Forgotten trails often take us to our roots. Shilpa Mudbi and team are on a mission to keep the folklore alive by telling the lesser-known folk stories to urban audiences.
Co-founder of the Urban Folk Project, Shilpa Mudbi introduced the audience at the HOPE Fest to the mythology of Yellamma through a music and storytelling performance - Yellamma and other stories on Thursday night. In her captivating style, she narrated the transformation of young beautiful princess Renuka to powerful Goddess Yellamma.
The Urban Folk Project was started by Shilpa Mudbi Kothakota and Adithya Kothakota to bring to the fore lesser-known folk forms by creating scope for research, documentation, archiving, and ultimately experimenting with these knowledge systems.
“We started our journey researching and documenting Yellammanaata, which is a ritualistic overnight play hosted mostly during Dussehra by marginal communities around north Karnataka.”
Yellamma’s temples are across southern India, even in Sri Lanka. Her following across Karnataka and Maharashtra consists of the Jogathi (transgender women disciples), Jogamma, Jogappa, and the devadasi communities.
The Urban Folk Project followed these communities to document rare and dying forms related to ‘Yellammanaata’ like ‘Chowdki Pada’ and ‘Jogathi Nritya’. Yellamma and other stories is the contemporary version of Yellamma’s myth.
“We could trace many versions of Yellamma stories during our research. Every community tailor-made the experience according to their needs and styles. Its is a collective telling of experience of so many women,” says Ms. Mudbi.
The performance raises pertinent questions about gender, patriarchy, purity and power structures.
