When Narippatta Narayanan Namboodiri experiments, which he does more often than not, and that too with Kathakali, which is the one art he has mastered, it is not as if the sexagenarian is innocent of the risks they entail. For one, the classical dance-drama has its share of grandly sculpted choreographic pieces where an ill-timed batting of the eyelid or a misplaced jerk of the fingertips would only mean impropriety, not innovation. Plus, the fact that such physical parameters are rather well defined in the Kalluvazhi style he is groomed.
Added to this is the fact that his audiences, at least during his formative years, have been from his native central Kerala, noted for their orthodoxy. In fact, his own village of Karalmanna in Palakkad district is known for its purist aesthetes when it comes to Kathakali. Yet Narippatta has never shied from trying new things in his art. “Only that,” he shrugs (and his sense of humour becomes evident), “sometimes you intend to show one thing, the viewer gets it as something else.”
Narippatta, though, has never given up. After all, novelty was one distinct pursuit of his chief guru too. The late Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair always maintained a refreshingly inquisitive approach to not just characterisation; his interactions with other classical dances of the country had earned his performances a smart touch of eclecticism in body language as well.
In a way, Narippatta has gone a step further — by even conjuring up mudras for a set of mythological figures so often featured in Kathakali. Nalacharitam, one of the most popular story-plays in the form, has had no prescribed hand gesture for three of its key characters: King Nala, his spouse Damayanti and his younger brother Pushkara. “This is something that had made me curious even as a child. More so, when we have a mudra even for Kali, the villain in the piece,” he notes. It took a detailed study and series of scholarly consultations before Narippatta to arrive at the shaping of a mudra for the three. Today, not just him, a few other artistes — some of them quite senior — adopt them.
Narippatta, all the same, is self-critical: “These mudras haven’t really been widely accepted. And, I’ve myself sensed that the gesture for Pushkara has a better shape to gain.” Also, he’s particular that these new mudras shouldn’t be recklessly employed. “In the wedding night scene of Nala, the hero addresses his wife as ‘Bhaimi’ in the second line of the slow-paced verse. There it should be the customary depiction (of the literal meaning): King Bhima’s daughter — else the elegance would simply be lost.”
Much like his tutor Keezhpadam, Narippatta’s improvisations have a touch of reality as well as romance. For instance, his lust-filled hunter (Kattalan) in Nalacharitam, while inviting a forlorn Damayanti to be his life partner, would portray the dramatic part keeping intact the culture (reality) of a forest-dweller — by acting as if he would lift the beautiful lady like a deer he had felled using an arrow.
“This bit of mime, you know, is linked to an earlier part in the scene where the hunter, half asleep in the small hours, wonders what his food for the day would be. Only to be soon encountered by a charming woman at whom he had to anyway send an arrow because a python was about to swallow her leg,” he adds. So much for the romantic part of it.
If this is one among those pieces he himself brought in, there are others where Narippatta strives to retain some of the novel ideas propagated by his trainer Keezhpadam, who died in 2007. Like, his Ravana, while recounting his struggles to glory that stemmed from Kaikasi’s anguish, would be poetic when he narrates it as “my mother once gifted me a garland of pearls made out of her tears” instead of the usual line, “mom’s tears fell on me”. Similarly, his Hanuman in Lavanasuravadham, on seeing founts of water shooting up when Lava and Kusha shoot arrows to earth, rejoices by inferring them as the tears of joy from their grandmother (their mother being Sita, daughter of Bhumi Devi — or Mother Earth).
Presumably, such depictions require deep bookish knowledge. And Narippatta is a keen reader of Puranic literature, even if it has a contemporary
interpretation of it. That’s how Duryodhana chips in an extra bit to a ridiculing remark he makes about the Pandavas when Lord Krishna tries a rapprochement bid between the warring cousins ahead of the Mahabharata battle. “Pandu’s sons aren’t his,” the eldest Kaurava claims, “In fact, Bhima is a son of a hunter.” A clear adaptation of one point from the M T Vasudevan Nair’s 1980s novel Randamoozham.
Currently an instructor at his alma mater Sadanam Kathakali Akademi east off Ottapalam, Narippatta had earlier been associated with the School of Drama near Thrissur. Those were days when he got a chance to be grasp some principal stage techniques in vogue in other forms of theatre.
Even before that, Narippatta had an innings with Western actors of the Grotowski school that had founded concepts like Poor Theatre which gained steam in Eastern Europe. “Their admiration for Kathakali enabled both parties to gain interesting insights into the power of body language, though we never had any collaborative work,” he points out.
But then, Narippatta’s give-and-take exercises have always happened naturally. He seldom forces it upon himself — or the audiences.
(The writer is an art scholar based in Thrissur. nambiarkkg@gmail.com)