Pebet - a scream

Performance Analysis of Pebet

As I wait for the word file to open and sit idle after watching a stimulating and brain scratching recorded performance of Pebet, I hear a rhythm of a drum from the lawns of Lohit hostel nearby. And quite involuntarily, I started tapping my hands to match the rhythm. Such, I think, is the power of rhythm; it can engulf anyone’s attention and make an impact. This was used precisely by H. Kanhailal, with a convergence of folklore, graceful gestures, and ethnically-rooted movements. Heisnam Kanhailal, a Padma Shree and a Padma Bhushan awardee and an art theatre transformer experiments in his Kalakshetra Manipur theatre laboratory with new forms of ‘language’ of theatre. He has adapted the Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’ in his theatre which uses minimal props and abandons lavish costumes, sets and even at times the theatre space. Kanhailal’s Pebet, originally a folklore fireside story, which has been passed down by generations only through smriti[i], is a story about a bird, Pebet and her children and a cat.   

In the folklore, the Mother Pebet has seven children and the cat tries to whisk them away from her tactically. But, Mother Pebet boosts his ego by praising him until her kids are ready to fight. When the children are trained and ready to face the world, she confronts the cat. The cat is successful in capturing one of her children. Nevertheless, through her cleverness, she manages to free her child from the cat and the cat vanishes from their lives. A fable with a typical happy ending has been used tactfully by Kanhailal in his adaptation of Pebet. He alters it to make a critique of the encroachment of Vaishnavism on tribal based ethnicity of Manipur in the early 18^th Century and its after-effects which Manipur suffers even today. This play, first performed in 1974 by Kalakshetra Manipur, invited a great deal of criticism and was also called ‘anti-Hindu’ and ‘anti-national’.

The recorded performance of Pebet, features Sabitridevi, Kanhailal’s wife as Mother Pebet, her five children, and a cat, performing on a stage with lights and minimal set. Kanhailal has adapted the cat as a Brahmin, by using saffron costumes, rudraksha beads in his hand and several bells round his neck and of course, the sacred janeau. Whereas, Mother Pebet is dressed in a blue costume which is draped in traditional Manipuri style. The first few scenes and last one is quite the same as it is in the folklore; it is somewhere between the beginning and the end that Kanhailal does magic with the play. When the younger one of Pebet’s children is captured by the cat, he starts forcing and training him to his rhythm ‘shamu-kaka, lili-kaka’. He then awards him with one of the bells (symbolic to the bell in the temple, considering himself as the superior) that he wears around his neck and asks the younger one to lure his other siblings and bring them to him. As the play proceeds, the cat is successful in seizing all of Pebet’s children and he makes them do various ritual masked bizarre activities. However, towards the end, as if a dream, the four of her children walk back to the mother, but the younger one remains within the clutches of the cat. That’s when the original happy ending is placed, where the cat asks Mother Pebet ‘how should I eat your child’ and she sings a song to the cat, which the cat follows blindly and in the process the younger one too, comes back to its mother.

The play begins, with Sabitridevi, humming delightfully in the center stage. Her gestures are human like, but her leg dips up and down, like a bird. Through her actions, it is conveyed that she is expecting her babies. She starts humming three notes in various pitches; first, it sounds soothing, but as she proceeds the notes sound excruciating and are very sharp, resembling a mother delivering a child. We also see a red light in the background which adds to the painful event and gives a shade of dawn. Her body postures and gestures of holding the stomach and arching back are loud and are seen in silhouette against the red light. Around her we see five actors lying down curling themselves, depicting a child in the mother’s womb. Here, I feel, this scene is extremely crucial to the play as it creates a concrete emotional anchor in the audience, by actually showing childbirth and further how they mature with time.

The performance is predominantly non-verbal, besides a few conversations. The performance is wholly uplifted with the diverse rhythms created with certain syllables like ‘ha-pebet-te-tu’, ‘shamu-ka-ka, lili-ka-ka ’, ‘hey-hiieh-heh, and ‘nga-raau’ and different natural sounds. The act is gestural, psycho-physical and has fluid movements with the natyadharmi fashion where modes of representation are stylized.

Another interesting scene from the play is the scene where the cat approaches Mother Pebet’s nest for the first time and asks her ‘how handsome am I?’ Pebet responds by singing a song in his praise. While singing this song she does certain actions that the cat imitates, which seem like the cat (the Brahmin)  tries to reflect her actions intending that he is one of them. This imitation of her actions is not seen in the further repetitions of the same scene, as the cat starts becoming impatient. As the play unfolds, the actions of the brahminical cat like making the kids lick the toe, setting them against each other, making the strongest one of them break wings of others, kids licking his arse, etc. make evident the atrocities and awful conversion of the tribal into Vaishnavism. During all these acts taking place, the cat keeps on muttering ‘shamu-ka-ka, lili-ka-ka’ in a mantric rhythm, thereby ritualizing the actions and masking them as pure and as a devotion to God. Similar pattern is observed during the famous ‘janani janma bhoomi’ scene, where a Sanskrit shloka ‘janani janma bhoomischa swargadapi gariyasi’[ii] are used to provoke the children and the cat orders them to throw stones at their mother. The reference of the shloka, its rhythm, and tone used in the particular scene lose their actual meaning and is propagated as an order from the Brahmin forming false connotations. It is ironic and atrocious to see that while muttering these word, the children throw stones at their mother who is calling them to come back to her.

There is a great deal of discussion and criticism about each and every aspect of Kanhailal’s Pebet. It is a fusion performance, with an amalgamation of art forms like the movements adapted from Thang Ta[iii], mimetic representation of the bird and the cat through hand gestures and body postures and the rhythm. Pebet is a small sparrow-like bird, which is not seen in the recent times and might have become extinct. But let’s hope that with Kanhailal’s Pebet, we might be able to create an awareness about the extinction of the Manipuri culture.

---

[i] Smriti is that which is remembered and reproduced by people through vocal; which is not written down.

[ii] Sanskrit shloka ‘janani janma bhoomischa swargadapi gariyasi’ meaning ‘mother and motherland are superior to heaven’ uttered by Rama in Ramayana.

[iii] Thang Ta is a term used for an ancient martial art known as ‘Huyen Lallong’. The art developed as a result of the war environment in Manipur as Christian era began. Thang means ‘art of sword’ which emphasizes on lowering of one’s body near to ground to enable a spring like action for expansion and attack. Ta means the ‘spear’, emphasizing on opening out of body in two forms; to stimulate the expanse of the sky and to emulate the expanse of the earth at ground level in order to reach out to all directions of space. 

~ Aishwarya Walvekar