The Phallus and The Fire- Theatre Anthropology of Danda Nata

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About the Author RAMESH P. PANIGRAHI (b. 1944) is the author of 44 published plays in Odia and in English with a Sahitya Akademi award for 1984 and Sangit Natak Akademi award for 2001. He is one of the top ranking popular playwrights with best sellers that run into multiple editions. Panigrahi is acclaimed as a fast selling, ingenious and inventive playwright, who has also published two novels and translated many short stories into English. Dr. Panigrahi has published books on existential psychology, post modern performance studies and interpretation of classical literature besides writing and editing books on painting and culture.

Preface I am not providing an ambitious taxonomic schemata or a mythopoeic subtext of our primordial imagination while writing about this ancient-most theatre called Danda Nata that originated in the Suktimati Civilization around 10th century B.C. Danda Nata is a mixture of shamanistic showmanship, magic and religion. It is a vision of a primitive artist of 10th Century B.C. whose creativity equals to that of our post modern creators of art.

The book may be read diachronically, but it should be understood, absorbed and analyzed synchronically. Since Danda Nata is a theatre of the primitives of the Rik Vedic era, it automatically embraces a study of comparative religion, morphology of myths, rituals and theologies; yet it presents itself as a single visionary conception which the primitive mind tried to express.

Our central concept through this discursive narrative of a book is that Danda Nata is a performative archetype. The book claims that anthropology (and psychology too) have recently made significant strides toward a unified vision. Many of the symbols and icons are studied in the subconscious, primitive hieratic minds that are expanding into patterns of great comprehensiveness, the relevance of which is not generally open to question. The book studies the icons of Danda nata which are of supremely expansive significance rooted in the elementary mind. The book has excavated the study of its rituals and mythopoeic dreams. Their myths and dreams are crude art forms, blurred and dim visions, rough drafts of the post modern finished art forms of some accurate artist

The book, to use the language of Jung, is a narrative expression, on the ethnological level, of the archetypes which he described as patterns of psychic energy originating in the collective unconscious. Archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the platonic "eidos" but distinguished from philosophical idealism, as being more empirical and less metaphysical. More an archetypal discussion than a mythopoeic performative content, this book describes a process, a perspective and not a content. After what Maud Bodkin has done in poetry, no one else has discussed how imaginative performative experience is communicated by forms and patterns of a ritualistic theatre. This book establishes the priority of interest in the archetypal over the mythological. Danda Nata cannot be located in the physiology of the brain, the structure of its language, the organization of the Suktimati society nor in the analysis of their behaviour, but in the process of Suktimati imagination, in the alchemy of its discourses.

The Pata Dandua or the main performer, focusing on the Shamanistic imagination claims kinship with semiotics and structuralism. It is not a theological argument I have attempted, but through archetypal psychology I try to recognize how that Shamanistic psychic reality is inextricably involved with its performative rhetoric. Issues of genre, period and language are ignored or subjected to gross generalization since I search for universals in as disparate as this 10th Century B.C. performance. At places the entire performance appears visionary. The rise in the 1980s, of the 'reader response theory', which I substitute as "Spectator response theory" in theatre criticism provides some impetus for canon revision for which, during the process of writing this book, I apply Jung as a source of theatre studies. Consequently Danda nata means to me a primordial image, a part of our collective unconscious, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same kind and thus part of the inherited response pattern of the Odia race.

Introduction The thin Aryan population that inhabit Indian theater space has popularized the name of Bharata's Natya Sastra, though few do posses a copy of that book in their personal libraries. Around five per cent of our Indian theatre practitioners have heard or seen Viswanatha Kaviraja's Sahitya Darpana. Wester empiricism and scientism have taught them not to believe in old authority and also to popularize a notion that the value based doctrines of theatre and aesthetics "Pretend" to be absolute and generate an extra temporal (that, they say, is illogical) importance.

This book makes a counter argument against those gloomily serious contemporary scholars of pop-criticism who impose dominating views of industrial science on the contemporary works of art under the umbrella of post modernism. This book, based on field study and observation, poses radical challenges to the western authorities who have attempted to subvert the Indian aesthetic studies. These aestheticians of this fusion era can be defined by a phrase from Bhratruhari: "Sakhat pasuh puchha vishana heena".

The scholarly imaging of Odisha during the 76 years (1936- 2012) of its emergence has been only an aping and deconstruction of the absolute truths. There are many absolutes, and is one, too, for theatre. The rational frame for such validation remains buried in theatre anthropology.

The 21st century theatre carnivals in Koraput district begin the festival, even today; with the burning of the flames in the primitive ritual space (The primitivity of Koraput is as old as 1000 B.C.). The primitive teams carry the flames to the carnival site and many such flames from the primitive sites become one and keep burning through out the carnival. The extinguishing of the flame with one more ritual symbolizes the termination of the festival.

The fundamental purpose of such theatre festivals is to set the stage for a sacrificial act called "Theatrical performance". This festive sacrifice is necessary to inoculate society against falling into interminable violence, with in the circumference of life and its double, theatre. Roger Caillois goes a little further: "In its pure form, the festival must be defined as the paroxysm of society, is not only its climax from a religious, but also from an economic point of view,"

The primitive performances of Orissa, in a state in which 62 different primitive tribes inhabit, show the modern generation their ethnic shades of style every year and their virtual performances present us a harmonious tradition that integrates the violent, (killing of animals, men, etc.) and the political-cultural aspect of their ethnic life, the carnivalesque and the erotic in a single package. Around the middle of April (13th, 14th and 15th) fertility performances like the Chhau, Danda, Chadaka and Uda-Parava performances are staged. Performers walk on fire, perforate their tongues and backs with iron hooks and act out other acrobatics that cannot be justified through scientific rationale of the metropolitan Indians who pride in hybridizing their language and manners. Their science cannot incorporate and analyze shamanistic truth. The examples of such shamanistic theatre practices dig new earth/space for a detailed study of theatre anthropology with illustration from at least one theatrical form of the primitive days. Danda Nata provides an interesting example since it started around 1000 B.C., perhaps one of the ancient most beginnings for theater world.

The aboriginals of Malkangiri district continue to perform the story of Ramayana in their daily style of living since they relate themselves to Ramachandra's 14 years of exile from Ayodhya into the forest of Panchavati. Susant Nayak and Hemant Nayak of Rayagada (Orissa) publish a literary magazine, captioned Panchavati and the local people take pride in reminiscing Rama's stay in their forest. The naked Bonda women shave their heads clean even today and relate the practice to Sita's curse during her exile in their area. They committed the crime of laughing and gazing at Sita's nude physique while she was bathing under the forest fall. Now the government uses the same fall for generating hydro- electricity.

You can still find a Hanuman, who jumps from one tree to another performing in Malkangiri area, and when the civilized spectators award him with currency notes, he allows his naked chest to be pinned. He would ask an appreciator to pin the currency note on his bare chest and he would not bleed. On the contrary, he would appear in the next scene with lots of currency notes tagged to his bare-chest by pins. This transformed Hanuman performer can also be noticed in other parts of undivided Koraput district.