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Inside the Drama-House

University of California Press

This book describes the performance of a medieval text as shadow puppet play in a small corner of south India. The text is the Kamparamayanam , a Rama story composed in Tamil by Kampan, at the Chola court of Tanjore, probably in the twelfth century.1 The puppet play is today performed in the Palghat region of Kerala primarily by Tamil-speaking puppeteers in temple festivals dedicated to the goddess Bhagavati. The recontextualization of this epic text, eight centuries after its composition, into a new medium, in a rural, ritual setting and a new linguistic context, is the central theme of this book. Although I will emphasize the Kerala puppeteers' particular telling of the Rama story, especially through translations of their performances, I will also take up the wider issues of audience interaction, the interpretive role of oral commentary, and the intertextuality of Rama stories. In this initial chapter, I begin with audiences and then provide an introduction to Kampan's Rama story in Kerala. Imagine that (a medieval) Shakespeare was thought to exist only in libraries, until a performance tradition with local commentary was discovered somewhere in Wales; then add that the players perform for an absent audience; and you have the Kerala shadow puppet play.

Even if it had no relation to the medieval Tamil epic, the Kerala tradition is important because Indian shadow puppetry is little known both inside and outside the subcontinent. Like Buddhism, the art was thought to have vanished from its Indian birthplace as it migrated and flourished elsewhere in Asia. But Indologists debated whether references in old Sanskrit texts proved the existence of an ancient shadowpuppet play; if such a tradition had existed, where was it now?2 The answer came in 1935 when a German scholar saw a performance in Karnataka and, in an uncanny coincidence, an American journalist stumbled on another in Kerala. The vanishing act had been an illusion, and we know that Indian shadow puppetry is performed in Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh, and until recently, in Maharashtra and Orissa. The Kerala tradition was known to the outside world only by a handful of essays until 1986, when Dr. F. Seltmann published his excellent monograph.

Known as tol pava kuttu ("leather puppet play"), the shadow puppet theater in Kerala is never performed for one night, or for anything less than eight nights in succession. Night after night, for ten or twenty or even sixty consecutive nights, two or three men sit inside a small building and manipulate painted, perforated leather puppets, throwing shadows on a white cloth screen, chanting Kampan's verses and explicating them in a rambling commentary that is generated both by convention and the predilections of individual puppeteers. How these various pieces of the tradition?shadow puppetry, epic story, commentary, and festival?come together in this performance of a Tamil text in Kerala took me many years to understand, for the Rama story is multiple, the Kampan text vast, and the series of overnight performances monumental. Any single book intending to cover all these topics fully would fail (a translation of the performance sequence itself would exceed a thousand printed pages). The puppeteers claim it takes ten years to acquire the knowledge necessary for a skillful performance, warning that attempting to explain a verse "without first studying the old books is like a man trying to bind a wild elephant with a wet lotus stalk."3 A few lotus stalks have surely slithered through my hands in the past decade, but I believe that enough of the elephant has been bound for me to write this book about a text and its new audiences.

Nothing, however, had prepared me for my first full shadow-puppet-play performance, in January 1984, and had someone told me that I would spend the next ten years attempting to understand it, I might not have made the trip. As I hurried along narrow, dark roads toward the village of Suhavaram in central Kerala in a taxi with five puppeteers who were to perform there that night, my thoughts ran on a single track?"How much sleep will I lose? When will I return in the morning? I said I'd be back around midnight, but they've now told me that it will be daybreak before we even leave this place I've yet to see." The puppeteers were asleep in the rumbling auto?Krishnan Kutty, the senior puppeteer; his two sons, aged sixteen and eighteen; and two assistants, Sankara Nayar and Narayana Nayar.

I met Krishnan Kutty in 1978 when I wandered into a large auditorium in Bangalore, the computer capital of modern India, during a national festival of shadow puppetry; I was supposed to be attending a Fulbright Conference for grantees, but shadow puppets seemed more interesting. Stumbling onto his spirited performance in that artificial setting, I was intrigued, for it seemed that the story had something to do with Rama?in Tamil, in Kerala. Tamil I knew, from my first trip to India in 1970-72 as a Peace Corps volunteer (when I had to learn the language well enough to speak it faster than my friends spoke English), from later research trips, and from graduate school at Berkeley. Kerala, too, was familiar to me since I had done field work on its border with Tamil Nadu for an earlier book, but the Malayali temple festivals, food, and language were unfamiliar. Of the Rama story, I knew only the barest outline?his exile, the loss of his wife, her recapture from Ravana in Lanka, and something about Hanuman, the monkey who aided Rama. More than this, all those other names and episodes, which everyone else seemed to know, blurred into a jumble of sounds and kinship relations. But shadow puppetry in Kerala?wasn't that the premier performing art of Java and Bali? This intrigued me, so I scribbled down a few notes and returned to the Fulbright meeting, full of questions that I failed to pursue until, six years later, my wife and I visited her son, who was training as a Kathakali dancer in central Kerala. Michael casually mentioned that some puppeteers lived nearby; the next day I found Krishnan Kutty's home, and he immediately invited me to the performance that very night at Suhavaram.

The taxi, puppeteers still snoring, reached Suhavaram about ten o'clock. Suhavaram is a small village of Tiyar agricultural workers and a few Nambutiri Brahmins in the far western reaches of the puppet-play region, on the banks of the Ponani River, not far from the town of the same name, where the river flows into the Arabian Sea. When we arrived, it was pitch-dark and chilly, but the large area in front of the temple was buzzing with activity, hissing with bright kerosene lamps, and booming with loud temple music. Climbing out of the taxi, I was drawn to a performance of Ottan Tullal, in which a dancer recites mythic stories in Malayalam, but my companions showed no interest: "Sure, have a look," they said begrudgingly and then lifted the huge woven basket containing their puppets from the trunk of the taxi and lugged it toward the drama-house (kuttu matam ).

Standing off to the side, at an angle to the Bhagavati temple, the small drama-house did not catch my attention at first; from a distance, anyone might mistake its red-tiled roof, wooden rafters, and whitewashed walls for a modest home or shop. Only the long, open front, where the white cloth screen hangs down at night, marks this oblong structure as a stage...