Purusha Vesha: The Comic Koti-Chennaya Play

When the twins Koti and Chennaya appear at a shrine, they appear as daivas, and people watch in awe. In Purusha vesha they appear as characters, and people laugh.

Almost nothing has been written about it. This page sets down what the folklorist B. A. Viveka Rai wrote of it in 1996, and what can and cannot be said from that.

What it is

Rai describes Purusha vesha as a folk theatre that is “not as religious” as the kola or nema, the bhuta performances. The Koti-Chennaya story is sung in it, but in a different spirit.¹

It is one of the nine settings in which Rai lists portions of the epic being sung, set beside the Baidarle nema, wedding rituals, work in the fields and leisure time. It is the one he describes as satirical.¹ The epic itself is covered on The Koti-Chennaya Paddana: A Fourteen-Hour Epic, and its story on Koti and Chennaya, the Twin Heroes.

Who performs it

Rai’s colleague Vamana Nandavara collected the version from two informants, Monta and Erappa Gowda, who take the parts of Koti and Chennaya. It runs to about 24 hours.¹

The twins themselves belong to the Baidya or Biruva community, whose traditional work is toddy tapping, and the Biruva community treats the epic as an expression of its own identity.¹ The men who play them here are Gowdas. Rai does not say why, and we have found no source that does.

What it makes fun of

Rai says the Purusha dance “ridicules the traditional folk religion, including bhuta performances”.¹ The men do not recite the entire paddana. The part they perform is sung jointly, in alternating lines, and Rai describes it as a product of this kind of theatre. In his words, the message of the paddana here is relaxation and not ritual effectiveness.¹

There is one puzzle in his account. He gives the version as about 24 hours long, but says the men do not recite the whole paddana, while the whole epic runs to about 14 hours.¹ He does not explain the difference.

A cousin: Pursere Kattuna

Another custom has some of the same ingredients. Pursere Kattuna is a night-long dance of troupes who go from house to house at the full moon of Suggi. It was mainly started by the Tulu Gowda community, and Koti and Chennaya are among its costumed characters. The resemblance is real, but we found no source that says Purusha vesha and Pursere Kattuna are the same thing, or that one grew out of the other.

What we could not find

We found nothing on where and when Purusha vesha is performed now, and nothing on whether the 24-hour version Nandavara recorded is still sung. The only account we have is from 1996.

Related

• The Koti-Chennaya Paddana: A Fourteen-Hour Epic, the epic and the nine settings in which it is sung
• Pursere Kattuna: The Night Dance of the Suggi Full Moon, a Gowda-led night custom with Koti and Chennaya among its characters
• Yakshagana: The Coast’s Dusk-to-Dawn Dance-Drama, the other stage form that has taken up the epic

Sources & further reading

The books and articles behind the numbered notes on this page.

1. B. A. Viveka Rai, “Epics in the Oral Genre System of Tulunadu”, Oral Tradition 11/1 (1996): 163–172 (read in full): the nine settings, the Biruva community, and the Purusha dance and its 24-hour version.

This is a single source, written in 1996. The page on Pursere Kattuna uses Wikipedia, a Wikimedia blog post and a short Wikipedia article on Siddavesa.