The drum in the cage

In the koothambalam at Ambalappuzha — the temple theatre — there is a large copper drum standing on the timber floor inside a steel cage. On the plinth in front of it, in painted red and blue Malayalam, is a label. It reads: ചരിത്ര സ്മാരകം — historical monument — മിഴാവ്, and beneath that, that it was used by the great poet Kunchan Nambiar, who inaugurated the Thullal movement.

That is the temple’s own account, painted on its own floor. It is also, if the tradition is right, the instrument at the centre of one of the better origin stories in Indian performing arts.

What a mizhavu is

The mizhavu is a large copper pot-drum, played standing, and it is the percussion of Koodiyattam and Chakyar Koothu — the temple theatre traditions of Kerala, among the oldest continuously performed drama anywhere. It is not an accompaniment in the casual sense. Playing it is a hereditary office, and the drum itself is treated as a sacred object.

The night the poet fell asleep

Kunchan Nambiar, in the eighteenth century, was the mizhavu player at a Chakyar Koothu performance at this temple. And during it, the story goes, he dozed off.

The Chakyar noticed. Chakyar Koothu is a form in which the performer is licensed to mock anybody present — that is the whole point of it, a ritually protected right to satirise, extended even to kings — and he used the licence on the sleeping drummer, in front of the audience, at length.

The reply

Nambiar did not argue. He went away and came back with an entirely new art form.

Ottamthullal is a solo performance: one man, painted and costumed, dancing and singing a story in fast, plain, colloquial Malayalam that an ordinary audience can follow without a gloss — where Koothu proceeded in Sanskritised language for the educated. Its verses are funny, rapid and mercilessly satirical, and a great deal of the satire is aimed at exactly the sort of people who had just humiliated him: the pompous, the learned, the well-born.

He is said to have staged it for the first time here, at Ambalappuzha, in answer.

What makes the story more than an anecdote is that Thullal took. It became, and remains, one of the most popular performing arts in Kerala — a form invented in a single act of wounded pride that turned out to be the thing the audience had been waiting for, because it was in a language they actually spoke.

The rest of Ambalappuzha’s literary weight

Nambiar is not the only one. Melpathur wrote his Prakriyasarvasvam — a grammatical work, not the devotional poetry he is better known for — at Ambalappuzha. Ezhuthachan’s Adhyatmaramayanam Kilippattu, the text that did more than any other to shape modern Malayalam, is traced to a Telugu Ramayana read at this temple. For a shrine best known to visitors for a cup of sweet payasam, it has an unreasonable share of the language’s foundations attached to it.

Nambiar himself is said to have died at Ambalappuzha, of rabies.

Seeing it

The drum is in the koothambalam, on the temple’s ground, behind bars and clearly labelled, and you do not need permission or a guide to find it. It is worth a minute of standing still. Most objects in Kerala temples are venerated for what they are. This one is kept because of what somebody said about a man asleep behind it.