'Drag Sastra' by Patruni Sastry reinterprets classical Indian performance texts like the Natyashastra and Abhinaya Darpana through the lens of drag, positioning drag performance within longer histories of gender fluidity, rasa, theatricality, and embodiment in Indian art traditions. Drawing from Patruni’s own practice across drag, classical dance, protest art, and performance, the book connects concepts like Lokadharmi and Natyadharmi, Desi and Margi traditions, Navarasa theory, mudras, and forms like Theyyam, Lavani, and Gotipua to contemporary drag culture.
As a trained classical dancer, Hyderabad-based drag artist Patruni Sastry spent years revisiting ideas from the Natyashastra — the foundational Sanskrit text on theatre, dance, music, rasa, gesture, makeup, and performance — and the Abhinaya Darpana, a text centred on expression, movement, and emotional communication, while practising drag. They noticed how extensively these texts already described many aspects of drag performance, but never through a direct or clearly articulated framework for drag itself, which became the starting point for 'Drag Sastra'. After their first book, 'Life Is Drag, Sas It Up', which focused on autobiography and lived experience, this release is part manual, part reimagining of classical Indian performance texts read through a queer lens, specifically through the practice of drag.
One of the key ideas that drew Patruni in was the distinction between Lokadharmi and Natyadharmi: Lokadharmi as the colloquial existence of a performer within a social setup, and Natyadharmi as the imaginative and rule-bound existence of a performer on stage, and drag moves through both spaces. In social contexts, gender performance is often expected to fit neatly within recognisable masculinity or femininity, while stage performance allows exaggeration through makeup, costume, lighting, and theatricality.
“Though drag has always been propagating within the Natyadharmi aspect because there is a freedom of existence as a person who is performing on stage, it has also reverse cycled into Lokadharmi, where the same drag artists who performed in Shakespearean theatre would come back conventionally dressed, bringing drag with them as very colloquial, cis-friendly or cis-passing, which also became a way of existence for a lot of trans people at that point in time,” they share.
Patruni reads both the Natyashastra and Abhinaya Darpana as texts that see the performer’s body as a vessel with an inherently gender-neutral nature, where any body can perform any character or gender as long as it is attuned to that character's behaviour, “...which is equivalent to the idea that anybody can do drag,” they note. The book examines the distinction between Desi and Margi traditions, with Desi as folk or common traditions, and Margi as classical traditions built through structure and practice. They connect 'unstructured drag' within community spaces like drag suppers and local drag events, and 'structured drag' within theatrical and staged formats such as nightclubs, Broadway, and larger performance venues. The shift in space changes everything from exaggeration and lip-syncing to costume, contouring, and characterisation, shaping drag into a more theatrical and classically performative form.
Through rasa theory and the nine Navarasas, Patruni also re-examines Indian traditions of cross-dressing and gender performance through art forms like Theyyam, Bhoota Kola, Lavani, and Gotipua, mapping each form through its dominant emotional and performative quality. They associate Theyyam with Raudra Rasa because of its recurring invocation of the angry goddess, while forms like Lavani carry their own distinct emotional frameworks shaped through performance traditions like Tamasha theatre. The book extends this mapping into contemporary drag as well, examining humour drag, camp drag, and protest-based drag through their corresponding rasas and emotional registers, including the use of Raudra Rasa within protest performance. All of these intersections form part of Patruni’s larger analysis of drag through Indian performance theory.
Much of 'Drag Sastra' also grows out of Patruni’s own performance practice across nightlife drag shows, contemporary and classical dance, folk-song storytelling, and avant-garde protest art. Moving between these spaces led them to constantly re-evaluate how the Natyashastra and rasa theory function across different forms of performance, eventually shaping the methodologies explored in the book. They also revisit ideas like Ashtanayika to think through how drag queens and trans people navigate everyday social life, while approaching drag itself as a method that can move across artistic practices because characterisation, at its core, remains genderless. The book re-examines Patruni’s own protest-based performance works like 'Come Sit With Me' and 'Show Me Visibility' through Raudra Rasa and the breaking of the third wall between performer and audience, while also exploring how classical mudras and hastas, including gestures like Tripataka Hasta, can be reinterpreted within drag performance through visual references and photographs.
“I see drag as not something different from Indian classical dancers or Indian classical dance itself. It is the same kind of effort that Indian classical dancers and Indian classical arts put in that drag queens are also putting in, but it comes from a community that has been marginalised, so it has always been seen as vulgar or not fit for society. That is the major narrative I want to debunk, because across the world drag is still being antagonised as a negative art form. Within my own practice, I try to re-bring drag as a more cultured, more hierarchical, and more equivalent art form alongside Indian classical dance and music.”Patruni Chidananda Sastry
Patruni locates the central merit of 'Drag Sastra' in reconnecting drag to the long history of gender performance embedded within Indian art traditions. They point out that many Indian performance forms already contain aspects of drag, cross-dressing, and gendered embodiment, with men performing as women across the subcontinent for centuries. The discomfort, in their view, begins once the English term “drag” enters the conversation, because the form immediately becomes associated with sexualisation. Patruni returns to the Natyashastra here, particularly its treatment of sexuality as a legitimate and integral part of artistic expression. Through mudras, hasta mudras, and abhinaya, the text offers ways of communicating sensuality through gesture, expression, and movement in forms that remain accessible and legible to wider audiences. Through these intersections, 'Drag Sastra' attempts to demystify the idea of drag as a Western import and reconnect it to older Indian performance histories that have continued despite centuries of social and political upheaval.
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