Anurupa Roy in performance.

MAHABHARATA
Mahabharata, premiered in 2016 and still running, was created with the support of the Festival Mondial Des Theatresde Marionnettes, Charleville- Mezeires, France. It explores the inner dilemma and back stories of 14 characters in the play. Each character in the Mahabharata is an archetype whose single minded and unquestioning loyalty to one belief leads to the inevitable conflict. Was there ever a moment when each of these human beings by making a choice, the choice of letting go, could have averted the war?

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I met Anurupa when she was visiting England to take forward a project to create a directory of community artists in India. Over the course of an hour in a busy, noisy hotel café near Charing Cross station, she gave me an avalanche of information about her work to combat gender discrimination, to support communities in conflict zones and much else. Her passion and skill made a deep impression, as she explained how she uses the seemingly neutral art form of puppetry to reach around the many restrictions on discussion of the rights of women, HIV positive people, young people in the criminal justice system, and many other marginalised groups. 

She developed an interest in puppetry as a child, creating shows with a friend and taking them round her neighbourhood in Kolkata. However, when she wanted to train professionally there was no formal training available in India, which led her eventually to study at the University of Stockholm, graduating in 2001. She has also trained with the Scuola de la Garatelle in Naples. At the end of her degree in Stockholm, her Swedish fellow graduates all moved into jobs in the state funded puppetry sector in Sweden, but she returned to India with no plan for how she would put her ideas into practice. There were two established puppetry companies in India, but they were entirely focused on creating shows for presentation in theatres. Undaunted, she embraced the freedom this gave her to invent whatever form she wished for her new puppet theatre.   

Katkatha’s centre for puppetry, in Jaitpur Village, Badarpur, on the southern edge of Delhi.

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Connection and Communication through puppetry 
Her first experience of the particular power of puppetry came from working with children who were living in a rock quarry:   

“Some of them were child labourers, the parents were really poor, and none of them had access to good school education.

Many of them had polio because they lived in the quarry which was often flooded  – they were using the same water to drink and to bathe. It was something of a disaster area. Working with the children gave me the first realisation that the puppets were more than entertainment. We could talk to them, have conversations with them and bridge this gap between me as a privileged urban kid and the young children who worked and lived in the quarry. We had a common language, and it was a way of having them accept me and tell me their stories but indirectly. 

Soon after this, I worked for about six months with children with special needs and it was almost a repeat of the same story.  I worked with children with Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, guided by an organisation which specializes in special education. Very often when the children were put into a therapy session where they were told “this is therapy and you’re going to learn motor control”, they wouldn’t be able to do it. However, if they were holding a stick that was moving a ribbon, they would forget that the arm was incapable of moving the ribbon and they would start getting engaged by the material that was triggered. I couldn’t calculate what that was immediately, but it was very clear that there was a psychosocial impact.

Actors’ theatre also has this but it’s different because puppetry is material oriented and it’s outside of the body.” 

Gender Discrimination and Sexual Health
From 2002 onwards, her work focused on gender and sexual health, starting with a project in Gurgaon, an area just south of Delhi, which at that time comprised of a network of several large villages. 

“One of the biggest problems was a very high rate of female infanticide, and a very high rate of abortion –

often dangerous abortions of healthy female foetuses. I started working with a medical organisation that was looking at the reproductive health of women. They had realised that it wasn’t enough to say “here are some contraceptives, use them”. It wasn’t really about contraception access, it was about the right to use them, not getting physically abused or sexually abused by the husband or the in laws. I worked with women and  girls aged 14 to 21. We started to work with this idea of what are the narratives of women and how do they navigate through this extremely powerful patriarchy and through their own narratives, and how do we weave in the narrative of women’s sexuality? Of course, a few years down the line I completely changed my mind and realised it was the boys and men I needed to work with! But these were early days and in 2003 this work meandered into HIV and AIDS and all the taboos associated with it. Again, I noticed that puppets can often say things that a human cannot. A puppet has a quite incredible license to talk about taboo subjects . 

In the same village the doctor was once almost stoned and they chased away a woman doctor, whereas my puppets could talk about contraceptives, and they would hear it. They wouldn’t immediately hear it, but they would be laughing at the puppet, and they would at least give me a hearing. By them I mean men. I was allowed to work with the women because I was the silly doll player – “she doesn’t mean any harm.” I remember the first day I was working in the village four men turned up with these big sticks. “What are you teaching our women, are you teaching them to eat before we do?” I said, “no we are just making a puppet” and they said “What?  What is this? OK you can do what you like.” 

I worked there for two years quite unhindered. I learnt that one had to navigate the community. There are the stakeholders and then people who are invisible – underpowered or not taken too seriously. The question was how could one flip that and tell their stories through puppets in a way that cannot be told using their own voices, and present them in a public forum?

A lot of the women started to perform with shadow puppets, and they were allowed to say things as permission came in.”

MUJHE BHI GINO
This project from 2009 included a roadshow with a difference involving 20 young women from Jharkhand and UP who travelled with team Katkatha on the back of a truck to use giant puppet heads and puppets at public spaces, like market places and village squares, to celebrate and tell the story of local women achievers and to enable their own communities to look at women with a different lenses.

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Work in Conflict Zones
Anurupa also told me about her work in Kashmir, starting in 2007, as well as a recent project from 2021 to 2023, working in an atmosphere of increasing  tension.  It was probably an understatement for her to say it was not the safest project I have done ….. 

“In 2007 I worked with 32 girls with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the small village of Bijbehara.

The clinical psychologist could not understand how these 32 women aged 15 to 22 all had PTSD. One of the things that emerged during puppet theatre improvisation was that they had all had the same experience of being stuck in crossfire where all the adults around them had died and they were left with the corpses for some 24 hours.  Almost all of them had PTSD from that one incident. This had somehow not emerged during the cognitive therapy sessions. This was the premise for the rest of the work in Kashmir. When communities have collective PTSD somehow cognitive therapy is not as effective as something like and – I don’t have a word for it yet – a community collective narrative therapy where you talk about stories but not about the politics, and you use the language of metaphors to do that. This gives a safe space to talk about things that the minute a political language enters it is usurped by some entity and the individual doesn’t have a say – which often happens. Women and children are not the mainstream voice.  

We collected the voices of women and interestingly all the stories were initially of women encountering soldiers – both the separatists as well as the military – and the lack of safety.  Many of them had been physically and sexually abused. We decided to bring in a Kashmiri poetess from the 16th century, and all of them started to write letters to her – incidentally she was buried in this village. Over a period of 7 months, all the letters would be hung on a tree and people could read them – they were anonymous. The women suddenly found that they had shared experiences of PTSD. They had never told each other they hadn’t slept for 12 years or that they had recurrent headaches or that they had the same nightmares.  We turned the narrative into a show which we performed in Delhi. Some of it was controversial because people didn’t like what we were saying but very often it began a dialogue.  I think there’s something to be said about the safety in this kind of non-human theatre, or art forms that are not direct and don’t use human agency in a very direct way. 

For the more recent work in Kashmir, we were determined that it would be artistic work by children and the teachers themselves. This included a big wall mural, and a series of peep shows where you could see the story of a boy only through a little peephole, a fantastical story all about loneliness, made by four teenage boys. They all spoke about how as Kashmiri young people nobody was listening to them. The family had decided what they should do with their lives, the state had decided what they should do, the school had decided what they should do. All the primary agencies of their lives were making their decisions and nobody understood why so many young boys were self-harming. 

This show gave them a voice. It led to them being able to negotiate expectations with their families when they saw the performance.” 

Water Conservation: Folk traditions and Belief systems 
I asked Anurupa to tell me about the Jal project  – The Water Detectives – which was the first one I had heard about, from my long-term friend and colleague, the artist Loraine Leeson Who | cSPACE.  Loraine had come across Anurupa’s work on an Arts & Humanities Research Council funded visit to Rajasthan as part of an inter disciplinary team looking at issues of water conservation:

“This project was in a very dry district of Rajasthan in 2016, developed in partnership with UWE (University of the West of England).

Essentially much of our work is based on behavior and human psychology even though many of our projects begin with something very technical. The district of Jhunjhunu is one of the most arid districts of India. The communities in the villages had traditional practices of conserving water, especially rainwater. They built tanks, organised through the village community and administration, and they would conserve drinking water by not letting any human beings or animals come anywhere near the water.   People had folklore, belief systems and songs around these bodies of water. Women had to walk kilometers to carry the water on their heads.   On the face of it you think it’s really cruel for the women because they were carrying all this weight, but a lot of women we spoke to who are now grandmothers said it was the only time they had to themselves – two hours in the day when nobody bothered them. 

Children’s drawing from The Water Detectives project.

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So, there’s a huge social practice based on these water bodies. However, 15 years ago the government brought tap water directly to people’s homes. Now all of these water bodies are full of plastic bottles and junk. Most of them are choked and there’s no system of conserving water. Women don’t go to fetch water so everybody’s now using water as a perennial source but a river that has been damned and that is 120 km away bringing tap water to your homes is not a perennial source.  

The project was aiming to reclaim the relationship with water that the community had by working with young people. It was called The Water Detectives. They would go home and ask their families and especially their grandmothers about stories of water and songs about water. We found out that all of them worship water bodies when a child is born. A child is attached to a well and is taken to the well for blessings. This resulted in several shadow puppet performances and an exhibition about water bodies that the children had made themselves, with stories and songs they had learnt. The idea was to build a dialogue between generations, and between the people who take the decisions and the children, using the puppet as the neutral material in the middle, so that children would be taken more seriously.

We are continuing this work on water conservation, with another recent project in 16 districts of Madyha Pradesh, again based on this behaviour towards water. It’s a youth led project, where we spend 5 days in each village creating performances around water, a giant puppet parade and a celebration.    

School children participating in The Water Detectives project.

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Community Arts and Arts Activism in India
I asked Anurupa about how community arts has evolved in India. She described a history that encompasses both state run initiatives starting with the folk arts experiments of the Song and Dance Division that began in the 1950s, intending to educate people on issues of family planning and literacy and on the other hand a strong tradition of powerful activist theatre, particularly within the interior of India. In her own work, she increasingly feels there is no division between the artistic creation of new shows and the use of puppetry in their work with communities.   

She is now working on a project to link up community arts practitioners across India, as she sees that many of them are not aware of each other’s work, partly due to the great distances involved. This is being undertaken in partnership with Kim Wide of Take A Part, one of the UK’s leading socially engaged art organisations, based in Plymouth, who she met when they were both on a Clore Leadership programme.

This article inevitably gives only a small snapshot of the work of Katkatha – there is so much more that could be added on their role in training and supporting a new generation of puppeteers, their international links, and the breadth and scale of their creative productions and work in communities. Their website contains a wealth of information on all of this and some powerful videos.   

Old newspapers and trash, a rag picker, creepy crawlies, creatures from nightmares, dreamscapes, nebulous faces, dismembered hands, plastic bottles, curious people, devouring mouth, grabbing hands, running, masking, unmasking and more trash… life in progress or is it progress?

It is about a town on a hill. A perfectly ordinary town, ruled over by an extremely popular King. A town which people leave in droves in fear of a monster that terrifies it. A town at war, where people are banned from reading books of their choice. In this town lives Guddu, separated from his family after the monster’s attack. In this town lives Chhotu, who reads books in secret, and asks dangerous questions. When Teelapur’s warriors return from a war they no longer understand, they join hands with Chhotu and Guddu to take on the monster.

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