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UNESCO on the Ground
Local Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage
By Michael Dylan Foster, Lisa Gilman Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Indiana University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01953-0
CHAPTER 1
Voices on the Ground: Kutiyattam, UNESCO, and the Heritage of Humanity
Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater of Kerala state was recognized as India's first UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Looking back a decade later, how has UNESCO recognition impacted both the art and the lives of its artists? Based upon two years of ethnographic research from 2008 to 2010 among Kutiyattam artists in Kerala, India, this essay follows the art's postrecognition trajectory through its increasing mediatization, institutionalization, and liberalization. Drawing on extended interviews with over fifty Kutiyattam actors, actresses, and drummers, it focuses on reclaiming the voices of affected artists on the ground.
Location: Kerala, India
Kerala is a state largely characterized by exceptionalism. Located on the southwestern coast of the Indian subcontinent along the Arabian Sea (figure 1), the region was known historically for its spice trade with much of the ancient world. At the turn of the twentieth century, Kerala was known for a number of exceptional characteristics — a matrilineal kinship system that gave women comparatively greater autonomy than women in other areas of India; the rule of distance pollution that created the most rigid caste system in India, with lower caste groups not only "untouchable" but "unapproachable" as well; and the relative religious equality, in terms of both tolerance and sheer numbers, between its resident Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish populations. In the course of the twentieth century, Kerala experienced what Robin Jeffrey (1992, 2) has termed "a social collapse more complete than anywhere in India" that entailed the destruction of the matrilineal inheritance system, the spread of formal education and associated rising political activism, and an increasing cash economy that sparked land redistribution legislation by the world's first (1957) democratically elected Communist government.
The discourse of Kerala's exceptionalism is most often articulated through what has become known as the Kerala model of development. Formulated in a 1975 report for the United Nations, the model is characterized by Kerala's low per capita income and high levels of unemployment and poverty coupled with indicators more typical of highly industrialized regions of the developed world, including high levels of literacy and life expectancy and low levels of fertility and infant and maternal mortality (CDS 1975). Kerala currently has the highest literacy rate in India (93.91 percent), lowest infant mortality rate (1.4 percent), lowest population growth (4.86 percent), and only natural sex ratio (1.087:1 women-to-men) — factors that have often been attributed to the state's dominant matrilineal past and political mobilization of social rights led by Kerala's main Communist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (Lukose 2009; see also Jeffrey 1992; Franke and Chasin 1992). More recently acknowledged for its vital role in the propagation of the Kerala model is the state's longstanding migration to Gulf countries. Resulting remittances flowing into the state coupled with India's widespread economic liberalization have led to an expansive commodity culture that gives Kerala, despite continued low economic growth, the highest per capita consumer expenditure in India (Lukose 2009; Kannan and Hari 2002). As the Kerala model has become increasingly unsustainable, however, many have come to regard it as a failed project, a utopia-cum-dystopia characterized by "corruption, moral laxity, stagnant economy, widespread unemployment, high suicide rates, alcoholism, indebtedness, increasing violence against women and, more recently, AIDS" (Sreekumar 2007, 43).
In another manifestation of its discourse of exceptionalism, Kerala has a wider reputation within India as a region preserving "marginal survivals" of an ancient, Sanskritic culture that once spanned the subcontinent. Unlike many other regions of India, most of Kerala was never directly ruled by any foreign power, contributing to its status as a "repository of ancient Sanskrit texts" and cultural forms such as Kutiyattam and Vedic chanting (Raja 2001, xii). The 1909 "discovery" of the Trivandrum Bhasa plays, which first brought Kutiyattam to wider public attention, exemplified Kerala's status as a repository in two ways (Unni 2001). First, the palm leaf manuscripts represented a rediscovery of the famed second-century CE playwright Bhasa, whose plays were thought to have been lost. Second, the wider discovery of Kutiyattam as a living example of Sanskrit drama in performance challenged the longheld assumption that Sanskrit drama was a purely literary form (Sastri 1915; Keith [1924] 1970). This early framing of Kutiyattam as the only living link with ancient Sanskrit theater practice has persisted through the present-day, resulting in an ongoing temporalization of the art in terms of the past.
ICH Element: Kutiyattam Sanskrit Theater
Kutiyattam is often described as the oldest continuously performed theater in the world, with the earliest records documenting the form dated to the tenth century CE. While some have speculated that it began as a secular performance in royal courts, it was definitively incorporated into Kerala's caste-based temple complex in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, where it remained until 1949 (Narayanan 2006). As a kulathozhil, or hereditary occupation, it was performed in the temple by both men and women of the Chakyar, Nambiar, and Nangiar castes in exchange for land, food, and clothing. Kutiyattam, meaning "combined acting," embodies a mix of Sanskritic tradition and the indigenous cultural landscape of Kerala. The term encompasses a larger performance complex which includes Kutiyattam, the enactment of Sanskrit drama with multiple actors onstage; Nangiar Koothu, the female acting solo; and Chakyar Koothu, the male verbal solo performance. Composed by famous playwrights such as Bhasa, Saktibhadra, and Harsha, the plays staged date from the second to tenth century CE and are performed according to stage manuals passed down as palm leaf manuscripts. The plots generally revolve around the epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, although a few address Buddhist themes. Recognizable by its rich narrative expression through mudra hand gestures, highly emotive facial expressions, stylized movements, and sparse dialogue of chanted Sanskrit, Kutiyattam focuses on the aesthetic elaboration and extension of each moment. Consequently, only one act is ever performed at a time, lasting anywhere from five to forty-one days on the temple stage. On the public stage, where the majority of performances now occur, an act is usually performed on a single night as one edited, three-hour segment.
In the course of the twentieth century, the system that had sustained Kutiyattam as an elite, temple-based occupation for nearly one thousand years crumbled beneath the artists' feet in a dramatic tide of change that swept over Kerala and the emerging Indian nation. The matrilineal, gurukula-system educated, land-owning Kutiyattam community was unalterably affected by the destruction of royal patronage, the Communist land redistribution legislation depriving artists of their lands, and state legislation officially destroying matrilineal inheritance. Many members of Kutiyattam families sought other occupations, thus rejecting the existing agrarian order and becoming "agents of modernity in new forms of employment," like so many others in Kerala who came to associate their hereditary occupations with an increasingly distant past (Osella and Osella 2006, 571).
A few progressive members of the community fought to adapt both the art and their lives to survive the changing times, giving rise to a discourse of endangerment and samrakshanam (safeguarding) that has persisted in various incarnations through the present day. Actions that were considered unthinkable at the time, such as performing Kutiyattam outside the temple and democratizing its performance community, are now retrospectively narrated as revolutionarily necessary for the survival of the art form. Guru Painkulam Rama Chakyar is credited with taking Kutiyattam out of the temple for the first time in 1949, with teaching the art's first nonhereditary students in 1965, and with implementing a process of aesthetic reinvention of the art at Kerala Kalamandalam, the state performing arts institution. As a result, contemporary Kutiyattam straddles two spheres: the temple and public spheres of performance — the former inhabited by hereditary performers, both professional and nonprofessional, and the latter by professional performers, both hereditary and nonhereditary. Often depicted as an ancient art of the Chakyars in Kerala today, Kutiyattam defies such stereotypes through the diversity of its community members, who assert their subjectivity as contemporary artists practicing a contemporary art.
Current Status with Regard to UNESCO: India's First Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (2001)
Paris, 1980: The UNESCO Features newsletter reported on a Kutiyattam performance staged in the city as part of the art form's first international tour, funded in part by UNESCO's International Fund for the Promotion of Culture (Kinnane 1980). Paris, 1999: While on tour to Paris again, a UNESCO representative came to the performance and encouraged the Kutiyattam troupe members to apply for a new program that UNESCO was launching. Granted UNESCO funds for the application, it was through the effort of the troupe's leader and a few other key individuals, such as internationally renowned film director Adoor Gopalakrishnan, that Kutiyattam's application was submitted to UNESCO by the Indian government as its only candidate that first year. The art's national and international connections thus laid the foundation for its international recognition. When the first Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity was subsequently announced in 2001, Kutiyattam became India's first expressive tradition to be so recognized by UNESCO, although not without controversy (figure 3).
While the Indian Ministry of Culture began budgeting a small amount for the "preservation and promotion of intangible heritage of humanity" in 2003, Kutiyattam's action plan began to be implemented in 2004 primarily through a UNESCO/Japan-Funds-in-Trust project, which issued 150,000 US dollars to six institutions over a period of three years (Government of India 2003–4, 182; UNESCO 2007). Under the direct oversight of the UNESCO New Delhi regional office, the funds were used to support meetings of a Kutiyattam network, the revival of plays, publications, student training, public awareness-raising workshops and performances, academic seminars, the production of ten documentaries, and a workshop on basic conservation techniques for palm leaf manuscripts. In 2006, a special fifty-million rupee provision was made in the National Budget for India's three UNESCO Masterpieces — Kutiyattam (2001), Vedic Chanting (2003), and Ramlila (2005). This sparked a fight between two major national institutions for control of the project, the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) and the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts (IGNCA). The SNA eventually emerged victorious based on its long-standing financial support of Kutiyattam, and in 2007 it founded a national center, Kutiyattam Kendra, in Kerala's capital city of Trivandrum.
The Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's national academy for dance, drama, and music, began translating Kutiyattam into national heritage early on, clearly valuing the art for its "pastness" through its widespread characterization as "the only surviving link to the ancient Sanskrit theater" (SNA 1995; see also Lowthorp 2013b). This is part of a longer process of Indian nation building that, as Vasudha Dalmia (1997) has argued, appropriated Orientalist discourse through the "nationalization" of Hindu traditions viewed as legitimized in ancient, Sanskrit texts. Thus viewing Kutiyattam as a marginal survival of an ancient Vedic (i.e., Hindu) age, the SNA began showcasing and documenting the art in the 1960s and incorporated it into a funding scheme targeting endangered art forms in the 1970s. This eventually culminated in a "total care plan" for the preservation of Kutiyattam which provided low, steady levels of funding starting in 1991 (SNA 1991–92). With the 2007 opening of the Kutiyattam Kendra, funding for Kutiyattam was significantly increased and the art became included in a small, elite group of the SNA's permanently funded institutions. Remaining under the purview of the SNA, which continues to characterize the art as both endangered and as India's only living link to ancient Sanskrit theater, Kutiyattam's post-UNESCO project implementation has constituted a continuity of state policy, both in discourse and practice.
Kutiyattam Kendra ushered in a number of initiatives. Prioritizing Kutiyattam's transmission, it began distributing augmented student and teacher stipends to three existing and four new institutions. It funded the only carpenter in Kerala making costumes for Kutiyattam and other Kerala arts. Kutiyattam Kendra made the art's public promotion another priority, funding monthly lecture-demonstrations and performances at universities, schools, cultural institutions, temple trusts, and other organizations across Kerala and, to a lesser extent, India. It began organizing an annual performance festival that brought all of the institutions together, as well as various specialized seminars and workshops throughout the year. In 2008, Kutiyattam was incorporated into the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as per the terms of UNESCO's 2003 Convention, remaining under state patronage via Kutiyattam Kendra. This study, conducted from 2008 to 2010, represents a perspective approximately one decade after UNESCO recognition.
On-the-Ground Perspectives: Mediatization, Social Status, and the Rise of the Institution
One young artist once described to me his understanding of UNESCO, inquiring, "What is UNESCO exactly? We don't know. UNESCO doesn't do anything directly, so for us artists there is no UNESCO. To our knowledge, it is only the Indian government that is doing something." Along with a few artists who openly admitted to me that they didn't know what UNESCO was or what to expect when it recognized Kutiyattam, the majority of artists viewed UNESCO as a distant international organization whose interventions were indirectly facilitated through national and local bodies. A few had had direct interaction with the organization — the twelve artists who performed at UNESCO's Thirty-First General Conference, for example — but even in those institutions that received direct funding from UNESCO/Japan-Funds-in-Trust, contact was facilitated by their largely nonartist institutional leadership.
There was a wide range of perspectives surrounding the UNESCO project formulation and implementation that reflects the diversity of the contemporary Kutiyattam community. Several artists expressed that they didn't feel they had much of a voice in the process, as it was dominated by local and national nonartist institutional leadership, however well-meaning, with meetings sometimes held in languages they largely did not understand — English and Hindi — when SNA or UNESCO representatives attended. While there was a general consensus that the recognition was a good thing for the art form, opinions varied over exactly to what extent. Some attributed to UNESCO a minimal role, having provided "only money" or "only recognition, like an award." Others ascribed a more pivotal role to the recognition, expressing the view that if not for UNESCO, Kutiyattam "would have died out in ten or twenty years since no one would come to study it." Most artists, however, fell somewhere in between, both recognizing UNESCO's ephemeral role — as one artist put it, "UNESCO is like a rain that comes and goes suddenly, but doesn't stay" — and the lasting impact that its recognition has had upon both Kutiyattam's general social standing and its position vis-à-vis the Indian government. Among the spectrum of sentiments expressed on the issue, those subjects most often raised — the art's increased societal recognition and the rise of the institution to its current monolithic prominence — will be discussed here.
UNESCO's 2001 recognition of Kutiyattam brought a flurry of media attention. As Kerala has both the highest literacy and media exposure rates in India, this attention made a noticeable impact on Kerala's public imagination. When an artist is asked his profession, his reply is no longer met with a blank stare. Kutiyattam's greater media presence has led to increased societal recognition, but it has not translated into greater audiences as many had hoped. As one artist noted: "Kutiyattam spread out superficially, like smoke. People have come to recognize the name and costume but don't come to watch performances." The smoky tendrils of greater Kutiyattam awareness spread throughout Kerala, India, and the world on the winds of UNESCO. In Kerala, however, the recognition carried the wider misconception that artists were given a lot of UNESCO money and should thus perform without pay — festival organizers now eager to include Kutiyattam for its advertising value are often not ready to pay for it. Despite the overall greater media attention and general interest in the art since UNESCO recognition, more popular art forms like Kathakali and Mohiniyattam, seen as icons of Kerala culture, still dominate Kerala's arts media and wider performance arenas.
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Excerpted from UNESCO on the Ground by Michael Dylan Foster, Lisa Gilman. Copyright © 2015 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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