Journey
Possession, mask and shadow — the ritual theatres
Performances in which a man becomes a god, or a puppet is shown to a goddess who has no audience, or an actor stops the plot for a fortnight. These are temple and village institutions rather than stage arts, and in several of them the performer comes from a caste that could not otherwise enter the house he is blessing.
Stops (10)
- Teyyam, north Malabar · Teyyam — Kannur and Kasaragod
A performer of a Dalit or other subordinate caste puts on painted face and towering headgear and, for the hours of the performance, is the deity: he gives oracles, blesses, and is addressed as god by the landowning families who employ him. There are several hundred teyyams, many of them people killed unjustly.
- Būta Kōla, Tulu Nadu · Būta Kōla — Tulu Nadu
Hereditary Nalike, Pambada and Parava performers possessed by Panjurli, Koragajja or Kallurti, dancing with torches to drumming through the night, and then judging land and family disputes in the spirit's voice — a binding judgement, accepted by people who would not accept a court's.
- Mutiyēṭṭu, central Kerala · Mutiyēṭṭu — the Muvattupuzha and Periyar villages
A Kali drama in which the goddess is first drawn on the floor in coloured powders, worshipped, and then danced out of existence by the performer who becomes her, wiping the drawing away with his own body as the possession takes hold. UNESCO-listed in 2010.
- Yakṣagāna, coastal Karnataka · Yakṣagāna — Udupi and the Tulu coast
All-night theatre with painted headgear and a singer-director who narrates and argues with his actors. Its heart is the arthagarike, an unscripted spoken debate in which two actors argue the ethics of the night's episode for hours before a village audience that decides who had the better case.
- Kūṭiyāṭṭam · Kūṭiyāṭṭam — the temple theatres
The oldest continuously performed theatre in India, given by hereditary Chakyar actors in the kuttambalam halls of Kerala temples. In the nirvahanam a character halts the plot to mime his entire previous life, so a Sanskrit play of a few pages can run a fortnight. UNESCO-listed in 2001.
- Tōlpāvakkūttu, Palakkad · Tōlpāvakkūttu — Palakkad and Thrissur
Leather puppets against an oil-lamp screen in a permanent shed beside Bhadrakali temples, performing the Tamil Kamba Ramayanam over as many as twenty-one nights with Malayalam commentary. It is offered to the goddess, and held whether or not anyone is watching.
- Chhau, Seraikela and Mayurbhanj · Chhau — Seraikela, Mayurbhanj and Purulia
Three masked dances of the Jharkhand–Odisha–Bengal border built on weapons drill and performed at the spring Chaitra Parva. Seraikela's was a court form danced by the ruling family, which toured Europe in 1938; Purulia's, a hundred kilometres away, is a loud village form with enormous masks.
- Terukkūttu · Terukkūttu — the northern Tamil country
Night-long street performance of Mahabharata episodes within the eighteen-day Draupadi festival, ending in fire-walking. The cult of Draupadi as goddess exists only in this belt and in the places Tamil emigrants took it — Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Caribbean. The festival is the performance, not its occasion.
- Ramman, Saloor Dungra · Ramman — Saloor Dungra, Chamoli
A masked April festival held in one pair of Garhwal villages, where each mask belongs to a particular family and may be worn only by a particular caste. UNESCO listed it in 2009 for those two villages alone, because the practice is inseparable from their specific social arrangement.
- Ottan Thullal · Ottan Thullal — Kunchan Nambiar’s answer
A one-man Malayalam dance-monologue in fast colloquial verse, invented in the eighteenth century as a deliberate opposite to temple theatre: vernacular rather than Sanskrit, outdoors rather than inside, cheap, quick and openly rude about officials, temple servants and the learned.