STORIES, DRUMS & VOICE
The Stories and Music Behind Every Kathakali Performance
Where Kathakali's stories come from — the Mahabharata and Ramayana — and how singers, the chenda and maddalam drums carry a scene the actors perform in silence.
See Kochi show dates on GetYourGuide ↗Epics as the source material
Kathakali's stories come almost entirely from India's great Sanskrit epics — the Mahabharata and the Ramayana — along with other Puranic literature, the wider body of traditional Hindu narrative texts. Individual performances are drawn from attakathas, purpose-written play-texts that adapt a single episode from these epics into verse suitable for staging: a duel, a test of loyalty, a battle between good and questionable characters, a moment of divine intervention. Because the epics themselves are vast, a single evening's performance usually covers one self-contained episode rather than an entire storyline, which is part of why the pre-show introduction matters — it orients you to which specific moment in a much larger epic you're about to watch.
Two voices carry the narrative
While the performers act out the story in movement and gesture, they never speak — instead, two vocalists positioned at the side or back of the stage sing the narrative verses and dialogue, in a traditional call-and-response style. The lead singer typically carries the main melodic line while a second voice supports and punctuates it, and together they narrate what's happening, name characters as they enter, and set each scene's emotional register. It's worth listening for this layer specifically: the singing isn't background music, it's effectively the performance's spoken text translated into song, with the actor's body performing what the voice is describing in real time.
The chenda and maddalam — the show's engine room
Kathakali's percussion is built around two main drums: the chenda, a loud cylindrical drum played with sticks that drives the performance's more dramatic, high-energy passages — entrances, battles, moments of anger — and the maddalam, a quieter barrel-shaped drum played by hand that underscores gentler, more lyrical scenes. Cymbals (elathalam) played by the vocalists add further rhythmic texture. Together this small live ensemble does far more than accompany the actors — it cues entrances, marks shifts in mood, and often drives the pace of a scene as much as the performer's own movement does, which is why a Kathakali evening feels as much like a concert as a piece of theatre.
Familiar episodes you might recognise
Some of the most frequently staged Kathakali episodes are drawn from well-known moments in the Mahabharata and Ramayana — duels between princes, tests of a hero's strength or virtue, and confrontations between noble and villainous characters, the kind of scenes that map naturally onto the pacha-versus-kathi colour contrast described in a companion guide. Exactly which episode you'll see on a given night in Kochi varies by venue and season, so it's worth asking or checking the programme rather than assuming — but knowing that these performances draw from a shared, centuries-old pool of epic stories, rather than being written fresh for visitors, is useful context for anyone new to the tradition.
Why the music matters even if you don't follow every word
You don't need to understand the sung Malayalam verses to feel the effect of Kathakali's music — the shift from driving chenda rhythms to quieter maddalam passages tracks the emotional arc of a scene closely enough that the mood comes through regardless of language. Many visitors describe the combination of drumming, chanting and silent, exaggerated gesture as more immersive than a conventional subtitled performance would be, precisely because you're reading tone and rhythm rather than translated text. Approaching the evening as a piece of live music theatre, rather than a play you need to follow word for word, tends to make it easier to simply sit with the atmosphere.