www.nationalheraldindia.

com

28 JULY 2019 LIFE & LETTERS 9

KUTIYATTAM AND ITS
MANU V. DEVADEVAN ‘the centralized administrative structure of

T
the Cera Empire’. In Bruce M. Sullivan’s
he Kutiyattam theatre of Kerala is estimation, Kutiyattam ‘is the only
among the few classical art forms of surviving genre of classical Sanskrit

South Asia that confront us with a
strange paradox. It is a genre of
dance-drama that is at once nostalgically
familiar and frustratingly unintelligible.
There is an Arjuna on the stage, but it is
hard to say what he is up to. There is a
Laksmana and a Surpanakha, a Bhima, a
Jimutavahana, a Yaugandharayana, a
Vasantaka—characters that are known to
us as though they have been in
conversation with us for a long time. They
have, nevertheless, metamorphosed into
mysterious beings on the stage, doing
things that would have left the playwright
‘spinning in his grave like a dervish’.
Vasantaka in the Mantrankam of
Pratijnayaugandharayana has become
Kulukuttunni Sarmman, a gluttonous
brahmana jester who is, nonetheless,
believed to have attained Sivasarupyam
(likeness with Siva)! And the Bhima in the
Kalyanasaugandhikam has more
important offices to minister than bringing
Draupadi the flower she longs for. He has to
witness a python swallowing an elephant
in the forest and watch the appearance of a
lion that has reached there to intervene,
and he has to do these by playing all the
characters in the scene on stage—the
elephant, the python, the lion, and
Bhima—by transforming from the one to
the other through a method of acting
called pakarnnattam.
Kutiyattam is not a widely popular form
of performance; as a matter of fact, it has
never been one. However, it has been the
focus of considerable
academic and artistic
interest over the last Kutiyattam is
three decades,
especially after the seen as a
UNESCO declared it as
one of the Masterpieces self-constituted
of Oral and Intangible
Heritage of Humanity
world in itself
in May 2001. Funding
from the state and non-
governmental agencies
for promoting the art has increased in
recent years, resulting in rich
documentation, novel forms of
dissemination, and a series of ingenious
and inventive experimentations that
include staging the plays of Kalidasa
(which were not part of the traditional
Kutiyattam repertoire), and adaptations of
many other texts, such as the
Cilappatikaram, Macbeth, Heinrich von
Kleist’s Penthesilea, and twentieth-century
Malayalam poetry.
Scholarship on Kutiyattam has also
made progress, leading to several
important publications. While these
initiatives have been invaluable in their
own right, there is also no denying that our
understanding of Kutiyattam today is
hardly different in qualitative terms from
what it was in the 1970s or the 1980s.
Scholarly assessments have mostly been
descriptive in nature, and where this is not
the case, the question that has worried
scholars is whether or not the Kutiyattam
theatre constituted ritual.
This state of affair springs from two
basic methodological limitations in
existing approaches to the study of
Kutiyattam. Firstly, our knowledge of what
unfurls on the stage draws, almost entirely,
upon the present-day staging of
Kutiyattam. Performances in our times,
however, are neither located against the
backdrop of an agrarian political economy,
as they were in the sixteenth or the
seventeenth centuries, nor intertwined,
SEMANTIC UNIVERSE
Kutiyattam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually
performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years
dialogically or semantically, with the life-
world, self-understanding, values, and
cosmologies of the performers and their
patrons. Today’s Kutiyattam is an alienated
spectacle, objectified and removed from its
audience in tune with the commodity logic
that characterizes the capitalist political
economy. In this new form, Kutiyattam
carries considerable semantic weight from
the homologies drawn between the genre on
the one hand, and categories such as
‘tradition’, ‘Kerala theatre’, and ‘the oldest
surviving Sanskrit theatre’ on the other—
associations that are vital for understanding
any present-day staging of Kutiyattam, but
extra-epistemic when placed as templates to
make sense of its performance three or four
centuries ago. Secondly, existing studies do
not contextualize Kutiyattam in relation to
other forms of contemporary literary and
theatrical practices.
Nor do they place it against the backdrop
of the political economy in a compelling
Kutiyattam: Mantrankam and
manner. Kutiyattam is seen as a self-
constituted world in itself,
largely of a ritual nature.
Heike Oberlin and David
Where this is not the case,
discussions are limited to
a thin appraisal of the
patron-client relationship
that its performers had
established with the elites,
and tall talk on the long
tradition of playwriting
and performance—
beginning with the plays
ascribed to Bhasa, and the Natyasastra of
Bharata—from which the genre is believed to
have evolved.
That it is the only surviving Sanskrit
theatre in India is one of Kutiyattam’s claims
to popularity. It is, in Farley P. Richmond’s
assessment, ‘one of the oldest continuously
performed theatre forms in India, and it may
well be the oldest surviving art form of the
ancient world. Although the precise links
between it and the ancient Sanskrit theatre
have not yet been determined, kutiyattam is a
regional derivation of the pan-Indian
classical tradition, a bridge between the past
and the present.’
Also widespread is the belief that
Kutiyattam has been in practice for 2,000
years. ‘It can’t be ascertained whether this is
historically true’, writes Archana Verma, ‘but
there is at least evidence that in 1100 CE, king
Kulasekhara [ sic ] and his Brahmana
minister Tolan [ sic ] reformed the
performative acts of Kerala.’ Sober
assessments place the origins of Kutiyattam
in the age of the Ceraman Perumals (ca. 844–
1122 CE). Pragya Thakkar Enros observes
that Kutiyattam is ‘believed to have come into
TITLE: existence during the tenth century’. K.G.
Two Masterpieces of Paulose traces its beginnings to the historical
developments of tenth- and eleventh-century
Kerala.
Anguliyankam The changes brought about by King
Kulasekhara in the
EDITED BY:
eleventh century [ sic ] to
Shulman
the tradition of staging Sanskrit theatre
Sanskrit drama, Paulose
notes, was in fact not in Kerala goes
PUBLISHER: Kutiyattam. Only two
Oxford University Press centuries later, in the back to the
PAGES: 348
thirteenth century, did
Kulasekhara’s theatre
ninth century
PRICE: Rs 1795 metamorphose into
Kutiyattam.
This involved the
introduction of Malayalam—or Nampyar
Tamil, as it was called—for explaining the
meaning of the Sanskrit verses to the non-
Sanskrit audiences, the development of a
rural world centring on temples, and the
‘grand alliance’ that the brahmanas
successfully forged with the ruling elites and
intermediate groups following the collapse of
theater with an unbroken lineage
(parampara) of masters and pupils during
the last nine hundred years’.
These positions do not inspire confi
dence in the light of the evidence on hand.
The earliest reference to Kutiyattam that
we know of is from the kramadipika (stage-
manual) of the Bhagavadajjuka, 12 which
is not older than the sixteenth century. To
the same period belongs the Natankusa, a
text on dramaturgy that locks horns with
the Sanskrit theatre of its day in a puritan
spirit. No mention of Kutiyattam occurs in
any surviving text from the fourteenth, the
twelfth, or the ninth centuries. Nor do we
have indication in any source for
performance on a comparable scale.
Attempts to reconstruct a millennium-long
history of Kutiyattam are only banal—and
oftentimes patronizing—exercises of
reading retrospective evidence back into
time.
In a recent intervention, Heike Oberlin
has like many others argued, but on very
different grounds, that Kutiyattam dates
back to the eleventh/twelfth century.
Basing her argument on epigraphic
sources, she posits that the Nannyar and
Cakyar traditions of performance were
different from each other, that the former
was known in Kerala as early as the ninth
century, that the latter, known in Tamil
Nadu from very early times, was
introduced in Kerala only during the
twelfth century, that the two traditions
came together to form a distinct genre of
performance, and that
the word Kutiyattam,
literally ‘acting
together’, may refer to
this historical union.
This assessment is
remarkably original,
but no less conjectural.
No epigraphic source
from the ninth to the
twelfth century refers
to Kutiyattam by name,
nor are things associated with it, such as
the purappatu, the nirvahanam , the
kuttampalam stage, etc., mentioned.
Neither do the inscriptions persuade us
that performances extending over eleven,
thirty-five, or forty-one days were ever held
during this early period. Scholars and
performers of Kutiyattam generally believe
that ‘acting together’ refers to the coming
together of all actors, after the extended
preliminaries involving solo performances,
to present the play proper.
The story of Sanskrit theatre in Kerala
goes back to the ninth century, when a
playwright from the region, endowed with
a fertile imagination, wrote two plays, the
Unmadavasavadatta (which is lost) 16 and
the Ascaryacudamani. These plays marked
a new beginning. Saktibhadra, the
playwright, was aware of the novelty of his
enterprise. He began the Ascaryacudamani
with the observation that a play from the
south was as impossible as the blossoming
of a skyflower or the extraction of oil from
sand. This was certainly not an innocent
claim; for with the important exception of
the Pallava king, Mahendravarman, who in
the seventh century wrote the Mattavilasa
Prahasana and the Bhagavadajjuka, no
playwright is known to have existed in
South India before Saktibhadra’s time…
(Excerpted from Two Masterpieces of
Kutiyattam: Mantrankam and
Anguliyankam, edited by Heike Oberlin and
David Shulman, with permission from the
publisher)

BOOK REVIEW

Impressionism and a boy killing a bad man

Poomani’s characters are not righteous men with a cause. They just happen to react to whatever wrong is done to them
LUIS A. GÓMEZ killing a bad man will have to live on the run or be institutions of the state must be thought from below, with the surroundings while a new maturity springs
jailed. In that dichotomy lies the plot and the with care but passionately: inside him.

S tarts with a bang, sort of a bang: a young boy kills

a man with a sickle, and runs. The first few pages
of Heat are simply a violent moment that will unfold,
slowly, from the kid’s mind to the readers to help
them understand one of the simple reasons a person
has to chop an arm of another and then make a fatal
incision in his ribcage: vengeance. But Poomani, a
venerable figure of Tamil literature, will not spend
TITLE:
much words describing the killing or the escape;
Heat what comes after that shapes the entire book.
AUTHOR: Using cinematic resources, the author doesn’t
indulge in elaborate language or big analogies.
Poomani Austere and elegant, his style of writing sets actions
PUBLISHER: and dialogues almost naked. Pim, pum, pam! And
run, Chidambaram, you killed the man who got your
Juggernaut
brother murdered. Run and then throw one of the
PAGES: 264 homemade bombs you carry behind you, when you
PRICE: 499 see the pair of shadows following you, enhanced by
a bus’ lights. Like this, a reader will find sequences all
over Heat. Focusing on the light, the weather and
the landscape, the author will get you glancing at
the country, the hills, a little temple or a Banyan tree.
In some passages everything is almost frozen for a
page or two. Flashbacks will provide some rationale
to the killing, the anger of this boy, and the suffering
of his people.
Again, like the film director Poomani is, this book
flows over a week in the way a documentary would.
That said, in the afterword to the English edition, the
author not only recalls his own youth but one true
story of a 15 year old boy killing a man, just not the
end of it. Maybe because there is none yet to these
bloody anecdotes where a powerful rich man can kill
a boy without remorse or punishment but a boy
narrative of Heat. Anybody will find a story that
addresses the theme from various angles. One being
honour, for example, treated as poor people’s trove;
motivating a fierce but quiet demeanour, honour
leads to revenge, a way to settle a score with those
greedy persons who exploit them or grab their lands
by force. It’s not just about violence and an unjust
world. Because violence is not the boy’s brutal
behaviour but the privilege of the police, the judge,
these powerful land grabbers. This book deals more
with a community reacting to that privilege, refusing
to be simple ignorant victims. Heat sheds an
uncommon light on this: these poor farmers he
writes about haven’t lost what is theirs without
putting up a fight. That conflict is what Poomani and
many Indians know too well.
A few parables, an impressionist effect
P lanted in between the stages of Chidambaram
and his father’s escape, you will find short scenes
about little wonders and a few parables to be run in
your mind. Like the parable of the good thieves
pushed away from their agricultural life by bigger
fish. Or maybe the snake hunters the boy watches at
work. These scenes glue the main story as in an old
adventures novel. The exoticism lies tenderly in the
past, or in this world the young boy gets to know, it’s
never insulting or nostalgic.
In the same way, Poomani makes nature always
present, coping with human interventions.
Everything we built and do is ‘at risk’ of being
covered by foliage, ravaged by animals ... lost.
Then, we reach the core of Heat. Problematic as it
is, the disruption in the lives of ‘big men’ and the
So you say. What unnecessary trouble? Are we
inviting it? Shouldn’t there be a limit to the atrocities
these big men commit? If the landlords levy big fines
on wage labourers and swindle their earnings, how
will their families survive? If we try to put an end to
this practice, these landlords get a sprain in the groin.
Those government fellows are even worse. All thieves,
working hand-in-glove! And you call them great souls.
Great souls, my foot (p. 102).
But Poomani’s characters are not righteous men
with a cause. They just happen to react to whatever
wrong is done to them. That’s an added value
surging from the directness of the writer’s style, a
certain amorality, an ethos not derived from
imposed notions but from their common sense.
That’s more or less what impressionism was
during the last third of the Nineteenth century. A
detailed attention to the light and the foliage all
around, the ambience. That’s what Van Gogh had in
mind when, late in his life, decided to paint and
brush his version of the world over canvases. Or,
approaching Heat with literary examples, Anton
Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant, or Isaak Babel
and Boris Pilniak after the Russian Revolution.
Trying to produce art after the invention of
photography was not the art of resemblance but of
sensible memories, souvenirs of the heart.
In this voyage Chidambaram is forced to take, he
grows older by the day. Learning to cook by heart
or becoming stealthy around populated areas.
Discussing the situation with his dad and uncle.
Remembering his family and a life that looks lost in
time. Like that other boy in The Steppe, one of
Chekhov’s masterpieces, this poor Tamil kid marvels
‘This is a bad time for good people’
I t is indeed. In Heat democracy looks in decay from
below, contradicting the rosy outlook the state tries
to put over it. Rich people and have-nots were never
equals in front of any law. The boy written by
Poonami learns this the rough way (while on the run)
just like his father did and his grandfather before
them. Theirs is an unfair fight—sickle versus
money— they are willing to fight, nothing else to do.
The dialogues between Chidambaram and his
father, ranging from family to politics, are simple
and clear. People in the villages talk in the dark like
this when they gather at night to discuss the
important things of their little lives. They know
what makes a policeman’s lathi dance and the
judge stay put (money.) That’s how the system
works and they lose most of the times. Only the
cynical will deny that these officers never bring
justice or protection, as they should. Gross
generalization? Perhaps, it’s like thinking poor
people are ignorant or—worse—stupid.
But this is not a pamphlet or a work of socialist
realism. It’s a familial love tale, around a boy who
killed a man seeking revenge. A hideous thing for a
young person to do when, like Poomani states in
the afterword, his life should be like a garden
‘sheltered by the cool shade of affection.’ So maybe
we should think of this book as a compassionate
exposition of how people forced to live in the
lowest layers try to preserve their humanity. That’s
the rationale of their actions, killing if they must.
What about the heat? Well, if Poomani is right,
the heat is yet to come and burn it all.