Swang
Swang , also Svang ( Hindi स्वांग , svāṅg), Sang (Hindi सांग , sāṅg), is in the narrower sense a folk dance theater in the northern Indian states of Punjab , Rajasthan and the Malwa region in Madhya Pradesh . The focus is on dialogues and stories in prose form, the songs are sung in a wide range of styles, ranging from the melodic structures of semi-classical Indian music to today's film music. The themes come from widespread mythical tales or historical hero stories of Panjabi -Folklore.
Swang as an overarching style is the most famous folk theater tradition for entertainment in northern India. From this old mixture of dance, theater, song, staged dialogue and monological narration, independent forms developed such as the nautanki style, which is widespread throughout northern India , the regional styles sang in Haryana , bhagat in Uttar Pradesh and khyal in Rajasthan . In addition to this historical and geographical definition, the terms swang, sang and nautanki are sometimes used interchangeably.
history
In addition to the religious ritual theaters, the devotional theater forms ram lilac and ras lilac , which are part of the Bhakti cult, i.e. the worship of Rama and Krishna with partly entertaining character, festivals with plays and other performances have been handed down for pure pleasure since ancient Indian times. In the Shatapatha Brahmana texts belonging to Yajurveda, there are instructions for the sacrificial ritual as well as a list of entertainers: professional singers, musicians, dancers, acrobats and jesters. According to the period between 200 BC A treatise on the performing arts in Natyashastra , written in AD 200 and written in AD 200, must have already given popular forms of entertainment theater in regional languages at this time, as theater is said to have been available for all castes including the lower Shudras and Shudras of the sacred language Sanskrit were kept away. The Harivamsa , a script classified as a supplement to the Mahabharata , also shows that there were ancient Indian plays in regional languages.
Terms such as samaj ( samāja, "community"), which often appear in Arthashastra (ancient Indian theory of the state), the Jatakas (instructive stories from the life of the Buddha), Sanskrit dramas and inscriptions, represent the earliest Sanskrit preforms of today's Swang. From the 5th to the 11th century, the term sangītaka appears in Sanskrit texts , which is derived from sangīta ("music") or sangīt (meaning a "composed song") and can be viewed as a popular development from the classical Sanskrit drama . The Maithili poet Vidyapati (around 1352 - around 1448) called his piece Goraksha Vijaya , composed in 1425, as sangitaka .
The words swāng, svāng and sāng are probably derived from Sanskrit svānga , "disguise", "camouflage" in the meaning of "drama", "drama". Sāng is also written sāngīt in the regional languages. With this meaning of the dialect word sāng , which has been proven for centuries , the direct descent from Sanskrit sangīt ("music") is improbable. The current spelling sāngīt instead of sāng could have been composed of sāng and Sanskrit gīta (“song”), meaning “sang-song”.
According to different assumptions, (1) the popular swang developed from the Sanskrit drama sangitaka , (2) that classical form of theater goes back to earlier folk traditions, (3) an independent parallel development took place without major influence, or (4) the Sanskrit theater emerged from earlier ones popular forms and after its decline it again formed the basis for a popular theater.
None of the folk theater traditions can be traced back in their concrete form to the 16th century. Malik Muhammad Jayasi (late 15th to first half of the 16th century) mentioned Swang in his poem Padmavat from 1540, as did Sabalsingh Chauhan, another Hindi poet from the 17th century, in his Mahabharata . The British administrator Richard Carnac Temple (1850-1931) published his three-volume collection of poems The Legend of the Panjab from 1883 to 1890 . It contains three swang poems that were performed each year at the Holi festival in Jagadhari in the Ambala district in Haryana . In Punjab, the swang tradition has probably existed since at least the 18th century. The more modern version nautanki originated in Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh) and spread over northern India at the beginning of the 20th century.
The last Nawab of Avadh , Wajid Ali Shah (reigned 1847-1856), who was deposed from the British East India Company , wrote plays in which he mixed elements of bhagat, swang and ras lila and called his own style rahas . In his palace district in Lucknow , he had a building ( Rahas Manzil ) built especially for the performance of these pieces . The Urdu poet Agha Hasan Amanat (1815–1858) was inspired by this. He wrote the play Inder Sabha , which was first performed in 1854 and became so popular that the Parsees included it in their theater repertoire and the orientalist Friedrich August Rosen (1805-1837) translated it into German. The new style, in turn, refreshed the Swang tradition. Sang in Haryana is said to have been developed by Kishan Lal Bhaat around 1750.
Around 1870 the Swang Theater, influenced by rahas and bhagat from Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh, reached the city of Hathras in the west of this state. There the love story between Jamal, the daughter of a Turkish minister, and Gabru, a young trader from Central Asia, was performed. A play by Vasudev Basam on the same theme called Syah Posh , after the so-called residents of Kafiristan , quickly became famous and ensured that numerous swang theater groups were formed in this region and Syah Posh was later performed on Nautanki stages. A student of Basam, Murlidhar Rai, wrote the play Shahjadi Nautanki , from whose content and style of performance Nautanki developed as an independent form in the cities of Kanpur and Lucknow at the end of the 19th century, and von Swang assumed the leading role as a North Indian folk theater. Hathras and Kanpur are the two most important centers today in which nautanki is cultivated in different performance styles.
The main difference between Swang and Nautanki is that the older style was staged in the open and the new development from the European-influenced Parsen theater took over a stage limited to the rear by a curtain. In addition, with Swang the narrative consisted of verses with sung dialogues, while with Nautanki the actors recite prose. In the Nautanki, the previously neglected costumes, the make-up and the accompanying orchestra with kettle drums ( nagārā , also nakkara ) , which became louder during the dramatic actions , gained in importance.
After the high point at the beginning of the 20th century, increasingly trivial song and dance interludes, based on the pattern of Bollywood films , disappointed lovers of sophisticated music, right down to obscene scenes that occasionally displaced the plot as a whole and the reputation the performer sank. Another disadvantage today, in addition to the competition from the film industry, is the lack of professionalism of many Nautanki theater companies. On the other hand, there are efforts to preserve the art form nautanki as an old folk tradition and to adapt it to the changed viewing habits of the audience, for example by shortening the performance from eight to three to four hours.
Performances
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In Swang, stories are told in a straight line, sung dressed in verse and presented as prose in dialogues. Acting, on the other hand, takes a back seat. The actors used to appear in everyday clothes and only occasionally in costumes and with make-up. The professional theater troupes move from village to village according to the festive calendar and attend social and religious events. In the past, male actors also performed the female roles, and women began to perform as well in the late 1930s. Above all, women developed dance interludes into independent scenic units by adopting the tradition of nautch girls. These were professional entertainers in the palaces. The British colonial rulers referred to the temple dancers ( devadasis ) as nautch-girl , the word is twisted from Sanskrit nritya to Prakrit nachcha ("dance", "dance").
Nine to twelve male performers belong to today's swang troupe ( khara ), four of them are instrumentalists who play the kettle drums tabla and nagārā , the strings sarangi , harmonium and occasionally cymbals . A cook belonging to the Brahmin caste travels with the troupe, the other members of the khara do not belong to a certain caste and do not necessarily inherit their profession. Hindus and Muslims are equally part of the troops, the latter are mostly among the instrumentalists. The Swang troupe is led by a khareband who is recognized by the members as a guru . He organizes the performances, composes the dialogues and usually appears in one of the main roles.
In Swang Theater, the actors act outdoors without curtains or backdrops, with the audience sitting in a circle around the stage. This practice also characterizes the traditional performances of sang, bhagat, khyal and bhavai in Gujarat , some (“stage”) in Madhya Pradesh and jatra in Bengal . Jatra generally stands for a folk theater without a backdrop, a religious festival or procession. In Maharashtra today, tamasha is a crude folk theater that goes back to the development of swang. There is another stylistic relationship with some South Indian dance theater styles. In Karnataka , bayalata generally means performances that take place outdoors, specifically yakshagana . In most theaters, the stage consists of a slightly raised wooden platform, in front of or at the edge of which the musicians sit.
In addition to regional forms of theater, swang also describes the concept of a solo entertainer as a broad term. An actor who slips into the role of a deity can say that he has accepted the "swang" of that deity. In the most general case, so is swang for any performance of folk actors appearing in different roles.
In Himachal Pradesh , the swang theaters that appear at annual religious festivals such as Dashahara and Shivaratri are also called jhanki (“glimpse”). This is what otherwise, in religious theater, the setting up of the actors of the gods is called a stationary scene so that the audience can come forward and pay their respects. During the Lohadi festival, boys in costumes go from house to house all night, one disguised as a deer, the others drum and sing. Other ritualized dance forms known as swang in Himachal Pradesh are chandroli, jhamakada and googa . In addition to dancers and singers, there is a clown who makes rough jokes. In the swang tegi dance at the Divali festival, animals are imitated, the dancers wear wooden tiger masks. Jhamakada (also nanoo vinayaka ) are dances in the swang tradition that are performed at weddings and other transitional celebrations.
stories
Many of the stories are from the Punjabi -Folklore, partly fictional themes to present social situation occur. The tragic love story between the rich and beautiful Hir from the Jat folk group and the wandering Ranjha, who is employed as a cowherd at her father's court and plays for her on his flute ( bansuri , regional wanjhli ), is popular. The story, spread out in numerous versions, also forms the theme for the coarse dhapa songs from which the refined classic tappa singing style developed.
Another story about a mythical-romantic couple from the Pakistani province of Sindh is called Sassui Punnhun (Sassi-Punnu). The daughter of the Raja of Banbhore , Sassui, who was cast out as a toddler , grows up with a simple washer-man until the news of her beauty reaches the son of the ruler of Makran , Punnhun. The two find each other and are fraudulently separated.
In Sohini Mahiwal (Suhini-Mehar) the beautiful Sohini is the daughter of a potter. The rich merchant Izzat Baig from Bukhara loses all his money out of carelessness and love for her and becomes a simple buffalo herder - hence the name Mehar, later to an ascetic on the other side of the river who brings Sohini food. They only find each other when they drown together in the river.
Puran Bhagat was a son of King Sulwahan (Raja Salban), who once ruled Sialkot in Pakistan's Punjab . The childless first wife of the king, after trying unsuccessfully to start an affair with the prince, claimed that he wanted to rape her. The indignant king ordered his son's hands and feet to be cut off and to be thrown into a well. A guru saved Puran and built him a shelter at the well, where he soon became a wise man himself and his place a pilgrimage destination. In the place of the fountain near Sialkot there is a grave today, to which women who want to have children make pilgrimages. The famous story has been told and processed many times. Rudyard Kipling wrote the short story "The Miracle of Puran Bhagat" published in English in 1895.
In the narrative cycle Raja Bharathari , known throughout northern India , the title character is the king of Ujjain from the 1st century AD. After he had gained deep insight into the world, he gave his royal crown to his brother and retired to the forest to ponder the true meaning of life. Several episodes from his life deal with the illusory manifestations of earthly existence.
literature
- Farley P. Richmond, Darius L. Swann, Phillip B. Zarrilli (Eds.): Indian Theater. Traditions of Performance. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 1990
- Manohar Laxman Varadpande: History of Indian Theater. Loka Ranga. Panorama of Indian Folk Theater. Abhinav Publications, New Delhi 1992, pp. 142-144, 161f
- Ved Prakash Vatuk, Sylvia Vatuk: The Ethnography of Sāng. A North Indian Folk Opera . In: Ved Prakash Vatuk (ed.): Studies in Indian Folk Traditions. Manohar, Delhi 1979, pp. 29-51
Web links
- Swang, Indian Form of Theater. Indian Net Zone
- Anand Jha: Sewang - The Folk Dance of Malwa. Boloji.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nautanki, Uttar Pradesh. Indian Net Zone
- ↑ Theater in Haryana. Indian Net Zone
- ↑ Varadpande, p. 133
- ^ Darius L. Swann: The Folk-Popular Traditions. Introduction. In: Richmond, Swann, Zarrilli (Eds.), P. 240
- ^ Kathryn Hansen: Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theater of North India. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, p. 47, ISBN 978-0520072732
- ↑ Vatuk, p. 30, footnote 3
- ^ Darius L. Swann: The Folk-Popular Traditions. Introduction. In: Richmond, Swann, Zarrilli (Eds.), P. 239
- ^ Richard Carnac Temple: The legends of the Panjâb. Vol. 1. Education Society's Press, Bombay 1884: a Swang poem p. 122, online at Internet Archive
- ↑ Folk Dances of Haryana. Indian Net Zone
- ↑ Darius L. Swann: Nautanki. In: Richmond, Swann, Zarrilli (Eds.), P. 263
- ^ Parsi Theater. Indian Net Zone
- ↑ Varadpande, pp. 142-144, pp. 161f
- ^ Devendra Sharma: Performing Nautanki: Popular Community Folk Performances as Sites of Dialogue and Social Change. Dissertation. Ohio University, Athens (Ohio) 2006, pp. 205f
- ↑ Vatuk, p. 33f
- ↑ Varadpande, p. 143
- ↑ Himachal Pradesh. The Indian Analyst
- ^ SC Bhatt, Gopal K. Bhargava (Ed.): Land and People of Indian States and Union Territories. Vol. 10. Kalpaz Publications, Delhi 2006, pp. 327f. (online: Swang. webindia123.com)
- ↑ Menka Shivdasani: Suhini Mehar. ( Memento from October 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Muse India
- ^ Charles Swynnerton: Romantic Tales from the Panjab with Indian Nights' Entertainment. Archibald Constable & Co., London 1908, pp. 231–245 ( online at Internet Archive )