All hands on stage!

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1998 by Ratnamala Nori, Ethirajan Anbarasan

The media explosion left traditional Indian puppetry without a leg to stand on, but now a revival may be on the way

Chalapathi Rao learnt how to handle puppets even before he learnt his alphabet. In the last five decades, he and his troupe have staged innumerable puppet shows in India and other parts of the world including twenty-three performances in Germany and two in New York. Today, the fifty-eight-year-old artist from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh makes ends meet not by his artistry but by selling lampshades and small handicrafts. "We used to give as many as fifteen performances a month during my father's time," he recalls. "Now we only perform for four months a year and go no further than our neighbouring villages. For the rest of the time we survive by selling handicrafts." Rao is one of the thousands of once popular traditional puppeteers in the Indian sub-continent who have been swept away by the mass media explosion.

A popular art form with a long tradition in India, puppetry seems to have been first mentioned in the ancient Tamil epic Silappadikaram (second century BC). It has been and still is an effective tool for communicating religious, political and social messages. Puppeteers, who always moved around from place to place, mostly used ancient Indian epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha as their themes, and their shows were a regular feature of religious and local festivals, wedding celebrations and social gatherings. Style and presentation differed from region to region. Puppetry enjoyed royal patronage, and as its popularity spread across oceans many Southeast Asian nations adapted the art form to their own cultures and traditions (see box page 42).

Known as Thollu bommalata (Dance of leather puppets) or Bommalattam (Dance of dolls) in south India and Katputhli (string puppet) in northern India, puppets enthralled audiences the moment they came alive to the accompaniment of song and music. Now, as in the past, the puppeteer narrates a story, manipulates the figures, gives each character an appropriate voice, and carefully choreographs sound effects and movement. A successful puppeteer needs to have a thorough grasp of poetry, history, philosophy, religion and music. Puppeteers also sing to the accompaniment of musical instruments, speak several languages, and bless the event and the surrounding area by quoting from religious scriptures. Once upon a time, performances began after sunset and lasted for hours, sometimes all night long.

The strength of puppetry is in its interactive quality. It is a live medium with a personalized approach. Puppeteers sometimes invent their own stories, improvising from the basic plot a complex network of intrigues, romances, wars, magic and comedy. The use of local dialects and stories makes for an immediate and direct rapport with the audience, with whom puppeteers often converse through their characters.

Payment in kind

Today puppetry occupies a far less significant place on the Indian cultural scene than it did in its glorious past. No institutions or university courses are dedicated to puppetry, and puppeteers learn their art either through family tradition or simply because they become interested in it. Industrialization, urbanization and the advent of modern mass media, especially films and television, have inevitably put a damper on traditional and folk forms of art worldwide and Indian puppetry has been no exception. Feature films and modern dance performances have replaced puppet shows in the village festivals. The phenomenal growth of satellite television in the last two decades has kept children and adults alike glued to the screen. (Official reports in 1995 estimated that there were about forty million television sets in India, and that the figure was growing at the rate of 10 per cent annually).

According to Dadi Pudumjee, president of the Indian branch of the Union Internationale de la Marionette (UNIMA), an international non-governmental organization, puppeteers in the past were rewarded by villagers in cash or kind (e.g. rice, vegetables and clothes), in addition to their fee. "Those customs have disappeared now and puppeteers could not survive on their earnings alone (between $5 and $20 for a performance). The arrival of the modern media also brought a need to improve the production quality and content of these puppet shows. Unable to change with the times, many traditional puppeteers vanished from the scene."

Despite the onslaught from the mass media, some forms of traditional puppetry, handed down from generation to generation, have kept going in the modern multi-media world. Chalapathi Rao, who runs the Nimmalakunta puppet group in the Ananthpur district of Andhra Pradesh state, is one of the rare survivors. He has adapted modern themes and techniques to this ancient art form. "In 1980, when we were about to give up the profession, the state government gave us some financial assistance and advised us to incorporate new themes," Rao recalls. "They also commissioned us to introduce social awareness themes like family planning and literacy instead of dramatizing traditional religious subjects." Unlike Rao, those who did not change their repertoire and move with the times were forced to abandon their vocation and take to other means of livelihood like farming, toy making and handicrafts.