When a wooden mask becomes a living god

Teamwork often involves conflict. Modern corporate manuals and new age management gurus have developed slick vocabularies offering solutions to problems in collaborative projects.

Let us go back to a die-hard traditional setting, to see how a group of losers dealt with implacable rivals, and irrevocable defeat.

The year was 1934, the place a nondescript dot on the landscape. But Saliamangalam village, Tamil Nadu, has its own USP. Every summer, its inhabitants conduct an exclusive 500-year old ritual drama called Bhagavata Mela. This is the story of how the man-lion god tore apart the evil Hiranyakasipu, and saved Prahlad, his devout child.

Every member of the all-male cast belongs to the village, inheriting his role from his forefathers.
Migrants unfailingly return to the village to claim their right to become gods and demons in the all-night performance. The stage is the main street, with the audience packing both its sides.

Just before the climax, the audience rushes to take a purificatory bath and returns to witness the “divine avatar”. Firecrackers explode as the actor, like his father and grandfather before him, dons the traditional face mask, and is transformed into the god Narasimha. He plunges into a frenzied trance from which he is released only after “killing” the demon. The raging god is then placated by the devotion of his supplicants — the performers and the audience.

It is easy to see that the purpose of the villagers in holding the Bhagavata Mela show is neither to entertain, nor to evoke some aesthetic experience. The goal is to make God appear on earth, cleanse evil, protect the community, bless the world. The man-lion mask is the conduit for this transformational process. Without it, the human actor cannot become divine. It is never referred to as a “mask” but as “Swami”, God.

Custom decreed that through the year, the mask should be entrusted to two branches of the same family, descendants of the male and female line in the same clan, who took turns to safeguard it.
These alternating custodians offered daily puja to the mask — the family deity and village god.

This twin allotment ensured that if one guardian faced a problem, the other could step in and continue the puja uninterrupted.

Naturally, no greater calamity could befall the Saliamangalam community than the loss of the mask. In 1934, one of the custodian families refused to transfer the mask to the other claimant, and absconded overnight, taking the mask to Chennai. An ancient trust was broken.

The panchayat did its best, but pleas and negotiations failed. Calling the police or going to court was not an option as it would stop the mandatory daily worship which kept divine power intact, and destroy the purity of their deity. Besides, if you steal a God, it is not for humans but for the gods to decree the consequences! Violence or retaliatory trickery was no solution. A gentle forbearing elder sighed: “After all, they stole our God, because they loved Him dearly.”

But the dilemma remained. How to enact the Prahlad natak without the sacred mask?  The entire village met in front of the temple sanctum, and vowed to continue the ancient tradition. Inspired by Prahlad’s famous line — “God is everywhere, in a stone pillar as well as in a blade of grass” — they found a fig tree whose gnarled trunk suggested a lion’s mane, and made a new mask. They moved on.

Summer 1935 saw the installation of this new mask, ceremonially invested with perennial sanctity. And so the tradition continues to this day, uninterrupted in performance, unshaken in faith.

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician and journalist, writing on the performing arts, cinema and literature.