World Theatre Day: A Peek at the 600-Year-Old Legacy of Assam's One-Act Vaishnava Plays
Since the predecessors of the revered 15th century saint Sankardev wrote in verse, he can rightfully be called the first playwright from Assam for writing 'Ankiya Naat' with dialogue.
![World Theatre Day: A Peek at the 600-Year-Old Legacy of Assam's One-Act Vaishnava Plays](https://cdn.thewire.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/27155305/bhaona-assam.jpg)
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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New Delhi: In the thick of the 1990s insurgency in Assam, the evenings would invariably be long and silent.
Long, because no one would dare step out post sundown, fearful of coming in between the state and non-state actors caught in a fierce combat. Those nights spent at home from the early evening till dinner time seemed never ending. Devoid of people, the streets would often be filled with stray dogs whose howls would occasionally break the prevailing silence.
On several winter nights though, that silence would be broken by the sounds of Khol and Taal, the two primary musical instruments of Assam linked deeply to its Vaishnava legacy. In between the music, voices would float home, of a narrator – the Sutradhar – delivering dialogues in a sing-song manner about good demolishing evil in Brajabuli, a literary dialect that can be traced back to at least 600 years in the state.
In silence, families in little towns would sit on verandahs to listen to those renditions drifting in from the neighbourhood naam-ghar, the Vaishnava temples – drawing from them shards of not just faith in good winning over evil as propagated by those dialogues, but also a sense of normality that had existed in the pre-insurgency years.
In normal times, many of the same listeners would have been spotted at the naam-ghars, watching intently those renditions commonly known in Assam as Ankiya Bhaona or Bhaona. The Bhaona performances, though presented throughout the year, would be particularly staged during November, coinciding with the Raax (Raas) festival celebrated at the hub of the Vaishnava monasteries, Majuli Island.
![](https://cdn.thewire.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/27155549/A-still-from-a-Bhaona-Photo-wikimedia-commons.jpg)
A still from a Bhaona. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The Bhaona performances are typically based on Ankiya Naat, a legacy of one-act plays that revered Assamese saint Sankardev (1449-1568) began in Assam by writing six plays to be used as an instrument to establish a new religious denomination, the Ek Sarana Nama Dharma, as against the rigid and exclusionary Brahminical Hinduism sweeping through the region then. His principle disciple, Madhabdev, too went on to write a bunch of Ankiya Naat including shorter plays, the Jhumura, in which songs are an integral part and at times even dialogues are in a song.
Together with Sankardev’s Ankiya Naat, these plays form the traditional core of dramatic performances in Assamese society.
First Assamese playwright
Like in Bengal, the modern Assamese drama too drew inspiration from western plays in the 19th century. But the tradition of writing a play in Assam is one of the oldest in India. Sankardev, as early as 1468 CE, had readied his magnum opus ‘Cihnna Jatra’, a pageant of painted scenes depicting the seven Vaikunthas (heavens in Hindu mythology). Those paintings became the backdrop of a dramatic performance. He had put together that performance at age 19. There were trained performers to depict the pageant, and songs and dance were added to the act. The play was written before he embarked on a pilgrimage to mainland India.
Noted Assamese public intellectual Hiren Gohain, who has researched and written extensively on Sankardev, had termed him the first in India to have written a play in a regional language in prose till the advent of the British.
After Cihnna Jatra, Sankardev wrote six more plays – Patni Prasada, Rukmini Harana, Keli Gopal, Kaliya Damana, Parijat Harana and Rama Vijaya. In the recently published history on the rich legacy of mobile theatres in Assam, Theatre on Wheels, authors Jayanta Kumar Sarma and Kishore Kumar Kalita had pointed out that Rukmini Harana, Parijat Harana and Rama Vijaya have more dialogues than the other Ankiya Naat of Sankardev, and, therefore, they could be called full-fledged dramas with “definable plots, characters and dialogues”.
![](https://cdn.thewire.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/27155649/Vaishnava-saint-Srimanta-Sankardev-Photo-wikicommons.jpg)
Vaishnava saint Srimanta Sankardev. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Of the six plays of Sankardev, only Ram Vijaya was based on the Ramayana, and the rest on little Krishna. The religion he propagated celebrated Krishna in his child form – the reason why Radha as his consort is not a venerated figure in Assam like she is in several other Vaishnava traditions.
Types of Bhaonas
Here, it is worth a mention though that while these plays are now commonly referred in Assam as Ankiya Naat and Bhaona, late Maheswar Neog, a repository of immense knowledge on Assamese dance, plays and music, had underlined that the early Vaishnava writings in Assam didn’t refer to them as so, and that Sankardev himself had denoted his dramatic creations as nata, nataka or yatra, and also nritya. He had called the actors Natuwa or Nartkaka.
The Bhaonas in Assam are largely of two types – Ankiya Bhaona or the plays written by Sankardev and Madhabdev; and Bhaona or the other plays penned by the Vaishnava monastic heads after the two gurus. While the language of the Ankiya Bhaona is invariably in the Brajabuli dialect, the rest were either in Brajabuli or in pure Assamese. Neog had pointed out that akin to the 17-18th century Kerala when one had to write a Kathakali play in order to be known as a poet, in post-Sankardev Assam too, it became an imperative on the abbots (Satradhikars) in a number of Satra (Vaishnava monasteries) to also write a religious play to be recognised as worthy of their position. That vibrant practice of play-writing gave birth to a number of plays and performances that went on to be known as Bhaona.
Parts of Assam also have a fascinating tradition of presenting Hejaria or Bare-chahariya Bhaona, and Dhura Bhaona. Neog had pointed out that the Hejaria (a thousand) version had been named so because more than one dramatic performance would take place simultaneously. These performances would be typically held in the dry season on the paddy fields (pothar) after the harvest. “A part of an extensive field is cleared of the paddy stumps and made even by the collective labour of a number of villages agreeing to organise the show. If twelve plays are to be produced, a large pandal (platform) is built to consist of a central circular or twelve-faceted ground plan covered by a wood and bamboo three-terraced structure at the centre, and twelve constituent pandal, all radiating out from that central structure,” he wrote. As indicated by him, community labour was used to decorate that central structure where a throne of sorts would be placed to put the Vaishnava holy book Bhagawad Purana to make it look like the manikut, the sanctum, at a naam-ghar.
Neog had further explained that on the third terrace of that structure, 12 smaller pedestals (thapona) or trays (sarai) were placed “where too a holy scripture of like description (Bhagawad Purana) was put in each”. The entire structure would be covered with straw. A pitcher-like superstructure (kalash) would be placed at its centre to look like a temple. “The constituent pandal are built each by a village or a group of villages having to put up a bhaona,” he had added.
Interestingly, the Dhura Bhaona had sprung out primarily in Upper Assam during the British era presumably to thwart the considerable impact of Bengali Yatra plays on the local population.
Traditionally, an Ankiya Naat or Bhaona would be staged at the naam-ghar or at times under a robha (temporary shed). During Madhabdev’s era, at the revered Barpeta monastery, he had also built a separate house, bor-ghar, to stage his plays Bhojana-Vyavahara and Dadhi-Mathana.
Still, in a typical setting, the hall of the naam-ghar, particularly at a monastery, would become the auditorium for the plays, leaving out a narrow lane up to the sanctum so that the musicians and the actors could easily enter and depart a scene. Next to the pillars near the manikut, seats would be arranged for the monastic head, his guests, and elderly villagers. While the rest of the audience would fill up the remaining part of the auditorium, a section of it is exclusively for women and children. Since the principles of Sankardev’s dharma were egalitarian, the audience would be composed of all strata of society.
Typically, these plays open with a musical component called Dhemali (literal meaning in Assamese would be playful) before the narrator enters the stage to announce the subject of the play, and then on conducts the whole show, weaving in dances, songs and interpolating them with his explanatory commentary.
The play would end with a mangala bhatima, a panegyric of the hero with good wishes to the audience.
The green room
Both at the naam-ghar or under a robha, there had also been the concept of greenroom, called cho, to carry out the make-up of the actors and also to stock the accessories required during the play, say, the clubs, swords, bows and arrows, and also the masks worn by actors to accentuate the makings of a particular characters. This is the reason Majuli has a rich tradition of mask-making. Though the masks are today made of bamboo and mud, there was a time when they were made of wood, like those worn during the performances in Buddhist monasteries.
The fall
The crumbling of the Ahom kingdom, first due to the Burmese invasion of the early 19th century, and the subsequent entry of the British in Assam to help the Ahoms chase away the Burmese, caused a huge disruption in everyday life in Assam. The practice of staging Bhaona too was affected by the times. Neog had particularly highlighted that noted Vaishnava dramatist Lakhsminath Dvija, in his drama Kumara-Harana, had wished that their patron, the Ahom king Chandrakanata Sinha who had lost his kingdom to the Burmese, would return to power.
Though the British defeated the Burmese, they soon appended Assam to their existing territory in the neighbourhood, the Bengal Province, and began imposing a different administrative set-up. In the colonial era, with the advent of Bengali Yatra plays in Assam, channelled by Bengali imposed on Assam as an official language, the Bhaona, underlined Neog, “came to be much maligned as a form of rustic amusement in spite of its classic qualities”, thus pushing it back to remain confined within the Vaishnava monasteries and in some rural and semi-urban belts.
Till day, this rich heritage of classical drama has not been able to find too many takers from among the modern drama practitioners in Assam to be willing to add some of the imports to their performances.
Still, in the ’90s era, it was not uncommon to spot a store or two along the highways of Assam which would rent out costumes of traditional characters for Bhaona. Those stores would hint the existence of a parallel dramatic culture and practice in the small towns and villages of Assam. Today those stores are a rare sight.
In the 1990s insurgency days, a news reports that had moved several in upper Assam was about harassment meted out by the security forces to a bunch of Bhaona performers and narrators returning home after a late evening performance at a naam-ghar. The report had said that the performers couldn’t speak Hindi properly and began singing and playing the Taal and the Khol instead to convey to those men in boots that they were artistes out for a recital. Yet they were beaten up, leading some to comment then, “The days of the Maan (Burmese) are back.”