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ShareA puppet as a gift from her mother when she was nine decided the course of Anurupa Roy's life. She started doing puppet shows at friend's birthday parties. "It's one of those things you do to become popular. I didn't really think that I would do it as a profession."
At college she used her self-taught skill in an NGO's neighbourhood literacy project, hiding it from her college mates, "because what was cool in school doesn't seem so in college"; but when she found that adults enjoyed the show too, she started doing political satires.
Today the Delhi-based Roy, 31, and her associates at the Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, not only hold workshops and performances of their puppetry plays but also work with several NGOs, on various issues (like HIV/AIDS awareness, social communication, gender).
When she started, it was a struggle, "There are no puppetry schools in India. In 1997, the only way to learn was to apprentice with someone. I worked with Dadi Pudumjee, but he travelled a lot. I am mostly self-taught.
I attended workshops, read books and worked with Ranjana Pandey, who was using puppetry in education for children with special needs. We did a TV show called Khullam Khulla in 2001, which was like Sesame Street."
Then Roy happened to see a performance by Sweden's Marionette Theatre. She wrote to them and was accepted as a student at the Dramatiska Institut. "I really learnt puppet theatre there, and later at street performances at Naples, Italy."
At Katkatha, they design and make their own puppets, write their scripts, everything is hands on."It is odd that puppetry is not taken more seriously, considering we have 18 living traditions. People only seem to know of the Rajasthani Kathputlis, which is only 60 years old, while the Tolu Bomalatta shadow puppet theatre from Andhra Pradesh is 3,000 years old. People are not even aware of the other forms."
For her latest production, About Ram, part of the children's theatre festival on at Prithvi, she has worked with shadow puppets and animation -- the first time traditional puppetry and computers have been used together to createmythological theatre for children - in a non verbal form, using just music. "
She has travelled to Mumbai earlier with a production called Almost Twelfth Night and was excited enough by the response to return with a more complex work.
Anurupa Roy's workshop: Giant Puppets, from today; the performance of her puppet play About Ram: May 10 and 11, 11am and 3pm, Prithvi Theatre
