liberality of a king, each being praised in a decade of stanzas of a particular rhythm’ (Murugan 1999, p. 300). ‘Pattu’ is a general name for the songs used in performance, and these could be of any number of lines and follow the melody of any genre of folk song. In the chapbooks, these sequences of poetry and song are called ‘Jatai’ (a colloquial word, as opposed to the literary word ‘Jati’, used in everyday speech to mean the same thing). Alternating with the more formal Jatai sequences are dialogues in prose and general announcements for the audience known as ‘pothu vacanam’ (‘general speech’). Of all the chapbook plays, Draupadi Kuravanchi is very special in the sense that on the one hand it contains the basic structure of all koothu plays, and on the other it invokes the framework of Tamil literary genre known as ‘Kuravanchi’. This latter form is associated with the nomadic Kuravar people who tell fortunes and lead the lives of gypsies. A performance of Kuravanchi normally features a Kuravan (a male member of kuravar caste) as Singan and a Kuratti (a female member of kuravar caste) as Singi. Singan and Singi walk through the streets until they find a young woman and tell her fortune, normally concentrating their efforts on predicting their subject’s good prospects in love. This generic pattern has produced a long list of poems in Tamil Classical literature including Lord Murugan’s mythology where Murugan woos Valli, his second wife, a Kuratti. The purpose of this particular myth has been to indicate that Murugan the god resides even in the lowliest of people, and this idea can subvert the entire caste system. Kuravanchi is so flexible that one even finds Bethlehem Kuravanchi written during the early Christian missionary period and narrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Tracing the development of the genre, Se. Vaidhialingan argues that its evolution as a dramatic form must have come from its musicality (Se.Vaidhialingan 2002, pp. 282–83). The flexibility of its structure lies in the Pattu section, where it can accommodate a variety of folk songs and sometimes even contemporary Tamil film songs. While the verse sections of Viruttam and Tharu remain the fixed part of Kuravanchi drama, Pattu offers scope for improvisation, change and addition.

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Figure 7.7 Draupadi Kuravanchi (ensemble).

The story of Draupadi Kuravanchi At the end of the twelve years exiled in the forest, the Pandavas have to begin their year in disguise. If they are discovered by the Kauravas during this time, the Pandavas will have to suffer another twelve years of banishment. In order to prevent the Pandavas from cultivating crops, Duryodhana orders that anyone trying to buy or beg for seeds should be given only roasted grains. He also prepares his army to search all the forests and flush them out before they begin their life in disguise. Krishna visits the Pandavas and tells them about Duryodhana’s plan, advising Draupadi to go to Hasthinapura disguised as a Kuratti, carrying with her the youngest of her husbands, Sahadeva, transformed into a baby. Krishna also suggests that, as a gypsy, she should predict the future of the Kaurava women and request fresh grain seeds in payment for her fortune telling. Draupadi does as he advises and meets Duryodhana’s mother, Gandhari, and his wife, Peruntiruval. They test the gypsy’s abilities through a series of questions on folk beliefs. When Draupadi replies satisfactorily to all their questions, Peruntiruval tests the gypsy by asking for stories about her past. If the descriptions of Peruntiruval’s


life prove accurate, she agrees to pay the gypsy in fresh seeds. Draupadi then tells of Duryodhana’s attempts to kill the Pandavas, and of her own humiliation after the Pandavas lost the game of dice. Immensely satisfied with the gypsy’s accurate telling of her family history, Peruntiruval urges her to predict the future. Draupadi narrates the fulfilment of her own vow – the horrible death of Duryodhana on the battlefield, and Draupadi’s anointing her hair with his blood and decorating it with his torn intestines. On hearing this, Peruntiruval falls to the ground and weeps and wails. Seeing her daughter-in-law so distressed, Gandhari intervenes and challenges the gypsy to tell her some details of her own past. So Draupadi reveals some of the most personal details known only to Gandhari, especially Gandhari’s first marriage to a male goat and the circumstances of her conceiving 100 sons. Shocked by the truth and accuracy of these revelations, Gandhari cannot console Peruntiruval. Draupadi now demands her payment of seed grains. Meanwhile Duryodhana, learning about the Kuratti and her predictions, suspects that she is, in fact, Draupadi, and orders her arrest. Krishna advises Arjuna to go to Hasthinapura as a Kuravan to secure Draupadi’s release, and Arjuna as Kuravan fights with Duryodhana’s warriors. Duryodhana wants to find out whether this is Arjuna, but the Kaurava elders advise him not to concern themselves with gypsies, for kings should not be bothered about people of such a lowly caste. Moreover, if the Kuravan does turn out to be Arjuna, he might destroy the entire kingdom. So Duryodhana releases Draupadi, and she and Arjuna return to the forest with the seed grains. However, when they reach home they discover that the seeds are roasted and therefore not fertile; Krishna tells them to plant the roasted seeds anyway. When Arjuna enquires how they will grow, Krishna replies: Listen, sister’s husband (maittuna). If you ask how the roasted cennel [grains] will grow, the blackened ones will become crowlike [kakkai colam – a kind of millet], the black grains will become uluntu [black gram], the burnt ones will become manakkam [another millet], the cooked ones will become centinai [red millet], and the ones that have grown black will become karuntinai [black millet]. Since we have sown them in nine kinds like this, we give them the name navataniyam [nine grains]. They will grow in three months in a way that is pleasing to the nine planets [navakkirakankal].

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152 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds And so the roasted grains grow, to the amazement of Duryodhana. Meanwhile the Pandavas and Draupadi Amman [as she is called in this finale] settle down in the kingdom of Matsya. Draupathai Kuravanchi Natakam, p. 6416 Despite Draupadi Kuravanchi following all the generic rules of Kuravanchi’s dramatic structure, Se.Vaidhialingan regards it as a corruption of the form, since Draupadi as gypsy does not tell fortunes but instead soothsays the doom of the Kauravas (Se.Vaidhialingan 2002, p. 283). However, Hiltebeitel sees a similarity between the structure of Draupadi Kuravanchi and ‘that of numerous Brahmana and Classical myths in which the gods and demons (like the Pandavas and Kauravas) contest with each other for the elements of the sacrifice’(Hiltebeitel 1991a, p. 309). The elements of sacrifice in this case are the seed grains. For Hiltebeitel, Draupadi Kuravanchi further exemplifies and supports his argument that Draupadi worship has cult status in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu (Hiltebeitel 1991a, p. 309). Hiltebeitel argues that the ceremony of the nine grains (in Sanskrit, navadhanyam) is given a mythological origin in Draupadi Kuravanchi. As Krishna and Draupadi collaborate in the scenes of death and revival, navadhanyam represents the principle of rebirth and immortality at the heart of symbolic sacrifices performed at the Draupadi festival. For him it is no coincidence that Krishna should send Draupadi to trick the Kauravas into yielding to the Pandavas before they enter the kingdom of Matsya for their regeneration (Hiltebeitel 1991a, p. 309).17 The central image of the navadhanyam is extremely appealing to an audience of agricultural labourers, and a performance of the story has immense ritual importance for them. The people of Kulamanthai believe that tonight’s show will bring agricultural prosperity in their village starved of rains. Their expectation is magnified by the fact that Subramaniya Thambiran’s group is very famous for performing Draupadi Kuravanchi.

Back to the show The chapbook version of Draupadi Kuravanchi fills sixty-four pages and follows a conventional structure of invocation to the gods, followed by Viruttam, Tharu, Vacanam (prose speech) and Pattu, and repetition of this sequence until the script concludes with Mangalam (auspicious ending). However, the Kulamanthai performance contains several digressions. This is common enough – the chapbooks are conceived as official chronicles of their period, and it is accepted that the live version of the show will differ from its literary equivalent. For example, in the script everyday speech is rendered in Classical prosody; in many cases, the


writer’s concept of high Tamil does not coincide with the expression of high Tamil currently prevalent. In this performance of Draupadi Kuravanchi, the entrance songs, background musical numbers and several of the prose speeches more or less adhere to the chapbook version. However, once the actors start interacting with Kattiyankaran or other characters, huge digressions occur. The chapbook text is worked with creatively to suit the immediate needs of performers and audience; most importantly, it is being stretched to fill out a whole night’s performance. To make seven hours’ entertainment out of the short script requires enormous improvisatory skill, especially on the part of Kattiyankaran. In his comic chorus role, he is on stage throughout the show, introducing characters and plot, diverting a scene for comic interchange, and encouraging the audience to play an active part in it all. Meghanathan uses every opportunity to display virtuosic linguistic abilities and an acute sense of timing, much to the delight of the crowd. Tonight’s Draupadi Kuravanchi is just one of ten consecutive all-night dramas in Kulamanthai, and Meghanathan will be given a break tomorrow when another actor, Rajendran, will take over from him as Kattiyankaran. While Kattiyankaran enters the stage announcing his own name in the third person, the kattai vesham characters have a much more elaborate entry. A fully made-up Duryodhana waits in the green room while the musicians sing the verse announcing his arrival. The famous King with precious stones in his crown With his ministers at his side With the stone on his neck shining like lightning His shoulders flashing big as if they were huge clouds With Sakuni, Salliyan, Karnan With Bhishmar and Dronar With his brave younger brothers surrounding him Here comes Duryan to his royal court. Duryodhana/Jothi sings this passage along with the musicians while he is sitting backstage and again as he enters. Kattiyankaran and another actor stretch out a shining orange and purple cloth to mask his arrival, escorting him downstage of the musicians. As they walk, they sing along with the musicians and Duryodhana, declaiming their message out front. Only Jothi’s stamping feet and ankle bells can be seen underneath the curtain; they are spinning in tight circles known as kirki.18 Tension rises as the drumming becomes more intense, and the singing is punctuated by fearsome roars from the king. The singers move on to the second stanza, still referring to Duryodhana in the third person.

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154 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds The King of Kings, Sri Maha Raja Raja, The Fierce King The unrivalled King, The Forceful King, Duriyabooban, With the only flower umbrella held over his royal head, With guards standing both at his side With the drum beats thundering With the crackers bursting With Vikarnan, Karnan, Veeshmar, Dronar surrounding him Here comes Duryodhanan Veena and Thamboor play the melodies, All the military generals bow their heads, The snake flag flies high Victorious music fills the air Drummers walk with respect Along with horses and lions Here comes Duryodhanan With the rosebay garland on his chest and The auspicious crescent moon on his forehead Here comes Duryodhana. Suddenly Jothi jumps onto the middle of the musicians’ bench and strikes a terrifying pose with his papier mâché sceptre swung over his shoulder, his tongue stretched out and eyes glaring and rolling. His face echoes precisely the red mask above it that crowns his head-dress. The bejewelled wooden wings on crown and shoulders are shown off to their greatest effect – they magnify his physical presence, their colour and shine in keeping with the lyrics. There is no attempt to illustrate any of the other grandiosities described – the umbrella, the firecrackers, the military generals and their flag. Drums must suffice for these. Kattiyankaran removes the handheld curtain with a flourish and announces: Behold! Silence! Attention! For the King of Kings The Maharaja of Maharajas! The Extravagant King! Duryodhana Maharaja! For a moment, action is suspended, everyone focused on Duryodhana on high, before he jumps off the bench and starts spinning again in anticipation of the Jatai section. Jothi whirls around like a dervish, his arms flying up and down, helping him balance as the speed increases. His horizontal skirt exaggerates the movement, like a spinning top; the bells on his ankles ring out, his feet spinning round as he traces a wider circle across the floor with his flailing sceptre leading the way. Such forceful


kirki are intended to impress; the audience is comparing the actor’s athletic ability to many others they have seen. His skills in improvisation, verbal play and repartee will also be judged, perhaps placing him in the stiff hierarchy of star performers of Therukoothu. The drumming decreases and Duryodhana slows down to sing out front: Of all the kings in the world There is only one Maharaja I, Duryodhana the Maharaja of all Maharajas, come I, Duryodhana the Maharaja of all Maharajas, come. The third person introduction, proclaimed by the full company, then by Kattiyankaran, has changed to a first-person solo pronouncement. The tripartite introductory convention is complete; Duryodhana has arrived. The king’s self-importance is immediately undercut by an intervention from Kattiyankaran who sings a nonsensical song: Papparapapara pai papparapara pai Pai [mat] in the sky Ayee [grand mother] in the Kuthir [Paddy basket] Papparapapara pai papparapara pai.

Figure 7.8 Jothi plays Duryodhana.

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156 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds Duryodhana looks perplexed but ignores Kattiyankaran who runs in a circle around the stage, like a child driving an imaginary toy vehicle. Duryodhana blinks deeply before continuing: The cosmos trembles, Even the dead shiver, All the world reverberates When the emperor walks. Kattiyankaran replies with another bathetic song. Do the chicken need (medical) treatment? Do the sparrows need the treatment? Duryodhana interjects with a question. Duryodhana: Hey guard! Do you know who I am? Kattiyankaran: How do I know unless you tell me? Duryodhana: My name is king Duryodhana with a garland of rosebay, an emperor who has never bowed his head before anybody. Our flag . . . Kattiyankaran: Your flag? Duryodhana: Do you know what our flag is? Kattiyankaran: What flag? Duryodhana: Aravar [snake] flag! Kattiyankaran: Avarai [beans] flag! Extremely irritated, Duryodhana runs after Kattiyankaran and beats him with his papier mâché sceptre. After several such sequences of mishearings and beatings, Kattiyankaran is eventually brought into line and shows his respect by repeating verbatim all Duryodhana’s concluding sentences. However, he cannot forgo an opportunity to intervene and irritate his master. For instance, when Duryodhana tells the story of Draupadi having mocked him when he visited the Pandavas during Rajasooya worship, Kattiyankaran interjects to remind Duryodhana that she is a goddess, pointing out that both the Pandavas and the Kauravas gambled her away. Kattiyankaran’s strategy is to ridicule the high status of a kattai vesham character and to push him to own up to his faults. His subversive questions are delivered with strutting cheek, angling his lines out front as if on behalf of the audience. He is our spokesman, ridiculing upperclass pomposity, sanctioning and encouraging our fearless mockery. Duryodhana’s character is open and rather innocent in its self-seriousness,


and our laughter is making him look stupid. He reacts with surprise and then increasing annoyance; his anger is sure to increase as the play proceeds and he is further humiliated. Virulent ridicule from both onstage and off is intended to push the actor to a really high-voltage performance. Duryodhana’s anger is expressed using his fearsome physical mannerisms – the kirki, rolling his eyes and pouting his tongue, over and over again. Such intense, repetitive physical energy might naturally lead the actor into a state of trance, especially in a ritually charged episode. While physical or verbal prowess can gain a performer a place in the Therukoothu star system, it is his proclivity towards trance and his ability to transfer it to members of the audience that is most valued and perpetuates his star status. For an audience member, the high point of emotional involvement is to go into trance. As with the committee members’ trance in their street dances as Pandavas, this intense loss of control signals the importance of the event – it authenticates the power of the story presented. Trance in the Therukoothu context is aptly referred to in Tamil as ‘Aavesam’ (‘Fury’) and is most common in the staging of the violent ‘Disrobing of Draupadi’ scene from earlier in Mahabharata, where a vivid sense of outrage dominates. Draupadi’s humiliation in the Kaurava court is given endless repetitive descriptions in Kuravanchi, as it is the main reason for her vendetta against Duryodhana. The story reaches the audience from different characters’ points of view. Duryodhana claims that her laughing at him (when he visited the Pandavas as their guest) was the reason he tried to disrobe her. In response to this, Kattiyankaran, the storyteller and others preach lengthy moralising on what should be a woman’s behaviour in everyday life. There is even a Tamil proverb that says: ‘If a woman laughs, disaster follows.’ Duryodhana accuses her of double effrontery because Draupadi also laughed at his father, saying: ‘I thought only my father-in-law was blind. Now I know my brother-in-law is also blind.’ Even Kattiyankaran, who ridicules everything Duryodhana says in the earlier scene, later gives credence to the basis of his anger. Nonetheless, the intended violation of stripping Draupadi naked is unpardonable. In Therukoothu’s musings it is repeatedly said that the elder brother’s wife deserves the respect and love one reserves only for one’s mother. By the time Draupadi makes her appearance as a gypsy, it is past midnight and most of the audience have gone to sleep. The play goes on as if everybody were still fully engaged. Indeed, the old men at the front are attentive – as Therukoothu connoisseurs they are determined not to miss a thing. But the women behind have to be up early (as soon as the show finishes), to fetch water from the well and other household

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158 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds duties. It is only the third night of the cycle of plays and everyone needs some rest before participating in tomorrow’s daytime ritual, listening to the storytelling and coming to the next all-night play. Some find ways to stay awake – they wander over to the stalls for a cup of tea or a smoke. Those who succumb to sleep still don’t want to miss anything. In the silence of the night, the actors’ loud voices prevent their drifting into deep sleep. Some people murmur the songs as they snooze; some smile in response to Kattiyankaran’s jokes. The play is entering their imaginations through subtle and unconscious means, mingling with their dreams. At the entrance of the gypsy Draupadi, the connoisseurs nudge the others awake. The man with the green face who played Draupadi in the first part of the show is now replaced by another actor, Kanniyappan. Two or more actors playing the same character is common in the set of Mahabharata plays dealing with the lives of the Pandavas in disguise – one represents the straightforward character and the other their successful transformation. Kanniyappan wears a dark-blue sari and gold jewellery, his soft features and long, black hair elegantly suggesting a seductive young woman. However, his face is painted blue like Krishna’s, and on his head is fixed a little blue bucket that he spins with his right hand as he talks. The spinning bucket invites hilarious comments from Kattiyankaran, who draws attention to its comic absurdity. But it does the job – audience members jostle to come forward and place coins in it, or pin notes to the gypsy’s shoulders. A young woman willingly gives up her grumpy baby to play the part of Sahadeva, and he is whisked about on Draupadi’s hip. When this child’s fearful shrieking starts detracting from the dialogue, he is handed back to his mother and another enthusiastic family steps forward to offer their progeny. Our neighbours in the audience assure us that the babies’ participation is an excellent thing – giving one’s child into the hands of the Draupadi actor in Kuravanchi is said to enhance their intellectual prowess. Different episodes of Mahabharata are believed to provide different blessings and boons to communities and individuals. For instance, performing the story of Karna Moksham (Karna’s Salvation) on the sixteenth day after the death of a person is believed to liberate the departed soul from the cycle of rebirths (Frasca 1990, p. 135; De Bruin 1998, p. xiii); attending a ritual performance of Arjuna’s Penance is believed to enhance fertility in women.19 All the way through Kuravanchi, Kattiyankaran stage-manages the audience participation, encouraging people to step forward and play their part. As the mediator between fiction and reality, his job is to highlight the intrinsic qualities of a mythical scene, connecting them to


Figure 7.9 Kanniyappan as Draupadi with Meghanattan as Kattiayankaran.

everyday life experiences. Later on, when Draupadi meets with Gandhari, Duryodhana’s mother and her own mother-in-law, Kattiyankaran comments on the scene, drawing comparisons with everyday conflicts between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. The audience is encouraged to see Draupadi and Gandhari not simply as removed mythological figures, but as ordinary people like themselves. Kattiyankaran is making direct connections between the epic story and life here and now. He links up the worlds of stage and street in other ways too – if a character speaks in a highflown literary language, he paraphrases it; if a caste dialect is used, he mocks it; he links the injustices done to Draupadi to familiar experiences known to the audience. In a poignant exchange between Kattiyankaran and the gypsy when she is trying to obtain fresh seeds, he criticises the low quality of rice supplied through the Government’s public distribution system.

Ritual performance The day after Kuravanchi, the villagers take part in another Mahabharata event – Madupidi Sandai (‘The Fight for Cattle’). Young men and old assemble with their cattle in the village square where they sat the night before. The cattle are freshly washed and groomed, their perfectly arched

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160 Therukoothu: coalescing worlds horns have been painted bright blue, some decorated with shining tassels and bells. As the men wait for things to get going, they smile and chat with their friends and relations in the surrounding audience. In the green room at the back of the stage, the actors, Duryodhana and Arjuna, prepare themselves slowly. Today Duryodhana’s flared skirt is red and white, his head-dress a tall, circular crown strung with fresh jasmine flowers. Arjuna, disguised as the eunuch Brihannala, wears a green sari; and his face is painted pink one half and blue the other half. One of the yellow-clad men brings fresh banana palm branches to decorate the front of the stage area. In the branches, Arjuna’s bow is hung. The three deities are brought on their bier from under the eaves of the temple where earlier they witnessed the storytelling. A pujari performs a puja at the edge of the stage and people, especially children, surge forward to take part. Muthuganesan the storyteller gets onto a

Figure 7.10 Villagers and cattle wait for action.


podium in the middle of the crowd to relate the story of King Virata’s cattle that will be played out by the actors. The audience is silent, acutely attuned to the import of the words – just as they had been earlier in the day sitting for hours listening to his stories. It is rare for the storyteller and actors to come together in this way. For this Madupidi Sandai ritual the actors have nothing to say; their role is purely physical. Once Muthuganesan’s story is complete, they are brought down off the stage area and onto the street level. Arjuna is given his bow and Duryodhana carries his characteristic sceptre. The actors are blessed by the pujari, then commence their chase around the square, dodging through the crowd. The people cheer and whistle as the actors run at the cattle, forcing them and their owners to flee outwards into the street and the paddy fields. Some of the frightened animals break loose and charge away in a cloud of dust. Arjuna and Duryodhana keep circling clockwise around the square and the temple area, running and jumping as they go. Their presence is not menacing; if one did not know the story of the fight to regain the king’s cattle, it would be hard to comprehend the exact conflict being played out. Everyone is surprisingly relaxed, as if careless of the significance or impressiveness of their actions. As Arjuna and Duryodhana return from their half-a-dozen cycles, they slow down and wander into the crowd positioned at the edge of the stage platform. Heads down, like footballers coming off the pitch, they make their way through the group of women and children up onto their stage. The committee members join them and pat them on the back, congratulating them on their performance. The repetitive circular running in this ritual anticipates a later one in the festival – the high point of the Mahabharata story called Padu Kalam (‘The Final War Field’). This will occur in about a week’s time, Arjuna’s brother Bhima chasing Duryodhana through the streets and then around the village square, the two actors fighting viciously with wooden weapons and kicking clods of dust after them. Finally, Bhima and the villagers will fall on the huge sculpted figure of Duryodhana and pierce its thigh, releasing a vivid store of red kumkum powder.20 In that popular event, the villagers participate in the destruction of their potters’ statue. Here in Madupidi Sandai, the equivalent climax is the moment at which the cattle are released, charging out of the village square. The involvement of the cattle in Arjuna and Duryodhana’s fight is of great significance to the villagers, as it affirms the importance of their beasts. The livestock are a central part of daily life here in Kulamanthai, and this fact is celebrated by their being spruced up and brought onstage to participate. Here they are in the sacred Kingdom of Matsya and our guest Arjuna will take care of them.

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Figure 7.11 Running over hot coals.

Within the same twenty-four hours, two completely different ways of playing out Mahabharata have been used, ritual drama and dramatic ritual – both of them enabling the villagers to take part in the epic. Where the staged drama of Kuravanchi was expanded to include all sorts of contemporary relevance and comic diversion, the story of the fight over cattle has been simplified into a stylised communal activity. The play was a vehicle for extended performer/audience interaction, the community ritual a concentrated representation of the essence of the conflict. Moving from the all-night performance of Kuravanchi to chasing the villagers’ cattle in Madupidi Sandai, the actors have burst out of their stage confines and joined the crowd. The division between performance and audience has caved in and everybody, even the animals, has become a character in Mahabharata; the epic world and the real world are one. By fusing itself with its audience, the theatre of Mahabharata is fully affirming the system of values by which the community lives – the preservation of progeny and land, livestock and family. As we leave Kulamanthai, we think of the villagers running over burning coals on the penultimate day of the festival. Through this ecstatic act, they will complete their ritual observances and come back to the everyday world. Only on their return will Dharmaraja ascend his throne to restore natural justice. And perhaps it will rain.

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8

Modern Therukoothu Survival

The rains did fall. That year, north Arcot had a good monsoon for the first time in too many years. Perhaps the villagers of Kulamanthai put it down to their twenty-day Mahabharata festival. Perhaps the other villages round about who had not financed such a thing were suitably grateful to their neighbours. In the realms of devotional performance, and superstition, cause and effect are perhaps not quite so simple. But from the point of view of the satisfied villagers, the actors played a significant part in helping their crops to grow. The honouring of Draupadi is one aspect of the actors’ total involvement in the lives of the audience, the significance of their work on all levels. Their work is not just providing escapism and satire, but also a spiritual support that keeps the community going. This level of integration, with its central element of ecstasy and trance, is far away from the nature of contemporary urban drama. How can someone based in that secular, commercial environment in India make sense of it? Here is one account from M. Natesh, a Tamil theatre designer based in Chennai (see also the appendix on p. 192). It was in 1984 that I first watched a full nine nights’ koothu. It completely changes your biorhythm. Your body clock changes and on the fourth day you kind of go mad. Keeping awake the whole night, watching koothu, sleeping fitfully in the daytime with the Therukoothu group under the shade of a few stray mango trees, it does that to you. Sweat, body odour, the grime from the dust, frequent baths and the smell of coconut all over from the toddy1 is nothing less than an orgy. It was in the month of May. The days were hot – around 45 degrees. The nights were cold, since mountains surrounded the village. The food at the village gave us a large belly since truckloads got downed by us. Those whole sleepless nights did it. The actors

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164 Modern Therukoothu: survival ate large amounts too, but they were used to it. After breakfast we slept, only to wake up in the middle of the day, in a pool of our own sweat; quitting lunch we went out and drank a number of tender coconuts one after the other. I remember gulping down nine in a row. In that kind of heat one’s body is in struggle, not knowing what to do, but with the coconut milk it immediately cools down. Heated up, then really cooled and then washed and fresh, ready for the night, it was an ordeal.

Figure 8.1 Sambandhan performs Arjunan Thapasu.

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Arjunan Thapasu (‘Arjuna’s Penance’) – a theatrical ritual – happens immediately after the night’s performance, early in the morning when you are strangely alert after the sleepless night. Arjuna must do penance before he gets the paasupathaasthra (mythological WMDs) from Lord Siva. The tree on which Arjuna climbs is an interesting invention – it is like a ship’s mast, some kind of a ladder. A tall palmyra tree is cut and strong thick pegs are shoved in on alternate sides that can support a man resting on each peg before climbing up to the next: a very abstract entity. All objects that happen in the ritual are symbols, very colourful symbols, very evocative: blood is there everywhere, in the red kumkum powder that married women piously wear on their forehead. It is all right as a dot on someone’s forehead but little mounds of it heaped intermittently at the ritual site, the earth smeared red, and holy water sprinkled, is nothing but absolute evocation. Manjal-kumkum (yellow-red), white jasmine flowers, green mango leaves and neem leaves, water and the cool dawn is a wonderful set-up for Arjuna to go up the tree and do his penance. War, death, life and celebration, is an intense, obsessional indulgence for them. Those who don’t have children pray for one under the tree and those who get a child after such prayers bring the newborn to the tree; they hang it in a thuli (cloth cradle) and thank the gods. Arjuna goes up the ladder uttering mantras 2 from each rung – beautiful poetry written for Lord Siva. Women come in yellow saris after having a bath in turmeric holy water and pray under the tree. The top of the tree has a platform. Arjuna goes up, finishes his puja and throws yellow lemons and vilva leaves (called bael) at the audience below. A heavy breakfast and a sleepless night take you into a trance and you stupidly wonder at the colourful character going up the tree. Watching Padu Kalam (‘The Final War Field’) from someone’s terrace might save you from the collective catharsis going on. Otherwise you are simply part of the massacre. It is the communal destruction of one of Duryodhana’s legs that comes to mind whenever I think of Padu Kalam. The trance that comes to the actors when they unconsciously start believing they are actually the characters they represent, make them ethereal, giving you an unbelievable high. Higher than the high I got in any other gathering. The giant ‘Duryodhana’ sometimes is made under a couple of huge tamarind trees for the sake of the shade. Bhima butchering Duryodhana is always there in the air about that site, even when the

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166 Modern Therukoothu: survival statue has been destroyed. After three rounds of running around the figure, the actor playing Bhima hits the leg of the figure with a mace. Blood and sinews splatter. People break through the barriers and smear their hair with the blood that is actually there (kumkum water, cooked rice and a few other things in that mud pot buried in the figure’s leg where Bhima hits). Duryodhana’s wife appears at the scene and beats her chest and cries and wails. She sits high up on a ladder carried across two men’s shoulders; she holds a broom and a cane plate which the construction workers carry while at work as coolies. The crowd rubs off the dot on her forehead symbolising widowhood, which is seen by the young lads as a joke, since she is played by a male impersonator. This excruciating Padu Kalam exercise in scorching heat makes me think that these people are a totally different lot, and that I don’t have any connection with them. They are like the earth, grass and dirty water of the fields. Who are they? Why is it that I don’t know them? It is a scene that can’t happen in the cities. In these koothu happenings you need to enjoy the heat and give yourself to the entire ritual exercise. You need to need it.3 M. Natesh is painfully aware of the strangeness of the events: ‘Orgy . . . ordeal . . . obsessional indulgence.’ The level on which the village audience responds to their actors’ performance in the rituals is beyond anything you can experience in conventional contemporary theatre. This world of superstition and physical intensity is a lifetime away from the airconditioned rationale of modern urban entertainment. In M. Natesh’s final sentence he is suggesting another fact about his urban theatre that contrasts with the Therukoothu village shows – audiences do not need it in the way that the villagers need it. For someone who dedicates his life to creating theatre, this is something of a disappointment. M. Natesh’s description shows how attractive the rural rituals are in symbolic and visual terms. His images are extremely vivid – the parallel levels of signification an inspiration for any designer or theatre director. There is obvious theatricality in the way things are presented, with the mourning drag mother creating a mixture of laughter and tears, the bloody goo from the statue’s thigh turning out to be rice and kumkum powder. These witty, strongly visual characteristics have influenced M. Natesh in his work as a painter and theatre designer. His playwright father, Muthuswamy, has been so smitten with the power of the local folk theatre that over the past thirty years he has sought to bridge the gap between the rural and the urban theatre scenes.

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Muthuswamy In June 1975, on the same night that the Emergency4 was declared in the nation of India, a demonstration performance of the Therukoothu play Karnan was staged at the Music Academy in the annual Chennai music festival. During a general interaction section, Na. Muthuswamy (then a well-known short story writer) stood up in front of the huge gathering and declared that what they were watching was true Tamil theatre. The upper-crust audience assembled at this event ridiculed him. They regarded the show as some sort of aberration, a strange untouchable creation, a throwback to the superstitions and vulgarities of pre-urban culture. Muthuswamy explains: In the city, people followed a caste-based agenda. The Brahmindominated theatre was full of aspects from Sathir 5 and rituals, whereas this non-Brahmin form was filled with adavus 6 from martial arts – much more theatrical, with dazzling techniques.7 I felt they might have taken inspiration from ancient Tamil theatre. In politics, neither the Marxists nor the regular politicians accepted Therukoothu. The Marxists called it a feudal form, they called me a revivalist – such was the criticism. Nor did the Dravidian8 movement accept koothu since there were gods in it. They were not ready to say that it was the Tamilian’s traditional theatre. Only after the intellectuals and the politicians came to know of the international folklore scenario did people begin to think about it, and start calling it ‘people’s art’.9 Immediately after the Emergency was lifted in 1977 there was a period of political awakening in Tamil Nadu, with old inhibitions and prejudices being overthrown. Endless discussions among communities instilled a sense of liberalism, and inspired a new kind of individualism in educated young people. To discover a true identity for themselves, they wanted to go back to the roots of things. For this young, energised group, the clouds of class oppression were slowly getting cleared. The ridicule accorded to the lower-caste culture now became replaced with a passionate interest, and Muthuswamy’s enthusiasm for street theatre started to find sympathisers. As a short story writer, he became embroiled in the ‘New Poetry Movement’ – a group of poets, activist–writers and young admirers who were beginning to promote literature in the true Tamil language, as opposed to the style of writing perpetuated in popular journalism. As part of this search for authenticity Muthuswamy started

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168 Modern Therukoothu: survival writing various articles on Therukoothu which were published in the mid-1980s as a collection on the aesthetics of performing arts. Though he had never been in the habit of reading plays he started analysing other writers’ work, and over a period of eight years he slowly let new elements into his writing. It gradually moved away from direct narrative and increasingly invoked the abstract and the absurd. Others in the New Poetry Movement hailed his first published collection of three plays as revolutionary, comparing it with the work of Ionesco, an absurdist French playwright. As M. Natesh explains in a 2004 interview: All kinds of reasons have been given for Muthuswamy’s change of direction, but I personally believe it was his deep need to protect his work from disappearing into oblivion. Though he is still revered as one of the greatest short story writers in Tamil, he wrote in an abstract style that was found to be obscure by a majority of his next generation admirers. Theatre saved him from this obscurity. The Therukoothu company performing that night in 1975 was the Purisai Kalaimamani Natesa Thambiran Therukoothu nataka manram10 from north Arcot – the same company featured in our account in Chapter 7. It was not a good time for companies like theirs – this Music Academy demonstration for urban connoisseurs was one of the ways they eked out a living. Since the arrival of silent films in the 1930s, village audiences had been an unreliable source of income and the Thambirans had been forced to diversify. They had managed to expand their skills, abandoning the koothu style when necessary and offering village audiences shows using the songs and plots of popular drama, or editing their long, semiimprovised traditional village shows into shorter demonstration performances for urban audiences. After the show, Muthuswamy introduced himself to the actors backstage and invited them to his home to discuss a potential collaboration. Over the next couple of years, Natesa Thambiran’s cousin Kannappa Thambiran11 formed an intense artistic relationship with Muthuswamy. The two artists planned to create Tamil theatre together, harnessing Muthuswamy’s writing skills to the noncaste-inhibited, non-cinema-influenced street theatre. Their work was linked to the ideals of the New Poetry Movement with its anti-traditional outlook, envisaging something totally modern for a Tamil audience. When the writer’s own theatre group, Koothu-p-Pattarai, was formed in 1977, its actors were members of the Thambiran family. Most of these actors had received some sort of koothu training with Kannappa Thambiran back in Purisai.


Koothu-p-Pattarai: beginnings At the outset Koothu-p-Pattarai (KPP) had no money. The actors were earning a living in the daytime working at the Chennai postal department. The company began by putting on workshops and demonstrations, concentrating particularly on the exchange of performance techniques between artists from different backgrounds. The most significant member of the Thambiran clan to join Muthuswamy’s KPP early in its evolution was Sambandhan, the youngest son of Kannappa Thambiran. He had come to Chennai looking for a job, to settle down in life since it seemed that cinema had overtaken his father’s trade in popular entertainment. But Muthuswamy took him along to a pan-Indian Theatre Workshop in Madurai. This residential workshop was conducted by people from the National School of Drama in Delhi – internationally renowned playwrights, directors and designers. Within a seventy-day period the participants were taught about contemporary theatre and all that was happening worldwide. Inspired by this experience, Sambandhan went back to his village to gain proper training with his career hopes totally altered. A reinvigorated Muthuswamy became convinced that contemporary Tamil theatre was possible, that his company could produce full-blown productions. These fragile beginnings were given another boost by a burgeoning interest from scholars who came to research the local folk theatre. With an American cassette recorder in front of them, the Therukoothu actors began remembering forgotten songs and even started creating new texts for their own repertoire. A video demonstration of the adavus and thalams (dance steps and movements for beats), deconstructed for pedagogical clarity, was another early opportunity to formalise their performance style. Until this time the actors had no experience of analysing their techniques, let alone under the scrutiny of foreign scholars.

Panchali Sabadam: Draupadi’s Vow During the early 1980s the Delhi-based Sangeet Natak Akademy (SNA) and the Ministry of Culture started to recognise the work that was going on all over India relating to rural theatre, and began to support it under various schemes. In 1980 SNA released a five-year grant to Kannappa Thambiran’s group in Purisai to teach Therukoothu. With increasing interest coming from urban and international audiences, the Purisai group was eager to evolve new texts from stories in Mahabharata. Subramanya Bharathi’s Panchali Sabadam was chosen by Muthuswamy

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170 Modern Therukoothu: survival and Kannappa Thambiran as a text to set to music, and staged as a oneman show for Sambandhan. The show was primarily a vehicle for him to be onstage in Chennai. The city audiences were attracted to the play not because of Therukoothu but because they regarded Bharathi (1881– 1956) as the most significant poet in the national freedom struggle. It was the centenary of his birth and the public was celebrating his fight against the British Empire.12 The production was shown in Chennai venues and at SNA in Delhi, and was well received. The story of Panchali Sabadam is the same as Draupadi Vasthrabaranam, the attempted disrobing of Draupadi after she has been won in the game of dice,13 but Bharathi’s script gives it an overtly political gloss, portraying Draupadi as a metaphor for India violated by the British. There is also a strong feminist line in the poetry, and the production contained this main message: are we going to wait for legislature to change the fate of women or are we going to help them to empower themselves? In 1982 it was staged in Chennai using a full Therukoothu company, including actors from KPP. Under an internal cultural exchange programme it toured Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Pondicherry. Finally, it was telecast live by Doordharshan, the national television network.

Figure 8.2 Sambandhan performs Panchali Sabadam.


The Ramayana Festival The literary, metaphorical style and secular political concerns of Panchali Sabadam made it unsuitable for performance in the villages. In this area, KPP and the Purisai group wanted to build up an increasingly broad range of shows, and in 1985 they launched a series of new one-night rural koothus with a production of Ravana Vadhai (‘The Killing of Ravana’). With this production, telling a well-known mythological tale, Muthuswamy and Kannappa Thambiran were reacting against a vulgar style of Therukoothu performance that had recently become the norm due to the increased popularity and accessibility of television and film dramas. Coming from their complementary angles of script and music, they set about creating a new show that foregrounded the rough-hewn strengths of street theatre, providing audiences with high-quality, exciting performances that might draw them away from the imported television clichés. In order to free themselves from the now ingrained caricatures, they were introducing a new repertoire of subjects taken not from Mahabharata but from Ramayana, a completely unexplored source for traditional koothu.14 The show was very well received. Subsequent productions of stories from Ramayana persuaded the core group of Muthuswamy, Sambandhan and Kannappa Thambiran to plan a ten-day Ramayana festival with rituals around the celestial birthday of Rama, Sri Rama Navami. This festival would stand alongside the existing ten-day Mahabharata festival. A five-night Ramayana festival was put on in 2002, staging the five Ramayana shows that KPP now had in its repertoire and culminating in a ritual on the morning of the final day – Ramar Pattabhishekam (‘The Crowning of Rama’). All the Ramayana plays use text from the Kamba Ramayanam15 combined with koothu movement and music. They are given a contemporary angle, using the Kattiyankaran’s vernacular and semi-improvised discussions to expand on current issues such as marriage obligations or war. Characters in the plays have long speeches opposing war, promiscuity and life out in the wild jungle as opposed to marriage and life in the community. The five shows were funded by the SNA or the Ministry of Culture of the Government of India, and major grants still need to be found if they are to complete the planned ten-day Ramayana. They also have a long way to go in simply formulating the rituals and integrating the whole as profoundly as it is integrated in Mahabharata festivals. Finding a particular temple around which the festival could be hosted is another significant problem, though many villages have the Vaishnavite ‘Perumal’ temple where a Rama celebration would make sense.16

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172 Modern Therukoothu: survival

Suvarottigal and England During a village show, Muthuswamy’s new contemporary play, Suvarottigal, was shown to the rural audience and proved surprisingly popular. It has an abstract narrative originating in a discussion about the posters on the walls of Chennai: despite the city’s monumental, digitally printed billboards and neon lights, it still has huge hand-painted political posters suspended above the chaotic streets. Even small political meetings of minor functionaries get advertised in this way, and the information is picked up by passing crowds. The nature of the war between the two major political parties can be seen in the enormity of the posters competing on hoardings. Suvarottigal is Muthuswamy’s commentary on how politicians and the public interact in this visual battlefield of street advertising. There are no specific characters; the voices are nameless and without individuality, appearing like soloists out of a chorus body. There is one central Kattiyankaran figure and a couple of other actors competing for the post of chief Kattiyankaran, but generally the company functions as a community, full of conversational conflict.17 In Suvarottigal, Muthuswamy is questioning the individuality and autonomy of those who create and destroy the posters. The final statement asks: ‘When a person in the play asks what he will paste here and tear there, is he an actor or a character?’18 The script is extremely economical, yet rich in Tamil word play and strong visual images. It is full of stage directions often describing satirical action – for example, a man walks across the stage, lazily pasting up a poster; he pats himself on the back for doing such a good job, so smug that he doesn’t realise the poster is upside down, even when others point it out to him. The rural crowd responded to Suvarottigal’s abstract qualities without inhibition, allowing the play to act upon them without any preconceptions, and understanding the content perfectly. It was a political and social subject rather than a religious one as in their traditional folk plays, but this seemed no barrier. Muthuswamy’s next play, England, was designed specifically for the city theatre venues, using a strong visual approach. The script, poetic and abstract like Suvarottigal, explored ideas about Indian identity, harking back to Mahatma Gandhi’s fears of crude industrialisation in the modernisation of India. It opened with the Gandhian symbol of cloth weaving (signifying economic control and cultural self-respect) as some innocent past, a naïve version of life overwhelmed by much more gruesome realities. The difference and tension between town and country formed the central dramatic axis of the play. As M. Natesh explains in a 2004 interview:

Modern Therukoothu: survival 173 Muthuswamy is using koothu as a ritual to ground his work in a 1111 2 specifically Tamil cultural context. You could call the play England 3 [staged first in 1989] a proper representation of his style. This play 4 has the feel of a short story. There is a simple narrative that gets 5 thwarted into the abstract and moves from there to make broader 6 political comments on who rules India. The initial scenes in the play, 7 where balls of thread hang from the ceiling and the actors pull the 8 strings out and get themselves entangled, are symbolic of what is still 9 happening – the strings of history pulling and enmeshing the present. 1011 The repeated refrain begins now: ‘Those who speak English, rule us 1 still.’ Then it moves on to current-day tarmacs and roads, addressing 2 urban aporia and poverty, portraying the jerkiness of transition from 3111 the rural to the urban, hurtling bullock carts and busy buses. Gandhi 4 walks in like a stranger on stilts and participates in the narration. 5 Each player gets a meaty bit to mouth on India’s identity and 6 Gandhi’s notions of freedom for his people. Descriptions flip from 7 one Tamil world to another – the street, the village hut, the temple, 8 the slum. After Gandhi’s exit the actors take positions to form a 9 human creature that eats like cattle and that stands on four legs, 20111 hands grounded to the floor. Parvathi (Lord Shiva’s consort) comes 1 out doing a martial dance. 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 21111 Figure 8.3 Koothu-p-Pattarai ensemble in England.

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174 Modern Therukoothu: survival

Vellai Vattam Muthuswamy’s work has always focused on local issues, the preoccupations of Tamil people in the street. The stylistic influence of Therukoothu is evident, with declamatory vocalisations, a sense of communal debate and iconoclastic vigour. The odd specific stage device also appeared in his shows, almost as a homage to the rural folk actors, to draw attention to their living tradition. However, his plays have not tried to be exact copies of Therukoothu shows, using the dance steps or music throughout. This form of influence he left to outsiders whom he invited to work with KPP – first off, K.S. Rajendran from the National School of Drama. In 1988 he staged a version of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle with the actors in Therukoothu style. The Tamil translation was by Mr Krishnamoorthy, a German Scholar from Chennai, and was titled Vellai Vattam. After a process of adaptation the show was staged again by KPP in 1998. This was a collaborative performance using folk music by Kannappa Thambiran for the songs, and combining a general Brechtian style of acting embodied in Kattiyankaran with more stylised effects using traditional adavus. The Purisai group participated in the production alongside the KPP actors. The central theme of corruption made the play an instant success with audiences in the villages, and it later ran to overflowing houses in Chennai too. The adavus were performed with great skill and proved an accessible aspect of the production, attracting the interest of people from all walks of life. Vellai Vattam was seen as an important play that validated the presence of KPP in Tamil theatre and was a roaring success for everyone involved.

Development work Rajasuya Yagam, a new village play created by Thambiran and Muthuswamy, was successfully integrated into the ten-day Draupadi Amman village festival. It is an example of one way in which their work has moved between village and city audiences, having different meanings for each. One segment of the show, lasting a couple of hours, was staged independently and became propaganda theatre for the State, useful to publicise their nutritious meal scheme for pregnant women. As Sambandhan explains: We were the first to bring in social awareness without the ritual. Since contemporary relevance is within the tradition, it is koothu’s focus, we can bring issues and ideas into the text of the drama, and they become part of the story. There is an important example to illustrate


this: in the play Rajasuya Yagam I incorporated the theme of female infanticide. In the story of Chara Chandran, the character is a child born to two women, half each! In the original story the two halves are thrown away, whereas in my story the village deity, Charadevi, looks at the discarded half-babies and raises all kinds of contemporary questions, from dowry to infanticide to disowned wives; problems with in-laws and whatever else, bringing in nutrition for pregnant women. What should these two women have done to produce a complete baby? The whole thing is integrated using Kattiyankaran and goes beyond propaganda to become part of the drama. When the Centre For Development, Research and Training (CFDRT) started collaborating with KPP and the Purisai group in the late 1990s, Rajasuya Yagam was used to demonstrate the efficacy of inserting useful information into a street show. The CFDRT chose ten Therukoothu groups from the area around north Arcot and helped them introduce messages about contemporary development issues into their work, without disturbing the traditional format. The KPP actors showed the members of these groups various techniques for moulding messages into a show. However, Muthuswamy is not convinced that such processes are anything but a pandering to funding bodies, as he explains. Those people who are working in the social projects have no belief in the effectiveness of koothu; they aren’t really convinced about the capacity of koothu as a vehicle. The koothu people have no marketing skills, but they will include propaganda elements because they need money. So that aspect, the agit prop angle, won’t work unless those employed by the NGOs put in enough effort and believe in it. So far it is a failure.

Training and money In 1988 KPP began to function in repertory. At the beginning they got a US$200,000 grant from the US Ford Foundation. Twelve young actors decided to take up theatre as their full-time activity for life; they were paid Rs.800 (about US$16) salary per month and were housed at a new residence near the coast in the south of Chennai. Three of the youngsters (in their teens) were from the Purisai Therukoothu family.19 The training provided by visiting artists from abroad enabled both the city and the rural performers to expand their techniques, while the long legacy of

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176 Modern Therukoothu: survival accumulated skill was still upheld in the central teaching of Kannappa Thambiran. Sambandhan continues: After the training I got [with KPP], nothing direct went into the koothus, but my mind became active in a different way. I started delivering my lines with punch and strict awareness of timing. Blocking a play [which occurs in modern theatre] happened when new plays were produced. One more important thing: ‘cues’ were never there in koothus; we brought in that habit since the shorter demonstration versions of our work – lasting one, two or three hours – needed tightening up. My father even jokingly did a five-minute koothu! Once the Ford Foundation funding ran out, it was difficult for KPP and their Purisai collaborators to find ways to keep going. Kannappa Thambiran was quite open about the fact that local village interest in Therukoothu had only revived in recent years because of Muthuswamy’s group in Chennai. His company had been able to work in recent decades due to the ‘trickle-down’ of finance via Koothu-p-Pattarai. For example, a few years ago Thambiran’s company put on a fully staged version of Draupadi Vasthrabaranam (‘The Disrobing of Draupadi’) outside the temple in Purisai for Rs.2,000 (split between fifteen performers, that gave them a good day’s wage each). The sponsor was an American producer looking for the best Indian performers to take part in her pan-Asian festival back in California. The whole village gathered outside the temple to support the actors, happy to attend a free show at some American’s expense. Without KPP, it is hard for the Purisai actors to find enough work. In the village, Kannappa Thambiran once had a monopoly on opera productions in the district, but now they are in trouble – Sambandhan’s five daughters. Five females forbidden to perform Therukoothu in the village festivals – it is taboo. Sambandhan is prepared to find ways around this sort of thing, training new performers who are not part of the family. But the village panchayats are a conservative lot, and it is difficult to persuade them that non-family members are just as good as the wellknown Thambirans. Plus there is serious competition from his cousin’s company (featured in Chapter 7). The village actors are constantly struggling to find buyers for their traditional Mahabharata shows, and the new Ramayana festival created with Muthuswamy is at present just an ambitious vision. With the recent death of Kannappa Thambiran, Sambandhan has taken on his father’s pedagogical mantle, but it remains to be seen how he manages to keep his family’s legacy going.


As time goes on, the actors employed by KPP come and go. Many have now been members of the group for more than twenty years, and have been trained by various schools of thought and theatre practitioners from all over the world. They must have attended at least forty international workshops, including those at which they have attained the skills of traditional Therukoothu. They have created productions with directors from all over the sub-continent and beyond,20 and collaborated with Therukoothu groups outside the Purisai region whose style of performance is very different. Over the years there have been more formalised attempts to preserve and disseminate folk performance techniques. Near Purisai a centre was planned where the Therukoothu form could be methodically taught, but initial excitement gradually fizzled out with lack of funds. An annual theatre festival, show-casing contemporary theatre and perhaps leading to an international theatre festival, was planned in 1989 and for a few years a small version staged. It soon became too much effort and the experiment ended. However, in 2004, to commemorate Kannappa Thambiran’s death a year before, a two-day festival was conducted and there is hope that the idea of annual show-cases may yet see the light. Without consistent funding it is difficult for Muthuswamy to sustain the actors’ training or to stage his own plays. He is still writing for KPP, now concentrating his focus on the rituals of Therukoothu like Padu Kalam and creating contemporary social satires out of them. As the global village implodes there is increasing likelihood of funding from outside India, brought by artists who will fly in and work with the skilled Therukoothu performers. Whether this will feed into the unique relationship between Chennai-based KPP and the rural Tamil actors remains to be seen. Between Chennai and Purisai, in the temple city of Kancheepuram, a different approach is being undertaken, using funding from Europe. As a conclusion to this chapter, we will look briefly at the work of Dutch theatre academic and practitioner Hanne De Bruin.

The Sangam: bridging an even wider gulf Settled in India since the 1980s, Hanne De Bruin has contributed immensely to the koothu form, giving it status in international forums through her detailed analysis and writings on what she calls Kattaikoothu.21 Along with Therukoothu/Kattaikoothu actor and writer Rajagopal, she is closely involved in the formation and administration of an independent association called Kattaikoothu Kalai Valarchi Munnetra Sangam (‘The

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178 Modern Therukoothu: survival Sangam’ for short22). It is a non-profit, non-Governmental organisation working in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu. Its vision is perhaps more social than artistic in that it serves the interests of professional Kattaikoothu performers and promotes Kattaikoothu as a theatre in its own right.

Activities Since its inception in 1990, the Sangam has provided a framework within which professional actors, actresses and musicians can come together, participate in artistic activities and training, teach, develop new artistic ideas, and discuss professional needs and expectations. Advocating the cultural and economic rights of all rural performers, they also highlight the specific problems involved in the lives of professional rural women performers. The Sangam provides specialised training for Therukoothu actors in the form of workshops, demonstrations and discussions to improve specific aspects of performance – for example, vocal techniques, the design and maintenance of costumes, ornaments and stage setting (including the use of lights), and the storyline of all-night plays. They implement changes where required, and will rework and rehearse traditional scripts into condensed performances that can be presented at non-traditional performance venues. Rural children and young people are introduced to the folk theatre through part-time theatre and music training at the evening theatre schools. In a separate and ongoing venture, a selected group of underprivileged rural children aged between five and fifteen are given full-time, professional training (acting and music). The aim is to create a well-trained, professional group of future performers and teachers who will earn a good living with their craft. The students stay in the hostel of the school located five minutes from the Sangam’s premises. Two families, a cook and a cleaning lady look after the children. Basic education (Tamil, English, mathematics, science, social science and computer skills) takes place in the hostel; artistic training takes place in the training space adjacent to the Sangam’s premises and in the Sangam’s auditorium. The school offers the group (currently numbering twenty-nine) in-depth training in acting and music supplemented by introductions to other art forms (modern dance, puppetry, story writing), in addition to the basic education. The students are encouraged to explore their own artistic and intellectual abilities and to turn them into professional skills. Three children have worked as childactors in professional theatre companies. Eleven of the twenty-nine


belong to families where the father and/or grandfather are or were involved in Therukoothu. The others did not have any previous relationship to the theatre. The children, as well as the staff, have different caste and family backgrounds, and the school tries to deal with this in an egalitarian and realistic manner. Boys and girls get exactly the same training – artistically, where they take on different gender roles, as well as in the field of basic education. All students are involved in school productions and acting classes, and during their first three months at the school they receive individual acting tuition. Their shows tour to Chennai and are sometimes broadcast on local television. The adult Sangam company aims to produce new plays that introduce non-traditional themes and forms to rural audiences, or that highlight traditional themes in a novel way. In 2002, they participated in one of the interactive theatre forums of the Prithvi Festival, held in Mumbai. Their presentation was followed by a 45-minute performance of The Eighteenth Day – a re-working by Rajagopal and Hanne De Bruin of the traditional all-night play about Duryodhana’s final day on the battlefield. In 2003, they staged an ad hoc performance of The Embassy of Krishna on the occasion of a tractor exhibition held in Kancheepuram, at the invitation of the Manager of the State Bank of India, Kancheepuram Branch. The play catered to the interests of the rural clientele of the bank and highlighted the possibility of obtaining loans for a variety of purposes, among them the purchase of tractors, cows and poultry, and the drilling of bore-wells. In 2004, the opening performance of their annual theatre festival at Kancheepuram was an abbreviated version of The Disrobing of Draupadi, rehearsed by the students of the Kattaikoothu Youth Theatre School. The performance drew a huge crowd, which was seated and standing in the three streets leading up to the performance area. They were local people, in addition to the students’ family members, totalling somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people. A performance in the nearby village of Vanankulam was attended by about 2,500 people, including many children, who watched throughout the night. In addition to these two festival nights, the Sangam’s repertory company performed an all-night play at Vallimalai village on the occasion of the Masi cittirai (full moon) festival. The main objective of this performance was to publicise the formation of the Sangam’s company with an eye to future engagements in the area. Plans for the construction of a Therukoothu/Kattaikoothu centre at a village roughly ten kilometres outside Kancheepuram have recently begun to take shape. The centre will house the Sangam’s office and the Kattaikoothu Youth Theatre School, in addition to offering space for outdoor and indoor performances and training sessions. The architectural

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180 Modern Therukoothu: survival challenge is for the indoor spaces to embrace the liveliness, directness and rawness of the folk theatre performances. The Sangam are acutely aware that the creation of a space of their own is not, and should not be, an attempt to preserve the theatre in a fossilised state. The building should confer dignity on the performers and spectators, and, consequently, help to raise the status of the form. This requires a delicate balance between formality and informality, public and intimate presentation, between everyday-life activities and the unique time and space that dramatic performance can create. Some might say such a building is contrary to the spirit of Therukoothu, so bound up with the outdoor life of its community. But Tamil Nadu is a fast-changing state. It is rapidly becoming a forerunner in the worldwide IT industry, and contemporary technological innovations are part and parcel of people’s lives. The computer, the mobile phone and camera, all sorts of up-to-theminute digital media, are now part of everyday life. While the Sangam’s folk-theatre practitioners are increasingly technically savvy, so are all the foreign practitioners and scholars who visit them. They need the focus and concentration an indoor space can give them. Hanne De Bruin’s project is a very twenty-first-century challenge, an important attempt to modernise without destroying the Tamil folk heritage.

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9

The global village

We were brought up on the ‘modern theatre’; that theatre has been ours for nearly 200 years! We do not think of it as foreign. The folk theatre, that we think of as foreign . . . Badal Sircar (Schechner 1983, p. 25) The great Bengali playwright Badal Sircar voices a truth common to urban theatre practitioners all over India. They share their aesthetic not with the folk theatres but with Europeans and Americans. As a result, they are just as foreign to artists in the local rural communities as are visitors from outside their country. In this final chapter, I would like to look at this relationship between folk theatres and foreigners.

Foreign-ness As I said in my introduction, I have always been aware of my own foreignness in approaching the folk theatres of India. As the holder of a British passport, I am acutely aware of the colonial legacy it carries and am on a constant lookout for its effects. But it is too simplistic to claim that the British Raj of 100 or 200 years ago is the only colonial power at work in India. These days, the impersonal force of worldwide consumerism is a much greater imposition. Some call this normalisation the ‘global village’. There are plenty of Indians who have totally embraced this new culture – they eat at McDonald’s, drive large jeeps, shop for jeans in airconditioned malls and watch Sky TV. These people never set foot in the rural India where they and the folk theatres originate. Sircar’s point is therefore more salient than ever: it is increasingly possible to be a foreigner in one’s own country. Back in the 1970s, while visiting a Purulia Chhau show, UK playwright John Arden was shocked by the way it had been altered to suit foreign visitors like himself.

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182 The global village Instead of dancing ‘in the round’ for the benefit of all the audience, they imperceptibly metamorphosed their act into a proscenium arch display, pointing everything at the academics – maybe they didn’t even realise they were doing it. The academics recorded and recorded. The archives will now be stuffed, the doctoral theses already lying on the publishers’ shelves. Arden 1977, p. 149 Arden’s description of an artificial staging for academics seems quite tame in comparison with the huge operation going on in Seraikella these days. Like the 1970s version, our Chhau is being presented front on, but with an even greater array of modern commercial accoutrements – the mics, the lights, the cameras. The Chief Minister nevertheless assures us of the show’s cultural authenticity – in his elegant Hindi (not the local people’s language, but quite possibly the visiting foreigners’) he explains that we are watching tribal dance. Yet when we take a walk through the crowd, we discover the tribal people busy admiring Yamaha motorbikes and watching television soaps. Clearly the fancy stage show has been put on not for them, but for us – part of the new Jharkandi politicians’ tourism initiative. Like Arden, we cosmopolitan theatre-makers have come in search of real, live street theatre. We don’t want it altered just because we are there. Dissatisf ied with the seeming falseness of the Chhau Mahotsav, we look for the folk theatre that has not been appropriated by cynical politicos. In the crumbling palace courtyard, well-educated members of the Maharaja’s family can describe the origins of their art. But in doing so they, like the Chhau Mahotsav guru, are using the Queen’s English. The huge body of literature that describes the esoteric meaning of the dances is in English, and J.B. Singh Deo’s lyrical English language descriptions are being quoted, despite the fact that most of the audience cannot possibly understand them. We can’t help suspecting that the whole intellectual package has been put together for naïve foreigners like us. We watch the palace courtyard shows as the last vestiges of community theatre, our liberal sensibilities gratified that they contain both tribal and royal influences. But there is a troubling colonial legacy – our literature informs us that the royal heritage is intertwined with the period of British colonial power. Were it not for the Brits, the Maharajas would never have been able to develop the Chhau form. And their cultural interest was broader, more cosmopolitan than they might nowadays like to admit. We know Bijoy Pratap Singh Deo brought European ballet

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and even possibly Manipuri dance, via the Bengali Tagore, to his dance aesthetic. Out in the streets, we enjoy the artistry of guru Kedarnath’s students, remembering that this school would not be able to survive were it not for the income generated from foreign students. We try to switch off from bald economics and look deeper into the beauty of what we see. The masked dance is tantalising, elusive. Surely it is part of a profound ritualistic celebration. Inspired, we search for its integration with the religious rituals we have discovered at the mysterious, melancholy riverside. But we have to admit that the bhaktas’ ceremonies are being filmed for a Mumbai archive. On the night when the cameras fail to turn up, the central symbol of the water pot is missing. All of a sudden, the ritual becomes lax, perfunctory – the drummers arriving late and the socalled devotees fighting over goat meat. Perhaps all the dignity, all the religious weight, had merely been an act for the camera. It may well be precisely because interested scholars, practitioners and tourists keep coming to Seraikella that the Chhau exists at all – were we to stay away, the whole thing would disappear. This is a tricky responsibility to have. On one side, like John Arden, we are disappointed not to be seeing something totally unspoilt; on the other, we sense that we are a vital part of these people’s economic welfare. We know how

Figure 9.1 The author and Prince Braj Bhanu Singh Deo, Seraikella Palace.

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184 The global village hard it is for theatre practitioners all over the world to make a living. All the more so in the deprived rural regions of India. Yes, we admit, we are merely tourists, but tourism is arguably a greener, more ethically acceptable form of commerce than industry or mining or the numerous other ways in which these people might make a living. Interest from foreigners can prove artistically as well as financially beneficial to the folk-theatre. It can invigorate both the artists and their audiences, making them value what they have when they see how it is valued by others. When villagers see people from outside the community watching a show they are intrigued, drawn to take another look. As seasoned interculturalist Richard Schechner says: ‘I think that the presence of the field worker is an invitation to play-acting. People want their pictures taken, want books written about them, want to show how they are and what they do’ (1983, p. 231). Perhaps a performer puts on a better show for having the cameras on him; ‘play-acting’ is, after all, what actors do. Here is M. Natesh, taking a scholar to see a rural Therukoothu show: The stringing together of stories for a whole night’s koothu was never evenly dramatic. Certain bits were boring, which put most of the audience to sleep. The dramatic segments would wake them, or the character would run into the audience and tap a few sleepers, causing a minor commotion and waking them up. Most of the time, if there wasn’t a specific audience request or a complaint about the quality of the performance, the group just ran the show automatically. But we were documenting that particular koothu and so it went on very well. They took us for granted as an informed lot and wanted to impress. One show, at about 2am, Vedachalam was doing a minor role in an insignificant manner. I had walked nearly ten kilometres in the dark without a torch or whatever with Rustom Bharucha, the renowned Bengali intellectual. That was my first meeting with him and it was my job to take him to the village that night. Accidentally, Vedachalam noticed us from the corner of his eyes and at the snap of a finger his attitude towards his performance changed. He connected with me immediately and great art started flowing from his body.1

Nostalgia Rustom Bharucha himself does not seem able to see the benefits his presence can bring.2 Much of his writing has concerned the way in which Indian theatres have been misunderstood and misappropriated by


foreigners. His book, Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalisation, opens with a description of the camera-clicking interculturalists at a Chhau performance and his feeling of being mere voyeur in a supposedly indigenous event. ‘Foreign endorsement’, he says, is craved by officials, yet has become so much part of the Chhau performance that the show itself is fractured, romanticised. Reduced to kitsch . . . one notes discomfortingly the kind of saccharine sweetness that characterises the commodification of folk: a gentrified voice – culture mediated by All India Radio and the appropriation of folk melodies for film music and in light classics. Bharucha 2000, p. 74 Bharucha uses emotive language such as ‘fractured’, ‘commodification’, ‘appropriation’ – these words assuming that what he terms ‘folk’ is victim to some outer power, the bullying foreigner, no less. I am struck by the assumption that ‘foreign endorsement’ is to blame for the changes that have occurred in commercial Chhau (‘kitsch’ is, of course, a German word used by the English-speaking Indian to describe an unappealing aesthetic). But is this definitely the case? Thirty years ago, John Arden was a passive guest, just like Bharucha and me, frustrated at the way a show was altered according to mistaken assumptions about his taste. The other foreign enemies that Bharucha reckons have spoilt things for Chhau are radio and film: if only the folk songs had not been broadcast by those nasty modern media, he is saying, then they would have kept their integrity (in place of ‘saccharine sweetness’, something akin to ‘earthy goodness’, no doubt). The ‘gentrified voice’ and ‘light classics’ are, Bharucha implies, at the other end of the spectrum from what Chhau really is – theatre for non-gentry (‘the people’, perhaps) and non-Classical. Yet according to historical accounts the whole repertoire of Seraikella Chhau was created by and for the Indian gentry – the Maharajas; it has therefore always been ‘gentrified’. Its music and steps famously hark on the Classical heritage of India and Europe. No foreign artist or producer has imposed these things on Chhau dance, its very integrity contains them. The central idea in this sort of scholarship is that to watch modern folk theatre is to witness something that has seen better days. Hand in hand with folk theatre goes dissatisfaction for the (foreign) scholar/practitioner who visits it – we long for that better, purer past, an era of unsullied

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186 The global village authenticity where that real folk theatre took place. It is not just the Chhau that inspires this nostalgia. In the same vein, the Vithabai Memorial Ashramites in Narayangaon talked of a Golden Age of Tamasha when it was serious and the dramas contained ‘social awareness’ and serious messages. They have placed the now-dead Vithabai on a pedestal as the true Tamasha dancer and say that today’s performers are mere commercial puppets in comparison. Yet, as we have seen, during Vithabai’s lifetime Gargi criticised her for being too modern, too vulgarly commercial. Like Veenapani when she originally sent me off in search of the fastdisappearing folk theatres, the Tamasha experts are keen to press upon me the fact that Tamasha is a ‘dying art’. Perpetually dissatisfied with what is happening in the present, they lament that the authentic folk theatre is over, dead.

The history of the authenticity search Bengali academic Roma Chatterji sees this nostalgic attitude to the folk theatres as intrinsic to its identity. It intertwines with India’s twentiethcentury cultural evolution, closely related to its colonial history. Her historical explanation clarifies many of the assumptions that feed the scholarship of Bharucha and his ilk. In the period leading up to Independence, city-based politicians and intellectuals were searching for some way to identify themselves afresh. British overseers had created a version of Indian culture that indulged their penchant for ancient heritage; they had encouraged Sanskrit studies and celebrations of the Indian Classical arts (as we have seen in the Chhau scholarship). As a reaction to the Orientalist view of India as highbrow tradition, the idea of folk culture was born – something rooted not in dusty old texts and temples, but in the living rural people.3 City politicians, academics and writers went out into the countryside and ‘discovered’ all sorts of artistic and cultural phenomena they might label ‘folk’.4 These were marginal cultures, little understood by those who found them – what Sircar rightly calls ‘foreign’. They were randomly chosen to fit the need for a new ‘authenticity’ in the new Indian Federal Republic. As long as the art was seen as pre-colonial and non-Aryan it was acceptable; the most important thing was that it represented a tradition from an alternative political angle to the Orientalist one. Quite how the Seraikella Chhau got labelled ‘folk’ in these circumstances is intriguing to conjecture. Perhaps the practitioners stressed the Parkhanda and indigenous elements over the Classical ones. No doubt the Maharajas allowed the villagers to demonstrate their art. The inclusion of Seraikella Chhau in the folk theatre canon is, as we have seen,


in many ways an aberration. Chatterjee would argue that the scores of theatre forms labelled ‘folk’ during the Independence era were randomly and superficially selected. A decade or so after Independence in 1947, money and interest from Delhi got the whole folk-theatre industry off the ground. Under the stewardship of Dr Suresh Awasthi, the Sangeet Natak Academy in Delhi (the official Government agency established to encourage and preserve traditional performing arts) began to finance projects that rooted out the folk traditions and brought them to the city centres, inspiring urban practitioners to ‘search for their roots’.5 Folk theatres were regarded not just as authentic art forms, but as inspiration for new artistic visions in secular urban theatre. This process has been repeated again and again into the current century – when urban practitioners are at a loss for inspiration there is a great body of work waiting in the unspoilt countryside, ready for them to ransack. This is perhaps the main reason for all the nostalgia and the lamenting – if the material is conceived as dying, then those who take from it need not feel guilty; they are saving, rather than exploiting it. Seen in this way, folk theatre is the corpse from which the vultures of modernity gain their sustenance.

Romanticism Since well before the twentieth century, artists all over the world have looked to folk arts for inspiration. Even without the emotive cultural boundaries created by post-colonial India, the arts of rural people have often provided individuals with fresh ways to revitalise and re-identify themselves. For example, the British music world has regularly called on its indigenous folk music through the centuries. Composers from Henry Purcell to James MacMillan have used traditional folk tunes and idioms in their writing. At the turn of the twentieth century in England, Gustav Holst travelled the length and breadth of England searching out village musicians whose work might revivify his music. Meanwhile, Rabindranath Tagore did the same among the Bauls of Bengal. These two artists were following in the European Romantic vein, searching for their own voice through their folk traditions. For Tagore this was a Bengali voice layered onto those already present in his cultural make-up, including Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. In colonial Britain, Holst’s process of finding his music included a good look at Indian heritage: he taught himself Sanskrit and his settings of songs from the Rig Veda are some of his most popular choral works still performed today. Tagore’s, like Holst’s, was a quest for individual authenticity, but it was appropriated by intellectuals with a political agenda. Intent on

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188 The global village establishing the Indian national identity, they took his folk-influenced work and held it up as a pure voice of the Nationalist cause. It is external political agendae like this that warp personal artistic responses. The whole notion of folk theatres is, as we have seen, rich in its political legacy. But I believe that true artists carry no fixed national identity, no impulse to dominate or to exploit. When we come together we come to share, perhaps to barter, certainly to learn. The modern theatre practitioner, beavering away alone with his or her script, and the gregarious folk practitioner can learn much from one another. Muthuswamy is a modern-day Romantic in search of his roots. When Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime was imposed on his region, he had a political agenda – he was searching for something rough and grounded and purely Tamilian with which to counter the oppression, and he found it in Therukoothu. However, like Tagore, he was working in a complex intellectual environment with all sorts of reference points. He talks passionately about his quest for authentic Tamil theatre, but his scripts were celebrated from the outset not for their local efficacy but as compared to Ionesco. His company trains with the folk-theatre artists and puts on all sorts of shows – devised, scripted by local writers, mythological, contemporary, satirical. But their really successful show, the one that put them on the professional map, is an adaptation of Brecht. Like the Marathi playwright Girish Karnad, Muthuswamy needed to appropriate the work of a dead German dramatist in order to validate interest in the local, contemporary folk theatre. His is a complex process – it is the gradual assimilation of influences that make up his singular voice. In the end there is no simple political identity; his work is too good for that. As with artistic assimilation, so the financial pressures of putting on theatre bring together myriad forces. With sponsorship from Delhi and the US Ford Foundation, and now tapping into all sorts of foreign funding bodies and academic institutes, Koothu-p-Pattarai is increasingly cosmopolitan in its identity. Meanwhile, away in the more rural region around Kancheepuram, Dutch national Hanne de Bruin is using charitable funding from abroad to train more villagers in the skills of Therukoothu. By allowing a certain iconoclastic approach, Hanne’s Sangam is gradually moving away from the strict repertoire of shows for a religious context and creating new work that is commercially viable – at tractor exhibitions and far-away Mumbai forums. She is introducing a philosophy of creativity and entrepreneurialism to the Sangam students. A livelihood is available to those trained in the form, but they need to keep expanding their skills in order to appeal to evolving audiences.


If we dare to remove the false legacies that surround folk theatres, ideas of their foreign-ness and their ancient (dying) heritage, what do we see? I hope this book has provided the reader with an introduction to three vibrant shows and their practitioners – all of them tough, lively and versatile. Despite climate change (in fact, even because of it) the rural Therukoothu performers are still staging festivals for the stricken agricultural community; they have been finding ways to diversify ever since the silent movies came in. In increasingly secular and urbanised Maharashtra, Borgaonkar’s Loknatya Tamasha is entertaining the hoards seated there in the dust. In the new state of Jharkhand, the Seraikella Chhau dancers are doing their thing in front of more and more cameras and VIPs. Folk theatres belong to poor communities; like their audiences, they must use ingenuity to survive. Whether it is Chhau dancers slogging away at the CM’s trade show, or Therukoothu actors improvising dialogue about current political events, these performers are always on their toes, satisfying their public. We have seen shows that contain all sorts of ‘kitsch’ influences – the trendy, sexy Tamashas, the Therukoothu plastic costumes and fluorescent lights. These novelties are part and parcel of the actors’ creativity. Their very open, fluid approach to theatre-making means the work is altering all the time, able even at short notice to bring in new ideas to please the crowd. Roma Chatterji has studied the progress of contemporary Purulia Chhau as it has evolved to please both locals and the tourist industry. She accepts that a live art form like folk theatre is continually changing and is not embarrassed by aspects of its modern identity which scholars like Bharucha find so objectionable: ‘In fact folk art that survives today as a living cultural form does so only by successfully adapting to commodification and electronic transmission. To describe this as inauthentic is to condemn folk art to oblivion’ (Chatterji 2003, p. 591).

More folk theatres Back in post-colonial, multi-cultural UK, the Punjabi folk dance, Bhangra, is the entertainment of choice at any family get-together, even for people who have no other link to the Punjabi way of life. You don’t need to be an artist to want something of what the ‘folk’ have. Tamasha Theatre company (based in London) goes from strength to strength, with films and touring shows and educational initiatives. There are numerous other ‘Asian’ companies up and down the country, entertaining the theatre-going public, with television chat shows, Bollywoodstyle musicals and films providing even greater access to pan-Indian

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190 The global village culture. The Indian Classical dance classes at my local youth theatre are bursting at the seams; in the shopping centre Indian cloth, jewellery and shoes are more popular than ever. And if anyone feels like a quick shopping trip to Delhi or a burst of sunbathing on a Goan beach, the prices of flights get lower and lower. If I look hard enough in my consumer-obsessed, largely secular culture I can just about uncover deeper echoes of what I have experienced in the Indian folk theatres. There are even ritual festivities resembling the Draupadi Amman festival – Nativity plays; Guy Fawkes; May Day. These are community celebrations with a strong performance element linked to a variety of social legacies – religious, historical and agricultural. It is quite possible to take part in them without any of these associations, yet by doing so we are acknowledging our common cultural inheritance. The strength of folk theatre anywhere resides in its community’s ability to look at itself and describe itself in dramatic terms. In the individualistic modern world this sort of sharing around long-established rituals is a potent way to retain a sense of community. In my city of Oxford, May Day is a huge occasion celebrating the beginning of summer where highly skilled Morris dancers and their instrumental accompanists travel from miles around to perform in the street. We urbanites have little contact with the countryside, scant knowledge of the way the seasons evolve and the ancient fertility rites that should accompany them, but we still get out into the street and party. We dress up our May King and Queen and bone up on our Maypole dancing for an outdoor event not so far away from those folk festivals in India. Since my first encounters with these theatres, India has experienced increasing prosperity in the world economic forum. Urban India now holds its own in the global village. Foreign investment in the urban centres is huge, with ambitious building schemes altering the landscape all around. The economic growth shows up even if you are not present in the sub-continent – for example, in the UK we are in direct touch through phone and computer, often without even realising it. Someone in Bangalore is issuing my bank statements; another in Pune has information on local train times; a Chennai IT expert is sorting out my computer problems. Those people on the end of the phone work all day in air-conditioned, English-speaking offices; in the evening they get on the hot and crowded bus and return to their non-English-speaking family. Their home may be very simple, in a suburb or slum or even in some far-flung village. Life is changing fast: if Goldman Sachs’ famous prediction is correct, India will be the third largest economy in the world by 2050 (far more


successful than the UK). As the country advances apace in the world economic steeple-chase, the rural poor will gradually feel an effect, even if they gain little of the material benefits. The workforce needed to propel the boom is already starting to move from remote villages into suburban slums; they are bringing their folk theatre with them. Where once they may have had little access to the world beyond the village, these contemporary folk have an increasingly cosmopolitan and wide-ranging set of cultural influences. Like twenty-first-century folk all over the world, they are making theatre in a global village, under the impersonal influence of satellite TV and computer technology. They are increasingly familiar with Hollywood and Sky TV, Coca-Cola and Sony, and the range expands daily, more and more as the economy burgeons. They are also becoming familiar with the economic inequality that comes with consumer culture, the confusions and injustices that afflict us. Transported to the slums of Chennai and Pune, Therukoothu and Tamasha enter a complicated and brutal environment. The challenge is to represent that complexity on stage – real life as it is lived in the modern world. There is no reason to suppose that they cannot do this – energy and versatility are their trademarks. The old idea of folk theatre happening in some closed and innocent world simply cannot exist in the global village. Probably it never did. Rather than regarding these theatre forms as foreign – under threat and far away from our lives – we have more chance than ever to fully engage with them. By doing so we can find our own survival mechanisms, our own version of folk vitality. Perhaps we will use the folk theatres’ influence to grow, engaging with our own communities in the same spirit of danger and fun. This very modern impulse should carry us far.

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Therukoothu appendix

Julia Hollander in conversation with M. Natesh in 2004 JH Are there examples of commercial artists using koothu in their work? Natesh There is no such thing happening. We only have examples of Therukoothu portrayed as a degenerate form in old Tamil films. These days I have no memory of having seen anything, even in Tamil films. JH Are the Classical dancers who use aspects of Therukoothu making lots of money from it? Natesh No. After the great, legendary Chandralekha, who created her own version of modern Indian dance, lots of dancers want to create namesake ‘experimental’ work. Those are the ones who use some or other aspect of koothu. But they spend their money to produce it and not the other way round. Also even if it happens it would just be some extension of regular Classical stuff and nothing separate. JH On the TV? Natesh Nothing. There are non-prime-time segments when they telecast some ‘countryside’ art forms, which nobody watches. JH What exactly is the aspect of Therukoothu that appeals commercially in the modern Tamilnad? Natesh Nothing.

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Postscript

The folk theatres featured here are easily accessible to the reader should he or she want to get on a bus and brave the heat of the Indian summer to visit a remote rural community. As bus numbers and times change regularly, it has not seemed worth citing exact advice on how to get to the shows – suffice it to say, you need time and patience. Go to the urban centre at the right time of year (stated in the relevant chapter), and ask around. Perhaps you can trace the urban practitioners featured in this book – they will no doubt give you up-to-the-minute advice. If you don’t speak the local language, you are nevertheless likely to find some locals speaking English, at least in town. Get on the bus, keep talking to people and asking for advice when you need it. When you find the shows, there is no ticket system (of course), but I advise you to make some donation to the performers and possibly to the village panchayat. Meet the actors, and see how it has all changed since I was there.

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Glossary of terms

Abhinaya Adavu Akhara

Acting, actions expressing particular emotions. Dance step (Tamil). Wrestling pit or arena; in Chhau, a school of acting. Arati Waving lights before a deity, accompanied by devotional songs. Ardhanarishwara Combination of Shiva and Shakti – half-male, halffemale. Arrack Locally brewed alcoholic spirit (Tamil). Beedi Little brown cigarette. Betel Plant from which nuts and leaves are used for paan. Bhakta Devotee. Bharat Official name for India. Brahmin Highest ranking, priestly caste. Caste Social grouping defined by ritual ranking, endogamy, commensality and sometimes still by occupational specialisation. Chandan Sandalwood paste. Dalit Untouchable or scheduled caste. Darsan Sight of a divine being. Dholak Horizontal drum. Dhoti Cloth worn by men over lower part of the body. Draupadi Wife of the Pandava brothers in the epic story Mahabharata, also known as Panchali. Ganesh Hindu elephant god, remover of obstacles, fondly known as Ganapati. Gopi Milkmaid, one of the god Krishna’s cohorts. Guru Teacher. Gurukkal Learning through apprenticeship to the guru. Hanuman Hindu monkey god.

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Jarjara Jatra Khadi Kirki Kirtan Krishna Lasya Lila Lingum Lok Mahabharata

Mantra Mela Moksha Mudra Nachya/Nautch Natak Natyasastra Palu Panchayat Parsi Parsi theatre Patil Prashad Puja Pujari Purvaranga Raga Ramayana Rupee

The god Indra’s flagstaff, used in the first dramas of Natyasastra to drive off evil spirits. Festival; also the name of the street theatre originating in Bengal. Hand-woven cotton cloth. Fast spins, pirouettes. Sermons through song. Means ‘dark’ – the much-loved, blue-faced boy god (manifestation of Vishnu). Lyrical, graceful element of dance. Sport, play; the divine purpose of creating the world according to ancient Hindu philosophy, Phallus, symbol of Shiva. People; folk. The longest of Hinduism’s two great epic tales, concerning the wars between the Pandavas and Kauravas. Contains the most popular, well-known Hindu scripture, the 700-verse Bhagavad Gita (Song of the Lord) – the teachings of Lord Krishna. Repeated prayer chant. Gathering; performing troupe. Salvation, deliverance. Symbolic hand gesture used in Classical dance. Boy who acts the part of a girl. Drama. Ancient Sanskrit book of dramaturgy. Loose end of the sari hanging down at the back. Unit of local government. Person belonging to the Zoroastrian religion. English colonial-style theatre developed by the Parsi community in the nineteenth century. Head man. Propitiatory offering. Hindu ceremony, worship. One who leads the puja, priest. Preliminary ceremonies before a play. Melodic mode of music. One of Hinduism’s epic tales, concerning the life of great Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu. Indian monetary unit. One British pound is roughly equal to 80 rupees; one American dollar roughly 42 rupees.

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196 Glossary Samadhi Sangam Sangeet Shakti Shiva Sutradhar Swadeshi Swaraj Tala Tandava Trishul Utsava Vaishnavist Vattiyar

Salvation. Community or association. Music. Shiva’s consort, also known as Parvati and Kali. Supreme female goddess. Supreme male god of destruction whose worshippers are called Shaivites. Father of Ganesh. Stage manager figure in Sanskrit drama. Use and manufacture of indigenously made goods. Self-rule/reliance. Rhythm (in music and dance). Aggressive, muscular element in dance. Trident, chief weapon of Lord Shiva. Festival. Worshipper of Vishnu, the Protector. Guru, writer (Tamil).

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Notes

Full details of authors and publications referred to in these notes can be found in the Bibliography. Introduction: first encounters 1 2 3 4

7

Meaning ‘theatre workshop’. Typical south Indian bread made with fermented ground rice and dhal. See Chapter 7 for the Mahabharata stories and their characters. A manifestation of Vishnu in the form of Krishna and his consort, Radha, combined. Basil. I [the author] got round this issue by making a generous cash donation to Ima’s ‘foundation’. Spinning on the spot (see Chapters 7 and 8 on Therukoothu).

1

Chhau: competing spaces

1

In the poem ‘Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva’, by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by William Radice (1985). There are contentions regarding the name of this region. Locals (including the royal family) who see its cultural roots as linked to nearby Orissa claim that the actual name should be ‘Sadhei Kala’, meaning ‘sixteen arts’ in the Oriyan language. In Sanskrit this would be ‘Sodoso Kala’. The sixteen arts form the sixteen petals of the lotus flower, and Ganesh is lord of them all. These ‘arts’ are more human qualities than the formalised creative arts, being such things as cheerfulness, concentration and dispassion. Those who propound the ‘Sadhei Kala’ nomenclature say the colonial British and then the Bihari administration who ruled the region chose a distorted and simplified version of the original in naming it ‘Seraikella’. However, the alternative name is rarely used even by those who regard it as authentic. Richmond (1990) regards this association of the Chhau and its festival as something intrinsically ‘amateur’ and makes the point that Chhau cannot be professional because it is so much part of the community event. The fact that the dance is fully integrated into the communal celebrations is what defines it as ‘folk’.

5 6

2

3

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198 Notes 4 The etymology of Singhbhum is contested, as in the tribal Munda dialect ‘sing’ means ‘sun’ and ‘bonga’ means ‘god’, and the local tribes regard the Sun God as the creator of the Universe. See Singhbhum, Seraikella and Kharswan, T.N.N. Singh Deo, 1954. 5 See Kolkata choreographer Manjusri Chaki Sircar’s article ‘Tagore and the Modernisation of Dance’ in Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-five Years, Vol. 1, pp. 244–252. 6 Meaning competitive arena or school, a term mentioned in the poetry of the Middle Ages (S. Awasthi, Chambers Hindi–English Dictionary 1993). 7 See Chapter 2 on modern-day Chhau. 8 If they give Rs.50,000 away each night, even the fourth and fifth prizes might be worth one person’s salary for one month. 9 Seraikella was, from Independence until 2000, part of the state of Bihar. 10 This should be a matter of days, but nowadays we don’t have time to wait. 11 Kapila Vatsyayan equates the style specifically with the masks of Wayang Topeng in Indonesia (Vatsyayan 1980, p. 80). 12 Cited in Schechner (1983, p. 190). 13 See R.D. Banerji, The History of Orissa, Chapter 7, ‘The Overseas Empire Kalinga’. 14 The symbol of Shiva – a stone phallus. See J.B. Singh Deo (1973) for the story of Indra, the asuras and the jarjara – p. 34. 15 Kapila Vatsyayan confusingly states that he represents Shiva (Kapila Vatsyayan 1980, p. 76). 16 The crowd who follow Mangala up the street are keen to tell us a local superstition associated with the jatraghat: if it drops off Mangala’s head, the community must chop off his head. 17 In the dances of Shiva, Tandava is the furiously aggressive male dance, Lasya the tender female dance. 18 Gargi (1991) states that the bhaktas should now roll on beds of thorns, but there was no evidence of this on the occasion I witnessed. 19 On the second night is Brindabani (a Hanuman ritual with a Krishnaassociated name). During this ritual, the jarjara is carried by a performer representing Hanuman (Gargi 1991, p. 168) from the river to the Siva temple and eventually to the Raghunath temple in the palace grounds. This lively procession is said to be particularly popular with children and families. 20 In November 2000, eighteen districts of south Bihar were united under the independent name Jharkhand. In the 1991 official census of the area, the population was estimated at just under 22 million. In the same census it was found that only 34 per cent of the population in the area were literate (only 21 per cent of women) (Prakash 2001, 217). 21 The tribal groups ‘generally belong to the Proto-Australoid stock, though traces of Mongoloid strain have also [been] found’ (Sanchchinanda 1972, p. 168); ‘95 per cent of the tribal population are settled agriculturists’ (Sanchchinanda 1972: p. 170). 22 In fact, only a quarter of the total population of Jharkhand is tribal, with the vast majority of people belonging to all sorts of groups speaking Oriya, Bengali and Hindi languages. 23 ‘Classical’ (implying a strictly codified form; highbrow) and ‘Folk’ (implying spontaneity and community participation; lowbrow) are old terms commonly used to classify Indian art forms. Such dichotomies possibly enable

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24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

scholars to better understand and analyse, but also create rigid lines of difference out of keeping with the complex and holistic nature of performance art in India. She also says it is the absence of song that has led scholars to name Seraikella Chhau ‘folk’ (Kapila Vatsyayan 1980, p. 78). Possibly these are Bijoy Pratap Singh Deo’s words. Kapila Vatsyayan sees a relationship between Odissi dance and Seraikella Chhau in one particular common stance – weight held on one foot while the other explores the space in all directions (see Vatsyayan 1980, p. 72). The Pattanayaks have a long association with Seraikella Chhau, at least as far back as the 1930s when Tapan’s grandfather toured with the royal family. J.B. Singh Deo (1973) says ufli simply means ‘leaps and motion’. Topka means ‘steps’. ‘The word chali occurs in dance texts of Sanskrit from the earliest times and is used uniformally throughout India’ (Vatsyayan 1980, p. 71). According to Vatsyayan, the chalis correspond to the adavus or primary units, elementary movements of Bharatanatyam and other Classical dance styles (including Manipuri dance). According to Kapila Vatsyayan, these gestures equate to the Sanskrit (Natyasastra) upalaya. A dance unit has the same name in Classical dance. In the literature, e.g. Jivan Pani and followers, it is said that one is dressed in white, the other in black. In written accounts such as above, the pots are said to be metal pots filled with holy water suspended across his shoulders from a bamboo pole. Perhaps this version has become stylised over the years into the less literal version of today. Jivan Pani et al. say that a boy dressed as Bala Krishna accompanies the watercarrier, but this was not so in the version witnessed – rather, Krishna and water-carrier seem to have been conflated. In 1980, Vatsyayan wrote of Seraikella as ‘a small princely state . . . which continues to have a cohesive society where the commoner and the prince are all members of the same family’ (Vatsyayan 1980, p. 68). The group of akharas of which Kedarnath was once a member. See Introduction, p. 7. Also called Kalikaghat or Kamnaghata, ‘representing the third aspect of creation, namely of desire and its subsequent destruction’ (Vatsyayan 1980, p. 80). The black goddess of destruction. In 2003, as in previous years, a nominal amount was paid well in advance. At least one more significant ritual is meant to be performed. Next morning is the first day of the new month of Baisah, New Year in the Oriya calendar (J.B. Singh Deo 1973). The sacred water from the Jatra Ghat left in the temple should be poured over the Shiva lingum as a libation. The Kali Ghata should be buried, its predecessor from the previous year having been dug up and taken to the palace. This old pot is unsealed and the water inside examined. The quantity and quality of the water in the pot indicates what is in store for the king and his people in the year to come. Finally, the villages all around now begin a season of performances over the next few weeks; the Chhau music echoes across the plains as they celebrate New Year.

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200 Notes 2

Expanding Chhau: beyond masks and Maharajas

1

6 7

A fourth – Kharsawan Chhau – is presented at Chhau Mahotsav, blending the Parikhanda martial art movements with what the festival programme terms ‘folk elements’. It is claimed this form has been practised by local tribes people, particularly within the ‘Ho’ community. During the nineteenth century the kings of Kharsawan are said to have intervened in creating and refining the repertoire. Masks have been done away with in order for the dancers to perform more freely, exhibiting their martial athleticism. The dancers perform aggressive fighting gestures with weapons, wild physical acrobatics and vibrant facial expressions. The boys in the presentations we saw seemed to lack any serious technique, and we were unable to ascertain exactly how they studied the form or where its major proponents hung out. Boy performing as a girl. In Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-five Years. Vol. I: Music and Dance. Visit her website at www.kalinga.net/ileana. A version of Citaristi’s article published in Nartanam, Mumbai, Vol. II, No. 3 (July–Sept. 2002). Symbolic hand gestures. Citaristi, see note 5.

3


1

Among other things, Bharata means ‘actor’; he may or may not have existed as either author or compiler. I like this: ‘Vidushaka should be assigned to a person who is short-statured, with protruding teeth, hunch-backed, with ugly face, bald-headed and redeyed’ (trans. N.P. Unni 1998). This is a contested fact – folk theatre being dominated as it is by castes below Brahmin (see Srampickal 1994, pp. 68–71). For those who can read, there are at least eight major script systems besides Perso-Arabic and Roman in use across the sub-continent. Bhattacharyya 1975 (quoted in Schechner 1983, p. 187). Tamasha programme, 2004. In correspondence, 2004. Nick Hill, in conversation.

2 3 4 5

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 4

Tamasha: escape

1 2 3

In Gokhale 2000, p. 413. For origins of lavani see Varadpande 1992, p.165. In the introduction to Deshpande’s play Teechya Aeechi Goshta (‘Her Mother’s Story’). See Gargi 1991, pp. 85–86. Most towns and cities in Western and Southern Maharashtra have an equivalent popular Sangeet Bari venue. See Chapter 5 on contemporary Tamasha. This equates to roughly 25p, or one-seventh of a Pune car driver’s daily wage. The hijra, or eunuch, is a common and popular member of Sangeet Bari troupes. See the film Lok Shahir Ram Joshi (1947).

4 5 6 7 8

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9 Nick Hill, in conversation. 10 See Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers (Georgia 1980). 11 Ambedkar was a minister in Nehru’s Government and a framer of the Indian Constitution. He encouraged mass conversions to Buddhism in protest against the Hindu caste system. 12 The number changes from year to year. 13 This is a good wage, even in urban Maharashtra. 14 See Chapter 4 on Tamasha. 15 This is the common claim. However, Shanta Ghokale, in her ‘Tamasha’ entry for OUP’s Encyclopaedia, says the structure was not settled until the beginning of the twentieth century. 16 For an introductory description of the traditional Ras Lila, see Gargi 1991, pp. 115–131. 17 Meaning ‘Hail Mother’ – the national song of India, associated with patriotic ardour but also seen by many as Hindu rhetoric that excludes other religions from a sense of national unity (see Bhattacharya’s book on the song, Penguin Books India 2003). 18 Varadpande (1992) disagrees with this, citing a script of 1865 as the very first vag (p. 170). 19 Gargi, writing in the 1950s, states this is the norm. 20 See Seeta Aur Geeta (1972, starring Hema Malini) and ChaalBaaz (1989, starring Sri Devi). 21 See R. O’Hanlon (1987): ‘In writing pawadas about Shivaji in the late nineteenth century, Phule and others tried to place themselves within an already existing tradition, to express themselves in the sort of language that would be understood amongst the agricultural and landowning groups of rural Maharashtra and to attract collective loyalties.’ 22 See Patil’s 1993 book on the subject. 5

Re-working Tamasha: from socialism to social mobility

1 See Gokhale 2000. 2 Author’s Introduction to Three Plays, Delhi, OUP 1994, pp. 14–15. 3 Arundhati Bannerjee in her introduction to Five Plays by Vijay Tendulkar, Delhi, OUP 1993, p. vii. 4 Tendulkar in his Sri Ram Memorial Lecture ‘The Play is the Thing’, Lecture 1, 1997, printed as the preface to his Collected Plays in Translation, Delhi, OUP 2003. 5 Satish Alekar in his introduction to Ghashiram Kotwal, p. xi. 6 Alekar, p. xiv. 7 See Ghashiram Ek Vadal (‘Ghashiram, a Storm’) by Deepak Gharay (Mumbai, Granthali 1996). 8 Introduction to the Seagull Books edn, pp. iv–v. 9 Tendulkar quoted in the introduction to Ghashiram Kotwal, p. viii. 10 The traditional commentator and stage manager figure (cited in Natyasastra). 11 Ghashiram Kotwal (trans.), Seagull Books, etc. 12 Ghashiram Kotwal. 13 Quoted by Pushpa Bhave (1989) in Contemporary Indian Theatre: Interviews with Playwrights and Directors, p. 46. 14 See Chapter 4 on Tamasha.

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202 Notes 15 ‘ “He’s gone to the cemetery” is a retort used in anger when the place a person has gone to is too wicked to be named’ (Gokhale 2000, p. 209). 16 Ghashiram Kotwal. 17 Ghashiram Kotwal. 18 Quoted by Gokhale 2000, p. 213. 19 Ratnakar Matkari, Mazha Natyalekhan/Digdarshanacha Prawas (trans. Gokhale), p. 77. 20 From an English translation of the unpublished Marathi text by Sushama Deshpande. 21 From the same. 22 See Ranganath 1980. 23 See Chapter 4 on Tamasha. 24 See Chapter 4. 25 Meena Nerurkar in correspondence, 2004. 6

More discoveries

1 See Kathryn Hansen, Parsi Theatre (2005). 2 There are many more regional dialects than the eighteen constitutionally recognised languages. No national infrastructure exists for the translation or systematised learning of Indian languages across regional borders. 3 At the same time, the vast world of Hindi film has had close contact with folk theatre, taking its stories and styles and its ebullient community context, and putting them into its own melting-pot. 4 Companies who tour southern Maharashtra are known to take cash donations from the public as down-payment for sexual favours to be exchanged after a show; companies in the north (like the Borgaonkar company featured in this book) might also accept cash, but never in anticipation of sex. The different habits can lead to embarrassing confusion. 7


1 Mahabharata, the great Hindu epic of the Bharata Dynasty, was composed around 300 BC and received numerous additions until about AD 300. It is 15 times longer than the Bible and divided into eighteen cantos containing altogether about 200,000 lines of verse interspersed with short prose passages. 2 Dharmaraja, or Dharmarajan, is the Tamil name commonly used for Yudishtra, the eldest of the Pandva brothers. 3 Hanne M. de Bruin is the lone scholar who calls Therukoothu Kattaikoothu because of the kattai veshams used in Therukoothu (see ‘The Sangam’ in Chapter 8 on modern Therukoothu). 4 The Vaishanavite mark on the forehead is known as ‘Namam’ in Tamil. It is a vertical U-shaped white stripe drawn on the forehead with a red line in the middle. Vaishnavites are religious followers of Vishnu. 5 Saivites are religious followers of Shiva. They wear a horizontal ash stripe on their forehead. 6 As evidence, Hiltebeitel cites the Kuram copper plates of Parameshvaravarman I Pallava. 7 Potharaja is a historical figure who ruled the Gingee kingdom. His accommodation as a mythical character along with the other characters in

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19 20

Mahabharata reveals the way history and mythology mix. A Muslim warrior named Muttalarauthan is also normally accorded iconic representation inside the Draupadi Amman temple premises, although we did not see his statue in Kulamanthai. For detailed analysis of such syncretic processes, see Hiltebeitel’s The Cult of Draupadi Mythologies (1991). Therukoothu groups follow a complex system of sharing the fees among themselves. For a detailed analysis of the sharing system, see Hanne M. de Bruin’s Kattaikoothu: The Flexibility of a South Indian Theatre Tradition (1994). Therukoothu artists, leaders and gurus come from several other castes also. They enjoy the status of ritual specialists irrespective of the castes they are born into. The ritual burial is followed only in the Pandaram caste. When Kannappa Thambiran passed away in October 2003, he was buried in the sitting position. His Therukoothu Company performed ‘Karna’s Salvation’ on the sixteenth day after his death to liberate him from the cycle of rebirths. When Kannappa Thambiran says his grandfather knew the songs and steps for Bharatanatyam and fed them into Therukoothu, he is citing one very recent way in which folk theatre can inherit Classical music and thus the Sanskrit tradition. Ganesh marks consist of the Tamil alphabet equivalent of ‘U’ with two underscores. They are drawn before the beginning of any activity. All translations from the Tamil are by Muthukumaraswamy, unless otherwise stated. Kalaimamani is the annual award given by the Government of Tamil Nadu for artists in all fields of performing arts, including folk performing arts and cinema. Therukoothu artists consider this award to be highly prestigious and if awarded it is advertised in the banners of, and announcements before, the play. Despite massive research carried out on the Therukoothu tradition, very little exists on the phenomenon of printed folklore such as chapbooks. The recent publication of Stuart Blackburn’s book Print, Folklore and Nationalism in Colonial South India (2003) is the first work in that direction. Translated by Hiltebeitel 1999, pp. 308–309. Hiltebeitel cites Beck’s ‘Elder Brother Story’ (Annanmarswamy Kathai) to draw our attention to a similar episode in which the roasted seeds sprout, by Vishnu’s grace, when planted. Also in that epic, the heroes receive roasted seeds from their cousins. These are similar to the fast pirouetting movements of Indian Classical dance forms, employed here in koothu to show rage and power. See M. Natesh’s description on p. 165 of Chapter 8 on modern Therukoothu. See M. Natesh’s description on p. 166 of Chapter 8.

8

Modern Therukoothu: survival

8

9 10

11

12 13 14

15

16 17

18

1 The locally brewed coconut toddy is drunk in order to lower the body temperature. 2 Prayers. 3 M. Natesh interview 2004. (See also the appendix on p. 192.)

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204 Notes 4 Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial clampdown on nationwide dissent, suspending democratic rights and judicial procedures and imposing a general culture of conservatism and censorship. 5 The Sathir dance is the original version of Bharatanatyam, and is associated by many with the very refined and formalised movements of Classical dance. In fact, its accompanying rasa, the shringara rasa, deals primarily with eroticism, connected to the divine, and is used in Therukoothu as well as many other dance forms. It is intended to transport the audience (especially men) to sublime erotic zones. Among Brahmins, Sathir is a derogatory term used to admonish children if they jump about and create a rumpus. 6 Dance steps. 7 This interpretation of Bharatanatyam and folk movements being polar opposites is contentious even in the small circle of Therukoothu experts. 8 The Dravidian movement is primarily an anti-caste political movement with an atheist stand, intent on establishing a southern region independent of the north. Dravidian culture is the pre-Hindu, pre-Aryan culture of the subcontinent, still surviving in the language and social make-up of the southern states. 9 All quotations in this chapter are translated by M. Natesh. 10 See Chapter 7, p. 142. 11 See Chapter 7, p. 142. 12 Most of the Dravidian leadership did not celebrate Bharathi since he was a Brahmin by birth. Ironically, during his lifetime the Brahmins shunned him for being a dreamer and nonconformist, and not a supporter of the caste system. 13 See Chapter 7, p. 132. 14 Though Muthuswamy says that he has seen Ramayana koothu in the villages many years ago. 15 Kambar was a poet who wrote a Tamil version of the Ramayana. 16 Perumal and Rama are different manifestations of the same god, Vishnu. 17 Muthuswamy is against the creation of conventional characters, saying: ‘Whoever plays in the play is a character.’ 18 Translated by M. Natesh. 19 Today, after seventeen years, one of them is an actor-technician, still working with the group. Another left the group in 1990 and is now an excellent animator. His brother, who left the group recently, is a young dancer freelancing in the city. Of the non-Purisai actors, these days Pasupathy is a mainstream cinema villain getting paid as much as Rs. 1 million per film and Kalairani is a character actress in the mainstream cinema earning Rs.100,000 per film. Two others, Jayakumar and Palani, recently took part in the highly successful British Council production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that toured extensively inside and outside India. 20 M. Natesh: ‘I feel it is Muthuswamy’s marketing strategy to employ white trainers as a whip to enthuse lazy Tamil actors.’ 21 The Tamil-speaking world knows this performing art form only by the name Therukoothu. However, Hanne M. de Bruin (1994) calls it ‘Kattaikoothu’ because of the kattai veshams worn by the actors (wooden accessories – parts of the costumes such as the elaborate crowns). See note 3 to Chapter 7, p. 202. 22 ‘Sangam’ means ‘association’.

Notes 205 1111 9 The global village 2 1 M. Natesh interview, 2004. 3 2 Bharucha, as a Harvard-educated Parsee, shares neither language nor culture with the Chhau artists. 4 3 Ironically, this discovering and utilising folk culture for political ends 5 originated in the ideology of the colonial overseers themselves. For example, 6 in the 1930s Gurusaday Dutt set up training camps for Bengali school7 teachers to learn folk dances and rural sports based on Baden-Powell’s Boy 8 Scouts movement and the revival of English country dancing by Cecil Sharp (Sen Gupta 1965). 9 4 This is one of the reasons that ‘tribal’ and ‘folk’ get conflated in a region like 1011 Jharkhand – they are simply different labels for the same thing. 1 5 See Amitava Roy (1995), ‘Folk is what sells well’, in Rasa: The Indian 2 Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-five Years, pp. 10–12. 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 21111

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General Anand, Mulk Ras (1950) The Indian Theatre, London: Dobson Arden, John (1977) To Present the Pretence, London: Methuen Barba, Eugenio (1995) ‘The Steps on the River Bank’ in Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-five Years (2 vols), Kolkata: Anamika Kala Sangam, pp. 14–22 Bharucha, Rustom (1990) Theatre and the World: Essays on performance and politics of culture, N. Delhi: Manohar —— (2000) The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalisation, London: The Athlone Press Brandon, James (ed.) (1993) Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, Cambridge: CUP Chatterji, Roma (2003) ‘The Category of Folk’ in Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology (ed.Veena Das), N. Delhi: OUP, pp. 567–597 Gargi, Balwant (1991) Folk Theatre of India, N. Delhi: Rupa & Co. Hansen, Kathryn (after Somnath Gupt) (2005) Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development, Kolkata: Seagull Books Karnad, Girish (1994) Three Plays, N. Delhi: OUP Kennedy Dennis (ed.) (2003) Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance (2 vols), Oxford: OUP Lal, Ananda (ed.) (1995) Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twentyfive Years (2 vols), Kolkata: Anamika Kala Sangam McGrath, John (1996) A Good Night Out, London: Nick Hern Books Muni, Bharata (trans. Dr N. P. Unni) (1998) Natyasastra, Delhi: Nag Publishers Parmer, Shyam (1975) Traditional Folk Media in India, N. Delhi: Geka Books Pavis, Patrice (ed.) (1996) The Intercultural Performance Reader, London: Routledge Rajadhyaksha, Ashish (1990) ‘Beaming Messages to the Nation” in Journal of Arts and Ideas, vol. 19, May 1990 Richmond, Farley (ed. with Darius Swann and P.Zarrilli) (1990) Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press

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Said, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism, London: Routledge Sardar, Ziauddin (1999) Orientalism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press Schechner, Richard (1983) Performative Circumstances: From the Avant Garde to Ram Lila, Kolkata: Seagull Books —— (1985) Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press Srampickal, Jacob (1994) Voice to the Voiceless: The Power of People’s Theatre in India, N. Delhi: Manohar Varadpande, M.L. (1992) History of Indian Theatre (vol. 2, Loka Ranga, Panorama of Indian Folk Theatre), N. Delhi: Abhinav Yarrow, Ralph (2000) Indian Theatre: Theatre of Origin, Theatre of Freedom, London: Routledge

Chhau Banerji, R.D. (1930–31) The History of Orissa From the Earliest Times to the British Period, Kolkata: R. Chatterjee Chambers Hindi–English Dictionary (1993), N. Delhi: Allied Publishers Ltd Chatterji, Roma (1995) ‘Authenticity and Tradition: Reappraising a “Folk” Form’ in Representing Hinduism, The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (ed. V. Dalmia and H. von Steitencron), N. Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 420–421 Chowdhry, A. (1978) ‘Chhau Nacha’ in Lesser Known Forms of Performing Arts (ed. Durugdas Mukhopadhyay), N. Delhi/N. York: Sterling Publishers, pp. 108–112 Khokar, Mohan (1979) Traditions of Indian Classical Dance, N. Delhi: Clarion Books Khokar, Mohan and Doshi, Saryu (eds) (1982) ‘Chaitra Parva Rituals – Chhau Dances’ in The Performing Arts, Mumbai: Mang Publications, pp. 75–89 Lenka, Bhagabat Prasad (2001) Chhau: The Shining Ornament of Eastern Art and Culture, Baripada: Mayurbhanj Mukherjee, Birnel; Kottari, Sunil; Lal, Ananda and Dasgupta, Chidananda (eds) (1995) RASA: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-five Years, Calcutta: Anamika Kala Sangum Research and Publications Mukhopadhyay, Durugdas (1978) Lesser Known Forms of Performing Art in India, N. Delhi: Sterling Press —— (1989) ‘Chhau Dance of Mayurbanj and Seraikella’ in Culture Performance Communication, N. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Natih, Susan (1985) Chhou Diaries, Dartington, UK Pani, Jiwan (1969) ‘Chhau: A Comparative Study of Seraikella and Mayurbanj Forms’, Sangeet Natak 13, pp. 35–45 Prakash, Amit (2001) Jharkhand: Politics of Development and Identity, Hyderabad: Orient Longman Sanchidananda (1972) ‘The Tribal Situation in Bihar’ in The Tribal Situation In India: Proceedings of a Seminar (ed. K. Suresh Singh), Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, pp. 169–185

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208 Bibliography Singh Deo, Juga Bhanu (1973) Chhau, Mask Dance of Seraikella, Cuttack: Jayashree Devi (exclusively distributed by Murishiram Manohartal, Delhi) Tagore, Rabindranath (1985) Selected Poems (trans. William Radice), Harmondsworth: Penguin Vatsyayan, Kapila (1980) Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams, N. Delhi: National Book Trust —— (1981) A Study of Some Traditions of Performing Arts in Eastern India, Gauhati: University of Gauhati, Department of Publications —— (1987) Traditions of Indian Folk Dance, N. Delhi: Clarion Books (associated with Hind Pocket Books)

Tamasha Marathi films Lok Shahir Ram Joshi (1947) by Shanataram (Baburao Painter); The story of the eighteenth-century Tamasha composer Amar Bhoopali (1951) by Shanataram, presenting lavanis in a Tamasha setting Sangte Aaika (‘Listen to what I say’) (1959); a corrupt landlord seduces a Tamasha woman and then throws her out. Her daughter, inheriting the Tamasha tradition, takes revenge Vithabai (2001) Video interviews, Sparrow Films, Bombay Seeta Aur Geeta (1972) best known of the Hindi movies with a long-lost twins plot ChaalBaaz (1989) famous Sri Devi vehicle

Books Abrams, Tevia (1990) ‘Tamasha’ in Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, (ed. Richmond et al.), Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 275–305 Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi (2003) Vande Mataran – The Biography Of Song, N. Delhi: Penguin Books India Bhave, Pushpa (1989) Contemporary Indian Theatre: Interviews with Playwrights and Directors, N. Delhi: Sangeet Natak Academi Dangle, Arjun (ed.) (1992) Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Literature, Bombay: Orient Longman Dwyer, Rachel and Pinney, Christopher (eds) (2001) Pleasure and the Nation, N. Delhi: OUP Enloe, Cynthia (1980) Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in a Divided Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin Gokhale, Shanta (2000) Playwright at the Centre, Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present, Kolkata: Seagull Books Gupta, Chandra Bahn (1991) The Indian Theatre (2nd revised edition), N. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Kale, Kishore Shantabai (2000) Against All Odds, N. Delhi: Penguin

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Michael, S.M. (ed.) (1999) Untouchable: Dalits in Modern India, Colorado, USA: Lynne Rienner Publishers Nadkarni, Dnyaneshwar (1969) ‘Marathi Tamasha Yesterday and Today’, Sangeet Natak 12, pp.19–28 —— (1988) Balgandharva and the Marathi Theatre, Mumbai: Roopah Books O’Hanlon, R. (1987) ‘Marathi History as Polemic’, Modern Asian Studies 17/1 Omvedt, Gail (1994) Dalits and the Democratic Devolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India, N. Delhi: Sage Publications Patil, Anand (1993) Western Influence in Marathi Drama, Goa: Rajahauns Ranade, Ashok D. (1978) ‘The Powada’ in Lesser Known Forms of Performing Arts in India, (ed. Durugdas Mukhopadhyay), N. Delhi: Sterling Press, pp. 58–64 —— (1986) Stage Music of Maharashtra, N. Delhi: Sangeet Natak Academy Ranganath H.K. (1980) Using Folk Entertainments to Promote National Development, UNESCO Roland, Romain (1926) Le théâtre du peuple: essai d’esthétique d’un théâtre nouveau, Paris: Michel Tapas, Vijay (1995) ‘Marathi Theatre’ in Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-five Years, Vol. II: Theatre and Cinema (ed. Ananda Lal), Kolkata: Anamika Kala Sangam, pp. 171–178 Tendulkar, Vijay (1986) Ghashiram Kotwal (trans. Zelliot, etc.), Kolkata: Seagull Books Tendulkar, Vijay (1993) Five Plays, N. Delhi: OUP —— (2003) Collected Plays in Translation, N. Delhi: OUP India Zelliott, Eleanor (1996) From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement, N. Delhi: Manohar

Therukoothu Blackburn, Stuart (2003) Print, Folklore and Nationalism in Colonial South India, N. Delhi: Permanent Black De Bruin, Hanne M. (1994) Kattaikoothu: The Flexibility of a South Indian Theatre Tradition, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Leiden —— (trans. 1998) Karnamoksham (Karna’s Death): A Play by Pukalentippulavar. Pondicherry: Institut Francais De Pondicherry —— (2003) ‘Challenges to a Folk Theatre in Tamilnadu’, Seminar on The Social Role and Impact of Theatre: Opportunities, Challenges, Sustainability in the Present Context of Globlisation, Indian Regional Office of HIVOS, Bangalore, 29 January Frasca, Richard A. (1981a) ‘Terukkuttu: The Traditional Theatre of Tamilnadu’, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies, Chennai: International Association of Tamil Research —— (1981b) ‘The Socio-religious Context of the Terukkuttu’, Fifth World Tamil Conference Souvenir, LVI, LVIII, Madurai —— (1984) The Terukkuttu: Ritual Theatre of Tamilnadu, Ph.D. Dissertation, Berkeley: University of California

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210 Bibliography —— (1990) The Theatre of the Mahabharata: Terukkuttu Performances in South India, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press —— (2003) Terukkuttu. South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia (ed. Margaret A. Mills, Peter J. Claus and Sarah Diamond), New York/London: Routledge Hiltebeitel, Alf (1991a) ‘The Folklore of Draupadi: Saris and Hair’ in Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions (ed. Arjun Appadurai, Frank F. Korom and Margaret A. Mills), Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press —— (1991b) The Cult of Draupadi Mythologies: From Gingee to Kurukshetra, N. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass —— (2001) Draupadi Among Rajputs, Muslims and Dalits: Rethinking India’s Oral and Classical Epics, New Delhi: Oxford —— (2002) Rethinking the Mahabharata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma King, New Delhi: Oxford Manoharam, S. (1997) Pandaram: People of India: Tamilnadu. Vol. XL, Part two (ed. K.S. Singh, R. Thirumalai and S. Manoharan), Chennai: Anthropological Survey of India Murugan, V. (ed.) (1999) A Dictionary of Tamil Literary and Critical Terms, Chennai: Institute of Asian Studies Naidu, T. S. (1997) Agamidiya Vellalar. Pandaram: People of India: Tamilnadu. Vol. XL. Part three (ed. K.S. Singh, R. Thirumalai and S. Manoharan), Chennai: Anthropological Survey of India Purisai, Kannappa Thambiran (1992) Interviewed by Venkat Swaminathan, Sangeet Natak 105–106 (July–December), N. Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi Ramaswamy, Mu. (1999) Terukkuttu Nadippu, Tanjavur: Tamil University Ranganathan, Edwina (1983) ‘Therukkuttu: A Street Play from Tamilnadu’ in Sangeet Natak 67 (January–March), N. Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, pp. 1–15 Thanikachala, Mudaliyar (1997) Droupathai Kuravanji Naatakam (trans. Muthukumaraswamy), Chennai: B. Rathina Nayakar and Sons Thurston, Edgar and Rangachari, K. (1993) Castes and Tribes of Southern India (Vol. I and Vol. VI.), N. Delhi: Asian Educational Services Vaidhialingan, Se. (2002) Tamizh Panpaattu Varalaaru, Chidambaram: Annamalai University

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Index

Note: page references in italics indicate illustrations Achalcamb, Rustom 121 actors: breath control 28–9; declamation 73; female impersonators 79, 82, 103, 145, 166; local knowledge 128; more than one for same character 158; removal of separation from audience 162; spiritual support role 163; star status 128, 157; trance 157, 165 Agamudaiya Mudaliars (caste) 139, 141–2 agriculture 69–70, 71, 110, 129, 129, 130, 133–4, 152, 189 Ai Tuze Lekroo 103–7, 110 Alekar, Satish 113 All India Radio 118, 185 Ambedkar, Dr. 84 Arcot, north 134, 163, 175 Arden, John 72, 181–2, 183, 185 Arjuna 132, 133, 151, 160, 161 Arjuna’s Penance (Arjunan Thapasu) 158, 164, 165 Aryabhushan Theatre, Pune 76, 82, 83 Ashta Venaika (festival) 86 astrology 30

audiences: Chhau 35, 50–1; middle-class 122, 124; participation 104; respond to actors’ local knowledge 128; Tamasha 79, 80, 81–2, 85, 92, 95, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 110; Therukoothu 147, 157–8, 162, 166 Aurangabad University 121 authenticity, search for 182–3, 186–7 Awasthi, Suresh 187 Bacchae 17–18 backdrops see drops Balgandharva Natyamandir, Pune 77–82, 121 Bali-Jatra 28 ballet, European 23, 24, 56, 125, 182–3 Banaviddha (‘Injured Deer’) 24 ‘Bandya the Accountant’ 109 Bapat, Vasant 122, 123 Bapu Mang see Bhau Bapu Mang Bapurao see Patthe Bapu Rao Baripada 59 Bazar Sahi 25, 52 bells, ankle 51, 94, 94, 144, 153, 154 Bengal 58–9, 119, 187

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212 Index Bhagavat Gita 133 bhaktas 32, 33, 33–4, 46, 47–8, 51, 53, 55, 183 bhangis 44–5, 62, 66–7 Bhangra 189 Bharat Natyamandir, Pune 113 Bharata Muni 66–8 Bharatanatyam 122, 124, 142, 204 Bharathi, Subramanya 169–70 Bharucha, Rustom 5, 127, 184–5, 186, 189 bharud poetry 105 Bhattacharya, Ashutosh 58, 72 Bhau Bapu Mang 85 Bhima 3–4, 4, 136, 138, 165–6 Bihar 23, 26, 35–6 Bombay see Mumbai Borgaonkar, Baburao 86–7, 88, 101, 102, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 126 Borgaonkar, Shivram 87, 97 Borgaonkar, Vijay Kumar 86–7, 88, 89, 89, 90 Borgaonkar Loknatya Tamasha 86, 87, 88–107, 89, 91, 98, 110, 189 Brahmin Sahi 25, 52 Brahmins 68, 76, 77, 82, 83, 105, 109, 124, 135, 167; opposition to 107–9, 113, 114–17 Brandon, James 87 breath control 28–9 Brechtian theatre 111–12, 174, 188 Brindavan 13, 14 Britain 189–90; see also London British rule 65, 84, 104, 109, 113, 126, 170, 181, 182, 186 Brook, Peter 1, 73 Calcutta see Kolkata castes 58, 82–6, 139, 141–2; conflict 107–9; see also Brahmins cattle 159–62

Caucasian Chalk Circle, The 112, 174 censorship 87, 104, 114 Centre For Development, Research and Training (CFDRT) 175 Chaitra Parva (New Year festival) 23, 25; in Baripada 59; last night 49–55; ritual 29–34, 45–8, 53, 55; see also Chhau Mahotsav chalis 43–5, 62 Chandavarkar, Bhaskar 112, 118 Chandrabhaga (Moon Maiden dance) 24, 48–9, 48, 51, 54 Chandralekha 192 chapbooks 148–9, 152–3 Chatterji, Roma 58, 186, 187, 189 Chawla, Veenapani 1–3, 6, 74, 186 ‘chaya’: and derivation of ‘Chhau’ 65–6 Chennai 2, 190, 191; Music Academy 167, 168; political posters 172; Therukoothu in 21, 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 175–6, 179, 191; upper class attitude to Mahabharata 134–5 Cheyyar, river 135 Chhaabildas school 121 Chhau: acting style 73; Classical legacy 65–8; derivation 65–6; and festivals 69–70; foreign influence 182–4, 185; Kharsawan 200; Mayurbhanji 57–8, 59–64; music 37–8, 66, 73; and poverty 71–2; Purulia 57–9, 66, 72, 181–2, 189; as street theatre 70–1; see also Chhau, Seraikella; Chhau Mahotsav Chhau, Seraikella 5–7, 20, 22–55, 130, 182–4, 189; amateur nature 57; authenticity as ‘folk theatre’ 182–3, 186–7; Chandrabhaga (Moon Maiden dance) 24, 48–9, 48, 51, 54; costumes 35, 39, 40, 49, 51, 54, 55, 59; history 24–5, 29; links with other dance forms

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42, 43, 59, 67; in London 22–3; masks 5, 27–9, 27, 31, 39, 49, 51, 53, 54, 66; Mayura (peacock dance) 7, 8, 24, 28; and modern world 56–7; music 37, 37–8, 66; poses 42–3; Ratri (moon dance) 6, 38–41, 40; royal family and 22–3, 24–5, 28, 30, 49–50, 53, 56, 59, 65, 66, 68, 182–3, 185, 186; six elements 41–2; stages and dance floors 26, 35, 39, 49, 50; styles of movement (chalis) 43–5, 62; Tandava and Lasya (masculine and feminine) 53; use of feet 44; Westernisation 182; see also Chaitra Parva; Chhau Mahotsav Chhau Dance Centre 26, 27, 36, 38, 42 Chhau Mahotsav 25–55, 30, 72, 182; alternative performances 49–53, 54; competition 25–7, 36; last night 48–55; performance 37–41; workshop demonstration 41–5; see also Chaitra Parva; Chhau, Seraikella ‘chhauri’: and derivation of ‘Chhau’ 66 children 14, 50–1, 95, 158, 165, 178–9 Citaristi, Ileana 5, 16, 20, 60–4, 63 cities: economic growth 190; lack of knowledge of rural drama 134, 166, 167, 170; see also specific cities Classical arts 65–8, 186; dance 37, 59, 60, 64, 65–8, 122, 124, 142, 190, 204; music 66, 185 colour coding 28, 31 comedy 67, 77, 97–8, 101, 105, 128, 137–8, 147–8, 153; see also jesters committees, local 130, 139–40, 141 Communist Party 109–10

competitions 25–7, 36, 72 computer age 180, 190, 191 costumes: Chhau 35, 39, 40, 49, 51, 54, 55, 59; film 99; Tamasha 93–4, 94, 99, 103, 104; Therukoothu 144–5, 154, 155, 158, 160 Craig, Edward Gordon 1, 15, 17, 21 curtain, handheld see front-cloth cymbals: kirtan 10–11, 15; mandila 11; manjeera 77; in Therukoothu 146 Dadar 121 Dalits 84–5, 118 dance: ballet 23, 24, 56, 125, 182–3; Bharatanatyam 122, 124, 142, 204; Chandrabhaga 24, 48–9, 48, 51, 54; Classical 37, 59, 60, 64, 65–8, 122, 124, 142, 190, 204; for dramatic effect (in Ghashiram Kotwal) 116; film 100; Kathak 64, 78, 122; Lezim 99; Manipuri 42; Odissi 37, 43, 49, 59, 60, 67; rhythms 38; ritual 30, 47; Sankirtana 7–8, 10–16; Sathir 167; Tamasha 77–82, 96–103; and trance 141; tribal 35–6, 51, 59 dance floors see stages and dance floors Das, Dev 102 De Bruin, Hanne M. 134, 177–80, 188 declamation 73 Delhi 9, 42, 187, 188, 190; National School of Drama 169, 174; New Delhi 72; Sangeet Natak Academy 169, 170, 171, 187 Deshpande, P.L. 112, 123 Deshpande, Sushama 76, 83, 119–20 Dharmaraja 132, 133

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214 Index dheu topka 61 Dholki Phat 86, 96, 98, 110, 116, 123 dom (caste) 58 Doordharshan 170 Draupadi (goddess) 170; appearance as gypsy in Kuravanchi 157, 158, 159, 159; babies handed to (for intellectual prowess) 158; make-up 144; performances of ‘disrobing’ of 157, 169–70, 176, 179; shrine 136, 141, 142; story 132–3, 150–2, 156, 157; temples and worship 133, 134, 138, 163 Draupadi Amman festival 2, 130, 133–62, 163–6; preparations 139–46; Rajasuya Yagam 174–5; ritual 134, 139, 141–2, 159–62; show 146–9, 152–9; storytelling 136–9, 140–1, 146, 160–1 Draupadi Kuravanchi 148–9, 150, 150–9, 162 Draupadi Vasthrabaranam (Disrobing of Draupadi) 157, 169–70, 176, 179 Dravidian movement 167 drops 35, 92, 103–4, 125–6; see also front-cloth drummers 58 drums: chadihadi 38; daf 83; dhol 38, 42; dholki 75, 77, 83, 86, 96, 97, 98, 110, 116, 123; dhumsa 38; electronic 99; madal 51; Mirudangam 142, 146; nagara 38; pung 13, 15; as sound-effects 154; see also rhythms Durga’s dance 59 Duryodhana: costumes 144, 145, 154, 155, 160; fight for cattle 160, 161; final battle 3–4, 4, 161, 165–6, 177, 179; make-up 144, 155; ornaments 144, 145, 155; performance of 153–7;

statue 138, 139, 146, 165–6; story 132–3, 150–2 Earth Mother 10, 23, 30 East-West Dance Encounter 60 Echo and Narcissus 60, 62, 63 economy, Indian 190–1 ecstasy see trance education 71, 126, 178–9; social (drama used for) 87–8, 120–1, 174–5; see also training Eighteenth Day, The 179 Eknath 84 Embassy of Krishna, The 179 England 172–3 eunuchs 58 Euripides 17–18 families: extended 71; feuds 142 female impersonators 79, 82, 103, 145, 166 feminism 170; see also women fertility rites 158, 165 festivals 2, 69–70, 86, 109, 130, 171, 177, 179; see also Chaitra Parva; Chhau Mahotsav; Draupadi Amman films: Bollywood 125, 189–90; choreography 100; costume 99; drama 100–1, 171; make-up 144; music and songs 58, 85, 98–9, 101, 102–3, 110, 121, 128, 146, 149, 185; pornography 121; silent 168, 189; themes 107 finances see patronage; payments; sponsorship fire-walking 134, 162, 162 FLTM see Forum of Laboratory Theatres of Manipur flute 37, 39, 41, 52–3 folk songs 149, 185; see also lavanis folk theatre: artistic qualities 73; authenticity question 182–3, 186–7; and Classical tradition

Index 215 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 21111

65–8; community 130; environment 69–72; experiments and research 118–19; foreign influence 125–7, 181–6, 187–8; influence of television 127–8; influence on Ghashiram Kotwal 114–15; local knowledge 128–9; Ras Lila 99; rehabilitation programme 87–8, 92–3; rejection of hierarchy 68; resilience 68; Sankirtana 7–8, 10–16, 20; urban lack of knowledge 134, 166, 167, 170; used to convey social information 87–8, 120–1, 174–5 see also Chhau; Tamasha; Therukoothu Ford Foundation, US 118, 175–6, 188 fortune-telling 149, 150–1 Forum of Laboratory Theatres of Manipur (FLTM) 9 Frasca, Richard A. 144 front-cloth 16, 67, 99, 104, 125, 153, 154 Gadkari, Madhav 122 Gajvi, Premanand 84 Gan 96, 108–9, 123 Gandhi, Indira 25, 188, 204 Gandhi, Mahatma 24, 172, 173 Ganesh 67, 86; festival 109; invocation to 77, 96, 108–9, 114, 146; mask 28 Gargi, Balwant: Folk Theatre of India 5, 6, 7, 29, 53, 59, 76, 85, 87, 109, 186 Gaur, Ranjana 59 Gavankar, D.N. 85, 109 Ghadge, Ramachandrarao 109 Gharia Bhar 46–8 Ghashiram Kotwal 112–18 ghatwali 33, 34 ghondals 104 Ghosh, Haren 22 ghungroos 94, 97

globalization 181, 190–1 gobar-goola 61 gods: love of drama 67–8 Good Person of Schezuan, The 112 Gotipuo 43 Gouranga 10, 14 Gourlila 14, 16 Greek myth 17–18, 60, 63, 64 Grotowski, Jerzy 60 Gudi Padwa 86 gurukkal tradition 12 halgi 96 Hanuman 14 harmonium 37, 97, 136 Hiltebeitel, Alf 134, 135, 136, 152 Hinduism 18, 69, 96; see also festivals; Mahabharata; Vaishnavite sect Hindutva movement 92 Holst, Gustav 187 Hussey, Dyneley 23 Icarus 64 Imphal 9–16 improvisation 17, 104, 118, 123, 129, 131, 155 Indian National Theatre 118 Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) 109 Indonesia 28 information: drama used to convey 87–8, 120–1, 174–5 Ionesco, Eugène 168, 188 IPTA see Indian People’s Theatre Association Jambeb 59 jarjara 32–4, 33, 47 Jatai 149 jatra 86, 89 Jatra Ghata 31–4 jesters: Kattiyankaran 143, 147–8, 153, 155–7,158–9, 159, 171,

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216 Index 172, 175; Maushi 97, 98, 101, 116, 117, 123, 128; songadhya 98, 101, 105, 117, 123; Sutradhar 67, 115, 117, 123; vidushaka (jester) 67 Jharkhand 35–7, 46, 56–7, 59, 66, 71, 182, 189 Joshi, Ram 123 Jothi (actor) 144, 153–7, 155 Journey, The 63–4 Kale, Kishore Shantabai 83–4 Kale, Promod 118 Kali 53, 55, 133 Kalighat 53, 55 Kancheepuram 177, 179, 188 Kanniyappan (actor) 158, 159 karanas 67 Karna Moksham (Karna’s Salvation) 158 Karnad, Girish 111, 188 Karnan 167 Kashyap, Prakriti 58 Kathak dance 64, 78, 124 kattai vesham characters 144, 153, 156, 204 Kattaikoothu see Therukoothu Kattaikoothu Kalai Valarchi Munnetra Sangam 177–80, 188 Kattaikoothu Youth Theatre School 179 Kattiyankaran (jester) 143, 147–8, 153, 155–7, 158–9, 159, 171, 172, 175 Kavi see Pattu Kendre, Waman 75 Khan, Shaafat 119 Khandobacha Lagin 118 Khanolkar, C.T. 112 Kharkai, river 31, 32 Khude, Mahadev 93 kirki 16, 154–5, 157 kirtan (cymbals) 10–11, 15 kirtan (sermon) 104, 116–17, 125 Kolhati tribe 83–4 Kolkata 18–19, 24

Koothu-p-Pattarai (KPP) 168, 169–70, 171, 173, 174, 175–7, 188 Krishna 10, 138; dances depicting 51–2, 52, 116; depicted at Draupadi Amman festival 143, 143–4, 146; Gharia Bhar ritual 46–8, 47; in Mahabharata 132–3, 150, 151–2; mask 28, 51; songs depicting 12, 13, 98–9 Krishnamoorthy, Mr 174 kshatriyas 108 Kulamanthai 134, 135, 135–62, 163; see also Draupadi Amman festival Kuravanchi 149, 152, 158; see also Draupadi Kuravanchi lalits 98 language 12, 125, 127, 182, 202; Tamil 131, 137–8, 148, 167, 168, 172, 178 lavanis 76, 79, 82, 83, 85, 86, 99, 101, 103, 107, 116, 118, 121; in US production 122–3, 124 Lezim 99 lingum 33, 34 literacy 68, 71, 126 local knowledge 128–9 Lokkatha ‘78 118 London: Pit Theatre 17; Vaudeville Theatre 22; Tamasha Theatre Company 74, 189 Love for Three Oranges 16–17 Madgulkar, G.D. 123 Madgulkar, Vyankatesh 112 Madras see Chennai Madupidi Sandai 159–62, 160 Mahabharata: Arjunan Thapasu (Arjuna’s Penance) 158, 164, 165; Bhagavat Gita 133; blessings endowed by different episodes 158; Brook’s production 1; depicted at Draupadi Amman

Index 217 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 21111

festival 2, 130, 133–62, 163–6, 174–5, 176; Draupadi Kuravanchi 148–9, 150, 150–9, 162; Draupadi Vasthrabaranam (Disrobing of Draupadi) 157, 169–70, 176, 179; Karna Moksham (‘Karna’s Salvation’) 158; Madupidi Sandai (‘The Fight for Cattle’) 159–62, 160; narration of 136–9, 140–1; Padu Kalam (‘Final War Field’) 3–4, 4, 161, 165–6, 177, 179; Panchali Sabadam 169–70, 170, 171; Rajasooya (horse worship) 138; story 132–3, 150–2; see also Duryodhana Mahapatra, Prasanna 27, 28 Mahapatra, Susant 28 Mahapatra family 27–8 Maharajas: Mayurbhanj 59, 60, 64; Seraikella 22–3, 24–5, 28, 30, 49–50, 53, 56, 59, 65, 66, 68, 182–3, 185, 186 Maharashtra: castes and caste conflict 77, 82–3, 84–5, 108, 109, 113–14; censorship 87, 104, 114; and contemporary Tamasha shows 119, 120, 121, 122; diaspora (USA) 121–4; education enables use of scripts 126; esteem for shahirs and powada tradition 87; ghondals 104; Hindutva movement 92; importance of Tamasha to rural community 74; kirtan tradition 104, 116–17, 125; Kolhati tribe 83; kshatriyas (warriors) 108; Lezim (folk dance) 99; Muslims 83; popularity of lavanis 76; popularity of live entertainment 111; research into folk theatre 118; Sathya Shodak Samaj 107–9; television 127; urbanisation 75, 189; see also Narayangaon; Pune; Tamasha Mahars 84 mahoori 37

make-up: Tamasha 93, 104; Therukoothu 142–4, 155 Manbhumi see Purulia Chhau Mang, Bhau Bapu see Bhau Bapu Mang Mangala 30–1, 33–4 Mangalaghat 30–1 Mangalam 152 Mangeshkar, Lata 100 Mangs (caste) 84–5 Mani (actor) 144 Manimacha, Ima 10–16, 13, 18 Manipur: dance 7–8, 10–16, 42, 183; language 12; political and social situation 8–10, 15–16, 20, 119; touring shows 119 Mansingh, Sonal 59 mantras 165 Marathi culture 76, 79, 82–3, 87, 95, 98, 108, 111, 112–13, 116, 122, 188 martial arts 41, 66, 167, 200; Parikhanda 42–3, 59, 67, 125 Marxists 167 Masi cittirai (festival) 179 masks: Indonesian 28; none in Mayurbhanji Chhau 59; in Purulia Chhau 58, 66, 72; in Seraikella Chhau 5, 27–9, 27, 31, 39, 49, 51, 53, 54, 66 Matha 72 Matkari, Ratnakar 118 Maushi (jester) 97, 98, 101, 116, 117, 123, 128 May Day 190 Mayura (peacock dance) 7, 8, 24, 28 Mayurbhanji Chhau 57–8, 59–64 Meghanathan (actor) 143, 148, 153, 159 Mehta, Vijaya 112 Meitei tribe 10, 12 melodrama, Victorian 125, 126 Ministry of Culture 104, 126, 169, 171

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218 Index Ministry of Information and Broadcasting: Song and Drama Division 87–8, 92–3 Moghuls 82, 83, 108 monsoons 69–70, 95, 129, 135–6, 163 Morris dancing 190 mudras 60, 61 Mukhopadhyay, Durugdas 65–6, 92–3 Mumbai 1, 20, 60, 95, 109, 114, 122, 183, 188; Arya Samaj 18; National Centre for the Performing Arts 112; Parsi community 125; pornography 121; Prithvi Festival 179; Star Bars 121; Sutradhar Theatre Institute 118 Mumbaiche Kawale 119 Mun, Vaisant 84–5 Munda tribe 35 Muni, Bharata see Bharata Muni Murugan, Lord 149 music: British 187; Chhau 37–8, 66, 73; Classical 66, 185; essential element of folk theatre 73; film 58, 85, 98–9, 101, 102–3, 110, 121, 128, 146, 149, 185; folk 73, 112, 174, 185, 187; Tamil 136; in US Tamasha production 123 Music Academy, Chennai 167, 168 musical instruments 37, 64, 73, 97, 99, 105, 146; flute 37, 39, 41, 52–3; harmonium 37, 97, 136; percussion 77, 96, 97, 99; shenai 37, 39; see also cymbals; drums Muslims 83 Muthuganesan (storyteller) 134, 136–9, 160–1 Muthuswamy, Na. 2–3, 20, 21, 166, 167–8, 169–70, 171, 172–4, 175, 176, 177, 188 Nadkarni, Dnyaneshwar 106 Nair, Santosh 59

Nana Phadnavis 113, 114, 116 Narayangaon 86–7, 88–107, 110, 127, 186 Natesh, M. 163–6, 168, 172–3, 184, 192 National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) 112 National School of Drama 169, 174 nationalism 109, 114 Natyasastra 33, 66–8 navadhanyam 152 NCPA see National Centre for the Performing Arts Nehru, Jawaharlal 87 Nerukar, Meena 121–4, 123 New Poetry Movement 167, 168 New Year 86, 133, 199; Western 76, 77; see also Chaitra Parva Nijinsky, Vaslav 23 nostalgia 186–7 Odissi dance 37, 43, 49, 59, 60, 67 opera 17–18, 24, 73, 109 Operation Sunnyvale 9 oral tradition 126 Orientalism 23, 186 Orissa 5, 28, 33, 42, 48, 59, 60 Oriya language 42, 66 Oriya poets 38 Oxford 190 Padu Kalam (‘Final War Field’) 3–4, 4, 161, 165–6, 177, 179 Pancha bhuta 64 Panchali Sabadam 169–70, 170, 171 Pandarams 141–2 Pandava Brothers 132–3, 141, 150–1, 152, 156, 157, 158 Pani, Jivan 65–6 Panipat, battle of 113 Parikhanda 42–3, 59, 67, 125 Parsi theatre 125–6 Patel, Jabbar 112, 113

Index 219 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 21111

pati see front-cloth Pati Gelega Kathewadi 112 patriotism 100 patronage 72, 73; see also sponsorship Pattanayak, Rajat 38, 39 Pattanayak, Tapan 38, 39, 40, 42, 43–5, 45 Patthe Bapu Rao 82, 85, 123 Pattu 149 Pawala 82 payments 89–91, 130, 138, 140, 158, 175, 176 PDA see Progressive Dramatic Association percussion 77, 96, 97, 99; see also cymbals; drums Peshwa era 96, 104, 106, 113, 114, 122 Phule, Jyotirao 108 playwriting 111, 148–9 poetry 38, 84, 87, 105, 149 politics 92, 99, 107–10, 112–18, 159, 170, 171, 172, 188; Manipuri 8–10, 15–16, 20 Pongal 134 pornography 121 poverty 68, 71–2 powadas 87, 105 pranam 42–3, 44 prasad 95–6, 96 Prithvi Festival 179 Progressive Dramatic Association (PDA) 113, 114 Prokofiev, Sergei 16–17 puja 32, 34, 46, 48, 68, 160, 165 pujaris 46, 141, 142, 160, 161 Pune 75–82, 83, 86, 90, 95, 107–8, 109, 113–14, 124, 190, 191 Punekar, Lata 77, 79, 121 Punekar, Surekar 79, 121 Purisai 142, 148, 169–70, 176, 177 Purisai Kalaimamani Natesa Thambiran Therukoothu nataka

manram 134, 142–8, 152–62, 171, 174, 175, 176 Purulia Chhau 57–9, 66, 72, 181–2, 189 question-and-answer form 106, 115, 126–7 Radha 10, 12, 13, 46–7, 51–2, 52, 98–9, 116 radio 118, 185 ragas 37, 66 Rajagopal (actor/writer) 177, 179 Rajasuya Yagam 174–5 Rajendran (actor) 153 Rajendran, K.S. 174 Raleigh, North Carolina 74 Ramar Pattabhishekam 171 Ramayana 135, 171, 176 Ranga Deratha 97 Rangayan 112 Rangbaji 101 Rao, Patthe Bapu see Patthe Bapu Rao Ras Lila 99 Ratri (dance) 6, 28, 38–41, 40 Ravana Vadhai 171 Red Flag Cultural Squad 85, 109 religion: as anomaly in Tamasha 98–9, 101; importance of 68; see also Hinduism rhythms: Dholki Phat 86, 96, 98, 110, 116, 123; gudgudi 34; katan 38; talas 7, 38, 49, 51, 66, 146, 147 Richmond, Farley 65 Rig Veda 38, 187 Ring Cycle, The 22 ritual: Arjuna’s Penance 158, 164, 165; at Chaitra Parva 29–34, 45–8, 53, 55, 183; importance of 68; Madupidi Sandai (‘The Fight for Cattle’) 159–62; in Natyasastra 68; at Ramayana festival 171; sacrifice 34, 55, 138,

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220 Index 152; Therukoothu 131, 134, 139, 141–2, 159–62, 165–6 Rolland, Romain: People’s Theatre 109 Romanticism 187–9 Rough Theatre 73 Sable, Shahir 121 sacrifice 34, 55, 138, 152 Sadhei Kala 49–50 Sahoo, Kedarnath 26, 52, 57, 67 Said, Edward: Orientalism 23 Saivite 136 Sambandhan (actor) 164 Sanamahi 10 Sangeet Bari 76, 77–82, 78, 83, 96, 99, 103, 119, 121, 128 Sangeet Natak Academy (SNA) 169, 170, 171, 187 Sankirtana 7–8, 10–16, 20 Sanskrit culture 65, 66, 67, 68 Sanskrit studies 186, 187 Santhali tribe 49, 51 Sarabhai, Vikram 127 Saraswathi 68, 146 Sathe, Anna Bhau 84–5, 109 Sathir dance 167 Sathya Shodak Samaj (SSS) 107–9, 110 sawal-jabab (question-and-answer form) 106, 115, 126–7 Schechner, Richard 57, 59, 67, 72, 184 scripts, introduction of 126–7 SDD see Song and Drama Division Seraikella: history 24; landscape 23, 24; lawyers 70; regions 24, 35–7; see also Chhau, Seraikella Seraikella, Maharajas of 22–3, 24–5, 28, 30, 49–50, 53, 56, 59, 65, 66, 68, 182–3, 185, 186 Seth, Daksia 59 shahirs 87, 101, 104, 106, 108, 109, 121, 126–7 Shaik, Omar 109

Shakespeare, William 187 Shakti 23, 30, 106 Shantiniketan Centre for the Arts 24, 28, 42 Sharma, Bharat 59 shenai 37, 39 Shiv Sena 92, 114 Shiva 23, 31, 32, 33, 34, 48, 106 Shivaji 76, 84, 92, 108, 109 Simha dynasty 24 Singan and Singi 149 Singh Deo, Aditya Pratap 24–5, 28 Singh Deo, Bijoy Pratap 24, 25, 38, 49, 56, 66, 182–3 Singh Deo, Braj Bhanu 183 Singh Deo, Brojendra Pratap 25 Singh Deo, J.B. 29, 44, 182 Singh Deo, Rajkumar Suddhendra 5–7, 8, 20, 22, 25, 29, 53 Singh Deo, Suvendra Pratap 25, 31 Singh Deo, Tikayet Nrupendra Narayan 25 Singhbhum 24, 35–6: Eastern 59 Sircar, Badal 181, 186 SNA see Sangeet Natak Academy social information: drama used to convey 87–8, 120–1, 174–5 socialism 111–12 Solapurkar, Lata 88, 94–5, 97, 101–2 Song and Drama Division (SDD), Ministry of Information and Broadcasting 87–8, 92–3 song troupes see Sangeet Bari songadhya (jester) 98, 101, 105, 117, 123 songs: film 58, 85, 98–9, 101, 102–3, 149; folk 149, 185; minstrel 104; Sankirtana 11–12; Therukoothu 146–7, 149; Urdu 83; see also lavanis speech 73–4 sponsorship 72, 121, 130, 176 Srampickal, Jacob: Voice of the Voiceless 19 Sri Kala Pitha 26–7

Index 221 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 21111

Sri Kedar Centre 26 Sri Rama Navami 171 SSS see Sathya Shodak Samaj stages and dance floors: Chhau 26, 35, 39, 49, 50; drops 35, 92, 103–4, 125–6; Parsi 125–6; street 70–1; Tamasha 91–2, 99; technology 126; Therukoothu 138–9, 140, 145–6; Westernised 181–2 Star Bars 121 storytelling 134, 135, 136–9, 140–1, 146, 160–1 street theatre 70–1, 167, 171 strip shows 121 Sundara Manamadhe Bharali 122–4, 123 Sutradhar (jester) 67, 115, 117, 123 Sutradhar Theatre Institute, Bombay 118 Suvarottigal 172 Tagore, Rabindranath 22, 24, 28, 42, 56, 183, 187–8 Tai Chi 18 talas 7, 38, 49, 51, 66, 146, 147 Tamasha 20, 73–4, 75–124, 189, 191; apparent commercialisation 186; and Brechtian theatre 111–12; castes 82–6; costumes 93–4, 94, 99, 103, 104; dance show 96–103, 100; Dholki Phat 86, 96, 98, 110, 116, 123; finances 90–1; Ghashiram Kotwal (urban play) 112–18; influence of television 128; local knowledge 128–9; make-up 93, 104; modern adaptations 118–21; in Narayangaon 86–7, 88–107, 110, 127, 186; organisation 88–91; play 103–7; and politics 92, 99, 107–10, 112–18; preparations 91–6; revival movement 87–8; Sangeet Bari 76, 77–82, 78, 83, 96, 99,

103, 119, 121, 128; in USA 121–4 Tamasha Board of Maharashtra 104 Tamasha Theatre Company, London 74, 189 Tamil language 131, 137–8, 148, 167, 168, 172, 178 Tamil Nadu 2–5, 20, 68, 69, 129, 130, 178, 188; castes and politics 142, 167; contemporary theatre 168, 169; lack of knowledge of Therukoothu 134, 167; literature 137–8, 149; music 136–7; new technology 180; worship of Draupadi 133, 152 Tantric meditation 10 Tanvir, Habib 119 technology: modern 180, 182; stage 126 Teechya Aeechi Goshta 119–20 Teen Paishacha Tamasha 112 telecommunications 190 television 71, 72, 79, 92–3, 127–8, 170, 171, 179, 191 temples 70, 133, 171 Tendulkar, Vijay 112–18 Thambiran, Kannappa 142, 168, 169–70, 171, 174, 176, 177, 203 Thambiran, Sambandham 169, 170, 170, 171, 174–5, 176 Thambiran, Subramaniya 142, 143, 143–4, 146, 148, 152 Thambiran family 141–2, 148, 168, 176 Tharu 149 theatre, folk see folk theatre Theatre Academy, The 114 theatres 125–6; see also stages Theresa, Mother 18 Therukoothu 2–5, 19, 20, 68, 130, 131, 132–62, 189, 191; costumes 144–5, 154, 155, 158, 160; derivation 131; local knowledge of actors 129; makeup 142–4, 155; and modern

1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 21111

222 Index theatre 16, 166–80; Natesh on 163–6, 184, 192; preparations 139–46; psychological effects of 163–6; relationship with storyteller 140–1; show 146–9, 152–9; stage 138–9, 140, 145–6; training 175–6, 177, 178–80, 188; used to convey information 172–5, 179; see also Draupadi Amman festival; Muthuswamy Thevarasan (musician) 134, 136, 137 Thiyam, Ratan 119 Threepenny Opera, The 112 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 109 tourism 56–7, 59, 72, 182, 183–4, 189 training 41–5, 97, 175–6, 177, 178–80, 183, 188 trance 4, 131, 141, 157, 165 trees, sacred 10, 12, 14, 165 tribhangi 43 Truth Seeking Society see Sathya Shodak Samaj tuntuna 97 twins, theme of 107 UNESCO 120 United Kingdom 189–90; see also British rule; London United States of America 121–4, 176 upalayas 44, 45 Urdu singing styles 83 vag natya 103–7, 109–10, 126 Vaidhialingan, Se. 149, 152 Vaishnavite sect 10, 171; symbols 142, 144 Vallimalai 179

Vanankulam 179 Vasudeo Sangat 118 Vatsyayan, Kapila 38, 66–7 vattiyars 148 Vedachalam 184 Veenapani see Chawla, Veenapani Vellai Vattam 174 Victorian melodrama 125, 126 vidushaka (jester) 67 Vignesh Wara 86 villages 69, 70–1, 72, 83, 87, 89–91, 130, 168, 176 Villiputurar 136 Viruttam 149 Vithabai 85–6, 90, 93, 106, 186 Vithabai Memorial Ashram 97, 107, 110, 186 voice projection 146 Wagner, Richard 17; The Ring Cycle 22 weddings 121 Weill, Kurt 112 Westernisation 2, 74, 109, 121–4, 125–7, 181–6, 188 women: and Chhau 26, 30–1; feminism 170; and human rights 15–16; lifestyle 71, 72; mother versus daughter-in-law theme 107; and Odissi dance 43; opera production 18; and Sankirtana 7–8, 10–16, 20; shows for 121, 124; Tamasha performers 76, 77–82, 78, 83–4, 85, 90–1, 97, 98, 98–9, 100, 102–3, 110, 119–20; Tamil proverb on 157; and Therukoothu 176, 178

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