পুতুল নাচ

Bengal has three traditional puppet forms: rod (danger putul or danger putul nach), glove (beni putul) and string (taror putul or shuto putul). The rod form is the oldest and the most theatrical, and is conventionally traced to around the fourteenth century — a date repeated in almost every account and supported by no surviving document, which is worth saying plainly. What can be said with confidence is that rod puppetry in Bengal developed as a miniature of jatra: the same repertoire, the same declamatory delivery, the same visible orchestra, the same all-night village performance, played by figures three feet high instead of actors.

The puppets are not manipulated from above or below in the usual sense. The puppeteer stands behind a bamboo-and-cloth curtain with the rod set into a socket tied to his own waist, so the figure rides in front of his body and moves as he moves. This is why the form is sometimes described as danced rather than operated, and why its gait reads as human rather than mechanical: it is a human gait, borrowed.

The troupes were itinerant. The southern districts of western Bengal carried the largest number, travelling village to village through the dry winter season, playing the melas that attach themselves to Durga Puja and the autumn and winter fairs. The performers came overwhelmingly from communities with no land and no other trade, and the craft was hereditary within families rather than organised into a guild.

In the twentieth century the modern puppet theatre split off from the village tradition. Suresh Dutta, who founded the Calcutta Puppet Theatre and received the Padma Shri in 2009, built a proscenium puppet practice trained on Eastern European models, and most contemporary Bengali puppet directors studied with him. That work is healthy. The village rod tradition it grew out of is not: it is now described as being on the verge of extinction and survives almost entirely in South 24 Parganas.

The rod puppet is Bengali theatre in miniature, and it preserves a version of jatra more faithfully than jatra now does. The Bibek, the declamatory delivery, the unamplified singing, the four-sided attention, the epic repertoire of Ramayana and Behula — the puppet stage kept all of it after the live companies began amplifying, shortening and casting television actors. If you want to see what a nineteenth-century pala sounded like, the last place to look is a three-foot doll.

The mechanism is also worth stating for itself. Most puppetry hides the human body and substitutes a mechanical one. Rod puppetry in Bengal does the opposite: it straps the figure to the operator, so the doll inherits a person's walk, sway and breath. The illusion is not that the puppet is alive but that it is inhabited.

Its disappearance is the clearest single case of what the decline of the village fair has cost. The art needed no building, no electricity and no subsidy, only a crowd that gathered somewhere every winter. When the crowd stopped gathering, an art form that had cost almost nothing to maintain simply stopped.