"A Maharajah's Festival for Body and Soul"

by Richard Schechner

[Richard Schechner is a prominent teacher of and writer on theater and has made a lifelong study of Asian performance forms and practices, especially Indian forms.  (Full disclosure: Schechner was one of my professors in New York University’s Department of Performance Studies.  He’s now emeritus.) 

[Among his other credits, he is the editor of The Drama Review and was founder and artistic director of the Performance Group (1967-80), progenitor of today’s Wooster Group, and, from 1992 to 2009, of East Coast Artists  This article first appeared in the New York Times on 26 November 2000 in the “Arts & Leisure” section. 

[The Ramlila is an enactment of the tale of Rama, the hero of the epic poem the Ramayana who is often worshipped by Hindus as an incarnation of the god Vishnu.  In the Ramlila, the myth is presented as a cycle play, much like the mystery plays of Europe, and the whole celebration can last from seven to 31 days, depending on the region of India (each of which celebrates it in its own style at a different time of the year), and evokes the atmosphere of a secular festival as well as providing for religious observance. 

[The Ramlila of Ramnagar, described in Schechner’s report below, celebrated for almost 200 years, is the largest, longest, and most elaborate of the various festivals in India and the Indian diaspora.  For the interested reader, the Ramlila festival and performances are described in many books, including Anuradha Kapur’s Actors, Pilgrims, Kings, and Gods: The Ramlila at Ramnagar (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1990).]

A king, his prince and his courtiers ride in full pomp atop richly caparisoned elephants. They, along with tens of thousands of spectator-devotees, their hands pressed together in the Hindu prayer-salute, admire and worship the gods Vishnu and Lakshmi in their incarnations as Rama and Sita. Titanic battles pit human-size gods against 50-foot-high demons.

For a whole month there is continuous theater, 31 daily episodes of love, war, exile, intrigue and adventure. The stages for this performance of great magnitude are locations dispersed, filmlike, throughout Ramnagar (literally, Ramatown), a midsize settlement across the Ganges River from the holy city of Benares [now called Varanasi] in the north Indian province of Uttar Pradesh.

Ramnagar is the seat of the Maharajah of Benares, Vibhuti Narain Singh, still revered by multitudes of Indians more than 50 years after losing his crown and his kingdom when the Princely State of Benares was dissolved into the Union of India in 1949.

This is Ramlila, or Rama’s play: participatory environmental theater on a grand scale. Ramlila is theater — and it is religious devotion, pilgrimage, a festive fair and political action. Audiences range from a few thousand for some episodes to 100,000 for others. Every Hindu Indian, and most Muslims, know the story of Ramlila; it is always being presented in films, on television, as graphic art and in literature, ranging from great poetry to comic books. There are thousands of local Ramlilas enacted all over Hindi-speaking India — and in the diaspora, too, from Trinidad to Queens.

But the Ramlila of Ramnagar is different. It features the Maharajah of Benares as patron, director and player. It is many days longer than other Ramlilas. It is more skillfully produced theatrically. It draws much larger and more devoted crowds. And its future may be more precarious.

During Ramlila, Ramnagar is transformed into a living theatrical model of the entire Indian subcontinent, from the Himalayan mountains in the north to Sri Lanka off the southeast coast. Nothing of Ramlila’s size, totality and intensity has been seen in the West since medieval times. Compared with Ramlila, the Oberammergau Passion Play and Peter Brook’s “Mahabharata” are small scale.

The text of Ramlila is a version of the poet-sage Valmiki’s 2,000-year-old classical Sanskrit poem known as “The Ramayana.” Like “The Iliad,” Ramlila tells the story of a great war waged to recover a stolen wife. The background for this tale is the rise to power of Ravana, the 10-headed demon king of Lanka (today’s Sri Lanka), who terrorizes humans and gods. The gods implore Vishnu and Lakshmi to take human form — as Rama and Sita — and subdue Ravana. This they do, but as humans they are bound by the laws of human nature and society.

On the night that Rama is to be made king of Ayodhya, a reversal of fortune occurs and he is sent into exile, along with his brother Lakshmana and his wife, Sita. In the forest, Ravana tricks Sita and kidnaps her. Rama gathers an army of monkeys and bears, led by the ever-loyal, much-loved monkey god, Hanuman. Across rivers, hills and jungle, Rama’s army chases after Ravana. Reaching the southeast coast, Rama’s army builds a bridge across the sea to Lanka. In battle, Ravana loses his son and a brother. Finally, Ravana himself is killed by Rama. Triumphantly, Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman return to Ayodhya, where Rama is at last crowned king — heralding a golden age called Ramraj, or Rama’s rule.

Like all great art, Ramlila changes its meaning over time. Nationalist sentiments, present mostly as a vague background 25 years ago, now operate openly, especially among many younger male spectators. And today’s Hindu nationalists, wanting to turn India into a Hindu state, hold Ramraj up as their ideal.

Under the watchful eye of the Maharajahs of Benares, Ramlila has been performed in Ramnagar every year since the early 1800’s. But how long it will continue is no longer certain. The pressures of India’s ever-increasing population and the nation’s vigorous economic growth threaten this unique theatrical-religious cycle.

Ramlila needs lots of time and space — scarce in today’s India. People who once would support Rama in his war against Ravana now run businesses that can’t be ignored for a month. At the same time, forests, ponds and open sites are being eaten up by housing and highways. Even finding younger actors and technicians to replace those already well past retirement age is proving difficult.

As an American theater director who has studied Ramlila since 1976, I am fascinated by its scale, by the attention to detail in its staging, lighting, scenic design and costuming, by the acting and singing, and by the convergence of narrative, spectacle, devotion and politics. I have seen all 31 episodes twice and, along the way, interviewed the Maharajah, the Rajkumar (crown prince) and many participants and performers in the play, as well as a number of spectators. In September [2000], I went to Ramnagar to see portions of this year’s spectacle, as I have in other years.

Ramayana means Rama’s journey, and Ramlila suggests this journey literally. There are no seats. People sit on the ground, stand, watch from rooftops or perch on walls. When the action calls for it, the crowd moves from one location to another. Following in Rama’s footsteps is fundamental to Ramlila. This movement is a kind of pilgrimage, a worship-in-action.

The festival itself transforms an area of many square miles. Some of the stages are enclosures in the middle of the town, others are deep in what was once forest and jungle, or on grassy hillsides and in open fields, or amid large gardens of fragrant blooming trees and temples and marble gazebos built by former maharajahs. For one scene, the stage is the Maharajah’s own palace, known as the Fort, which it really once was.

Each episode is called a lila [‘divine amusement’ or ‘the playful activity of a god’]. On most days, Ramlila begins at 5 p.m. and continues until 10 at night. Some episodes last late into the evening and one, Rama’s coronation, does not end until dawn.

The staging is simple and iconographic, replicating images from temples, religious paintings and popular posters. The costumes are richly woven silks in resplendent gold and red. The faces of some actors are adorned with glittering jewels. Many colorful masks and large, brightly painted papier-mache effigies animate the performances.

Certain roles are passed down in families and are usually played by the same actors year after year. This year, for example, Ravana was played by Kaushal Pati Pathak, a farmer living about eight miles from Ramnagar. When I first saw Ramlila in 1976, Kaushal’s elder brother, Swami Nath Pathak, shared the role with their father.

But this tradition is no longer secure, though it has persevered for more than 100 years. Kaushal said he did not want his son to portray Ravana. “Life as a farmer is too hard,” he said. “The Maharajah has no money anymore. I want my son to work in the city.” The sentiment is heard frequently these days.

The original Ramayana poem itself is never spoken because Sanskrit is a language very few Indians understand. Instead, what people hear is the Ramcharitmanas, a 16th-century Hindi version of the epic. The entire Manas, as it is called, is chanted by 12 men sitting each night in a circle close to the Maharajah. But even though at Ramlila one can see dozens of people reading texts of the Manas, many others cannot understand its archaic Hindi. To enable everyone to follow the story, a maharajah in the mid-19th century, Ishwari Prasad Narain Singh, commissioned a group of poets and scholars to compose dialogue in vernacular Hindi for the Ramlila.

Until that point, the performers mimed the action but did not have lines to recite. Today, the dialogue is spoken — or rather, shouted with great vigor — by the actors. It is necessary to shout because Ramlila uses no microphones. This adherence to an earlier technology — kerosene lanterns and flares provide the lighting — is a major aspect of the production. Once, in the 1940’s, microphones were used, but angry spectators stormed the stage and smashed the equipment. Ramlila exists partly as a window in time, a conscious conservation of pre-Independence traditions.

Not only the techniques, but the underlying socio-religious structures of Ramlila are extremely conservative. Tradition, of course, has its own role in the presentation of the epic. Virtually all of the Ramlila actors are Brahmin men and boys, the highest Indian caste. The exceptions include a boatman and the small boys who play the monkey and demon armies. The roles of Rama, his brothers, Bharata, Lakshmana and Shatrughna, and Sita are enacted by young boys, usually between the ages of 8 and 13, whose voices have not yet changed and who have no facial hair. These children, it is believed, who are still innocent, are the only ones fit to embody the gods.

When I asked why a girl might not play Sita, I was told that any female onstage would be considered by villagers to be sexually compromised. It is also said that any girl who portrayed Sita would never find a husband because the action in Ramlila is considered real, including the wedding rites for Sita and Rama. Thus, “No one will marry a girl who has already been married.” When asked why the youth playing Sita does not face the same problem, my informant laughed: “He is a boy. He can’t be married to another boy.” The contradiction — that what is true for a girl-as-god is not true for a boy-as-god — did not seem an issue. As for Rama, no problem: a king can have more than one wife.

The boys who enact the five most sacred roles of Rama, Sita and Rama’s three brothers are “gods for a month,” and people literally worship them by touching their feet, singing hymns in their praise, or simply staring intently at these divine beings. This intense gazing, called “taking darshan” [the auspicious sight of a Hindu or Buddhist divine image or holy person] of the gods, is adapted from Hindu temple worship, in which looking at images of the gods is thought to be beneficial. The actual felt presence of the divine is the core of the Ramlila experience.

At the other extreme, thousands of people come to Ramlila mostly to enjoy everything from snacks to dinners and to obtain goods ranging from trinkets, posters of the gods, books and good-luck charms to marijuana and hashish. Ramlila is a time and place of pleasure as well as devotion.

The largest crowds attend the final battle between Rama and Ravana. This occurs on the 10th day of the Hindu month of Ashvina, almost always in October. It is the occasion for a great theatrical spectacle, a moment of supreme religious fulfillment and yet excited festive celebration.

First, the Maharajah ritually worships weapons and horses — the symbols of his royal power. Next, he and his court mount magnificently adorned elephants and parade through the adoring crowd from the Fort to Lanka. The Maharajah then proceeds through the battleground and departs. “It is not proper for one king to witness the death of another,” the Maharajah told me. “Therefore, I do not stay to watch this lila.”

After the departure of the royals, Ravana and Rama fight. Ravana’s death is marked relatively undramatically. The actor crosses the battlefield and touches Rama’s feet in humble surrender.

A three-hour celebration ensues. The people are happy: Rama is victorious, Sita liberated, Ravana dead. It’s a great, happy picnic on a warm early autumn night. People are eating, singing, socializing, flirting and praying. Towering over the scene is Ravana’s giant effigy.

About 10 p.m., in the words of Anuradha Kapur, an Indian theater director and author of a book on the Ramlila: “All at once, the effigy bursts into flames. Firecrackers explode, bamboos crackle, sprays of sparks shoot out. The customary five hot-air balloons ride into the sky. Ravana’s mighty spirit rises heavenward. The balloons soar into the clouds until they are no more than little yellow specks. The demon is liberated.”

One group that always gains maximum pleasure and devotion from Ramlila are the sadhus, holy men who have renounced worldly goods, live on alms and spend their days and nights singing praises to the gods. The Maharajah provides all sadhus with daily rations of rice and lodging. But despite this generosity, there are many fewer sadhus than before. “Who wants to renounce the world these days?” a man asked me.

And where there used to be lightly traveled paths leading into the quiet countryside, now there are streets clogged with diesel fume spewing trucks and buses, horn-blasting cars and motorcycles, not to mention bicycles, cows, water buffalo and goats. The deeply rutted dirt roads have not been filled or smoothed for years.

Why is the Ramlila so enormous? The most direct answer is that since the early 19th century, the Ramlila has been the defining project of the Maharajahs of Benares. The current line was established in the mid-18th century and, caught between a failing Mughal [Mongol conquerors of India or their descendants] power and an emergent British presence, was not secure on the throne. Sponsoring a large Ramlila was the way for the Maharajahs of Benares to shore up their religious and cultural authority at a time when they were losing both military power and economic autonomy.

Vibhuti Narain Singh ascended the throne in 1939 when he was a boy of 12. Ten years later, his kingdom was dissolved. But the Maharajah continued to rule, not in political fact but by virtue of his learning, his religious devotion and his patronage of Ramlila. Wherever he goes, people greet him with ringing shouts of “Hara! Hara! Mahadev!” (“Shiva! Shiva! Great God!”), because he is believed to be a manifestation of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and reproduction. Now 73 and frail, unable to walk unassisted, the Maharajah is doing all he can to pass the Ramlila on unchanged.

With the participation of Nissar Allana, a stage designer, and myself, the Maharajah is planning a Ramlila museum, which will take shape first as an Internet site with thousands of images, as well as sound recordings and scholarly and historical materials. Kapila Vatsyayan, one of India’s leading performance scholars, hopes to edit a facsimile edition of an early-19th-century illuminated manuscript, a four-volume version of the Manas with hundreds of original illustrations in a style influenced by Mughal painting.

I am helping to prepare a prompt book detailing all of the current staging — a how-to-do-it manual that the Maharajah hopes will assist his son, Anant Narain Singh, who is now in his 30’s, when it becomes his turn to oversee the Ramlila.

The Ramnagar Ramlila has thrived for nearly two centuries as a magnificent spectacle, a religious experience and a cosmic drama. But will it make it through the next 25 years? The crown prince has never known what it is to rule a state. Is his devotion as intense as his father’s? Can he command the same respect? He is a more modern man than his father. Is it an irony or a sign of the times that on several occasions when we have met, I was dressed in Indian kurta and pajamas, while he wore casual Western clothes?

BUT succession to the throne is not the only uncertainty facing Ramlila. A bridge across the Ganges that opened this year funnels hordes of trucks close to the Ramlila stages. New housing overruns rustic Ramlila settings.

Meanwhile, money is a big problem. Environments and costumes are beginning to look rundown. Performers receive a few hundred rupees as a contribution to those who do sacred work. At one time, this money amounted to something, but no longer. Atmaram, the 80-year-old supervisor of props, sets, lights, costumes and special effects, was not sanguine about the future. “I am training no one,” he said. “After I am gone, who will know what to do?” Atmaram has been on the job for more than 50 years. The knowledge he carries in his head is not replaceable.

Until now, few outsiders have attended Ramlila. It doesn’t make sense to go for one day, and Ramnagar does not have the infrastructure to accommodate longer visits, unless one is ready to rough it. For more foreigners to come — or even for upscale Indians from Delhi and Calcutta [now Kolkata] — Ramnagar will require extensive upgrading. The crown prince is studying the possibility of converting a portion of the Fort into a five-star hotel.

Yet everyone recognizes that Ramlila’s uniqueness is a function of its nontourist Indianness, of its being theater and more than theater at the same time. Will increased attention from outsiders help preserve or further disturb Ramlila?

[On 17 August 2018, I posted “Speaking Truth To Power” on Rick On Theater, a report describing the Shaliko Company’s production of its 1987 “Circus Opera,” Mystery History Bouffe Goof, conceived by company director Leonardo Shapiro.  A modern take on Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1918/1921 Mystery-Bouffe, I made a comparison of Shapiro’s production to the Ramlila.

[I’m in the process of preparing a biographical post on Leonardo Shapiro, about whose work I’ve blogged many times (including the most recent offering, the four-part “Leonardo Shapiro’s Strangers: A Dramaturg’s View,” 8, 11, 14, and 17 January.  I hope to have it ready for posting shortly.]

Melā! An Indian Fair (Washington, D.C., 1985)

[On 15 January, I published a post on the Natyasastra, the ancient Indian text on theater.  Looking through my archive of theater reports, I found this one on an Indian folk festival presented in Washington, D.C.; I wrote it in September 1985, almost 34 years ago.  Not all Indian folk performances are derived from the Natyasastra, but many are (or have been “sanskritized” during the modern era to align with the teachings of the treatise).  If you’ve read “The Natyasastra,” you may recognize some of the practices I described in that article in some of the performances I report on below.]

What do Louisiana and India have in common?  Well, probably not much—except in Washington, D.C., between 26 June and 7 July [1985].  [Note that I wrote this report decades before anyone ever heard of Bobby Jindal, an American of Indian heritage who was Governor of Louisiana from 2008 to 2016. Indeed, Jindal was barely 14 when I wrote this.  ~Rick]  Those were the dates of the 1985 Festival of American Folklife on the Mall, which this year included a Louisiana Program and “Melā! An Indian Fair.”  Exactly how an Indian melā qualifies as American folklife is not clear, but the celebration of Indian art, culture, and life has been all over Washington recently as part of the nationwide Festival of India.    

Besides the food and crafts of India’s many cultures and regions, much of the melā is given over to Indian dancing, singing, music, and theatre.  This combination of eating, selling, and performing is not strange; India’s traditional performances are frequently part of fairs and celebrations that go on all day for several days, or even weeks.  People come and go, eat, and sell or buy while the performances are going on all around them.  Spectators choose when they want to watch and when they want to do something else, much the way we do at a carnival sideshow.  The noise, smells, and competing sights and sounds are all part of the event. 

Many of the performances are rituals, with religious significance implicit in the very doing.  Others are rooted in ritual, but have lost the connotation of worship over the centuries.  This, too, is not strange: Indian fairs are often connected to religious celebrations.  Even so, commercialism is not alien to their religious purpose.  Unlike the money-changers in the temple, Indian merchants and worshippers belong together. 

The performances at the festival were presumably authentic in the sense that they are performed the same way back in the villages and towns of Gujarat, Punjab, or Bengal; however, the importation to America and the cultural mélange in which they were presented means we probably saw altered versions.  No matter, though: the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds all around still fooled us for a short time.  We were in India at a melā!

The performers appearing on the small stage at one end of the fairground or wandering among the booths included devotional singers, folk actors, folksingers and folk dancers, percussionists, puppeteers, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, and two bahrupiyas wandering about teasing the visitors with impersonations of one or another of 52 gods.  They came from West Bengal, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Andhra, Uttar, Haryana—and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Across Madison Drive, in the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, more Indian life was on view.  A child’s perspective of the cycle of village life was exhibited at “Aditi—A Celebration of Life” through July 28.  Aditi is the Aryan goddess identified with the source of life; it is also Sanskrit for the creative power that sustains the universe.

Visitors to Aditi started at the section depicting coming of age and traveled through the cycle of life from courtship through marriage and birth, and a child’s learning to participate in community life, to maturity when the cycle begins again.  Passing through each section, visitors saw village artisans and craftsmen plying their trades, and performers of many kinds displaying their talents for our amusement.  Here, too, were magicians, jugglers, puppeteers, singers, musicians, dancers, and the ubiquitous wandering “impersonators.” 

One of these last came down a corridor clanging tiny cymbals to attract our attention.  It looked like one man carrying another “piggy-back.”  Then it looked like a man with a stuffed dummy on his back.  Then, impossibly, it looked like a dummy with a man on its back.  Finally, when he was close enough to be seen clearly, it turned out to be a man with a stuffed dummy on his front so it looked like the dummy was carrying him.  The crowd broke into peals of delighted laughter when we realized how we had been fooled.

In a section resembling the courtyard of a house, a Rajasthani family performed a traditional “play horse” dance that is a ceremonial part of the Hindu wedding celebration.  It symbolizes the groom riding off to pick up his bride, with his whole family in attendance.  Formerly, there was an actual procession, with the groom riding a horse to the bride’s home; today, the members of the groom’s family perform this dance with a hobbyhorse.  It is whimsical and fun, as the “horseman” gallops, rears up, chases women and children, dances with the spectators, and swishes the horse’s tail.

In a curious performance, at the very entrance to the exhibit, a man danced to the beat of a drum.  Made up as a woman, he had a long veil hiding half his face.  With a flip of his head, the dancer shifted the veil to the other side of his face, revealing that it was made up as an old man.  The continuous switching—the ultimate in sex-role blurring—was so fascinating, it was hard to pull away to the rest of the exhibit.

Among the performances, traditional crafts people were making pottery, glass paintings, woven baskets, story scrolls—all the arts of Indian villages.  Displayed along with the modern products were their older—in some cases even ancient—counterparts.  Though there were differences in the artists’ styles, and contemporary influences were sometimes visible, the basic craft and product were unchanged.  These were not revived crafts such as we might see at Plymouth or Williamsburg—they were living traditions with roots thousands of years deep.  The same, one imagines, must be true of the performance traditions.

Beyond the village arts, Washington—and later New York—will also be treated to a sampling of India’s classical performing arts.  In September, the Kennedy Center will house the “India Festival of Music and Dance” with folksongs, Bharata Natyam [lit., “Indian dance”] and Kathak dance [an Indian classical dance form], and Kathakali and Kuchipudi theater [classical Indian dramatic forms] performed by some of India’s most famous artists.

Along with the Indian painting and sculpture on exhibit at many of Washington’s galleries and museums, the capital is being treated to a colorful and fascinating display of the living arts of India.  The Festival of India in Washington even occupies such unlikely sites as the National Zoo.  Unquestionably, “Aditi is all that has been born and shall be” (from “Hymn to the Gods,” Rig Veda, 1500-1200 B.C.E.).

'The Natyasastra'

Somewhere between the 2nd century B.C.E. and the 2nd century C.E., what are now The Natyasastra’s 37 chapters were likely assembled in India.  (Some editions have 36 chapters, including Manomohan Ghosh’s 1951 version, and some have 38.  I used Ghosh’s 1967 37-chapter rendering of The Natyasastra.).  The oldest known “how-to” book on Asian theater, predating Zeami Motokiyo’s (c. 1363-c. 1443) treatises on Japanese Noh drama (written between 1402 and 1430) by some 16 centuries, it’s attributed to the sage Bharata-muni (dates unknown; may have lived about 500 C.E.) but was probably compiled by several contributors over many years.  (The compilation and publication is likewise uncertain and estimates range between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E.) 

The book’s title is variously rendered as Natyasastra, Natyashastra, Natya Sastra, or Natya Shastra, often with diacritical marks.  The word(s) mean, loosely, ‘theater treatise’ or ‘performance manual.’  The Sanskrit word natya is usually translated as drama but it can refer to other expressive performance forms, such as dance (one of the Hindu god Shiva’s avatars is Nataraja, “the lord of dance”), and sastra (which is pronounced ‘shastra’) means ‘treatise,’ ‘manual,’ ‘book.’ ‘rules,’ or other term of similar meaning.  Because I based my reading of The Natyasastra on Ghosh’s translation, I’ll be using his version of the book’s title. 

Our primary source of information about ancient Sanskrit performance and a guide to understanding many of the living performance traditions in India today, the treatise is still used by classical Indian performers such as actors of Sanskrit dramas by the likes of Kalidasa, Sudraka, Bhasa, and Asvaghosa; Kathakali dancer-actors; Kutiyattam storytellers; and Bharata Natyam and Orissi dancers, as well as classical musicians and singers.  Unlike Aristotle’s (384-322 B.C.E.) Poetics (c. 335 B.C.E.), The Natyasastra was written for theater practitioners, not analysts.  A complete handbook of theater production, it covers all elements of playwriting, theater construction, costume, make-up, acting, dance, music, and aesthetics (including Rasa theory, on which I posted on 13 January 2010) in the minutest detail. 

(The root of natya is the Sanskrit work nat, which means ‘act’ or ‘represent,’ so natya can even be rendered as ‘acting.’  Like many Asian performance forms, classical Indian theater doesn’t make the same distinction we Westerners make among ballet, drama, and opera.  What we call Chinese or Beijing Opera is the progenitor of Japanese Kabuki, which many Western critics categorize as dance drama.  But Kabuki performers don’t consider themselves “dancers.”  Ask them, and they’ll insist they are Kabuki “actors.”  The form they work in, like Kathakali in India, Indonesian Wayang Topeng and Wayang Orang, and many other Asian performing arts, combine acting, singing, dancing, and what we’d recognize as mime into one synthesized art form.  The Natyasastra reflects this totality: performance, according to Bharata, is a combination of all the arts: speech, dance, singing, music, gesture and mime, decor and costumes.)

The Natyasastra is partly a religious text, the “fifth Veda,” revealing to the people the rules of dramaturgy and stagecraft as handed down to Bharata (muni is a term of honor meaning ‘sage’ or ‘saint’) by the god Brahma.  The production of a play is an offering to the gods, and performing is a Vedic ritual act.  Composed in verse (with some prose passages in a few chapters), The Natyasastra (like Konstantin Stanislavsky’s “ABC’s”) is conveyed as a sort of dialogue between Bharata and his disciples.   Bharata (whose name is also the Sanskrit word for both ‘actor’ and ‘India’) had 100 sons, who all became actors.  (Bharata Natyam simply means ‘Indian dance,’ for instance.)

In addition to the presentation of ancient theology, principally of the Vedic tradition of pre-Buddhist and pre-Hindu India (though, because it was compiled during a period of religious transition on the Subcontinent, its religious philosophy is something of a hybrid), The Natyasastra also discusses what we’d call performance theory, aesthetic philosophy, mythological history, and practical theater craft. 

Between 1865 and 1898, a number of studies, articles and partial translations of The Natyasastra and other Sanskrit treatises were published in several European languages, including French, English, and German, though none seems to have been a complete rendering of the text.  In modern times, particularly after 1950, there have been many translations of The Natyasastra, all or in part, into English and other languages, as well as many more critical studies of the treatise.  (An Internet search indicated that few are currently in print or available even to special order from stores like Barnes and Noble or Amazon.)  

Because of its status as a Vedic text, The Natyasastra views theater not as an entertainment, but as a way of getting spectators to another state of mind (rasa).  (This is what Rasa-Bhava is intended to accomplish, as you’ll see.)  In theory, because attending a performance is supposed to be a spiritual experience, the viewer is supposed to be transported to a more transcendent plane, but today Indian performers see the effect in a more secular frame.  (There is at least a superficial resemblance between this precept and Aristotle’s notion of catharsis as mentioned in his definition of tragedy in chapter 6 of the Poetics.)

A complete run-down of all the topics touched on in The Natyasastra would be impossibly lengthy, and I really mean this post to be a general introduction to the treatise.  (There are various translations in libraries, especially university libraries, and used copies can be found on line and in antiquarian bookstores.)  I’ll compile a précis of the chapters (which will vary slightly depending on whether you compare mine with a 36- or 38-chapter version) and comment at more length when I feel it’s warranted.  (Note that my original study of The Natyasastra was in pursuit of its discussion of acting and Bharata’s instructions in comparison to the Konstantin Stanislavsky system, the basis of my acting training.  I developed this comparison into “The Natyasastra and Stanislavsky: Points of Contact,” published in  Theatre Studies, volume 36 [1991].)

The first chapter of The Natyasastra recounts the mythical “Origin of Drama” (chapter titles will vary depending on the translation).  Bharata tells his disciples that Brahma, the Creator, handed down The Natyasastra to all the castes as the Natyaveda.  The sage describes the first production of a play at a festival for Indra, the guardian god, but Vighnas, evil spirits, try to ruin the production.  Indra destroys the Vighnas. 

Chapter II is the “Description of the Playhouse,” detailing how the theaters are to be constructed.  Bharata describes the rites and rituals associated with the theater construction.  “Puja to the Gods of the Stage,” the third chapter, lays out the hierarchy of gods of the theater and which one presides over which areas of the theater building.  (Puja is a devotional prayer ritual.  Even today, when dramatic performances are no longer considered worship rituals, a prasad, a food offering, is placed at the edge of the stage.)  The gods have to be pacified and the building purified to avoid terrible consequences of offending the gods.

In Chapter IV, “Description of the Class Dance,” Bharata says that he’s written a play to be performed for the gods.  The deities are pleased and instruct another sage, Tandu, to teach Bharata the Tandava dance (literally ‘Tandu’s creation’ but commonly known as the “class dance”) and there’s a detailed, gesture-by-gesture, body part-by-body part description of the dance.  Bharata explains when dance is appropriate to a play and when it’s not.

“Preliminaries of a Play,” the fifth chapter, describes the rituals associated with the prelude to a dramatic performance (Utthapana ceremony).  Following the set-up, there’s a song in praise of gods, Brahmins, and kings (“Benediction”); an entrance song (“Walking Around”); and the introduction of the play (“Laudation”) by the Director (literally, ‘the expert,’ not a prototypical, pre-Saxe-Meiningen stage director but the company manager).

Chapter VI (“The Sentiments”) and VII (“The Emotional and Other States”) cover Rasa-Bhava.  This is the section of the book that makes it possible for the actors to transport the spectators to a different frame of mind, not unlike what we in the West mean when we speak of “the willing suspension of disbelief” (a term coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834)—we freely enter into the fictional world of the play.  The Natyasastra is very precise in its discussion and description of this process—but if you can cut through the Sanskrit terms and stilted English translation, the basic principles of the theory are not more alien than that which Stanislavsky, Uta Hagen, Lee Strasberg, or most 20th-century acting teachers inculcate.

Chapters VI and VII together identify and describe the bhavas, the “Psychological States” or “Modes of Being” of the performers, and the corresponding rasas, the “Sentiments” felt by the spectators.  The bhava, the emotion felt by the actors, results from a “Determinant” (vibhava), or determining circumstance.  The vibhava affects the characters so that they feel sorrow, fear, wrath, or some such emotion (bhava).  The “Consequent” (anubhava) of a particular bhava is a specific behavior such as weeping, fainting, blushing, or the like.  The anubhava, if properly executed, will cause the audience to feel a specific rasa corresponding to the bhava felt by the actor. 

Chapter VII goes into great detail about the bhavas, which are broken down into three categories.  The third category of bhavas are the eight sattvas, or “Spirited” modes.  There’s no adequate translation of sattva, but this allows the actor to convince himself the circumstances are real to the character, even though, as the actor, he knows they’re not.  (This is a very simplistic reduction of Rasa-Bhava.  I’ve tried to be brief here; however, I refer the reader once again to my post on Rick On Theater “Rasa-Bhava & The Audience,” 13 January 2010, for a more detailed examination of this complex and fascinating acting theory.)

Chapters VIII, IX, and X (“The Gestures of Minor Limbs,” “The Gestures of Hands,” and “The Gestures of Other Limbs”) cover in great detail all the codified movements of the parts of the actor’s body.  Indian classical theater, like many other Asian performance forms, uses highly stylized and long-established gestural expressions and The Natyasastra naturally stresses the expressiveness of the body, since it is vital that “the audience . . . follow the meaning of the play visually, through the codified system of hand gestures and facial expressions.”  These chapters and others that describe the movements, gestures, and expressions of the actors, which in Indian classical theater are closely related to Rasa-Bhava, are very technical and extremely detailed.

Chapters XI, XII, and XIII (“The Cari Movements,” “The Mandela Gaits,” and “The Different Gaits”) cover walking and foot movements the same way the previous three chapters did gestures.  (A cari is the movement of a single foot.  There are movements of two feet called karana and a combination of karanas is called a khanda.  Three or four khandas make up a mandala.  That may give readers an idea how precise The Natyasastra is in codifying movements and gestures.)

“Zones and Local Usages,” the fourteenth chapter of The Natyasastra, designates the different "zones” of the stage and explains the significance of each one to the play and the characters that appear there.  “Local usage” (pravrtti), just as the phrase suggests, applies to the costumes, languages, manners, and professions of different countries in the world as they appear in plays.  (The “world” to which Bharata refers, of course, is largely the Indian subcontinent of South Asia and the countries are the ancient kingdoms.)  Even this is codified as The Natyasastra designates only four regions for this differentiation: Daksinatya Local Usage (southern countries), Avanti (central and western), Odgra-Migadhi (eastern), and Pancala-Madhyama (northern/Himalayan).

Chapters XV through XXII cover playwriting and dramaturgy.  “Rules of Prosody” (Chapter XV) defines, describes, and classifies the poetic meters used in classic Indian drama.  Since Sanskrit drama is written mostly in verse, it also details the proper way an actor must recite each kind of poetry.  It’s a lesson on elocution, voice, speech, and articulation—a voice and speech lesson with specific instructions in the proper pronunciation of the sounds of the Sanskrit and Prakrit languages.  “Metrical Patterns” (Chapter XVI) lists all the different types of poetic meters and how they are employed in plays, with examples of various dramatic situations in which each pattern would apply.  Different meters correspond to specific rasas.  Chapter XVII, “Diction of a Play,” names the 36 “marks of excellence” of a well-written play, such as Ornateness, Compactness, Simile, Metaphor, and 32 more.  (In this usage, “diction” doesn’t refer to speech articulation or enunciation, but the effectiveness and clarity of the poet’s word choice and expression.) 

Chapter XVIII, “Rules of the Use of Languages” instructs poets on the distinction of Sanskrit, the largely literary tongue which on stage is used for the speech of noble, heroic, and refined characters, and Prakrit, the vernacular language, with its many regional, local, and class dialects, of lower-caste, mad, or drunken characters, as well as women and children.  (Prakrit is also often more appropriate for songs in a play.  Most of a classical Indian play is written in Sanskrit.)  “Modes of Address and Intonation” (Chapter XIX) explains how characters of different types and social status speak to one another.  It also specifies how the verses are to be recited in terms of vocal quality, with certain inflections corresponding once again to certain rasas.  (This is that other kind of “diction,” how words are pronounced.) 

In Chapter XX, Bharata describes the “Ten Kinds of Play” that make up classic Sanskrit drama.  He lays out their structure, the rules for their composition, and what is appropriate or not to represent on stage.  Chapter XXI, “The Limbs of the Juncture,” is a detailed analysis of the plot structure of a play.  (“Joints” and “Limbs” are the terms The Natyasastra uses for what Michael Chekhov, the acting teacher, theorist, and director who was a nephew of playwright Anton Chekhov, called the play’s “Main Climaxes,” the points in the play’s action when the character’s pursuit of his major goal changes direction.  

The Natyasastra divides the action of a play into five stages: Beginning, Effort, Possibility of Attainment, Certainty of Attainment and Attainment of the Object.  Roughly, these stages agree with the Stanislavskian identification and pursuit of the objective (Beginning and Effort), encountering obstacles (Effort and Possibility of Attainment), and overcoming the obstacles and achieving the objective (Certainty of Attainment and Attainment of the Object).  Sanskrit drama did not have unhappy endings so there were no plays in which the main characters’ objectives were not accomplished.

In “The Styles,” the twenty-second chapter, Bharata relates the mythological origins of the performance styles of Sanskrit dramas, which is both a matter of the way the plays are written (that is, the writing style) and the way they are performed (the acting style).  As with most other categorizations in The Natyasastra, these are very specifically defined and described, and, once again, each style corresponds to certain rasas generated in the audience. 

Chapter XXIII covers “The Costumes and Make-up” of a classical Indian play.  It covers props (including fake animals) as well.  Bharata describes both how these are made and how they’re used on stage.

Chapters XXIV through XXVI deal with acting, portraying specific characters, and what we’d call acting technique (the practical methods of making viewers believe a fiction: that it’s cold and rainy, that the knife you’re playing with is really sharp, that you have a headache).  Chapter XXIV, “The Basic Representation,” focuses on speech, the movement of the body, and physical grace.  It also instructs aspiring actors on portraying emotions and feelings and various psychological and emotional states, and how to respond to different circumstances and situations that occur in Sanskrit drama.  Successfully representing these states is key to creating the correct rasa in the spectator.

“Dealing with Courtezans [sic]” (Chapter XXV) actually explains how to portray men and women in various types of courtship, romantic, and sexual relationships (for example, a woman overcome with love, winning a woman’s heart, and a courtesan’s mercenary treatment of men).  Most Sanskrit plays are some sort of love story.  “Special Representation,” the twenty-sixth chapter of The Natyasastra, is instruction on how to enact physically what Uta Hagen called the “given circumstances” of a scene: the time of day, the season of the year, the weather, bright sun, dust, and so on. 

Chapter XXVII describes “Success in Dramatic Production,” which Bharata separates into two kinds.  One is human success, which is simply signs of appreciation from the audience for the performance—applause, laughter, praise, gifts.  The other kind is divine success, which is the approval of the gods.  This is manifested by the lack of disturbance from the audience, errors in the performance such as accidents or actors forgetting lines, fire or an animal getting loose in the theater, and so on.  If all goes well, the gods are signaling their approval. 

The music of a Sanskrit performance is discussed in Chapters XXVIII through XXXIV, covering not only the types of music to be heard, but the instruments on which it will be played (with several chapter devoted to specific types of instruments such as reeds, cymbals, and drums).  Chapter XXXII describes the songs performed in a play. 

Chapter XXXV, “Types of Characters,” is essentially the breakdown of the classical theatrical troupe.  Like Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men in Elizabethan England, Sanskrit acting companies had to have the actors on hand to cover all the plays in their repertory, so, like repertory companies in the West from Shakespeare’s day to the Straw Hat Circuit in the first half of the 20th century in the U.S., they categorized the characters so they could distribute them to the appropriate performers according to their abilities, special talents, age, appearance, and so on.  In other words, they engaged in “typecasting,” just like Western companies in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

(To be clear, “typecasting” isn’t what most people think it is.  Characters are divided into “types,” such as “leading man,” “leading lady,” and “character man.”  The company’s actors are also “typed” and when it comes time to assign actors to roles, actors are matched to their roles according to type—along, of course, with other considerations.  So a leading actor is cast in a leading man part, a character woman is cast as a character part, and so on.  It was a way for repertory troupes to be sure that they had enough appropriate actors on the roster to cover all the parts in their repertoire.  The classic Indian categories were different, of course, but the idea was the same.)

The Natyasastra, needless to say, describes in great detail many different characters that make up the three types that populate the Sanskrit plays and the physical and temperamental attributes of the actor best suited to play them.  In “Distribution of Roles” (Chapter XXXVI), Bharata advises the Director (this is the company manager once again) to follow the precepts for typecasting that he’s laid out.  This chapter also describes at length each of the kinds of parts that occur in a Sanskrit drama, and also non-performing member of the troupe such as the makers of garlands and headgear, the company painter, and so on.

The last chapter, XXXVII, in Ghosh’s translation of The Natyasastra, is “Descent of Drama on the Earth.”  When Bharata had finished presenting the Natyaveda to the sages, they asked him how the drama had come from heaven to the earth.  Bharata explained to them that his 100 sons had angered certain sages by caricaturing them and the sons lost their status as Brahmins, members of the highest caste, and became Sudras, the lowest caste.  The sages cursed Bharata’s sons, but the gods interceded on Bharata’s behalf.  Indra retrieved the Natyaveda and instructed Bharata to spread is over the earth.  The 100 sons of Bharata, having become actors themselves, taught the text to their sons, founding a family of actors, and the gods were pleased and redeemed Bharata’s offspring.  (This suggests that, at least in ancient India, the acting profession was prized and honored, a fate actors didn’t experience in the West, where they were often vilified and ostracized, especially among religious folk, because they make their living by lying, pretense, and deceit.  There are still members of some faiths that see acting and theater as inherently sinful.)