Shadow Puppets of Andhra Pradesh
Encyclopedia
Shadow Puppets of Andhra Pradesh are wandering entertainers and peddlers that pass through an India
n village during the course of a year- offering to sing ballads, tell fortunes, sell amulets, perform acrobatics, charm snakes, weave fishnets, do tattoos, mend pots. It is an ancient custom by which – for centuries before radio, movies, and television- the knowledge of Hindu epics and local folk tales, not to mention news, spread to the most remote corner of the subcontinent.
Marionette players are one of the various entertainers, who perform during the whole night. They use puppets made of animal skins as characters. They usually perform various stories from Hindu epics Ramayana
, Mahabharata
etc.
As the players manipulated the puppets, placing them on the screen and then moving them away, they create the illusion of the figures suddenly materializing and then fading out. They also cause the figures to walk, sway, hop, and fly through the air. The degree of skill they display in animating the dancers is astonishing. They can swivel a dancer's detachable head and manipulate her hands while keeping her hips swaying to create a remarkable illusion of twirling.
The puppeteers accompany all the character's speeches with animated movement of arms and hands, which they flip over to create a three-dimensional effect. The swaying of freely dangling legs also adds to the feeling of animation. When several puppets are stationary on the screen at the same time, they are pinned to the screen with date palm thorns. A puppet would be rapidly pinned with one or two of the lone, thin thorns passed through the perforations in the headdress of shoulder ornaments. Such puppets are still able to engage in animated conversation by means of the sticks moving their hands. Characters that engaged in rough fighting, such as the monkey king Hanuman or the jesters, are often held from the hip, enabling them to be moved with greater control than by the central stick alone.
About five minutes throughout the performance the action will be broken by the episodes of broad comic relief from the jesters speaking in a slangy, quirky style and engaging in slapstick antics. Some of these depended on a strong dose of scatological humor or puns and risqué allusions. Except for certain commonly used expletives, their language is not obscene, though sequences were bawdy to a degree not observed in other popular forms of entertainment.
Interspersed with spoken dialogue, verse passages in literary Telugu and even Sanskrit
are sung accompanied by music. These occur especially in contexts of heightened emotion or important events rather like arias in European operas. The players serve as their own musicians and all members of the troupe knew the music that accompanied the various passages.
, a portable keyboard organ that sometimes serves only as a drone; a long, two-headed South Indian drum with tapering ends (mrdangam); strings of bells worn on the ankles and wrists; and pairs of finger cymbals. A wooden shoe, a type with stilts is used to keep its wearer above the mud during the rainy season, was struck against schoolchildren's seating planks to create dramatic clacking and banging sound effects for fight scenes.
The singing style and the conventions of vocal delivery for the play closely resembles the form of singing in an old-fashioned drama genre known as 'Satyabhamakalapam'. Accompanied only by the drum and finger cymbals, the player sings raising his hand up to one ear, as if to listen to what he is listening.
very bad
; the ten-headed demon king, Ravana
. All other puppets are made from goat skin, readily available locally. Most puppets are made from a single skin, though some require more. At least four skins are necessary for Ravana –one for his body, one for his legs, and one to make each set of five arms.
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n village during the course of a year- offering to sing ballads, tell fortunes, sell amulets, perform acrobatics, charm snakes, weave fishnets, do tattoos, mend pots. It is an ancient custom by which – for centuries before radio, movies, and television- the knowledge of Hindu epics and local folk tales, not to mention news, spread to the most remote corner of the subcontinent.
Marionette players are one of the various entertainers, who perform during the whole night. They use puppets made of animal skins as characters. They usually perform various stories from Hindu epics Ramayana
Ramayana
The Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic. It is ascribed to the Hindu sage Valmiki and forms an important part of the Hindu canon , considered to be itihāsa. The Ramayana is one of the two great epics of India and Nepal, the other being the Mahabharata...
, Mahabharata
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....
etc.
Performance details
The performance begins with a series of sung invocations and a line of ornate, strikingly stylized puppets pinned in overlapping fashion onto the sides of the screen. The puppets are mounted down in the middle on a palm stem, extended to form a handle used to move the body of the puppet. Their arms are moved with detachable sticks that had a small piece of string with a peg at the end, which slipped into holes on the hands. Generally, one puppeteer manipulats all three sticks of a single puppet, holding the central handle stick in one hand and two arm-control sticks in the other. Often two to three puppeteers operates puppets on the screen at the same time, each one delivering the lines for his or her own puppet.As the players manipulated the puppets, placing them on the screen and then moving them away, they create the illusion of the figures suddenly materializing and then fading out. They also cause the figures to walk, sway, hop, and fly through the air. The degree of skill they display in animating the dancers is astonishing. They can swivel a dancer's detachable head and manipulate her hands while keeping her hips swaying to create a remarkable illusion of twirling.
The puppeteers accompany all the character's speeches with animated movement of arms and hands, which they flip over to create a three-dimensional effect. The swaying of freely dangling legs also adds to the feeling of animation. When several puppets are stationary on the screen at the same time, they are pinned to the screen with date palm thorns. A puppet would be rapidly pinned with one or two of the lone, thin thorns passed through the perforations in the headdress of shoulder ornaments. Such puppets are still able to engage in animated conversation by means of the sticks moving their hands. Characters that engaged in rough fighting, such as the monkey king Hanuman or the jesters, are often held from the hip, enabling them to be moved with greater control than by the central stick alone.
About five minutes throughout the performance the action will be broken by the episodes of broad comic relief from the jesters speaking in a slangy, quirky style and engaging in slapstick antics. Some of these depended on a strong dose of scatological humor or puns and risqué allusions. Except for certain commonly used expletives, their language is not obscene, though sequences were bawdy to a degree not observed in other popular forms of entertainment.
Interspersed with spoken dialogue, verse passages in literary Telugu and even Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
are sung accompanied by music. These occur especially in contexts of heightened emotion or important events rather like arias in European operas. The players serve as their own musicians and all members of the troupe knew the music that accompanied the various passages.
Musical instruments
The musical instruments consists of a harmoniumHarmonium
A harmonium is a free-standing keyboard instrument similar to a reed organ. Sound is produced by air being blown through sets of free reeds, resulting in a sound similar to that of an accordion...
, a portable keyboard organ that sometimes serves only as a drone; a long, two-headed South Indian drum with tapering ends (mrdangam); strings of bells worn on the ankles and wrists; and pairs of finger cymbals. A wooden shoe, a type with stilts is used to keep its wearer above the mud during the rainy season, was struck against schoolchildren's seating planks to create dramatic clacking and banging sound effects for fight scenes.
The singing style and the conventions of vocal delivery for the play closely resembles the form of singing in an old-fashioned drama genre known as 'Satyabhamakalapam'. Accompanied only by the drum and finger cymbals, the player sings raising his hand up to one ear, as if to listen to what he is listening.
very bad
Puppets and Cinema
People compared shadow play to movies was informative. Shadow play was an ingenious technology of animatinc pictures, developed centuries before the advent of the motion picture industry. Here was a method of enabling four or five people to bring a hundred or more colorful mythological characters to life in the most remote village, all accompanied by virtuoso singing, contagious rhythms , and dramatic sound effects. And how elaborate the characters' costumes were with swirling sashes and ornate necklaces and garlands, all cut to let points of light glisten in intricate patterns.Puppet making
Three types of skins to manufacture puppets – antelope, spotted deer and goat. Antelope skins are reserved for making a limited number of auspicious characters such as the gods and epic heroes. Deer skin, noted for its strength and resistance to rough handling, is employed in the figures of warrior, BhimaBhima
In the Mahābhārata, Bhima is one of the central characters of Mahabharata and the second of the Pandava brothers...
; the ten-headed demon king, Ravana
Ravana
' is the primary antagonist character of the Hindu legend, the Ramayana; who is the great king of Lanka. In the classic text, he is mainly depicted negatively, kidnapping Rama's wife Sita, to claim vengeance on Rama and his brother Lakshmana for having cut off the nose of his sister...
. All other puppets are made from goat skin, readily available locally. Most puppets are made from a single skin, though some require more. At least four skins are necessary for Ravana –one for his body, one for his legs, and one to make each set of five arms.