Ollantay, the Khipu, and Eighteenth-Century Neo-Inca Politics

Most criticism of the secular Quechua play Ollantay has focused on the debate as to whether the play is essentially Hispanic or indigenous in origin. The reduction of this issue to such a binary opposition fails to take into consideration the essentially transcultural nature of the work. Regardless of whether or not a version of the story dramatized in Ollantay belonged to some kind of indigenous tradition, the alphabetic version that has survived is a product of the eighteenth-century Inca renaissance. The social and political context of eighteenth-century Cuzco informs an analysis of the two khipu readings in the play and the way in which these passages were translated in the nineteenth century. The implicit description of the khipu in the initial Spanish and English translations appears to reflect what may have been colonial innovations in khipu practices.