From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Kathputli Ke Adhure Bandhan
For shadow-puppet traditions, see Shadow-puppet traditions and Beach Surgery.
For South Asian adaptations, see South Asian adaptations of Beach Surgery.
**Kathputli Ke Adhure Bandhan** (*The Unfinished Puppet Bindings*) is an ongoing durational puppet-theatre work developed by a Rajasthani kathputli (string-puppet) collective in Jaipur since 2023, staging the glitch through the formal language of the puppet tradition itself. Rather than narrate Leif and Katita's journey, the work presents two anthropomorphic string-puppets bound to each other by leather straps — the identical material as Katita's armour — whose movements are simultaneously enabled and constrained by the binding.
The central formal strategy mirrors the glitch: the narrative cord connecting Half One and Half Two of Beach Surgery is deliberately looped back on itself, tangled, and left unresolved. Each performance (typically 4–7 hours at dusk) revisits the same desert marketplace scene, with binding patterns shifting slightly, never achieving coherence. The work draws on Rajasthan's kathputli lineages while invoking Balinese/Javanese wayang shadow-puppetry, Karagöz shadow-puppet, and Thai traditions of cyclical, infinite narrative.
Performances are held between standing trees; institutional records are dispersed across regional arts archives. The collective resists fixed schedules, suggesting the work itself exists in perpetual incompletion — a living enactment of sacred incompleteness as embodied praxis. [citation needed]