At the recently concluded Kashish film festival, Ananya Kasaravalli’s Harikatha Prasanga (or, Chronicles of Hari ), gave us an insight into an ages-old performance tradition, the Yakshagana. Although the film’s focus is the ‘trials and tribulations’ of its lead protagonist, the female impersonator, Hari (played by Shrunga Vasudevan), the detailing provided to a backdrop of a thriving yakshagana practice provides flavour and atmosphere to a tale seeped in the politics of identity. The period itself could be both contemporary or bygone, which provides the film a quality of prescient immediacy.
World of make-believe
The daily drudge of the actors’ lives is alternated with their performances onstage, presented with finesse and a fealty to a canon that has survived several centuries. It is a world of make-believe that is also desultorily real. The theatre form appears to be almost wholly devoted to depictions from the great epics, and the markers of traditional performance, performed from dusk till dawn, seem to be authentically realised. This ethos is almost akin to that of a temple astir with devotees, and the makeshift green room, plumbed up by bamboo palings, acquires the feel of a ritual chamber. We survey the company tailor’s station as the camera lingers on actors applying make-up or wearing elaborate costumes, becoming gods as it were before the giggly children and women mill around nervously backstage.
The social repercussions of performing in a yakshagana troupe are also spelled out in no uncertain terms. Kasaravalli frames the film as a documentary project that pieces together Hari’s journey from honour to infamy, and reveals a world of intrigue and petty provincialism, in which the truth is often obscured to serve a prevailing narrative — in this case, the demonisation of a vulnerable being. Within the practice, there is scant soul-searching. The players often tour for six months a year, away from their families, earning little more than a pittance. The awe they inspire onstage, with their regalia in place, often doesn’t percolate down to the social standing they command off it.
Changing landscapes
Female impersonators, especially, are stuck in a performing cul-de-sac that they cannot extricate themselves from, given the dearth of actors willing to take up female parts. There is the heady adulation that women in the audience, particularly, harbor for the men who play women on stage with such verisimilitude, but that doesn’t insulate them from becoming objects of derision off it. The film makes no mention of the growing trend of female yakshagana troupes that have cropped up in Karnataka. These troupes haven’t yet made a dent on the cultural landscape, and are not considered a threat to the livelihood of the male performers in a manner similar to how turn-of-the-century female impersonators were wiped out with dispatch from early sangeet natak by women who took to the stage.
As Hari, Vasudevan inhabits a fluid persona without a trace of the affectation embraced by lesser actors with their stereotypical flounces and tics. The yakshagana performance, of course, depends heavily on the codification of an essential femininity but there must still be an internalisation that accompanies the gestural, which Vasudevan is able to give a good account of. His work is complemented by the excerpted performances that stand in as visually rich metaphors for trying episodes in Hari’s life. Perhaps one of the primary reasons for the film’s inclusion in a queer film festival, is Hari’s implied transsexualism, which is treated with layers of ambiguity that attempt to mirror underlying conflicts not articulated in conventional terms, reminding us that this is an outsider’s view, pieced together from memories and fragments relayed by others. The self seldom disavows categorisation as expediently, and Vasudevan, even with all the despondence at his disposal, never fails the psyche of the character he has been assigned.
Second nature
In many ways, he is quite dissimilar to the persona inhabited by Prasad Cherkady in Sharanya Ramprakash’s play, Akshayambara , where Ramprakash positions herself as a belligerent Dushasan opposite Cherkady’s Draupadi, in a telling subversion of yakshagana convention. Cherkady has a distinctive demeanour, given to insouciance and the occasional brusqueness, and takes on female parts almost perfunctorily, even if they have now become second nature. He is an altogether different kind of female impersonator than Vasudevan’s Hari, but this is in keeping with the idea that reducing femininity to a kind of quintessence, as Hari’s director attempts to do in a scene from the film, is a rum notion in itself. For Vasudevan, the role represents a blossoming of sorts. Mumbai audiences would remember him from his roles as the earnest young men in plays like Andrea Gronemeyer’s The Boy With A Suitcase , and Abhishek Majumdar’s The Afterlife of Birds.
The very nature of theatre itself allows for the creation of liminal spaces in which the marginalised can find their footing in full view of the world. The fringe welcomes outsiders, even if some, like Hari, can be singed by the realities of a profession that must still exist within a larger social context that is much more unforgiving. Many films, exhibited at Kashish this year, have been set against the backdrop of theatre and performance, perhaps to exploit the dichotomies of life queer people are so well acquainted with, where identity itself becomes a performance, and the real self can only find an airing in an unreal setting with hopefully, loads of costumes and make-up involved.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
