Advanced Course in Performance Traditions of the Mahabharata in Tamil Nadu- 2

This course is the second, more advanced part of a two part package of courses on the Performance Traditions of the Mahabharata in Tamil Nadu. It will give a comprehensive overview of the architecture of the 20 days of the festival when the Mahabharata performed as a village ritual leads to its narration as a story which leads to its enactment as theatre. For the first ten days of the festival, the audience will be given an exposition of the Mahabharata to the fulcrum moment in the festival, the killing of Bakasura which is the first narrative that is performed as a ritual, narrated as a story and enacted as theatre. Repetition, as AK Ramanujan says, is a crucial element in Indian narrative and performance traditions and the course will explore how repetition becomes an important factor in the transmission of oral traditions. Repetition also becomes a vehicle to invoke both collective and individual memory. The Mahabharata which is narrated in these festivals is not a translation, but an invocation of Vyasa’s text. The course will explore the diverse influences on this Bharatham from Kalidasa, Natyashastra and aesthetic theories of Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta.

The course will highlight the importance of the Epic being performed as an interwoven fabric of ritual, theatre and storytelling, as this trifurcation is a form of ‘distanciation’, providing the audience a space for introspection while engaging with the Epic. The course will also highlight the difference between the dramatic narrative traditions and Epic traditions which are built on different foundations. The notion of the ‘author’, the ‘actor’ and their relation to the audiences in both traditions of performances will be addressed. The Mahabharata storytelling or the Bharatham sessions which forms the foundation on which the entire edifice of these festivals is constructed will be foregrounded in this course. The singing of the Bharatham for ten days before the theatre begins, at one level becomes a recapitulation of the Epic to the contemporary audiences, drawing them into the Epic so that they can relive the Mahabharata again. Students will be encouraged to do fieldwork and explore similar performance traditions in their own regions