All roads are leading to a certain businessman’s house at Chutia, Ranchi, during the festive five days. Here, small, clay puppets of Durga and her family have taken over the window, er stage, and pulling the strings are two teens.
Brothers Rishab Shukla (15) and Vivek Shukla (14) can give tough competition to the Puja pandals and also shilpkars of the city.
The two, sons of businessman Suresh Shukla and students of DAV, Kapil Dev, are hosting a 10-minute puppet show on Bhairav Vadh at their home, thus reviving an old, almost-forgotten art. What’s unique is that they have sculpted the puppets on their own by using clay.
So, what sparked off this love for puppetry at such a young age? “If I can recall correctly, our first brush with this art occurred at a village in Bihar, where my maternal grandmother used to live. There, local groups used to organise puppetry shows. We loved the programmes and started drawing cartoon characters on paper. Gradually, we began creating cartoons with the help of placards and made them move with the help of strings. With time, we improvised our art,” said Rishab, who studies in Class IX.
The two, who are into puppetry for the past three-four years, have transformed the window of their house into a stage for depicting how Durga kills Bhairav or asur. The stage has been divided into two sections — the top has been reserved for narrating chiktrakala or goddess tales while clay models of Durga and family have been placed at the bottom.
While Rishab creates the idols, brother Vivek, a student of Class VIII, looks after the lighting and other aspects of the show like ensuring smooth movements of the puppets during narration.
“We haven’t used anything that is dangerous to the environment. Even the dresses of the idols have been made with clay and painted with natural colours,” said Rishab, adding that this year, they got just two days to make the idols.
“We had our exams till September 30 after which we started working. Right from designing the set and idol-making to light and sound arrangements, everything was wrapped up in just two days (October 1 and 2). We didn’t face much problems as we had planned everything around a month ago. We just had to execute our plans,” Vivek chipped in.
As for choosing Durga Puja to host their shows, Vivek said: “We never thought on these lines. We started puppet shows during Durga Puja around three-four years ago. It became a practice since then. Only, we choose different themes every year.”
The duo further said that they had been performing puja on their own for the past four years and puppetry had always been their way to narrate myriad tales about Durga.
“Puppetry is a part of folklore. It needs to be revived, but with modern and contemporary sensibilities as its subjects,” said Vivek, adding that although they wanted to become engineers, puppetry would always remain a passion.
