–Shashibala
STrOLLiNG minstrels are highly skilled storytellers and actors who perform to teach folk people through singing and dancing, making gestures and playing music, using oral and visual material like painted scrolls and shadow projections. They are professional entertainers, moving from place to place, transmitting ideas, forms and styles of various types of arts. They not only act as instructors in society but are instruments for sociocultural changes. They are vehicles of reform movements and articulators of satire and social comment. They have the power to please and enrapture the audience, narrating stories in a loud and overwhelming voice that stimulates the mind and palpitates the heart. They try to make their language as attractive as possible but easy to understand. Normally it is a combination of poetry and prose. They create sketches or painted illustrations to accompany their presentations. Sometimes these tend to be rough pictures, since made in a short time. When minstrels perform, the whole atmosphere becomes so charming that the viewers sit spellbound. Their ultimate aim is to save society from the vile and the sinful. For the religious minded, the performances are a medium through which they can be enlightened and be saved from the cycle of rebirth and death. They are a part of the village community in India, classified as bhāṇḍas, naṭs, gandharvas, vairāgīs and so on.
The art of strolling minstrels is termed as folk drama, traditional theatre or folk dance. In India, the Epics, Purāṇas and other stories receive a different kind of treatment in the hands of minstrels, performing as professionals or non-professionals, but they are dedicated academics seeking a spiritual release. They keep art traditions active within a temple precinct or the court of a king. They do not belong to any particular caste.
The traditional art can be traced in most parts of India from north to south and from east to west. Even across the boundaries it travelled to various countries in the Southeast and to the Far East. But the art developed in multiple forms showing regional distinctiveness because of racial and linguistic factors existing in the society. The entertainers used to create their own copies with some modifications of various texts, folk tales and legends. Many such versions are found written in a mixed style of prose and verse with varying proportions. Prose is highly conversational, and verse is full of rhythm.
In ancient times, special endowments were made to temples in India to teach religious principles through the recitation of scriptures such as Epics, Purāṇas and other religious texts. Apart from discourses, storytellers made use of visual means to impart religious instructions. The earliest reference to such performances is found in ancient Indian literature where śaubhikas were shadow players, the maṅkhas were mendicants showing pictures while the granthikas were narrators who, for example, discussed the fate of Kaṁsa from the beginning to the end. There were people who adopted this art for their living and could bring the stories alive in the viewer’s mind. In a Sanskrit drama, the Mudrārākṣasa, it is said that one of the characters, Nipuṇaka, disguises himself as a man who shows pictures of Yama and the punishments in hell when he was to spy for Cāṇakya. Such people were known as yamapaṭṭakas carrying a canvas stretched out on a support of upright rods and showing the Lord of the Dead mounted on his dreadful buffalo. Yamapaṭṭakas enjoyed popularity for more than 1,000 years, showing rewards for the good and evil deeds in the realm of Yama. People, including children, used to gather around to listen to their words. They used to expound the features of the next world chanting verses.
Until recently, the exhibition of such performances was popular in India but gradually became less in demand giving way to other forms of religious folk entertainment, as for instance puppet shows and shadow plays. In Bengal, paṭuās or citrakāras are still found as a class in rural areas. They used to paint pictures, go from house to house, exhibiting and singing. The narrators used to point to a specific spot on their paintings when narrating the events that they depicted. The pictures called paṭs are classified according to their size
and subjects. They can be square, rectangular or in scroll form. But with the decline of possibilities of their survival only by this profession of storytelling the artists have taken up other occupations such as image making and snake charming. A number of paṭuās settled in Calcutta in the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Citrakathās were picture-showmen in Maharashtra like the paṭuās of Bengal. They performed with wooden marionettes. A citrakathā in his collection had a set of pictures of Rāma, Sītā, Rāvaṇa, Pāṇḍavas, Arjuna’s sons and other major characters of the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata along with pictures of famous kings like Hariścandra. The set was wrapped up in a cloth bundle. Two performers sing and recite stories, using tamburā and ḍamaru or tāla for musical accompaniment. Performers used to squat on the ground. A wooden board of the size of a picture was propped against the knees and a piece of cloth rolled up in front of the board prevented pictures from slipping.
Bhopās of Rajasthan have either scrolls or wooden boxes with folding doors called kivāḍa. Colourful figures of gods and goddesses, men and animals are painted on the folding doors on a red background. Bhopās fix the scrolls on two poles while performing. They sing and mime the story while women illuminate scenes with lamps. Stories of heroes are popular with the Rajasthani audience. These show all episodes of a story on one picture. Scenes follow scenes without any dividing line in between.
Teejan Bai, a devotee of Lord Kr̥ṣṇa, is famous for performing Pāṇḍavāṇī, a narrative folk form of the story of Mahābhārata. She was a Bhilai girl from a village of Madhya Pradesh, who took up Pāṇḍavāṇī not as a profession but as a passion. She still feels it to be her life. She does not care for the name and fame she has been conferred upon but for the ever-growing knowledge and creativity that comes to her through Pāṇḍavāṇī. She began singing Pāṇḍavāṇī to the plants and trees in the forests and fields around her where it was an art exclusively and strictly confined to the males.
Swimming against the tide she began to sing the religious and mythological stories. She relates the familiar tales of the Mahābhārata with gusto through singing and enacting ballads of the Pāṇḍavas in the fiery Chhattisgarhi tradition. She has created her own style that has remained unchanged for three decades. She has saved a regional art style from the threat of extinction.
When Teejan Bai comes to the stage she infuses everything around her with the energy and charm of a little girl, in a style unique to her. But she is unable to explain the source of this immense energy that ignites her body and helps her perform flawlessly. She always holds a tambūrā decorated with peacock feathers and bright flowers which is taken as representative of bhakti and bhagavān; it is her śakti, without which she cannot perform. It represents different things at different points of time during performances – sometimes it is the warrior’s horse on the chariot and at times Arjuna’s bow.
She looks vibrant and vivacious; her inner being so absorbed into every bit of its technical and emotional aspects. The sheer energy of her lyrical style adds to the charismatic performance. Plus, she adds interesting innovations. Her stories are interwoven with colloquial slang when she sings, dances and delivers dialogues at a high pitch. A harmonium, a ḍholak, a banjo and a tablā give her company.
Teejan Bai weaves skilfully nuances of satire on contemporary societal habits through the stories of Arjuna, Karṇa, Kr̥ṣṇa and several other characters of the Mahābhārata and important events in the epic like the fight between Karṇa and Arjuna, dialogues between Arjuna and Kr̥ṣṇa, the story where Draupadī was insulted or the killing of Duḥśāsana, Duryodhana and Kaṁsa. She has created myriads of images, gestures and expressions personifying the inner being of the characters that she plays. The dialogue delivery, flowing with requisite tonal ebb and low, automatically takes the audience to the epic world of the Mahābhārata, totally absorbed in the turbulent twists and turns of the tragic tale. She becomes highly emotional while depicting scenes like conversations between Karṇa and Kr̥ṣṇa. Her witty additions enthrall the audience. Her main aim is to enlighten the society. Her passionate pursuit has created a considerable stir in the world of aesthetics when the audience is left tapping their feet at the resonance of her tambūrā.
Buddhist Tradition
The tradition of travelling monks, narrating the tenets of Buddhism in an interesting manner through drama goes back to the time of the Buddha himself who had encouraged the use of storytelling as a way to capture the attention of an audience and convince them of the precepts conveyed through
a given tale. This approach would be certainly sanctioned by upāya (skillful means). The Buddha’s own sūtras are full of interesting parables and tales. The Buddha also sanctioned the use of local vernaculars so that the people of various countries and regions would be able to hear his message in their own language.
The monks tell the stories from the Jātakas, Avadānas and Nidānas so that sophisticated Buddhist concepts are made apprehensible and palatable, becoming enjoyable and memorable. The tradition of telling unforgettable tales was transmitted to China and Japan through Central Asia from India by monks who traversed vast deserts, mountains and oceans to carry the message of Śākyamuni to the oriental world. Like all evangelists, they found music and performances helpful in the process of attracting the people. They composed vernacular pieces creating a new genre of folk song.
The monks used to derive themes from Buddhist literature and recreate them in their own way. Such books used by strolling minstrels were copied and adapted by performers in accordance with regional taste and the intellectual level of the audience. According to the colophon of a text, they were copied for pious reasons, normally by the scribes and copyists who were students at the monastic schools.
The narratives were written in prose-metric style; the verse portion was chiefly hepta-syllable, written in semi-colloquial language, dealing with both secular and religious themes. They have an intimate relationship with pictures. A splendid example may be found in the “Sutra of Wise and Foolish”, which consists of hundreds of long and short stories recorded by Buddhist monks from China who had heard them in 445 CE in the oasis city of Khotan in Central Asia.
Other Traditions
Storytelling was established as a popular art form in the Christian world because one of the primary functions of renaissance art was to communicate stories and ideas by visual means to contemporary beholders in ways that were more enticing, vivid and memorable than was possible in text, sermon or speech. St. Ursula’s tale became hugely popular throughout Europe and was as easily available as the Bible. It was illustrated in a series of large canvases
approximately 3 m high and up to 6 m long. The paintings executed between c.1490 and 1500 CE were hung all around the interior of the building that served as both the confraternity’s meeting hall and its communal chapel. They depicted the life of Ursula, where she makes a divinely inspired decision to ask her suiter to convert to Christianity and allow her to go on a pilgrimage to Rome with a retinue of 11,000 virgin women and so on. Visual emphasis given in many canvases is often on the tale’s ceremonial moments. Stress was laid on ritual behaviour.
Japan had its share of storytellers and wandering minstrels, whose repertoire included stories and legends of gods, heroes and personages famous in national history. One of the most popular of these stories was the history of joruri. The love story of this celebrated woman was so popular that it overshadowed all the rest and gave its name to the whole class of minstrel narrative, so that joruri came to be the generic name for this class of recitals. The joruri stories were originally unwritten, handed down from minstrel to minstrel. The first written text of joruri was created by the mistress of Oda Nobunaga, the ruler of Japan, in late sixteenth century.
Sangaku, the Chinese dance was full of humour and comedy. But Japan developed the tradition of temple dance called kagura, which was performed at the cave of the sun goddess and which is still perpetuated in the kagura dances at shrines and temples. The Japanese assign the origin of “Noh” lyric drama to kagura dance. Over a thousand “Noh” dramas are known to have existed. Some of them are known as “Kami-no” or “Shinji-no” because they are related to the stories of gods or things divine, mythological pieces or pieces related to the legends connected with some particular divine being or temple.
Buddhist monks in Japan practise mendicancy, asking for alms from door to door, chanting passages from the Buddhist sūtras, praying for the salvation of the people. Hokiichi Hanawa was a blind scholar who had lost his eyesight at the age of seven. He confined himself in the Tenjin shrine and compiled a book of classified quotations from classical books. He spent thirty-nine years and compiled 635 volumes.
Sightless musicians sang stories to the playing of their Satsuma-biwa or lute. Even now some of the best musicians in Japan are blind. A blind woman, who was called Goze, was a famous street singer.
The Korean minstrels chant Kosa-yombul, going from village to village in order to raise funds for building or repairing temples. Yombul, meaning invocation, is of two types: each having different texts and employing different instrumental accompaniments. Some of them are transliterations of Sanskrit texts while some are Chinese translations from Sanskrit. They were chanted by professional shamanistic singers for exorcism, money raising and entertainment. The professional Buddhist chanters used to sing Hwach’ong that is based on a text written in Korean and which derives its music from folk songs. The dance performed in conjunction with the chant is known as chakpop (making of the dharma). In contemporary Korea outdoor band music is one of the three components or performing genres in traditional Korean Buddhist rites.
The tradition was taken to Indonesia where it became popular as “Wayang beber”. A Chinese traveller, who had visited Indonesia during the Ming dynasty, has described the performance of dramatic storytelling utilizing a picture scroll or a series of individual scenes on cards. He felt the performance was very similar to the one that was common in China.
Today when social scientists are worried for flickering moral and social values, strolling minstrels may contribute in transmitting the required tenets of philosophy in an easy-to-understand manner to the unenlightened through an art that has the power of convincing the audience which is so vibrant. There is no space for boredom. They can please and enrapture the audience in a loud and overwhelming voice which vibrates through the mind and palpitates the heart.