It is a well-known fact that India abounds in four forms of puppets. First is the glove puppet, manipulated like a glove worn in hand. These are mostly found in Midnapur and Murshidabad districts of West Bengal and do not require a puppet stage. The rod puppet needs a main rod for the body and two more rods to manipulate the limbs. These are seen predominantly in West Bengal out of whole India, primarily in the Gangetic delta. The third form is string puppet, manipulated by four or more strings, mainly seen in Nadia district. Such puppets are prevalent also in Bangladesh from where most of the string puppeteers have migrated to West Bengal and Tripura. The fourth is shadow puppet: reflecting shadows on screen for the puppet show. This form is not found in West Bengal in traditional puppetry.

Different puppet forms require different stage-settings, because rod puppets are manipulated from below and string puppets from above. Shadow puppets require their own curtains with audience in front and puppets moved from behind. The traditional puppets have always been popular in the fairs and market places, and the puppeteers carry their own stage-set from show to show. The string puppeteers own even their tents to hold shows.

RECENT CHANGES IN TRADITIONAL PUPPETRY

The main innovation adopted by traditional puppet groups is to mount their traditional puppet-stage on the proscenium stage of today. Since puppetry has achieved technical sophistication, the puppet-stage is set on the proscenium stage with modern lights and props, -- not found feasible in the traditional fairs and festivals earlier.

Since all traditional puppets are heavily influenced by the folk-form of their regions and derive their themes, costumes, styles and music from them, folk theatre and puppetry have always complemented each other. Traditional puppetry mainly showed puppets performing dances to the vocal or instrumental music accompaniment as still seen in Murshidabad district and Santhal tribes. Since Bengali folk theatre is dominated by the Yatra form, which imbibed clarinet in its concerts during the British time, the puppet theatre, too, added concerts to their opening overtures using clarinet. A further development was to add the word ‘Opera’ to the name of the puppet theatre, carried forward by many puppet groups more than 100years old. Like Yatra again, the puppet plays added stories to the dances. The stories were initially balladic in nature with dominant song-and-dance sequences. Later on, the stories of puppet plays, like Yatra, changed into epic, historical, social and even political themes, often cleverly blended with a balladic form.

Patronage, other than the community and social kind, has been conspicuous by its absence. Only in the eighties, the traditional groups started receiving official funds and call-shows, and were increasingly involved in the folk festivals in different districts. Some troupes began being invited to India Festivals abroad. Traditional puppet groups started competing with contemporary puppet groups for stage facilities and lighting design. The competition spilled over cinema, which lent its filmy stories and music to traditional puppet plays. Clarinet in concert got replaced by the keyboard and even lives musicians replaced by taped voices. The shows became shortened to suit modern temperaments. The treatment was not averse to showing storm and thunder with lighting skills, vastly different from the oil-lamps and petromaxes of yesteryears. Even the traditional puppet figures were much-improved versions now, with multiple joints and better manipulations. The principal sustenance of traditional groups, however, still comes from their shows at fairs and festivals, and seldom from urban proscenium stages.

CONTEMPORARY PUPPET GROUPS IN KOLKATA

Contemporary puppet theatre differs from traditional groups in three important ways. First, the contemporary groups are not hereditary in nature as traditional groups have been, but come from many different professional backgrounds. Secondly, most such groups started working inspired by the foreign puppet groups as well as the puppet traditions in the country. Finally, all the contemporary groups perform invariably on proscenium stages and have no carry-over of traditional stage-sets.

In West Bengal, contemporary puppetry began in the forties with the artist Chittraprasad who had been painting the famine-scenes of Bengal of that time. With his artistic background, he had a natural talent for making puppets, which he utilised to put up some performances. To him belongs the credit of starting non-traditional puppet theatre.

The Puppets, starting in 1952 under Raghunath Goswami. Derived their inspiration from the string puppets of Rajasthan and made marionettes to produced plays based on folk tales, such as, the Beauty and the Beast. Later, they took to glove and rod puppets and produced such puppet plays as Hattogal Vijay Pala, Abak Jalpan, Ravaner Chikitsa and animal stories as Buddhir Bal and Kamon Jobdo. The group even made a film Hattogal Vijay that won the best Children’s film award in 1961. Yearning for a permanent puppet theatre in the Kolkata city, they established Putulpuri as a miniature puppet theatre in central Kolkata and went on to produce their first shadow puppet-play Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La. Over the last few decades, they have been experimenting and researching in puppetry and allied media like techniques of shadows and silhouettes, flat-figure animation, low-cost animation and innovations in education and communication. Their low-cost films and programmes for television received accolade for education and entertainment. Raghunath Goswami’s special talented in the professions of design and interior decoration came handy in their productions.

Children’s Little Theatre (CLT) began working in puppetry in 1955 with four short puppet plays under Suresh Dutta. The subsequent visits of a Czechoslovakian couple with marionettes and the world-famous Russian maestro Sergei Obraztsov with his puppet troupe created immense enthusiasm in Calcutta, leading to CLT’s production Begging Mouse appreciated by Jawaharlal Nehru. Suresh Dutta, with his background of dance and painting, started a regular puppet section with specialization in stories, puppet making, stagecraft, sets, lighting, music, sound and research, which are still on. Securing a government scholarship to work under Obraztsov at the Moscow State Central Puppet Theatre turned tides in Suresh Dutta’s career who returned, after training, to produce such masterpieces as Lav-Kush and Aladin. CLT’s productions in the eighties were Mithua and the grand musical Alibaba.

Suresh Dutta’s own Calcutta Puppet Theatre (CPT) began life in 1974 and benefited a lot from joining hands with such masters as Tapas Sen in light design, Khaled Choudhury in stage-setting and puppet-design, Mohit Chattopadhyay in script-writing and V. Balsara in composing music. CPT’s outstanding production Aladin has been drawing packed houses in India till today, with more than 2000 shows. Their other landmark productions have been Ramayana, Sita and Ajab Desh. Besides conducting training courses and workshops in their own studio, CPT has been active in children’s shows in education and environment. Suresh Dutta is the only puppeteer from West Bengal to have received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for contributing to contemporary puppetry. Meanwhile, Aladin has visited Poland, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.

Another splinter group of CLT was Youth Puppet Theatre (YPT) established in 1963 under Sisir Biswas. Their principal productions have been Rhythm of Nature, Tasher Desh, Alibaba and Forty Theives, Frog Choir and Kshudita Pashan. They participated extensively in many puppet festivals and conferences abroad like USA, Poland, UNIMA Congress in the USSR, UNIMA festival in France and in the World Esperanto Congress in Belgium, apart from other European countries.

Little Puppet Theatre (LPT) started in 1976 under Sanjit Ghosh, a laboratory scientist and a former puppeteer-artist from CLT and CPT. LPT’s first production Birpurush earned overnight fame and they began to organise shows in different States of India. LPT visited International Puppet Festival in France, Switzerland and Belgium. Their later production was Alibaba, after which Sanjit switched over to making puppet serials for television. Many successful Hindi serial-productions like Potli Babaki, Gupi Gayen Bagha Bayen and yet-to-be-released Pinocchio belong to his directorial prowess.

A late starter was People’s Puppet theatre (PPT) in 1977 under Hiren Bhattacharjee, a schoolteacher with pronounced political leanings. Their first production Ekti Moroger Kahini ran for several hundred nights in West Bengal and other States, using Hindi dialogue. Their other productions are Sedin Baner Jale, Kshude Patuar Rupkatha, Darir Khela, Cherry Phuler Phulki, Rather Rashi, etc.

Putul Rangam, which started in the late fifties, was a small group under the noted painter, cartoonist and poet Shailo Chakraborty. He did many short productions, with experimental dolls and drama, mostly stimulated by foreign puppeteers. There were other small groups like Putul Gosthi since 1964 under Dr. Shanti Ranjan Paul, a medico and a disciple of Raghunath Goswami and Tal Betal Puppet Theatre since 1973 under Shubhashis Sen with his family of three generations. The latter group has been very active in television with nearly two scores of short productions.

Out of the above groups, only CPT and PPT have continued their excellence in puppetry till today. The recent additions to the contemporary puppet groups are Nalanda Puppet Theatre under Saibal Ghosh, with Purushottam SriKrishna as a flagship show; Indian Puppet Theatre under Gita Banerjee, a trained teacher, with social plays and Bengali TV serial Sri Chaitanya to their credit; and Puppetorium under Arun Ghosh combining magic-show with puppetry. The most recent group is Dolls Theatre under Sudip Gupta, a student of Suresh Dutta, who have taken off well with Encounters With the Nature and visited Tehran. There are many other small groups, NGO and voluntary organisations, which have resorted to puppetry to expound social and environmental themes from, time to time.

 INNOVATIONS BY CONTEMPORARY PUPPET GROUPS

The principal styles adopted by the bulk of contemporary groups in Kolkata is to use rod puppets supplemented by gloves and shadow puppets, with string puppets seldom used. The rod puppet technique was popularised by Suresh Dutta who, based on his Russian training, added many imaginative mechanisms and modern contraptions to rod puppets, doing full justice to the West Bengal tradition of rod puppetry. Such puppets are much more dynamic than before and can have their eyes, mouth, neck, hands and other limbs manipulated at will, -- including even the fingers. This adaptation has now spread all over India.

Another transition that the non-traditional groups have made while performing on the proscenium stage is an extensive use of modern stagecraft, light design, costumes and dramatic stories. These are undoubtedly the outcome of foreign influence, as a number of puppet groups have been visiting India from abroad year after year. Performances of foreign and Indian troupes shown on the TV screen and videocassettes have naturally caught people’s imagination. An interesting feature has been the holding of many puppet workshops with Indian puppeteers. It has happened at times that the puppeteers have come forward to talk to the audience contravening normal puppet traditions. Like the Japanese Bunraku style, puppeteers have dressed themselves in black clothes and manipulated puppets on the front stage, or, used black-lamps to let the puppet dance in the air by invisible hands. A part of the reason is the exposure of Indian groups to foreign innovations while visiting abroad.

Traditional puppets used to be painted by Patuas (craftsmen who paint idols) and reflected divine images; with expressionless faces, Yatra costumes and jewellery, and dominant basic colours. In contrast, contemporary puppets have brought expression on faces and accompanying costumes according to characters on modern stage, and have replaced wood, terracotta and solapith with papier-mâché, thermo Cole and any other suitable material fulfilling the needs. Puppets themselves can be composite: mixing rod with string. The colours can have oil-base and do away with varnish of yesteryears. New types of puppets have streamed in: Bunraku, palm puppet and moppets being most popular.

Petromax and gas-lamps have yielded to modern dimmers, spots, strobe lights and black-lamps, -- using new techniques to bring the burning Lanka on stage, open Alibaba’s cave to mysterious lights, allow sunrise on the sea-shore or let Vasudeva ride on Yamuna water with baby Krishna hooded by Vasuki snake. This is proscenium theatre par excellence: creating the magic of light and sound for the audience and balancing stage-sets with stylised designs. Even an open stage can mirror light on plastic sheets and create effects of myriad ripples from ocean-waves!  

Themes and music, too, have undergone metamorphosis on proscenium stage. The traditional Ramayan, Mahabharata and Bhagavata tales, which were the staple of traditional puppetry, have not disappeared, but are told with a lot of panache, side by side with themes based on political movements or social consciousness. Short plays with education themes based on political movements or social consciousness. Short plays with education themes have appeared where children can talk to puppets. There are musical skits as well. Abstract plays, however, have not appeared yet. Many Calcutta plays on proscenium stage have made imaginative use of puppetry. For instance, Swayik Galo Yudhhe by Theatre Workshop opened with moppet Hitler and his two colleagues, designed by the puppeteer Raghunath Goswami. Again, Madhav Malanchi Koinya by Anya Theatre and Karnavati by Sayak have used puppetry in conjuring up some fantasy characters and the background, all designed by Suresh Dutta.

CONCLUSION

Federation of Puppet theatres, now defunct, was the first ever-collective effort of puppet groups in West Bengal. They held a puppet festival in 1982, combining traditional and contemporary groups and facilitating interaction among them. Pashchim Banga Putul Natya Sangha has now been established bringing within its fold many traditional teams. UNIMA India, Indian Council for Cultural Relations and Sangeet Natak Akademi have organised international puppet festivals in 1987 and 1990 at Delhi, bringing in many contemporary groups from abroad and helping interchange of ideas in the contemporary puppet scenes. Still, experimentations and innovations are not as many as they should be and the number of groups seems to be on the decline. The puppet medium is still considered a children’s preserve and has not extended itself into the adult domain, as in the case of proscenium theatre in the country.

[From the book Bengali Theatre: 200 Years.]