An effort to keep alive tribal culture and their artistic skills

A play on tribal culture and tradition in their dialect enacted by tribals from Koraput district of Odisha enthralled the urban audience of Berhampur at the 8th State-level drama festival on Tuesday night.

This play named ‘Meria’ had been written and directed by Girija Kumar Choudhury and enacted by ‘Eski’, a tribal amateur theatre troupe from Laxmipur in Koraput district. ‘Eski’ is a tribal word meaning ‘thirst’.

According to Mr Choudhury, this theatre troupe is an effort to keep alive tribal culture and artistic skills by the real tribals to check outsiders from plagiarising it in wrong way. Writer and director of the play hails from Berhampur but since 1990 he is closely attached to tribals after being posted as a teacher in Laxmipur college.

Uniqueness of this play was that except two, all its characters were enacted by tribal artistes. No props were used for the play. Tribals in their traditional attire and use of their traditional musical instruments on the stage could easily carry the audience to some remote tribal village of Koraput district.

Tilottama Patnaik, a lecturer of Laxmipur College, had designed the costumes of characters to make them look as original as possible. A musician of Domb community, Nilakantha Garada, gave the music. Live music performed by the characters on stage with tribal flute, string instrument dudunga, tribal drums like dhampa, madal, tidipidi provided the background music. During the climax of the play, five types of tribal musical rhythms were used to depict different human moods and emotions.

Story of the play was related to human sacrifice or ‘Meria’ tradition of tribals. Inhabitants of a remote tribal village suffering from severe drought decide to offer human sacrifice to appease ‘Dharani Penu’ or mother earth for rains. They find a youth frustrated with his life, who agrees to give up life for faith of these tribals and agrees to become ‘Meria’. But the daughter of the village head falls in love with this youth. Despite knowing about it, the village head due to traditional faith fails to stop the human sacrifice. He and others face police action and realise the futility of human sacrifice to appease Mother Nature. This simple story could become a soul touching enactment on stage because of truthful depiction of tribal culture and tradition by the tribals.

“It proved that any thing in original pure form touches our hearts despite the fact that the play used tribal dialect,” said veteran theatre activist of Odisha Rajoo Padhi.