Valorous heroes and heroines from Indian mythology enact tales of triumphs and tragedies, as Ravi Gopalan Nair’s nimble fingers bring them to life in the flickering golden glow of a traditional lamp. Bhima’s search for the Saugandika flower to please Draupadi casts a spell on the audience as skilled puppeteers stage the Kathakali play ‘Kalayanasaungandhikam’ using glove puppets. ‘Duryodhanavadham,' ‘Dakshayagam,' and ‘Utharaswayamvaram' are the three other plays performed by puppeteers of Natana Kairali, perhaps the sole practitioners of Pavakathakali in Kerala. Using puppets resembling Kathakali actors to stage plays from the repertoire of Kathakali, complete with vocal music and percussion support, these puppeteers keep alive an art form that was on the verge of fading into history.
In his kalari at his home in Nedumangad, Ravi shows you the puppets that transform into Veerabhadran and Bhadrakali of ‘Dakshayagam’. He has brought some of the puppets from Natana Kairali in Irinjalakuda where the rest of the troupe assembles for rehearsals and practice sessions. The troupe includes K.V. Ramakrishnan, K.C. Ramakrishnan, K. Srinivasan, V. Thankappan and Kalanilayam Ramakrishnan. K.V. Ramakrishnan and K.C. Ramakrishnan were jointly selected for the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s award in 2011 while Ravi was awarded the Dakshina Chitra Virudu by the Madras Craft Foundation and Friends of Dakshina Chitra Museum in Chennai.
Serendipity was what made Ravi, a self-taught photographer who used to run a studio in Nedumangad till 1981, a practitioner of this art form. His initiation into Pavakathakali also happened to be the period of revival of this form of puppetry. Some three decades ago when Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, the doyenne of crafts in India, visited Kerala, she happened to see Pavakathakali puppets in a museum in Thrissur. Enquiries revealed that the art form was literally hanging by a thread as many of the practitioners had fallen into penury. That is when she asked Kathakali and Koodiyattam exponent Venu G. if he would be able to revive the art form before it vanished completely.
“By then both Chamu Pandaram and Velayudhan Pandaram, the main practitioners of Pavakathakali, had passed away. But with the help of K.V. Ramakrishnan, Chamu Pandaram’s nephew, my brother managed to collect some details. He also wanted someone to learn how to make the wooden puppets and their costumes. My brother asked me if I would do it and I agreed,” remembers Ravi.
That is how he became a disciple of Thottassery Narayanan Namboodiripad, Kathakali artiste and costume designer, a maestro in his chosen field. “I travelled all over the regions where Pavakathakali was customarily staged and collected all the puppets I could find. After carefully studying the puppets, we began making them ourselves,” says Ravi. He also began learning from Eravankad Shangunni Ashari, a master carpenter.
Then he returned to Natana Kairali. Ravi cherishes those years in Irinjalakuda where he spent his time learning and interacting with titans of theatre, puppetry and folk arts of Kerala. In 1984, Venu adapted ‘Kalyanasaugandhikam’ for Pavakathakali and it was presented at the India International Centre, New Delhi. Soon other stages followed and Ravi travelled with the troupe to countries in Europe, United States and Asia. Ravi received a national scholarship for further studies in Pavakathakali and also a junior fellowship for studying the ‘mask traditions’ of Kerala.
Ravi feels that there is a core of spirituality in Indian arts and that it is necessary to imbibe that to do justice to any art. “We must interact with titans and watch masters at work to understand what it is that makes their recitals stand out. In my case, my father, Gopalan Nair, was a rasika of Kathakali and tried not to miss a single play that was staged in those days. He used to take us along and that experience came in handy when I began to practice Pavakathakali – the movements, the gestures and the finer points of a play helped me fine tune my performances.”
Ravi did not limit himself to this. Drawn towards Jerzy Growtosky’s ‘poor theatre’, Ravi, with the financial support of the Swiss government, studied and practised ‘Para theatre’ and other avant garde theatre movements in Switzerland and France from 1992 to1995. He feels that while working with anthropologists and ethnographers from Europe and Switzerland, he helped them create a new vision to look at traditional forms and its practice in Kerala.
In 2000, together with his wife, Parvathy Baul, he travelled to Vermont in the United States to study about the Bread and Puppet theatre and its creator Peeter Schuman. “This is a kind of political theatre with an anti-war message that has been in vogue since the sixties,” he says. He has also worked as artistic director of several prestigious international productions and teams documenting the indigenous folk arts of Kerala. However the most memorable one, he says, was an “incredible journey to the old illams in Thrissur, Malappuram and Palakkad from December 2010 to January 2011. It was an attempt to trace the artistic route of the old Andi Pandaramas. Many of the elders remembered watching Pavakathakali in their childhood.” The entire programme was documented and funded by the IGNCA.
To ensure that Pavakathakali continues to mesmerise its viewers, six students have been selected from different parts of Kerala to learn to make and manipulate the puppets. Three of them are being trained in music and percussion.
“We have so much to offer to the rest of the world. It is imperative that we inculcate that pride and understanding of our arts in the next generation,” says Ravi.
Art of Pavakathakali
Believed to be perfected by nomadic performances of ‘Andipandarams’ of Kerala, this art form has performers using glove puppets weighing at least two kg. Three fingers and a string are used to mimic the movements of Kathakali while staging a performance. In olden times, puppeteers were itinerant performers who travelled from home to home showcasing their art forms. For Andipandaras, such performances were the means of their livelihood. Paruthippulli and Kodumbu villages in Palakkad are two places that are home to Pavakathakali. Although they had migrated from Andhra Pradesh many centuries ago and settled in Kerala, their mother tongue continues to be Telugu. When they reached Kerala, they used to perform the ‘Aryamaala,’ a Tamil folk drama, as a puppet show. Later when Kathakali became popular in Kerala, they carved Kathakali figures, studied the text and shaped it to make it their own art form. Till the sixties, Pavakathakali was alive in the hands of artistes like Chamu Pandaram. A troupe from Paruthippulli under the leadership of Chamu Pandaram travelled with their performances covering different places up to the Poornathrayeesha temple in Tripunithura.
