Bhagavata Mela
பாகவத மேளா
Also Melattur Bhagavata Mela, Bhagavata Melam.
Theatre Tamil Nadu
What it is
Bhagavata Mela is dance drama performed by men in a handful of villages of the Thanjavur delta, in the street in front of the temple, as an offering rather than a show. Melattur is the best known of them. The performers are Telugu speaking Brahmin families descended from migrants the Nayaka rulers brought south in the sixteenth century, and the plays are in Telugu though the village has spoken Tamil around it for four hundred years. The Prahlada Charitram is performed every year without fail, and the actor who plays Narasimha puts on a mask that is worshipped before he wears it.
How it is built
Performed at night on a platform in the street facing the temple, with the deity brought out to watch. The music is Carnatic, the dance vocabulary close to Bharatanatyam, and the plays are sung and danced rather than spoken. A Kattiyakkaran introduces. The Konangi, a clown, opens the evening. Male actors play every role including the women. The Narasimha mask is kept in the temple, taken out with rites, and the actor who wears it fasts and is treated as the deity while it is on.
How it is learnt
The question a family actually has
Within the Melattur families, learnt from childhood by watching the annual performances and then by being given small roles. Formal training in Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music is now usual alongside, since few of the performers live in the village any more and most come back for the festival from Chennai or further. Rehearsal is concentrated in the weeks before Narasimha Jayanti. The tradition is held by perhaps a few dozen families and the number who can take the principal roles is small.
Whose lineage is whose
Where a claim is contested, by whom
The form descends from the Kuchipudi tradition of Andhra, carried south by Telugu Brahmin families settled in the Thanjavur delta under Nayaka rule, and the two are visibly related. Melattur Venkatarama Sastri in the eighteenth century composed the plays still performed. The twentieth century saw the tradition nearly end and then be deliberately revived, and it now survives on a mixture of family obligation, state recognition and a small festival audience. Whether men should go on playing the women’s roles is raised from outside and generally declined from inside, on the ground that the performance is a temple offering with its own rules.
Worth knowing
The mask that is worshipped
The Narasimha mask used at Melattur is kept in the temple and is treated as a deity in itself. Before the performance it is taken out with rites and the actor who will wear it fasts and prepares. Once it is on he is not addressed by his own name, and the story is told in the village of actors who could not be brought out of it easily afterwards. The scene it is worn for is the killing of Hiranyakasipu, and the audience stands. It is the clearest case in south Indian theatre of a performance that the performers do not regard as performance.
Telugu in a Tamil village
The plays are in Telugu and the families have lived in Tamil speaking country since the sixteenth century. The children learn the roles phonetically as often as not. The language has been kept because the plays were kept, and the plays were kept because they are owed to the deity annually. A tradition maintained by obligation rather than by demand looks fragile and has in fact outlasted a great many better attended ones.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Tamil Nadu
- Melattur, Saliyamangalam, Theperumanallur and a few other delta villages, performed around Narasimha Jayanti in front of the temple.
- Andhra and Telangana
- Kuchipudi is the parent tradition and the language of the plays is Telugu, which the Andhra tradition recognises as its own.
Connected to
Deities
Festivals
Related arts