For my non-Tamil speaking friends, this email's subject line might have sounded odd. It is because it is the transliterated title of an old Tamil book. It means something like "My Life in Drama" as in stage plays. It can also be understood as "My Fake Life". Pun is certainly intended by the author. Thought will write a note about this Tamil book, for many interesting reasons.
I came across this book in an article I was reading on the Tamil magazine website solvanam.com. Since it sounded interesting and is readily available to download as a public domain PDF version, started reading it. This is supposedly an autobiography written by a legend in Tamil stage plays, called T.K.Shanmugam, who lived from 1012 to 1973. You can read a quick excerpt about him at
It was written/published more than 50 years back and appears to be based extensively on the daily diary he had kept. So, it read more like a series of diary updates rather than a cohesive thesis or a well put together story. Every couple of paragraphs or page had a subsection title, as each one talked about a particular event or activity, without too much of a continuation from one subsection to the next. After a few pages I was getting a little tired with the flow and the prose. But then realized I actually need to step back to understand the overall ideas in the book on my own, rather than depending on what the author is saying page by page. Once this realization set in, I started enjoying the read.
I was intrigued to note that even after using English as my first language for the past 3+ decades, I could read a book in Tamil much faster than I can one in English. Granted this book is certainly light reading, compared to something like Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay. Still, this book is more than 560 pages long and I was able to read it in 2-3 days. You can either say my Tamil is still much better than English or perhaps my English will never improve to be any good till the end of my life. 
The author TKS had joined a company when he was just 5 years old and had started performing. He has written about his life as a traveling performer and subsequently as a theater company owner, spanning 50 years from pre-independence British colony India days to the post-independence Republic of India years. Similar to traveling circus groups that were popular during the first half of the 20th century in the US, there were these theater groups that were popular in India, particularly in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Each one of these companies had a long name something like Madurai Saraswati Ghana Vinoda Nadaga Sabah. Many companies had the Madurai prefix, which refers to a famous temple town in Southern India that was historically known for poetry, literature and theater. They felt it gave them an aura of credibility, irrespective of whether they are originally from Madurai or not!
Each group probably consisted of close to about 100 people, that constituted of actors, musicians, stage designers, organizers, accountants, cooks, managers and so on. Owners who invested money, traveled with the group and managed day-to-day affairs or employed managers and stayed in their home bases. These groups used to put together a play that could be based on one of the Indian mythologies (such as The Ramayanam, Mahabharatham or a subplot from one such mythology), or based on historically popular brave Indian kings & queens or based on contemporary societal issues that were on the forefront in those days. These groups are often called "Boys Company". Many even had that term in their company names. It actually indicated that most of the actors in these companies were 10- to 20-year-old boys. It is amazing to realize that 12, 13-year-old boys memorized hundreds of pages of dialogues and songs and then performed as full-fledged actors on these theater productions, playing both male and female roles. The tutors in the company used to teach them how to sing and act. Newbies will start performing small roles and depending upon their abilities, graduate to bigger roles, finally ending up with the lead roles on multiple plays. They are often required to memorize lines (author refers to "lines" as "paadam" in Tamil, which means "lesson") for both hero and heroine roles as they may be required to switch roles depending upon the play/company/actor availability & requirements! Those who play female roles routinely used to grow long hair to make the makeup part easier to complete. While they did employ few women actresses, since keeping young women in payroll and taking them around had its own complications and safety issues, they preferred men (or actually boys) playing female roles.
Similar to circus companies in the US in those days, these companies used to move from one town to another every few weeks. Once a town is picked, they will find a stage for which they will pay rent, find a big house where most of the company members would stay (this is referred to as company house) and start practicing. Food will be cooked and provided by the company to all the employees on a daily basis. These stage plays will start around 9:30 p.m. and we'll go on till 2:00, 3:00 a.m. in the morning, thus lasting about 5 to 6 hours or even more! It is common for these young actors to even sleep in between and then wake up to return to the stage to finish off performing their roles. Shows will not be held on weekends but more on weekdays. Audience used to finish their work and then head over to these temporary theaters to see these elaborate shows.
There were a lot of very intriguing and interesting facts that are sprinkled around the book. For example, it was customary to print notices with interesting hook lines, exclaiming why a particular character that is part of the play is laughing or crying and encouraging people to come and see the show to find out the answers. When the company TKS belonged to moved into a small town (circa 1923), they were told that in that town there are no printing presses to print anything and so it is not a practice to distribute notices to advertise the play. The author TKS being a 11-year-old boy, was afraid to ask the elders in the company as to how else would they advertise the play in that town. But he subsequently comes to know that outside the building where the show was being performed, half a mile away, there was a marked location to explode loud firecrackers. Around 7:00 p.m. they would explode 3 firecrackers that would send out loud booms, heard by people in the nearby towns and villages in the next 5-to-10-mile radius. This will serve as an advertisement and notification that a drama company is in town performing plays. Hearing these loud booms, people will walk over or come in small carriages to the location, buy the ticket and watch the play that runs through the night.
In the early days, there was no electricity. So, they used what are called Petromax lights. Since even these are expensive, they used to have just 4 such lights. One in front of the theater, one in the back where actors were putting on make-up and two on the stage to light the stage up. That's all the lighting they had for the big production! Author talks about difficulties they had walking from company house to the building where the show was taking place in the dark, in unpaved village mud paths, worried about animals or snakes attacking them! Usually, one elder in the company will carry a lantern and lead the walk, while everyone else will just follow that person walking in the dark. Sometimes plays used to be staged in the middle of the ground, with people sitting around (like amphitheater) as well. As the decades passed by, they moved on to more solid stages, electric lighting and lot of stagecraft involving electricity, elaborate pulley systems to show mythological characters flying, floating on clouds and so on. It was also customary to stop the play before the final scene, to allow local patrons/village heads to come and give presents (like gold medals) to the actors and then continuing with the last scene to complete the play. Picture of the book's cover page shows TKS with four different looks. He is in the middle with glasses, performing as the Hindu God Krishna on the left, as a king/warrior and as a female Tamil poetess named Avvaiyaar on the right. Since his performance in this role was so spectacular and the play was such a big success, he was given the title "Avvai" and so was known as "Avvai Shanmugam".
Since these were the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the growth of this industry is quite closely tied up with Indian freedom fighting movement to get freedom from the British, promoting societal values such as women's education, widow's remarriage and so on. Author write with so much of exuberance about seeing national leaders & freedom fighters such as Gandhi, Nehru, Rajaji, singing in front of them, interacting with many others. Since motion pictures were also showing up to compete in the entertainment realm, these companies, actors, and owners were often involved in producing movies based on their plays. In many years/towns, collections for the shows used to be so bad that they need to frequently move to find greener pastures or switch shows from one to the next within a day to try to make more money. If the movies they produced were successful, they plowed the profits back into these productions. Many of the political parties in Tamil Nadu having understood the power of this mode of mass communication, routinely used this medium to promote their ideas and principles. Many of the show authors subsequently became political leaders, and Chief Ministers of the state. Since one division of the political party considered themselves as rationalists who were atheists, they were often opposed to productions based on Indian mythologies with Hindu Gods. Still the drama companies and the atheist politicians got along, tolerating each other as they were also often staging plays that tried to push the society in the right direction that they both could agree on.
It was amusing to see practically every name the author mentions (as actors, musicians, writers, tutors, supporters, that would run into hundreds) has their caste name listed as the name's suffix. This was very common in those days and was practically a mark of respect, though it sounds so anachronistic today! Another amusing thing I noted about the names were the double initial. In the state of Tamil Nadu in India, there is no concept of family name. Each one is given a name (my name was Sundararajan) that will be preceded by the first letter of the father's given name (in my case Vedantham) as the person's initial (and so my name in school certificates were V. Sundararajan). Occasionally my classmates (or even my Dad) used to have two initials, referring to their hometown, etc. My Dad's official name is A.D.Vedantham, where A refers to the town where he grew up in (Ariyakudi) and D refers to my paternal grandfather (Desigan). In my school days, out of 30, 40 kids in my class, usually a couple will have two letter initials. But practically every person this author refers to (including himself) had two initials!
There is so much more to write, such as the ease with which TKS and three of his brothers, learned different languages to bring in plays from other languages in India, how they wrote down occasional English dialogs in Tamil, memorized and delivered them precisely earning kudos, so many jokes (someone's hair piece coming off exposing the boy playing girl), dangers (stage props falling down occasionally injuring actors), difficulties (local mafia asking for a cut in collection without which they won't let the production go on), the immensely satisfying literary (Shakespeare like) Tamil poetry and songs they wrote/sang, new drama conferences they conducted and prizes they instituted to nurture the trade and so on. I was also amazed to hear that each show they put together was done only after receiving proper written permission from the author and for each show performed, they provided royalty to the author. This is especially impressive, since Indian movie stories were often copied from Hollywood or other places without any copyright attribution in the 1980's, which is getting corrected now, since anything produced anywhere in the world is visible everywhere else.
When I was growing up, movies had mostly taken over and so stage productions had dwindled and morphed considerably. I have seen many live historical/mythological/contemporary productions. But they used to be just one show performed with the support of a local cultural association, not a 25 or 50 day runs conducted by the show's own company. In the 80's these shows became mostly contemporary comedies that were cheaper to produce. These are still on since there is no Broadway type shows permanently being staged in India though different Indian states still have smaller production houses staging plays. But I do fondly remember couple of big historical productions of this kind I have seen in the late 1970's that were really impressive with their elaborate costumes, sets and magic tricks performed on the stage (e.g. to show a ghost, they will have smoke going up on the stage, on which they will show slides or projection of a ghost, etc.).
Write back about equivalent practices/shows/customs you grew up with or have heard of during the last century wherever you live.
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