Tradition · dance-drama tradition · India
Melattur Bhagavata Mela, Thanjavur
Also known as Melattur Bhagavata Mela, Melattur dance, Melattur dance-drama village, Thanjavur, drama village
The 400-year-old Melattur Bhagavata Mela dance-drama tradition at Melattur village in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu — the Vaishnava bhakti-centered dance-drama performance tradition established in 1502 by the Vijayanagara Brahmin community migrating from Vijayanagara to the Thanjavur Nayaka court. The Bhagavata Mela plays enact Vaishnava Puranic stories (particularly from the Bhagavata Purana) and are performed only by male Brahmin dancers of the Melattur village during the annual Narasimha Jayanti festival each May. The tradition's distinctive feature is its exclusively male-performer nature (male dancers playing female roles with distinctive costume and makeup — the stri-vesham tradition), its Sanskrit-Tamil bilingual script, and its sophisticated combination of dance (abhinaya), music (Carnatic) and dialogue. The tradition has only one living performance village — Melattur, with about 15 performer families. The 1980 Sangeet Natak Akademi recognition of Bhagavata Mela as a national tradition.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 10.850, 79.200
Connections (3)
- Companion in the same setKuchipudi village
Kuchipudi and Melattur are two village dance-drama traditions performed by Brahmin men in Telugu, both under grants from early modern rulers — a Golconda sultan for one, the Thanjavur Marathas for the other. Both survive as annual village performances as well as in the extracted stage forms. Melattur has never been staged commercially, and its Narasimha mask is treated as the deity rather than as a costume.
- AnalogueTerukkūttu
Two Tamil dramatic traditions that never met: Melattur Bhagavata Mela is a Brahmin village form in Telugu, performed once a year by a settlement of migrants from the Andhra country under Thanjavur patronage, and Terukkuttu is a non-Brahmin street form in Tamil attached to the Draupadi cult. Both stage epic episodes with men in all roles; they differ in language, caste, patron and audience, which is most of what the word tradition covers.
- Site adjacencyThanjavur Brihadishvara
Melattur Bhagavata Mela is performed in Melattur village, about twenty kilometres from Thanjavur city, each year during Narasimha Jayanti; it is tied to the Thanjavur Maratha court's patronage of refugee Telugu brahmin performers rather than to the Brihadishvara temple precinct.
On these journeys
- Classical dance geographies — court, temple, sattra, gharana, village
- Carnatic music memory — Vijayanagara to the Kaveri delta to Madras
Sources
Wikipedia, “Thanjavur”. Sangeet Natak Akademi documentation and the Nāṭyaśāstra commentarial tradition.
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