Imagined Spaces

I was talking with the Kudiyattam artist Kapila Venu recently about the magic of eyes.

- Tishani Doshi

I had read how Kudiyattam performers could show with their eyes, a particular motion of flies falling into a fire and then flying back unhurt (sikhini salabham). I was stunned by the detail of it. That the need for such a gesture existed, that it could be conceptualised, taught and performed. Students of Kudiyattam must master how to bring vayu (breath) into their eyes, so they can become conduits of sorts. A performer can take hours to move an imaginary mountain on stage; can show how a river originates atop some far mountain, then widens in grith as it comes toward you, then thins as it travels off into the distance. All with zero tech, just abhinaya and ocular wizardry.

Kapila told me that one of her favourite scenes in the Ramayana is when Ravana sees Sita for the first time. Ten-headed Ravana in his flying chariot. Seeing this beautiful woman. Each of the 10 heads beginning to describe some aspect of her. The many heads then arguing between them. This kind of multiplicity contained in a single body, which then enables the audience to experience it, is the kind of skill a fiction writer could be deeply envious of. It's an exchange of vision in real time. Do you see what I am making? Can you see it too?

When I watched Kapila later that evening on stage, I tried to find her—the person I had been talking to just a few hours earlier. But she was not there. Or rather, she was somewhere alongside the person(s) she was on stage. On stage, she and her percussionists had summoned a world with an oil lamp, a tiny curtain, and a wooden stool. Poof. Universe created. A space that was circular and infinite, of mythic time and present time. A boundary had been drawn between them and us, but it was a porous one, an invitation to cross over the threshold to meet.