Miruga Vidusagam: Theatre of the body, ritual and land

This article engages with Miruga Vidusagam, a seminal play by Tamil theatre director Murugu Bhoopathy, to explore his authorship, and its focus on the human body and traditional rituals in its reinventions of myths to address contemporary issues. Murugu Bhoopathy’s play undergird the human body as a dynamic space to frame the trajectory of history from ancient rituals to contemporary culture, and foreground the movement of the actors and the various objects of the ritual, like the lamp, sieve, basket, mortar and pestle, to paint the many shades of oppression experienced by women, clowns, animals, landless farmers, refugees, workers, employees and children. The focus of this article is on Bhoopathy’s rural-experimental theatre, where the human body, land and rituals get intricately linked and metamorphosize into each other for the representation of the voice of the people on the fringes in Tamil Nadu.