Read an Excerpt
Stigmas of the Tamil Stage
AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF SPECIAL DRAMA ARTISTS IN SOUTH INDIA
By SUSAN SEIZER Duke University Press
Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3432-3
Chapter One
Legacies of Discourse Special Drama and Its History
Our father was then keeping afloat in the ocean of life by hanging on to that piece of driftwood known as Special Drama. -T. K. Shanmugam, actor Special Drama means "as they please: without responsibility." They had no discipline (kattuppatu), no regularity or propriety (olukkam); they talked as they pleased in the dramas, they talked whatever they knew, which amounted to comedy and all that, because they had no murai. -A. K. Kaleeswaran, harmonist
The Legacy and Legend of Sankaradas Swamigal
The author of the majority of plays in the dramatic repertory of Special Drama is playwright T. T. Sankaradas Swamigal (1867-1922). Recognized by historians as an important figure in the development of modern Tamil drama, Swamigal is much more than a historical figure to the contemporary Special Drama community. He is revered and honored by Special Drama artists as a guru and as the founder and first teacher of their art form. As such he is actively remembered by artists in speech, song, and worship, as well as in annual collective, commemorative festivals.
For the purposes of this book, Swamigal is an important historical figure primarily because of the disparity between the place he occupies for Tamil drama historians and the position he holds for Special Drama artists. Historians, generally only briefly, mention his work as a bridge between tradition and modernity. Swamigal's oeuvre of over fifty scripted plays includes Hindu mythologicals, Indian histories, Christian devotional stories, and translations of several works of Shakespeare. The scripts alternate sung verse with spoken prose passages and are generally celebrated as popularizations of familiar stories rendered in pleasing prose accessible to the masses. A standard account, from the Encyclopaedia of Tamil Literature, reads as follows:
The significance of Cuvamikal [Swamigal] as a modern dramatist lies in the fact that he has brought about a creative blend of the old and the new in the Tamil dramatic tradition. He has fused into his plays the elements of the ancient folk dramatic forms, those of the musical plays of the pre-modern days, and the characteristics of the modern Tamil play that came into being under the impact of the West. (IAS 1990, 499)
My sense, having read numerous such accounts, is that the degree of syncretism in Swamigal's oeuvre has rendered both his works and the artists who continue to perform them rather too uncategorizable for historians. Again, both he and they mix too much: their art is messy, overly emotionally expressive, and anything but elite. These are not my own terms but rather terms one reads over and again in so many words in the historiographic record. It is a record that either overtly criticizes or else damns by faint praise; as previously noted, extant accounts of the development of Tamil drama make only fleeting reference, if any, to Special Drama, and even then only in the past tense (for a recent example, see Baskaran 2001, 76). Certainly to date, no written account of Swamigal's contributions reflects the kind of following he has inspired among practitioners of his art today.
For example, Swamigal is the frequent subject of actors' own oral elaborations in the form of reverential praise, as well as not-so-reverential anecdotes. These verge on the tall tale, as the ferocity of Swamigal's own acts of devotional worship in turn inspire artists' devotion toward him. In addition to accounts of the frights his own performances visited on female audience members, and of how his heavy disciplinarian hand terrified members of his boys company, the master is said to have angrily hurled songs composed on the spot at the goddess Meenakshi in her temple in Madurai, accusing her of ignoring the plight of the lower classes.
And though it rarely takes written form, appreciation of Swamigal can indeed be found in a plethora of material forms. Colored prints of his portrait circulate throughout the acting community, reprinted and distributed every year on his remembrance day, the anniversary of his death in November 1922 (fig. 1), when Special Drama artists conduct an elaborate celebration and parade through the streets of central Madurai with his image enshrined in a decorated chariot (fig. 2). Similarly, a three-foot-tall plaster statue of Swamigal, seated in the same pose as in the portrait, resides permanently in the Madurai Actors Sangam building. Artists stop in to pay their respects to the guru in devotional gestures and prayers each night before they leave town to perform. On an architectural scale as well, Swamigal has received commemoration in two large auditoriums often used for state-level political functions, one in Chennai and one in Madurai, each bearing his name. Permanent large-scale bronze memorial statues in his likeness have been erected at prominent intersections in Madurai (fig. 3), Dindigal, and Pondicherry (his final city of residence), to which artists annually make pilgrimages.
We must not be misled, then, by the limits of the written record in judging the influence of Swamigal on the contemporary field of Tamil popular drama. For artists, his importance stems from two related aspects of his achievement. The first is his scripting of the majority of the plays in their repertory. The second is his pivotal role in the development of drama companies, the historical precedent to, and condition of possibility for, the current form of Special Drama.
Many of the artists initially trained in drama companies under Swamigal's tutelage went on to teach their art to subsequent generations, establishing a lineage of teachers and students who trace their artistic heritage directly to him. This is a lineage in which many of the Special Drama artists whom I interviewed for this book proudly partake. Though recognized by historians-"Those who were trained by him are now famous in the dramatic field" (Varadarajan 1988, 266)-artists who bear this heritage have nevertheless remained an untapped source of ethnographic material for the serious historical study of the roots and subsequent developments of contemporary Tamil popular theater.
What I present here, then, are the beginnings of a history of Special Drama, or rather the beginnings of a revision of the history of Tamil drama that would sufficiently recognize the contributions of the living art of Special Drama. By including artists' voices in this history, I am substantially augmenting the standard historiographic record on Tamil drama. My focus on Special Drama exposes lacunae in a historiographic record that has to date largely omitted this complex theatrical practice from the political and social life of the region. Its inclusion here offers new perspectives on the lived dimensions of the class, language, and regional political struggles that have so defined South India during the past century.
The History of Special Drama
Today, Special Drama is primarily performed in villages. Such rural venues are not, however, where Special Drama began. The genre's roots are much more urban. Special Drama developed in the interstices between the traveling British and Parsi troupes of the nineteenth century and the myriad large Tamil drama companies that came to dominate the Tamil stage in the first decades of the twentieth century (IAS 1990; Kapur 1993; Hansen 1998; Rangacharya 1980). These latter included adult companies as well as companies of child actors, known as boys companies (several of which trained both girls and boys, the name notwithstanding). Companies operated as both disciplinary training ground and home to their year-round charges.
During this period, actors of all ages who left companies after receiving training in their repertory plays circulated on the margins of established troupes and were available for freelance work. Performances that engaged such independent special artists were called Special Drama (Shanmugam 1972; Perumal 1981; Baskaran 1981, 2001; A. Narayan 1981; Navaneethan 1985).
The services of such freelance special actors were often employed to augment company dramas even while a company organizational structure, name, and management remained. That is, even into the 1940s, a drama advertised as being "a special drama" might be put on under a company name; I present and discuss examples of such drama advertisements on handbills in the following chapter. "Since almost all the companies were performing the same plays, it was easier [sic] for an actor to desert one and join another to his advantage" (Rangacharya 1980, 110). In certain instances, at least, the company system itself seems to have been fairly dependent on the frequent movement of artists between companies: "A professional company would be having one or two talented singers and actors who would be the main attraction for the audience. After some time the singer and the actor would break away and form his [sic] own company" (108), resulting in new "companies" that might consist of no more than a few company players regularly augmented by freelance artists.
By the end of the 1940s, however, the financial burdens of keeping any kind of company structure afloat became increasingly overwhelming, and the vast majority of drama companies had folded. Instead, the appeal of dramas that might be organized entirely through the already existent, albeit informal, network of independent freelance artists grew. It was Special Drama so organized, rather than company drama, that finally proved able to weather the displacement of popular theater occasioned by the advent of the silver screen. Once Tamil talking films began production in Madras in the 1930s, urban drama halls were increasingly converted into cinema halls. By the end of World War II, only a few drama companies remained (the most well-managed ones, to be sure; see Baskaran 2001, 78), and cinema had effectively pushed popular drama off its urban pedestal and out onto the village and "rurban" platforms where it has continued to play ever since.
"Rurban" is a term coined by A. K. Ramanujan (1970) to describe what he perceives as a notion, emergent in both classical and modern Tamil literature, of "a center continuous with the countryside" (242). Madurai, an ancient city frequently described as an overgrown village, is in many ways just such a rurban center. The potential of this hybrid term to capture and characterize something of the quality of life in the regions of Tamilnadu where Special Drama is performed draws me to it; using "rurban" to describe the present-day network of Special Drama helps me conjure a sense of the places it so nimbly links.
Note that this reverse trajectory of progress, this move from the urban-based "company drama" to the rurban "special drama," offers an important corrective to any unidirectional theories of the development of modernity in South Asia. Such theories appear repeatedly in the inescapably teleological accounts of theater in India that have defined its historiography to date.
For example, in his 1989 essay "Theatre in India," Girish Karnad sets the modern Indian theater apart from Indian folk theater on the basis of two key modernizing features: use of the proscenium stage, and the sale of tickets (Karnad 1989, 334-35). Subsequent to these developments, theater, like film, "remained an essentially urban medium" (337). One way to understand the historiographic awkwardness surrounding the subject of Special Drama, so confusingly straddling urban and rural worlds as it does, is to recognize that it muddles the blueprint: this is a theater born of modernity, which in the early twentieth century had both the proscenium stage and the tickets and yet subsequently became part of the ritual economy of the regional countryside, a ritual economy now largely based on the religious and agrarian calendars of village life. Such a reverse trajectory should spell decline, but Special Drama continues to shine (sequins, lamé, and glitter adding powerfully to the effect) from the elevated perch of a proscenium stage that bespeaks a prior life lived very much elsewhere.
The hybrid sensibility captured by this genre thus complicates the straight line of a predetermined rise from rural to urban that has characterized the historiographic narrative of the modernization of Indian theater to date. Indeed, what plays onstage in many out-of-the-way places is a finer articulation of a history that tacks back and forth between "the modern" and "the folk" than such a linear narrative allows.
The history of the development of modern Tamil drama as written by drama historians normally has four stages. They culminate in the development of two styles of drama, the elite amateur style of the sabhas and the popular professional style of the commercial theater companies (Baskaran 2001, 78). I now summarize these four canonical stages and then add a fifth that recognizes how the hybrid theater tradition, begun with company drama in the nineteenth century, has continued through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries in the form of Special Drama.
Tamil Drama History, Stage One (of Undatable Roots)
An indigenous Tamil theatrical tradition is believed to have existed in Tamil-nadu "from time immemorial" (Varadarajan 1988, 255), based on evidence found in stone inscriptions in temples and on allusions in poetic works and their commentaries. Though no ancient texts remain, what evidence there is points to a tradition of staging dramas in temples (IAS 1990, 491-92). A separate tradition of folklore plays in verse and song produced seventeenth-and eighteenth-century texts that do still exist, seen by some as "products ... of the evolutionary development of the folk dramatic forms" that must have preexisted our written evidence. It is unclear to what extent these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century folk forms influenced the popular form of indigenous Tamil folk theater as it exists today, known interchangeably as kuttu (folk drama), terukkuttu (street drama), or kattaikuttu (drama with wooden ornaments); on the subject of these names, see Bruin 2000. Indeed, "Little is known about the local forms of theatre that were in existence" before the nineteenth century (Bruin 2001a, 62). One historian writes somewhat despairingly, "the fact remains that whatever Tamil drama or dramatic works might have existed and flourished in the ancient days, not a vestige of it remained or was even remembered" by the end of the nineteenth century (Gopalratnam 1981, 119).
It is nevertheless accepted that folk theater was traditionally performed by villagers for villagers, often as a hereditary occupation. These outdoor ritual performances were enacted in sung verse, the dramatic content of which was puranic, retelling mythic stories from the Hindu epics and puranas. These "night long, ritual like performances" were usually performed during religious festivals (IAS 1990). It is also accepted that before the advent of Western influences on Tamil popular theater, "dramatic performances had been the prerogative of a limited number of (caste) lineages, whose members held locality specific rights-cum-obligations to perform on particular occasions" (Bruin 2001a). This system of local performance rights and obligations defined Tamil theater until the mid-nineteenth century.
While in truth then little is known of its early theatrical form, terukkuttu as actively practiced and performed much more recently has come, in the postindependence period, to define Tamil "folk theater" (Frasca 1990; Bruin 2000). Consequently, it is now in relation to kuttu that other currently existent forms of Tamil theater, including Special Drama, are understood to be-in the way mutually defining terms such as "traditional" and "modern" so often are-definitionally other than indigenous folk theater. An elite class of Tamil scholars take an interest in drama and begin in the 1860s to translate and adapt Western dramas and literature for a similarly elite audience. "The elitist character of the plays stems from their [authors'] anxiety to raise Tamil drama to the level of the Sanskrit and the western plays" (IAS 1990, 496). This was considered the beginning of modern Tamil plays, defined as such precisely because they were based on Western models. At this stage, "Involvement in the theatre came to be considered by the elite to be a fit engagement for persons with a Western education" (Baskaran 2001, 77).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stigmas of the Tamil Stage by SUSAN SEIZER Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
