A travel
report by
Tishani DoshiThe writer is a pilgrim at Kalamandalam, Kerala's temple of performing arts.
Photo Credit: Saibal Das
The little masters of Cheruthuruthy begin their days early, rising at 4am to practise kannusadhakam in the dark. Today, I exercise my eyes early too, charting my way from the murky coils of Thrissur Railway Station in a barge-like Ambassador rumbling across the black ribbon of highway with a glow-in-the-dark Jesus on its dash. By the time I make my way over to the campus of Kerala Kalamandalam, classes are already in full tilt: the masters, big and little, are attending to morning practical lessons, and darkness has given way to extraordinary light.
Govind, my guide for the day, takes me through the gates of this 75-year-old stalwart cultural institution, giving me a running commentary of its history along the way. He tells me that training in Kalamandalam is unique in that it follows the ancient gurukula system of education, which requires both students and teachers to reside on campus. The shishya leaves home at the age of 13 to stay with his guru, and for the next eight years at least, remains in a state of continuous learning. Here, life is art, time is tradition, past present and future coexist, and the body and soul are one. Students eat, sleep, breathe, perspire art: and still, some never become masters.
Continuity runs through
Kalamandalam. I can sense it just by walking around from one kalari to the
next, observing the small size of the classes and the intensity of the
exercises. There’s no palpable sense of hurry, or of wanting to capture
knowledge. This is not the path of the conqueror: it is the patient toiling
of the devotee, with both guru and shishya aiming to erase boundaries of
time, pushing themselves further and further until they enter the sublime
territories of magic. I found it fascinating. After all, if Aristotle could staunchly hold to the idea of history being cyclical, refusing to believe that he was living after the time of the Trojan war, then why shouldn’t these students be encouraged to believe that the great masters—Ravunni Menon, Krishnan Nair, Rama Chakyar, Chinnammu Amma—still walk with them, and that they too have a shot at immortality? Art here is not reduced to a subject: it is the quest of a lifetime. So where does the visitor fit in?
I decided to view my whole experience as a cultural pilgrimage, an agreement to step forward and backward in time. The aim of the ‘Day with the Masters’ tour, after all, was transcendence, with the brochure eagerly gushing: "Experience a journey across two thousand years of artistic heritage in three enchanting hours." So, rather than feel guilty about the fact that I was casually breezing through what takes a lifetime to master, I decided to treat it as a rare opportunity—a window to the soul, as Blake would say, and Jim Morrison would later echo. Where else would I get a feel for this great transference of secrets and skills, or bear witness to the wonder of the human body—how it can metamorphose into a wheel, an elephant’s trunk, a field of swaying paddy?
Govind proved to be indispensable
as we walked around, providing fascinating insights to Kerala’s titanic
tradition of performing arts. I learned that the entire Kathakali costume
and headgear can weigh up to 35kg and can cost from Rs 60,000; that there
are 600 hand gestures and nine facial rasas which actors must master; and
that young chenda and maddalam (both percussion instruments) players must
rupture their fingers on the frames of jackfruit wood-frames for three years
before they can think of moving on to the real thing.Govind was so effective, that even though he hasn’t formally studied dance or music, he was eager to show off his limited repertoire of skills wherever possible. I drew the line at the Lalatatilaka, which would have required him to put a tilak on his head using the toe of his leg raised backwards. It sounded more complicated than it actually was, but luckily for Govind, there was a handy sculpture depicting this posture along with the 107 other karnas of dance on the pillars of the magnificent koothambalam.
The koothambalam, literally ‘temple theatre’, was my favourite structure in Kalamandalam. Put aside the fact that many of the other buildings hiding in the rear of the property have adopted the chunky RCC look rather than traditional aesthetic lines; the koothambalam is pure spatial bliss. Laid down in 1976, it is built in accordance with the Natyashastra, Bharata’s one-stop-shop treatise on performing arts in India. The Natyashastra is the oldest surviving text of stagecraft in the world weaving together dance, drama, and musical narration and it details everything a performer could ever want to know; for instance, how the theatre hall is the world, and how the eye, that tiny wonder, is capable of expressing the whole of human experience.
My second favourite spot, after the
koothambalam, was the tomb of founder and mahakavi Vallathol Narayana Menon
in the old campus on the banks of the river Nila. It lies in a most serene
enclosure of ancient trees with these words (his own) inscribed on his tomb:
"When we hear the name Bharatham, our hearts should be filled with pride.
When we hear the name Keralam, the blood should surge in our veins." Vallathol was a large man, over six feet tall (although the five-foot cot in his museum/house might suggest otherwise), but his largesse really extended to his vision of the future of India which he believed could only be woven with "the golden thread of the past". In 1930, a time when performing arts were dependent on the capricious patronage of provincial rulers, Vallathol founded Kalamandalam as a way of liberating artisans from the caste hierarchy and offered them a place to practise their art in peace. For him, it was a question of preservation. Kathakali, Koodiyattam, and Mohiniattam, the three kings of Kerala’s performing arts, were on the decline, and he gave them the necessary leg-up that they required. Which brings us back to the interesting time of the thriving present.
As I leave Kalamandalam, I can still hear the sound of feet hitting the ground in synchronisation, the resonance of sticks and hands striking wood, the songs of the old masters mixing in with the new. My initial fears, of this being a new strain of cultural voyeurism, are somewhat assuaged. In the end, it is only the river that disappoints. The Nila, supposedly the longest river in Kerala, looks a shade of what she must have been. Hers is not the music of ringing feet of dancers or throbbing drums. In fact, to tell the truth, it’s difficult to tell if she breathes at all. But as the sun subsides at the end of my day, sitting on the shady lawns of the River Retreat, well-oiled and massaged, I see groups of children going down to her banks to play as they have been doing for centuries, celebrating the joy of their young bodies. And this is what I think: I am in Kerala, it is beautiful here, the blood is surging in my veins.