Visible Puppets

Visible Puppets and Hidden Puppeteers: Indian Gombeyata Puppetry

Michael Schuster

Abstract: Gombeyata is a string and rod puppet tradition of India. Here the relationship between performance practice and religious worship is explored by Michael Schuster, who undertook his initial research on a Fulbright fellowship.

When I first met Thimmapachar, my puppet teacher, in l989 in the small village of Nelligere, I was not prepared for the education I was to encounter. I had come to Karnataka in southern India from California for a ten-month study of the traditional wooden puppetry called gombeyata, but initially I failed to understand the core of this tradition because I could not fully fathom the spiritual aspects of the art. As a Western theatre artist I was trained to respond to narrative concern. With time, however, I came to understand that this folk art exists as a spiritual exercise for puppeteers and continues to inform their aesthetic choices even as the performing context alters.

I had previously studied wayang kulit purwa in Central Java, as well as kathputli marionettes in Rajasthan, and had spent a month following a gombeyata troupe from the coastal area with teachers experienced in urban and even Western culture. Thimmapachar, by contrast, was deeply immersed in local, village culture. Not only did he serve as [End Page 59] a priest for the Vishwa Karmis, a community of blacksmiths and carpenters, but he was also a bhagavata--a puppet narrator and troupe leader who teaches the text to the puppeteers, delivers narration, drums on the mrdanga, and sings to highlight action and emotion. (See Color Plate 2.)

Encountering Gombeyata

With my friend and translator Mowgalli Ganesh, a student of folklore at Mysore University I entered Thimmapachar's house. In the courtyard, a small, open furnace was surrounded by bullock carts and plows in need of blacksmithing. In the dim, windowless room, I saw a tall, dark man with white hair sitting behind a small anvil used for making gold jewelry. He motioned for us to sit on the straw mat where young boys served us sweets and tea. It was agreed that Thimmapachar, his younger brother Cennapachar, and his son Murthi would teach us puppetry after they had finished their day as wheelwrights, plowrights, and goldsmiths. Consulting his astrology books, Thimmapachar said we would need to wait several days for an auspicious beginning. As we left, two young boys purified the area where we had sat with cow dung. The area had to be purified because I was not a caste Hindu.

On Saturday night we returned to Thimmapachar's house for a rehearsal. At the far end of the room a rectangular puppet stage ten by eight by eight feet high was formed by ten poles lashed together. It was masked in front by a cloth that hung from a pole eight feet to four feet above the floor, masking the upper part of the puppeteers' bodies. The remaining four feet to the floor became a proscenium-like playing space via a second cloth dropped from a horizontal pole four feet above the floor and set to the rear. The puppets performed in the space between the two cloths. With their faces toward the audience or in profile, the visual effect is one of relief sculptures moving against a neutral background, as the curtain in front of the stage is opened and closed to mark the change of scenes.

We sat on mats. Cows were led past to the adjoining room. After an hour, four villagers arrived and Murthi climbed into the rafters to bring down the puppets. Seven people painstakingly prepared the eighteen figures in a mode similar to dressing the god image in daily temple ritual. The carved wooden puppets range between twenty and thirty-six inches in height. Characters include kings and heroes, princesses and dancing girls, demons, clowns, sages, and gods. Kings and heroes are distinguished by pink faces, even facial features, and the elaborate crowns inlaid with mirror work. Females have pink faces and refined features. Demons have bulging eyes, fangs, and red faces painted with elaborate designs. Clowns are brown with irregular features and conical hats. Sages resemble heroes, but they are distinguished [End Page 60] by their topknots and orange clothing. Gods are identified by their adherence to Hindu iconographic features. Skirts and saris, which customarily demarcate the legs of the limbless figures, were draped after putting on a blouse. Appropriate accessories were then attached: necklaces, chains, braids, bracelets, shoulder guards, chest plates, and weapons. Murthi came over and demonstrated a female figure. Placing a hoop with three strings connected to the puppet head on the crown of his head, he took a metal rod in each hand and attached them to the puppet's arm. As Murthi raised his arm or turned his head, the puppet mirrored each movement. This unique combination of string and rod manipulation allows the puppet's movements to mirror the puppeteer's exactly. (See Color Plate 2)

Thimmapachar finished making offerings at the family altar and sat behind the anvil with his drum as a girl of ten positioned herself by the harmonium. The six manipulators tied on ankle bells that would sound as they danced the puppets. Thimmapachar performed a hospitality ritual called a puja. Cennepachar brought the elephant-headed Ganesha puppet to his brother who stood before the figure singing and offering incense, coconuts, and bananas. Thimmapachar concluded by waving lit camphor before the image. Puppeteers and musicians took their places, and Thimmapachar chanted the customary prologue:

O potbellied Ganesha
You are a kind god.
Offer me all success.
O well-wisher, we bow our head before you.
Kindly bless us. ¹

The curtain revealed the dancing Ganesha, the divine remover of obstacles who is honored before South Indian performances. Next a dancing girl moved rhythmically before Ganesha, waving the traditional fire offering. Finally, the bhagavata sang a Sanskrit invocation to the deities who rule the directions, asking forgiveness from gods and viewers, concluding the ceremonial part of the production.

The dramatic narrative, the prasanga, was introduced by the clown puppet, Hanumanayaka. The clown danced and began a comical, improvised dialogue with Thimmapachar focused on the inappropriate offering the clown had made to the deity. Eventually the bhagavata revealed to the clown the title of the story Karibanta Kalaga. King Karibanta's Battle is the only local legend in the gombeyata repertoire. All the other tales are drawn from the Hindu epics and Purana.

All gombeyata performances start with a presentation scene (odololaga) that takes place in the court of a king or god. With the help of the clown, the bhagavata asks the characters to identify themselves. This [End Page 61] story begins as King Karibanta's chief minister is showing the ruler a picture of the beautiful princess, Jagan Mohini. The impulsive king rushes out to find her, but in the forest he encounters a beautiful demoness, Pundarika, who woos him:

PUNDARIKA: O beautiful gem,
How did you come to me?
Oh, this is god's grace.
He is like the moon shining.
Is he Indra? Is he the god of love?
Ah, handsome king, touch me, as you have
touched my heart.

Learning she is the daughter of the female demon Udandi, Karibanta rejects her. But she points out that great heroes like Bima in the Mahabharata married low-caste women. She presses her suit:

PUNDARIKA: My flower, listen to my words. The lotus is
planted in the mud. The pearl is produced by
the insignificant oyster. The magnificence of the
forest is fertilized by the excrement of its
creatures. Don't neglect me. Marry me.

Karibanta succumbs, but soon he is beset by his mother-in-law, Udandi. He flees but Udandi pursues and decapitates him. Pundarika and Jagan Mohini both join his funeral pyre, as do all the mourning villagers. After everyone is consumed by flames, the god Shiva restores all to life.

Scenes include spoken narration, sung narration, dialogue, action, and dance to music and song. The clown interacts with the major characters, the bhagavata, and the audience. After every scene, the puppets perform choreographed dances lasting from one to ten minutes. Arms accentuate the direction of movement of the puppet, either up and down, or side to side, while feet inscribe one of two geometric patterns. I recognized the poses and visual highlights of gombeyata as similar to those in bas-relief on the wooden carts used to carry the image of the deity at temple festivals. The similarity between puppet shows and the friezes on temple carts can be attributed to the fact that both puppets and carts are carved by Vishwa Karmis craftsmen.

The five-hour rehearsal ended with a mangalam: a victory song to the gods. Six puppets danced, raising their arms toward heaven:

All gods bless us.
If we did wrong, show us our error.
O god, we are like a puppet in your hand.
Please lead us from trouble. [End Page 62]

The curtain closed after three in the morning. Feeling as if I had missed essential elements, I was reminded of an audienceless shadow performance I had seen five years earlier in Kerala. Tortuously slow and not an entertainment for humans at all, that show was one of a series of plays performed in an eight-week cycle for the gods. I realized that gombeyata, too, was best understood as an act of devotion. Indian theatre critic Rustom Bharucha describes the limitation of Western scholarship when it interprets Indian performance:

Western performance theories when examining non-Western theatres fail to confront (and at other times acknowledge) a sense of the divine, without which almost no traditional art of India can be adequately understood. Their preoccupation with structure and technique (at the expense of faith) frequently results in new systems of meaning that reject or tacitly avoid what these performances mean to non-Western people in their own cultural context. [Bharucha 1992, 218]

As a result of my efforts to understand gombeyata in its religious context, I came upon several insights. I learned that puppetry can be a vehicle to transcendence; that puppetry has aspects of darshan--beholding the deity--and potency in affecting the physical world; and that tantric practice is used in image making.

Transcendence

By learning the practice of gombeyata from Thimmapachar, I gradually came to understand puppetry as a physical practice which leads to another state of being. My study began the following week as Ganesh and I came each night to learn the performance of Karibanta Kalaga. It continued over the following months as I returned once a week--first to study and later to perform with the troupe. Sometimes we would dance the puppets; at other times we would dance moving our own limbs as if we were the puppets. Thimmapachar fed me lines until I memorized the text. So each night I entered the world of gods, heroes, and demons with forty pounds of puppet hanging on my head; I danced long hours till head, back, and shoulders ached. Sometimes, however, I would lose myself in the long, repetitious movement sequences--the only reality seemed to be the dancing figures. The repetitive rhythm combined with the weight of the puppet on the head/neck joint brought perceptual change that puppeteers regard as entering into the powerful world of the divine. As Cennapacher declared in an interview (December 27, 1989): "I prefer to perform the roles of the great heroes and gods. . . . They come to life through me. And I become part of these important stories." Puppeteers identify with their puppets by contemplating the figures before performing. They [End Page 63] then experience their connection to the image in each movement of arm, leg, or head, which has its complement in the puppet's gesture.

This identification, however, should not be confused with trance. While trance performance is common in South India, the relation between puppet and puppeteer is closer to the link between priest and god image: the practitioner avoids possession by the god. Phillip Zarrilli in Richmond et al. (1990, 124) writes that the

priest of most traditional Hindu rituals functions as a permanently "pure" vehicle through which ritual action is effected. . . . He provides access to the divine cosmic world by means of his control and manipulation of ritual acts, gestures, words, and so on which effect the results of the ritual. Therefore, as the "performer"--the one who does the gestures, rings the bell, pours the water, and the rest--he usually remains "cool," never himself interfacing directly with the deity or its power.

The puppeteer, like the priest, may contemplate the deity in his performance, but he is never possessed by the god. In possession ritual, the spirit of the deity enters the body of the person entranced; the puppeteer, by contrast, while physically linked to the puppet, remains aware of his separation.

Darshan and Potency

At the heart of gombeyata are the concepts of darshan and potency. Darshan is "the central act of Hindu worship . . . to stand in the presence of the deity and behold the image with one's own eyes, to see and be seen by the deity. [This is darshan] . . . sometimes translated as the 'auspicious sight' of the divine" (Eck 1985, 1). To the villagers the sculpted image is "as real as their friends, neighbors and relatives" (Srinavas 1976, 325), and through the efforts of the craftsman the spiritual world is made visible to the masses. Eck continues: "Hinduism is . . . an 'image' making religious tradition in which the sacred is seen as present in the visible world--the world we see in multiple images and deities, in sacred places and in people. . . . India is a visual and visionary culture, one in which the eyes have a prominent role in the apprehension of the sacred" (p. 10).

The concept of darshan--of seeing and being seen by the divine--is an integral component of the puppet performance. All puppets are carved with disproportionately large eyes to heighten the viewer's awareness of sightedness. Cennepachar in an interview (June 4, 1989) noted that gombeyata is a way of receiving darshan: "When I perform the puppets the audience can see the gods act out the ancient stories. It is auspicious for all who come. I also receive the blessing of the gods and heroes when I perform them." [End Page 64]

In addition to providing an opportunity for darshan, the performance itself is felt to have potency. Interviewing Hanumanta Gowda, an eighty-five-year-old puppeteer from North Karnataka (September 26, 1989), I learned of past links of puppetry to rites of fertility: "About fifty years ago there were special performances . . . given to help a childless woman conceive, to rid a family of bad luck, or to make rain if there was a drought." In rainmaking, the whole village would join in a puja and share a meal before Virataparvan: The Disguise of the Pandavas was performed. In this story the five heroes of the Mahabharata and their wife Drupadi live in disguise. They assume roles that are the antithesis of their normal persona, reversing the natural order of the social system. In Andhra Pradesh shadow puppetry, the same story was presented for similar purposes:

The puppet shows are sometimes performed to bring rain in times of drought, just as "the carnivalesque" Virataparvan of the epic is recited for the same purpose. Apparently the inversion of everyday standards coupled with the release of contained energy is felt to be capable of reversing the cosmic state, or of revitalizing the liquid flow of the universe which has, for whatever reason, become blocked. [Schulman 1985, 207]

Female fertility and puppetry were intertwined also. Nanjunda Rao, an expert of traditional art, remembered that as a child in Bangalore in the 1930s he would see women seeking conception or safe delivery by offering cloth to female characters--especially the puppet of Krishna's wife Satyabhama. This presentation of cloth echoes the custom of presenting saris to pregnant women. By making the offering, the women were ensured a swift pregnancy or a safe delivery.

Ramaiah, a puppeteer from Aggalakote, in an October 11, 1993, interview remembered his uncle Narisinggappa (1860-1940), a self-taught puppeteer who mysteriously acquired a set of figures. Of particular power was the figure of Satyabhama, which the nephew claimed could move without the aid of human hand: "There used to be a famous female vocalist who was a great admirer of the puppets. She would place the puppet on a swing and play her violin for the puppet, who would swing in time to the music without any human assistance." Such attention to an image is nearly identical to the rajapacharas (royal honors) given a god figure during a temple festival.

This Satyabhama puppet would also be used by Narisinggappa to make decisions. He would sit in front of it for hours awaiting the fall of an arm. If the right hand moved, the answer was affirmative; if the left, negative. Villagers in the past would look for similar direction from a temple image (Srinavas 1976, 324-325). Satyabhoma would even appear in Narisinggappa's dreams: once he dreamed she desired a [End Page 65] jeweled belt. Soon he saw a dancer in the palace at Mysore who wore the same belt, and he made a miniature version for the puppet. Here we see a common theme in Hindu folk religion: the power of a god manifested in a jewel. For Ramaiah, the figure of Satyabhama remains powerful: "It is a subtle feeling. Only after the puppeteer has danced the puppet for fifty performances can he begin to feel the shakti [female divine energy]. Then the puppet begins to dance the man."

Ramachari, a puppeteer from a disbanded troupe in Bellur, showed me a two-hundred-year-old set of puppets which had not been used in fifty years. Once a year the puppets are taken out, dressed, and worshiped during the Navaratri Festival. Both darshan and power over the physical world are achieved through the powerful presence of the marionette.

Tantric Aspects

The carving and painting of puppets and images is part of a tantric tradition. This can be seen from the treatment of tools, the connection between puppetry and yantra images, and the practice of the eye-opening ceremony as the final act in the creation of a puppet. In puppet making, puppeteers bring male and female, peaceful and violent, dualities into balance. Iron tools, which are considered an aspect of the female god Kali, are purified by the male sculptor so that carving a figure can begin. During the autumn festival of Navaratri the worship of the weapons (ayudhapuja) is performed. The craftsman (to control the violent aspects of metal/Kali) offers a gray pumpkin covered with vermilion (symbolizing blood) as a sacrifice to his tools. The metal rods which manipulate the puppet's arms are called naharatcha --arrows--possibly in reference to their ability to activate the violent aspect of the deity.

Puppetry and yantra are linked. A yantra is an abstract line drawing used for meditation and magic. These images on paper or palmetto leaves are in fact clarified versions of elaborate, painted mandalas: "They contain the form symbolism which is beyond even visual appearance and represents the primary spiritual essence of things" (Boner 1962, 16). It is believed that the true nature of cosmic manifestation can be apprehended by contemplating yantra. Although Thimmapachar mentioned the use of yantra in puppet making, he refrained from full discussion--probably because esoteric practice is not to be shared with the uninitiated. I was present when he created mandala-like yantra to cure villagers. And in an interview on December 26, 1989, he suggested that certain yantra passed down from his ancestors could prevent other puppeteers from infringing on his audience. Nanjunda Rao indicated where yantra would have been placed--in the hollow back of the head or the space under the arm guard--as [End Page 66] he showed me three seventeenth-century puppets. Placed inside the puppets, yantra were believed to have power to affect real-life events.

The final remnant of tantric practice is seen in the last step of puppet making. After the other aspects of the puppet have been finished, the netromilana (eye-opening) ceremony takes place. Power enters the image during this ceremony in which the craftsman recites a mantra while painting the pupil. This ceremony, done for village deities, until recently was undertaken for puppet figures as well. The power of the deity will enter an image if it is made according to strict aesthetic conventions. As Zimmer (1955, 318) notes, in

India the beauty of images is not intended for the aesthetic enjoyment of the secular beholder; it is a contribution to their magical force as "instruments" or "tools" (yantra). "The divinity draws near willingly," we read in the Hayasirsa Pañcaraträ, an authoritive Vais.n.ava text, "if images are beautiful." . . . The ornamentation facilitates the process of conjuring or inviting into the statue, as into a temporary residence, the divinity with whom the devotee, in meditation, is finally to become one.

The highly decorative nature of the temple deity is repeated in the puppets to encourage the life force of the god to enter them. With rapid political and socioeconomic change, the magical properties of the puppets have become obscured, and many of the practices described here have disappeared in the last fifty years. Although most puppeteers consider the performance a devotional entertainment and not a means for accessing tantric power, the visual aesthetic of the puppets and performance practice are still informed by tantric principles.

An Art in Transition

Folk arts in Karnataka have gone through major transitions, and many gombeyata troupes have disbanded while those that remain perform infrequently. Of fifty troupes before Indian independence, five perform regularly today. Temple festivals, a customary venue, do not offer enough work and troupes seek institutional support from urban folk festivals, folk art research, schools, political or community organizations, international festivals, and mass media. In seeking this patronage, puppeteers modify their art: dances, dialogue, and narration are shortened; shows are presented in public halls rather than temples; electronic sound and lighting are introduced.

Puppeteers are often eager to adapt to the changing world, but they still see their work as connected to spiritual practice. I remember visiting Murthi who showed me a Ganesha figure which had a simple, battery-operated motor in the hollowed-out back of the head--the [End Page 67] site where, in times past, a yantra might have been slipped. When the motor was turned on, the mandalam, a circular halo, revolved around the deity's head. (See Color Plate 3.) The deity's face at the center of the moving circle represents the manifest in an expanding consciousness. Thus the hidden yantra has been replaced with an electrical mandalam --technological magic of the twenty-first century. But from the audience's perspective, the puppet movement by veiled manipulators and the revolving halo driven by an invisible power source point to the same metaphor: unseen forces operating in the universe. In gombeyata from the opening scene to the end of the performance the audience speculates on the issue central to Indian metaphysical thought--the nature of the visible and the hidden.

Michael Schuster is a founder of the Train Theatre in Jerusalem and is a professional puppeteer and videographer. He finished a graduate certificate program at the University of California at Santa Cruz and received his doctorate from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Currently he is a folklorist at the Hawai'i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.

Note

1. See Mowgalli Ganesh (1991). All play quotes are from this source.

References

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Eck, Diana. 1985.

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Ganesh, Mowgalli, trans. 1991.

"King Karibanta's Battle." Manuscript edited by Michael Schuster.

Richmond, Farley, Darius Swann, and Phillip B. Zarrilli. 1990.

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Schulman, David Dean. 1985.

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Srinavas, Mysore Narasimhachar. l976.

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The Art of Indian Asia: Its Mythology and Transformations. Vol. 1. Completed and edited by Joseph Campbell. New York: Pantheon.