Opinion India@75, Looking at 100: We need to look at art in context, not through a colonial lens

Traditional puppeteers are considered wise persons or shamans because they are the carriers of generational knowledge, whether it is local literature or oral folk narratives of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata or skills like how to make paint from natural material or to transform leather from animal skin into a translucent, almost plastic material. They also know which plants have medicinal qualities and advise people on major social questions through metaphors and stories.

In our culture, dance, theatre and music were never separate. The performer was always sarvagun sampann. It was not possible to think of the performance as being separate from a social ritualistic aspect because each performance was deeply contextualised in a particular community. Let’s not forget that 90 per cent of India’s population watches ritual performances even today.

But in the last 75 years, policy has looked at art forms as belonging to compartments of regional or linguistic identities. In this perspective, the shaman or wise person’s identity is not at the centre of the art form, unlike in other Southern and Southeast Asian countries. In Indonesia, the cultural policy looks at the dalang, the puppeteer-musician-shaman, as encompassing all of these roles. As a consequence, there is no crisis in art forms because policy has understood the role of the narrative and the community at the centre of the art form. There is no museumification.

In India, the art form is diminished to being either an artefact or a performance commodity. This is followed by the “dying art” label. Intangible heritage is reduced to one building, one monument, one narrative. What is lost is the story of the monument, why it was built and its relevance or the relationship with the community that built it. This lack of relevance has led to the acquisition of puppets for museums with no context provided about who the puppeteer was, what the story was or where it was performed. The consumer then experiences only a small, often cosmetic, aspect of the entire performance art. That is why a lot of these arts are facing a crisis of no audiences.

There’s a need for deep introspection on our cultural policy. We need to ask how we really look at the diversity of our art forms and not try to force square pegs into round holes. We need to stop saying, “This is classical, this is traditional, this is folk…” and look at where the performer comes from and what the context of the performance is. We need to ask who looks at the art form and decides its policies — the artist or the community. Are they included at all in the process of preservation and propagation?

The lens through which we look at ourselves and our culture has a colonial filter, visible in classifying some art forms as higher than others. It has influenced our idea of preservation. Artworks and forms are taken into museums and made exotic. We have exoticised a lot of our own culture because that was the colonialists’ view of us. Often, policies made by the urban elite are based on notions similar to the colonial point of view. In academia, today, when scholars do research in the interiors of India, they treat their own country-people as “natives” and, so, unequal. There’s an urgent need to decolonise our attitude.

Our performing arts have great diversity, located both in traditional and contemporary spaces. Whether it’s the epics or local stories, there are many, many versions — some of these don’t exist in any printed or written form. For instance, in one of the many oral Ramayanas, particularly in Karnataka’s leather shadow puppet tradition, there is a 100-headed Ravana called Shatakantha Ravana, who is different from the 10-headed Ravana. He is defeated by Sita. Oral stories are dynamic. As traditional puppeteers would say, “The epics are there to ask you questions. The answers are for you to find in your life.”

Puppet theatre is a delicate balance. In each performance magic is created, as a shadow is cast on a screen. People can experience the same performance differently — as a ritual, an exorcism, magic or pure entertainment — and they are all happening simultaneously. As you change, as you grow older, the same performance keeps changing for you. Art, then, is far more nuanced than currently imagined at the policy level.

People ask me if puppetry is dying. But the form is not in crisis, its context is. My wish for the next 25 years is that we acquire the ability to look deeper into our understanding of culture, both at a policy level and as consumers. Let us go back a few steps and try to retain the diversity of context, rather than allow one loud, monolithic narrative to overwhelm everything else.

The writer is a Delhi-based puppeteer. This article is part of an ongoing series, which began on August 15, 2022, by women who have made a mark, across sectors