Folk Theatre as a Genre of Folklore

If we accept Roger Abrahams's definition of folklore as "a collective term for those traditional items of knowledge that arise in recurring performances," we perceive that Nautanki theatre is part of the folklore of India.^[36] Nevertheless, as Abrahams points out elsewhere, folk drama has been little discussed in the folklore literature, and its recognition as a discrete genre has been somewhat belated.^[37] Western scholarship on folklore traditions of India has first focused on the narrative genres, especially the oral or folk "epic" and the folktale, and secondarily on the smaller forms such as the folk song, riddle, and proverb. Folk theatre may have escaped notice because of its dual citizenship, being perceived as "theatre" more often than "folk." Whatever the reasons, the neglect must be remedied. Folk theatre shares so much with other genres of folklore in South Asia that the problem is not whether to consider it as folklore but how to delineate clearly its connections with other folklore genres.

The issue of generic classification is far from solved for the other folklore forms, however. Theoretical discussions of generic interrelations have only recently appeared in the South Asian folklore literature.^[38] Many valuable detailed studies of specific traditions suffer from a lack of precision in the use of genre labels, in part resulting from the confusion between Western-based analytical modes of classification and indigenous taxonomies.^[39] The difficulty is compounded by the multitextuality of the better-known Indian stories. Gene Roghair notes that the Telugu Epic of Palnadu exists in a wide range of media:

It can be found in the form of modern verse; unedited palm-leaf manuscripts in both classical and folk metres; edited scholarly publications...; motion pictures; elementary school reading texts; novels; stage plays; radio plays; ... rice-transplanting songs; burra katha ...; articles in weekly magazines; paintings; sculpture;... and extended oral narratives.^[40]

This multiplicity is not unusual and could be documented for many folk narratives in India today.

Similarly, the stories found in the Nautanki theatre are for the most part not unique to this performance genre. The Princess Nautanki story itself is present in prose tales in several regional languages as well as in metrical ballads, folk plays, and modem dramas. The stories of the saintly followers of Guru Gorakhnath such as Gopichand, Bharathari, Puranmal, Guga, and others circulate as myths, legends, ritual narratives, oral epics, and poems all over North India. Magical tales of adventure such as the Rup-Basant cycle have multiple versions, including dramatic and folktale forms.^[41] The martial themes of the Alha recitational tradition are also favorite stories in Nautanki theatre, and the Amar Singh Rathor theme is common to Nautanki and the puppet theatre of Rajas-than. Contemporary topics such as the bandit queen Phulan Devi, based on journalistic accounts and hearsay, occur not only in Nautanki but in the Hindi lyric genre barahmasi , in the Bhojpuri genre biraha , and in the Alha style.

Nonetheless, the hypothesis I propose is that Nautanki as a theatrical genre possesses conventional modes of communication between audience and performers that set up expectations of a certain type and establish the genre's identity with relatively low levels of ambiguity. The purpose of defining the genre's boundaries is not to erect rigid classificatory walls but to understand the dimensions of performer-audience interaction signaled by a Nautanki drama as distinct from other related folklore genres. As Abrahams asserts, "Genre analysis provides a common frame of reference by which such conventions of form and use may be compared and thus permits one genre or group of genres to cast light on others, either within one group or cross-culturally."^[42] The identification of Nautanki's unique generic traits would help us contrast it to the genres that border it. We may then extend this system of relations to other parts of South Asia and even beyond, where folk drama, folk narrative, folk song, and folk dance reside in close proximity.

Narrative content alone is an insufficient determinant of Nautanki since other genres of North Indian folklore share the stories. Content is just one element in a triad of criteria that Western folklorists use to name traditional genres. In Abrahams's terms, content, form, and context are the significant variables that separate generic categories. Dan Ben-Amos uses slightly different language with the same basic meaning when he distinguishes prosodic, thematic, and behavioral levels of folk-

lore.^[43] Content or theme refers to the story, the sequence of events of a narrative genre. Form designates the prosodic structure of the genre and its possible use of music, dance, and painting and extends to literary analysis of dramatic structure, rhetorical strategies, and other textual features. The last criterion, context or the behavioral aspect, names the customary usage of the genre, its connection to social structures, its appropriateness to certain settings, and the characteristic interaction between audience and performers. Taken together, these levels of analysis provide a descriptive framework for a folklore genre that identify it as a member of a class of objects and simultaneously distinguish it from other members within that class.

In terms of content, Nautanki belongs to a large group of narratives that includes the various legends and tales known to the North Indian region. The reservoir of potential Nautanki narratives is fed by oral and written accounts from Arabic and Persian romances, Sanskrit epics and Puranas, folk epics of Rajasthan, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh, legends of saints, kings, and local heroes, popular novels, historical events, newspaper accounts, and popular films. Within this class, Nautanki exerts certain preferences in its choice of subject matter. We have noted the genre's lack of dependence on pan-Indian epic materials and the low level of religious content manifest in the stories. Nautanki themes tend toward the martial and romantic, with social dramas based on contemporary life entering in the modern period.

At the formal level, these stories are structured according to a musical and prosodic plan distinctive to the genre. The overall texture is antiphonal, alternating sung recitation of verses with musical passages using the same melodic and rhythmic motifs performed by an ensemble of percussion (typically the nagara or kettledrum), wind instruments (shahnai , clarinet, or flute), and harmonium. The tunes are largely dictated by the meters of the verses, and over twenty different meters may be used. However, the bulk of narrative discourse is composed in the ten-line stanzaic form doha-chaubola-daur , and dialogue frequently occurs in the meter bahr-e-tavil , consisting of two long lines. Prose also appears in improvised passages often of a humorous or topical nature, and it is more prevalent in certain styles of Nautanki (such as the later Kanpur style influenced by the Parsi stage).

The sophisticated formal apparatus of Nautanki employs the verse patterns and conventions of Hindi poetry (seen in the doha and chaubola ) as well as regional folk genres such as the lyric forms dadra, thumri, savan, holi, mand, lavani , and so on. It also draws on the traditions of

Urdu classical prosody, borrowing verse types such as ghazal, sher, qavvali , and others. Similarly, the musical materials show some features of classical Hindustani music, including a rudimentary raga structure, the use of metered cycles (tala ), and rhythmic cadences of three repetitions (tihai ). In these formal features of music and meter, the intermediary character of the genre is again visible, the mediations occurring here between Hindi and Urdu poetics on the one hand, and folk and classical music on the other.

The relative complexity of the performance form is consistent with the professional status of the actors and singers, their lengthy apprenticeship (often beginning in childhood), and the specialization of roles within the troupe. However, not all performers are equally accomplished. Formal complexity accordingly varies with the performer's expertise. This introduces the question of the relationship between the degree of formal elaboration and gender. In a comparison of women's folk songs with those of men, Ved Vatuk observes that men's songs in Hindi and Punjabi tend to use regular end rhymes and meters related to the "high" poetic tradition, whereas women's songs use repetition patterns (refrains) instead of rhyme and a looser prosodic structure.^[44] Vatuk's work suggests a continuum of metrical complexity associated with gender that would identify male performers with traditions like Nautanki that are metrically and musically quite intricate. Folk genres such as the prose tale, the lyric song, and others performed by women tend to be shorter and lack the complexity of the epic and drama.

Another attempt at constructing a gender-based dimension for genre is that of A. K. Ramanujan, who reworks the classical Tamil division of akam/puram to suggest a continuum stretching from domestic "interior" tales told primarily by women to public "exterior" performances by males. As Vatuk does, Ramanujan identifies the women's domain with less formulaic, less complex uses of language, and men's with the elaborate techniques of the professional bard.^[45] Though on the face of it this argument may appear to state a correlation found in a number of folklore genres, such an equation of form with gender is of limited application. It assumes a traditional, unchanging ideal (to some) of unschooled secluded women. Rather than remain indoors, many Indian women work in the fields, in animal husbandry, in quarrying, road building, and construction; they haul water and firewood daily; they travel on pilgrimages or to weddings and festivals, and they visit relatives; in short, their lives take them into the exterior world on a regular basis, and folklore activity undoubtedly occurs on these occasions. Re-

garding women's knowledge of sophisticated forms, it is well known that as professional singers and dancers they carried on the traditions of the performing arts for long periods when men's expertise in these areas had almost died out through lack of court patronage. Women have excelled in literature, music, dance, and theatre for centuries in India, and they still play a very important role in the performing arts, including the folk arts.

Before the introduction of female actors, men impersonated women in Nautanki as they did in other traditional theatres. Around the 1920s women joined Nautanki troupes and began to sing and dance the female roles; a similar process had occurred in the theatres of Bengal and Maharashtra earlier. Considering the importance today of women as actors, singers, dancers, and even as troupe managers in the Nautanki theatre, we could not characterize it as a male or male-dominated institution. Nor could we explain its formal sophistication as a result of the determining presence of males. Women use the same meters and musical materials as men do; their art is in no way stylistically inferior because of their gender.

Although we know very little about the performance art of women in India, we must not assume that their performance is less formally sophisticated than that of men, or that it is exclusively tied to the hearth and limited to private interior contexts. Only recently with the expanding body of knowledge generated by feminist studies have we recognized that much of women's history has been lost or suppressed in societies around the world. Definitive study of women's participation in the cultural processes in India remains a project for the future. Nonetheless, we can assume from the partial evidence available that women have taken a significant part and that their activities have been extremely varied. Until the subject is thoroughly researched in its own right, to summarize the complex relations that may exist between folklore genres and female performers, audiences, and performance contexts would be premature.

Ramanujan's use of the akam/puram dichotomy in reference to folklore genres leads into the third element of generic classification, the interaction between audience and performer. The identification of interior and exterior contexts sets up one way of looking at this variable. Ramanujan's continuum places the folktale at the extreme of interiority, where an intimate, often familial, connection exists between performer and audience. At the other extreme, the theatrical performance represents maximum exteriority and professionalization, with a public

(and therefore depersonalized) relation between audience and performer. According to this model, both the formal nature of the genre and its subject change to some extent when the performance moves from an interior domestic space into an outer public one. Although Ramanujan does not explain it in this way, the greater distance between the exterior nonfamilial audience and the public performer may necessitate a more redundant, verbally ornamented, repetitive (formulaic) style to bridge the relatively greater gap in experience and affect between speaker and hearer. The domestic context, in contrast, assumes an affinity of feeling and a shared substratum of interaction. The communication is therefore sparser, less redundant, more economical in its means.

The concept of interpersonal distance between audience and performer is central also to Abrahams's way of perceiving the contextual dimension of folklore genres. Abrahams outlines a continuum of relations between performer and audience extending from total interpersonal involvement to total removal. At the extreme of involvement, he lists the conversational genres, such as jargon, slang, traditional similes and metaphors, and the discourse of address, appeal, and assault: proverbs, spells, curses, prayers, charms. At a slightly greater degree of distance are the play genres, such as riddles, jokes, verbal contests, debates, spectator sports, and finally rituals, folk plays, games, and dance-dramas. In folk drama, "contact between performers and audience is almost completely severed this is what is meant by the term 'psychic distance.' "^[46] However, the degree of audience involvement in folk drama is still greater than that present in the "fictive genres," in which dramatic movement must be envisioned by the mind's eye rather than being present in visual form on stage. This group includes the "great" narrative forms of folklore, the epic, ballad, lyric, and legends, as well as work songs, traditional sermons, and so on. Finally Abrahams's spectrum includes static genres such as painting, sculpture, and design, which present the extreme of removal between audience and performer, relying not at all on performance or verbal communication.

Whereas Ramanujan's model emphasizes the spatial component of context, Abrahams focuses on the quality of communication embodied in the genre's conventions, ranging from the completely dialogic and participatory to the univocal, professional, and ultimately even nonverbal. Nevertheless, a considerable degree of compatibility exists between the two models. Both stress the conventional separation of audience and performer in a publicly enacted theatrical event, a separation that may be ensured by verbal as well as visual and spatial means. This

separation distinguishes theatre from debate and verbal contest on the one hand, in which respondents have an equal role, and from religious ritual on the other, in which audience members often participate both as officiants and as recipients. Abrahams, however, makes a unique contribution by specifying the crucial distinction between folk drama and narrative forms, namely the acting out of the story, so that makeup, costumes, and movement visually represent the narrative events to the audience. Abrahams is undoubtedly correct in asserting that the techniques of theatrical representation bring the audience closer to the performance, closer to the action and the emotions of the characters, than a recitational mode that employs no dramatic role-playing. A performance genre that mimes human action through the artifice of stage acting—showing the audience the actions of the story, not simply talking about them—is fundamentally different from one that simply narrates.

Following this reasoning, a Nautanki enactment of a story from the Alha epic (to take one possible example) belongs to one genre, and the Alha's epic recitation belongs to another. We would perceive this distinction if we listened closely to the formal structure of the performance, especially the meters and tunes used, but grounds for confusion exist even here because Nautanki has incorporated the characteristic meter of the Alha epic, the chhand (also known as alha chhand or bir chhand ) into its prosodic texture. We could also look for the ubiquitous nagara and other musical instruments typical of Nautanki. We could more easily discern the difference between the folk theatre Alha and the epic recitation Alha by a simple visual survey of the costuming, makeup, physical movement, as well as the possible presence of a raised stage, painted curtain, or otherwise demarcated performance space signifying the dramatic mode of representation and the generically unique relationship of audience as spectators to performers as actors.

Despite the similarity of story material then, the folk theatre possesses its own performance praxis, and it secures its own objectives through a generically defined grammar. This is not to argue that dramatic and narrative genres are always easy to separate in Indian folklore. Within the dramatic texture of Nautanki, for example, some narrative passages occur in which a character describes her or his own movements and actions in the third person, usually to relate an abbreviated series of events. The folk theatrical traditions, including Nautanki, also bring on stage a narrator (the kavi, ranga , or sutradhar ) who makes connections between segments of action by means of narrative speech. On the other side, epic performers from narrative traditions

such as the Panduvani of Chhattisgarh embellish their singing with many physical gestures, including facial expressions, brandishing of weapons, and energetic body movements.^[47] The presence of a "second," the singer-respondent present on the stage who prompts the main performer with "And then what happened?" and other verbal cues, also brings an element of dramatization to the performance style of many South Asian epics. Still, epic performances as a class will tend to have conventions in common, as will folk drama performances, and though both classes incorporate elements from other genres, the approach of each is sufficiently distinct to ensure its own identity.

To summarize the discussion, we may best define Nautanki according to two referential schemes. As an intermediary theatre , it is representative of the class of theatres in India that have flourished in the more industrialized, semiurbanized environment emerging from agrarian society. It belongs to the public life of the community, employs professional personnel, and depends on a sophisticated level of social organization for its commercial survival. As a folklore genre , it is a relatively long and complex form, related to oral epic and other narrative genres in content, but distinct from recitational forms in its dramatic mode of performance and in its own sophisticated formal grammar.

Nautanki as conceptualized here is certainly folklore, but it is not folklore as "timeless" or "immortal." The historical moment figures significantly in Nautanki's rise and development, and the theatre has already gone through tremendous change. We must further qualify these categories and continua in a historical perspective, by erecting another axis for comparison. That perspective provides the focus in the next two chapters. For now, suffice it to say that folklore is the product of its age. Folk theatre in India—especially in its recent manifestation as intermediary theatre has a spongelike quality that allows it to soak up whatever is current, controversial, or salable—whether it be new songs, dances, plots, topical references, jokes, or puns. One trait of a large form like Nautanki, moreover, is that it can maintain a framework (much as the traditional epic did) so that generic integrity persists even with the continual implantation of new materials. This integrity is somehow greater than the sum of the parts named by content, form, and context. It is carried forward by a tradition that includes texts as well as performance events, lineages of poets as well as rival performing troupes. No one locus is sufficient to define the elusive unity of this mediating art.