What to expect
Highlights
- Heritage experience at Kerala Kathakali Centre
- Architecture, local stories and old trade/cultural routes
- Good fit for guided walks and nearby cafes/shops
The story
The performance is the second half of the evening. The first half is a man sitting cross-legged on the floor with a mirror, building a face out of rice paste and paper — and it is the part people remember. Fort Kochi is where most visitors to Kerala meet Kathakali, the state's classical dance-drama, and Kalaripayattu, its martial art. Both were made for other rooms entirely: a temple courtyard through the whole night, and a sunken earthen pit at dawn. What you see in Fort Kochi is a compression of them, honestly done and openly explained, which is a fairer description than either the brochures or the purists usually give.
The story of Kerala Kathakali Centre
Kathakali actors do not speak. Every word of the story is sung by vocalists at the back of the stage — the lead ponnani keeping time on a gong, the shinkidi answering on cymbals — while the actor carries the meaning entirely in hands, eyes and body. The vocabulary is precise rather than improvised: a set of basic hand positions, catalogued in the old manual Hastalakshanadeepika, combine into several hundred recognised signs. If you know the code, a Kathakali actor is talking in complete sentences. If you do not, you are watching an enormously expressive silent film, which is still a good evening.
The eyes do the emotional work, and they are trained like a muscle. Students spend years on exercises that isolate eyeball movement from the head, and performers redden the whites before going on — traditionally by slipping a seed of the chunda plant inside the lower lid, an old practice that is not universal today. The result, under stage light, is a face that can hold an expression across a room without a word.
The make-up is a taxonomy, not a decoration, and once you know it you can read a character before they move. Green faces, pacha, are noble: gods, kings, the heroic. Kathi, the knife, adds an upturned moustache and a knife-shaped mark to a green base and marks the magnificent villain — Ravana, Duryodhana — arrogant and grand rather than merely evil. Beards, thadi, split by colour: white for the noble monkey characters like Hanuman, red for the violent, black for the schemer. Kari, black, is for demonesses. Minukku, the polished or radiant, is for women, brahmins and sages. The raised white ridge framing the face, the chutti, is built up from rice paste and paper on the actor's own skin, and it is slow — which is why arriving early to watch it is the standard advice and the better half of the ticket.
The drums are not accompaniment so much as weather. The chenda, a hard upright drum struck with sticks, drives the male and martial passages; the maddalam, played with the hands, carries the gentler ones. The music belongs to the sopanam tradition — the temple-step singing of Kerala — and it is loud, deliberately. Kathakali was built to be heard across an open courtyard by an audience that was not sitting quietly.
In its original form a Kathakali play ran through the night, beginning after dark with drums calling the village in and ending near dawn, with the audience free to sleep through the passages they knew and wake for the ones they loved. That is not what a visitor to Fort Kochi sees. What is offered here is an hour or so: the make-up, an explanation of the mudras and the navarasas — the nine emotional states an actor must be able to summon on demand — and then one or two extracted scenes. Purists have called this a reduction, and strictly it is. It is also the reason a first-time visitor has any way into the form at all, and the demonstration format is unusually honest about what it is doing.
Kalaripayattu, usually shown on the same circuit, is a different discipline entirely: one of the oldest surviving martial systems in the subcontinent, trained in a kalari, a sunken earthen pit dug along a fixed orientation and treated as sacred ground. Students begin with meippayattu, the flowing body-conditioning sequences, before moving to sticks, then to the sword and shield, and — at the far end — to the urumi, a flexible whip-like blade worn coiled round the waist, which is as dangerous to a careless wielder as to an opponent. The system also carries a body of knowledge about marma, the vital points, and the same masters have traditionally practised a linked healing tradition.
Legend & myth
Kathakali's origin story is usually told as a quarrel between two rulers, and it is worth enjoying as tradition rather than filing as fact.
The tale runs like this. The Zamorin of Calicut composed Krishnanattam, a cycle of plays on the life of Krishna. The ruler of Kottarakkara, wanting a troupe for a festival of his own, asked to borrow the performers — and was refused, in some tellings with the insult that his court would not be able to appreciate them. So he wrote his own cycle, Ramanattam, on the life of Rama, in the language of the people rather than in Sanskrit. From Ramanattam, so the story goes, Kathakali grew.
The elements are real enough — Krishnanattam and Ramanattam both existed, and Kathakali plainly descends from that milieu — but the snub itself is the kind of neat causal insult that oral tradition is very good at manufacturing, and the surviving evidence for the exchange is thin. Treat the rivalry as the frame the tradition chose for itself.
A second, quieter claim is often made about Kalaripayattu: that it is the parent of Asian martial arts generally, carried to China by the monk Bodhidharma, who is traditionally described as a south Indian prince. This is widely repeated and is not established. The Bodhidharma-to-Shaolin story is itself late and disputed within Chinese scholarship, and the leap from it to a specific Kerala lineage is an inference rather than a record. Kalaripayattu's genuine antiquity does not need it.
The third assumption is the one visitors bring in without noticing they hold it: that Kathakali is timelessly and necessarily male. It has been male, and for a long time — roughly three centuries in which the form was performed by men, and for most of that period by men of one high caste, since the caste restriction was not legally abolished until 1946. But that is a history, not a rule of the art, and it has been broken within living memory.
The dates are worth having. A women's troupe called Nadananiketan was formed at Thrissur in 1962 and lasted until 1968. The durable one came in 1975, when the Tripunithura Vanitha Kathakali Sangham was formed under the guidance of Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair and staged Kalyanasougandhikam with women playing Bhima and Hanuman — male heroic roles, in a form whose whole physical vocabulary had been built by and for men. Tripunithura, an hour from here, still has its women's troupe. The first documented woman to appear in a Kathakali performance is generally named as Kartyayini, from the same town.
You will very probably not see any of this at a Fort Kochi evening show, and that is worth saying plainly rather than leaving as an impression. What is staged for visitors here is the standard repertoire performed by men, which is an accurate representation of the tradition as it mostly is and an incomplete one of where it has got to.
One last thing, which is not a myth but is the detail nobody believes until they are told twice. The performers' eyes are genuinely red, and it is not make-up or a contact lens. Before going on, the actor places the prepared base of a chundappoo — the flower of Solanum, the chunda plant, also used in preparing holy water in Kerala temples — inside the lower eyelid, then rotates the eyeball until it settles. It stays there through the performance, holding the eye a vivid red, and is taken out as soon as the role is finished. The face is painted; the eyes are not. That is the difference between the make-up room and the transformation, and it is why the make-up demonstration is worth arriving early for.
Read the full history of Kerala Kathakali Centre 507 more words
History
Krishnanattam is credited to Manavedan, the Zamorin of Calicut, and is generally dated to the middle of the seventeenth century. Ramanattam is attributed to the Raja of Kottarakkara in the same century. Kathakali as a distinct form emerges out of that lineage, absorbing older Kerala performance traditions — the temple theatre of Kutiyattam, ritual forms such as Theyyam and Mudiyettu, and the physical training of Kalaripayattu, which is where its stance and footwork come from.
The form was then deliberately reshaped rather than merely inherited. Reformers associated with Vettathu Raja and, later, Kaplingadu Namboodiri are credited with revisions to the make-up, the costume and the staging that moved Kathakali away from its Ramanattam origins and towards the recognisable modern form. Its patrons were temples and princely courts, and for a long stretch its survival depended on them.
That dependence nearly killed it. As the old patronage systems weakened under colonial rule and into the early twentieth century, the tradition contracted sharply. The decisive intervention came in 1930, when the poet Vallathol Narayana Menon founded Kerala Kalamandalam, an institution that took Kathakali out of court patronage and into formal training — and, in doing so, preserved a form that had been close to disappearing. Kalamandalam remains the reference point for Kathakali training in the state.
Kalaripayattu's twentieth century runs on a similar arc. It is commonly stated that the British suppressed kalari training in Malabar in the wake of the early-nineteenth-century revolts, and that the art survived in secret before being revived in the 1920s alongside a wider revival of Indian cultural forms. The revival is well attested; the details and the reach of the ban are repeated more confidently in tourist material than the sources strictly support.
Fort Kochi's own role is recent and commercial. Dedicated evening venues staging shortened Kathakali performances with a preceding make-up demonstration developed here as Kerala's tourism grew from the 1990s onward, and they are now the ordinary way a visitor encounters the form. This is a genuine change in the art's setting: from an all-night ritual performance for an audience that knew the stories, to a timed show for one that does not. Both things can be true — that the compression loses a great deal, and that without it almost none of the people now watching would ever have seen Kathakali at all.
Why visit
Because the make-up room is better than the show, and almost nobody tells you that in advance. Watching a face be built over an hour, in silence, with a hand mirror on the floor, is the part visitors describe years later.
Because it is the one evening activity in Fort Kochi that is genuinely of the place rather than transferable to any beach town, and it sits within walking distance of most of the heritage quarter.
Because the mudra and navarasa demonstration gives you a key. Once you have seen an actor build nine distinct emotions on demand, and seen a few of the hand signs named, the performance afterwards stops being decorative and starts being legible.
