“Kuttu paathi, kottu paathi,” says Perungattur Po Rajagopal, a professional Kattaikkuttu theatre artist, playwright, and the founder of Kataikkuttu Sangam in Punjarasantankal Village near Kanchipuram. It translates to “Kuttu is half singing and half music.” As a mukavinai player in the Kattaikkuttu orchestra, I couldn’t agree more.
The word kuttu is also spelt as koothu. However, the Kattaikkuttu Sangam uses Kattaikkuttu as its standard spelling. This article follows the same convention. Further, the Tamil Lexicon online dictionary uses diacritical markings to transliterate கூத்து to kūttu.
What is Kattaikkuttu?
Kattaikkuttu is a traditional Tamil language-based musical ensemble theatre form popular in the north and central districts of Tamil Nadu. It combines iyal (words) and isai (music) into visual performance (naadakam or kuttu). All-night performances take place during village festivals and as part of death rituals.
Plays are based on the Mahabharata, Ramayana and Puranas. Kattaikkuttu is also known as Therukoothu (or Terukkuttu), even though historically the latter term referred to a mobile performance that is often a part of a temple procession. Nowadays both terms are used interchangeably to denote all-night narrative performances.
The term Kattaikkuttu comes from kattai (wood) and kuttu, referring to the use of wooden ornaments worn by heroic male characters to symbolise their royalty and valour. Today there are different stylistic lineages within kuttu. I am trained in Po Rajagopal’s style, which is sometimes referred to as the Perungattur bani.
In this style, performances are accompanied by three musical instruments: a pedal harmonium to provide pitch and melody, a mridangam and dholak providing rhythm and the mukavinai — a small double-reed wind instrument.
The sound of the mukavinai is high-pitched and loud, reaching out to audience members seated far away. Kattaikkuttu continues to thrive in villages because sufficient actor-singers take up professional theatre. However, trained musicians, and mukavinai players in particular, are difficult to find.
Several reasons prevent young people from opting for a career as a mukavinai player: the long duration of performances, relatively low payment and the fact that playing the mukavinai carries a stigma associated with caste and the production of saliva.
While many other instruments have found their own space in society, the mukavinai has not. Nowadays the instrument is used only in some styles of Kattaikkuttu.
Historically, there is evidence that the mukavinai formed part of the chinna melam used by the rural Devadasi community until it was eventually replaced by the flute and the clarinet (and later the violin) due to a lack of players.
As a result, the mukavinai remains invisible to larger audiences and certainly has not caught the people’s imagination.
Why does the mukavinai matter?
My own journey with the instrument began when I joined a Kattaikkuttu gurukulam as a ten-year-old child. The gurukulam was founded by Rajagopal and theatre research scholar Dr Hanne M de Bruin. This residential school offered rural children, including girls, for the first time, the chance to learn kuttu in combination with a formal education in a safe environment exempt of caste, class, gender and social discriminations.
Like many students, I was trained in acting, singing, and movement, but I was particularly drawn to the sound of the mukavinai. Over time, I began learning to play it while also continuing my training as a Kattaikkuttu performer. The instrument became not just part of my artistic practice but also a way to understand the deeper musical structure of Kattaikkuttu.
I realised the importance of the orchestra, especially the mukavinai, when I played the instrument for the first time in an all-night performance in Duli village near Cheyyar taluk in Chengalpattu district.
I was 13 years old and it was the first time I was to be part of an all-night Kattaikkuttu performance. That all-night performance taught me the roles and responsibilities of the Kattaikkuttu ensemble.
Prior to the performance, Rajagopal had trained all of us for months to perform Draupadi Kuravanci, a play that forms part of Kattaikkuttu’s elaborate Mahabharata repertoire.
Kattaikkuttu’s soundscape
In the Perungattur bani, the pitch of the mukavinai is 4½ kattai (F# octave scale). However, pitches and ways of playing differ from style to style.
In the Perungattur style of Kattaikkuttu, the mukavinai is pivotal in creating the typical Kuttu sound. Kattaikkuttu is an unamplified theatre tradition. The sound of the mukavinai is loud — and it is meant to be so. Its sound conveys emotions that can travel across open village grounds and reach audiences sitting far away from the stage.
In Kattaikkuttu we have the munnani, which refers to the actor-singer or singers on stage, and the pinnani (chorus). The role of the mukavinai is like that of the pinnani: chorus-like, it repeats the lines of the lead actor-singer. In addition, it provides transitions between the different stanzas of a viruttam (eight-line recited-verse).
When Kattaikkuttu actors are on stage, they wear heavy wooden ornaments and costumes specific to each character. They have to sing and dance at the same time and often run out of breath or become tired in the middle of the performance. In such instances, mukavinai players elaborate on ragas, perform jati—short musical compositions structured around tala and raga—and play musical interludes that boost the actor-singers’ energy and provoke emotions in the spectators.
In addition, other than in a musical concert, elaborations or alapanais are rendered only for a few minutes so as not to break the flow of the narrative or affect the (waiting) performer’s energy.
The knowledge of playing the mukavinai used to be transmitted orally to the male members of the Navithar (barber) caste, who are categorised in the state as Most Backward Class (MBC). Because of this community-based transmission, the instrument has remained relatively unknown outside the world of Kattaikkuttu.
The Kattaikkuttu Gurukulam has opened up playing the instrument to members of other castes as well as to different genders. However, in spite of these efforts, today, only a handful of musicians continue to play it professionally in Kattaikkuttu performances.
Despite its powerful sound and unique role in this theatre tradition, the mukavinai remains one of the least documented instruments in south Indian music and performance traditions.
My work, supported and guided by the Kattaikkuttu Sangam, the Sumanasa Foundation and TM Krishna – a Carnatic vocalist, author and activist – focuses on creating a respectable space in society for the mukavinai. It allows me to transmit the practice of playing the instrument to future generations of musicians and explore novel repertory and performance venues.
Currently I am teaching the mukavinai to students of the Kattaikkuttu Diploma course, a 10-month residential training programme of the Kattaikkuttu Sangam. For me, the mukavinai is more than a musical instrument. It is my independent voice when I play and also the voice of Kattaikkuttu — a sound that carries stories, emotions, and the memory of generations of performers. When kuttu flourishes, keeping its kottu, or musical voice, alive through the sound of mukavinai is both a responsibility and a privilege.
Author bio: Sasikumar Panchu is a mukavinai practitioner and a Kattaikkuttu theatre artist and researcher. His research on the Kattaikkuttu’s musical ensemble focuses on studying the mukavinai and revitalising and transmitting its musical knowledge and practice.
