Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play

In constructing a comprehensive study of this dance-drama form from Kerala, South India, based more or less on mythological and epical stories, Phillip Zarrilli locates his Kathakali Dance-Drama at the intersection of ethnographic and performance research, oral history, textual analysis, performance documentation, and post-structural analysis. His commitment is to elucidating the unique process whereby a literary text enters the realm of Kathakali performance, where the performing bodies create a narrative parallel with the original literary document. This shapes the structure of his book, which is accompanied by five videocassettes. (These were not available to me and would certainly enhance a reader's experience of Zarrrilli's study.)

In the way he writes about it, we immediately understand that Kathakali is not a cultural "object-to-be-known" for Zarrilli. Introducing this performance form, he quotes his colleague, Prabodhachandran Nayar, who says that Kathakali, like an "ocean of possibilities" (1), can be many things to many people depending on their orientation and focus. Throughout the text, and especially as we journey through the rich history of this form and contemporary developments in it, we sense—and appreciate—Zarrilli's negotiations between different "takes" on the genre, its different audiences, and structural changes. This, of course, does not mean that a culturally specific understanding of this form is absent. Zarrilli also talks about some of the typical ways in which Kathakali is performed and witnessed by audiences in Kerala, for whom—whether connoisseurs of the form or children who know little if anything about its nuances—it is an integral part of social and cultural interaction.

In a historical overview, Zarrilli traces the evolution of Kathakali between the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries and its consequent maturation and refinement, supported and encouraged actively by a system of patronage that was intimately linked to the political organization and social hierarchy of Kerala at that time. The establishment of British colonial rule and the proliferation of English education thereafter led to significant changes, resulting in a crisis in the patronage system and in audience interest and participation in Kathakali. Kathakali was revived in the early twentieth century, largely through the initiative of the poet Vallathol Narayana Menon, who founded the Kerala Kalamandalam in 1930. Instead of narrating these details as linear history, Zarrilli weaves the story of the origins, development, downfall, and revival of Kathakali through oral histories, reminiscences, and theorization, which together illuminate different aspects of this phenomenon. Zarrilli also talks about how the Kalamandalam ultimately systematized a very different mode of training and performance, and significantly, of patronage, changing Kathakali's status from a performance form sponsored almost entirely by wealthy landlords to one organized under the Kalamandalam as a grant-in-aid institution, dependant largely on government support and national and international touring of Kathakali companies. Here, Zarrilli returns to reflect on Prabodhachandran's metaphorization of Kathakali as an "ocean of possibilities" as he discusses the evolution of Margi, one of the best known and best funded Kathakali training and performance companies, in a trajectory relatively different from that of the Kalamandalam. The funding support of the Kalamandalam creates a certain set of political pressures that tend to dominate artistic choices, ensuring also that productions are inviting of popular or community audiences. Margi, on the other hand, operating under the collective leadership of connoisseurs, has developed Kathakali more as articulating a "classical" aesthetic, a "'theater of the mind' requiring a 'higher' consciousness and aesthetic sensibility" (33) that relocates Kathakali as an elite art form.

I have devoted much space to this context-setting discussion because it is here, I think, that Zarrilli immediately distinguishes his work from the work of many other scholars. He recognizes, for instance, the failure of terminology evolved in relation to Western forms, such as "classical," which reflects an inaccurate and incomplete translation of the word "margi," to convey a...