Concentration: Kūḍiyāṭṭam and Kerala Shadow Puppets (Tolpāvakkūttu).  Kerala prabandhas.

Texts of performance: 

Mantrāṅkam, Kalyāṇa-saugandhikam, Tamil Rāmāyaṇa in shadow-puppet enactment. Major auxiliary text: Rāmāyaṇa-prabandha.

Texts of theory: 

The Sanskrit Naṭāṅkuśa and the Sanskrit Vyaṅgya-vyākhyā commentaries on the two major Kūḍiyāṭṭam plays by Kulaśekhara. Līlā-tilakam, grammar of proto-Malayalam.

Revisiting year 1:

The early kīrttanas—the major musical genre-- in Karnataka and the Tamil country.). Prabandha works of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries in all the languages, with an emphasis on Sanskrit literary production.

Leading questions:

Do we find the cultural thematics that emerged from Year 1 reproduced and/or transformed in live performance? What aesthetic theory can be inductively formulated for these classical dramatic traditions? How did they crystallize and coalesce as we know them today? Does stage performance reconfigure the semantic and aesthetic fields of literature and music?