Parayan Marana Kathakal’s resounding success seemed poised to change Kerala theatre forever. But seven years on, its promise remains unfulfilled.
Daya Gayathri from a performance of Parayan Maranna Kathakal. Credit: Daya Gayathri.
Picture a cemetery. Corpses, covered by white sheets, lie scattered on the ground. A lone figure walks around, occasionally giving vent to stifled cries mourning the departed. They call out: “Sweet Maria…” and a body rises. The corpse narrates the circumstances of its tragic death: 2012, stabbed, murdered by the person they loved. The mourning figure calls out again: “Shalu…” and another body rises, narrating how they were strangled to death in 2019. One by one, the deceased are summoned. They were real people once. Now, they are characters in a play, united by a single thread: they were all killed because they were transgender.
About seven years ago, a small group of trans people in Kerala staked everything they had to bring their stories to life through theatre. The play that they birthed, Parayan Maranna Kathakal [Untold Stories], has been staged nearly fifty times since its inaugural performance in 2018. With each successive performance, it has grown in stature—from its inception as an experimental play by a debutant theatre troupe, it has evolved into a major cultural landmark in Kerala.
Featuring real stories of trans strife and resilience drawn from the lived experiences of the cast, Parayan Maranna Kathakal represented a triumph of trans people’s desire and determination to tell their own stories. Not only did the play bring nuanced narratives of trans lives to stages across India, but it has also launched the careers of several trans artists in the process.
However, despite its rich legacy, lasting change remains elusive, and transgender narratives and trans people continue to struggle for a foothold in Kerala theatre.
This is the story of how the play came to be, what it meant for the artists involved, and how they have been trying to use its impact to carve a lasting space in the state’s theatre scene.
Kerala theatre has a rich tradition of engaging with progressive politics. The Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC), founded in 1949 by a group of people who were active in the communist movement in Kerala at the time, has over the years staged several performances engaging with themes like social injustice, class struggles, and political oppression. KPAC’s plays were made for the common masses of Kerala society. Yet, it was only in the 90s, during the height of the HIV epidemic, that Kerala theatre first addressed a queer subject.
Vinod Kovoor, an actor in the Malayalam cinema industry, was part of the play, Avasana Chumbanam (The Last Kiss). It had two transgender characters as protagonists, one of whom was played by him. Vinod, at the time, had been involved in a government-run HIV prevention programme aimed at creating awareness among sex workers in Kerala. He met several transgender individuals during this time, especially in Kozhikode, and their life stories influenced him to develop the play, which dealt with the turbulent romantic relationship between an interfaith transgender couple.
Vinod co-wrote the play, which delved into themes such as the double life a transgender person is forced to lead in society and the complexities of their familial relationships. Even though the two leads were portrayed by cisgender individuals, Vinod said that it was probably the first instance of a play in Kerala exploring transgender lives. The production won the Best Play award at the State Drama Festival, and Vinod was awarded Best Artist.
Kerala theatre had to wait a quarter-century more before the next play to address transgender lives, Parayan Maranna Kathakal, was performed in early 2018.
The play’s journey began in 2016, when actor and activist Sheethal Shyam, and make-up artist Renju Renjimar founded Dhwayah Transgenders’ Arts and Charitable Society. The collective’s original vision was primarily focused on fashion shows, beauty pageants, folk arts, and dance performances. Theatre made its entry serendipitously.
In the same year that Dhwayah was founded, the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK) featured a play by Panmai—the first transgender theatre group from Tamil Nadu—which included trans artists like Angel Glady and Living Smile Vidya. The play’s success in Kerala prompted the faculty at the School of Drama and Fine Arts at the University of Calicut in Thrissur to suggest to Sheethal that something similar ought to be developed locally.
The idea resonated with Sheethal and Renju, and they dived headfirst into the project. “We were eager to commence the project, despite not having a fixed plan for the play’s theme or the production aspects involved,” Sheethal told queerbeat. “But first, we needed a director, someone who had experience working on queer themes and with the transgender community.”
Enter Srijith Sundaram, a Tamil Nadu-based queer theatre artist, playwright and director, who was also a close acquaintance of Sheethal’s. Srijith had founded the theatre troupe Kattiyakkaari, which had earned a reputation for working with the underprivileged and marginalised members of society, especially queer communities, in Tamil Nadu. When Sheethal approached him, he quickly agreed to participate in the project.
With logistical support from the School of Drama, Dhwayah hosted a 10-day workshop in January 2018 for 15 members of the group, who had been selected for the play. Every person who attended the workshop had to deal with personal challenges to be there, Srijith recalled. Some had to go to great lengths to convince their parents, while others were still struggling with their gender transition. Some of the artists who acted in the play had never been on stage before. For example, Daya Gayathri, a trans woman, had worked in Chennai Metro before joining the play.
Heidi Sadiya, who holds the distinction of being Kerala’s first transgender national television newsreader, joined the production as an actor. “I was quite active during my school days in the performing arts. When I got to know about Dhwayah in 2017 and their initiative to start a drama troupe, I didn’t hesitate,” she told queerbeat.
Another actor was Surya, who is widely recognised as the first transgender actor to establish a presence in mainstream performing arts in Kerala. She said that at that time there were scattered individual performances by transgender artists in amateur and street theatre. “But Dhwayah and Parayan Maranna Kathakal set the ball rolling for transgender artists to come together in professional theatre,” She said.
Surya and her partner Ishaan became the first transgender couple to officially get married in Kerala. Their journey features in the play, with Ishaan, a trans man, also performing.
Having worked with the transgender community in Tamil Nadu for a long time, Srijith said he quickly noticed the contrast in the issues being discussed by the trans people in Kerala compared to those in his home state. In 2015, Kerala became the first Indian state to introduce a comprehensive policy for the welfare of trans persons. In Srijith’s view, these “reformatory steps” meant that “queer politics in Kerala had progressed further.”
However, he also observed that “transphobia remains widespread.” He recalled, “all the artists in our play had personal tales of discrimination and ostracisation to tell the world.”
These experiences eventually became the basis of Parayan Maranna Kathakal. “The many themes portrayed in the play illustrated our lived experiences. Hence, our performances had an emotional tone throughout,” Sheethal said.
One of the ways the play brought the trials of trans women to life was through the symbolism of the sari. In a particularly evocative scene, the artists line the stage and perform the act of draping saris, while narrating the numerous humiliating experiences they have faced because they chose to wear sarees. In public spaces and private ones, on movie sets and in college campuses, insults and alienation were the typical response when these trans women had dressed as they chose.
The same artists then proceed to narrate how they landed roles in movies that portrayed transgender lives accurately and were invited as guests of honour for inaugurations in colleges. And in these victorious moments, they were still wearing sarees—defying the discrimination and proudly “owning” the attire in the same spaces that once belittled them.
The play found instant success. “When we first staged the play at the School of Drama, everything about it was improvised,” Srijith recalled. “It was challenging, but the impact was immense.”
It seemed as if Kerala’s trans artists had finally claimed their much-deserved and long-denied spotlight. “Our society in general had overlooked the queer community’s presence across most social spheres. Their lives, their stories, remained invisible for so long,” said Shailaja Jala, a veteran theatre director and artist who is currently the general secretary of the Network of Artistic Theatre Artists Kerala (NATAK) and the founding director of the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK). “The transgender community’s entry into theatre has now started to be embraced,” she added.
The play had such a massive impact that it soon elicited invitations for performances outside Kerala. “Word got around, and we were invited to perform in all kinds of arenas. We never looked back until the pandemic put the brakes on us,” Sheethal said. When the play travelled to the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the cast did not want to simply render the original performance on a new stage, recalled Daya. Since many of the artists were familiar with the local language and culture of these states, they improvised and adapted the play to suit the milieu.
The play’s runaway success meant that it gradually transcended its original intended purpose and began to be used as a vehicle to support other causes. During the 2018 Kerala floods, which claimed the lives of nearly 500 people, the proceeds from many of their shows were donated to the state’s disaster relief fund. In 2019-20, Dhwayah put on special performances in which the cast wore only black costumes to protest the Citizen Amendment Act, 2019, the National Register of Citizens, and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019.
Parayan Maranna Kathakal’s success was always a tale of victory against the odds. Finding financial backing for the play was a struggle in the initial period. Outstation performances stretched Dhwayah’s limited resources, forcing the artists to perform on empty stomachs on many faraway stages, recalled Daya. Another challenge, particularly for some of the younger cast members, was convincing their families to let them travel outside the state for performances, said Sheethal. For others, she added, career stability was an issue: they had to sacrifice the security of full-time jobs.
However, all the artists queerbeat spoke to for this article unequivocally said that the impact the play managed to make more than made up for all the hurdles they had to surmount.
Daya recalled how the play was pivotal in her parents’ acceptance of her gender identity. She successfully underwent her gender affirmation surgery a couple of months after the play debuted. Although they had always been supportive of her choice to gender transition, she remembered that they had struggled to come to terms with it emotionally. Parayan Maranna Kathakal transformed that reluctant acceptance into a full-hearted embrace. After the first performance, Daya recalled, her parents stepped onstage, hugged her, and said: “We had a son for so long, but we have a daughter now.”
In show business, success, however grand it may be, is often fleeting. The question that follows soon after is ‘what next?’.
By 2020, everyone was waiting for the next production—one that would potentially build on Parayan Maranna Kathakal’s success and take trans representation in Kerala theatre to the next level.
Mazhavil Dhwani, a new collective focused on theatre, had been created as an offshoot of Dhwayah in 2018, soon after the birth of Parayan Maranna Kathakal. The new group began planning its first production—a grand mythological drama titled Puranangal Punarjanikumbol (When Sacred Epics are Reborn).
The School of Drama in Thrissur offered logistical support and seed funding for the new venture. However, given the heightened scale of the new production—featuring live music and mythological costumes—the cost of initially putting the play together exceeded a lakh, according to Ishaan. This was a substantial increase over the cost of their previous production.
Puranangal Punarjanikumbol was performed for the first time in 2023. Of the six artists who were part of it, only Sheethal and Ishaan remained from the previous production, Parayan Maranna Kathakal. The new play featured the life of Shikhandi, a transgender character from the Mahabharata, interwoven with the narratives of queer people in present-day India. Ishaan recalled that, much like its predecessor, the initial feedback was positive.
The debut run of the play, however, proved to be a prelude to crushing disappointment. Puranangal Punarjanikumbol has struggled to find stages since its inaugural shows. Ishaan believes that the high budget worked against its chances of getting staged after its initial run. “Perhaps, in retrospect, we were a bit too ambitious with our second project,” Ishaan said.
Sheethal added that several other factors might have worked against the play, including the untimely death of one of its original cast members, Praveen Nath, the first transgender bodybuilder from Kerala. The difficulty in arranging technicians— stage designers, theatrical makeup artists, and the live orchestra—was another major reason.
Apart from the challenges posed by its grand canvas, the play also suffered from reduced enthusiasm amongst the artists themselves. Parayan Maranna Kathakal had succeeded in part because its cast had been highly motivated. They sacrificed wages, put relationships at risk, and even starved to make the play a success.
In Sheethal’s view, that zeal did not sustain and carry over into the second production. While Ishaan partly agreed with Sheethal, he also doesn’t feel that it is fair to “completely place” the onus of Puranangal Punarjanikumbol’s struggle on the transgender artists and the community.
“I’m not blaming the artists in any way. Parayan Maranna Kathakal had a big team, a lot of collaborative effort, and most of them have gone on to pursue their professional goals since then: acting in movies, joining the makeup industry and so on. Some of them aren’t even in India now,” said Ishaan. “We couldn’t generate the same visibility for Puranangal Punarjanikumbol right away, and then it just became difficult to rejuvenate. It’s sad, because it does deserve more attention and credit.”
Ishaan believes that Parayan Maranna Kathakal, which was last performed in 2022, also deserves a return to the stage. But the unavailability of funding holds back these dreams. All the artists queerbeat spoke to for this story felt that transgender theatre in Kerala needs government funding in order to truly thrive.
Karivellur Murali, secretary of the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi, the apex body for performing arts in the state, told queerbeat that while there have been conscious attempts from official bodies to encourage the creative efforts of the transgender community in theatre, it is not feasible to set aside funds or grants specifically for such a collective. The primary reason, he said, is that the “Sangeeta Nataka Akademi cannot operate as a funding agency. It can only support the academic and aesthetic development of the art form in the state.”
Murali also added that the central government should initiate specific schemes to support arts projects including theatre by queer and trans people.
In 2018 Kerala’s government set aside funds to support women filmmakers but there is no such project for trans people yet. queerbeat reached out to the Kerala government’s Department of Cultural Affairs to talk about the lack of funding for trans theatre in the state. We will update the story if we receive a response.
Government support aside, Sheethal believes that trans people in Kerala theatre will have to figure out innovative ways to support their art so they are not fully dependent on others. Sheetal isn’t sure yet how exactly they would go about doing that.
Despite the relative lack of success of their second production, it appears that Dhwayah’s efforts have sown the seeds of change. Transgender representation—both in terms of subject matter and in terms of the involvement of trans artists—is slowly growing in Kerala theatre.
Abhilash Pillai, the director of the School of Drama & Fine Arts, University of Calicut, noted that the recent International Festival of Theatre Schools (IFTS) hosted by the university featured “several transgender theatre artists from our state as pedagogues and workshop trainers.”
The curatorial board of IFTS also included Vijayarajamallika, a transgender poet, writer and activist from Kerala, who has penned several notable poetry collections, some of which have been adapted into plays. Her autobiography was made into the play Corner by the Natya Shastra Theatre Group, based in Palakkad, Kerala.
“The inclusion of trans (and queer) themes in theatre in Kerala can be divided into pre- and post-Parayan Maranna Kathakal,” said Heidi. She also noted a recent play in a fest conducted by Calicut University, which featured a trans woman performing the role of an advocate and was free of any stereotypes.
Several of the artists who were part of Parayan Maranna Kathakal have ventured into the Malayalam cinema industry. Sheethal has acted in mainstream features like Aabhasam, Vishudha Rathrikal, and several short films. Deeparani, a makeup artist and model, has appeared in some independent movies and most recently in the Malayalam web series 1000 Babies.
For Daya, as explained earlier in the story, to even be a part of Parayan Maranna Kathakal was an arduous journey—navigating parental acceptance for one. Since then, she has acted in Malayalam films like Heaven and Get Set Baby and hopes to direct a movie in the future.
Sometimes she wonders whether she would even be alive if Parayan Maranna Kathakal hadn’t happened. “Being a part of the play gave me a second life.”
Writer
Bharath Thampi is a journalist, writer and documentarian based in Kerala. He likes to make bad puns, philosophise and analyse the human condition, all of which reflect in his writing.
Editor
Visvak is a writer and editor, mostly of narrative nonfiction.
Producer
Ankur Paliwal (he/they) is a queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
