In the Tholu Bommalata tradition, the choice of animal hide for each puppet is not incidental. It is iconographically determined and has been for two thousand years. Auspicious divine characters were made from antelope hide. Common characters from goat skin. Ravana alone, along with the warrior Bhima was made from deer hide, chosen for its exceptional strength and resistance to the demands of his most physically complex puppet form.
The construction of a Ravana puppet required a minimum of four skins: one for the body, one for the legs, and one each for the two sets of five arms. Each skin treated with herbs, beaten thin and translucent, and stretched flat before being cut and assembled with threads and bamboo. The geometric perforations across the ornaments, garlands, and costume panels are dense, precise, covering every surface are the means by which light enters the leather and the figure becomes luminous. In backlight, Ravana’s deer hide glowed with a quality different from any other character in the tradition: denser, more saturated, the perforations more intricate. He was made to command the screen.
The ten heads are arranged around the single front-facing central face and fanning outward in profile, each with its own crown and expression, the whole construction wider than it is tall. At performance scale, a Ravana puppet can exceed 160 centimetres in width. Behind the white cloth screen and the oil lamp, this is the figure that stops the audience.
