VELLORE: The stage was never just a stage for Thilagavathi Palani. At 11, it was a place where she could become Draupadi one moment and Gandhari the next, with only a few minutes in the green room to change costumes, trace kohl around her eyes and answer the drumbeats calling her back.
What she did not know then was that, beyond the lights and costumes, she was entering a world where women were rarely allowed to stay. As other girls left the art form when they reached puberty, relatives urged her to return home and marry. But Thilagavathi kept returning to the stage.
Nearly 25 years on, those early performances have grown into a career that has challenged one of kattaikoothu’s deepest conventions. At 36, Thilagavathi is the first woman to build a life around an art form that has long belonged almost entirely to men. And now, she is preparing others to follow where she once had no one to follow.
Thilagavathi was born into a family of koothu artistes in Ranipet’s Kalavai. The artiste reminisced about her childhood home as a space always alive with music, drumbeats, and action. Within a year under her paternal uncle’s tutelage, Thilagavathi’s father, Palani P, who is also a koothu artiste, recognised her talent and sent her to a residential kattaikoothu gurukulam, run by K Rajagopal in Kancheepuram.
When she joined the gurukulam, there were two other girls in her batch. However, in a year or two, she was the only one left. “My friends stopped learning and left the centre after they started menstruating,” said Thilagavathi.
The early years of learning posed extreme challenges, as she hardly had another woman to look up to. She recalled, “After the first 4-5 years, my relatives wanted me to quit, go back to the village, and get married. My father was supportive, but my mother wasn’t.” Eventually, her father told her that if she truly believed in herself, she could continue the training; but if things did not work out, she would have to take responsibility for her decision. As the eldest of five sisters, with her father as the family’s sole breadwinner, she understood what was at stake. Still, Thilagavathi was resolute. “I will manage, somehow,” she told her father.
After finishing eight years of training under Rajagopal, she joined her guru as an apprentice for two years. In 2017, the Sangeet Natak Akademi honoured her with the Bismillah Khan Award. “It was my dream to take my parents on a flight at least once by the time I turned 40. We all took a flight to collect the award,” she fondly recalled.
Amid pressure from relatives to marry Thilagavathi off, her mother had set aside a plot of land near their house on Kalavai Koot Road for the ceremony. That is where Thilagavathi’s training centre stands, where her troupe of 10 students, including six children, practise footwork and movements to the drumbeats and their teacher’s counts of rhythm. She founded the training school, Sri Thilagam Kattaikoothu Kuzhu, in 2024.
Apart from the traditional Mahabharata or Ramayana stories usually portrayed in kattaikoothu, Thilagavathi is now trying to explore tales that deal with contemporary issues. She now performs on gender justice, global warming, climate change, domestic violence, and leprosy. “The art form employs simple gestures and language, and it can reach a wider audience,” she explained. Venturing into untouched topics, Thilagavathi now has to dedicate more time to research, writing, and song composition.
Besides the overnight performances typically spanning over eight hours, from 10 pm to 6 am, Thilagavathi now takes up short, 45-minute performances on contemporary issues, considering the diminishing attention span of people today.
Decades after she first faced her fears of performing in front of an audience, today, Thilagavathi is seen tracing kohl around the eyes of a seven-year-old girl, who is part of her troupe. With just an hour to go before the performance, she is in the green room, assisting her troupe members to don the makeup and costumes in haste. Looking at them getting ready, she proudly said, “These are the future torchbearers of kattaikoothu.”
(Edited by Thamizhamudhan Sekar)