Palghat and the Puppet Play

How and when the Kamparamayanam entered Kerala and the puppet play is also unknown. Neither the text nor the puppet play appears in records left by the early Portuguese and Dutch, or later English merchants who built factories and competed for the spice trade on the Kerala coast; even the usually zealous Christian missionaries entered this interior tract only in the nineteenth century, after British military rule had been established. Still, and although clues picked up

along the years do not yet form a conclusive answer, enough is known to suggest what happened to Kampan's text in Palghat.

Tracing this transmission of Kampan into Kerala will take us through mountain passes and along trade routes, so I begin with geography. To cross from the Tamil country into Kerala, one must traverse the Western Ghats, a mountain range that runs down the spine of southern India and whose peaks reach well over eight thousand feet (see maps, pages xv and xvi). Pilgrims and local people are known to climb over the low hills, but most travelers enter Kerala through two mountain passes, the Shencottah Gap in the south and the Palghat Gap in the central range. Coming through the Palghat Gap by train or bus or car, one is struck by the abrupt shift from the rocky, cotton-growing soil on the Tamil side to the soft patchwork of rice fields on the Kerala side. This is the Palghat region, a broad fertile plain watered by heavy monsoon rains and several rivers, where two crops a year are frequent and three are not uncommon. Monsoon months are muggy and muddy, but there is palpable relief from the dry and dusty days on the other side of the mountains, a contrast that may have prompted a nineteenth-century British official to describe the Palghat region as the "most beautiful that I have ever seen."^[26] Here, and only here, in this green swath of central Kerala through which the Bharatapuzha River flows—an area fifty miles from mountains to sea and about half that distance from north to south—the shadow puppet play is performed.

Fertile Palghat is a hinterland wedged between the Malayali kingdoms to the west and the Tamil kingdoms to the east, which explains much of its history and culture.^[27] Although an outlying district of the ancient Cera kingdom, and later a minor principality of Venganadu, Palghat's natural riches and location attracted the evil eye of its powerful neighbors. Lying on the main trade route through the mountains, Palghat links the weaving centers in the Tamil country to the west-coast ports of Cochin, Ponani, and Calicut, and to Persia and the Arab world. Vying to control this valuable trade, the Zamorin of Calicut, the Raja of Cochin, and the Tamil Kongu kings turned Palghat into a battlefield in the medieval period. The Tamils invaded but never annexed Palghat, and political control swung back and forth between Calicut and the Cochin, eventually cutting the region in half: lands south of the Bharatapuzha River, containing the most productive rice fields and prosperous weaving centers, were ceded to Cochin and ruled by the Nambiti kings from a small palace in Kollengode;^[28] lands north of the river, including those belonging to the rajas (Achans) of Palghat, re-

mained attached to Calicut. Whatever independence these two ruling houses of the region managed to achieve was not long-lived. As the power of the Zamorin grew throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Palghat rajas courted favor with Cochin as a counterweight. South of the river, the Nambitis adopted the same strategy whenever threatened by Cochin and stood in alliance with the Zamorin. This cat-and-mouse game continued until the invasions from Mysore in the mid-eighteenth century pushed Palghat into one of the infamous stories of the British conquest of south India: the war against the Muslim rulers of Mysore—Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan.

Fearing such an invasion from Mysore, the Zamorin of Calicut occupied Palghat in 1746, but his forces were soon overrun by Hyder Ali, to whom the Palghat rajas had appealed for aid. In order to protect the valuable spice trade that traveled from the Kerala coast through the Palghat Gap to his landlocked capital at Seringapattinam, Hyder fortified Palghat town by building a massive stone garrison there in 1765. Commanding a plateau and surrounded by a deep moat, this imposing fortress became an obsession for British forces seeking to oust the Mysoreans; eventually, Colonel Fullarton led the victorious assault in 1783 (taking time to marvel that Palghat "is a fertile and extensive district and the adjacent forest abound in the finest Teek [sic] in India").^[29] When Tipu Sultan was eventually driven back to Mysore in 1792, Palghat came under British rule administered from Bombay; and after Tipu was finally defeated in 1799, the line that had been drawn in the medieval period reappeared: lands north of the Bharatapuzha River, including Palghat town but excluding Chittur, became part of British-ruled Malabar; those south of the river, plus Chittur, were retained by the princely state of Cochin-Travancore. Finally, in 1956, for the first time in a thousand years, a united Palghat emerged as a district in the newly created state of Kerala. Today the Achan Rajas of Palghat retain their title and royal accessories, but little else;^[30] during the annual coronation of the Raja, in 1989, I noticed that caparisoned elephants outnumbered spectators.

Politically divided, Palghat is culturally hybrid as well, and to some, it is a no-man's land—unorthodox, even dangerous. Suspicions of caste impurity are not an uncommon theme in India, but they cut deeply into the legends of both local royal houses. The Kollengode Nambitis, who ruled the southern Palghat region, are said to be descendants of a Brahmin mysteriously brought up as a blacksmith, while tales of pollution among the ruling family of Palghat appear in history books to

explain why Tamil Brahmins (Pattars) and not Malayali Brahmins (Nambudiris) dominate the region.^[31] The following version, told to me by an elderly Tamil Brahmin man in Palghat, is representative:

Sometime in the 1500s when Palghat was a small principality under the Cochin Raja, only Nambudiris [Kerala Brahmins] lived here. Then a young prince of the Palghat ruling family, I think he was named Sekhari Varma, fell in love with a tribal girl. The Cochin Raja opposed this marriage, but the prince refused to budge and married the girl. Suddenly all the Nambudiris left and the prince sent to Tamil Nadu for Brahmins to conduct temple rites. These Pattars [Tamil Brahmins] had been coming to an annual Vedic scholars convention at Tirunavaya [near Pattambi] and so they knew the area. So they decided to settle in Palghat. Then the tribal queen turned all the Bhagavatis into tribal goddesses—Emur Bhagavati, Min Bhagavati, Manapully Bhagavati. The Pattars came from Tanjore, Madurai, and Kancipuram, and even now you can see this history in the names of their agraharams [settlements], for instance Cokanathapuram, after Siva's name at Madurai.^[32]

Another legend traces the marginality of Palghat to confusion of a different category: the first ruler was a Tamil, a Pandiya king named Subangi, who was actually a woman disguised as a man.^[33] This stigma of crossed categories attaches even to Tamil Brahmins in Palghat, whose local name (pattar ) is almost a synonym for miscegenation. Palghat's hybrid culture is evident today in the several castes who are both Tamil and Malayalam, worshiping at Bhagavati temples while wearing clothes (vesti ) and jewelry (double nose pin) the Tamil way and speaking Tamil words with Malayalam forms and sounds.

Languages are also intermingled in borderland Palghat and its pup-per play. Tamil was the literary language of the west coast until perhaps the thirteenth or fourteenth century, when Malayalam began to emerge as a separate literature, in part as a consequence of Sanskrit influence. Predictably, Rama texts illustrate this mottled linguistic history in Kerala. Although the first Rama text on the west coast was probably the Sanskrit Ascaryacudamani , the more popular Ramayanas (Ramacaritam and Rama Katha Pattu ), which date from around 1400 A.D., ., are an admixture of Tamil meters and usage with Malayalam vocabulary; the narrative in both these texts, however, follows Valmiki.^[34] Sanskrit eventually allied with Malayalam to form another hybrid (mani-pravalam ) that eclipsed the Tamil stream of literature and produced the most famous Kerala Ramayana, that by Eluttaccan, about 1600 A.D. (Some puppeteers claim that Malayalam is derived from Sanskrit and argued

fiercely with me on this point in the drama-house.) Beneath this literary surface, Tamil and some kind of Tamil-Malayalam patois continued to be spoken in border areas, such as Palghat, where contact with the language on the other side of the mountains remained unbroken or was renewed by migration. By the early twentieth century, census reports show about one-third of the people of the Palghat region spoke Tamil as their mother tongue.^[35] Nowhere is this polyglot more audible than in the drama-houses, where Tamils and Malayalis chant verses in literary Tamil and comment upon them in a Tamil-Malayalam patois (plus an occasional Sanskrit sloka ) for their Malayalam-speaking patrons.^[36] Small wonder, then, that local people say the puppeteers speak cetti basai , a mildly derisive term for "trader speech."

The term is not wholly inaccurate, either, since the Tamil-speaking puppeteers belong to the same groups of merchants, traders, and weavers (Mutaliyar, Chettiyar, Mannatiyar) who for centuries traveled to Kerala through the Palghat Gap, along the trade route linking Tamil commercial centers with the west-coast ports.^[37] Upon entering Kerala, these merchants reached the town of Palghat, whence goods were transported down the Bharatapuzha River to Ponani and then by sea to Cochin or by an overland route northwest to the port of Calicut. Modern performance sites form a string of dots along these routes, from the Tamil centers to Palghat town, along the Bharatapuzha River, and along the road to Calicut. This trading must have been ongoing for centuries, but inscriptions show an increase around 1500, after a major Tamil temple was built at Kalpathy, near Palghat.^[38] One family of puppeteers claimed that their ancestors migrated from Madurai "three hundred years ago," and another dated their migration from Pollachi about 1650. Whenever they came, they brought with them rice, textiles, jewelry, chilies, and, I believe, Kampan's text.

One reason to believe that Kampan's text was brought to Kerala by these Tamil weavers and merchants is their historical relationship with the Rama cult in the region and with Kampan scholarship generally. One might assume, for instance, that Kampan manuscripts were brought into Palghat by Tamil Brahmins, who also began to settle there around 1500, but preservation and recitation of the Kamparamayanam is not and has never been a brahminical tradition.^[39] Beginning with Kampan himself, who was born in a caste of temple servants and musicians, and extending to the editors and commentators of his text, non-Brahmins have dominated the field. I was struck by the fact that Brahmins are insignificant in the shadow puppet play and that the few

local Rama temples in their control have no connection to Kampan's epic;^[40] Tamil Brahmins in Palghat, for example, celebrate Rama's birthday in association with Valmiki's Sanskrit epic or Eluttaccan's Malayalam text but not Kampan's. On the other hand, several small Rama shrines in the countryside are visited by Tamil merchants traveling from Madurai via Pollachi and Palghat to Calicut along the old trade routes. I heard one legend explaining that a rice merchant dedicated a statue to Rama on the spot where he recovered a cartload of lost merchandise, a spot that now has a stone temple with an image of Rama and Laksmana and a shrine to Hanuman.

Mutaliyars, in particular, have played a prominent role in Kampan legend and scholarship.^[41] According to most accounts, both Kampan's patron, Cataiyappan, and Kampan's rival, Ottakkuttan, were Mutaliyars, as were most scholars who are acknowledged to have transmitted the Kamparamayanam .^[42] We know that the commentary to both the first (partial) printing of Kampan, in 1843, and the first full edition, in 1914, were edited by Mutaliyars. And they are the leading puppeteers in Kerala today.^[43]

If Tamil weavers and traders brought Kampan's text to Kerala and now perform as puppeteers, what about the art of shadow puppetry in Kerala, the third side of this historical triangle? Temple records indicate that in the early twentieth century the tradition was well established and spreading, new drama-houses built, and many puppeteers employed.^[44] However, the only pre-twentieth-century evidence I located is the inclusion of "leather puppet play" in a list of performing arts and amuse-merits in a mid-eighteenth-century poem by Kuncan Nambiyar, who was born and lived for some time in a village on the Bharatapuzha River where puppeteers still perform.^[45] More clues, but only a few more, are provided from epigraphical and literary sources for the other traditions of shadow puppetry in India, especially in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu.^[46] Dating from the sixth century onward, the Tamil references are both the earliest and the most intriguing since the Kerala tradition is largely Tamil in textual origin; yet one wonders about the reliability of this literary evidence because it is so sparse, often ambiguous, and lacks corroboration from inscriptions. My own conclusion is that the modern shadow puppet plays in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu developed only in the seventeenth century and derive from southern Maharashtra.

I make the case for Maratha derivation by culling information from several publications, especially Victor Mair's study of visual storytelling

traditions in India (and elsewhere in Asia).^[47] Mair demonstrates that painted scrolls, pictures, hand puppets, leather puppets, and other media are related and often used in a single performance. Other writers suggest that these arts of visual narration followed a southerly path of migration—from Rajasthan, into the Maratha country, across the Deccan, and into the Tamil country.^[48] The itinerant performers of southern Maharashtra and the northern Deccan, for example, who performed with both painted pictures and leather puppets, trace their origins to Rajasthan and Gujarat, where painted-scroll and various (but not leather) puppet traditions have been documented.^[49] Families of these Marathi-speaking picturemen probably migrated south with the Maratha armies moving across the Deccan in the 1600s, which would explain why the shadow puppets in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh resemble the folk (Paithan) paintings and storytelling pictures in Maharashtra. Eventually, the Maratha armies entered the Tamil country in the late seventeenth century and established their court at Tanjore, where the modern Tamil shadow puppet play almost certainly evolved and where, much earlier, Kampan lived. As Jonathan GoldbergBelle has shown, the Maratha court at Tanjore influenced several performing arts, such as Yaksagana, which in turn influenced the life-size leather-puppet tradition (dodda togalu gombeyata ) of the northern Deccan and the storytelling art of Harikatha.^[50] The most conclusive evidence of a trans-Deccan migration of shadow puppetry to south India, however, is that puppeteers in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh speak Marathi as their mother tongue.

The puppeteers in Kerala, however, do not speak Marathi, and the tol pava kuttu appears to be a distant cousin of these other traditions. Still, despite its geographical cul-de-sac, the Kerala tradition cannot have been entirely uninfluenced by the others; the secret of Ravana's death, for example, the pot of ambrosia hidden in his chest, is a motif found both in Kerala and in many southern tellings of the Rama story. In nearly every performative aspect, however, the contemporary Kerala tradition differs from the Maratha-influenced puppet plays. First, puppeteers in the other south Indian traditions are itinerant or semi-itinerant and perform as families, including the women, whereas in Kerala puppeteers live permanently in villages or towns and perform in exclusively male troupes. Second, puppets in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu are translucent, but in Kerala (as in Orissa and most of Southeast Asia), they are opaque and perforated so that they cast shadows in black-and-white filigree silhouettes. Third, the puppets

in Kerala are considerably smaller than those in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka (but larger than those in Orissa and similar to those in Tamil Nadu). Fourth, although performances in other states have all but lost their ritual role, in Kerala they remain part of a temple festival and do not include the scatological scenes so prominent elsewhere. Fifth, as already mentioned, only in Kerala are performances held not in a temporary shed but in a permanent building (kuttu matam ) built solely for the puppet play.^[51] Finally, and more than any other factor, language separates the Kerala puppet play from the other Indian traditions; if elsewhere the puppeteers speak Marathi as their mother tongue, in Kerala they speak Tamil (or Malayalam).

Drawing all this evidence together, I believe that Marathi-speaking puppeteers came to Tanjore in the late seventeenth century, where they passed the art of shadow puppetry to Tamils, who then carried it into Kerala, where Kuncan Nambiyar described the puppet play around 1750 and where the Kampan text had already been brought by Tamil traders.