Leah Lowthorp, "Deep Cosmopolitanism: Kutiyattam, Dynamic Tradition, and Globalizing Heritage in Kerala, India" (Indiana UP, 2025)

Jan 14, 2026

Leah Lowthorp, a cultural anthropologist and folklorist at the University of Oregon, delves into the world of Kutiyattam, the ancient Sanskrit theater from Kerala. She discusses its rich cosmopolitan history and critiques the ways UNESCO frames non-Western traditions. The conversation touches on Kerala's diverse heritage, the role of communism in reshaping cultural identity, and the significance of kinesthetic empathy in understanding performance. Leah also hints at her upcoming project exploring online folklore around genetics, blending tradition with modernity.

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ANECDOTE

Apprenticeship Shaped The Research

Leah Lowthorp trained in Kutiyattam and performed an inaugural orangetam to understand artists' embodied practice.
Her apprenticeship built trust with teacher Margi Usha and shaped her research questions and access.

INSIGHT

A Thousand-Year Cosmopolitan Theatre

Kutiyattam is the world's oldest continuously performed theatre with thousand-year continuity and multi-language performance.
Lowthorp frames its history as engagement with multiple cosmopolitanisms rather than isolated tradition.

INSIGHT

Multilingual Performance Enables Relevance

Kutiyattam's use of Sanskrit, Malayalam, Prakrit, Manipravalam, and mudra gestures embodies historical multilingual cosmopolitanism.
The Vidushaka figure translates and updates Sanskrit action into local, topical commentary, enabling continual relevance.

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Deep Cosmopolitanism: Kutiyattam, Dynamic Tradition, and Globalizing Heritage in Kerala, India explores the extraordinary past and present of Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater, the world's oldest continuously performed theater. Recognized as India's first UNESCO intangible cultural heritage of humanity, the matrilineal temple art of Kutiyattam has been performed by men and women in Kerala, India, since the tenth century C.E.

This book illustrates how Kutiyattam Sanskrit theater has encountered multiple forms of cosmopolitanism over the course of its thousand-year history. Exploring how Kutiyattam artists create meaning out of their deep past through everyday narratives and reflections, author Leah Lowthorp traces the art's cosmopolitan encounters over time, from the premodern Sanskrit cosmopolis to Muslim sultans, British colonialists, Communist politics, and UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. In so doing, Lowthorp fundamentally rethinks the notion of cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective with premodern roots and offers a critique of the colonialist undertones of how international heritage organizations like UNESCO conceptualize peoples and traditions around the world.

Diving into an ethnographic exploration that considers Kutiyattam's multiple cosmopolitanisms over a period of one thousand years, Deep Cosmopolitanism offers a model for decolonizing modernity and challenges us to rethink what it means to be cosmopolitan, traditional, and modern in the world today.

Indiana University Press generiously make this book freely available as an Open Access monograph. To read, please visit here.

Leah Lowthorp is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon. She is a cultural anthropologist and a folklorist. She is editor (with Frank J. Korom) of South Asian Folklore in Transition: Crafting New Horizons (Routledge, 2019). Her email address is lowthorp@uoregon.edu.

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, critical development studies, and the anthropology of time. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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