Good ol’ Oggu Katha goes hi-tech with Dharmagraham

In a first-of-its-kind endeavour, culture buffs in Hyderabad got to savour an

Oggu Katha

— Renuka Yellamma — with slick sound and light effects for the first time in the city. Titled Dharmagraham, the folk play employed multimedia and modern theatrical techniques such as LED lighting, props and a live set to recreate the mythological story of Renuka and Sage

Jamadagni

in front of a packed

Ravindra Bharathi

recently.

The play began with a group of folk artistes narrating the story to the audience in the traditional Oggu Katha style with beautiful ballads.To add a visual element to the tale, the production roped in a sand artist, Jala Venugopal, to recreate the story parallelly through live sand art on a screen on stage.
The narration began with Renuka, played by Swarna Yadav, the wife of Sage Jamadgani, creating a sand pot on the banks of river Malaprabha. She is busy perfecting the pot when the reflection of a fairy couple (gandharvas) on the water distracts her. The sight sparks worldly desires in her mind and the pot breaks. Her husband, Jamadgani sees all of it through his divine vision and gets infuriated by her lack of concentration. The sage orders her to go on an exile to a forest for 12 years to absolve her sin as a punishment.

Unlike other versions that focus on Jamadgani and his son

Parashurama

, Dharmagraham strived to bring forth the story of Renuka for the audience. Unlike
traditional Oggu Katha performances, where a male plays a female character, this production cast women to play Renuka and other female characters. Directed by Oggu Ravi, the performance garnered thumping applause from the audience — especially the scenes, where the fairy couple and Parashurama were shown flying mid-air using ropes as they descend on the stage.

Mamidi Harikrishna, the Director of Telangana Cultural Department, termed the production a dream
project and stressed that plans are currently afoot to give many more such mythological gems a theatrical avatar. “We didn’t do anything new. Just like Girish Karnad, who gave Kannada folklore theatrical avatars, we plan to do something similar with Telangana folk tales. Renuka Yellama is our first in this regard,” he says, adding, “The uniqueness of the play is that it is centered on a female character unlike the regular versions. In the ancient times, it’s the female characters that dominated these folk tales but over the course of time and with advent of patriarchy, the male characters started getting more prominence. With this production, we have tried to show how Telangana folklore has always been women-centric.”