Boy wonders to matinee idols

In this day and age, they may be accused of infringing on child rights. But ‘boys companies’ – or professionally run travelling theatre companies comprising child actors, specifically boys – were a big part of Tamil theatre’s renaissance in the first half of the 20th century.

A lively segment of the entertainment scene of those times, the boys companies not only proved to be a means of sustenance for children from impoverished families, but a gigantic pool of talent too.

Apart from the greatest stars of Tamil cinema – M G Ramachandran and Sivaji Ganesan – an entire generation of actors, music composers, playback singers, lyricists and writers of the industry spent their formative years in boys companies and owed their popularity to them. S G Kittappa, the unparalleled singing sensation of the Tamil stage, and T K Shanmugam, the greatest thespian of 20th century professional Tamil theatre, were products of boys companies.

In a 1948 manuscript published posthumously, Gurusami, a stage actor who had also run a drama company, defines a ‘boys company’ as a touring theatrical entity functioning under a proprietor and with about 300 people.

This included male child actors who numbered anywhere from 50 to 150, scene artists, make-up men, craftsmen and others liaising for various needs on behalf of the company with the outside world. According to him, boys companies had brought about a refreshing new change on the Tamil theatre scene, when touring drama companies and ‘special’ dramas – musical plays featuring a few prominent stars – faced deterioration on many fronts.

W h a t c o u l d have led to this phenomenon of kids trooping on to stage to astound the world with their precocity? What in the world made people queue up to pay and watch a bunch of kids – as young as six – speak lines of amazing profundity that they didn’t even fully perhaps understand? One of the reasons is attributed to the patronage these companies got from powerful playwrights like Sankaradas Swamigal, who believed young child actors were way better to work with than adult actors who came with too much baggage, making wanton departures from the drama text.

Adding to this was the general revulsion that society then had for anything connected to theatre; parents would not permit their wards to patronise stage plays and those who secretly did so would keep it to themselves. In this scenario, kids playing actors broke social taboos and in some way, softened the heart of the larger public towards the art form. ‘Sivaji’ Ganesan, who joined a boys company when he was just seven, would recall that people would line up to cheer for them like they were celebrities, as they marched from the company house to the theatre.

Poverty often drove these boys to a career on stage, as it was with MGR and his elder brother Chakrapani, whose widowed mother Satyabhama put her sons with the ‘Madurai Original Boys Company’, so that they would be assured of at least two meals a day. MGR was just six then. Sivaji Ganesan had joined out of his passion for acting, declaring that he was an orphan.

S V Sahasranamam, the veteran stage and film actor who later ran the famous ‘Seva Stage’ troupe, was about 12 when he tried to join the ‘Madurai Bala Shanmugananda Sabha’ by faking a letter of his father’s approval, but was busted by the company’s manager. His father, however, allowed him to make his choice between studies and acting. Sahasranamam chose the latter, only to begin his song lessons with severe canings on his thigh.

When he could bear it no more, he would plead with his tutor to strike the other thigh! The boys were put through a strict regimen; made to rise early, offer prayers after bath, given lessons in music, dance and scripts. This sort of training made boys companies declare they were akin to drama schools or universities of the dramatic art.

There was discrimination in these companies too, with star performers being treated to good food and accommodation, while lesser-known boys had to make do with meagre provisions. However, even yesterday’s star boys could face an immediate blight if their voices broke at some stage.

Unstable companies carried the danger of reducing some members to beggary. When the going was good, the boys were precious to the companies, and were well guarded. The story of a fearless Satyabhama extracting her two sons from the clutches of the menacing and powerful boys company proprietor, Satchidanandam Pillai, is epic stuff. The world of these boys companies was marked by hijackings, kidnappings and transfer of af filiation to competing companies.

The companies had risen as an alternative to theatre by adults, but with the advent of the Tamil talkie as the cheapest and most popular form of entertainment, theatre itself received a body blow, and the phenomenon of boys companies too tapered off. But apart from the joy they gave to their audiences, the undisputed contribution of these boys companies to Tamil cinema was perhaps the sea of talent it gave to the industry