Folk theatre that still works

A jatra company arrives at a village in the late afternoon. By evening there is a stage, a canvas roof over the audience, a generator, a lighting rig, a sound system and a crowd. By midnight a story is being told at full volume, with songs, and it will still be going at four in the morning. By the next afternoon everything is in a truck and the ground is empty again.

This has been happening in Bengal for something like two hundred years as a commercial business, and in Assam since 1963 in a more industrial form. Neither is a folk survival in the sense the word usually carries. Both are companies: they employ people, sell tickets, tour, compete, and go out of business. Their interest for this pillar is that they are the counter-example — the one part of Indian performance that never needed a patron, a ministry, a syllabus or a revival, because it never stopped selling seats.

What a jatra actually is now

Jatra began in the sixteenth century as devotional performance connected to the Vaishnava movement: processions, tableaux, sung narrative, staged in the open and organised around the life of Krishna. Over two centuries it moved from temple grounds to a commercial circuit, and by the nineteenth century companies were touring, charging admission, and competing for audiences the way any popular theatre does.

The modern form is not archaic. A contemporary jatra uses a proscenium with wings, a painted backdrop, an orchestra, and stage lighting that would not look out of place in a theatre. It often casts film and television actors, because audiences buy tickets for names. Its repertoire is largely melodrama: family conflict, betrayal, divine intervention, and a moral resolution at dawn. When a company adds a video screen or a reality-show-style opening, it is doing what commercial theatre everywhere does.

And it is a circuit, not a scattering. Companies book villages months ahead through agents; a village committee guarantees a minimum take and keeps the gate; the season runs from October to April, because that is when the harvest is in, cash is circulating, the ground is dry enough for a tent, and the audience is not in the field.

The Assam version, which is more industrial

Mobile theatre in Assam takes the same logic further. Since Nataraj Theatre was founded in 1963, the form has become a seasonal industry of companies that travel with everything: a tent seating a thousand or more, a steel stage, lighting, generators, a kitchen, dormitories for the company, and a crew of a hundred to a hundred and fifty people who live on site for eight months.

Each company plays a new production roughly every few weeks through the season, which means the operation is closer to a repertory film studio than to a touring play: scripts written to order, sets built in a workshop, music recorded, and everything rehearsed at speed. The productions are often adapted from films or built around local stars. Ticket prices are low, the tent is the venue, and the whole thing is financed against advance bookings from village committees, who take the risk on the gate.

It is worth being clear about how unusual that is. This is a commercial theatre industry of a scale and durability that most countries do not have, operating in a region where the fixed cinema hall has largely disappeared. When the last single-screen cinema in a district closes, the travelling tent is not a nostalgic substitute for it. It is the only live performance available.

The contrast: the same region's other theatre

Assam also has the opposite model, and it is older. Ankia Naat, composed by Srimanta Sankardeva in the sixteenth century, is devotional drama performed in the village prayer hall — the namghar — by residents, for the community, on festival occasions. It is not ticketed, does not tour, has no company and no season. Its economics are the economics of a congregation.

The two forms have coexisted in the same state for sixty years. One is a commercial industry with budgets, contracts and competition; the other is a liturgical practice sustained by volunteers. Both are alive; neither is a survival of the other. Which is the point this pillar has been making from the first entry: the interesting question about an Indian performing art is never "is it authentic" but "who is paying, and what does the payment require of the form".

Why this one did not need saving

The forms in the earlier entries were rescued: by the state, by institutions, by middle-class reformers who reclassified them as heritage and built syllabi around them. Jatra and mobile theatre were not rescued, because they did not need to be. They had a paying audience and a cost structure that could follow the audience.

That is also their vulnerability. They are exposed to everything a business is exposed to: the erosion of village disposable income, the competition from a phone screen in every hand, the rising cost of diesel, the difficulty of finding a company of a hundred and fifty people willing to live in a tent for eight months. No ministry will bail them out, because they are not heritage; they are a trade. And like every trade in this pillar, they will change what they perform in order to keep performing.

This is entry 08 of Arts & Performance in About India, and the last in this pillar. Five pillars are now complete: food, architecture, festivals, faith and thought, land and peoples, and this one. The next pillar — Everyday Life — goes from the stage to the timetable.