Described for centuries as repulsive and evil, Shoorpanakha, a minor but significant character in the Ramayana, finds the spotlight in renowned Kathakali artiste Dr. Sadanam K. Harikumar’s latest production.
By Akshaya Pillai
It is a little difficult to place my finger on the exact point in my memory where I first encountered Shoorpanakha. Could have been from an Amar Chitra Katha panel, all thick black outlines and unwavering expressions, stark enough for even a child to know whom to trust and whom to fear, or from the stories my father summoned from memory night after night, or through the televised epic serials that drifted through our living room on Sunday mornings. But the Shoorpanakha of my childhood had impossible fingernails. Long and curved and yellow. Sometimes she had fangs too. The forests of the Ramayana felt crowded with beautiful people. Rama was beautiful. So were Sita and Lakshmana. Even Ravana possessed a certain grandeur. His sister Shoorpanakha, however, was always repulsive, across formats.
Years later, speaking to veteran Kathakali artiste Dr. Sadanam K. Harikumar over a patchy phone line that crackled its way out of monsoon-soaked Palakkad, I heard a version of Shoorpanakha’s story in which she had a son, and I was startled by how strange this sounded to me. Shoorpanakha stepped out from behind the caricature I had inherited as a child and began accumulating details; a son, a love story, a heartbreak, a sense of grief and longing, until I wondered how an entire person had managed to disappear behind a story of good triumphs evil. What if Shoorpanakha’s story did not end with the cutting off of her nose? That is the question at the heart of Harikumar’s Shoorpanakhankam, which arrives at the NCPA with a cast of five characters, four musicians and a three-member make-up team.
Drawing from a lesser-known Puranic tradition rather than the familiar retellings of the Ramayana, Harikumar’s production revisits one of Indian mythology’s most misunderstood women. Here, Shoorpanakha breaks free from merely being the demoness. She is not eternalised for her humiliation. She is a mother in mourning, a woman grappling with rejection and a character asking difficult questions about justice. “Shoorpanakha came to Panchavati not in pursuit of Rama but in search of news of Shambhu Kumara, which is when Lakshmana reveals to her that the young man—her son—has been killed after offending Sita,” Harikumar narrated. Shoorpanakha returns after the war has ended and Rama is preparing to leave for Ayodhya, to ask a question that seemed to me far more unsettling than any curse: “Was the punishment you gave me for loving you just?”
The choice of production feels consistent with Harikumar’s body of work. The senior artiste has spent decades returning to characters who arrive burdened by reputation or flattening. One of his earliest productions reimagined the relationship between Arjuna and Urvashi. Since the late 1980s, the Kathakali scholar has staged reinterpretations of Shakespeare’s Othello and Julius Caesar, less interested in exonerating his characters than in understanding them on their own terms. “I interpret these characters through their own perspectives, not mine,” he said. “I try to find justification in their actions.”
During a five-year stint teaching Kathakali at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, he also turned increasingly towards painting and sculpture, practices he continues alongside performance; perhaps another way of approaching a character through form, colour and shape rather than narrative alone.
Harikumar’s consistent exploration of alternate readings and marginalised voices has not always been easy in a scenario where many Kathakali practitioners remain within established interpretations and repertories. “Most people are happy enacting what was composed years and years back. It is just like a kind of nostalgia,” he noted. “They feel safe.” Audiences, too, often gravitate towards the familiar. New interpretations can be unsettling, particularly in classical forms that are closely tied to tradition, yet Harikumar believes that discomfort is necessary. People equate Kathakali with its costumes nowadays, he lamented. “Kathakali is not only about the costumes. It is something spiritual. It is as much about the mind, as it is about the body.” The observation comes from someone who has spent more than a decade designing Kathakali costumes and experimenting with chutti, the elaborate white facial frame that helps define a character’s visual identity on stage.
When I asked the 68-year old artiste about his process, he did not speak of innovation or reinterpretation or any of the words we tend to reach for when confronted with revisiting familiar stories. “I want to find the truth in their actions,” he said. This sounds deceptively simple until one considers what it asks of a form like Kathakali, where characters often arrive before audiences, bearing centuries of accumulated judgment.
Kathakali, after all, is built on a visual language that rarely leaves room for ambiguity. The virtuous hero enters in pacha, his face painted green, the colour of nobility and restraint. Villains and anti-heroes announce themselves through red streaks, knifeshaped patterns, blackened features and elaborate facial constructions that tell the audience who they are long before the musicians begin to narrate the story. The system is brilliant, economical and deeply theatrical. It is also, at times, unforgiving.
A little research throws up a painted figure of Shoorpanakha in the National Crafts Museum collection. What strikes me first is the tilt. The figurine does not stand upright so much as lean into the frame, her head angled, shoulders slightly slumped, as though she has been caught in a moment of waiting. Her skin is painted a dense black. Her breasts are bare. Above her rises a tall, tapering crown, almost architectural in its geometry, widening at the top into a series of scalloped curves. What is most striking, however, is not her monstrosity but her weariness. The figure appears almost burdened by the elaborate crown she wears, by the story she has been asked to carry. “In Koodiyattam also,” Harikumar told me, “Shoorpanakha is depicted with black skin, elongated breasts, elongated headgear and such things. But there are some Ramayana versions where she is considered as a beautiful woman with the name Meenakshi.”
Harikumar is the first Kathakali artiste to earn a PhD, a fact he mentioned without fanfare, though a certain pride entered his voice when he spoke about Shaapamoksha, one of his productions, being published in an international journal by the University of Hawai’i. Over the years, he has written over 20 Kathakali attakathas, among them Chitrangada, Karnaparvam, Shikhandi and Shoorpanakhankam, building a parallel repertoire of stories that sit slightly apart from the traditional canon.
The resistance, he said, has rarely come from younger performers. “Youngsters very much like to perform my productions. They like being challenged.” It is the older generation he worries about. “Some of them don’t want to have anything new, they don’t want to change anything. They just want to do the same thing, same thing, same thing.” Then, he laughed. “That’s like reading Ramayana in the month of Karkidakam.” The joke requires a little translation. Karkidakam, the rain-dimmed final month of the Malayalam calendar, is traditionally when many households in Kerala return to the Ramayana, reading the text from beginning to end. The comparison feels apt because Karkidakam is a season of repetition, of returning to familiar texts and ironically this year Harikumar will return to the Ramayana too in Karkidakam, at the NCPA, only through the eyes of the woman most versions hurry past.
Harikumar tends to answer questions with poetry. Perhaps this is unsurprising for someone whose artistic life has rarely remained within a single discipline. Besides performing, he sings, composes, paints, sculpts and writes. At one point, he reached for lines by Ayyappa Paniker to describe the future of Kathakali, reciting them in Malayalam with the ease of someone pulling a familiar object from a shelf. Later, he arrived at a metaphor of his own that seems to explain much of his life’s work. “Everyone wants to excel at this art form, and there is space for that,” he says. “You can draw to your heart’s brim. But it is expected that you don’t leave a signature at the bottom of the canvas. That is the norm.”
For Shoorpanakhankam, the signature is visible even before the performance begins. Harikumar has designed a new headgear for the character and dressed her in a blue skirt and peach jacket. And of course, the dense black face paint has been swapped for green. Small interventions perhaps, but then most artistic signatures are small at first, visible only to those who know where to look. By now, however, it is difficult not to see the costume as an extension of the same question that animates the production itself: what happens when a character, long imprisoned within a single image, is finally allowed to step outside it?
This article was originally published in the July 2026 issue of ON Stage.
