Aṅgulīyāṅkam, Rāmāyaṇa-Vēda of the Cākyārs

Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the Act of the Ring, is the performance of the sixth act of Śaktibhadra’s Āścaryacūḍāmaṇi according to the Kūṭiyāṭṭam tradition of Kerala. The Cākyār masters consider it as a ‘veda’ for pantomime, and for the traditional Rāmāyaṇa repertoire. They perform it as a kūttu, mono-action, according to their Malayalam acting manual (āṭṭaprakāram) for twelve days in five Kerala temples. On the base of this text and of its performance, this paper shows how the kūttu condenses almost the entire Rāmāyaṇa repertoire of Kūṭiyāṭṭam in a complex, unique and unifying structure, and analyses its epic dramaturgy. Johan underlines how the dramaturgy is based on arresting time either on the multiple levels of the dramatic fiction or on the level of the performance.