Sanskrit Theatre

Moser, Heike. 2012. »Many ›Kūṭiyāṭṭams‹: Emotions and Rituals in Kerala’s Sanskrit Theatre between Tradition and Modernity«. In: Emotions in Rituals and Performances. South Asian and European Perspectives on Rituals and Performativity. Ed. by Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf. New Delhi: Routledge, p. 378-396.

ाचीन भारतीय नाटक क लबी ृंखला को देख तो इन तमाम नाटक म यह बात सामाय तौर पर देखने को िमलती है क सभी म संकृत के साथ ाकृत भाषा समूह (िजसम मागधी, अधमागधी, आवंती, शौरसैनी, गांधारी, महाराी, वैदभ, पैशाची, ाय, बाहिलक, सकारी, चांडाली, सबरी, अभीरी, ािमली, ओी, दिणाय, अपंश आद दजन भर से अिधक भाषाएँ मुख प शािमल ह) का ापक योग देखने म आता है. यह सभी भाषाएँ ाचीन भारत म न िसफ बोली-समझी जाती रही ह बिक इनका िलिखत प और सािहय भी उपलध रहा है. ाचीन भारतीय नाटक म इनका ापक इतेमाल यह सािबत करने के िलए अपने आप म काफ है.

The aesthetics of puppetry and the puppet-theatre (which are at home on the ritual stage in some cultures) seem to me to be a valuable guide through the labyrinths of our psyche in matters of religion and spirituality. The question why it is often puppets, or actors stylized as puppets, that perform cultic games, takes us deep into our psychic needs and shows the fictional escape routes of our mind when it comes to certain embarrassments of imagination or representation. Puppets in human form, as in the Japanese No, or puppet-like plays involving actors, as in Kathakali or Kutiyattam in southwest India, seem to fulfil the requirements for mythological representation and spiritual rites in an optimum way. The folk-theatre-like Karagöz or Arabic Khayal may also have mystical origins, to which the opening Ghazel still bears witness today. As it is usually performed, we know it only as crudely comic or political slapstick theatre, which counteracts the mystical world rather than reproducing it. In this form it came to Greece as Karagiozis. Obviously, the aesthetic understanding of puppet-like depictions of gods is marked by the reluctance (or taboo) to imagine the gods in a completely anthropomorphic and all-too-human way, whether one was afraid that humans might feel godlike, or one wanted to express clearly the other-ness of the gods, or one did not want to be guilty of hubris or heresy. The ritual mythology theatre on a temple stage, or on a shadow screen near a temple, was intended to direct the gaze of the earthly to something non-earthly that wanted to avoid the appearance of mimesis as much as possible. "Non-earthly" should not be understood in the metaphysical sense, since the gods are not amorphous, spiritual beings, but rather living mythological communities. Similarly, as in early and classical Greek antiquity, the question whether one "believes" in the gods is not understood in India. One does not "believe" in the alleged thirty thousand, or perhaps one hundred thousand gods of the Indian pantheon, but lives in the remains of a mythological world that does not require a confession of faith, at best a binding membership in a culture. This world is simply there, and does not belong to any other sphere outside it. The ritual theatre, too is quite inner-worldly; it does not refer to anything outside. Our dualistic European thinking does not allow us to think of gods as non-transcendent. Just as the spirits of nature in animism are present within the world, the gods and mythical kings in Hinduism are simply "somehow" and "somewhere" there, even if only in rituals, in the temple shrine, on the stage, in the story being enacted or related. The medium is the bearer of the evidence, whether stone, temple, epic, palm leaf, stage, film, image or ritual: in it the gods are present , as they were in the statues of ancient Greece. Unlike how the colourful figures of the Ottoman-Turkish Karagöz expressed the fleeting nature of the earthly, the difference between appearance and reality, image and archetype, the events on the South Indian temple stage, in their exaggeration and alienation, are the opposite of shallow entertainment. The mythological events, often from the Ramayana epic, weigh heavily here. Individual acts taken out of it are presented, declaimed and summarized in perspective over many hours per performance, in cycles over days, even weeks, as if the aim were to counteract earthly concepts of time and to ensure the understanding of the unimagined through breadth, empathy and redundancy .

Moser, Heike. 2011. »How Kūṭiyāṭṭam became kūti-āṭṭam: The changing role of women in the Kūṭiyāṭṭam tradition of Kerala«. In: Between Fame and Shame – Performing Women / Women Per-formers in India. Ed. by Heidrun Brückner, Hanne de Bruin and Heike Moser. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz (Drama und Theater in Südasien, 9), p. 169-188.

Multimedia online: http://www.indologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/women_performers/contributors/moser/

Oberlin, Heike. 2015. »Mantrāṅkam in Kūṭiyāṭṭam: A short restudy«. In: »In ihrer rechten Hand hielt sie ein silbernes Messer mit Glöckchen…«: Studien zur indischen Kultur und Literatur. / »In her right hand she held
a silver knife with small bells...«: Studies in Indian Culture and Literature.  [Festschrift Heidrun Brückner]. Hg. v. Anna Aurelia Esposito, Heike Oberlin, B.A. Viveka Rai und Karin Juliana Steiner. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, p. 261-273.

Farley Richmond is the pioneering figure in Indian theatre scholarship in the United States. He has taught and headed departments at University of Michigan and SUNY Stony Brook, and is presently teaching at the University of Georgia. He is trained in Kutiyattam, one of India's oldest classical theatre forms, and is a key figure in bringing it to world attention.

Moser, Heike. 2009. »Naṅṅyār – Schauspielerinnen im klassischen Theater Südindiens«. In: Kulturwissenschaften und Frauenstudien. Aktuelle Arbeiten und Vorträge an der Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften der Universität Tübingen, Bd. 3. Ed. by Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo and Heidi Buck-Albulet. Tübingen: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, p. 11-30.

Oberlin, Heike; David Shulman (Ed..). 2019. Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam: Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Oberlin, Heike. 2019. »Mantrāṅkam, an Ancient Integration Project? Its Structure and Composition«. In: Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam: Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam. Ed. by Heike Oberlin und David Shulman. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 39-53.

Oberlin, Heike; Elena Mucciarelli. 2019. »Tying the Universe: The Interplay of Veda and Kūṭiyāṭṭam with Special Teference to Mantrāṅkam«. In: Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam: Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam. Ed. by Heike Oberlin und David Shulman. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 166-183.

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Heike Oberlin & David Shulman (eds.). 2019. Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam: Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

https://india.oup.com/product/two-masterpieces-of-kutiyattam-9780199483594?fbclid=IwAR2J16e3y61oUlOxqSYxewJdbTci69zzDRRCBbLJMC920pNSqifZuVLNG4c

Kūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. The actors and drummers create an entire world in the empty space of the stage by using spectacular costumes and make-up and by an immensely rich interplay of words, rhythms, mime, and gestures.

This volume focuses on Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the two great masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. It provides fundamental general remarks and relates them to pan-Indian reflections on aesthetics, philology, ritual studies, and history. Authored by scholars and active Kūṭiyāṭṭam performers, this is the first attempt to bring together a set of sustained, multi-faceted interpretations of these masterpieces-in-performance. With an aim to open up this ancient art form to readers interested in South Indian culture, religion, theatre and performance studies, philology as well as literature, this volume offers a new way to access a major art form of pre-modern and modern Kerala.


Table of contents

Foreword (K.K. Gopalakrishan)

Introduction (Heike Oberlin and David Shulman)

Opening up
Aṅgulīyāṅkam and Mantrāṅkam: Two Wondrous Crest Jewels of Kūṭiyāṭṭam (Sudha Gopalakrishnan)
Some Remarks on the Āścaryacūḍāmaṇi: Reflections, Reflexivity, and Wonder (Lyne Bansat-Boudon)

Mantrāṅkam
Mantrāṅkam, an Ancient Integration Project? Its Structure and Composition (Heike Oberlin)
What is Mantrāṅkam? (David Shulman)
Pracchana Bārhaspatyam: Irony and Illusion, Reality, Reflection, and Play in Mantrāṅkam (Orly Hadani Nave)
Reflection and Aruḷ: Creating Śiva on the Kūṭiyaṭṭam Stage (Hemdat Salay)
Vasantaka: Personal Considerations from within the Practice (Indu G.)
Mantrāṅkam: An Arena for Experimentation (Elena Mucciarelli)
The Mantrāṅkam Paribhāṣa from a Historical Linguistics Perspective (Ophira Gamliel)
Tying the Universe: The Interplay of Veda and Kūṭiyāṭṭam with special reference to Mantrāṅkam (Elena Mucciarelli and Heike Oberlin)

Aṅgulīyāṅkam
Aṅgulīyāṅkam, Rāmāyaṇa-Vēda of the Cākyārs (Virginie Johan)
Aṅgulīyāṅkam: The Nāṭyaveda of Kūṭiyāṭṭam (Bhadra P.K.M. and Rajneesh B.)
The World of Hanumān: Creating a Fluid Cosmos on a Kerala Kūṭiyāṭṭam Stage (Einat Bar-On Cohen)
Distinct Conventions in the Staging of Aṅgulīyāṅkam Kūttu (Ammannur Kuttan Chakyar and Aparna Nangiar)

Tying up
My Experience of Performing Aṅgulīyāṅkam and Mantrāṅkam (Madhu Margi Chakyar)
Knowing and Being: Kūṭiyāṭṭam and Its Semantic Universe (Manu V. Devadevan)
An Actor in Red and White: The Cākyār Community and the Early Maṇiprāvaḷam Corpus (Sivan Goren Arzony)

Note on the Contributors

Index

Drama and Ritual of Early Hinduism sets out to explore the foundations of theatre in ritual practice. In a careful, systematic way Lidova lays out a process by which the classical Sanskrit theatre may have come into existence. Scholars have wrestled with this question for centuries. Because of this work we have a better understanding of the process. The work is bound to encourage further speculation about this topic in the years to come.

Oberlin, Heike. 2015. »Kutiyattam – lebendiges Sanskrittheater aus Kerala, Südindien / Kutiyattam: living Sanskrit theatre of Kerala«. In: Ouverture Spirituelle: Kutiyattam, Dhrupad, Khyal, Bharatanatyam, Morgen-Ragas. Salzburger Festspiele, 18. Juli – 30. August 2015. [Salzburg: Salzburger Festspiele], p. 28-31 (Deutsch) and 39-41 (English).

Oberlin, Heike. 2015. »Die Tötung des Bali – The killing of Bali«. [Aufführungstext von Bālivadham auf Deutsch und auf Englisch]. In: Ouverture Spirituelle: Kutiyattam, Dhrupad, Khyal, Bharatanatyam, Morgen-Ragas. Salzburger Festspiele, 18. Juli – 30. August 2015. [Salzburg: Salzburger Festspiele], p. 32-38.

Moser, Heike. 2002. »Versrezitation im Sanskrit-Theater Kūṭiyāṭṭam (Kerala / Südindien)«. In: Meter, Rhythm and Performance – Metrum, Rhythmus, Performanz. Ed. by Christoph Küper. Frankfurt / M.: Peter Lang (Linguistic International, 6), p. 457-467.

Moser, Heike. 2002. »Versrezitation im Sanskrit-Theater Kūṭiyāṭṭam (Kerala / Südindien)«. In: Meter, Rhythm and Performance – Metrum, Rhythmus, Performanz. Ed. by Christoph Küper. Frankfurt / M.: Peter Lang (Linguistic International, 6), p. 457-467.