Kutagara Or From Mens House To Mansion In Eastern India And South East Asia

SR No.: 269707
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: W B Bollee
Publisher: W B Bollee
Total Pages: 25
Language: English
Classification: Article
File Size: 5 MB

Page 20

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each scene; in so doing he either reveals or conceals the ritual acts from the point of view of the spectators who as non-initiates sit in front of the white screen (kelir) separating the sacred from the profane world in the shadow play. The leather puppet show (wayang kulit) is old- though we have no textual evidence for it before ca. 1000 A.D. and clearly bears South Indian influence. Its performances symbolize the cosmos, reactualize mythical events and connect the spectators with their real and adopted ancestors, i.e. the heroes of the Indian epics, divine beings, just as the Natyaśāstra - the theatre handbook prescribes a divine comedy as the original piece treating cosmogonic events on a human scale.
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Returning now to our point of departure we can say that the kutagara originally was a men's house the horseshoe-shaped front of which represents the open mouth mukha-vatti - of the initiation demon; in the South it is still called simha-mukha, as we have seen. Now it also becomes clear why the rafter ends teeth are mostly represented vertically. Further, in view of the fact that the religious orders are in the first place men's sodalities, it should not surprise us that the Buddha and his monks live in kutagaras in the forest, just as the sacred men's houses are usually situated outside the village, and that the doors are guarded, most often by fabulous monsters, against incursion by the uninitiated. The Buddha is also an initiator: the monk Kassapa calls himself his son born from his mouth (Samyutta-Nikaya II 221,23).
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The Jain rock monument of Rani Gumpha in Orissa shows that in India, too, there was still a connection between kuţâgara and cult drama, for a long frieze containing dramatical episodes runs along the outer walls of the upper storey. Percy Brown
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