Chennai: It was one of the saddest days of the decade for Tamil cinema as the founder, director and playwright of Koothu-p-Pattarai, Na Muthuswamy passed away on Wednesday sending shockwaves across the industry. He is recognised as a pioneer in experimental Tamil theatre.
Some prominent names, including Vijay Sethupathi, Vemal, Pasupathi and Vidaarth, of Tamil film fraternity came to spotlight because of this sculpturer.
Born in Punjai, a village in Tamilnadu, Muthuswamy moved to the then Madras in the late 1950s. It was here that the often-corrupting forces of urban life compelled him to reflect on the relatively innocent and genuine nature of village life and customs.
Later, he began to write short stories on this theme. In the late 1960s, he abandoned prose to write for the stage, relying heavily on allegory. The plays that began to take shape were driven not by a linear narrative, but by a unique conversational logic that revealed the playwright’s penchant for creating poetic and highly dramatic pictures onstage.
In 1969, his production titled ‘Kaalam Kaalamaaga‘ (Time after Time) was hailed as the first modern play in Tamil stage history. Since then, over a dozen plays have followed.
His eight years of intense study of Theru-k-Koothu, the traditional folk street theatre of Tamilnadu, which left an indelible mark on Muthuswamy’s concepts of theatre, playwriting and theatrical training. These concepts led to the development of his new theatre group, Koothu-p-Pattarai.
His achievement was to simultaneously revive traditional folk theatre and create a new idiom for the contemporary stage based on movement and sound as the main vehicles of storytelling. Muthuswamy also has made an onscreen appearance in Seeman’s ‘Vaazhthugal‘ starring Madhavan.
The legendary playwright’s final rites were carried out in an artistic nature when Vemal, Pasupathi and Vidaarth banged ‘parai’ outside his residence and danced in folkstyle for over an hour on Wednesday.
| In 2004, Muthuswamy was interviewed by the ‘News Today‘. From our archives, we find it to be one of the copies to be preserved as an antique. He always wanted Koothu-p-pattarai to be a space of exposure. In his interaction, he had said, “Following Pasupathi and Kalairani making it big in the Kollywood, requests from numerous youngsters started pouring in, who evinced keen interest in joining the theatre group.” It was his wish to promote theatre art across various segments of the society. |
| MUTHUSWAMY’S INTENT |
| From the beginning, his plays depicted the destruction of personal identity by popular consumer culture through a method that infused folk theatre conventions, with a fresh and contemporary significance. The folk theatrical devices of the narrator, the mask, acrobatics and puppetry thus took on multiple meanings as intrinsic parts of theme and dramatic structure. While Eugene Ionesco’s creative output is typically viewed as an attempt to recapture lost innocence, Muthuswamy’s can be seen as a refusal to lose his innocence and individuality under the fragmenting forces of urban life. The influence of his native village Punjai, therefore, runs throughout many of his plays, revealing his steadfast resistance to the city’s narrow terms of acceptance and the intellectual impoverishment of modern India and many of her historical choices.
Abandoning the simple narrative plot, as individual human predicaments are not his main concern, Muthuswamy paints broad images of social and political transformation. Seeing the world as more than just a simple catalogue of discrete historical events, this playwright focuses not on the loss of Punjai and its ancient village-level innocence but on the urgent need for its recovery and affirmation. He has presented his plays in major cities of India and also outside the country. |
