SECOND HONEYMOONS, JURASSIC BABIES: IDENTITY AND PLAY IN CHENNAI’S
POST-INDEPENDENCE SABHA THEATER
Abstract
Second Honeymoon (1977) and Jurassic Baby (2000) are the titles of two very popular
Tamil-language plays from what I call the Sabha Theater genre that is based Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamilnadu. This talk will present an overview of my book project concerning this theatrical genre that relies on the patronage of voluntary organizations known as sabhas and also reflects a shared political ideology, structure, and aesthetic.
Sabhas are dominated by middle-class members of the high-caste Brahmin community, and this book demonstrates the social and ideological significance of regional language popular theaters in developing and projecting community identity. I will present a brief history of the development and trajectory of a theatrical tradition that despite its cultural importance has been largely ignored by scholars. Additionally, I will sketch generic boundaries for this type of theater and briefly explore the cultural facets of the humor, using Honeymoon Couple as an example of a typical play from the genre.
Bio
Kristen Rudisill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Popular Culture. Her PhD is in Asian Studies from the University of Texas, Austin, and her research focuses on Indian theater and dance. She has published several articles in journals such as Text and Presentation,
Asian Theatre Journal, South Asian Popular Culture, and Studies in Musical Theatre.
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SECOND HONEYMOONS, JURASSIC BABIES: IDENTITY AND PLAY IN CHENNAI’S
POST-INDEPENDENCE SABHA THEATER
Today I’m presenting on my book manuscript,
Second Honeymoons, Jurassic Babies, which is based on my dissertation. I’ll give you an overview of the book as a whole, then present the bulk of one of the chapters. The book concerns a theatrical genre I refer to as Sabha Theater due to its reliance on the patronage of voluntary cultural organizations known as sabhas in
Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamilnadu. It focuses on the intersections of caste, class, and aesthetics on the Tamil-language commercial theater scene in Chennai, and involves over fifteen months of extensive ethnographic research with writers, actors, and audience members of the Sabha Theater. In addition to interviews, I circulated a questionnaire with audience members and observed rehearsals, performances, and television and film shootings. I also use historical research and published criticism, combining my ethnography with performance (Conquergood, Kirby, Goffman) and area studies (Appadurai, Bhabha) approaches to construct a thorough vision of the development and trajectory of a specific theatrical tradition that despite its cultural importance has been largely ignored by scholars and simultaneously patronized and dismissed by its viewers. This book is the result of eleven years and five visits to
India (2001, 2003-4, 2008, 2010, 2012) spent trying to give a name and sketch generic boundaries for this type of theater, and to seriously consider what the plays mean for those who produce and consume them.
I consider such things as how the contemporary political climate and development of mass media have affected live theater in terms of aesthetics, personnel, scripts, production, and patronage. I also dispel some myths about the state of Tamil theater in Chennai. While it is certainly not at its peak now, it is also not “dead” as so many intellectuals and journalists in the
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city would like to claim. The relevance of these plays to an educated, middle-class audience both in India and the diaspora is ample proof of their importance, and while the dedication of many artists and enthusiasts may not lead to a revival, it certainly indicates a continuation of live Tamil language theater in Chennai.
This style of theater is the product of a Tamil Brahmin community concerned with emphasizing its local ethnic identity using Tamil language and inside jokes while simultaneously marking itself as cosmopolitan through both stylistic and content choices. As a genre of popular culture that developed in the Brahmin community during the early 1950s, a period of intense anti-Brahmin politics throughout this region of India, Sabha Theater functions as a window into the identity formation of a community so often defined solely by religion and the classical performing arts. The book will thus significantly advance and broaden scholarly understandings of Brahmin taste. This shift will encourage emphasis on actual popular practice and allow for the development of a more fluid and modern understanding of Brahmin culture, which is heavily influential both in India and abroad. Chennai is one of the centers for software development in
India, and these high-tech jobs are dominated by Brahmins. As personnel exchanges with the US and other countries accelerate, empirically-based research such as this into the values, aesthetics, aspirations, and allegiances of this segment of the Indian population becomes ever more essential.
This is the first book-length, comprehensive study of a regional language commercial theater genre in India. Recent studies of post-independence Indian modern and folk theater
(Dharwadker 2005, Seizer 2005, Dalmia 2006, Dimitrova 2008) have helped to illuminate issues of national and regional identity formation. Second Honeymoons, Jurassic Babies builds upon these insights by exploring them in the context of a commercial theater tradition that portrays an
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identity that is specifically marked by regional, caste, and class distinctions. The study examines the position of Sabha Theater within the context of other media and performance genres in the city of Chennai relevant to the lives of educated urbanites. This approach puts the theater into conversation with the television and film industries, with which the sabha theater shares writers, actors, and narratives, as well as with classical music and dance, with which it shares patrons and stages. Such an approach also opens a space for a productive discussion of taste creation and aesthetics, particularly with regards to the influential Tamil Brahmin community in Chennai. In comparing Sabha Theater and its audience to other entertainments in the city, the book historicizes and seriously studies commercial theater genres in Chennai for the first time by analyzing literary and performance texts along with performer, audience, and press responses.
The result is a complex view of a theater genre neglected by scholars that simultaneously receives elite patronage and yet is dismissed by its viewers.
By looking at humor and the spontaneous reactions of audiences to the comic scenarios and jokes contained in the plays, Second Honeymoons, Jurassic Babies offers insights into the actual, as opposed to idealized, self-conceptions of the Tamil Brahmin community. The book argues that the identities projected through the representation of ordinary families on stage for insider audiences conflict in telling ways with accepted stereotypes of frozen, idealized models of behavior and culture. These conflicts provide a potential index by which to measure and define the transformation of the city’s cultural atmosphere in the light of media, economic, and political changes. Furthermore, the study reveals that discourses surrounding the plays and their stylized brand of humor, especially debates about frivolity and vulgarity, point to fundamental contradictions in identities projected within and outside of the community. The geopolitical importance of the emerging Indian middle class and its pivotal role in the still-developing global
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culture of the 21 st
century underscore the need for research such as this into the values, aesthetics, aspirations, and allegiances of this growing segment of the Indian population.
Sabha Theater is a community theater, with audiences bound not only by their language, religion, and class, but also by their high caste status as Brahmins. Sabhas have been the main sponsors of classical music and dance performances along with some dramas and the occasional film, debate, or religious discourse since the 1928 founding of the Music Academy of Madras.
They organize entertainment for their fee-paying members, and each sabha has its own identity and focus based on the tastes of the founders and response of members to each year’s schedule.
Second Honeymoons, Jurassic Babies demonstrates the social and ideological significance of regional language popular theaters in developing and projecting community identity. I argue that the influence of the sabhas extends beyond their narrow target audience, however, as these cultural organizations are key players along with the press and the academy in creating a notion of “good” taste in Chennai. All three of those fields are dominated by the high-caste Tamil
Brahmin community, which thus both constructs and embodies the idea of good taste in the city.
Brahmins, as the most powerful taste-makers (in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense) in Chennai, are influential in shaping middle-class culture in the city. In contrast to other scholars (Singer 1972,
Hancock 1999), I argue that Brahmin identity is best visible not in tradition and ritual, because performances of the classical arts and the response of connoisseur audiences to them reveal an ideal that is frozen in time. I look instead to something much more fluid and spontaneous: humor. Jokes are cued, but it is common for them to fall flat or lose relevance over time. So when audiences actually laugh and find intended jokes funny, these performances can offer some insights into non-idealized self-conceptions of the community of observers who are responsible for the creation of taste in Chennai.
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Unlike classical music and dance, which are valued because of their adherence to
“tradition,” Sabha Theater is a more recent development that has not remained static, instead reflecting shifts in the political and social identity of the elite Tamil Brahmin community in
Chennai. In the early post-colonial period, when discussions of Indian national identity dominated public culture, Tamil Brahmins chose to emphasize their regional and caste identity with Tamil-language plays, and thus began the Sabha Theater genre. It was one of the new dramatic traditions that started in the post-Independence period that favored dialogue over other aspects of production, borrowing more from the British theater than from the Parsi, which isn’t surprising given that Sabha Theater actors come from elite backgrounds and have western educations, steady incomes, and secure social statuses. Elite amateur drama was not a new phenomenon in the post-World War II period; elites had been translating and adapting western dramas for elite audiences as early as the 1860s in Chennai, as Theodore Baskaran has discussed in detail. But it was new for sabhas, functioning as a patronage system, to support this type of drama in this period.
I conclude that such things as the contemporary political climate and development of mass media have drastically affected live Sabha Theater performances in terms of aesthetics, personnel, scripts, production, and patronage. The plays I consider part of this genre share a political ideology and a patronage system as well as a structure and aesthetic. I look at historical, political, and performance contexts, repertoire, humor, reception, performer, aesthetics, and performance style in order to historically, politically, socially, and artistically situate the genre.
The plays, several of which I analyze in depth, are part of a multi-lingual world of folk and experimental theater and Tamil-language television and film, and I clarify how they fit into that broad media landscape.
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The fact that many people from the Brahmin community choose to become members of sabhas or attend sabha dramas is not to say that the plays themselves are ideal representations of
Tamil Brahmin culture or of good taste. In fact, the discourse about the plays has created two factions within the Tamil Brahmin community, the most vocal of which dismisses them as “just comedy.” I engage with both voices in the course of my examination of these literary and performance texts in order to meaningfully approach questions about the circumstances in which the genre emerged, various trends, the drastic decline in audiences in the late 1980s, and how troupes and audiences are responding today. My research engages a number of methodological and theoretical issues including the relation between art production and audience; the interaction of literary texts, live performances, and mass media texts; and the effects of class, caste, and ethnic/religious identity on the content and aesthetics of theater.
Now I’ll present part of one of the chapters. In this chapter, I analyze the 1977 2 play
Honeymoon Couple, written by playwright and actor Crazy Mohan (b. 1949) for long-time theatre artist Kathadi Ramamurthy (b. 1938) and his troupe Stage Creations (founded 1964), as a typical play that illustrates the basic content as well as structural and aesthetic characteristics of the genre. I have selected this play as an exemplar for several reasons. First, it is a classic of
Tamil comedy theatre, thanks to both Crazy Mohan’s writing and Kathadi Ramamurthy’s acting.
Second, Stage Creations is average, neither at the top nor the bottom of the current theatre troupes in terms of either finances or audience size. Third, it exhibits the major traits that in my analysis constitute sabha theatre as a genre: patronage by sabha s, with their middle-class, usually Brahmin, audience base; a central theme concerning marriage alliances and/or married life; scripted witty dialogue with a thin plot and one-liner jokes, often including language jokes that code-switch between Tamil and English; a socially conservative message; and an “amateur
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aesthetic” that involves minimal sets, costumes, lighting, and two-hour evening or weekend matinee performances.
Honeymoon Couple has been one of the best-loved of what are referred to as the “pure comedies” that became popular during the peak of sabha theatre from about 1965 to 1985, and are still the most numerous and best attended plays in the city. Because fixed audiences made up of the sabhas’ members are linked to particular venues, plays must shift locations for every performance and troupes provide their own sets, props, and sound and light equipment, a system that has led to a minimization of all of these accoutrements. Sabha members are generally middle-class Tamil Brahmins, a community that is notorious for its social conservatism as well as for its high levels of education and appreciation of traditional culture (see Fuller 1996, Chuyen
2004, Hancock 1999, Singer 1972). This means that while individual scenes can toy with challenging social norms, in the end the message of the play affirms traditional values, especially with regards to marriage alliances, but concerning everything from generational norms to gender roles and class, caste, and regional divisions. These are performances designed to amuse and entertain, not to teach, and they should resolve noncontroversially.
The genre developed as it did in the early 1950s in response to factors both politicohistoric and artistic. On the political front, India gained its independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The decades leading up to this moment were dominated by a strong nationalist movement that was led by English-speaking elites throughout the country, and in Tamilnadu, the leaders of the independence movement were almost entirely Brahmin members of the National
Congress Party. Fearing that the minority Brahmin community would simply replace British rule with its own, non-Brahmins throughout Tamilnadu started a regional, Dravidianist separatist movement (see Geetha and Rajadurai 1998; Irschick 1986). Some of the strongest non-Brahmin
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leaders of the 1940s, including C. N. Annadurai and M. Karunanidhi, were also playwrights and screenplay writers. They produced a number of anti-Brahmin themed plays and films that were widely viewed throughout the state (see Hardgrave 1965; Rajendran 1989). I argue elsewhere that these attacks led Brahmins to reaffirm their values by developing positive images through live theatre targeted at their own insular community. There was no movement to justify the worth and contributions of the Tamil Brahmin community to the majority population; sabha theatre was developed instead. The plays work to humanize a community that has been demonized by political opponents and allow its members to maintain their self-respect and confidence.
Additionally, it allows members of this community to sit side by side in the theatre and share the experience of the play, which develops the bond between them (see Rudisill 2007).
On the artistic front there were a number of forms that influenced the development of sabha theatre including these anti-Brahmin Dravidian plays as well as the popular Parsi theatre and its local imitators, commercial film, folk theatre, and English drawing room comedies. Most popular theatre in Tamilnadu leading up to sabha theatre belonged to either the folk or Parsi traditions. Folk theatre and Dravidian theatre were both associated with low classes of performers, from whom sabha -goers wished to distance themselves. Folk theatre shared with
Parsi theatre a love for spectacle, costume, and music that had mostly moved into the film industry and off of the urban, proscenium stages by the 1940s. As film became more mainstream, it made less sense to pay for the spectacular Parsi-style extravaganzas by expensive professional troupes when low-budget amateur performances were available. Sabha theatre developed in part as a reaction to these forms, but it also borrowed from them. Parsi theatre, while best known for local historical and mythological plays, also reflected influence from colonial British theatre practices, adapting both English plays and novels for the Indian stage. It was also common for
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farces satirizing contemporary society to be performed on the stage after the main drama (see
Gupt 2005). The British influence is also visible in Tamil theatre in particular, through the work of Pammal Sambanda Mudaliar (1873-1964), who is widely regarded as the founder of elite amateur theatre in Tamilnadu. Sabha theatre is part of his theatrical lineage. In his autobiography, Mudaliar, a lawyer and judge, credits the English-language plays staged by
Europeans with giving him his first respect for the theatre and writes disparagingly of the Tamil plays performed near his boyhood home: “When I compared the costumes and make-up of the
English actors with those of performers in Tamil plays, I could have no liking for either the
Tamil plays or these performers” (Mudaliyar 1996: 26). Many of these English plays were in the style of the comedy of manners, and in addition to the less extreme costumes and make-up, likely endowed the developing genre with its emphasis on both witty dialogue and elite characters.
The most common plot line in sabha plays is organized around the Tamil proverb
 yiram poy colliy
 vatu oru kaly
 attai cey.
“Make a marriage, even if you tell a thousand lies,”
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and the most common themes are marriage alliances and/or married life, which continue to resonate with the middle-class urban audiences. Honeymoon Couple has a plot with a slight twist, that it is okay to tell a thousand lies if they result not in a marriage, but in a honeymoon. The marriage, in this case, occurred twenty years ago, but the honeymoon did not follow. This allows for humor based on the inversion of roles and a clarification of what is appropriate for people of different ages in Tamil culture with regard to love, sex, and romance. It is the aged, forty-five-year-old man, wearing dentures, who is longing for a honeymoon with his mortified and reluctant thirtyeight-year-old wife, while their children stay chastely at home to attend college.
Sabha plays, in general, are scripted, not improvised. Troupes are organized around a central figure who may be either the playwright (Crazy Mohan’s Crazy Creations, Cho
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Ramasamy’s Viveka Fine Arts, Marina’s (T.S. Sridhar’s) Rasika Ranga, K. S. Nagarajan’s Kala
Nilaiyam) or the lead actor (S. Ve. Shekher’s Natakapriya, Kathadi Ramamurthy’s Stage
Creations, Y. Gee. Mahendran’s United Amateur Artists, Purnam Viswanathan’s Purnam New
Theatre). New troupes generally start when an actor or writer who has been part of another troupe becomes famous enough to earn a chance from the sabha s to draw audiences on his own, the way Kathadi branched off in 1964 after ten years with Cho Ramasamy’s Viveka Fine Arts.
They may take with them some actors from the old troupe and also find friends and family members to join them in their new endeavor. Occasionally, as in the case of Rail Priya or
Dummies Drama, a troupe of all unknowns will appear.
Playwright-centered troupes tend to adhere much more closely to the written script than actor-centered troupes. Actor-centered troupes own the rights to plays by several different writers. Kathadi, for example, has a collection of unpublished plays handwritten in long notebooks, covered with marginal notes and stamped with the seal of police approval. The concerns of producers and audiences, who mostly represent the very specific community of middle-class urban Tamil Brahmins, also actively affect the format and content of sabha plays.
Kathadi Ramamurthy’s plays, like most sabha plays, are meant to be heard and/or seen, not read. Very few plays are published, partly because they represent a troupe’s cultural property, but mostly because the writers and actors believe that their work is only effective in performance . Attending a performance is social; it is an enjoyable escape, but why would anyone read a string of jokes on a page? I was asked. A much more common way to fix a play has been to record a performance text on film. Not only has Honeymoon Couple been popular with audiences for thirty years as a live performance, but also on television as one of Doordarshan’s
“Sunday Dramas” in the early 1980s, and as a DVD since its release in 2007.
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The dialogue is the most important component of the sabha comedy plays, which means that it is essential for the audience to be able to hear, and a poor sound system can ruin a play since most actors are amateurs who are not trained in voice projection. Kathadi uses three long, low microphones across the front of the stage, which are less intrusive to the performance, but also less effective, than a set-up like S. Ve. Shekher’s where there are four standing microphones into which actors speak directly. Critic M. Tangarasu (2000: 93) has lamented that Tamil theatre is at the sad state where it is enough for two or three people to stand on stage and say lines that the audience can laugh at.
Kathadi’s timing is perfect and his interaction with Sri Lalitha, the actress who usually plays opposite him, has been polished over their many performances together. He tends to stick to his scripts pretty closely, though he knows where he can cut if necessary, and when jokes have lost their relevance. Kathadi is widely respected, and considered to be one of the best comic actors the Tamil language has ever seen. In a 2003 article for The Hindu titled “Hooked on
Humour,” drama critic Kausalya Santhanam writes that “[f]or quite a few years now, the monopoly of success on the Tamil stage has been that of the experts with the appealing pun,” and most of the experts she names (S. Ve. Shekher, Crazy Mohan, Cho Ramasamy, Kathadi
Ramamurthy, Mouli, Nagesh, Thangavelu, Bosskey, the United Amateur Artists) are from the sabha theatre. Tamils are proud of their language play, and those who master it are much appreciated. Santhanam, a Tamil herself, says without reservation that “Tamil Nadu has some of the best comedians/ennes in the country. For, this is a city where even the cab driver and the rickshaw man are masters of the ready quip and the instant retort. The Tamil people have a talent for the right word.” The paradox is that although most Tamils would agree with this positive
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representation of themselves as funny, they will also use the derogatory slur “just comedy” when discussing the plays.
Language jokes, which Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi (1992) has shown to be the most popular type of Tamil joke, are an important window into the self-identity of the Tamil Brahmin community as revealed in sabha theatre. While Dravidian politicians were agitating against
Hindi and Sanskrit, these Brahmins were writing and enjoying plays in Tamil , complete with
Brahmin dialect speech and jokes that turn on knowledge of English. The plays may not make the audiences more “cultured,” but many of the jokes assume a certain level of education and cultural competence, including knowledge of English, current events, and classical performance arts as well as mass media. Tamil-language theatre, like the Marathi-language theatre discussed by Mahadev Apte (1992), demonstrates ethnocentrism and pride in language and culture.
Middle-class urbanites have a conflicted relationship with the English language, and clearly the title of Honeymoon Couple is in English, a language that functions as a marker of education, class, and wealth in India. The English title is essential to the humor in Honeymoon
Couple
, where “honeymoon” is not just a foreign word but also a foreign cultural concept. This blending of languages and cultures provides for a lot of humor. Sabha comedies are particularly fond of “code-mixing” jokes that blend two languages and require competency in both. The
Tamil reiterates that they are Tamils above all else, and proud of it; the English shows that viewers are both cosmopolitan and multi-lingual. One code-mixing joke that audiences find particularly funny in Honeymoon Couple and that is also directly related to the foreign concept of a honeymoon is as follows. Ramani is trying to convince Rukmani to go on a honeymoon with him. He is getting adamant and annoying, and she snaps and retorts, “Fine. Go on a honeymoon if you want to, but I’m not coming.” To which he responds, “Don’t you know anything? If I go
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alone that’s not a ‘honey’ moon but a ‘ta  i’ moon.” Ta
 i means “alone” in Tamil and also happens to rhyme with “honey,” making the joke funny on several levels. First is the cultural concept of a honeymoon, which has nothing to do with the literal meaning of the word. It implies a trip taken by a newly married couple and is, by definition, not something that one does alone.
Second, the rhyme is clever and creates slippage between the two concepts of “honey” and “ta  i” which are set up as opposites although they are not. It also allows the two languages to blend together in a way that sounds natural to the ear and requires the listener to pay attention in order to catch the joke.
The pure comedy plays that sabha s tend to favor as the most commercially successful consist of extremely thin plots that string together a series of jokes. This type of humor is generally discussed in a dismissive manner in Tamil culture, but cleverness and wit are clearly appreciated by audiences, who continue to laugh. It is important to note that the plays do actually have plots , despite many accusations to the contrary. In contrast to these plays, there are comedy shows in Chennai that really are nothing but jokes. For example, the Humour Club International frequently sponsors programs that consist of “jokes, humour music, miming, magic, skits and ventriloquism” (Vijayalakshmi 2003) and performers like M. T. Vedantham conduct hour-long humor shows that consist of “50-60 non-stop jokes” (Bhuvaneshwari 2003).
Honeymoon Couple is a good example of the hypothesis that although techniques, genres, and themes may be cross-cultural, humor is rooted in particular cultural contexts. In his work on humor in Marathi theatre from 1970-1990, Mahadev Apte argues that “[w]ithout the shared cultural knowledge and conventions one cannot appreciate humor even by oneself, nor can one communicate it to others” (1992: 38). There are, of course, different degrees of appreciation, and the relationship between culture and humor can work in both directions. It is possible to
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understand and appreciate humor after gaining cultural competency, but it is also possible to work from the humor to a deeper understanding of culture. This can work because “humor functions as a barometer, albeit a rough one, of what makes a society tick and what its major sociocultural attributes are” (Apte 1992: 14).
Traditional notions of marriage and family are still central to modern imaginings of
Tamil culture (see Trawick 1990, Uberoi 2001), and this has been fodder for the dramas. Farley
Richmond, writing in 1990, commented that “[i]n Madras one may find plays that are concerned primarily with family and social issues” (402), and this is still true today. Ideas about what it means to be “modern” or “middle class” are, as Sanjay Joshi (2001) helpfully argues, fractured and often contradictory due to the way the differing traditions and ideas about appropriate social relations found in different parts of India are combined with ideas of the modern.
I have translated a great deal of Honeymoon Couple from Kathadi’s handwritten and much-annotated notebook, and it is clear that like many of his plays, it has undergone changes, but Ramani in Honeymoon Couple is one of his most reprised and best-beloved characters.
Ramani hates to work and spends all of his time trying to get out of it by making up lies and excuses to tell his wife, his boss, his colleagues, his creditors, and anyone else who will listen
Instead of working, he wants to go on a honeymoon. The idea is so crazy that he tells his wife
Rukmani that it came to him in a dream. Although Ramani wants to go on a honeymoon, and argues that this is a perfectly natural desire for a middle-aged man, he still feels the deep-seated cultural pressure against it. Rukmani is mortified by the whole idea, and he is not immune. Even though there is plenty of evidence of his own embarrassment on the subject, Ramani scolds his wife, saying that it’s not as if she’s eloping, since she’s going on honeymoon with her own husband, and “What’s there to be ashamed about in that? ( atula e
 a avam
 am?
)” (Mohan
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1977: 91). The manager of the Ooty (a hill station west of Chennai and a popular honeymoon spot) bungalow, makes it clear that the idea of an older man on a honeymoon is not just laughable, but actually offensive to the general public, who would consider him to be a rascal without modesty ( vekkala ke
 avan ), a rascal without shame ( m
 ala ke
 avan ), and loose in the head ( l
 su ) (Mohan 1977: 128). At the very end of the play, Ramani and Rukmani decide to come clean. The play ends when the raja (who as I will discuss below is mistakenly linked with the hero) grabs his chest and screams as if the couple have given him a heart attack with their confession of honeymooning, but in a replay of an earlier scene involving Ramani, he has only been bitten by an ant.
It is made clear in Honeymoon Couple that marriages, honeymoons, and babies are appropriate only to the young in the specific world of Tamil culture. Ramani protests, scolding his colleagues: “ Che!
You are all so conservative. In America they have new marriages at age fifty and go on honeymoons. You are still so old fashioned.” This argument, that Americans are progressive and Indians backward, is not particularly effective in conservative Tamil culture, which often criticizes the practices of a corrupt America where young women flirt with boys and dress immodestly and people marry and go on honeymoons late in life only to get “die-vorced.”
There are many jokes that recur in the sabha plays over and over, thus offering a glimpse into Tamil Brahmin cultural values. One recurring theme has to do with confusion about people’s names. Central to
Honeymoon Couple is a joke about how confusing it can be when people have the same name. Ramani’s best friend at the office is named Rahottaman and it just so happens that there is a very rich Maharaja who also lives in their neighborhood whose name is often shortened to Rahottaman. The Maharaja Rahottaman owns a bungalow in Ooty and has a
P. A. (personal assistant) named Ramani. The theme of confusion overlaps in this instance with a
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joke about doctors. When Ramani sends his friend Rahottaman to pick up his heart x-rays from the lab, he is given Maharaja Rahottaman’s x-rays to take to the doctor. The Maharaja has serious heart problems and after seeing the x-ray the doctor fears for Ramani’s life, telling his family to do anything he wants, or his heart may give out. (This is why Rukmani finally agrees to go to Ooty on a “honeymoon.”) The Maharaja’s P. A., on the other hand, is given Ramani’s xrays at the lab and the confused doctor thinks there’s been some kind of miracle. Doctor jokes are always popular, and the doctor’s office is the second most frequently used set, right after the living room. The joke is sometimes about incompetent doctors, who have patients thanks to nonmerit-based reasons like family connections, and sometimes exploits anxieties about doctors’ motivations, as they make a living only when people are sick.
A second anxiety of this community involves money. The viewers of sabha theatre almost without exception would say they were “middle class,” a category that Sanjay Joshi
(2001) argues is “primarily a project of self-fashioning” (2). This self-designation, as convincingly demonstrated by many scholars (see Mankekar 1999, Dickey 2000, Ganguly-
Scrase and Scrase 2009, Fernandes 2006, and Brosius 2010), is largely dependent upon appearances and possessions as well as morals. In order to keep up appearances, therefore, many
“middle class” Tamils will cut corners in private, but if they are caught they will be exposed as
“misers” in a community where generosity has always been a commendable trait (see Ramanujan
1985: 291-292). Tamil Brahmins make fun of misers, but respect those who opulently display wealth.
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Ramani cannot get this right and goes into a great deal of debt over expensive imported toiletries which are hidden away even from his wife, making him an object of ridicule, not respect.
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The jokes keep the tempo fast-paced as does the structure of the plays, which are typically divided into twenty to forty short scenes ( Honeymoon Couple has seventeen). The structure and aesthetic of the performances are based on the premise that both performers and audiences are working people who participate in theatre for fun, not money. Instead of lasting all night like most folk dramas, sabha performances (of dance, drama, or music) are limited to approximately two hours. When the actors work all day in an office, it is difficult for them to spend a lot of time rehearsing, applying makeup, or dressing in elaborate costumes, as is required for most genres of professional and folk theatre in India.
As most sabha plays concern the lives of everyday families, they allow for quotidian language and costumes. M. Tangarasu (2000: 93) remarked derogatorily that one of the conveniences of sabha theatre is that people can rush straight from the office and onto the stage in the evening. This is part of what distinguishes this type of theatre and these actors from
“professionals” who need to earn their living on stage. The “costumes” say very clearly that acting is a hobby, not a profession. For the most part, the characters of sabha plays are ordinary folk and they dress in ordinary clothes, though perhaps more flamboyant than usual. Particular characters, however, like the raja in Honeymoon Couple, have special costumes that are excessively exaggerated for comic effect. The same balance of everyday exaggeration is there in the acting, which Farley Richmond describes as “realistic” with a “melodramatic tendency”
(1990: 415).
The sets and lighting are equally uniform and spare. Most troupes rent their sets from two designers (Padma Stages and Kumar Stage), so the same generic living room will be seen at different plays by different troupes. It usually consists of a painted backdrop with a door to the back and possibly a window with the addition of two plastic chairs in the center of the stage.
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Some troupes (Stage Creations and Natakapriya are good examples) will special-order painted curtains to use as backdrops which will represent a garden, bus stop, or other location. This amateur theatre uses only focus lights. Theatre veteran A. R. Srinivasan told me (2004) that they only light the stage from the front because they do not have enough lights to do more. He also mentioned that United Amateur Artists once attempted different lighting, but it created problems with their sets as the measurements of the individual theatres were so different.
Conclusion
My analysis of the form and content of sabha plays through the lens of Honeymoon
Couple offers insights into the particular culture of the community with which it is most popular—both as creators and consumers—Chennai elites, especially middle-class Tamil
Brahmins. The plays employ what I call an “amateur aesthetic” that developed in the early 1950s as a response to several factors, including the popular Parsi theatre, commercial film, folk theatre, nineteenth and early twentieth century British theatre, and regional caste-based politics and plays. This aesthetic is based on the premise that both performers and audiences are working people who participate in the occasional drama for fun. Most sabha plays concern the lives of everyday Tamil Brahmin families, with the logic of family situations pushed to the extreme. My reading of Kathadi Ramamurthy’s Honeymoon Couple illustrates the flamboyant quotidian nature of the pure comedy plays that focus on fast-paced dialogue filled with jokes, puns, and allusions and works from that humor to a deeper understanding of middle-class Tamil Brahmin culture. Some of the community characteristics revealed by my analysis include a concern with caste and class status, gender and generational roles, status symbols and anxiety about money, and the value of good names and reputations, doctor/patient relationships, and generosity.
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