How Kathakali is making space for new narratives

This year, Kalakshetra’s Kathakali Festival, titled ‘Kadha Rasa Sangama’, brought together three productions that explored the form’s capacity to engage with stories both familiar and unexpected.

The three-day festival opened with two new works: on the first day, Sadanam Academy presented ‘Mandodari’, which sought to foreground Mandodari as an independent and consequential character, whose role in the Valmiki Ramayana , particularly during and after the war between Rama and Ravana, is relatively limited. The play was not a straightforward dramatisation of a traditional Ramayana episode, but Sadanam K. Harikumar’s own Kathakali attakatha, built primarily from Thunchath Ezhuthachan’s Adhyatma Ramayanam , with considerable dramatic expansion of what the traditional texts leave unsaid. The central conflict thus became less Rama versus Ravana than Ravana’s struggle with his own obsession with power, with Mandodari representing the emotional and moral world he repeatedly ignored.