A white screen, about 4x6 feet, is tied to two metal poles at a height of three feet from the ground. A group of puppeteers and musicians sits behind it, hidden by a curtain that is hung from the screen. The performers hold up flat leather puppets against a light bulb and the shadow play begins.
It looks like sunrise as the puppets gradually appear on the ‘horizon’, being raised from below the stage by the puppeteers on the other side. There is a clash of cymbals; the harmonium matches the beats of the mridangam; the daskathi, two wooden sticks held in the palm, does a constant clackety-clack. The singing is sometimes euphoric, sometimes pleading, sometimes heroic, as befits the characters.
Hanuman comes to the rescue of Sita in Lanka and is confronted by the demon-like Lanka Devi. In this black-and-white battle of good and evil, the latter must inevitably be defeated: there is raucous, victorious laughter as the demons fall in a trembling heap.
I feel like I have been watching scenes from my unconscious. I remember Gouranga Charan Dash, the retired head of the Odia department in Cuttack’s Ravenshaw College and an authority on shadow puppetry, telling me that in the West, shadow puppetry is used to treat patients suffering from mental illnesses.
I am at the museum of puppetry, called Kandhei Ghara ( kandhei means puppet in Odia), being set up by Dash in serene, paddy-field-chequered Kutarimunda village in Odisha’s Angul district. The museum has not been inaugurated yet: Dash has arranged a private show to acquaint me with shadow puppetry, called Ravana Chhaya in Odisha (Ram, being divinity, theoretically cannot cast shadows; hence the name unwittingly making Ravana the hero of these plays, which originally used stories only from the Ramayana ).
Four for joy
Odisha is perhaps the country’s only State where four forms of puppetry thrive — shadow puppetry; rod puppetry, where wooden puppets are hoisted up on stage with a metal rod attached to their body and covered by their flowing garments; glove puppetry or Sakhi Kandhei Nata, where the puppets are formed by a ‘glove’, with the index finger becoming the head and the middle finger and thumb the arms of the puppet; and lastly, string puppetry, where the puppets are made to dance with the help of strings attached to their limbs.
Abhay Singh and his glove puppets.
Once it is ready, Dash’s Kandhei Ghara will display puppets from across the country, host performances, seminars and workshops for national and international researchers, and also have a library. Surrounded by puppets that stare at you in an uncannily human way, Dash, who did his Ph.D on puppetry and is also a Ravana Chhaya performer, tells me a play won’t come to life unless you are in a relationship with the puppets, who are the ones doing the manipulation, rather than the puppet-meister. The word ‘love’ keeps coming up.
Dash’s passion is apparent. He confides that in the early years of his engagement, he had been warned by his peers about the insidious charm of the dolls. “The puppets are demanding — they will make you forget every other love, make you indifferent to your wife,’ they had told me,” he says. If anything, that made Dash’s commitment even stronger, and no, he didn’t forget his wife.
Sabitri Dash, retired teacher of Odia language and literature, is actively engaged with her husband in the promotion and performance of puppetry. Together, they run the Srirama Institute of Shadow Theatre in Kutarimunda, which aims to preserve, modernise and facilitate research on puppetry.
India shares this ancient culture with other old civilisations like the Greek and the Chinese.
Puppet shows, especially Ravana Chhaya with its shadow play, are the earliest movies and it is ironic that the coming of television has irreversibly eroded the performers’ audience base.
Puppets for propaganda
Puppeteers are dwindling in number but they still have the power to hold people in thrall, not just in the villages but also in the cities. This must be one of the reasons why the government has been using the art form to popularise its flagship programmes such as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, and to spread awareness on HIV-AIDS, human trafficking, malaria and deforestation.
Such modules are plugged as part of efforts to ‘revive’ puppetry, but the intervention, which has helped the artists in several ways, has not always had a salutary effect. Governments often prefer to fix scripts according to political agendas and their conception of the ‘purity’ of the art form. This has tended to sanitise performances.
Rod puppeteer Maguni Charan Kuanr.
As a poor man’s mode of expression and entertainment (the performers were often from marginalised communities), puppetry usually contained elements like short satirical skits against the moneyed class that would be inserted between narratives from the Ramayana , Mahabharata or the Puranas . Performed in open village spaces and reaching out to the audience, who would be sitting on the ground a few feet away from the performers, puppetry was always meant to be interactive rather than preachy.
It also demands constant improvisation and funny, out-of-the-box bits to hold the audience’s attention.
When the government stipulates script, musical instruments and performance parameters, there isn’t much room for innovation.
Most of the artists have chosen to toe the government’s line, not just for the money it brings (which isn’t really sufficient) but also because it gives them recognition. In my conversations with the puppeteers, Delhi invariably featured as the place to be in.
While the idea of performing in a closed space to an audience of aficionados in the capital is understandably attractive, it also means the art is moving further away from its origins. Performances in villages, which had once given puppetry its settings and context, are now considered demeaning by the artists.
Dash has been trying hard to revive the village performances — his troupe still travels to the remotest regions — but most puppeteers are reluctant. Dash says, “I know how their mind works. They believe that wandering from village to village would immediately brand them as impoverished artists and label their art as ‘low-brow’.”
When the performers fail to get government support or make good money independently, they sell or disband their troupes. Dash lashes out at them, saying they are concerned with everything except their art.
Dash’s idealism and dissidence (he flares up about puppetry being employed for Swachh Bharat — “that is not art, it’s propaganda,” he fumes) — are admirable. At the same time, you cannot but sympathise with the puppeteers, who are unlikely to have either Dash’s intellectual wherewithal or financial cushioning to keep the art alive.
Kumbhakarna in Kendujhar
Maguni Charan Kuanr, a rod puppeteer in his 80s, who has been performing from the age of 27, is an artist par excellence. Puppets come alive in his hands in a way that has to be seen to be believed. He is also a sculptor, carpenter and designer: he styles his puppets out of wood and clothes them in multi-coloured costumes. Even when they lie lifeless in Kuanr’s battered trunk, they look striking; once animated by the master touch, they are irresistible.
A string puppet show.
Kuanr makes Kumbhakarna, Ravana’s brother from the Ramayana , who is dressed in a black satin robe with a silver waistband and sports a stylish handle-bar moustache, ‘speak’ a few lines for me. Upset at being roused out of season from his six-month-long hibernation, Kumbhakarna complains in a loud, angry voice. Kuanr is an expert at voice modulation: he can impersonate gruff Kumbhakarna or plaintive Sita with equal ease.
When I meet Kuanr at a half-finished Kali Puja pandal in Kendujhar town, he is sitting on the ground with his legs outstretched — he broke his hips a few months ago. The next day is Kali Puja and he is busy mixing the colours to be applied on a 12-feet-high idol of Kali he has made. The frail man says with confidence that the goddess will be complete by night’s end.
When I ask about his puppets, he says, echoing Dash, “They are the ones who direct me. If I don’t let them do that, they humiliate me. They are my love and they have put me in great trouble.” Then, with sudden canniness, he adds, “They can no longer provide me with bread and butter. No work gets done without money these days. Mon theke ki hobe, pashe dhan thaka chai (What’s the point of just having a heart, you must have money near you).”
Kuanr has brought in a great number of changes to the art he learnt from his guru. He standardised the dimensions of the puppeteer’s box and used a hand-painted background for the first time. He started using larger puppets (about two feet high) to ensure visibility for a larger audience.
Monetary constraints have not been able to defeat the artist in Kuanr. He is still eager for more innovations, thinking of making puppets of papier-mâché, which, being lighter, will be easier to carry. Although his health has taken a beating in the past few months, he is looking forward to travelling with his puppets again — “I get calls from Assam, Manipur, Darjeeling, Sikkim. No artist can match my skill: when I play, everybody watches spellbound,” he announces with artistic hauteur.
Record dance
Vidyadhar Ratha, of Karara Mada village in Dhenkanal, is a string puppeteer. He presents a portrait of an artist very different from Kuanr. At the very beginning of our meeting, he tells me that government-sponsored programmes are convenient because they save him the trouble of having to book spaces, which would involve giving money to the panchayat, the police and local groups.
His troupe, made up of family members and artists from neighbouring villages, sells tickets ranging from ₹15 to ₹50, depending on demand and the venue. Business is usually good during the festive season.
Ratha emphasises that he is a poor artist, although, with his pink khadi shirt and dyed hair and affluent-looking household, he seems better off than most other villagers. He tells me, “Make a strong case for the likes of us in your paper so that the government gives us an artist’s allowance.” His brothers, part of the troupe, nod in unison.
String puppetry seems quite popular — as soon as the first note sounds from Ratha’s harmonium, villagers start trooping into his house, even on the dark, rain-lashed day when I was there. I am a bit overwhelmed by the performance that follows.
A Ravana Chhaya performance based on the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
In a makeshift stage erected at the back of the house, garishly decorated puppets gyrate to Odia and Hindi songs played on a stereo. At one point in the performance, when a female puppet is dancing wildly to the Bollywood hit, ‘Nagin, Nagin’, five rubber snakes are lowered on the stage to gambol beside her. I am told solemnly that this is called the “record dance”, performed during the intermission or whenever the artists need to take a break, usually to unravel the puppet strings that get tangled during the course of a show.
Hand in glove
I had heard interesting legends about the glove puppeteers even before I went to meet them in Odisha. If eccentricity is one of the defining qualities of artists, then these puppeteers are artists through and through.
Most glove puppeteers belong to the nomadic Kela community, which has settled down in Odisha in the past few years. The Kelas were once snake-charmers, magicians, quacks and trapeze artists, and have now morphed into pedlars.
Living up to their nomadic genes, they play hard to get: they have largely refused to be part of government programmes, saying that they won’t be instructed about their own art. But they also want to give it up, as they complain that it marks them as out as belonging to a marginalised, somewhat reviled, group.
At Kutarimunda, Dash called them repeatedly, asking them to come over and give a performance. They agreed initially, but ultimately gave us the slip and I had to be content with a recorded performance.
Glove puppetry is called Sakhi Kandhei Nata because here the chief characters are Krishna and Radha and their sakhis. Radha is also Krishna’s best friend, his alter ego, his soulmate. The philosophy is embodied in the performance, as the Krishna and Radha puppets are the two arms of the puppeteer. They are literally one body.
I watch Abhay Singh performing in front of a village hut in cinematographer Indraneel Lahiri’s video documentation of Odisha’s puppetry traditions. Singh sits on the ground, a dhol strapped to his shoulders. One arm is Krishna, with the characteristic blue face, and the other is Radha, with a yellow face, both with colourful headgears of tinsel and ribbon.
The puppeteer becomes Radha and Krishna by turn — the lovers bicker, move apart, draw closer, sing to each other. In between dialogues, Singh energetically beats the dhol but visually, it is Radha and Krishna making music. And yes, it sounds and looks divine.
