Knowing and Being

This essay, a highly original study of Kūṭiyāṭṭam as an historical phenomenon and developing art form, offers an ontology of performance in relation to a highly specific epistemology embedded in the Kūṭiyāṭṭam tradition. The author distinguishes Kūṭiyāṭṭam in general and Mantrāṅkam in particular from other performative traditions in South India on the basis of the distinctive truth-value that emerges on stage (in relation to other philosophical streams such as the Advaita). He also reviews the historical evidence on dating and proposes a new hypothesis about the historical moment when Kūṭiyāṭṭam as we know it took shape. He talks about the two manuals that were known from the early period, the Dhananjayadhvani and the Saṃvaraṇadhvani and outlines their impact on the performance of Sanskrit drama in Kerala.

The World of Hanumān

The author gives a full-fledged report on a performance of Aṅgulīyāṅkam lasting 29 nights that she witnessed in 2012 at the Nepathya centre in Moozhikkulam. She posits interesting connections with the different cultural devices used during the performance, especially the ritual ones, and she shows that there is no opposition between ritual and aesthetic, but, on the contrary, that it is precisely the ritual aesthetic that permits the smooth world of Kūṭiyāṭṭam to work. The anthropological approach offers an in-depth reflection on the idea of ‘continuous’ and ‘non-representation’ as triggers of the motility and constant need of sustaining action in and of Kūṭiyāṭṭam: linearity, directionality and causality become merely one out of a myriad of options. She describes the traumatic life experiences that the audience relives during and after the twenty-second day’s performance. Even the actors tell of changes in their mode of consciousness on stage and during the entire period of the play.

Aṅgulīyāṅkam, Rāmāyaṇa-Vēda of the Cākyārs

Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the Act of the Ring, is the performance of the sixth act of Śaktibhadra’s Āścaryacūḍāmaṇi according to the Kūṭiyāṭṭam tradition of Kerala. The Cākyār masters consider it as a ‘veda’ for pantomime, and for the traditional Rāmāyaṇa repertoire. They perform it as a kūttu, mono-action, according to their Malayalam acting manual (āṭṭaprakāram) for twelve days in five Kerala temples. On the base of this text and of its performance, this paper shows how the kūttu condenses almost the entire Rāmāyaṇa repertoire of Kūṭiyāṭṭam in a complex, unique and unifying structure, and analyses its epic dramaturgy. Johan underlines how the dramaturgy is based on arresting time either on the multiple levels of the dramatic fiction or on the level of the performance.

Pracchana Bārhaspatyam

This article offers a rich analytical discussion of one of the most amusing of the embedded narratives in Mantrāṅkam—the tale of Iṭṭuṇṇūli and the parrot that eventually outwits her. This story has ancient roots in the Kathā literature but has acquired a peculiarly Keralan character in the process of being integrated into Mantrāṅkam, where it functions as a condensed emblematic statement of the major themes of the play as a whole. Nave has tried to decipher some of the major themes crucial to the project as a whole as they appear in one embedded tale. The play of Mantrāṅkam is considered to be one of the jewels of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. It places an immense strain on the performer and on his memory. It entails a great potential for tension along with enormous effort of the performer.

An Actor in Red and White

The author focuses on the major Maṇipravāḷam campus and prabandhams composed mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Kerala. These very often include detailed parodic descriptions of social reality and thus allow us a glimpse of Kerala society seen from within at this moment of critical cultural formation. Since Mantrāṅkam has remarkably similar segments in which large parts of the proto-urban and village societies are described in mostly parodic terms, we need to read the play in relation to the primary literary texts of this period. This is a pioneering essay with powerful implications for our understanding of the cultural milieu in which Mantrāṅkam was created.

My Experience of Performing Aṅgulīyāṅkam and Mantrāṅkam

This chapter gives an important testimony of an experienced actor’s viewpoint and his issues with regard to the performance of Aṅgulīyāṅkam and Mantrāṅkam. In this way, he outlines some peculiarities of this performance such as the unique relation with prabandham that can be seen only in Mantrāṅkam or some techniques of todays Kūṭiyāṭṭam that were not evolved yet (nirvahaṇam, kramadīpika). The special feature of these two acts is the enormous demand they make on the actor to perform both in depth and through a vast range at the same time. Here the aesthetic totality is more important when compared to the newer form of other acts, in which the details of enactment are more clearly visible.

Distinct Conventions in the Staging of Aṅgulīyāṅkam Kūttu

By getting trained to perform Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the actor becomes an expert in the acting techniques of Kūṭiyāṭṭam, that is, Aṅgulīyāṅkam includes only two characters: Hanumān and Sītā. Hanumān is the only character that performs the whole play and the text of Sītā will be recited by the Naṅṅyār who plays the cymbals. One of the major technical specialities of this play is that it includes the flashback-technique several times in different contexts and thus the whole story of the Rāmāyaṇa will be enacted on the stage. The authors are experienced performers themselves coming from a traditional Kūṭiyāṭṭam performing family. In their essay they analyse the structure of the play from the perspective of the actors, considering both the ritualistic and the aesthetical issues of the performance.

Mantrāṅkam

The author focuses on a tiny segment of the long performance of Mantrāṅkam, trying to use it as a magnifying glass to read the wide open structure of this work. The aim is to see how in the initial moment of the act, the fixed structure is not respected, and also to account for the apparently unmotivated shift between ritual and theatrical parts. If we are facing a fluid text that has always refused to be concluded, do we need to draw a division between what is theatrical and what is ritual? Are these two terms really of use when we deal with ‘non-discrete’ textual traditions? The author argues that to account for fluidity, we must look at the history of this corpus, which clearly retains traces of an earlier stage in the development of this art form.

Some Remarks on the Āścaryacūḍāmaṇi

Lyne Bansat-Boudon gives us a ‘thick description’ of Śaktibhadra’s Āścaryacūḍāmaṇi, from which the act Aṅgulīyāṅkam is taken. She defines powerful thematic emphases and focuses on the special expressivity of this work within the classical tradition and in light of the Nāṭyaśāstra and Abhinavagupta’s commentary. Further, she discovers surprising continuities between structural features discussed by Abhinavagupta and the living performance tradition of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. She further emphasizes that the preparation of the clearing also alludes to the pūrvaraṅga, those semi-ritual and semi-theatrical preliminaries to the performance of dramatic fiction. She concludes by saying that the yogin and the spectator of drama have in common such a ‘recognition’ of the Self (which is none other than their own Self)—a transitory experience for the spectator but one established once and for all for the yogin, who is thus nothing but an ‘emancipated spectator’.

Aṅgulīyāṅkam

This chapter is an important contribution because Bhadra and Rajneesh are writing from the viewpoint of performers coming from a traditional background, also capable of presenting Kūṭiyāṭṭam in the ritualistic setup of annual temple performances. They give an explanation of the peculiarities of Aṅgulīyāṅkam in comparison with other plays in Kūṭiyāṭṭam and explain the structure of Aṅgulīyāṅkam according to a typical traditional performance lasting for 12 days. They explain the structure of the Namaskāra segment of Aṅgulīyāṅkam and identify it as the basis of all techniques for non-verbal acting in Kūṭiyāṭṭam. Each and every portion of this act can be elaborated as much as possible by an eminent actor. Thus, this act is recognized as the Veda for acting.