M.D.Muthukumaraswamy

M.D. Muthukumaraswamy is a Tamil writer, Director of National Folklore Support Centre and a Consultant at Sahapedia

Muthuchandran Rao, a sixth generation traditional puppeteer of Tamil Nadu, often narrates how his brother Muthumurugan Rao's skills in drawing and puppet making saved his family from the jaws of extinction and allowed him to continue his family's art of puppetry. In a settlement near Thovalai, Muthuchandran Rao's village in the Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu, 130 families of traditional puppeteers cohabit. Though one can find many skilled puppeteers in the settlement, all but Muthuchandran Rao's family have adopted various other professions since they do not have the skills of making and maintaining leather puppets. Muthuchandran Rao is nonchalant when he says that his family's old puppets were also lost to moths, rats, and the passage of time. Unlike the puppets of the previous generation, his puppets do not sport elaborate functional and decorative perforations; they are rather plain and minimalistic. Muthumurugan Rao, the maker of these puppets, does not see the lack of decorative apertures as damage to the artistic achievements of puppet making of the previous era. Over the centuries, the source of light for the shadow puppet theatre changed from oil lamps to hurricane lights to petromax gas lights to electric bulbs and now tubelights. While the oil lamps required the beautiful lines of perforations on the puppets to emit light and illuminate the characters they depicted, the other sources of light do not need holes at all. The mild and thin goatskin, with which Muthumurugan Rao makes his puppets, is capable of diffusing light from behind the puppet and absorbing and reflecting light from the front to flaunt its colours and shapes. 

 

Muthumurugan Rao copied the outlines and colour schemes of the puppets of the previous generation but stripped them off decorations to make them functional and infused many contextual and contemporary elements into the form. Many puppets depict the clowns Uccukudumi (top tuft), and Uluvathalaiyan (mangled ead) and Muthuchandran Rao reserves the ones with the more exaggerated paunch and hindside for the rural areas where his ribald humour runs wild. The demon puppets display more fidelity to the tradition, and they share similar shapes and depictions with the other shadow puppet traditions of south India.  

 

However, Andhra shadow puppets are tall, life-size and easily measure up to six feet. The Kerala shadow puppets usually have a pedestal to stand on and the foundations prevent the puppets, especially the divine ones, from making an inappropriate hip movement or shaking a leg. The shape and design of the Kerala shadow puppets thus make them apt for their temple ritual contexts. The designs of Andhra and Tamil shadow puppets have more joints and no restrictive pedestals and they lend themselves to greater manipulations required for their entertainment and carnivalesque settings. What makes Tamil shadow puppets unique are the stories in their repertoire such as Nallathankal Kathai, a folk ballad which tells the story of a mother killing her seven children and herself during the time of an acute famine and the story of Harichandra who would always speak the truth and suffer the consequences. The Indian freedom struggle added the puppets of Mahatma Gandhi and Vivekananda and their life stories to the Tamil shadow puppetry repertoire. The master artists of Tamil shadow puppet theatre such as Muthuchandran Rao excel in the scholarship of Ramayana, regional ballads, ventriloquism, regional and caste dialects of Tamil and manipulation of the puppets.

 

Historically, the Maratha rulers of the Thanjavur kingdom brought the Marathi-speaking puppeteers like the ancestors of Muthuchandran Rao to Tamil Nadu in the 13th century. Over the succeeding generations, they wandered all over the Deccan plateau mastering all the dialects of Tamil. Having lost itstraditional patronage, Tamil shadow puppetry faces near extinction and the odd families such as Muthuchandran Rao's that continue to persevere, cater to the needs of schools and NGO campaigns. So, in the assortment of Muthuchandran Rao's puppets, we find a hospital, doctor, nurse, common man, cyclist, bus, train, film actress, and Jesus Christ. 

 

Muthuchandran Rao's address is 11-92, Thirumalapuram, Thovalai, Kanyakumari District -629302