Tradition · village street theatre
Terukkūttu
Also known as Terukkoothu, Koothu, Draupadi Amman cult, Terukkūttu — the Tamil street theatre
Street performance of Mahabharata episodes in the northern Tamil districts, staged through the night in the eighteen-day Draupadi festival cycle, with the Draupadi temple's fire-walking as its climax. Male actors play all parts in heavy makeup, wooden shoulder ornaments and painted crowns.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 12.230, 79.070
Worth knowing
The whole festival is a ritual of a cult of Draupadi as goddess, found only in this belt and in the Tamil settlements of Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the Caribbean that emigrants carried it to. The performance is not entertainment attached to the festival; the festival is the performance.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueMelattur Bhagavata Mela, Thanjavur
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.
- Shrine within cityGingee Fort
The Draupadi cult that terukkūttu belongs to is concentrated in the northern Tamil districts around Gingee, and its spread follows the old Gingee Nayaka and Vanniyar country almost exactly. Each village temple runs an eighteen-day festival ending in fire-walking, with the drama performed nightly through it. The cult is unknown in most of Tamil Nadu and unknown in north India, and it is the only substantial Draupadi worship anywhere.
- Devotional corpus onMahabharata
Terukkūttu stages the Mahabharata from the point at which Draupadi is humiliated, and the festival's climax — walking over fire — is read as her vow fulfilled. The episodes chosen, the eighteen days and the fire-walking together make an argument about the epic that no Sanskrit recension contains: Draupadi as the goddess whose anger drives the war, rather than as a queen it happens to. Tamil emigrants carried it to Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the Caribbean.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Terukkuttu”. Sangeet Natak Akademi documentation; UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage nomination files where the practice is listed.
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