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YAKSHAGANA
''Yaksha Gana'' is a kind of dramatic composition suitable for recitation before the rustic audiences by professional and amateur actors. This belongs to Karnataka and has a rural origin. It is an admixture of dance and drama.
Its heart lies in 'Gana' meaning music. It is about 400 years old. The language is Kannada and the themes are based on Hindu epics. The costumes are almost akin to the Kathakali (in Kerala) ones and the style seems to have drawn inspiration from Kathakali.
As prescribed in the Natya Shastra, it has the 'Suthra Dhara' (conductor) and the 'Vidhushaka' (the Jester). The 'Yaksha Gana' seems to be named after the form of music employed in it, which is said to be originally called ''Yaksha Gana''.
The 'Yaksha Gana' must have originally been a faithful form of Bharata's theatre in respect of 'Abhinaya'. As was to be seen till recently in Tamil street-plays, 'Abhinaya' or 'Nritya' must have been present to a large extent in the 'Yaksha Gana'.
But now, it has become considerably reduced, chiefly on account of the introduction of speech in an elaborate manner. It is in this respect that it differs from the Kathakali of Malabar and resembles the Tamil variety. In the Tamil play, the whole theme is in the form of songs and verses, both of which are sung.
There are occasional prose lines, which the chorus-like 'Kattiyakkaran' speaks, conveying information to the audience about what follows next and giving similar links. In a way the 'Yaksha Gana' as it has developed now, has approached the modern drama in having a lot of prose dialogue which the actors themselves speak.
When the actors stop the speech, the musical theme is sung, and while it is sung the ancient practice must have been to render every word of it through 'Abhinaya' as in Kathakali and Nautch.
The History
The 'Yaksha Gana' is possibly the common name of an old type of traditional, popular vernacular drama of South India, a name common to the three linguistic areas of Tamil, Telugu and Kannada and absent only in Malayalam.
In subsequent times the name 'Yaksha Gana' gave place to the two names 'Nataka' and 'Vilasa' in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, but it continued in South Canara.
In the Madras and Tanjore libraries there are many Tamil and Telugu 'Yaksha ganas, though none of them can be dated beyond the eighteenth century. The 'Yaksha Gana' belongs to the South Canara in the Kannada area, where other forms of Natya like 'Nautch' must have flourished in other places.
In South Canara, the 'Yaksha Gana' is one of the two most widespread popular dramatic entertainments, the other being the puppet-play, called as in Tamil by the name 'Bommalattam'. The vernacular name of the 'Yaksha Gana' is 'Bayal Attam' i.e. open-air play, a name which corresponds to the Tamil 'Terukkoottu' and the Telugu 'Veethinataka' both of which mean street-play.
The 'Yaksha Gana' troupes are attached to particular shrines, even as at the village of Ootukkadu etc., in Tanjore district, where the 'Bhagavata' troupes play only at the temples.
The 'Yaksha Gana' players of South Canara travel from place to place and people even pray to their gods in times of distress that they will order an 'Yaksha Gana' performance as offering.
The Themes
The themes of all the dramas of 'Yaksha Gana' are fights and warfare, stories of 'veera' and 'raudra' rasas from our puranic legends.
In 'Girija Kalyana', Parvati's wedding the love-incident forms but the central event in a long drama beginning with the destruction of Daksha's sacrifice by the terrific Veerabhadra and ending with boy-War-God Kumara annihilating demon Taraka and his hordes.
'Valinigraha', 'Draupadi-pratapa', 'Bhishma Vijaya', 'Virata-parva' or 'Keechaka-vadha', 'Karna-Arjuna-Yuddha', 'Atikayavada' are some of the other plays, all of which are stories of fight and war.
The Dance Drama
The actors roar and do robust dances in weird costumes. The drums are beaten loudly and 'veera' and 'raudra' rasas are portrayed most successfully. The make-up of the Rakshasas and other wild characters is in keeping with this atmosphere.
In the play called 'Draupadi-pratapa', it is a very effective, powerful and wonderful scene, which forms the climax of the drama at its end. 'Chandi' and 'Kali' appear in terrific attire, roar, and upon a background of war-beats on a drum in the orchestra at the back, they wheel round in a hand-to-hand fight.
There is 'Lasya' in 'Bhishma Vijaya' where the princesses bathe, and the 'Rukmangada' has some fine playing of 'Sringara' or love between King Rukmangada and Mohini. But the prevailing atmosphere is the 'Arabhati Vritti', the forceful manner.
Even a play like 'Rukmangada', whose rasa is the quietistic 'Santa', is played in such a manner as to contain mostly fights, and this is done by the introduction of conquest expeditions ('Digvijaya') of the crown prince, who defeats various kings, Asuras and God Yama.
The clown has great liberty and he is responsible for too much extempore comic speech appearing often. In the themes that are mainly puranic, occasional inventions occur and the 'Draupadi-pratapa' is a fine specimen of an imaginative creation spun out of a puranic nucleus.
On the whole, they play about fifty dramas; the whole of the 'Ramayana' and the 'Mahabharata' done episode by episode, as also other plays.
The Make Up
Surely, the 'Yaksha Gana' make up is as epic as its theme. It is decidedly more graceful, richer and more closely related to the ornamentation found in our sculpture than the Kathakali make-up.
The chief male characters, the hero and his son, or the king and his minister or prince, have a fine 'Makuta', and together with other characters belonging to the sublime type called 'Maha-purusha', and 'Dhirodatta', have a uniform kind of exalted make-up with 'Bhujakirti', 'Kataka', 'Virakaccha' etc. The head dress of the wild characters, the 'Dhiroddhatas' is of a different type, an arch-like head dress, which is prepared then and there on each occasion.
The 'Prati-Nayaka' or the villain, Rakshasas, Asuras and God Yama appear in the weirdest dress of the 'Yaksha Gana'. Their 'Makuta' is bigger and is of wood studded with glass and somewhat resembles some of the Kathakali headgears. King Salva in 'Bhishma-Vijaya', Mahishasura and Yama in 'Rukmangada' and Ravana in 'Atikayavadha' appear in this dress.
The face is masked, the lip hangs low and red; there are two carnivorous teeth; the nose is enlarged with some white matter, and long locks of hair hanging behind complete this male weird dress. There is a corresponding female weird dress; Chandi and Kali in 'Draupadi-pratapa' and Surpanaka in 'Atikayavadha' appear in it.
Lion's teeth, blood-red artificial tongue drawn-out and dangling, huge breasts and lengthy locks of hair at the back characterise this female weird make-up.
All the actors wear trousers to enable them to dance and over them a 'saree' is tied in the form of a 'Kaccha' with girdle ornaments. The faces of kings and princes have a rosy paint; king Bali appears with a green face, Yama with a black one, and Krishna and Vishnu, blue.
Hunters appear in some plays like the 'Rukmangada' and the 'Bhishma-vijaya' and they tie to their bodies some amount of green twigs to suggest that they are forest people; they first make a bonfire and dance around it before their action begins.
All royal characters have a bow and arrow in their hands; Vishnu and Krishna bring a chakra (disc) and Narada a bunch of peacock feathers. The costume of Narada has been modernised and along with it that of women characters also to a very large extent.
In the midst of old picturesque make-up, the heroine now appears discordantly dressed up in a modern make-up imitative of coquettish society women appearing on the modern stage. The old female make-up was full of old jewellery with 'Makuta' or 'Kirita' etc. resembling female figures in our sculpture.
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