Thousands of years ago, Rama and Sita were born. They decided to get married. Later, an understanding was reached, where the couple was to spend 14 years of their life away from royalty. The pair, along with Lakshmana, moved through forests. In this journey, they encounter Surpanakha from the Asura clan. Outrightly, she admits her desire to marry Rama. Upon rejection, Surpanakha approaches Lakshmana. And then faces his wrath.
Throughout history and most reimaginings of Ramayana, Surpanakha is always portrayed in a one-dimensional, villainous light for daring to speak what her heart desired, for setting her heart on a man, and for stepping outside the bounds of how a woman was expected to behave.
Parshathy J Nath, a theatre artiste, finds this “bizarre”. Why was Surpanakha treated the way she was in Ramayana? Just because she confessed her love for a man, should she be mutilated? These were a few questions she was searching for answers to.
In 2019, while being trained in multiple art forms, Parshathy began parallel searches. “One was the Surpanakha track. Her history is being reimagined and reasserting itself in the mythology. The second is the actor’s track, where, through Surpanakha, she is also trying to push herself, break up from the existing body and find a new performance body for herself,” she explains.
Bringing her quest as a performance-oriented play, Parshathy is coming to the city with Shoorpanakha: A Search. This is a foundation project, implemented by India Foundation for Arts (IFA) under the Arts Practice Programme), and is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment fund.
She says, “Surpanakha is a marginalised character in Ramayana. There is less literature about her, even in critical interpretive texts about Ramayana, people have not interpreted her much.” Hence, moving away from the written word, Parshathy chose art forms such as Kattaikkuttu, Koodiyattam, Mizhavu, Oppari and Parai, which bring to life an extensive and detailed episode of Surpanakha’s.
A parallel journey
Since 2019, Parshathy has been training in these forms to incorporate them into her performances. She first trained in Koodiyattam under Aparna Nangiar, and from there, Mizhavu from Kalamandalam Rajeevan and Kalamandalam Harihara Guptan. “Mizhavu was part of the Koodiyattam. It gives an emotional landscape to the performer because there is no music. It’s just the sound of Mizhavu that you perform on,” she shares.
During one of her practice sessions, popular Koodiyattam artiste, Sooraj Nambiar, opined, and Parshathy recalls, “He (Sooraj) sees Ramayana conflict as a conflict of culture — between Aryan culture and Dravidian culture.”
She places Surpanakha from the Dravidian culture in the play. “Surpanakha, an Asura queen, dwelt in the forest. To portray that, my body language has to be different, and I wanted to be shaken as a performer,” says the Bharatanatyam dancer, who believes that her performance body has a certain form of beauty, a cultural aesthetic, which does not go with her imagination of the demon character.
This search led her to Kanchipuram-based Kattaikuttu Sangam. Here, she learnt Kattaikuttu from P Rajagopal and Hanne M. de Bruin. They gave her an entry point to access Surpanakha better. “Rajagopal sir taught me a song that he has written about Surpanakha, which is also a part of the play now,” she notes.
Finding a stage
In search of her performative body and Surpanakha, Parshathy also picked up Paraiattam from Gangai master and Manimaran. Trained in different artforms, Parshathy was then mentored by Sharanya Ramprakash, who is the chief mentor of the play.
The artiste’s years-long search address the shortage of literature on Surpanakha, and for people to know her beyond the mutilation. “I am trying to see who she is beyond that? How is she as a woman? How is she as a living spirit? It is also my attempt to liberate her and many women who face similar situations in the contemporary world.”
Parshathy believes that in today’s world, there are many Surpanakhas around us. A woman who is expressing her desire, and suffering because of it. She says, “Nowadays, a woman won’t express desire like Surpankha because patriarchy does not allow you to. For a woman to tell a man, ‘I love you’ or ‘I desire you’ is considered bad. Topping that, cinema glorifies women who are petite, measured, pleasing and cute as the heroine and makes a very interesting hot woman who’s sexually attractive, do item numbers. The binaries of beauty we have created around us in popular consciousness need to be questioned.”
Having raised these questions and opened discussions in Bengaluru and Thrissur with the play, Parshathy hopes that the Chennai audience would resonate with the “Tamil performative culture that I’m tapping into. They will find that an actor from another state is trying to access the Tamil body language. People will resonate with it, culturally.”
Shoorpanakha: A Search will be staged on June 22, at Medai - The Stage at 7.30 pm
For tickets, visit: https://ticketed.in/event/shoorpanakha-a-search