The evening throbs with the fervent beats of traditional drums. The tall brass lamp on the stage flickers ominously as Lakshmana looks in awe at Surpanakha. The demoness is disguised as a beautiful woman — described as a jewel with long, dark eyes, bow-like eyebrows and full rounded breasts. Struck by the arrows of Kama, the god of love, he swoons. Moments later, regaining consciousness, Rama’s brother — who later mutilates the demoness — vows to toughen up. “How can I be so weak,” he asks himself and, with steely resolve, looks at her again. Something transforms in the actor’s green painted face, his dramatic eyes and wobbling red lips. The infatuation is gone, leaving behind just the ugliness of contempt.
A new turn is about to take place in the play, unfurling in slow movement at the India International Centre in the Capital. A small enthralled audience sits on the edge of their chairs as they watch Kutiyattam, an ancient Sanskrit theatre form gasping for breath.
The variations in rhythms give the audience a sense of the mood and time in a particularly complex, non-verbal form of storytelling. The
It’s not often that theatre lovers in Delhi get to watch a Kutiyattam performance. Elements of this art go back 2000 years to the Natyasastra. It is one of the most ancient living theatrical traditions known to India. The Lakshmana story was part of a recent six-day Kutiyattam festival, organised by Sahapedia, an online cultural resource, in collaboration with CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) and Seher, an NGO promoting performing and visual arts.
“It was once a thriving art form, kept alive by the temples. But there are just some 90 artistes across Kerala to carry forward the tradition. These include the drummers, actors, make-up artists and those who recite the verses,” says Margi Madhu, one of the celebrated proponents of the art form.
Madhu is a founder of Nepathya, a Kutiyattam centre operating since 1998 in central Kerala’s Moozhikulam village, where the art flourished for several generations. He and his team from Nepathya were in Delhi to perform Surpanakhankam (the second act of Saktibhadra’s Ascharyachudamani ).
“You can say I started training in Kutiyattam from the time I was in my mother’s womb,” says Madhu, whose father, the Kutiyattam legend Moozhikulam Kochukuttan Chakyar, initiated several leading dancers into the art, before breathing his last in 2009.
To a layperson, a Kutiyattam performance looks similar to Kathakali, a 300-year-old dance form. But experts point out that the similarity is only skin deep, mostly confined to attire, make-up, eye movements and hand mudra s. While Kathakali is a dance drama, Kutiyattam is theatre with very little movement. Often the actor will be sitting on a wooden stool, narrating a story in flashback, with just hand gestures, minute facial expressions and a heaving chest. Unlike in Kathakali, women have traditionally been a part of Kutiyattam.
The most palpable difference between the two, however, is pace. In Kathakali, a story is performed over one night. But one act of a single play in Kutiyattam can span several nights. The seven acts of Saktibhadra’s Ascharyachudamani pan over 120 nights.
There is often a story within a story, holding multiple narratives. The only clue the audience has to the plot is a hand-out distributed ahead of each day’s performance, and a few texts, usually just a sentence or two, displayed on a screen beside the stage. The play has no dialogues except in the end, and those are in Sanskrit verses.
Earlier, Kutiyattam was performed only at temple rituals. The temples offered both social and economic protection to Kutiyattam artistes, who performed through the year at various rituals and festivals. Post-Independence, the temples lost their financial power and the art stood bereft of the steady support it once enjoyed.
Today, artistes such as Madhu have been compelled to look for avenues outside Kerala. In July, the team at Nepathya performed at the World Sanskrit conference in Vancouver, Canada, and there were performances in parts of Europe. But such opportunities are rare, and Madhu points out that earning a living with Kutiyattam is a constant struggle.
“A day’s performance of 2-3 hours by a five- or seven-member troupe fetches us only ₹25,000-30,000,” Madhu says.
On the other hand, the art demands highly rigorous training. Kutiyattam artistes have to train for 10-15 years before they can perform in public, unlike in some of the other classical dance forms where artistes can perform after a few years of training and gain financial stability when they are still in their prime of life. “We struggle to retain the depth of the art,” says Kutiyattam artiste G Indu, who teaches Malayalam in a government school near Moozhikulam, where she lives.
Let it linger
There are three parts to a Kutiyattam performance. It begins with Purappadu (entry of the first character and his or her recapitulation, or offering different views of a back story). In Nirvahanam , an actor takes on the roles of several characters. The performance ends with Kutiyattam , told in the present tense, where more than one character appears on stage and interacts by way of dialogues, much like a familiar but more stylised form of theatre.
Kutiyattam is not for those in a hurry. The conflicts that raged within Lakshmana took 30 minutes of stage time. This, says Indologist and Kutiyattam expert David Shulman, underlines the “radical deep personalisation” of each character, integral to the art.
When Surpanakha, in search of a husband, approaches Rama once again, after once being tossed from Rama to Lakshmana, she tells him that she has transgressed her own modesty. Rama sending her to Lakshmana a second time replies, “Lovely one, do not think so. It is proper for a woman to approach a man. Even Ganga, happily ensconced in Siva’s matted hair, goes to the sea, who has several wives.” Once she leaves, Rama turns to his wife and unflinchingly says, “Dear Sita, it is not good to align oneself with women of loose virtue. It was just a strategy to send her away.”
Shulman, regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Indian languages and Kutiyattam, terms the art form “infinitely more radical than anything you’ll find”. The professor emeritus at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem tells BL ink , “The play offers a very sympathetic portrait of Surpanakha.”
Shulman’s link with Kutiyattam is an old and abiding one. In 2006, he watched Indu perform the Pootanamoksha , the story of the demoness Pootana, who tries to kill baby Krishna with poisoned breast milk. “It seemed to me the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I guess it was some sense of this unbelievable richness, going deep into the past,” he recalls.
It was after this that he visited Moozhikulam. “That was when we saw the art hanging by a thread. The artistes lament that they’re trained for full-scale performances of 20-160 hours. But today they are forced to make do with two-hour slots,” says Shulman.
He went back to his university and made a case for a grant of $10,000 as seed money to enable his advanced Sanskrit students to visit Kerala to watch full performances and to remunerate the artists. But patrons like Shulman are rare.
Time travel
“My only tension is time. When I am up on stage, I feel like I control its pace in some way,” says Indu. Instead of crunching 4-5-hour acts into two-and-a-half hours, she helps showcase the best scenes for a busier modern audience. “This way we keep the pace intact,” explains Indu, who masterfully transformed from Rama to Sita as a narrator on the opening day.
In 2008, Kutiyattam was recognised by Unesco as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. A few institutions were given a one-time grant. “The recognition gave more support for research on Kutiyattam. But for artistes like us, it did little to improve our financial situation,” says Madhu.
The Unesco recognition, however, led to heightened public awareness. Government bodies have done their bit. The Sangeet Natak Akademi now has a Kutiyattam Kendra, which gives a monthly remuneration of ₹8,000-13,000 to artistes, depending on experience and seniority.
The artistes stress the need for financial and vocational help. They want the Kerala government to provide them with teaching vacancies, which, they believe, will help both the performers and the art survive. Right now, most exponents are juggling their passion between odd jobs.
“These are national treasures that the government can protect for a tiny sum of money,” says Shulman. The Kutiyattam repertoire today consists of just 15-20 full-scale performances. “That’s not as large as the repertoire that existed 500 years ago. Of Ascharyachudamani ’s seven acts, only three or four are performed today. The remaining stopped being performed by the middle of the 20th century,” explains Shulman.
Aficionados worry about the future. Kutiyattam artistes can perform as long as they are able-bodied. Madhu’s father had performed even in his 90s. Indu and Madhu are in their 40s. The road is long and the magical lives on stage are running out of breath. If help comes any later, it may be too little, too late.
Shriya Mohan