Ravan Chhaya: India's Oldest Shadow Puppet Theatre

A Name With Theology in It

The name Ravan Chhaya does not name the hero of the story. It names the condition of the storytelling itself. It is named after Ravan, as it is believed that Rama, a divine and illuminated being, does not cast a shadow. This is not a minor distinction. It is a philosophical position embedded in the form's very identity, the acknowledgement that shadow theatre, by its nature, belongs to the world of appearances, of things that are real but not absolute and present but impermanent and therefore cannot contain the fully divine.

That theology produces a specific dramatic consequence. The puppet form of Ravana is much larger than that of Rama, with greater dramatic impact, casting an impressive shadow on the screen. The villain is the most visually powerful presence in the play. The god is relatively small and modest in shadow. The entire moral universe of the Ramayana is inverted on the screen, and yet the story told is entirely orthodox. The form and the content exist in productive tension with each other, and that tension is part of what makes a Ravan Chhaya performance, at its best, something that no other telling of the Ramayana can replicate.

How Old Is It, and Where Did It Come From

The history of Ravan Chhaya is not settled. The history of Ravana chhaya remains unclear, with different scholars offering different theories regarding its origins. Some have traced its roots to the third century BCE, while some have attempted to date it by tracing it as an influence on wayang kulit, the shadow puppetry tradition of Indonesia, which dates back to before the tenth century CE.

The literary evidence is substantial. References to shadow plays appear in Odia literature, including Sarala Das's 15th-century Mahabharata, Balaram Das's 16th-century Ramayana, and works by 17th- and 18th-century poets such as Dinakrushna Das, Upendra Bhanja, and Abhimanyu Samantasimhara. Terms like chitrapata, pattachitra, and bimba often denote shadow performances. The tradition was clearly established and understood long before any of these texts were written.

The text that gave Ravan Chhaya its present narrative form is the Bichitra Ramayana of Biswanath Khuntia, a 17th-century Odia poet. Ravan Chhaya follows the Odia version called Vichitra Ramayana by Vishvanath Khuntia, a seventeenth-century music-making poet. Khuntia's text, composed in lyrical Odia verse, gave the puppeteers a song-narrative that could be performed to music, and the marriage of his poetry with the shadow puppet tradition produced the form that has survived to the present.

The Puppet and How It Is Made

The central object of Ravan Chhaya is the puppet itself, and the puppet is unlike anything in the other Indian shadow traditions.

The puppets of Ravana Chhaya are made of untanned deer hide and are not articulated. Their movements are depicted through simple gestures. A bamboo split is attached vertically along the center of the puppet, which allows the puppeteer to both keep it stable and manipulate it.

The choice of untanned hide is significant. The 20 to 25 centimeter high figures are cut from three-millimeter thick goat or sheepskin, which is used for most characters, but god figures are made from deerskin and demons from stag skin. The material classification is itself a ritual one. Different categories of character require different materials, and the knowledge of which hide is appropriate for which figure is part of the craft knowledge that passes between generations.

The puppets are treated ceremonially, being blessed before they are first used and cremated with the ashes strewn in a river when they become worn out and unusable. The puppet has a life cycle. It is born into use through ritual, and it dies through ritual. In between, it is a performer with a sacred status that is entirely distinct from the objects we typically call props.

Perforations are used to create facial characteristics and detail the costumes and ornamentation. Held against the lamplight, these perforations become points of brightness within the silhouette, making the figure not simply a flat shadow but a patterned presence, light and dark simultaneously. A skilled puppeteer can produce, from a single unjointed flat figure, the impression of a character walking, fighting, grieving, or exulting by varying the angle, the distance from the screen, and the rhythm of movement.

A retelling of the entire Ramayana can require up to seven hundred puppets. Multiple versions of the same character are made to represent different emotional states. There is a Ravana in rage and a Ravana in grief, a Sita in captivity and a Sita in joy. The seven hundred puppets are not a cast of seven hundred characters. They are a vocabulary of seven hundred emotional-dramatic moments, and the puppeteer is the grammarian who arranges them into a story.

The Performance: What Happens on the Night

Ravana Chhaya performances are held at night, the shadows of the puppets being projected onto a white curtain against the light of an oil lamp. The performance begins with the breaking of a coconut and with invocations to the Hindu gods Rama and Ganesha.

The stage is a cube-shaped structure of bamboo poles, roughly eight to ten feet on each side, with the white screen stretched across its front face. Traditionally, an oil lamp placed a foot from the screen provided light, casting flickering shadows that enhanced the drama. Today, electric bulbs often replace the lamp, but the essence of shadows dancing with light remains. The flicker of the original oil lamp was not an accident of primitive technology. It was a feature. The moving flame made the shadows move even when the puppeteer was still, giving the figures a quality of presence that no steady electric light can replicate.

The story of the performance is narrated in prose by a narrator called the gayak, who is accompanied by two singers. A band of orchestra sits either in front of or behind the stage with their musical instruments: the Khanjani, a tambourine; the Daskathi, two flat pieces of wooden board struck together; the Mridangam; and small cymbals.

The soul of a Ravana chhaya performance is its music. The style of singing blends the folk and classical Odissi traditions. Ravana chhaya follows the traditional style of singing the lyrics from the Vichitra Ramayana, and the shadow show acquires a poetic quality akin to modern poetry.

The performance traditionally opens with a fixed character. The first shadow figure to appear is the barber, called the Bhandari. This stock character, a village barber with a knowing manner and a grandson who asks questions, serves as the bridge between the mythological world being depicted and the audience watching from the darkness. He is the ordinary person in the extraordinary story, and his presence establishes the register of the performance: reverent but not solemn, sacred but not inaccessible.

Behind the screen, the backstage is its own world. When you are backstage, a maze of puppets is strewn all over the floor. Different artists are crouched below the white screen, manipulating their puppets with their fingers. One of them, who is the leader, handles all the main characters, while the support staff handle the puppets, which portray the other elements of the story, such as animals, birds, and trees.

The Connection to Wayang Kulit: A Story the Sea Carried

One of the most compelling questions in the study of Ravan Chhaya is whether the Sadhabas, the ancient merchant navigators of Kalinga who sailed the Bay of Bengal to Java and Sumatra and Bali across two millennia of Indian Ocean trade, carried this tradition with them across the water.

Scholar Jivan Pani, an expert in performing arts, argued that the sea-faring navigators of Kalinga carried Ravana Chhaya to these regions. Over time, technical terms from Ravana Chhaya entered the language of Wayang Kulit, evolving into distinct forms but retaining their roots. The term 'Charma Rupa,' meaning 'leather puppet' in Odia, became 'Carma Rupa' in Wayang.

The parallels between the two traditions are striking. Both use leather puppets held against a backlit screen. Both draw their stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Both involve a master narrator whose voice carries the story while other performers manage the physical puppets. Both treat the puppets themselves as objects with sacred status. Whether these similarities represent direct transmission or parallel development from shared Indian Ocean cultural currents is a question scholars have not fully resolved.

What can be said is this: Wayang Kulit is today among the most celebrated performing arts traditions in the world, recognized by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003, performed before audiences of thousands, and practiced by master puppeteers who command celebrity status and significant fees. Ravan Chhaya, which may have been its ancestor, survives in two villages in Odisha, practiced by a handful of families, and is largely unknown outside the state.

The ancestor is dying. The descendant is thriving. That is one of the more quietly devastating stories in the history of Indian performing arts.

Where It Lives Now: Two Villages, A Handful of Families

Ravan Chhaya was popular all across the Angul and Dhenkanal districts of Odisha in the late nineteenth century, but at present it is practiced only in Odash village of the Angul district. This form of shadow theater, Ravana Chhaya, exists today as an art form in the villages of Odasa and Kutarimunda of the Angul district in Odisha.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ravana chhaya performances were especially popular in the Dhenkanal and Talcher regions of Odisha and even enjoyed the patronage of the royal family of Talcher. That royal patronage is gone. The audience that once gathered in village courtyards to watch an all-night performance has dispersed. The generation that learned the craft as children is aging. The generation that should have learned it after them has, in most cases, found other livelihoods.

Ravan Chhaya Natya Sansada, one of the premier shadow puppetry institutions of Odisha, was established in the year 1982 by the late Guru Kathinanda Das. The Sansada, a registered cultural society, has devoted itself to the preservation, propagation, and promotion of the rare traditional arts. It maintains a full repertory group of performances and imparts training to youngsters in puppet-making, designing, manipulation techniques, and music.

Another troupe, known as the Shrirama Institute of Shadow Theatre in Kutarimunda, was established by scholar Gouranga Dash and uses Ravana chhaya to stage performances on more contemporary themes. The adaptation of the form to contemporary subjects is a survival strategy, an attempt to show that the technique is not bound to the Ramayana, that it can carry any story into the darkness and give it shadow.

Whether these institutional efforts will be enough is not a question with a comfortable answer. What is clear is that everything that Ravan Chhaya knows, every technique of puppet-making, every convention of the performance structure, every tradition of the music and narration, and every understanding of how an oil lamp and a deer-skin figure can tell a story that holds a village in silence until morning live now in a very small number of human beings in two villages in Angul district. When those people are gone, the knowledge goes with them.

Why This Form Is Different From Every Other Indian Shadow Tradition

India has six surviving shadow puppet traditions across its southern and eastern states, including Tholu Bommalata in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Togalu Gombeyatta in Karnataka, Tol Pavakoothu in Kerala, and Chaya Putul Nacha in West Bengal. Each of these traditions uses colored, translucent leather puppets that cast colored shadows on the screen. The visual experience is rich, elaborate, and painterly.

Ravan Chhaya does none of this. The puppets used are a single-piece structure with no joints and no colors. They throw opaque shadows on the screen. The silhouettes are pure black against the white cloth. There is no color, no transparency, and no gradation of tone. What the audience sees is the absolute minimum: shape, movement, and the light that defines both.

This is a more demanding aesthetic than the colored traditions and a more difficult one to sustain. With color and transparency, the puppet tells the audience what it is. With an opaque silhouette, the puppet tells the audience almost nothing and asks the audience to do the rest. The story has to be carried by the music, the narration, the voice, and the audience's own imaginative engagement with the darkness.

In this sense, Ravan Chhaya is closer to what the most sophisticated contemporary theater is trying to achieve than to what its more elaborate regional cousins offer. It is an art of reduction, of negative space, of what is withheld. The shadow is most powerful not when it shows you everything but when it shows you just enough.

What Folk Experience Offers Around Ravan Chhaya

A live Ravan Chhaya performance facilitated in Angul district, experienced as the tradition intended: after dark, outdoors, with the oil lamp lit and the entire sound and light world of the performance intact, not in a theatre but in the village where the art still lives

A backstage encounter with the puppeteers before or after the performance, where the mechanics of the craft become visible and the mystery of the shadow is explained by the people who have spent their lives creating it

A puppet-making session with a master craftsperson from Odash village, learning the process of cutting deer hide, making the perforations that produce the figures' detail, and attaching the bamboo support that allows the puppet to be held and moved, taking home a puppet that was made by hand rather than bought in a crafts store

A documentary conversation with the families who carry this tradition, for those who want to understand not just the art but the economics and social conditions of maintaining a form that has almost no audience and no institutional income

A comparative shadow puppetry experience, for those with more time, that places Ravan Chhaya alongside the coloured shadow traditions of southern India, examining what is gained and what is sacrificed in each approach to the art of making stories from darkness and light

Folk Experience facilitates Ravan Chhaya performances and encounters with the practitioners in Angul district, Odisha. All visits are coordinated with the performing families and priced in a way that returns a meaningful share of the experience cost to the artists. To inquire about attending a performance or commissioning a puppet-making session, write to us or explore the rest of this Odisha blog series.