Tulu Nataka: The Stage-Play Tradition

The coast has several kinds of drama. There are the night-long performances of Yakshagana, and the sung epics of the paddana tradition. There is a third kind that is easy to overlook: plays written down and directed in the Tulu language, much as in any regional theatre.

They go by the name Tulu Nataka. There is little published about them, so this page is short. It sets down what we could check.

Not Yakshagana

The words of a Yakshagana play are improvised around a sung story, as the Yakshagana page explains. A Tulu nataka is different. It has a script, a director and a cast. It is closer to a play in any other Indian language than to a Yakshagana night, and it is in Tulu.

K. N. Tailor and the Ganesh Natak Sabha

The best-documented name is Kadandale Narayana Tailor, born in 1939 at Kadandale in Karkala taluk, Dakshina Kannada, and a tailor by trade. Wikipedia says that he loved acting from childhood, and that the Ganesh Natak Sabha, which he founded in Mangalore in 1958, staged as many as 17 dramas across the country and abroad.¹

He was also a film maker. Wikipedia calls him “the first ‘superstar’ of Tulu cinema”, and says he wrote, directed and acted in as many as nine Tulu films. It adds that he was largely responsible for drawing people to the Tulu language, literature and culture through his plays and films.¹ His honours include the Karnataka Nataka Academy Award in 1989 and the Taulava Award from the Tulu Nataka Kalavidara Okkoota, an association of Tulu stage artists by its name, for his contribution to Tulu theatre.¹ He died on 18 March 2015.¹

Siri on the national stage

In 2015 a Tulu play about an epic reached a national audience. Siri was produced by the National School of Drama’s Bangalore centre and directed by B. Jayashree. It is based on the Siri epic and on a play by Na. Damodara Shetty. Chinnappa Gowda, the folklorist, did the research, and Praveen D. Rao composed the music. Students of the school acted in it, and it was first staged on 23 July 2015.²

It covers only the first part of the epic, up to the death of Siri. Jayashree speaks both Kannada and Tulu, though neither is her mother tongue.² The play is a clear case of a sung oral epic being turned into a scripted stage play. The Siri epic is told on Siri, the Princess Who Walked Away.

Still on stage

Tulu theatre has not disappeared. Dr. Devadas Kapikad is a Tulu film and theatre actor, director, writer, producer, lyricist and singer, and owns a drama troupe called Cha-parka.³ Like Tailor, he works in both theatre and film.³

What we could not find

Our research notes found no academic study of Tulu theatre, and our own searching found none either. We could not check several things the notes mention: the early playwright Madhava Tingalaya and his play Jan Marl, a historical play on Rani Abbakka, the figure of more than 1,000 shows for Tailor’s troupe, and the present state of the drama artists’ association. We have left them out. If you can point us to a source, we would be glad to hear it.

Related

• Yakshagana: The Coast’s Dusk-to-Dawn Dance-Drama, the improvised form that Tulu Nataka is set against
• Siri, the Princess Who Walked Away, the epic that the 2015 play dramatises
• The Koti-Chennaya Paddana: A Fourteen-Hour Epic, the other long Tulu epic

Sources & further reading

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

1. Wikipedia, “K. N. Tailor” (checked 9 October 2026): his birth, the Ganesh Natak Sabha, his films, his honours and his death.
2. Wikipedia, “Siri (play)” (checked 9 October 2026): the 2015 National School of Drama production.
3. Wikipedia, “Devadas Kapikad” (checked 9 October 2026): his work and his troupe.

All three are short Wikipedia articles, and two of them rest on news reports. There is no scholarly study behind this page.