Preparing for Krishna its resonance that draws the spectator into a specific communion. This communion is neither arbitrary nor altogether subjective: it has been shaped by a context of feelings whose history is rooted in bhaktiy an intense love for Krishna that necessitates a surrender of the self. What makes this faith so strikingly undoctrinaire is its element of play. Sensations and gestures, rhythms and tones are more appealing to Krishna than pieties and facts. "Learned controversies' are out of place in his theatre of worship. In the actual seeing of Krishnattam, one does not remember the minutae 34 of the Natyashastra. One simply enjoys the play of Krishna. I cannot claim to be a bhakta, for whom Krishna is God. Nor can I call myself Sisahridaya ('one of similar heart), who is capable of empathizing with an object after years of discrimination and experience. It would be best to accept myself as a spectator, but one who participates in what he sees, not just a passive onlooker whoaccepts what is already there. I see what I am prepared to see in relation to what is in me, but this in turn is moulded by the context of what I see. Krishnattam, I believe, cannot be seen outside of Guruvayur, where Krishna is worshipped as Guruvayurappan. This temple is the site of Krishna's play. With such a sacred location it is not surprising that any attempt to write about Krishnattam as theatre is seriously challenged. This is particularly true when one adapts western performance theories, which for all their assimilation of non-western material, fail to confront (and at times, acknowledge) a sense of the divine, without which almost no traditional art in India can be adequately understood. These theories are perhaps most revealing of post-modernist modes of thought and states of being that are dominant in the west today. Their preoccupation with structure and technique (at the expense of faith) frequently results in new systems of meaning that reject or tacitly avoid what these performances mean to non-western people in their own cultural context. It is assumed that the 'scientific' nature of the analysis based on laws, principles, patterns and energies will be relevant to all people, both in the east and west, the representers and the represented. In preparing for Krishnattam, one must certainly avoid the constraints of western performance theories, but one must be equally wary of a certain kind of 'authentic' theatre scholarship that is affirmed in India today. Its style could best be described as the Third Person Omniscient, a heavily Sanskritized rhetoric that amasses 'facts' in an encyclopaedic manner without addressing them in any significant way. It is almost as if the utterance of these facts — immutable, unquestionable, forever fixed in time — will carry the weight of their meaning. Any attempt to situate these facts in a historical context is viewed as a threat to 'objectivity' and 'aesthetic purity' that such scholarship is bound to uphold at all costs. What develops in this surrender of a critical consciousness is an obsessive need to document terms and subdivision of terms, more often than not paraphrased from the Natyashastra. In this minutae, we have a formidable example of 'leaf-counting', where the reader is left without a glimpse of the trees. More bothersome than the pedantry is the abdication of human experience, the rejection of involvement in reading the past. My intention here is not to launch into a diatribe against the 'learned', but to point out that for a traditional art like Krishnattam, the facts are extremely elusive. One has Journal of Arts <& Ideas