THEATER IN INDIA

Temporal location of the development of his performing art and social

context of the time

Theater is an ancient practice in India. According to the Natyashastra, an

ancient treatise on dramatic art compiled between 2000 BC and the 2nd century,
theater was a gift from the gods to men. There is also evidence of the golden
period of Indian theater that lasted until the 5th century, shortly after the decline
of Sanskrit drama.

Although there was a break in dramatic literature, the performing tradition

remained through dance, music, singing and storytelling, transforming through
folklore and classical forms.

Modern Indian theater as it is known now has been marked by different sources.
Western influence did not reach this country until the late 18th century at the
time of the consolidation of the British Empire.

In 1830 the first spoken work in Bengali was carried out, which broke with the
usual format of the time. However, popular traditions, costumbrista theater and
other performative genres have been present throughout its history.

Main genres and styles developed, Main characteristics of staging, Main

themes that were talked about

One of the important sources for the study of Indian theater is the treatise on
dramaturgy, dance and music called Nātyaśāstra, written in Sanskrit which, due
to the difference in styles, must have been the product of various authors over
many years. In its 36 chapters, the rules for writing and performing a play are
stated in great detail, which demonstrates a fairly developed theatrical tradition.
The text begins with the origin of the drama and describes the theaters, the
gestures and movements of the actors, the use of language, the elements of the
plot, the makeup and the costumes.

The oldest theatrical form in India is Sanskrit Drama, described in detail in the
Natyasastra, a treatise attributed to Bharata and whose date of writing ranges,
according to different researchers, between the year 200 BC and 200 AD In this
work of thirty-six chapters, reference is not only made to the mythological origin
of theater, but also many of its aspects are discussed, such as interpretation,
theatrical architecture, costumes, dramaturgy, music, company organization,
staging, etc. Furthermore, it can be considered the first writing in which the
necessary presence in the companies of the stage director is explicitly
mentioned, which in the Sanskrit text is called sutradhara. Among the various
authors of this type of theater whose dramas have come down to us, such as
Bhasa, Sudraka or Bhavabhuti, the genius of Kalidasa, sometimes compared to
Shakespeare and whose most relevant writing is The Recognition of Sakuntala,
stands out. This text is still frequently performed today on Hindu soil and is
inspired by various passages from the endless Mahabharata, which, together
with Ramayana and Puranas, makes up the list of sources from which the
arguments of Sanskrit dramas are nourished. Starting in the 10th century AD,
this scenic form experienced an unstoppable decline, parallel to the political and
military decline of the castes that supported it. Today, a single Sanskrit theatrical
form typical of the Kerala region survives: Kutiyattam or Koodiyattam.
Recognized in 2001 by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible
Heritage of Humanity, it was traditionally part of the rituals carried out in temples
and its performances are normally carried out in a koothambalam or
kuttampalam, built according to the guidelines established in the Natyasastra.
One act of a Kutiyattam play can last for forty days, with performances extending
from approximately nine at night until, sometimes, three in the morning. Each act
is divided into three parts: Poorvangam (or preamble), Nirvahanam (individual
passages in which the characters introduce themselves and usually relate their
past) and Koodiyattam (in which the performers act together). Among the many
peculiarities of Kutiyattam, the fact that it is one of the few theatrical forms in
which men (traditionally belonging to the priestly caste known as Chakyar) and
women (ancestrally the ladies of the Nambiyar community called Nangiar) act
jointly. ). Likewise, the presence of the Vidooshaka or Vidushaka (Royal Jester)
is curious, who in a comical way glosses to the audience the events that unfold
in the drama. There are various forms derived from the Kutiyattam such as the
Kuttu or Koothu, in which a single actor represents all the characters of the
drama trying to highlight its moral message, the Nangiar Koothu, where only one
actress acts and in which the stories are extracted from the Sree. Krishna
Charitam that recounts the life of Krishna, or the Chakyar or Prabhandam Kuttu,
only performed by the ironic Vidushaka.

Among the recent masters of this art, Ammannoor Madhava Chakia could
perhaps be highlighted, considered one of the greatest exponents of Kutiyattam.
Usha Nangiar, one of his disciples, along with Kunjipaalykutty Nangiaramma,
are esteemed as two of the great performers of Nangiar Koothu. There are also
various training centers, most of which form theater companies. Ammannoor
himself founded his own school Chachu Chakiar Smaraka Gurukulam, and a
disciple of his, Gopal Venu, did the same with Natana Kairali. This institution
also includes Natanakaisiki, a research center created in 1979 by Nirmala
Paniker and dedicated to dances and theatrical forms performed by women,
such as Mohiniyattam, Nangiar Koothu or Thiruvathira Kali. Along with these
entities,
Kerala Kalamandalam, which has its own koothambalam, has become a major
educational center where regular five-year courses are held for students who
begin their training at the age of thirteen. In the school not only Kutiyattam is
taught but other Hindu theater forms such as Kathakali, Mohiniyattam or Thullal
are also taught. For its part, Margi, an institution established in 1970, has two
training centers and companies dedicated to the practice of Kutiyattam and
Kathakali respectively.
After the decline of Sanskrit drama, from the 15th century onwards, countless
theatrical practices that made use of the vernacular languages of each region
began to appear in the different Hindu communities. All of these stage forms
differ enormously in terms of interpretation, costumes, makeup or conventions.
Those that developed in the south of the country placed special emphasis on
dance, such as Kathakali or Krishnattam from Kerala, while those that
developed in the north emphasized singing, such as Khyal from Rajasthan,
Nautanki from Uttar Pradesh, Maach of Madhya Pradesh or the Svanga of
Punjab. Styles also emerged in which dialogue had a preeminent role, such as
the Bhavai of Gujarat, the Tamasha of Maharastra or the Jatra of Bengal. Of all
these theatrical forms of rural origin, perhaps the best known internationally is
Kathakali. The actors in this discipline traditionally belonged to the Nair, a caste
of soldiers trained in the martial art of Kalarippayattu, and were exclusively men.
In it

Kathakali there are three kinds of performers: the actor-dancers, the two singers
and the percussionists. The story is told through the lyrics of the ballads sung by
the rhapsodes, which include both third-person narrations and first-person
dialogues, as also occurs with the Gidayû chants of Japanese Bunraku. The
unique movements of the body, the unlimited expressiveness of the face and,
above all, the six hundred coded gestures that the dancers make with their
hands also help to understand the story. In Kathakali, Chutti is also of capital
importance, the colorful and complex makeup of the dancers that has nothing to
envy of that of Japanese Kabuki. Kathakali programs, which may consist of a
selection of relevant passages from several pieces or a complete work, usually
begin at dusk and conclude at dawn. There are many great Kathakali actors that
could be named such as Kalamandalam Gopi, Kottakal Sivaraman or Gopi
Asan. In addition to the training centers and companies mentioned above, in
Kerala there are others such as Kalanilayam and there are even institutions
dedicated to this art outside Hindu borders, such as the Kala Chethena
Kathakali Company, based in the United Kingdom and founded by the actor
Kalamandalam Vijayakumar. and by makeup artist Kalamandalam Barbara
Vijayakumar. We could not conclude this article without mentioning the copious
Hindu puppet theater. It includes different types of shadow theater such as
Gombeyatta, Ravana Chhaya, Pavaikuthu or Tollu Bommalu; glove puppets
such as Gopalila, Pavai Koothu or Pavai Kathakali, which, as its name indicates,
includes characters from the Kathakali repertoire; of string puppets like Sakhi
Kundhei or Kathputli; and rod puppets like Putul Nautch or Bommalattam.
Among current puppet manipulators one could perhaps name, among many
others, S. Seethalakshmi or Ranganatha Rao. And so we come to the end of a
hopelessly unfinished article. In the pipeline we are left not only with countless
institutions, companies, professionals and festivals, but also an infinity of
traditional theatrical and paratheatrical forms that still survive in India. Suffice it
to mention that only in the region of Kerala, the aforementioned coexist with
others such as the Margomkali or the Chavittunatakom, with Christian roots, the
Oppana or the Du muttu, with Muslim overtones, the Mohiniyattom, the
Kakkarissi Natakom or the Th iruvathirakali. Thanks to the work of institutions
such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi (National Academy of Music, Dance and
Drama), located in New Delhi and founded in 1953, the dissemination and
conservation of these performing styles is increasing. We only have to extend
this trip to get to know them. Here remains, then, this unfinished sketch of what,
if they dare, they can discover the work of the Indian playwright and the different
reactions that the text provoked in Europe.

In the 10th century AD. C., Sanskrit theater declined and practically ceased to
be a performed literary form. However, in southern India, a style of theater called
kūtiyāttam is practiced, in which actors use the stage conventions of classical
dance and perform ancient Sanskrit plays. The performers consider themselves
heirs of the old theatrical tradition.

The Theater in India, written in Sanskrit, already in the 5th century BC It had
important authors, such as Kalidasa (1st century AD), who has influenced the
West with his piece “Shakuntala”, which has been taken up by some European
authors. In the Indian Theater a form was generated, called Kathakali, which
was born in the 17th century in Kerala, in the southwest of India. Kathakali is
based on mythological texts, such as the poems of the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana, Hindu sacred books. The fundamental peculiarity of this Theater is
that there is no speaking in its performances, and the actors develop their
expression through total control of the body, dance, eye exercises, facial
gestures, etc.

One of the best-known authors of Sanskrit literature is Kālidāsa, who wrote three
plays: Abhijñ ā naś ā kuntalam [The Recognition of Śākuntalā], Vikramorvaśīya
[Urvaśī, Won with Courage] and Mā lavik ā gnimitra [Mālavikā and Agnimitra ].
Furthermore, he wrote poems: Raghuvam ś a [The race of

Raghu], Kum ā ra-sambhava [The Birth of Kumāra], Meghadūta [The Messenger

Cloud] and Rtusamhara [Cycle of Seasons], although the authorship of the latter
is a matter of dispute.

Kālidāsa has been associated with the court of King Candragupta II of Uyajinnī;
This king belonged to the Hindu Gupta dynasty, which ruled a part of India from
320 to 540 AD. c. The Gupta period is considered a golden age due to the
flourishing of arts and sciences.

Play 2 is classified as nātaka (heroic comedy) in the Indian tradition, the most
common of the 10 types of drama that distinguish dramaturgy treatises; the
Nātyaśāstra defines it as a "work whose theme is a well-known story; its hero is
a famous person of excellent nature; it describes the character descended from
a king, his multiple supernatural powers, exploits and amorous successes"
(Nātyaśāstra, XX, 10 -eleven).

It tells the story of Śākuntalā, 3 daughter of a nymph and a royal sage: the
newborn girl is abandoned by her mother and raised by the ascetic Kanva
in an āśram 4 in the forest. Years later, King Dusyanta goes hunting, enters
Kanva's aśram , who is absent, and runs into the beautiful young
Śākuntalā. The king takes advantage of the absence of Śākuntalā's tutor,
and convinces her to enter into a Gandharva marriage. 5 Śākuntalā accepts
on the condition that, if a child is born of the union, he must be entitled to
the royal title. The king promises the young woman that it will be so, and
returns to his kingdom.

Śākuntalā becomes pregnant and gives birth to a boy named Bharata; So,
she goes in search of her husband. Finding him, Dusyanta pretends not to
remember Śākuntalā, rejects her and speaks harshly to her. She asks the
king to keep his promise, and extols to him the importance of marriage
and the conception of a child. In the end, Dusyanta recognizes Bharata
and honors his wife Śākuntalā.

This well-known story 6 was used by Kālidāsa for his drama; However, he
made some changes: in Kālidāsa's work, Dusyanta promises Śākuntalā,
after her marriage, that he will send someone from the palace to pick her
up from the āśram and leaves her a ring with his name on it. She must wait
a number of days equal to the number of letters written on the ring. An
ascetic arrives at the āśram and wishes to be attended to, but Śākuntalā,
distracted by her amorous reverie, does not notice his presence. The
ascetic becomes angry and curses her: the person she thinks of will forget
her, but when he sees the ring, he will remember her. Śākuntalā, pregnant
and tired of waiting for the king's messenger, decides to go to her
husband's palace. Along the way, the ring falls into a river and is eaten by
a fish. When the young woman meets her husband, he does not remember
her. Later, a fisherman finds the ring, which finally ends up in the hands of
the king who, upon seeing it, remembers his wife. In the end, Śākuntalā
and Dusyanta are reunited with their son Bharata. Thus, Kālidāsa
transformed the cruel character of the Mah ā bh ā rata, and invented the
ring incident to justify Dusyanta's rejection of Śākuntalā. 7

In Sanskrit theater there is no tragedy: the endings are always happy and the
protagonists are perfect. The strict rules of this theatrical tradition are stated in
dramaturgy treatises. This scheme limited playwrights and forced them to look
for other ways to express their creativity. The plot of Śākuntalā is quite simple,
but that does not prevent Kālidās from describing in great detail the loving
feelings of the two characters. Sanskrit theater uses prose and verse, and the
genius of the author of Śākuntalā is shown in the complicated and varied meters
he uses in his verses, in the descriptions of the beauty of the characters, of
nature and in the comparisons between elements natural and human.
Like almost everything in India, theater and the different dramatic forms of the
Hindu continent, such as dance-theater, shadow theater and others, are in one
way or another closely linked to the different religions that coexist there and,
within the themselves, to the multiple currents and interpretations that have
emerged throughout its history. In this way art, at least originally, is considered
as a means of symbolic knowledge, and within Hindu aesthetic theory the
different expressive forms of art are taken as the manifestation not of a random
whim of the artist, but as a means of penetration into traditional wisdom, that is,
as a means capable of revealing knowledge of the sacred.

There exists, therefore, in all forms of this art a symbolic vocabulary that leads to
a non-ordinary knowledge of reality, in short, to a knowledge of the realities of
the spirit that, furthermore, cannot be arbitrarily separated from the material or
utilitarian reality of the artistic object. In Hindu art, the beauty of forms is not
gratuitous nor is it exclusively the product of a refined technique or mental
analysis, but, on the contrary, it is a consequence of an intimate demand that
leads the artist to reveal within himself a spiritual capacity that allows you to
gestate or conceive the forms that you are going to shape. In other words, the
artist polishes himself through his work and in the same proportion as he
discovers his own intimate and radical nature, he increasingly perfects his
external work.

In this way, art becomes, in its origin, a kind of yoga (Yoga understood as the
most effective practical preparation to undertake any undertaking and not as a
mere mental exercise or as a religious discipline) which, in this case, has to
allow the individual – both the artist and the viewer – to momentarily recover the
unity of his being with the world, freeing him from his own individuality through
aesthetic experience, thanks to which it is possible to feel the emotion of the
divine essence through of intuition and not through reason.

Thus, we have the determinants or vibhava, which are the aesthetic problem,
the argument, the theme, etc. (the hero and the other characters, the conditions
of time and place); The consequents or anubhava also act, which are the
gestures and other movements and, in general, the deliberate manifestations of
feelings; also the bhava or moods, both the transitory ones, which are induced in
the characters through pleasure and pain (joy, restlessness, impatience... and
so on up to thirty-three different coded types), and the states of permanent
moods (nine in total, and which coincide with the nine existing types of rasa);
Lastly, involuntary emotions or sattvabhava, which are the emotional states
originating in the internal nature, the involuntary expressions of different
emotions (such as horror, shuddering, etc... and up to eight in total).

According to Coomaraswamy, for a work to be rasavant, for it to evoke rasa, it

must be unitary: one of the permanent moods or any two rasas combined must
constitute the governing motif to which all other expressions of mood must be
subordinated. emotion. If, on the other hand, a transitory emotion becomes the
main motif of a work and therefore develops excessively, such emotion tends
towards the absence of rasa because the work becomes sentimental, when the
importance of art lies in the feeling and not in sentimentality. On the other hand,
we must differentiate, when talking about rasa, when we are referring only to a
codification that simply categorizes and differentiates (this is the case of the nine
types of rasa) and when we refer to the beauty, rasa, that is savored, out of
empathy, feeling the permanent motif of the work but not identifying with the
permanent motif itself. In other words, in Hindu art the aesthetic experience is
independent of moral pleasure or sensual pleasure and, sometimes, even of the
aesthetic qualities of the work.

Thus, the vision of beauty, the enjoyment of rasa, can be appreciated, according
to Visvanatha, only by those who are capable of it, and he states: “In the theater,
those who lack imagination are like pieces of wood, the walls or the stones.” For
this author, the capacity and genius necessary for the appreciation of beauty are
partly innate and partly acquired, although education alone is of no use, because
in the same way that the poet is born, so is the poet born. Rasika. In Hindu art
the viewer's appreciation of beauty depends on the effort of his or her own
imagination. Dhanamjaya, in his Dasarupa, states that the permanent motif of a
work is transformed into rasa thanks to the rasika's own capacity to be delighted,
and not "by the exemplifying power of the character of the hero who is
represented, nor because the work is intended to produce an aesthetic emotion”
( 9 ). In Hindu art, aesthetic emotion (or rasasvadana) can never be an object of
knowledge because its perception is inseparable from its existence, because
beauty, in other words, has no other existence than its perception. On the other
hand, if beauty is the reality experienced by the artist, only through the objective
work of art can he communicate his experience, using any theme he considers
appropriate, since beauty (which together with love and the truth is the three
facets of the absolute) manifests itself equally everywhere and in all things.

In short, what Hindu aesthetics establishes (and its theater seeks) is to achieve
that psychological state that allows access to the true reality that is outside the
confines of one's own everyday reality.

The ritual implies a deepening into the essence of the universe explained in the
Vedic and later writings, so that it operates as an access to the unintelligible, as
a door to effective freedom, that located beyond the narrow scope of what we
believe to be and beyond what we think surrounds us.

For its part, Kathakali, more recent, is a form of “dance theater” that emerged
approximately three hundred years ago in southern India, where dance, music,
mime and singing are combined in a show whose performances generally last
for an entire night and whose theme is based on episodes taken from the great
Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Its complex series of
movements and gestures is also established by the BharatiyaNatyashastra and,
as in the previous case, it was “reanimated” at the beginning of the 20th century
in the Kerala Kalamandalam, a center created by the poet Vallathol in the city of
Kerala.

Influence of the country's performing art on the rest of the world

Indian theater can not only provide us with theatrical mechanisms that influence
our way of doing theater and conceiving art (as happened with Artaud, Craig,
Brecht, Grotowski, Brook, etc., each of them collecting different elements,
whether formal, very philosophical), but it can also make us dive into our own
cultural baggage in search of those conceptions of the world that, because they
were not practical materially speaking, were relegated to the depths of our
rational natures. Now that we know again that human beings are much more
than pure reason, and that we are absolutely subject to a thousand and one
conditions of all kinds, theater is – it should be – reflection, search, renewal and
pleasure.