Dressed in an oversized crown and a billowing costume, Ravana is a swirl of red, white, green, and gold. He bellows a verse, shaking his fists at the moon – no friend of the lovesick. Frustrated in love, Ravana tries every possible gambit to take charge. He pleads with the moon. He taunts it – the moon is no match for Sita’s radiant beauty. In a last attempt at bluster, Ravana roars at the moon – threatening to topple it from the sky. Finally, tired, he gives up and slumps down to brood.

I was used to seeing Sanskrit and Prakrit plays in their natural habitat – the insides of a book, where the dialogues and verses cohere in neat harmony, all acted out in the reader’s mind-heart. Seeing the same familiar plays in the hands of the Kudiyattam actors, with their tendency to fly free from the text had always unsettled me. How could they stop with performing a single act, a single verse even? Where was all this histrionic material coming from? What does it have to do with the play-in-the-book? These are some doubts that returned to haunt me as I watched the Kudiyattam maestro, Margi Madhu play Ravana for a packed auditorium in Jerusalem earlier this summer.

Kudiyattam is a theatre form like no other. It is only in the last half-century that hereditary performers have stepped out of the oil-lamp twilight of the temple dance-halls (kuttambalam) to the limelight of the proscenium stage. If you are lucky, one full verse, or a couple of lines in Prakrit or Sanskrit are performed during a performance that lasts several hours. The actor first recites the verse. This is followed by an exercise in interpretation – through a precise, intricate code of gesture, a cipher that has signs for every object, every word, right down to the grammatical suffixes.

All of this is at a pace that some would call deliberate, some others glacial. So far, so good. These are elements one sees elsewhere – in dance, theatre, or cinema.

It is after this that the real wacky stuff begins. The actor, sometimes standing up, often settling down on a three-legged stool, elaborates the backstory of their character – Shurpanakha, Ravana, Hanuman, Subhadra or any of the other, absent characters. No longer declaiming, they express solely through bodily expression framed against the thrumming backdrop of the mizhavu drums. A solitary oil lamp abetted by the actor’s eyes, tinsel ornaments and chutti jaw-plate, casts a moving mosaic of light and dark. And it is all at a pace you would not think possible. Time turns viscous, trickling out through the opera of feelings laid bare by the character.

And it was in one such viscous moment, looking at and feeling with a gleaming despondent Ravana that it dawned on me. Sanskrit theatre – be it on page or stage – is not about telling stories. There are no plot twists, no spoilers, and the narrative arc doesn’t matter. Instead, it is about exploring the geography of emotion – that elusive domain of experience that we all think we know intimately, first-hand; but very many of us struggle to transact in it. Without resorting to the taxonomies of temporary (sancari) and stable (sthayi) moods, or debating the hierarchies of mood (bhava) and rasa, the Nangiyar and Cakyar actors have mastered the language of feeling – a wordless vocabulary that they weave into the most moving bodily poetry.

Steel claws flashing, Madhu conjured up not only Ravana’s lunar fulminations, but also the constellation of sentiments he went through. One cannot but travel through the character’s mental and affective landscapes – at whatever degree of vicariousness. As the performance ends, you walk away feeling a bit sore. Sore in body from sitting that long, sore on the insides from exercising emotional muscles you didn’t know existed. So, this is what all that noise over theatre (natya) and literature (kavya) is about.

Naresh Keerthi is Assistant Professor of Sanskrit Studies. He is interested in the kavya and natya literature of Sanskrit and Prakrit, and their mutual interactions with the many literary cultures of South India.