The Puppeteers' Oral Commentary

In the introduction to this chapter, I said that the puppeteers are primarily commentators, that their role is to explicate the Rama story as much as to tell it; and if we multiply by twenty or thirty nights what they did in the performance translated above, we may grasp the extent to which this is true. This is the point I want to expand upon, before picking up the story again, because this relation of the oral commentary to the Kampan text is fundamental to the art of shadow puppetry in Kerala. Traditions such as this, in which a major literary text is orally performed, often fall prey to two opposite but equally misleading assumptions. On the one hand, it might be thought that the oral performers "make up" their version of the Rama story, that the performance is very different from the text; we know, however, that the puppet play relies heavily on verses from the Kamparamayanam and other sources. On the other hand, oral performance might also be misunderstood as a mechanical reproduction of its source text, that performance is no different from the text; but this, too, given the narrative alterations discussed earlier, is misleading. Still, the full extent of puppeteers' creative retelling is apparent only from their commentary as described in this and subsequent chapters.

A distinction between narrated text and exegetical commentary is recognized in Tamil, and in Indian tradition generally, in much the same terms as in the West: written texts (mulam , root) may have written or oral commentaries (urai , speech, utterance). In the Kerala puppet play and many Tamil traditions, the written text comprises verses (kavi, pattu ), and the commentary (vacanam , speech) is an oral, largely improvisational, explication of those memorized verses and the events narrated within them. Ordinarily, the text/verses are thought to carry

the narrative burden by presenting the events of the story, and the commentary adds explanation. In the puppet play, this separation of story and explication is also plainly marked by language since the verses are chanted in formal Tamil, whereas the commentary is spoken in various forms of hybrid Tamil-Malayalam. Nevertheless, any conventional distinction between narrative and exegesis does not accurately describe the division of labor in the puppet play, in which the epic verses amount to less than the full story and the oral commentary offers more than an explanation. A more accurate description is that the verses operate as a mnemonic trigger to the commentary, which has its own stories to tell.

Those stories are part of the puppet play's broader interpretive task, which is to build coherence for Kampan's Rama story. My understanding of the concept of building coherence owes much to John Miles Foley's discussion of "traditional referentiality," mentioned briefly in chapter 1. Extending his earlier analyses of the Yugoslav epic tradition from "structure to meaning," Foley first discusses the formulae (of the oral formulaic theory) and then explains that they "command fields of reference much larger than the single line, passage, or even text in which they occur" and "bear meanings as wide and deep as the tradition they encode."^[36] This traditional referentiality is metonymic, Foley continues, because it evokes in an informed audience a set of historical and intertextual associations, which complete the story in Yugoslav epic singing. Foley may have overstated the referential power of epic language (all language is metonymic to an extent), but surely he is correct that oral epics call forth an immense field of associations. Something very much like this traditional referentiality operates as well in the commentary of the Kerala puppeteers. In fact, the puppet play is doubly referential: the puppeteers create meanings not only through the language of Kampan's text but also through the tales, proverbs, and quotations in their commentary. In the text-world thus built by the puppeteers, no event is isolated, no act unexplained, no character adrift; each piece is attached to another piece, and so by picking up any one episode or verse, the skilled puppeteer may move to any other episode or verse. On a larger scale, single Rama texts are also fragments that touch, extend, and overlap others in a mosaic that local traditions reassemble. Even Kampan was aware of this wider referential frame, when, as the poet setting out to compose a Rama story, he compared himself to a cat attempting to lick up the whole of the Milk Ocean. So, too, if we think of the puppeteers as storytellers recounting and revising the

Rama story, we will not hear all that they say, but if we listen to them as commentators, they teach us what we already know—that there is no the Ramayana, only Rama stories, each incomplete and therefore inexplicable without reference to others.

The principal pathways to this wider narrative world in the drama-house are fixed-phrase expressions and auxiliary tales. As is true of other oral performers, the puppeteers have a weakness for epithets ("benefactor"-Vibhisana; "raja whose crown bows to no one"-Ravana; "Truth of the Vedas"-Rama; "waxing moon"-Siva), for etymologies (of tumi , of anmai ), and for proverbs ("Kill your mother, but never kill a messenger")—all of which lead to episodes beyond the epic content of the verse under discussion. More unique is the puppeteers' use of another fixed form, the piramanam (explanation, rule), which are quotations from traditional Indian literature, mostly Tamil and occasionally Sanskrit, but rarely Malayalam.^[37] Commonly in proverb form, piramanam are second only to the epic verses as a source of knowledge and a basis of textual authority. When Rama wants to explain the meaning of the word "benefactor" to Vibhisana, for instance, he quotes from a Tamil book of maxims (Tirukkural , misidentified in performance as the Vedas): "Look closely at his face and you see inside his mind; whether anger, sincerity, or deceit, you can see its outer sign in the face"; and to explain that birth determines personality, he quotes the Tamil poet Auvaiyar. Every skilled performer knows two or three hundred quotations, which he memorizes from old palm-leaf manuscripts or, more often, from the notebooks in which he has carefully copied them. Some piramanam are contained within an auxiliary tale and are quoted as a tag line for retrieving that tale, which is then told in order to explain the meaning of a verse (see below). In disputes between puppeteers, nothing silences an opponent more quickly than to throw a piramanam at him.

Auxiliary stories unconnected to these fixed-phrase expressions are also told by the puppeteers in their commentary. Folktales, pan-Indian myths, and Tamil temple myths, especially Saiva myths, are often woven into the wandering discourse, but the richest repository of these explanatory stories is a group of tales inserted into the Birth Book or compiled in a sequel, the Uttara Kanda. These tales contain material which editors apparently could neither fit neatly into the narrative nor omit altogether and thus chose to insert at the beginning or at the end of the story. The tales in the Uttara Kanda, omitted in Kampan but central to the puppet play, form a sort of "folk supplement" to the Rama story.

This sequel, the Uttara Kanda, contains two general categories of stories: those describing Ravana's history prior to the beginning of the epic (the history of Lanka, his genealogy, his exploits, and so forth) and those that extend the plot beyond the return to Ayodhya (Sita's banishment from Ayodhya, the birth of her two sons, Rama's horse sacrifice, and the final separation of Rama and Sita). Since neither the early Ravana stories nor the later darker tales about Rama suit bhakti intentions, the Kamparamayanam does not contain the Uttara Kanda. In fact, a clear line is drawn between it and Kampan's composition: the Tamil Uttara Kanda is attributed to Ottakkuttan and is not usually printed with Kampan's text.^[38] This intertextual tension surfaces in the puppeteers' story of how Kampan came to write his epic. After Ottakkuttan's defeat in the poetic competition with Kampan, he despairs and destroys his Rama story, but the victorious Kampan intervenes in the nick of time to save the loser's Uttara Kanda and then persuades him to "join it to my six books ... then we shall have a complete Tamil Ramayana." A unified Rama text, however, is exactly what we do not have, and the puppeteers' reliance on stories from the omitted Uttara Kanda in order to interpret Kampan's text indicates how far the folk tradition reaches beyond its source text.

The puppeteers choose to tell stories from the Uttara Kanda about Ravana and not Rama, and this selectivity reorients the epic. Although Kampan alludes to events in Ravana's past, his narrative begins with and ends with Rama; at the other extreme, some Rama texts begin with the history of Lanka and tell the story from Ravana's perspective. Effecting a compromise, the puppet play formally adheres to Kampan's sequence and its Rama orientation but circumvents it in two primary ways. First the puppeteers actually begin the narrative either at Pancavati or with the War Book, and thus introduce Ravana and his family at the beginning of the story; second, throughout performance, the puppeteers use the commentary to tell Ravana's story (at Pancavati, we might remember, Surpanakha narrates Ravana's past history in some detail). The stories told most frequently in the drama-house form a cycle that describes Ravana's exploits before he enters Kampan's epic plot and thus creates a symmetry between what we know of Ayodhya and what we know of Lanka. From this "Ravanayana" we learn, in the above performance alone, that Dasagriva has Brahmin ancestry, is a fervent devotee of Siva and Brahma, received boons from both gods, defeated Indra and the Cosmic Elephants, molested Vedavati, is a master of the vina, and is a megalomaniac.

This last quality is also the theme of a story that illustrates how the puppeteers' commentary reframes Kampan's text from Ravana's point of view. When, in the first scene of the above translation, Ravana wonders how a mere monkey was able to burn Lanka, Vibhisana reminds him of his victory march after conquering the Three Worlds, during which his arrogance earned him three curses: from Kubera's messenger (that Ravana would be destroyed by another messenger); from Vedavati (that, in a later birth as Sita, she would destroy him); and from Nandi (that a real "monkey-face" would destroy him).^[39] As a result, Vibhisana informs his brother, the fire of Sita's chastity, magnified by the mirror of the emissary Hanuman, has burned Lanka. Told as the very first scene in the puppet play (and not found in Kampan), the story of the three curses reframes the entire epic around Ravana's flawed character: the king of Lanka is doomed by his own past—by an arrogance that engenders vengeance in proud monkeys and chaste women. What device more firmly links past and present, placing one Rama story in relation to others, than a curse, especially three of them?^[40] No wonder that the puppeteers often call their Rama story "a tale of eighteen curses."^[41]

Throughout the War Book, the puppeteers tell other stories from this Ravana cycle to explain other aspects of his character, and each story may be repeated to a different effect. Vibhisana's version of Ravana's victory march, for example, emphasizes his pride and lust, whereas a second version of the story later, told by Indra to the gods, emphasizes his stupidity when he gives away many of the lives granted by Siva. If a puppeteer wishes to praise Ravana's devotion, on the other hand, he may select the story of Ravana's encounter with Siva, in which he received his name, or the story of his austerities to Brahma on the shores of Lake Kuntalam, in which he received his weapons, his sword, chariot, and invincibility against gods and demons. Ravana's heroic endurance, as another example, is glorified by the story of the Cosmic Elephants, during the victory march, in which he conquers the Guardians of the Eight Directions by lopping off their thirty-two tusks stuck in his chest. Ravana himself alludes to those tusks in describing to Maliyavan the pain he felt when Hanuman pounded his chest during the first humiliating battle. These episodes from the Uttara Kanda, many of which are not even mentioned in Kampan's verses, are essential to the puppeteers' retelling of the Kamparamayanam .

The puppeteers tell other stories, as well, especially of Siva (the Markandeya story) and of Visnu (Churning the Ocean, Gajendra Moksa ,

Madhu and Kaitabha). The last story deserves mention here because it is told frequently (three or four times in the course of a festival and twice in our sample of performances) and because it illustrates the fact that the commentary tells stories to explain the actions of epic characters other than Ravana. Madhu and Kaitabha, as the puppeteers tell it, are two demons born from Visnu's earwax (or feces) to humble Brahma's pride because the creator god was prematurely drawing up plans for the next creation when he should have been fast asleep in Visnu's stomach. Tricked by Visnu into losing their invincibility in this life, the demons are given boons to fight the god again and are reborn as Kumbhakarna and Atikayan, who then face Rama-Visnu on the battlefield. From the same story, the puppeteers also derive Jambuvan, born from Brahma's nose water, which was loosened by his fear of the demons, rolled down his face, and settled in the cleft of his chin.

A final illustration of the commentary's power to create coherence is Natesan Pillai's account of how Kampan came to compose his epic.^[42] Narrated within the explication of a single verse word (tumi ), this story demonstrates how completely the commentary subsumes the narrative function and enables the puppeteer to move from the part to the whole—from a verse in the Kamparamayanam to the history of its composition—within the mosaic of the Rama story tradition. Looking closely at the performance, we see that the Kampan verse serves as the door through which this senior puppeteer exits the epic text and moves to a different vantage point, where Indra and the gods speak as detached observers of the events on earth. By stepping outside the verses, Natesan Pillai is able to talk about Kampan's epic, and when his tale of Kampan's composition is completed, he reenters the epic narrative through that same "verse door." This and other auxiliary stories dominate the puppet play, exceeding in total performance time the narrative delivered in the verses.

I first suspected the limited role of the verses when I realized that the puppeteers do not chant all the verses that they know. After comparing several performances with Kampan's text, a consistent pattern stood out: if Kampan summarizes a story in a string of verses, the puppeteers sing only one of those verses and use the commentary to cover the material contained in the others. This selective use of the verses occurs in the scene already discussed, when Vibhisana addresses Ravana in the war council: Although the puppeteers sing only one of the several Kampan verses spoken by Vibhisana to tell the story of Ravana's victory march, their commentary includes all the details of that story—the

curses, the names of elephants, and so forth. The puppeteers do not chant all the verses they have memorized because they do not need them. Instead, the verses are mnemonic devices, like the piramanam , memorized to trigger narration in the oral commentary of episodes from the wider llama story tradition. To adapt Foley's idea of "traditional referentiality," Kampan's verses are similar to other pieces that comprise the referential realm of the Rama tradition, that field of meanings which every performance evokes and none can exhaust.