Chhau: three things under one name

In 2010 a UNESCO committee inscribed a practice called Chhau dance on its list of intangible heritage. The entry describes one tradition. What exists on the ground is three, in three districts of three states, with different origins, different costumes, different music, different training and — the detail that gives the game away — a different answer to the question of whether the performer wears a mask.

Two of them do. Seraikella, in what is now Jharkhand, performs in masks of paper and clay so light that a dancer can wear one for a whole night. Purulia, in West Bengal, performs in masks that are large, heavy and crowned with a headdress that can add half a metre to the figure. Mayurbhanj, in Odisha, does not use masks at all. Its dancers show their faces, and the form is closer to a drilled movement vocabulary than to a masked drama.

Three origins, three paymasters

Mayurbhanj's version comes out of the paika akhada, the martial gymnasium where young men of the region trained with sword, shield and staff. In the 1920s and 1930s the ruling family of Mayurbhanj took that vocabulary and had it arranged for a stage — a palace project, with a palace budget, performed at the spring festival in Baripada and financed by the state.

Seraikella's version comes out of a drill too, but a more specific one: a sword-and-shield exercise performed by the men of the Seraikella court. In the twentieth century the court turned it into a masked dance-drama, with masks designed and made inside the palace workshop and roles distributed among the princes and the court's retainers. This is why the Seraikella mask is a courtly object: refined, restrained, made to be looked at closely by an audience that knew the family wearing it.

Purulia's version comes out of neither. It belongs to the spring festival complex of the villages — Chaitra Parva, the month of heat before the rains — and it is performed by farmers and labourers in an open field at night, to drums that can be heard across the village. The masks are made locally, in households that have done nothing else for generations, and they are large because the audience is far away and the light is a lamp.

The mask decides everything after it

A mask fixes the face. This has a consequence that runs through the whole technique: if the eyes and mouth cannot move, then everything that would normally be done with an expression has to be done with the angle of the head, the line of the shoulder, the delay before a turn. Dancers in the masked forms describe this as the hardest part of the training — the body has to say what the face is not saying, and it has to say it at a distance.

Both masked traditions solve it differently because their audiences are different. Seraikella performs indoors, close, for a court and its guests; its masks are small and subtle, and a tilt of fifteen degrees carries a change of mood. Purulia performs in a field at night, with lamplight and drums; its masks are big, high-crowned, brightly painted, and a tilt of fifteen degrees would be invisible. The Purulia solution is scale. The Seraikella solution is precision. Same problem, opposite answers — and each answer is correct for the room it was designed for.

Mayurbhanj, having no mask, kept the face and moved the difficulty elsewhere: into the evenness of the movement and the finish of the posture. Its repertoire reads as abstract to a viewer who expects a story, because a drill does not tell one. That abstraction is not a modern experiment. It is what a gymnasium looks like when it is put on a stage.

The borders are the wrong borders

It is often said that the three styles differ along state lines, and that is almost true but misleading. The lines that matter are older: they are the boundaries of three princely states and their capitals — Seraikella, Mayurbhanj, and the rural tracts around Purulia that were under neither. Today Seraikella is in Jharkhand, but its court culture, its script and much of its language are Odia, because the state it belonged to was an Odia-speaking principality surrounded by Odia territory. Partition into linguistic states in 1956 and the later redrawing of Jharkhand in 2000 put a state border through a cultural field, and the three Chhau traditions are a map of the older field, not the newer one.

What a shared name does

Through the 1950s and 1960s the princely patrons disappeared — the states were merged into the Indian union in 1948–49, and the privy purses that had supported court culture were abolished in 1971. Each of the three traditions therefore lost its original paymaster within a generation of the others, and each found the same replacement: the state government, the Akademi, the festival circuit and, later, tourism.

The Akademi began presenting the three together in the early 1970s, and that is the moment the word became singular. A grant programme needs a category; a festival needs a name on the poster; a UNESCO nomination needs one entry. All three of those are reasonable, and all three compress three economies into one. The compression has had uneven effects. Purulia became the best known, because its masks photograph well and its festival is large and public; Charida, the mask-making village, now has a tourist economy and a seasonal calendar that runs from the spring festival to the winter school-trip season. Mayurbhanj became the most academic, because its abstract repertoire suits a syllabus and a stage. Seraikella, the courtliest and the most restrained, became the least visible — its virtues are the ones that need proximity.

None of this is a complaint about the listing. The listing paid for teachers, instruments and travel, and without it the 1971 abolition of the privy purse would have done more damage than it did. The point is narrower and more useful: when a name is applied from outside, the parts of the practice that fit the name get funded, and the parts that do not get quietly dropped. In Chhau's case the mask survived, because a mask is photogenic; the akhada did not, because a gymnasium is not.

This is entry 16 of Arts and Performance in About India. The pillar's question — which of these forms were made for a court, which for a temple, and which for a market — is set out on the pillar page.