Tholu bommalata

Hanuman and Ravana in Tholu bommalata, the shadow puppet tradition of Andhra Pradesh

Tholu bommalata is the shadow puppet theatre tradition of the state of Andhra Pradesh in India with roots dating back to 3rd century BCE. ^{[1] [2] [3]} Its performers are part of a group of wandering entertainers and peddlers who pass through villages during the course of a year and offer to sing ballads, tell fortunes, sell amulets, perform acrobatics, charm snakes, weave fishnets, tattoo local people and mend pots. Tholu bommalata has a history of consistent royal patronage. ^[4] It is the ancestor of Wayang, the Indonesian puppet theatre play which has been a staple of Indonesian tourism and designated by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. ^{[lower-alpha 1]}

This ancient custom, which for centuries before radio, film, and television provided knowledge of Hindu epics and local folk tales, not to mention news, spread to the most remote corners of the Indian subcontinent. ^[1] The puppeteers comprise some of the various entertainers who perform all night and usually reenact various stories from Hindu epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata . ^[11]

Etymology

Tholu bommalata literally means "the dance of leather puppets" (tholu – "leather", bomma – "puppet/doll" and aata – "play/dance"). ^{[11] [12]} It is also translated as "the play of leather dolls" or "the dance of leather dolls". ^{[13] [6]}

History

Andhra history records that shadow puppetry was in vogue during the Satavahana period (2rd century BCE–2nd century CE). ^{[2] [3]} Art critics opine that the puppetry spread from Andhra to Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma. ^[3] Wayang, the Indonesian puppet theatre play which has been a staple of Indonesian tourism and designated by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, has its origins in Tholu bommalata. ^{[lower-alpha 1]} Some of the shadow plays are improvised based on Ranganatha Ramayanamu (c. 1300 CE). ^[12]

Tholu Bommalaata

The performance begins with a series of sung invocations and a line of ornate, strikingly stylized puppets pinned in overlapping fashion onto the sides of the screen. ^[14] The puppets are mounted in the middle on a palm stem, extended to form a handle used to move the body of the puppet. Their articulated arms are moved with detachable sticks that have a small piece of string with a peg at the end, which slip into holes on the hands. Generally, one puppeteer manipulates all three sticks of a single puppet, holding the central handle stick in one hand and two arm-control sticks in the other. Often two to three puppeteers operate puppets on the screen at the same time, each one delivering the lines for his or her own puppet.

As the players manipulate the puppets, placing them on the screen and then moving them away, they create the illusion of the figures suddenly materializing and then fading out. They also cause the figures to walk, sway, hop, and fly through the air. They can swivel a dancer's detachable head and manipulate her hands while keeping her hips swaying to create a remarkable illusion of twirling.

The puppeteers accompany all the character's speeches with animated movement of the arms and hands, which they can flip over to create a three-dimensional effect. The swaying of freely dangling legs also adds to the feeling of animation. When several puppets are stationary on the screen at the same time, they can be pinned to the screen with date palm thorns. A puppet can be rapidly pinned with one or two of the long, thin thorns passed through perforations in a headdress or shoulder ornaments. Such puppets are still able to engage in animated conversation by means of the sticks moving their hands. Characters that engage in rough fighting, such as the monkey king Hanuman or the jesters, are often held from the hip, enabling them to be moved with greater control than by the central stick alone.

Every few minutes throughout the performance, the action will be broken by the episodes of broad comic relief from the jesters speaking in a slangy, quirky style and engaging in slapstick antics. Some of these depend on puns or risqué allusions. Except for certain commonly used expletives, their language is not obscene, though sequences may be bawdy to a degree not observed in other popular forms of entertainment.

Interspersed with spoken dialogue, verse passages in literary Telugu and even Sanskrit are sung with instrumental accompaniment. These occur especially in contexts of heightened emotion or important events, rather like the arias in European operas. The players serve as their own musicians and all members of the troupe know the music that accompanies the various passages.

Musical instruments

The musical instruments consist of a harmonium, a portable keyboard organ that sometimes serves only as a drone; a long, two-headed South Indian drum with tapering ends (mrudangam); strings of bells worn on the ankles and wrists; and pairs of finger cymbals. A wooden shoe with stilts is used to keep its wearer above the mud during the rainy season, and can be struck against schoolchildren's seating planks to create dramatic clacking and banging sound effects for fight scenes.

The singing style and the conventions of vocal delivery that accompany tholu bommalata closely resemble the form of singing from an old-fashioned drama genre known as Satyabhamakalapam. Accompanied only by the drum and finger cymbals, the player sings raising his hand up to one ear, as if to listen to what he is singing.

Puppets and cinema

Comparisons of shadow plays to movies can be informative. The shadow play was an ingenious technology of animating pictures, developed centuries before the advent of the motion picture industry. Here was a method of enabling four or five people to bring a hundred or more colorful mythological characters to life in the most remote village, all accompanied by virtuoso singing, contagious rhythms, and dramatic sound effects. The characters' costumes were elaborate, with swirling sashes and ornate necklaces and garlands, all cut to let points of light glisten in intricate patterns.

Puppet making

Three types of skins have been used to manufacture puppets: antelope, spotted deer and goat. ^[7] Antelope skins are reserved for making a limited number of auspicious characters, such as the gods and epic heroes. Deer skin, noted for its strength and resistance to rough handling, is employed in the figures of the warrior Bhima and the ten-headed demon king Ravana. All other puppets are typically made from goat skin, readily available locally. Most puppets are made from a single skin, though some require more. At least four skins are necessary for Ravana – one for his body, one for his legs, and one to make each set of five arms. The puppets are made from 'nonviolent leather', that is the skin of animals that died a natural death is used rather than slaughtering animals for their skin. ^[6]

Current state of affairs

The shadow play has been only one set of techniques for dramatizing the vastly rich Hindu epics. It has now been superseded by motion pictures and television, which have reinvigorated the epics for the electronic age. But the shadow play was a brilliant innovation, one whose visual artifacts hold clues to the history of South Asian art and drama and deserve to be preserved for the delight of generations to come. ^[15]

See also

• Togalu gombeyaata , a similar form of puppetry in the neighbouring state of Karnataka

Notes

1. ^{[5] [6] [7] [8] [3] [9] [10]}

References

1. "Puppet Forms of India". Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (CCRT), Ministry of Culture, Government of India. Archived from the original on 15 May 2013.
2. Osnes, Beth (2001). Acting: An International Encyclopedia. ABC-Clio. pp. 152, 335. ISBN   978-0-87436-795-9.
3. Datta, Amaresh (1988). Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature: Devraj to Jyoti. Sahitya Akademi. pp. Puppetry is one of the most ancient Indian folk arts and Andhra history records that this art was in vogue during the Satavahana period in the 4th century B.C. Art critics opine that the puppetry spread from Andhra to Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, and from there to Africa, Greece, Macedonia and the Byzantine empire. ISBN   978-81-260-1194-0.
4. Osnes, Beth (10 January 2014). The Shadow Puppet Theatre of Malaysia: A Study of Wayang Kulit with Performance Scripts and Puppet Designs. McFarland & Company. p. 27. ISBN   978-0-7864-5792-2.
5. "Wayang | Indonesian theatre". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 3 April 2023. Developed before the 10th century, the form had origins in the tholu bommalata, the leather puppets of southern India. The art of shadow puppetry probably spread to Java with the spread of Hinduism.
6. Keith, Rawlings (November 1999). "Observations on the historical development of puppetry - Chapter Two" . Retrieved 3 April 2023. Perhaps the most interesting of the south-Indian puppet types for me, however, were the tholu bommalata -- the articulated, leather, shadow puppets -- which are the probable ancestors of Indonesia's wayang.
7. Currell, David (1974). The Complete Book of Puppetry. Pitman. p. 25. ISBN   978-0-273-36118-3. The tolu bommalata shadow puppets are found in the Andhra region and may be the origin of the Javanese wayang kulit puppets.
8. Rāmarāju, Bi (1991). Glimpses Into Telugu Folklore. Janapada Vijnana Prachuranalu. p. 90. Leather puppet shadow play is one of the most ancient performing folk art forms known to Andhras from 3rd century B.C. Historians and art critics opine that it spread to Java, Malaysia, and Indonesia from Andhra.
9. Sharma, Manorma (2004). Folk India: A Comprehenseive Study of Indian Folk Music and Culture. Sundeep Prakashan. p. 33. ISBN   978-81-7574-140-9. Indonesian version of Tholu Bommalata known as "Wayang" has roots in the Telugu-speaking region.
10. Autiero, Serena. "Tholu Bommalata: Telugu Shadow Puppet Theatre".
11. "Andhra Pradesh". Puppetryindia.org. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
12. Liu, Siyuan (5 February 2016). Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre. Routledge. ISBN   978-1-317-27885-6.
13. Kuiper, Kathleen, ed. (15 August 2010). The Culture of India. Britannica Educational Publishing. p. 290. ISBN   978-1-61530-149-2.
14. Rubin, Don (2001). The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: Asia/Pacific. Taylor & Francis. p. 162. ISBN   978-0-415-26087-9.
15. Bruce Tapper (Spring–Summer 1994). Asian Art & Culture. Vol. 7. Oxford University Press in Association with the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery/Smithsonian Institution, New York. ISBN   9780195088694.