Creating Conversations

In reading these translated performances and threading through their frequent digressions, readers may appreciate the point of the previous chapter that the puppeteers do not "tell" Kampan's Rama story as much as they explain it. In what follows, I expand that argument by analyzing the creation of conversations as the primary technique by which the puppeteers explicate and thereby gain control over Kampan's text. My description of these conversations covers not only verbal exchanges between epic characters, who speak in voices either faint or heard not at all in the epic text, but also dialogic relations between the oral commentary and the chanted verses.^[58] In discussing these mechanics and varieties of talk in the puppet play, I am guided by Bakhtin's concept of double-voiced or embedded speech, in which a second speaker imposes new intentions on another's speech, for this is the interpretive task of the puppeteers.^[59]

Four different conversations are spoken inside the drama-house.^[60]

1. The first conversation is spoken between the Brahmin puppets, Muttuppattar and Gangaiyati, who were introduced in chapter 3 as the narrators during the "Song of the Drama-House." I said there that their "master-of-ceremonies" repartee does not appear in Kampan and is a product of the puppet play, but what is salient here is that they deliver it entirely in dialogue. This first conversation indicates the drive to dialogue in the puppet play because performances might have been framed by a single voice—of one of the famous puppeteers saluted in the introduction, for example.

2. Once the Brahmin puppets are removed from the screen (never to return), the role of narrator is largely ignored as the performance moves into the second conversation, that spoken between epic characters

pinned up on the screen. In this second dialogue, which is heard throughout performance, puppeteers link each verse and each segment of the commentary in a conversational chain: the verse is chanted as if spoken by one character to another and then followed by commentary either in the first speaker's voice or as a response from another speaker, which prompts another verse, and so on, until morning.

3. A third conversation is spoken whenever the puppeteers veer off into an auxiliary story (see previous chapter) that contains dialogue. Although descriptive passages in these auxiliary stories are not invariably in dialogue, they are nonetheless spoken as part of the conversation between epic characters (conversation 2) in which those stories are embedded.

4. A fourth and final conversation is heard between Indra and the gods, who act as detached narrators. After the Brahmin puppets (conversation 1) leave the screen, the role of narrator is only clumsily handled by the epic characters (in conversations 2 and 3), who must somehow double as actor and independent observer, for example, during Vibhisana's long speech to Rama with which the translation above begins. (Readers may want to reread that speech because it is adduced several times in this discussion.) Puppeteers sometimes slowly slide the identity of the speaker from epic actor to narrator, as in this speech to Rama, for instance, when Vibhisana says, "Rama, notice that the poet here calls you ariya ," and then provides an exegesis for that word. Small-scale explications of this nature are regularly achieved without a formal shift in conversational frame; however, if the puppeteers wish to comment on weighty events—to set right the meaning of Ravana's first defeat, disclose the full meaning of Indrajit's death, speculate on various interpretations of Rama's grief, or tell the story of how Kampan composed his epic—they shift to a dialogue between Indra and the gods pinned high up on the screen above the epic action.

Unlike the Brahmin narrators, this pair of speakers is not a folk innovation, although the puppet play does alter their role. In Kampan, Indra and the gods appear seldom and nearly always as characters who speak directly to the epic characters in order to influence the epic action at crucial moments: advising Bharata to return to Ayodhya, reminding Rama of his dharma mission, and sending Rama a chariot in the final battle, for example. In the shadow puppet play, by contrast, Indra appears frequently, always with another puppet (who represents the other gods collectively) and always as a narrator who speaks with his fellow gods but not with epic characters.^[61] Nevertheless, as an audience

for the epic actors, Indra and the gods are not insignificant. In the last scene of the great battle, as we shall hear, Ravana urges Rama to spare no effort to present a spectacle worthy of the gods, and Rama addresses them before he kills the demon-raja: "Gods, I, Rama, now kill Ravana."

In and of themselves, these four conversations are not unusual, but it is remarkable that the puppet play creates them by a systematic and deliberate conversion of Kampan's text. Each Kampan verse is changed to speech, which is then woven into a dialogue with speeches in the oral commentary; as a result, every word in performance (except the infrequent prose transitions [avatarikai ] and some devotional songs) is spoken to a listener in an unbroken flow of conversation which ceases only when the puppets are taken down at five o'clock in the morning. Even the abrupt and frequent alternations between chanted verses and declaimed commentary do not break the conversational thread of performance. For example, consider again the example of the dialogue between Vibhusana and Rama at the beginning of the translation above. In the first verse, Rama poses a question ("Who is this mighty warrior?"), which he expands upon in the commentary until Vibhisana responds with the second verse ("Listen, Noble One"), after which Vibhisana continues to ramble on in commentary for almost half an hour. However far Vibhisana may wander—and when a puppeteer sails away with his favorite topic, the commentary sounds very much like a monologue—he is always hauled back into dialogue by a question put by himself or his partner. Every word in the verses and every. word in commentary is spoken within one of these four conversations.^[62]

The relationship between verses and commentary is itself dialogic and reveals how conversations enable the puppeteers to gain control of the epic story. I find it useful to think of commentary and text as a form of double-voiced speech, along the lines suggested by the Russian critic, M. M. Bakhtin, who identifies a variety of forms in which a second speaker overlays the first speaker's words with a second and contrasting meaning. Parody is a good example. As Bakhtin points out, not all quoted or embedded speech is double-voiced; only when the two voices convey two distinct intentions is the utterance double-voiced because only then is the speaker able "to impose a new intention on the utterance, which nevertheless retains its own proper referential intention."^[63] When the puppeteers chant the verses, we hear two voices but not two intentions; when they repeat verse words in commentary, however, and, even more, when they abandon simple exegesis for their own discourse, two voices are audible. This distinction between the voice of the com-

mentary and voice of the verses may be plotted along a continuum from lesser to greater discord: at one end, the voice of the puppet play imitates Kampan; at the other, it speaks independently of and sometimes (as explained in the next chapter) against the poet's intention.

At the imitation end of the spectrum are the chanted verses, during which the performer's voice is least distinct from that of the medieval epic. Because the words of the verses are (in Bakhtin's term) "already occupied," chanting them is single-voiced, and the puppet play attempts to impersonate Kampan's text. As Bakhtin explains, "If we hear another voice, then we hear something which did not figure in the imitator's plan."^[64] Nonetheless, even at this "imitation end" of the continuum, the folk tradition asserts some control by converting the verses to speeches and then linking them in the uninterrupted chain of conversation spoken by epic characters throughout the night-long performance. Many of Kampan's verses are already dialogues between epic characters, but they differ from the folk performance in the crucial aspect of voice. Speeches in Kampan are encased within the poet's voice, which appends a finite verb ("he said", "she shouted," etc.) at the close of each verse or at the close of the last verse in a series, whereas speeches in the puppet play are spoken directly by the epic characters. To achieve this immediacy, the puppeteers systematically drop the finite verb—the quotation marks, so to speak—from Kampan's verse; as a result, instead of reading (the line) "'Who is that great warrior?' asked Rama," we hear Rama ask: "Who is that great warrior?"^[65] (Although in written dialogue the finite verb is often necessary to indicate the speaker, in oral performance this is usually obvious by context.) This minor but consistent omission throughout performance alters the effect of the chanted verse; the textual intention still dominates, but now the puppeteers speak through the characters.

This conversion of Kampan's dialogue verses to speech is not a conversion from reported speech to direct speech; both Kampan's verses and the performed verses are direct speech, and such terms are inaccurate in any case since direct speech contains a "report" of who spoke and what the person said.^[66] For a sharper distinction between Kampan's dialogue and the puppeteer's dialogue, and perhaps between other forms of written literature and oral performance, I prefer the term "vocalization." Briefly defined, words spoken and heard are vocalized; words read silently, even in dialogue, are not. Although recent research has narrowed the once great divide between written and oral expression, especially in terms of shared formal features, such as parallelism, I am

convinced that they remain radically different in effect, which we recognize whenever we read a play and then see it on stage. In other words, the contrast between the puppet play and Kampan's poems is that between speaking and writing, or, in Albert Lord's apt phrase, between "words heard and words seen."^[67] Kampan's text, too, was probably orally recited, but even hearing dialogue written in the third person lacks the immediacy of hearing dialogue spoken in the first person. Truly direct speech is vocalized—spoken and heard in oral performances, or conversations, like those in the puppet play.

In addition to Kampan's dialogue verses, his descriptive verses are also vocalized in first-person speech by the puppeteers. Although converting these verses to dialogue is more complex than the single-word omission used to convert dialogue verses, it is still relatively simple. One or two new lines are often required, but the most frequent method is to replace the finite verb at the end of a verse with a vocative or imperative or both. An example is the puppeteer's vocalization of Kampan's famous opening verse of the Surpanakha episode, which likens the beauty of the Godavari River to poetry. When chanting this verse, the puppeteers change Kampan's final words "the heroes saw" ( virar kantar ) to "look, brother" (tampi, kanay ); rather than reading the poet's description of what Rama saw, we hear Rama describe it to Laksmana:

"Look, Brother, here is the Godavari,
     lying as a necklace on the world
Nourishing the rich soil
     rushing over waterfalls
Flowing through the five regions
     in clear, cool streams
Like a good poet's verse."

Alternatively, the puppeteers sometimes omit the descriptive verses altogether from the scenes sung in the puppet play; for instance, when Vibhisana extols Kumbhakarna's prowess (in the opening scene above), a string of verses detailing the warrior's appearance, his chariot, his armor, and his armies is dropped, and only the dialogue verses are retained (and altered, as already described) by the puppet play. If we look back at the Surpanakha and Va1i episodes in chapters 4 and 5, we will see that they, too, are presented almost entirely in dialogue, and this principle of omitting descriptive verses in favor of conversation governs the adaptation of episode after episode in the puppeteers' telling of the Rama story.

In its continuous drive toward dialogue, the puppet play reaches deep into Kampan's verses and converts even inner thoughts to speech. This conversion requires substantial alteration, and sometimes the whole Kampan verse is replaced by a folk equivalent; in this case, emotions unspoken in Kampan are vocalized by another character to herself or to an imagined interlocutor, as when Surpanakha, burning with lovesickness, addresses the moon. A comparison of Kampan's verse describing Surpanakha's feelings with its vocalized adaptation sung by the puppeteers illustrates the difference:

Kampa
Now as the warm wind from the Malayas entered her chest
Like Death's long spear, she who had thought herself
Able to consume the God of Love and the full moon
For a curry along with him was suffering and losing strength.^[68]

Puppet Play
Waxing moon! I'll make a curry of you! and then eat Rama, too.
But, no, the mountain wind, like harsh Death's spear,
Enters my seething breast,
And now I will sleep.

Although the puppeteers make revisions to Kampan's verse (the God of Love is omitted from, and Rama added to, Surpanakha's intended curry of victims; "losing strength" becomes "I will sleep"), they omit nothing essential and retain the poet's central image of the mountain breeze piercing, as death's spear, Surpanakha's chest. Despite this continuity of content, however, the verse sung in the puppet play is cast in a new psychological light because Surpanakha's emotions are spoken in her voice rather than refracted through the poet's words. If Kampan's verse is sorrowful, turning on the contrast between Surpanakha's desire and her suffering, then the folk verse is pathetic, almost comical, exposing the foolhardy bravado of one who boasts to the moon in the first line and yet is laid low by love in the last line.

Silent thoughts in Kampan are also voiced in the puppet play when the speaker addresses herself with a single word, commonly a vocative (manace , "Oh, heart") which replaces the last phrase of a verse ("he thought", "she feared," etc.). To understand this contrast between emotions thought and emotions spoken, I again compare verses from the Surpanakha episode, but instead of altering a Kampan verse, this time the puppet play replaces it entirely with a folk verse. Having seen

Rama on the banks of the river, Surpanakha attempts to identify the handsome figure:

Kampan
"The God of Love," she thought, "who lives in the heart
Had his body destroyed and Indra has a thousand eyes.
Siva has three eyes like lotus flowers and Brahma??
Who created the world from his navel has four arms."^[69]

Puppet Play
Is he Kama, visiting this earth with his love-bow?
Or Indra, king of gods, or some earthly raja?
Could he be Laksmi's consort, Visnu?
Or Siva glistening with garlands?
Or the Sun-god in his circling chariot?
Oh heart [manace ], who is this man?

This and all similar vocalizations of Kampan's verses, I am arguing, increase the puppeteers' control over the epic in performance. Vocal-izations appear to imitate the text, to speak in its voice, but they also open the door to a second intention; and once this dlialogic wedge has been inserted between the text and its recitation, conversations created by the puppet play pry them further and further apart. This distinction between the text and the puppeteers' voice sharpens as the performance moves from Kampan verses to their own commentary. After the imitative chanting of the four-line verse, the puppeteers repeat the first line and then provide a gloss which may unfold into tales and myths; the remaining three lines may also be repeated and glossed, but more common is the repetition and explication of single verse words (ariya and atitalam in the initial verse in the above translation). Such repetitions of verse lines and verse words push performance away from imitation and toward double-voiced speech, for now the poet's word is subject to the puppeteers' interpretation. Just as the poet embeds his characters' speech within his own, the puppeteers speak these verse fragments within their own commentary and thereby infuse them with new meaning. Rather than speaking as the poet (in a chanted verse), the puppeteers speak for him, and Kampan becomes another voice, another character, like the many traditional sayings (piramanam ) that the puppeteers manipulate for their own interpretive ends. Although the repeated verse words echo the epic poem, they also build small bridges to the more expansive commentary, within which the textual voice will eventually fade; the word ariya , for instance, leads into the theology of

the body, a discourse on grammar, and a telling of the Markandeya story. Although a dialogic gap has been opened, the puppeteers' voice still supplements Kampan, with only a minor difference in intention, and does not yet supplant the poet's words.

That difference becomes the distinction of doubled speech when the puppeteers elaborate their exegesis and spin out digressions. With the chanted verses steadily receding from the performative present, the resulting disjunction between epic action and oral commentary may itself become the topic of discussion, as is demonstrated by the now familiar example in the initial segment of commentary when Vibhisana speaks to Rama. While Kumbhakarna. and his armies of elephants and horses charge toward them, Vibhisana addresses Rama, and when the giant warrior is nearly upon them and the earth quakes beneath them, still Vibhisana speaks. For nearly two hours he speaks, slowly raising his right hand and carefully lowering it, two or three times, to dramatize a point. With no other movement visible on the screen, we understand Rama's growing anxiety about the "giant warrior bearing down upon" him as Vibhisana expatiates on the epithet "worthy one" (ariya ), tells the story of Mahabali, and explains noun classifications, all the time ignoring his Lord's pleas, and finally concludes with a long account of the Markandeya story. Rama, however, must show patience while the puppeteers tell their own stories.

At times, this incongruity between rambling commentary and imminent epic action is comical, as in another, later example from the translation in this chapter, when Jambuvan speaks to Hanuman. The monkey devotee must travel to the Medicine Mountain seventy-three thousand yojanas away and return quickly with the magical herbs that will revive Laksmana and the monkeys, but Jambuvan leisurely describes his own birth:

"It's a long, long story, requiring more than an eon to recount and we've only got three-quarters of an hour. But, in brief, I am a child of Brahma. Let me explain. Existence moves in cycles of creation and dissolution, since everything born—from the Three Gods to an insect—also dies . . ." [and so forth, for several minutes].

If it could be said in 1935 that the puppets "often remain stationary, merely gesticulating with right or left hand, during long spells of ca-denced chants," I can confirm that they have not picked up much speed

over the past half century.^[70] Given the commentarial nature of the puppet play, some tension between rapid plot and long-winded exposition is unavoidable, but the puppeteers flaunt this disparity rather than conceal it. Kumbakharna charges at Rama, and Laksmana and the monkey army lie unconscious, but the epic action must wait for the stories told in the commentary.

A less deliberate but more vivid illustration of the commentary's ability to invest the text with new intentions is the story of Kampan's poem told by Natesan Pillai, which was mentioned in the previous chapter. The story is prompted by a verse: during the construction of the causeway to Lanka, the ambitious monkey Kumutan throws an enormous boulder into the sea, sending water drops (tumi ) to the gods in heaven, who believe that ambrosia will rise again, as it did when the gods and demons churned the Milk Ocean.^[71] When chanting this verse, the puppeteers merge their voice with that of the text, but when they quote the verse and gloss the word tumi in the commentary, we hear their voice speaking. Once the verse is within their interpretive grasp, they crack it wide open to reveal the history of Kampan's text, from the desire of a Chola king to hear a "Rama story in the southern language" to the debate over tumi , from Kampan's deceit and Bhagavati's assistance to the poet's triumph over his rival and the composition of the Kamparamayanam . Through this extraordinary story, the puppeteers also gain control of the text by historicizing it. Although the verse about Kumutan appears halfway through the ten thousand verses of Kampan's text, the commentary claims that is was the very first verse written by him, and Natesan Pillai's story closes by stamping the epic with the day and year when Kampan first recited his composition. By creating these conversations in which the poet speaks, lies, worships, and eventually recites his own composition, the puppet play gives voice even to Kampan himself.

Doubled speech, competing intentions, and the puppeteers' grip on performance is evident also in ordinary dialogue spoken by epic characters (conversation 2). To say that the puppeteers speak in their own voice is more than metaphor here, since the epic characters speak not in Kampan's literary Tamil but in an idiomatic Tamil (cetti basai ); unlike the converted verses and repeated verse-words, these dialogues are not "occupied" by the poet's meanings and are thus more susceptible to the intentions of the puppeteers. We do not hear this dialogue if, as in our favorite scene between Vibhisana and Rama, the speeches last for five or ten minutes, but when the speakers alternate more quickly, the puppeteers' voices are distinctly audible. An example from the above trans-

lation occurs when Ravana considers what to do after Kumbhakarna's death:

"First that monkey burned our city , and then my palace is put under siege. I've lost a battle to Rama, Kumbhakarna has been killed, and now I've lost my son!"

[His wife, Danyamalini :] "Kumbhakarna is gone, our beloved son is dead, and who is next? All this because you want to keep that Sita as a concubine! [ To Indrajit ] Son, your brother is dead and now the fate of Lanka rests on your shoulders."

"Do not grieve, Mother. I will surely defeat our enemies. Father, send me to battle."

"Just seeing your strong hands, Son, gives me courage, but we have suffered another loss, a great loss.

"Now you tell me! Why did you send my little brother when I, conqueror of Indra, was here to fight? I humiliated that monkey Hanuman when he spied on us. Armed with special weapons, I leave for the battlefield this very minute."

"What weapons have you, Son?"

"Many. Siva granted me the snake-weapon, the Brahma-weapon, and the Narayana-weapon, and many more. And they have not yet been used. Remember that I am your son and will enter the field chanting your name."

"Yes! Go! Go and kill them both, especially the younger one who has killed your brother."

"Laksmana? I'll offer his head as a gift to the Earth Goddess."

The performed epic is loosened still further from its textual moorings when the dialogue accelerates into a rapid-fire argument between two characters, as in this excerpt from the translation in this chapter, in which Indrajit and Hanuman trade insults:

"Monkey-face! Stop jumping around and talk with me like a man."

"I'm not—"

"Shut up, monkey, and listen to me. Is this some kind of game you're playing? Attacking me not with bow or spear but with trees

and stones? Are you mad? Will that spindly branch ward off my missiles?"

"With this stone—"

"Speak up, animal, speak up!"

"You think words will defeat me? Quit babbling and fight. Why should I stop to talk? Does lightning wait before it strikes? Or a lion before it leaps? Advance, brave Indrajit, or are you afraid?"

[ More battle noises ]

"Take this, runt!"

"I'll rip out that tongue of yours!"

Here the epic characters respond to each other and not to the long-forgotten verse that prompted this heated exchange. Performance moves even further outside the text and into the world created by the puppeteers when dialogue is spoken not between epic characters but within an auxiliary tale (conversation 3 ). In the story of Poor Brains, for instance, the words are trebly distanced from the verses: they are spoken by characters in a story told by the umbrella bearer to Indrajit within the oral commentary spoken by the puppeteers.

Although the skillful performer eventually joins his commentary, whatever its contents, to his explication of a verse, these conversations between epic characters and within auxiliary stories are spoken by equal, distinct voices. Throughout the night, the puppeteers will chant and explicate verses, but they lay their surest claim to the Kamparamayanam by creating conversations.

Behind the ventriloquism of the puppets is yet another conversation, one in which the puppeteers speak with each other. I save this for last because it contains that interaction between speakers and listeners I had expected to find between the puppeteers and an audience on the other side of the screen—that dialogue whose absence baffled me for so long and yet was present all along when I learned where to look. Like their puppets, Kerala puppeteers always speak in pairs: a lead man and his support. After the initial pair have performed for an hour or so, a third man, who has been sleeping or resting in the drama-house, relieves one of them, who then sleeps for some time until he spells his now exhausted original partner. This rotation of chanting and sleeping (one of the world's more bizarre work schedules) requires three men, and given the dwindling numbers of active puppeteers, seldom are more than three

present in the drama-house. Seated together on a wooden bench or woven mats, the exchange between lead and support man assumes various forms but never abandons conversation. When a verse is recited, for example, the lead usually chants the first half of each line and his partner completes it; during the commentary, on the other hand, their interaction is reduced to a minimum when the lead puppeteer speaks uninterruptedly for several minutes.

As stated earlier, verse and commentary speak as voices within a continuous conversation, and when we realize that these are puppeteers speaking to each other, we can identify other dialogic devices. First, the conversational thread of the commentary is tenuously, if monotonously, sustained by the droning sound ("ahhhh . . .") muttered by the support man whenever his lead pauses for breath or thought and by questions from the support man (like the straight man in a comedy routine). Second, irrespective of length, speeches open and/or close with epithets employed as vocatives ("Rama-god" for Rama; "Young god" for Laksmana; "Ruler of Lanka" for Vibhisana). Ostensibly addressed to the epic characters, these epithets actually cue the exchange between puppeteers. If in the middle of an exchange between Rama and Vibhisana about the upcoming battle, to return to our well-worked example, the lead man inserts the long tale of the Churning of the Ocean and only returns to the epic narrative thirty minutes later with the question, "So what do you think . . . ?" his partner is likely to have forgotten who is speaking about what to whom; the panic on a young performer's face is painful but brief for he is rescued when the lead man appends to his question the epithet, "Ruler of Lanka?" With context thus restored, the support man is able to respond convincingly as Vibhisana.

Contrary to the impression this book might give, the commentary is not merely a series of long-winded discourses by sleepy puppeteers. Everything changes, as seen above, when the lead man shortens his speeches or his partner interrupts in an attempt to wrest control for himself; and when the interaction inside the drama-house escalates into this rapid-fire exchange, it is obvious that underneath the puppets' conversations the puppeteers have been speaking to themselves all along. In the example referred to above, when Indrajit insulted Hanuman (with cries of "Take this, runt,"), the puppeteer speaking for Indrajit challenged his partner, jabbing his finger and shouting at him, and nearly knocked him off the bench, while Hanuman's speaker raised his eyebrows and responded with cool disdain for Indrajit's aggressive

posturing. On another occasion later in the same performance, a puppeteer surprised his partner by asking an unexpected question and skillfully drew out the answer he (Angada) needed in order to dismantle his partner's (Jambuvan's) argument that fighting for Rama was futile:

[Angada ] "Sure, sure, Jambuvan, but who killed Madhu and Kaitabha?"

[Jambuvan ] "Er . . . Visnu."

"And who killed Hiranya?"

"It was Visnu . . . in his man-lion avatar."

"And who is going to kill these demons who face us now?"

"It will be Rama . . . as Visnu's avatar. I see what you mean,

Angada. But how can I face Rama after this disgraceful retreat?"

When performance moves into this high-speed, unpredictable exchange, one forgets the puppets pinned motionless on the cloth screen. Their flickering shadows are still visible for more than a hundred yards outside, but the performance has become a conversation spoken by the men inside the drama-house.

Tactics of talk employed by the puppeteers to control their conversations range from ordinary jibes to special puppet-play rules. Locked in an argument about the etymology of one of Indrajit's names, for instance, a puppeteer will not hesitate to cry, "Perhaps, but you sleep too much to be trusted with mental matters!" Similarly, the inveterate tendency of some puppeteers to speak at length on issues of vital importance to themselves often tests the limits of collegial respect: "Let that be," a frustrated partner once interrupted his lead's relentless description of Ravana's palace and towers and chambers, "and explain how you got here, Vibhisana." Certain senior puppeteers are notorious for their self-satisfying discourses and cavalier disregard for time, while others, fearful that the sun will in fact rise before Hanuman returns with the medicinal herbs, attempt to hasten the pace of the commentary in order to complete the night's action. One night, as a senior man was gliding languidly through Jambuvan's account of the origin of the world, his partner cut him short: "I see, Jambuvan, so that's how you were born; but what can we do about Laksmana's death?" Of course, no one likes to be interrupted, and puppeteers not willing to relinquish control of the commentary will raise their voice, speak faster, or simply

stonewall their partner. A cleverer trick for wresting verbal control, however, lies in the rules of the drama-house: if a puppeteer sails blissfully away on a digression, one need only recite a piramanam or quote a line from the verse under discussion (which everyone has forgotten), and suddenly, by force of professional habit, the puppeteer who was speaking will stop in mid-sentence and sing the line in unison with the man who has now wrested control of performance.

Despite this verbal jockeying for position, nights in the drama-house are not soured by antagonism. Frustration is common but not hostility. Looking back at the hundreds of performance hours I observed, and after making allowances for the odd egotist or disgruntled puppeteer brooding on some personal problem, I am struck by the cooperation and mutual respect displayed by the performers. The learned quotation and rapid retort, the skillful parody and display of logic are all calculated to please the little band of fellow puppeteers. Even when only two puppeteers are awake, they take pride in explaining how Ravana got his name or in exposing the tomfoolery of the messenger Sangadi. A measure of shame is likewise shared when someone hesitates, forgets the next verse, or begins with the wrong line. That is why neophyte performers clutch a crib sheet listing the first letter of each verse written in sequence in a tiny script, and why senior puppeteers also take into the drama-house a notebook containing the full verses (and sometimes piramanam ), which they may refer to but not read. Only once did I see a junior puppeteer completely at a loss; the poor man suddenly went blank in mid-verse; "I don't know the verses here," he murmured to his partner and hung his head, while the senior man looked at him in a mixture of pity and contempt and carried on with the commentary.

Quality counts on the other side of the cloth screen, too, as I explained in chapter I, but the puppeteers have little direct interaction with their patrons. Temple officials and influential men will eventually decide whether or not to invite the troupe back next year, and hundreds, sometimes thousands, of individuals will register their approval with one-rupee donations. However, the timing of these individual donations only points up the isolation of the puppeteers: whereas in most oral performances such donations are made during performance as a means of communicating with and influencing the performers with requests, in the puppet play those gifts are made before the performance begins, and the donors will not be present when their names are sung to secure blessings from the goddess Bhagavati. This absent audience of temple officials and one-rupee donors, like the goddess and the sleepy

crowd in front of the drama-house, hear words and see shadows only on the outside of the white cloth screen, where certain details of the epic action are invisible (such as Vibhisana's inspection of the false Sita fallen on the floor of the drama-house, and a small puja when Sita is about to enter the fire).^[72] The puppet play's public audiences do not participate in the performance; at best, they overhear it.

To be sure, all forms of puppetry impede interaction with an audience because the performer is hidden, and performances depend on the ventriloquist's illusion. For the spectator, part of the pleasure of the performance is to allow oneself to be fooled by the deception and to see through it at the same time, to hear the hidden puppeteer's voice and to pretend it comes from the visible puppet.^[73] Shadow puppetry, however, asks of spectators yet another degree of self-deception because (with rare exceptions) they do not even see the puppets clearly. In Kerala, the illusion is perhaps too successful. High up in the drama-house behind shadows, screen, and puppets, chanting medieval verses and a learned commentary, making few concessions to music or movement, these puppeteers have receded into their private world.

Puppeteers with whom I discussed the lack of an audience did not see it this way, however. They claimed a Golden Age once existed when they were patronized by local rajas and played to vast crowds who were later lured from the drama-house to the movie-house. Undoubtedly, large audiences did occasionally gather to see the puppet play, for they do so occasionally today—when the puppet play is presented concurrently with more popular events of the temple festival. I have also seen photographs of several hundred people gathered to see a performance on the final day of a festival held in the mid-1950s. All other evidence, on the other hand, suggests that these occasions are exceptions that prove the rule that the puppet play in Kerala is not performed for entertainment. For instance, the puppet play's absent audience was noted in 1935 by a foreign observer and again in 1943 by a local scholar who left no room for doubt: "It does not matter whether there is an audience or not."^[74] Shortly thereafter, and still nearly two decades before movies reached villages in Kerala, another scholar made this recommendation:

If the olapavakuthu [puppet play]^[75] is to survive (and it would be a great pity if it did not), it will apparently have to undergo considerable renovation in the reduction of exposition, a change that would have the desirable effect of quickening the movements of the figures on the screen

and bringing the kuthu [puppet play] nearer the natural desire of people for rhythmic representation. (Cousins 1970 [1948]: 212)

Although scant, these pre-1950 descriptions of performance are enough to indicate that the puppet play's tortoise-like pace and lack of an audience are not recent losses in a media war with movies and television. Equally important, they remind us that the puppeteers are expounders, not tellers, a fact that the above recommendation, with its friendly advice for a "reduction of exposition" and a "quickening of movements," did not grasp.

What that advice also failed to understand is that, unlike other storytelling traditions that use marionettes, scrolls, cards, puppets, and other props, the aesthetic of the Kerala puppet play is not visual; it is verbal. Nowhere is this verbal orientation, and the primacy of the commentary, more apparent than in the battle scenes and death scenes of the War Book. These fast-moving, action-packed scenes, especially Garuda's rescue of Rama, do attract some spectators to the drama-house, and such episodes are standard fare when the puppeteers perform at cultural festivals in New Delhi or elsewhere.^[76] But even in the War Book, when leather weapons are hurled across the cloth screen and thrust into leather chests, the puppets are very often at rest, pinned motionless on the screen for thirty minutes or an hour while the commentary rolls on and on without interruption. It is significant that the Kerala puppets are pinned on the screen, whereas elsewhere in India they are temporarily held against it, and in Southeast Asia they are inserted in a banana-tree trunk, to be taken out and manipulated later. Even the manufacture of the Kerala puppets leaves little doubt as to their intended activity on the screen, for typically they are made with only one movable arm and one movable hand.^[77] Behind this static tableau of pinned puppets, the puppeteers are less concerned with a visual presentation of events for an external audience than with creating conversations for those inside the drama-house. It would be difficult to improve on this description written more than fifty years ago:

It is a privilege to listen to their discourses and the subtleties of their discussion, which are animated by competitive enthusiasm, and there is hardly any subject on which they have not something to say. (Achuyta Menon 1940: 17)