Indira Peterson, Mt. Holyoke College

From Sthalapurana to Dance Drama:

Temples and New Strategies of Localization in Yaksagana Dramas

from the Tanjavur Maratha Court  in the 18^th century

The role of the agamic temple as a site for religious, cultural, social and political localization, and the agency of courts and literary production in the process of such localization, has received much attention in scholarship on South India (for example, Dennis Hudson, “Two Chitra Festivals in Madurai”, in G.Welbon and G.Yocum, eds., Religious Festivals in South India and Sri Lanka, 1982,  David Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths, 1980, and Indira V. Peterson, Poems to Siva, 1989).  In this paper I argue that the yaksagana dance dramas commissioned by the Maratha court in Tanjavur, especially in its foundational period in the early 18^th century, deploy the agamic temple as a device for expressing an innovative vision of localization. Examining the plots and performance contexts of several Marathi, Tamil and Telugu yaksagana dramas commissioned by Shahji II (1685 –1712) for enactment at the Tanjavur court and the Tyagaraja temple in Tiruvarur, and a Telugu Yaksagana drama commissioned in 1728 by Tulajaji for the Visnu temple in Mahadevapattanam, I show that in these dramas particular temples in the Tanjavur kingdom served as locations, contexts, and tropes that enabled an imaginative rehearsal of the Maratha court’s political and cultural relationship with the multi-ethnic and multicultural Tamil-Telugu world in which it functioned. In the plots and performance contexts of these dramas, court, temple, and new publics were brought into conversation in new ways.

A literary genre developed at the 17^th century Tanjavur Nayaka court, under Shahji’s patronage the yaksagana became a full-fledged dance-drama that was staged at the court or the temple. Early Maratha period dance dramas treat a variety of myths and invented themes in several languages (Tamil, Marathi, Telugu, Sanskrit), foreground dialogue and mimesis, and often focus on popular and folkloric themes. The plots of many of these yaksaganas involve a particular temple in the Tanjavur region. They invent new narratives (sthalapurana) for the temple, link the temple with deities from other temples in the Tamil area, or connect the new narrative with older, local and translocal myths. For example, the Marathi Gangakaverisamvada, performed at Shahji’s court, tells a new story about the relationship between the river Ganga and the Kaveri, the local river, at the Pancanadisvara Siva temple in Tiruvaiyaru, near Tanjavur, while the Telugu Sivakamasundariparinaya, commissioned by Tuljaji for the Visnu temple festival at Mahadevapatnam, simultaneously provides a new narrative of the wedding of Siva Nataraja of Chidambaram with the Goddess Sivakami at Mahadevapatanam and stages Tulaja’s vision of Smarta religion. Early Maratha Tanjavur yaksagana dramas not only link the Maratha king and court with the local temple, but also invent new political, literary and religious networks for the region.  In these dance dramas local temples perform complex cultural work, now functioning as the sites and contexts of performance, and now as the subjects of a court drama, pointing at new slippages between the spheres of court and temple.