’Art & soul
The magical world of string puppets

The manner in which puppets have been used to advance political, social or
religious causes is truly fascinating, writes B. N. Goswamy

I do not quite know what it was that put me in mind again of the world of puppets the other day. It might have been a clip of an old Hindi film I was watching which had something like these lines, tired words of a wise man: Ham sab to kathputliaan hain, jinki dor oopar waale ke haath mein hai. Jaisey woh nachaata hai vaisey ham naachte hain." (Like puppets are we all, the strings of which are in the hands of the Lord above. We dance exactly as he makes us do.)

But then I turned to a book that had been lying with me — unread, like some others — Kathputli by the ethnomusicologist Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy. For close to 15 years — during which he also made some films on the theme — Jairazbhoy had been researching the world of Rajasthani puppeteers, scouring the field from Rajasthan to Gujarat and on to Mumbai, and even further afield in Pakistan and Washington: this book was the result.

It is a dense but engaging study, making us move with ease between the world of make-believe they create on the stage to the world of harsh reality in which the puppeteers themselves live. In these pages, one meets performers of all kind and ilk: dholis and hurkiyas, rababis and sarangiyas; dakkalgars and mridangis: one encounters proud claims about Brahma, the creator, being himself the originator of the art of puppetry, and hears about the throne of the legendary Vikramaditya resting upon carved puppet-figures — putlis — each of which had a tale to tell. Slowly, but with excitement, one also enters the world of the stories that the puppeteers bring to life on their little stage: Dhola Maru, Sikandar ka hamla; Dulla Bhatti; Jaimal Fatta; Jogi-Jogan; Akbari Darbar. Battis Putli ka Simhasan; and that perennial favourite, Amar Singh Rathore.

Episodes from performances keep swinging into view: the preparation of the darbar, the arrival of the guests announced by a chobdar, the inevitable nautch within royal precincts; the confrontation between Rajput chief and Mughal overlord; and so on. The art is ancient; the technique at once simple and complex; the world magical. But then, all of us who have seen a kathputli performance know this perhaps.

My own interest in puppets extended gradually, however, to the world of puppetry outside our land, and I read a bit about it. For one thing, I discovered, there is an enormous variety of puppets: from the Bunraku of Japan to the shadow puppets of southern India and Indonesia; there are black light puppets and chin-face puppets, hand-glove puppets and finger puppets; water puppets and senor wences; marottes and marionettes.

Each of these — history, technique, social context — is, one finds out, a world unto itself. The earliest use of puppets seems to be traced — no surprises here — to China, even though Egyptian puppets, some of them having been found buried by the side of children, also go very far back: to something like 2000 BC. In classcial Greece and Rome, clearly, puppets were well-known and widely used. A famous passage attributed to Plato is believed to have survived in which, using a puppet as a didactic tool, he speaks to a group thus: " `85let us consider ourselves as living figures sent out from the workshop of the gods `85our passions are wires or strings pulling us up by opposite movements to contradictory actions. Good sense suggests that we should obey only one of these wires, resisting all the others`85"

The puppet theatre of Antiochus is believed to have been operated by the King himself, using large figures painted from life. And so on. After the Roman Empire went into dissolution, puppeteers are known to have travelled with jesters, jugglers and other entertainers across Europe, sometimes entertaining the king’s court.

In the medieval times, and with the spread of Christianity, the Church is said to have used puppets to teach doctrines and tell Biblical stories: hence possibly the name ‘marionette’ which, in one view, can be traced back to ‘Mary’, the Virgin.

Speaking of the last, what is truly fascinating is the manner in which puppets have been used, across history and across lands, to advance political or social or religious causes. In early Burma, thus, puppets often served as a conduit between the ruler and his subjects, the common folk pleading their cases through puppets without showing disrespect. For ‘a puppet could say things that a human could never get away with’. There are also instances in which, at the Burmese court, the Emperor himself would, without losing the dignity of his station, reprimand his children or wife through arranging puppet shows that put on a parable correcting errant children or careless wives. Parallel to the use of puppetry by the Church for its own ends, at the popular and the anti-establishment level puppetry also became an instrument of political activism.

In 17^th century England, thus, a puppet by the name of Punch – one speaks here of the ancestor of the famous ‘Punch and Judy’ shows – gained immense popularity, providing an outlet of how the common folk felt about the conditions in which they lived. This ‘hunchback character with a large, hooked nose, quite ugly and of terrible manners’ emerged as a hero of the lower class people, because he mocked the king’s laws and the Church’s oppression.

He could ‘explain, explore, embrace or critique the human condition’, as someone wrote. In more recent times, the role that puppets played in the Czech resistance movement against the Nazi occupation, fills a whole chapter of the history of that land. For puppetry, as a modern practitioner of the craft says, is "still one of the safest ways to act out, act up, entertain, educate, commisserate, wonder out loud, unburden yourself, release your feelings."

To come back to our own land, however. As Jairazbhoy points out, there is no real organisation or association of the puppeteers themselves that can give them any clout, and so little awareness among our people of the power of puppets. As a result, the acts of our, sometimes very gifted, puppeteers remain too tightly bound to the past, the courage to stand up to the ‘whips and scorns of time’, or to challenge ‘the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, `85 the law’s delays, the insolence of office", remains lacking. Occasionally, only occasionally, the craft is used for a higher end than simply to entertain.

As, for instance when mostly unimaginative officials press it into service, to push a social cause like family planning, or the need for saving. But, by and large, the puppeteer remains a puppet, manipulated by time, neglected by society, living in make-shift tents along the dark edge of sheer poverty. Is this what that ancient art deserves, is the question?

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