If in the 1970s anyone had hosted a seminar for or on women in Koodiyattam, it would have drawn precisely one participant— Kalamandalam Girija, who had just broken gender and caste taboos to join a 1,500-year-old Sanskrit theatre tradition.
By the ’90s, a couple of names would have been added to the list. Among them, the hugely talented Usha Nangiar, mentored by guru Ammannur Madhava Chakyar and G. Venu, to revive Nangiarkoothu, the sister genre of Koodiyattam, in a systematised manner.
Over the decades this band of women performers has grown in strength. And it is a sign of its progressive profile that a dozen female voices spoke at a recent seminar, at AmmannurGurukulam in Irinjalakuda in Kerala’s Thrissur district, on the evolution of women’s roles in Koodiyattam. The occasion was Gurusmarana, a festival held in the memory of Madhava Chakyar.
Revived and transformed
An art that seemed on the verge of dying till 2000, and in which female roles had whittled down to nothing, Koodiyattam is now increasingly ceding space to women artistes.
Not only were there veterans and pathbreakers at the seminar but also bright young artistes like Aparna Nangiar, Kalamandalam Sindhu, Krishnendu, Prashanthi and Kapila Venu. All of them are rooted in tradition—but they are also straining at its boundaries to break fresh ground. So, alongside the traditional repertoire there now is a growing body of work like Mandodari, Karthiyayani, Ahalya, Shakuntalam, Sita Parityagam and Madhavi, which challenge the stage’s male domination.
What was the journey like for a woman Koodiyattam artiste all those decades ago? What does the road ahead look like? What do seasoned artistes feel about innovation?
Nangiar says women were critical to Sanskrit theatre before Koodiyattam became a ritual offering in temples. “You can tell from plays like Tapati Samvaranam and Ashokavanikanam and their ancient manuals that women had a strong presence in Koodiyattam. But they were edged out by male actors and by the time I started learning, women had almost nothing to do on stage even though I underwent precisely the same training as the men in kalari ,” recalls Nangiar.
Interestingly, it was the progressive male gurus of the time, Madhava Chakyar himself and Painkulam Rama Chakyar, who helped their women students break in again by expanding the scope for female characters such as Tara, Sita, Subhadra and Shoorpanakha. Many of them had been banished from the stage and would only be referred to in passing.
The all-male establishment had also once decreed that the panchakanyas—Ahalya, Draupadi, Sita/ Kunti, Tara and Mandodari— from the epics ought not be presented on stage. “When plays had to be curtailed to one or two hours for modern audiences, it was the women’s roles that were first cut. For instance, in Ashcharyachoodamani , Hanuman is supposed to give Sita the ring and take back her hair ornament but there would only be Hanuman on stage and an imaginary Sita. But times have changed and not only is Sita back, there is also immense competition among women artistes to create new roles,” says Kalamandalam Sindhu.
In the years since 2000, Nangiar has staged some prominent women-centric plays like Ahalya , Karthyayini and Mandodari . Venu, who at 35 has carved a place for herself in Koodiyattam with her abhinaya skills, has been experimenting with new works like Soundaryalahiri , Shakuntalam and Sita Parityagam for a while now. “Most Sanskrit plays in traditional Koodiyattam had a few female characters who could be described as ‘adhyavasanam’, totally integral to the play. They were often defined by their womanhood, they weren’t dynamic or varied like the male characters. Men get to take on so many looks, switch costumes, play animistic characters like birds and monkeys, why can’t we,” she asks.
But the surge in experimentation by women artistes, so far held back by convention, is also worrying Nangiar a bit. “The foundation of a new work has to be rooted in available texts and resources, so we don’t stray too far from the classicism of Koodiyattam. There is every danger today of prettifying and diluting it to make it more entertaining. As a community of artistes we have to guard against this,” she says.
