All hands on stage!

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

Though puppetry shows are not making a sensational come-back, they are again being enthusiastically welcomed both in rural and urban areas. There have been suggestions that puppetry should be introduced as a subject in schools in India, but this has yet to materialize. Once considered a "dying art", Indian puppetry has started a slow revival but still has far to go before regaining its former glory.

Gloves, strings and shadows

There are four kinds of puppets in India - glove or hand puppets, rod puppets, string puppets and shadow puppets. Hand or glove puppets, as their name suggests, are worn on the hand and manipulated by the artist's fingers. Rod puppets are controlled with rods manipulated by the puppeteer, who is hidden from the audience by a screen. String puppets give more flexibility to the artists as the dolls are attached to a string above and a screen divides the puppeteer from the puppets. The traditional shadow puppets of south India are intricate flat figures made from goat or buffalo hide by skilled craftsmen. They are projected onto a translucent screen by means of a strong source of light from behind. The audience sits on the other side of the screen and does not see the puppets but their moving shadows on the screen.

Patronized by kings and lords, puppetry travelled beyond India as early as the sixth century AD. The ancient Indonesian art of shadow puppetry known as wayang kulit is a unique combination of ritual, teaching and entertainment using figures which are stylized representations of the original leather puppets from India. Most Indonesian shadow plays are based on the two epic stories from India, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Balinese and Javanese have combined the Hindu stories with Buddhist and Muslim ideas and their own folklore. Even Thailand's nang yai shadow play has its own version of the Ramayana.

RELATED ARTICLE: Local languages blossom in Europe

A new milestone has been reached in the recognition of Europe's local cultures and languages. Germany, which officially acknowledges the existence of six minority languages within its borders (including Danish, Sorbian and North Frisian), ratified in September 1998 the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and France has announced it will follow suit.

The charter, adopted in 1992 by the Council of Europe(1), aims to protect and promote regional European languages as aspects of a shared cultural heritage. There are about forty such languages and the charter has so far been signed by eighteen countries and ratified by eight(2).

France's decision has delighted more than four million of its citizens who speak Breton, Basque, Catalan, Occitan, Dutch, Alsatian, Corsican, Creole (in the overseas provinces), Tahitian and Kanak (in the Pacific territories). France has been extremely centralized since the Jacobins imposed their ideas during the Revolution and is almost the last bastion in Europe of official and exclusive monolingualism.

Article two of the French Constitution states that "the language of the country is French." The dialect of the Paris region was imposed on the rest of France many years ago to the detriment of the other languages.