Puppetry is serious business: Anupama Hoskere, an engineer, breathes life into this traditional art form

BENGALURU: The fear of loss of Indian culture, identity and arts led Anupama Hoskere down the puppet theatre route. A master’s in engineering (ME), Hoskere is director of Dhaatu Puppets, a non-profit committed to the promotion of puppetry. It’s important that the current Indian society has knowledge of its people, she believes. “I realised that puppet theatre was a fun and powerful way of talking about stories that would help people relate to their heritage.”
Hoskere feels the reason traditional art forms like puppetry struggle is because of the socioeconomic challenges India faced after Independence. However, in the late 1970s, Europe started offering scholarships for puppeteers to train and Hoskere was awarded the Erasmus Mundus scholarship to teach Karnataka’s classical puppetry to postgraduate students in Nice, Belgium and Paris. “The reason they asked an Indian puppeteer to teach this art is because we have a structure that can be taught at a university. It is holistic,” she says.

Hoskere, along with a crew of artists at Dhaatu, carves and designs the puppets herself. It’s a long process. Typically, the artists first select the wood, season it, design the parts of the puppet for movement, carve the case with required expressions and carve the limbs and body. Then they move to doing the joints, painting the face and body, stitching costumes and finally stringing the puppets.

Being in the puppet business is not easy as it struggles to stay relevant. While initiatives like puppet festivals, which Dhaatu organised recently in Bengaluru, are helping, the art needs an economic model. “It would be nice if I can pay decent salaries to the artists. I struggle every time we do festivals and declare that we have no more money left. But I cannot give it up,” Hoskere says.

An installation of the revived Bhagavata style puppets of Karnataka, along with the Gajendra Moksha puppets, which have been used at the Guimet museum in Paris, drew a curious set of crowds at the festival held at VR Bengaluru. “Along with four shows a day, featuring stories from the Panchatantra, we also conducted workshops and training for budding puppeteers.” To breathe life into the art and get more youngsters involved, Hoskere also conducts classes and hands-on interactions with artists at her Banashankari workshop. “My goal is to create a puppet cultural centre with a theatre, museum, library and workshop in the city,” she says.