తోలు బొమ్మలు

వికీపీడియా నుండి

ఈ వ్యాసాన్ని పూర్తిగా అనువదించి,తరువాత ఈ మూసను తీసివేయండి


డా. బ్రూస్ టేపర్ ఆంధ్రప్రదేశ్ లోని తోలుబొమ్మల గురించి స్మిత్‌సోనియన్ పత్రిక ఏషియన్ ఆర్ట్ ‍ఆండ్ కల్చర్, 1994 లో ప్రచురించిన వ్యాసము సారాంశము.


Many wandering entertainers and peddlers pass through an Indian 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.

During the entire two years in the early 1970s that I (Dr.Bruce Tapper) lived in Yatapalem, part of the rural farming village of Aripaka about forty kilometers from the port city of Visakhapatnam in the Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh, Once I found a troupe of marionette players who are ready to perform.

The troupe made a screen with white dhoti cloths and a booth like structure with palm leaves. Like all other village drama performances, this one began long after dark, around ten o' Clock, and lasted until sunrise. I (Dr. Bruce Tapper) requested 'Lankadahanam' (The burning of Lanka), the well-known episode from the Ramayana of the abduction of Rama's wife Sita by the demon king Ravana.


విషయ సూచిక

[మార్చు] Performance details

The performance began 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 were mounted down the middle on a palm stem that extended to form a handle used to move the body of the puppet. Their arms were 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 manipulated 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 operated 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 created the illusion of the figures suddenly materializing and then fading out. They also caused the figures to walk, sway, hop, and fly through the air. The degree of skill they displayed in animating the dancers was astonishing. They would swivel a dancer's detachable head and manipulate her hands while keeping her hips swaying to create a remarkable illusion of twirling.

The puppeteers accompanied all the character's speeches with animated movement of arms and hands, which they flipped over to create a three-dimensional effect. The swaying of freely dangling legs also added to the feeling of animation. When several puppets were stationary on the screen at the same time, they were 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 were 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, were 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 was 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 was 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 were sung accompanied by music. These occurred especially in contexts of heightened emotion or important events rather like arias in European operas. The players served as their own musicians and all members of the troupe knew the music that accompanied the various passages.


[మార్చు] Musical instruments

The musical instruments consisted of a harmonium, a portable keyboard organ that sometimes served 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 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 resembled 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.

[మార్చు] 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.

[మార్చు] 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. Deerski, noted for its strength and resistance to rough handling, is employed in the figures of warrior, Bhima; 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. Atleast four skins are necessary for Ravana –one for his body, one for his legs, and one to make each set of five arms.

[మార్చు] Conclusion

Shadow play was but one incarnation – one set of techniques for dramatizing the vastly rich Hindu epics. It is now superseded by motion pictures and television, which have reinvigorated the epics for the electronic age. But shadow play was a brilliant incarnation, one whose visual artifacts hold clues to the history of South Asian art and drama and deserve to be prepared for the delight of generations to come.