Kutiyattam, Kerala's Sanskrit Theatre, Was Inscribed by UNESCO in 2008 and Can Stretch One Act Over Days and a Full Performance to 40 Days, With a Single Actor Conjuring a World From Eyes and Hands

Kutiyattam is the Sanskrit theatre of Kerala, played in temple theatres by actors who can spend days on a single act of a play. UNESCO proclaimed it a masterpiece of the world’s intangible heritage in 2001, inscribed it on its Representative List in 2008, and describes it as “one of India’s oldest living theatrical traditions”. A complete performance, UNESCO says, may last up to 40 days.

Three communities on one stage

The word comes from Malayalam. Sahapedia’s overview, written by the scholar Sudha Gopalakrishnan, explains that kuti means “together” or “combined” and attam means acting, so Kutiyattam is combined acting: several roles sharing a stage. UNESCO’s archive note adds that it is the only form of theatre in India where men of the Chakyar community and women of the Nangiar community perform side by side, with percussionists from the Nambiar community.

Kerala Tourism says the Chakyar men supply the male cast and the Nangiar women the female cast, that the Nangiars also play the cymbals and recite Sanskrit verses, and that the Nambiars play the mizhavu, a large drum. Sahapedia’s article on the mizhavu adds that Chakyars also take the major female roles, with Nangiars playing heroines and maids in some plays. The sources also differ on the Nangiars’ community: Kerala Tourism calls them women of the Chakkiar community, while the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s annual report and Sahapedia’s mizhavu article call them women of the Nambiar community.

Kaladharan writes that the mizhavu is shaped like a big jar, made of copper or clay (clay ones are seldom seen now), with a leather-covered mouth, and its player sits in a wooden case. V. Kaladharan, the publicity and research officer of Kerala Kalamandalam, calls it the single major musical instrument of Kutiyattam.

The stage itself is a kuttampalam, a theatre built inside a temple compound. Sahapedia says these were presumably built between the 12th and 17th centuries and lists them at Thrissur, Guruvayoor, Irinjalakkuda, Kidangur, Thrippunithura, Chengannur and Harippad, with a newer one at Kerala Kalamandalam. Kerala Tourism names Koodalmanikyam temple at Irinjalakkuda and the Vadakkumnathan temple at Thrissur as the main centres where Kutiyattam is still performed every year.

One act becomes a play of many nights

Kutiyattam does not stage a Sanskrit play from start to finish. Sahapedia explains that it takes a single act, gives it its own name and performance score, and lets it run for days. Mantrankam is the third act of Bhasa’s Pratijnayaugandharayana, and Anguliyankam is the sixth act of Saktibhadra’s Ascharyachudamani. Its repertoire draws on Bhasa, Harsha, Saktibhadra, Kulasekhara, Neelakantha, Bodhayana and Mahendravikramavarman, and Sahapedia adds that the plays of Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti are not traditionally part of it. Sahapedia also records that Ganapati Sastri retrieved Bhasa’s plays from Kerala in 1912, where they had survived in performance as individual acts.

The longest single acts are works of endurance. Sahapedia puts Anguliyankam at about 41 days and Mantrankam at about 40 nights, and says three plays on the Ramayana (the Ascharyachudamani and Bhasa’s Pratimanataka and Abhishekanataka) once made a 21-act cycle that took a full year. The Sangeet Natak Akademi’s report counts Mantrankam at 41 days, and adds that such a run is now almost impossible to give in a temple, so the full performance has almost disappeared.

David Shulman, the Hebrew University scholar, saw Anguliyankam staged in August 2012 by the Nepathya troupe of Moozhikkulam, a village in central Kerala, over 29 nights and about 130 hours. In the Ramayana’s telling, Hanuman crossed the sea to Lanka and found Sita in Ravana’s garden, carrying Rama’s ring. On stage a single actor plays Hanuman and every other person Hanuman recalls, while a Nangiar seated at the left of the stage speaks Sita’s few lines and keeps the beat on cymbals. Most of the 29 nights go to Hanuman’s long retelling of what has happened since Sita was taken, with stories from other parts of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata woven in. Shulman, writing in The New York Review of Books, says performances range from 12 hours to over 150 hours, and that this act had not been given in full by that troupe for two generations. The wider story of Hanuman is told in tuput’s article on the mountain-carrier.

Eyes, hands and a lamp

UNESCO says the theatrical language is stylised and codified, with neta abhinaya (acting through the eyes) and hasta abhinaya (the language of hand gestures) prominent. The act, in UNESCO’s wording, lies in elaborating a situation or episode in all its detail, which is why a single act can take days.

Sahapedia’s overview and Kerala Kalamandalam describe the devices that make this possible. The actor can step out of a role and take on others in turn, a device called pakarnnattam, without changing costume. The comic role of the Vidushaka speaks in Malayalam, the regional language, and has licence to joke with the audience, while the other roles use Sanskrit. The real performance texts are the stage manuals: the attaprakaram, which sets out movement, recitation, gesture and elaboration, and the kramadeepika, which covers staging, costumes and the payment of artists. Kerala Kalamandalam adds that all of this follows the fourfold scheme of acting set out in the Natyashastra: movement of body and limbs, speech, emotion, and make-up and costume. The Natyashastra itself is the subject of an earlier tuput article.

Shulman describes how each performance opens. In the purappadu, or “setting out”, the actor uses pure stylised movement to bring a whole world into being, from Brahma down to the smallest ants, and then offers invisible flowers to the beings he has made. On the last night he takes the world apart again by dropping the last burning pieces of wick on the stage and bowing full length toward the god in the shrine. There are almost no props, he writes, apart from a small wooden stool, and a three-wick oil lamp burns throughout. UNESCO and Kerala Tourism both note that the actor’s role keeps a sacred side, with purification rituals beforehand and a lamp on stage that stands for a divine presence.

How old it is

UNESCO says Kutiyattam originated more than 2,000 years ago, as a blend of Sanskrit classicism and Kerala’s local traditions. Sahapedia gives the same figure, about two millennia, and also says the way Kutiyattam is acted differs enough from the practice described in the Natyashastra that scholars often treat it as a regional variation.

Kerala Kalamandalam’s department page gives a narrower, evidence-based date. It says the first stage performance of Kutiyattam backed by reliable evidence dates to the 10th or 11th century, when King Kulasekhara Varman composed two plays, Subhadradhananjayam and Tapatisamvaranam, and practitioners and some scholars believe the humorist and scholar Tolan guided Kulasekhara Varman in staging them. Shulman, for his part, describes a tradition surviving intact for more than a thousand years. These are different questions, when the form began and when its first firmly documented performances took place, and the sources do not close the gap between them.

Ten to fifteen years of training

UNESCO says actors train for 10 to 15 years, learning breath control and fine control of the muscles of the face and body. Margi Madhu, a leading performer from Moozhikkulam, told Sahapedia in 2015 what training at Margi in Thiruvananthapuram looked like when its Kutiyattam centre opened in 1981: he and two other students rose at 4:30 to recite verses in a low stance, learned parts of the purappadu from 8:30, had Sanskrit classes in the afternoon, and practised eye and hand movements in the evening. Teachers had them repeat a movement or verse until they were satisfied.

At Kerala Kalamandalam, he said, the diploma later followed a fixed syllabus of six years for male roles and four for female roles, and four years for the mizhavu.

From temple servants to schools and a UNESCO list

Performance manuals stayed, in UNESCO’s words, the exclusive and secret property of selected families until recent times, and the art was tied to temples. Sahapedia says there were once 18 families in the profession and the number has fallen to five, and that temples supported the performers with grants of land and payment for each performance. UNESCO says patronage collapsed with the feudal order in the 19th century and that a revival in the early 20th century was followed by a new shortage of funds.

The opening-up came in steps, all documented by Sahapedia, Kerala Tourism and India Art Review:

• 1949: Painkulam Rama Chakyar performed outside the temple.
• 1965: Kerala Kalamandalam started a Kutiyattam school that admitted students from outside the Chakyar community, over what Sahapedia calls heavy opposition from conservative sections and from the Chakyar community itself.
• 1980: Painkulam Rama Chakyar led the first trip abroad, with 13 artists from Kalamandalam.
• 1981: Margi opened its Kutiyattam centre, with Ammannur Madhava Chakyar as visiting teacher, Moozhikkulam Kochukuttan Chakyar as resident teacher and three students.
• 1982: the Ammannur Chachu Chakyar Smaraka Gurukulam at Irinjalakkuda was revived, and from 9 to 26 December that year the temple’s Koothambalam staged Asokavanikankam, the fifth act of the Ascharyachudamani, with the Ammannur family’s masters taking part and the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s team recording it on video.

Kerala Tourism credits Margi’s initiative with the UNESCO proclamation, and the Akademi’s report says UNESCO named Kutiyattam in 2001 and that the Akademi (see tuput’s guide to the classical dances it recognises) opened its Kutiyattam Kendra in Thiruvananthapuram on 27 May 2007. UNESCO’s archive note lists five institutions responsible for handing down the tradition. India Art Review reported in May 2026 that the Koodalmanikyam temple’s Manikyasree Puraskaram, awarded at its annual festival, went that year to a Kutiyattam artist, G. Venu, a disciple of Ammannur Madhava Chakyar who is credited with reviving the Ammannur gurukulam and with a Kutiyattam production of Kalidasa’s Sakuntalam, which the article says was anathema to the Chakyar community. Kalidasa and his play are the subject of tuput’s article on the poet.

Where it stands today

UNESCO’s inscription text says Kutiyattam is once again facing a lack of funding, leading to a severe crisis in the profession. Shulman wrote in 2012 that a few dozen highly trained performers were active in Kerala, many living hand to mouth, and that the 29-night staging he saw drew about 20 to 30 spectators on most nights.

For visitors, Kerala Tourism’s page on Margi says Kutiyattam, Nangiarkoothu, Chakyarkoothu and Patakam are taught and staged at its Valiyasala centre in Thiruvananthapuram, and its 2014 article on the form names the Koodalmanikyam and Vadakkumnathan temples for annual performances. Schedules change, so check with the institution before travelling. Another UNESCO-listed tradition that stages the Ramayana, in a very different way, is Ramnagar’s Ramlila, played out of doors across a town.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi’s report for 2015-16 says its Kendra could run only minimal activities for want of funds. It had still held 97 programmes by 31 March 2016 at the Government Museum in Thiruvananthapuram, fortnightly since August 2012, and had added monthly shows in Kannur, Harippad and Kochi, giving priority to young artists from outside the traditional communities.