Mahabharata discussed in vernacular form

CHENNAI: A panel of six participants from Chennai discussed the last episode, Padukalam, of the epic Mahabharata with a set of scholars from Bloomington, US, at the IIT campus recently. However, it was a virtual meet as it was done through video conferencing. Members from the US team took part in the discussion from the American Folklore Centre in Bloomington.  What  made this discussion even more special was the fact that it was not the actual Mahabharata that was discussed, but a vernacular format, which is generally performed as a play, staged during the annual festival held in villages of Kanchipuram district.  The villages become a stage and the villagers participate in the play.  During the two-hour long discussion, titled ‘An Anti-War Sentiment in the Performance of Mahabharata, an Epic about War’, video clippings of the festival  were screened. The clippings were of scenes such as  the one in which the character Duriyodhana is killed. Another clipping was that of  Duriyodhana disrobing Draupadi. The international video conference was part of the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society. MD Muthukumaraswamy from India’s National Folklore Support Centre, explained the concept of Padukalam while Udhaya, a storyteller from the village, explained various aspects of performing the act. One of the participants, Brenda Beck from the University of Toronto, observed the similarities between the Padukalams in Annanmaar Kadhai (her course of study) and the Mahabharata. “The protogonist in Annanmar Kadhai was able to resurrect the dead by chanting some mantras, while Duriyodhana also tries the same,” she said. Catherine Kerst from American Folklife Centre, who chaired the session at Bloomington, wondered about the multi-model reality of the whole play and MD Muthukumaraswamy explained to her that the participants keep shifting between the play, the festival and reality.