Putul Yatra (An Exhibition of Indian Puppets)

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Putul Yatra, an exhibition of Indian puppetry, was initially mounted on the occasion of Sangeet Natak Akademi's golden jubilee festival in New Delhi in 2003. Since then this exhibition has travelled in different forms to South- East Asian and European countries like Bangkok, Spain, Moscow and South Korea. In India, the exhibition has been to Mumbai and Lucknow.

The selection for the exhibition has been made with a view to facilitate a basic understanding of the range and forms of puppetry in India. String puppets, rod puppets, shadow puppets, and glove puppets are found widely distributed in the country, and we have included in this exhibition a fair sample of this typology manifested in forms of a wide variety. These are string puppets here from the Indian states of Assam, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa and Rajasthan; puppets manipulated by both rods and strings from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu; rod puppets from Orissa and West Bengal; glove puppets of Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Orissa; and shadow puppets from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Orissa and Tamil Nadu.

While these are all traditional puppets, a small selection of puppets created by modern puppeteers in India is also included in the exhibition. In some of these puppets, the influence of the Russian puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov who still remains an inspiration in India is plainly to be seen. To bring alive the performing art of puppetry, demonstrations by puppeteers from Rajasthan (who are widely distributed all over northern India) are featured in the exhibition, in addition to videos of puppet theatre from Sangeet Natak Akademi's audio-visual archive.

Like artefacts from any other culture, the puppets here on view are more than mere material objects. They speak to us through diverse narratives of India's variegated past, the values enshrined in India's culture, and remind us of the message of peace and harmony that India has always sent out to the world.