TRADITIONAL MEDIA AND SOCIAL MESSAGES
Theatre and Communication in Tamil Nadu

Kanchipuram is a dusty, provincial town in northern Tamil Nadu in
India. It is famous for its ancient temples and mata -- a
religious institution whose influential leaders are widely
respected and, moreover, regularly consulted about various issues
by a number of people including important politicians. However,
recently an altogether different part of Kanchipuram's cultural
heritage has received publicity in the regional and national
media for it is also the base of a unique association which
promotes the interests of professional artists of the
Kattaikkuttu folk theatre.

By Hanne M. de Bruin

This association is a grass-roots-level initiative started by
local actors and musicians who have little or no formal
education, meagre incomes and a low social status. It functions
as a intermediary between the official bureaucracy and "theatre
companies" -- groups of artists who work together for a theatre
season. The association runs a theatre school for children and
young people, it organizes an annual theatre festival and is
involved in the development of innovative plays on environment,
health, and gender equality. During my fieldwork on the
Kattaikkuttu tradition as part of my PhD research, many
performers expressed their need for better income prospects for
artists and for the introduction of new, young talent in order to
save the theatre from dying out, in addition to the necessity for
formal co-operation between performers to enable them to get
better access to the Indian bureaucracy. The performers'
association is the tangible result of their commitments and my
catalytic presence as a researcher probing into their profession
and lives.

POPULAR THEATRE AND NEW ISSUES
As a popular theatre with an inherent capacity to accommodate new
issues, a successful informal organization, and as a number of
professional exponents with vast communicative skills,
Kattaikkuttu appears to be an appropriate medium for the
effective transmission of development-related messages. The oral
nature of the theatre fits the communicative strategies of
largely illiterate rural audiences, while at the same time it
offers scope to adapt a play to the demands of a particular
performance context. Furthermore, the production of new plays
which are staged during the theatre's off-season provides an
additional income for the performers.
The use of traditional media for the communication of social
messages is not new. The communicative potential of these media
was already being widely recognized in the 1970s, and various
cases in which folk media were utilized for formal communication
activities in different Third World countries have been
documented. In spite of these attempts, folk media have not
become integrated on a more systematic basis into regular
development programmes. Many of these programmes pay only
lip-service to the pivotal role of communication in the
successful 
implementation of their activities, if they recognize it as a
communicative component at all. Communication and extension
activities are often not planned in advance as an integral part
of the programme, and sometimes there is not even a budget for
such activities.
Accurate, practical knowledge about the transmission of new
concepts through audio and visual media to target-groups still
deeply rooted in predominantly oral cultures is limited. Yet, in
the academic world an enormous amount of research has been
carried out on oral traditions, and on the multimedia character
of these oral expressions. The time seems ripe to use this
reservoir of data by re-applying them to the praxis of
transmitting messages to audiences with a large oral residue. The
IIAS therefore proposes to organize a seminar in which the
communicative potential of the performing arts will be explored.