Nautanki
Nautanki ( hindi नौटंकी , nauṭankī) is a folk dance theater in the northern Indian states of Uttar Pradesh , Punjab , Rajasthan , Haryana and Bihar . Typical is a change from funny, occasionally suggestive songs sung in the styles of semi-classical Indian music and popular Bollywood film music, staged dialogues in prose form and dance interludes. The secular, primarily entertainment-oriented plays deal with the mythical tales of the great Indian epics, historical heroic stories or contemporary social issues.
The origin of nautanki lies in the tradition of swang , which is widespread throughout northern India and which includes several regional styles, including sang in Haryana , khyal in Rajasthan , bhavai in Gujarat , tamasha in Maharashtra and bhagvat mel in Andhra Pradesh . In addition to this historical and geographical distinction, the terms swang and sang are also used instead of nautanki .
Professional male and female actors usually perform nautanki in large tents or theaters on the occasion of religious festivals or private family celebrations. The large kettle drum nāgāra dominates the accompanying orchestra and audibly announces the beginning of the event from afar. The older of the two styles is cultivated in Hathras , here the focus is on demanding singing performed in a high pitch. Kanpur's style puts more emphasis on acting, the songs are more catchy and are sung with a deeper voice.
history
Swang is the forerunner of Nautanki and in the spelling swang, sang or suang a term that appears in the Middle Ages in Indian literature written in Sanskrit , Prakrit and Hindi . It is probably derived from Sanskrit svanga ("masquerade", "disguise"). It is very likely that there was already at the turn of the century, when the treatise on the performing arts Natyashastra described the religious ritual theater of the upper castes , a parallel developed entertainment theater for the general population. In the 5th century, Kalidasa mentioned the word sang in his play Vikramorvashi , which featured singing accompanied by musical instruments alongside the drama. In the 15th century, Kabir complained about the enthusiasm of the population for the Swang Theater, which for him represented a contrast to the religious devotional cults. A century later, swangis was understood to mean female prostitutes who disguised themselves as male ascetics (yogis).
All of today's folk theater traditions for entertainment in northern India can be traced back to the 16th century at the most. Swang has probably existed in Punjab since the 18th century, and Nautanki plays have only been preserved in written form since the second half of the 19th century. Today's Nautanki style spread from Kanpur in the center of Uttar Pradesh at the beginning of the 20th century.
It is unclear where the word nautanki comes from. Most widely accepted is the view that the title of the particularly popular play Shahjadi Nautanki , in which the turbulent fate of the beautiful Princess Nautanki from Multan is portrayed, was initially transferred to the entire genre in the cities of Kanpur and Lucknow . Accordingly, Nautanki had initially replaced itself as an independent style of Swang and later took over its leading role as a North Indian folk theater. The name of the princess is made up of nau ("nine") and tank , an old unit of weight for silver coins (around four grams). The so-called lover of a Punjabi prince was volatile and fairytale like a flower and weighed only 36 grams. Alternative etymologies are nau taka (“nine rupees”), which a financier is said to have paid for a performance, nay tankar (“new sound”) for a particular style of music or the derivation of Sanskrit nataka (“theater”). Hindi lexicons and dictionaries did not use the term until the middle of the 20th century. In the title of today's theater plays, the word sangit (presumably composed of sāng and Sanskrit gīta , “song”) stands in front of the name of the main character, meaning “drama”. It is only called nautanki when the piece is discussed.
In Kanpur, Shrikrishna Pahelwan founded the first nationally known Nautanki troop. Here Nautanki took on elements from the commercial Parsenian theater, which had developed particularly in Bombay in the mid-19th century and was in turn influenced by European theater. In this context, the Alfred Theater Company , founded in Bombay in 1871 as Alfred Natak Mandali , is mentioned, which staged numerous modern plays in Bombay and Calcutta and existed under changing owners until around 1932. The innovations borrowed from the Parsen Theater included a rear stage curtain, which did not exist in the Swang Theater, which could be viewed from all sides, and prose dialogues instead of the previous alternate chants, as they were cultivated in the older tradition of Hathras in the west of Uttar Pradesh . The Kanpuri style brought spoken theater together with the songs from Hathras to form a new mix of styles.
In addition to the secular entertainment tradition of swang, the devotional theater style ras lilac from the Braj region in Uttar Pradesh and the equally religiously entertaining bhagat , whose main distribution is in the cities of Agra , Mathura and Vrindavan , represent a source of influence for Nautanki, with Bhagat not older than Nautanki should be. Certain structures of the presentation and the accompanying musical instruments are the same. In contrast to Nautanki, Bhagat is performed by amateurs and includes purification and invocation rituals at the beginning and end of the event, as is customary in religious dance theaters, such as the East Indian chhau .
In his three-volume collection of poems, The legends of the Panjâb , the British administrator Richard Carnac Temple published poems and songs from the Punjab from 1883 to 1890, including some that he had collected by a religious singer of the Swang tradition. His informant was invited to major festivities such as Holi in spring and Dashahara in autumn for a fee . In addition, Temple met other professional singers with a rather dubious reputation who accompanied dancing girls at family celebrations and, in addition to historical legends, performed personalities. Another group of religious swang singers performed specifically at the lower castes' celebrations and festivals.
Today's plays contain elements from all three levels of the Swang tradition. The topics are from the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata selected, and from the tragic experiences of the Panjabi -Heldensagen, as contained similar in some Persian and Arabic traditions. Other soap operas deal with interpersonal situations from everyday life. The use of dancing girls going to the tradition of so-called by the British colonial rulers nautch -girls back. These were professional erotic entertainers at the palaces. Nautch is corrupted by Prakrit nachcha , which goes back to Sanskrit nritya ("dance", "dance").
Before dancers and singers took to the stage in the 1930s, with a few exceptions towards the end of the 19th century, Nautanki was a matter of male performers who embodied both gender roles. Feminine-looking boys were dressed as girls; if they could dance well, they were in great demand and received a decent wage. At the end of the 19th century, as Temple described, there were nautanki troops who performed drama with singing and orchestra, and others who specialized in singing accompanied by the string sarangi and drums. The first Nautanki actress was Gulab Bai (1926-1996), who had been trained in the vocal school of Hathras. She became a celebrity in the late 1930s when she embodied the main female characters of the well-known mythical lovers. She developed a personal singing style in song genres such as dadra and lavani . In the mid-1950s she founded her own theater company, the Gulab Theatrical Company.
At the height of its popularity at the beginning of the 20th century, nautanki was the most widespread form of entertainment in northern Indian villages and towns. The numerous newly formed Nautanki troops were called mandali ("group") or akhara ("wrestling arena "), the latter name explained from the physically demanding singing style. With increasing professionalism, the Nautanki troops left their region of origin and went on major tours, some of them even came to Myanmar.
While costumes and make-up were not of great importance in the swang theater, both were required in the nautanki. The previous way of making music remained roughly the same, only the kettle drum nāgāra ( nakkara ) now provided a stronger accentuation of the dramatic actions. As in other popular theaters, the Nautanki featured a comical character who is also present on the stage and - often obscene - contributes jokes. In the course of the 20th century, more and more undemanding dance interludes belonging to film melodies ("filmigit") pushed the actual plot and the earlier folk songs into the background, until some Nautanki performances had degenerated into a revue of semi-Gothic dance numbers with obscene song texts. The task of the training facility Nautanki Kala Kendra , founded in Lucknow, is to counteract such degeneration through workshops and performances.
Drama has been produced especially for film since the 1990s, and the rural population also knows their Nautanki actors from television productions and the rental of VCDs . While the influence of the mass media reduced the number of visitors in the often overcrowded cinema halls, Nautanki continues to be financially supported as a rural form of entertainment by (older) patrons and is valued by viewers as a “real” performance, in contrast to the “ghostly” characters, that appear on the screen. Nevertheless, stage performances that are only equipped with simple backdrops and in which a theater director has to explain the course of action between the scenes can only compete with television productions with difficulty. In them all scenic details are shown in close-up, while the viewer has to evoke them in his imagination at the Nautanki.
Performance practice
Swang theater used to be played outdoors in a specific square or on the edge of the village without a stage. Hence the use of the kettle drum nāgāra, which is usually only played outdoors . Although Nautanki is also one of the annual festivities, performances against tickets in large, closed tents and theaters are widespread today. At smaller venues in the country, a wooden platform about one meter high is sufficient as a stage, which is surmounted by a tent roof. A high fabric partition surrounds the stage and the audience area. The actors prepare in the rear room, separated from the stage by a curtain. The size of the stage and its equipment with backdrops depends on the financial possibilities of the troupe. Light bulbs are used as light sources, hanging in a row above the stage; Effects with colored lights are rarely used.
The beginning of a performance is announced by a loud drum orchestra, consisting of one large and two smaller kettle drums ( nāgāra ), which are usually played by Muslims. Their pitch is constantly adjusted during use: moistening the membrane makes the tone deeper, heating the body, which is layered over a small charcoal fire, increases the tone. Other instruments include a harmonium , sometimes two, and the double-headed barrel drum dholak , which is played with the hands . The musicians sit on a low porch in front of or on one side at the edge of the stage. A Nautanki troupe includes ten to twelve members, including the musicians.
The performers begin with an invocation ( mangalacharan ) to a god in order to receive the blessing for the event, the invocation can use a Hindu or Muslim formula language according to the author of the play or according to the audience present . The Ramayana is preceded by a different opening than the historical drama Sultana Daku ("Sultan Bandit"), which takes place in a Muslim environment. According to Hathras tradition, the opening ceremony consists of a prayer ( bhaint ), in Kanpur a choir sings.
Then the stage director ( ranga ) lets the performance begin. He briefly introduces the content of the piece in vocal form and mentions the individual characters who appear in the first acting scene. The ranga (derived from Sanskrit rangachar , “stage director”) plays the essential role by announcing the place and time of the action and describing the environment the audience has to imagine, for example “it is night in the deep forest, the birds have go to rest in the treetops as the two walk through hand in hand ”. Occasionally he refers to the morality behind the stories. He fulfills the same function as the director of the Sanskrit theater ( sutradhara ) or the bhagavata of the South Indian Yakshagana dance drama.
The boiler drum player fills the pauses between the song verses and sets the tempo. The dialogues inserted at intervals are of secondary importance compared to the dances of the women and songs. In any case, three or four improvised comic interludes, in which misunderstandings, mix-ups and stupidities lead to scenic slapstick. Clowns create laughter by imitating familiar characters in an exaggerated way.
A traditional country performance starts at 11 p.m. and ends at dawn. In the past, 10,000 to 20,000 spectators crowded four sides around the stage at large festive events. As a result, the actors inevitably developed the penetrating style of singing that is characteristic of Nautanki, even if today in most cases microphones and loudspeaker systems amplify the voices.
stories
In popular legends, brave heroes, honorable bandits and languishing lovers appear. The straightforward narrated moral paintings come from the environment of the Rajput princes or go back to Arabic and Persian stories in which history and myths mix. Other plays (as musical drama: sangit , performed: katha ) deal with themes from the ancient Indian epics Ramayana in the version of Tulsidas from the 16th / 17th centuries. Century, the Mahabharata or from the Puranas . The sangits have been published as manuscripts since the end of the 19th century ; today the texts are published by some publishers and can be bought as booklets from street vendors.
The story of Gopichand , which deals with King Bharthari (whose nephew was called Gopichand), who ruled Ujjain for an indefinite period and was converted to an ascetic way of life by Guru Goraksha , has been widespread since the 19th century . Related to this is the suffering story of King Harishchandra, who through his true life lost all earthly goods until he finally found redemption. This piece, entitled Hariscandra natacamu, is also performed in the religious theater form Bhagavata mela near the southern Indian city of Thanjavur . Both religious and moral legends were first published as nautanki plays in the 1880s.
Oral folk tales, which imaginatively tell of the glory of bygone days at the royal courts, include the adventures of the brothers Alha and Udal, two brave Rajput fighters from Mahoba in the Bundelkhand region in the 12th century. The Rajput states of Delhi , Kannauj and the Rathor clan of Rajasthan rivaled each other at that time.
In contrast, there are only a few nautanki plays, which draw from the rich devotional Krishna literature, in which the adventures of the young god with his beloved Radha and the milkmaids (gopis) are described. These are reserved for the own genre ras lila .
Classic love stories with a tragic ending from Persian-Arabic tradition, on the other hand, also appear in the Nautanki repertoire. Examples of this are the 13th-century Persian lovers, Shirin and Farhad, and the even older oriental love story of Laila and Majnun . A parallel to the ancient Indian rulers who gave up their material possessions for a spiritual life is the Indo-Islamic story of King Khudadost ( Khudadost-Sultan ) from Yaman. He exchanged his previous life for that of a fakir and, accompanied by his wife and two sons, went about as a beggar. After hard years of hardship, he was finally reunited with his separated family and was given back the royal throne.
A play by Natharam Sarma from Hathras, whose hero is Subhash Chandra Bose (1897–1945), one of the leaders of the Indian independence movement in World War II, makes reference to recent political history . Otherwise, the plays with current content leave politics aside and deal with the gender balance in traditional Indian society with a moral index finger. Often times, a rich man is seduced by a deceitful woman and cheats on him until he finally returns to his self-sacrificing wife, who forgives him. In Puran Mal a young man is molested by his stepmother, he rejects her, she takes revenge by denouncing him on his father, who condemns the son, who is only rehabilitated after a long period of suffering. One moral of the story is that it is improper to marry a young girl to an old man, as has been widespread in India. In 1929, child marriage was prohibited by law for girls under the age of 14.
Social environment
The two main centers of Nautanki, Kanpur and Hathras are located in a central Indian state, whose population according to the 2001 census is a good 80 percent Hindus and around 18 percent Muslim. The spectators at Nautanki come from the two large and the other smaller religious communities, the pieces contain the tradition of both cultures. Persian influences brought the Mughal rulers into the country since the 15th century and the courtly art they promoted gradually influenced the taste of the long-established population. Nautanki has always primarily reached the simple strata of the population; the majority of the financial supporters of this form of entertainment also belong to the lower income groups in urban and rural areas and hardly belong to the educated elite.
The schools of Kanpur and Hathras differ in performance style and organizational practice. In the Kanpuri style, the focus is on the dramatic action, the songs are less demanding, they are performed with less ornamentation and in a lower pitch than in Hathras, where the listener should have a certain musical understanding of this older style.
The Hathras style goes back to a certain Indarman. He is credited with the play Khyal puran mal ka , dated 1892 , which despite its title does not belong to the Khyal style of Rajasthan, but rather became the starting point for the singing style of Hathras. A little more is known about Indarman's disciple Natharam, who was born in 1874. Natharam developed his soft voice as a boy who led his blind father around and sang begging songs until Indarman discovered him and accepted him into his troop ( akhara ). There he soon became successful as a singer and dancer in female roles, later as a composer and organizer. Indarman and Natharam formed the akhara into a well-known training institution in which they passed on their style in a personal master-student relationship as an exclusive knowledge. The students were obliged to perform exclusively with this akhara and no other theater company. As with a gharana in other dance styles and in classical music, a high artistic quality could be achieved and passed on, at the same time this system excluded all other Nautanki troops, because they could not win suitable performers, and hindered any development and innovation .
A list drawn up in 1910 contains the names of 32 members of this akhara with the precise details of who was whose disciple and the privileges assigned to him. The reputation of Natharam, who took over the management around 1910, was due to the fact that he owned a printing press with which he had his own and those of others written Nautanki texts copied and sold in booklets. At that time, the drama writers did not share in the proceeds of the performances, but only received money from the sale of the printed works.
The Kanpur School was founded by Shrikrishna Pahalvan after 1913 in response to the dictatorial closed system of Hathras. Shrikrishna was first known regionally as a talented poet in a poetry contest called shaiyar , and was encouraged by members of the Arya Samaj to write nautanki pieces. His style may have been influenced by khyal , which itself is said to go back to an older poetry competition in Rajasthan. Shrikrishna, together with Rasikendra, another poet, replaced the opening invocation to the gods and gurus with a simply structured choral singing, which was performed by all actors and received positively by the audience. The two put the acting part in the foreground, the scenes were usually located “in the garden” or “at the court”. With a corresponding stage background, they prescribed a seating position for the audience in front of the stage and thus distanced themselves from the three-sided positioning of the audience at the Kanpuri Theater. When other akharas in Kanpur took over the innovations of Shrikrishna, the second style was established.
While there was a closed circle of students in Hathras who learned from their guru by imitation, the new ideas in Kanpur attracted a greater number of young actors, for whom Shrikrishna Pahalvan had to organize an adequate training system. He founded three theater companies that trained students of different levels. As in Hathras, his methods were focused on the traditional understanding of roles, on imitating the teacher and on physical self-discipline, only the relationship with a single guru was of less importance for him. The training was more formally divided into teaching units.
The members of a Nautanki troupe are professional performers who no longer travel together as they used to. As a result, there is a lack of exercise and training opportunities for the young. The lower number of appearances requires the performers to supplement their income by working in agriculture, in the factory or as a trader. There are still private donors who invite Nautanki troops to a performance, but with the independence of the country in 1949, the small principalities, whose ruling families are often impoverished and are no longer willing to donate art, disappeared. Another, still existing, traditional form of support is fundraising among the citizens of a village or a city district in order to be able to invite a troop for a certain occasion with free entry for the public. The timely third means of financing is the sale of tickets, as happens at annual festivals and other public events that attract thousands of visitors and where nautanki performances take place over several consecutive days. Two or three Nautanki troops perform at the annual Magh Mela in Prayagraj . For the first time in 1913 Shrikrishna Pahalvan requested admission to a Nautanki performance at a festival ( mela ) in Unnao .
literature
- Kathryn Hansen: Grounds for Play. The Nautanki Theater of North India. University of California Press, Berkeley 1991
- Devendra Sharma: Performing Nautanki: Popular Community Folk Performances as Sites of Dialogue and Social Change . (Dissertation) Ohio University 2006
- Darius L. Swann: Nauṭankī. In: Farley P. Richmond, Darius L. Swann, Phillip B. Zarrilli (Eds.): Indian Theater. Traditions of Performance. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 1990, pp. 249-274
- Manohar Laxman Varadpande: History of Indian Theater. Loka Ranga. Panorama of Indian Folk Theater. Abhinav Publications, New Delhi 1992, pp. 142-144, 161f
Web links
- Nautanki, Uttar Pradesh. Indian Net Zone
- Nautanki. Yakshagana, Cultural Magazine
- Nautanki. Homepage of Devendra Sharma
- Nautanki "Sultana Daku" Dir. By Devendra Sharma - Bedhini dances to entice Sultana (part 1 of 2). Youtube video
- Nautanki, Laila Majnu - Bhagwan, Manna Dey, Bhabhi Song. Youtube Video (Nautanki songs in a film from 1957)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ved Prakash Vatuk, Sylvia Vatuk: The Ethnography of singing. A North Indian Folk Opera . In: Ved Prakash Vatuk (ed.): Studies in Indian Folk Traditions. Manohar, Delhi 1979, pp. 29-31
- ↑ Hansen, pp. 10, 13
- ^ Parsi Theater and Mumbai. (PDF; 1.2 MB) In: The Record News. The Journal of the Society of Indian Record Collectors. Mumbai. 2006, p. 25f
- ↑ Deepty Priya Mehrotra: Dying Drama. Boloji.com, July 23, 2003
- ^ Gulab Bai, UP Theater Personality. Indian Net Zone
- ↑ Swann, pp. 249-253
- ↑ Sharma, pp. 44f
- ↑ Varadpande, pp. 161f
- ↑ Sharma, p. 187; Swann, p. 271
- ↑ Swann, pp. 253-258, 268
- ↑ Hansen, pp. 90-92; Swann p. 260
- ↑ Hansen, p. 121f
- ↑ Swann, pp. 259-261
- ^ Population by religious communities. Census Data 2001
- ↑ Swann, pp. 264-266; Hansen, pp. 95f
- ↑ James R. Brandon (Ed.): Nautanki . In: The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theater. Cambridge University Press, New York 1997, pp. 99f, ISBN 978-0521588225
- ↑ Swann, pp. 266f
- ↑ Swann, pp. 267-269