Tholu bommalata

Tholu bommalata is the shadow puppet theatre tradition of the state of Andhra Pradesh in India with roots dating back to 3rd century BCE.

[11] This ancient custom, which for centuries before radio, film, and television provided knowledge of Hindu epics and local folk tales, not to mention news, spread to the most remote corners of the Indian subcontinent.

[13] The performance begins with a series of sung invocations and a line of ornate, strikingly stylized puppets pinned in overlapping fashion onto the sides of the screen.

Characters that engage in rough fighting, such as the monkey king Hanuman or the jesters, are often held from the hip, enabling them to be moved with greater control than by the central stick alone.

Every few minutes throughout the performance, the action will be broken by the episodes of broad comic relief from the jesters speaking in a slangy, quirky style and engaging in slapstick antics.

The musical instruments consist of a harmonium, a portable keyboard organ that sometimes serves only as a drone; a long, two-headed South Indian drum with tapering ends (mrudangam); strings of bells worn on the ankles and wrists; and pairs of finger cymbals.

A wooden shoe with stilts is used to keep its wearer above the mud during the rainy season, and can be struck against schoolchildren's seating planks to create dramatic clacking and banging sound effects for fight scenes.

Here was a method of enabling four or five people to bring a hundred or more colorful mythological characters to life in the most remote village, all accompanied by virtuoso singing, contagious rhythms, and dramatic sound effects.

Deer skin, noted for its strength and resistance to rough handling, is employed in the figures of the warrior Bhima and the ten-headed demon king Ravana.

But the shadow play was a brilliant innovation, one whose visual artifacts hold clues to the history of South Asian art and drama and deserve to be preserved for the delight of generations to come.