OLLANTAY, THE KHIPU, AND EIGHTEENTHCENTURY NEO-INCA POLITICS

GALEN BROKAW
University at Buifalo

The Quechua-language drama Ollantay figures prominently in literary

histories of Latin America, because it is the oldest surviving secular play
written in Quechua. But analysts of the play are at least as likely, if not
more so, to be linguists or anthropologists as literary critics. The
unknown provenance of the play poses serious problems for establishing
a literary basis upon which to analyze the work. Thus, from the moment
the first manuscript copy of Ollantay was discovered in the early nineteenth century, literary commentators and critics have focused primarily
on whether the play is an "essentially" indigenous or Spanish product.
The primary bases for the arguments in this debate are the play's preHispanic setting on the one hand (Tschudi; Pacheco Zegarra; Yepez
Miranda) and its general adherence to the formal conventions of Spanish
drama on the other (Mitre; Hills). Also from the very beginning, however, this debate reached an impasse, because there appear to be no definitive answers to the questions that would potentially resolve the issue.
There is no question that the conventions of the play generally coincide
with those of Spanish drama, but there is no corpus of Inca dramas that
would make possible a comparative analysis and provide a basis for
negating the indigenista claims. By the same token, however, the indigenista argument is unable to delimit an indigenous discursive formation
to which Ollantay allegedly belongs. This issue dominated criticism of
the play, because the horizon of understanding that normally makes pos31

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sible forms of hermeneutic or interpretive analysis appears indeterminate

in this case. Even arguments that attempt to determine a horizon of understanding within the binary parameters of this debate do not provide a
foundation firm or extensive enough to authorize more interpretative
analyses. This critical impasse derives from the premise that the play
must have some sort of essential, abstract, stable or fixed discursive identity and from the tendency to neglect the implications of transcultural
processes in the colonial period in general and the eighteenth century
more specifically.
Some more recent scholars, such as Jose Maria Arguedas, Martin
Lienhard, Carlos Garcia-Bedoya, and John Beverley, have advocated a
more measured approach that recognizes the transcultural nature of the
work. Lienhard and Beverley, in particular, have moved beyond the narrow terms of the hispanista)indigenista debate and engaged in analyses
that read the play as a transcultural product of the eighteenth-century
Andes. Critics such as Lienhard and Beverleyexplicitly or implicitly
avoid the problem of determining in the abstract whether Ollantay is
essentially Spanish or indigenous, because for them these categories have
no relevance outside their social and political realities. This kind of reading of Ollantay is as much a reading of the cultural and political history
of eighteenth-century Cuzco as it is of the play itself.
Lienhard and Beverley explore the possible relationship between elements of Ollantay^s plot and the socio-politics of eighteenth-century
Cuzco. Given the pre-Hispanic setting of Ollantay, a complementary
approach would conduct a comparative analysis of indigenous cultural
concepts and traditions over time and as they appear in the play. The relative paucity of detailed ethnographic information on the pre-Hispanic
and colonial periods makes such a project difficult, but there is at least
one element intemal to the play that may be susceptible to this type of
analysis. Specifically, the knotted, colored string device known as the
khipu appears several times, and on two occasions characters in the play
perform khipu readings that implicitly revealalbeit to a limited
degreematerial conventions of a khipu semiotics, that is to say conventions of a khipu system of representation. The play presents the story of
Ollantay, a prominent high-level but non-Inca official in the Inca empire,
who falls in love with the Inca Pachacutec's daughter, Cusi Coyllur.
When the Inca denies Ollantay's request to marry Cusi Coyllur, Ollantay
rebels. The rebellion lasts approximately ten years, during which time

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Cusi Coyllur is confined to a monastery. After initial success, Ollantay

eventually suffers defeat as a result of a deception by the Inca's general
Rumi Nahui. The Inca Tupac Yupanqui, who had succeeded Pachacutec
by this time, pardons Ollantay and reunites him with Cusi Coyllur and
their daughter Ima Sumac. The two khipu readings in the play involve
military status reports that take place at the beginning and the end of the
rebellion respectively. The first informs the Inca of the rebellion's success, and the second announces Ollantay's defeat.
With a few notable exceptions (Brotherston), the khipu readings in the
play have not attracted the attention of twentieth-century critics. There
may be a tendency to view this element merely as part of the representation of a pre-Hispanic Inca empire, which it certainly is; but the khipu
also has a history that continues throughout the colonial period and into
the twenty-first century. Whether or not Ollantay originated in an earlier
period, the versions to which we have access are most likely products of
the eighteenth century (Mannheim 148-50). The elements within the play,
such as the khipu, then, may also be tied in one way or another to the turbulent cultural, social, and political context of eighteenth-century Cuzco.
Before discussing the khipu that appear in Ollantay, then, an understanding of this context is necessary.
The negotiation in Ollantay between an indigenous Andean content
and a European discursive formation took place in the context of the
political turbulence of the eighteenth-century Spanish colonial government. In "The Age of Andean Insurrection," Steve J. Stem identifies more
than one-hundred uprisings that occurred in the Andes between 1742 and
1782 (34). Many of these rebellions were fomented in part by an Inca renaissance that involved a concerted effort among some descendants of ,
indigenous Andean nobles to revive and maintain the political and cultural status of an elite Inca culture. Beginning in the late seventeenth and
throughout most of the eighteenth century, the indigenous aristocracy
developed a renewed interest in their ancient traditions, as manifested by
the revival of Inca dress that appears in portraits, the organization of Incastyle processions, the fabrication of neo-Inca ceramic vases, and the production of Quechua language dramas (Rowe 22-24; Lienhard 79). Many
critics argue that Ollantay and the other Quechua-language dramas that
emerged in the eighteenth century were part of this Inca renaissance that
reached its peak around 1760 and entered a revolutionary stage shortly

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thereafter, culminating in 1781 with the rebellion led by Tupac Amaru II

(Lienhard 79; Garcia-Bedoya 337).
The mainstream Inca renaissance, however, was never motivated by
revolutionary sentiments but rather by the indigenous elite's need to
maintain a level of prestige and distinction within the colonial order.
Throughout the colonial period, the Spaniards had always afforded a privileged status to the Inca nobility, and this privileged relationship led to a
much higher degree of acculturation than occurred at other levels of
Andean society. By the end of the seventeenth century, highly acculturated Andean elites had become so Hispanized that they may have run the
risk of losing much of their indigenous cultural and historical identity
altogether and their privileged political status along with it. Moreover, the
gradual emergence of an indigenous and mestizo middle class would have
posed a serious challenge to the Inca nobility's monopoly on political
privilege. Thus, in large measure, the eighteenth-century Inca renaissance
may have been an attempt to revive cultural practices that would serve as
the basis for maintaining a political class distinction that was eroding as
a result of acculturation and the emergence of new economic class structures.
One of the inherent obstacles facing the Inca revivalist impulse would
have been the lack of any direct connection to a living, organic, elite Inca
culture. Activists interested in reviving an elite indigenous culture had
access to two main sources of information: (1) eighteenth-century indigenous communities that retained their traditional practices; and (2) early
colonial chronicles that described Inca culture. In "El movimiento
nacional inca del siglo XVIII," John H. Rowe suggests that eighteenthcentury Andean elites considered surviving Andean traditions as corrupted (24-28). Whether or not eighteenth-century Inca descendants made a
distinction between corrupt and non-comipt traditions, they certainly
would have distinguished between popular and elite cultural practices.
The social, cultural, and economic disparities between the acculturated
Andean upper-class and the indigenous masses in the eighteenth century
would have induced the neo-Inca revivalists to project the same structure
onto the pre-Hispanic past. A general awareness of eighteenth-century
Andean traditions may have informed the Inca renaissance to a limited
degree, but the whole-sale adoption of popular cultural practices would
have further blurred the class distinction that the Inca renaissance was
designed to reinforce.

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In the revivalist project, then, the Inca elites relied primarily on early

colonial descriptions of Inca culture, and more specifically on the Inca

Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios reales (1609). From the beginning of
the sixteenth century through the twentieth, in most cases Garcilaso was
the exclusive authority on the Incas. Rowe explains that Andres Gonzalez
de Barcia Carballido y Zufiiga's 1723 edition of Garcilaso's Comentarios
reales circulated widely in Peru and that the rebel leader Tupac Amaru II
owned a copy. Eighteenth-century indigenous elites such as Tupac Amaru
II, who had thoroughly assimilated Spanish culture and religion
(Valcarcel 38), relied heavily on Garcilaso's text for an understanding of
their Inca heritage. In his treatment of pre-Hispanic Andean culture,
Garcilaso includes a description of both the khipu and of an indigenous
theatrical tradition. Most scholars who have argued for the essentially

indigenous nature of Ollantay cite the following passage from the

Comentarios reales:
No les falto habilidad a los amautas, que eran los filosofos,
para componer comedias y tragedias, que en dias y fiestas
solemnes representaban delante de sus Reyes y de los sefiores
que asistian en la corte. Los representantes no eran viles, sino
Incas y gente noble, hijos de curacas y los mismos curacas y
capitanes, hasta maeses de campo, porque los autos de las
tragedias se representaban al propio, cuyos argumentos siempre eran de hechos militares, de triunfos y victorias, de las hazafias y grandezas de los Reyes pasados y de otros heroicos
varones. Los argumentos de las comedias eran de agricultura,
de hacienda, de cosas caseras y familiares. Los representantes,
luego que se acababa la comedia, se sentaban en sus lugares
conforme a su calidad y oficios. No hacian entremeses deshonestos, viles y bajos: todo era de cosas graves y honestas, con
sentencias y donaires permitidos en tal lugar. A los que se
aventajaban en la gracia del representar les daban joyas y favores de mucha estima. (I: 114)
In isolation from other sources, this passage appears to establish very
clearly the existence of an Andean theatrical tradition; and the role of the
amautas, who were also associated with the khipu, conveys the implicit
possibility that such works were recorded in this secondary medium.

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However, Garcilaso's description of Inca culture, of which the cited passage is an example, must be understood in the context of his personal situation, his larger project, and the description of similar cultural practices
that appear in other chronicles.
Garcilaso published his work at the age of sixty, having left Peru at the
age of twenty, and, as Gonzalez Echevarria points out, he was a skilled
writer steeped in European humanism (44-45). Although Garcilaso's
Comentarios exhibits both the historical and the allegorical humanist
methodologies identified by Anthony Grafton (23-46), he relies primarily on an historical and philological approach designed to reconstruct Inca
culture and society. Unlike the Greeks and Romans upon whose textual
legacy the European humanists focused their scholarship, however, the
Incas left no alphabetic record. So, Garcilaso could not engage in the
analysis of public records or textual sources as thfe basis for his historiographical project. Furthermore, although he claims to draw from friends
and relatives who had access to regional khipu accounts, he had no direct
access to khipu records. Rather, he directed his philological analysis
toward explicating the errors of contemporary texts that had misrepresented Inca culture as a result of an imperfect knowledge of Quechua; and
he appealed to his own knowledge of the language and his indigenous origins as a self-authorizing gesture.
The early colonial descriptions of indigenous culture that Garcilaso
criticizes are often very confiicted and ambivalent about the European
terms with which they are forced to describe Amerindian objects and
practices. Garcilaso's text suffers from the same ambivalence that characterizes most colonial discourses, but it is much less self-consciously so
than earlier chronicles. Garcilaso's ambivalence results from a desire
perhaps in large measure unconscious^to suppress difference. This is not
exactly what Homi Bhabha calls colonial mimicry, but it employs many
of the same techniques. Such mimicry, for example, always creates a certain slippage that belies the asserted equivalence, and Garcilaso's text is
no exception. First, Garcilaso does not mention any specific drama. If he
were aware of a work such as Ollantay, he surely would have mentioned
it (Hills 171; Calvo Perez 47). In fact, the existence of such a text would
have provided the basis for the kind of textual analysis in which humanists were trained. Second, Garcilaso explains that the actors in the plays
were Incas and other nobles rather than individuals from lower classes
and that they did not present "dishonest, vile, or lowly" entremeses. These

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assertions about the elite and civilized nature of the Andean tradition as
opposed to a more popular, lower-class phenomenon implicitly contrast
with sixteenth and seventeenth-century European dramas, whose actors
constituted a socially stigmatized lower class and whose entremeses often
focused on less than dignified subject matters. Thus, Garcilaso's description of Inca drama may be only indirectly related to Spanish theater
through an association with a humanist understanding of the more prestigious Greek and Roman traditions.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Andean performers were nobles who
retumed to their appropriate places after the performance suggests that
these activities were part of a larger cultural practice of some kind of ritual performance. With the exception of the Inca Garcilaso, early chroniclers who describe indigenous cultural practices do not find any Andean
analogues of European drama, much less mention specific indigenous
dramatic works. Clements Markham claims that Juan de Santa Cruz
Pachacuti Yamqui's Relacion de antigUedades (1613) identifies four different types of dramas, three of which Markham describes respectively as
a joyous representation, a farce, and a tragedy {The Incas 147); but the
Relacion itself is not as clear as Markham seems to suggest. This alleged
description and taxonomy of Andean drama appears in the context of the
birth of the sixth Inca's son. According to Santa Cruz Pachacuti's
genealogical history, the sixth Inca, Yabar Uacac Ynga Yupangui, dedicated himself to conquests in his old age. Upon the birth of his son, he
sent out orders to attend a celebration under threat of war. The text then
explains: "Y enton9es haze la fiesta del nacimiento de su hijo del infante
Viracochampa Yncan Yupangui, en donde embentaron representa9iones
de los farfantes Ilamados afiaysaoca, hayachuco y llamallama, hafiamsi,
etc. El qual dicho Ynga le da una buelta alrededor de Cuzco con su gente
de guerra sin dar guerra ninguno" (217). A grammatically literal reading
of this passage would understand the Quechua terms to refer to types of
actors or roles in the performance rather than types of drama. Moreover,
it is not clear whether the four terms are synonymous designations or
refer to different types of a larger category. The second and third terms,
listed separately in the edition cited above, appear together in a single
entry in Gonzalez Holguin's Vocabulario (160S): "Hayachuco llamallama
saynatahuacon. Los que hazen juegos, o dan9as disfra9ados" (1S6).
Markham's identification of afiaysaoca as "a joyous representation" is
also curious. This word appears to be a combination of afiqy referring to

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"reprehension" and saoca or sauca meaning "burlas o cosa de burlas"

(Gonzalez Holguin 29, 324). In general, the ambiguity of the passage in
the Relacion supports many different inferences, but the context in which
it appears in this text suggests that "embentaron representa9iones" refers
to a more impromptu participation in an Andean ritual performance tradition.
Furthermore, there are several chronicles that implicitly undermine
Garcilaso's description of Inca theater and Markham's interpretation of
Pachacuti Yamqui's text, and present an image of a very different performance tradition. In Suma y narracion de los Incas, for example, Juan
de Betanzos describes an Inca performance tradition that involves the
participation of Inca nobility in a ritual context (Betanzos 61; Lienhard
68). Guaman Poma provides a similar description adding details about the
same kind of performances practiced in other regions of the empire (1:
318[320]-327[329]). 1 would argue that these passages from Betanzos,
Guaman Poma, and Santa Cruz Pachacuti all refer to the same indigenous
practices described by Garcilaso's more Europeanized text. The rituals
themselves appear to consist of song and dance rather than the kind of
staging that takes place in European drama. Betanzos indicates that the
songs were often epic-like narratives (61). Thus, as Lienhard has argued,
there may have been an Andean epic mode that manifested itself in different social contexts. Even if a version of the Ollantay story were enacted in these ritual performances, it would not have looked or sounded anything like a European drama. Furthermore, the lack of any reference to
specific "dramatic" song and dance routines suggests that Andeans did
not conceptualize these activities as manifestations of some stable, fixed
text independent of the performance itself.
Garcilaso's colonial discourse of mimicry constitutes one of the primary strategies in his larger project which involves representing the Inca
empire as a kind of Golden Age that would compare favorably to Spanish
standards of civilization (Lienhard 67). The only way to do this in the
early seventeenth century was to make the Incas look as European as possible. Leaving aside the question of the degree to which this was a conscious or unconscious strategy, Garcilaso tends to equate indigenous
Andean cultural practices with Spanish ones as indicated in the passage
cited above in which he categorizes indigenous practices of performance
according to the Classical literary genres of comedia and tragedia.
The description of an Andean theatrical tradition in the Comentarios

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reales, then, had a determining infiuence on the way in which neo-Inca

activists (re)constmcted Inca dramas. There are also numerous other
examples in Garcilaso's text of the Hispanization of Inca culture that
would have been equally infiuential. The Comentarios reales wasand
continues to beso immensely popular precisely because it resonates
with European readers in ways that less mediated ethnographic representations do not. Thus, for the eighteenth-century indigenous elites,
Garcilaso's text provided the basis for reaffirming the waning indigenous
elite/popular hierarchy by redefining it according to the same cultural and
economic differences that characterized Spanish society. In the specific
case of the theatrical tradition, Garcilaso's use of terms referring to the
European dramatic genres comedia and tragedia to describe Inca ritual
performances facilitated this process, because, like Garcilaso, the eighteenth-century Inca descendants were already highly acculturated. The
"revival" of Inca drama based on Garcilaso's description became merely
a matter of infusing an already familiar European dramatic form with an
indigenous content. Ironically, then, Garcilaso's Hispanicized representation of Inca culture, including but not limited to his description of Andean
drama, served in many ways as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Garcilaso's text also describes the khipu, one of the icons of Inca
achievement and hence another prime candidate for revivalist projects. In
the eighteenth century, many local communities and haciendas still used
khipu, but there was already a wide-spread view that these surviving
devices were a degenerate vestige of a more complex system of representation. Most acculturated Inca elites, who were heavily invested in
maintaining their privileged positions in the Spanish social and political
system, would not have found much use for reviving the khipu as a communicative medium, but they may have resurrected it as a symbol of Inca
ingenuity. Indeed, the use of the khipu in Ollantay implicitly celebrates
this Inca medium by emphasizing its semiotic or representational capacity. The implicit description of khipu conventions in the play constitutes
one of the few concrete elements that may provide an opening for understanding its relationship to eighteenth-century indigenous culture and politics. Furthermore, it may shed light on the history of the khipu in the
Andes.
In translations of the Quechua text of Ollantay from the nineteenth
century and in at least one review of the play, a marginal debate took
place about the proper way to translate the passages in which the khipu

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readings take place. In the second scene of the second act, a messenger
arrives with a khipu received and read by the Inca's general. Below, I
include Tschudi's Quechua transcription and the corresponding text from
the first translation published by Jose Sebastian Barranca in 1868:
Ruminahui.
Caicca Ilantta; nan ccahuahuan
Cai umanpi hatascaiia,
Cai rurucunari runam
Tucui paiman huataccafla.
Ynca Pachacutec.
Ymatan ccan ricurccanqui?
Indianer.
Ollantaitas tucui Anti
Runacuna chasquirccancu;
Hinatan huillacurccancu
Ccahuatas ilaitucun panti
O sanitac umallampi.
Rumifiahui
Chaitan quipu huillasunqui. (Tschudi, Ollantay 87)
RUMI-NAHUI.(Descifra el quipu). He aqui una veirita
que tiene atada la cabeza con una madeja de lana; se han
rebelado tantos hombres como granos de maiz, ves aqui
suspendidos.
PACHACUTECY tu ^que has visto?
INDIO.Que toda la nacion Anti se ha sublevado con
Ollanta. Me han asegurado que ya se ve su cabeza cefiida
con la borla roja o encamada.
RUMI-NAHUI.Eso tambien dice el Quipu. (Barranca 31)
In Barranca's translation, Rumi-Nahui seems to indicate that the cords
of the khipu are attached to a wooden bar. Although this is uncommon in
archaeological specimens, there are examples of khipu whose main cord
is attached to a sometimes omately carved piece of wood. Even more
curious than the wooden bar is the suggestion that the khipu contained
grains of com, which is not a feature of archaeological khipu. The second

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instance of khipu reading in the play also reveals the use of objects inserted into the strings. In the fourth scene of the third act, the high priest
Huillac Uma reads the second khipu message:
Huillac-Uma.
Cai Quipupin can quillinsa
Nan Ollanta rupasccafia
Horccosccaiquin qquepariscay
Cai pisi ppunchau ccasita
Ay Mama huafiusccan rini
Munacuc sonccoipacc mini. (Tschudi, Ollantay 100)
HUILLAC-UMA.(Descifra el quipu). jEn este Quipu
hay carbon!, que indica que ya Ollanta ha sido quemado.
Estos tres. . . cinco quipus atados dicen que Anti-Suyu ha
sido sometido, y que se encuentra en manos del Inca, esos
tres... cinco, que todo se ha hecho con rigor. (Barranca 46)
In this case, Huillac-Uma indicates that the khipu contains coal. These
passages suggest that the khipu system of representation employed
objects such as com and coal as conventional signifiers in addition to the
other known conventions such as color, cord configuration, and knots.
Markham's 1871 English edition of Ollantay, which in many cases
appears to be more a translation of Barranca's Spanish version than of an
original Quechua text, translates the Quechua in exactly the same way. In
1878, Gavino Pacheco Zegarra translated a different but very similar
Quechua manuscript of the play into French. Pacheco Zegarra argues that
the suggestion that kemels of com and pieces of coal were inserted into
the khipu is the result of a mistranslation by Barranca and Markham (52,
108-09).
Ultimately, there may be no way to determine the original referent of
these passages as conceived by the person who produced them, but the
confiicting translations are a useful point of departure for understanding
the nature and status of the khipu in the eighteenth century. The pertinent
section of the Quechua text from the first passage in question is the following: "Cai mmcunari runam / Tucui paiman huataccafia" (Tschudi,
Ollantay 87). Barranca and Markham translate the word ruru as "granos
de maiz" and "grains of com" respectively (Barranca 23;

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Ollantay 59-60). Pacheco Zegarra, however, argues that ruru actually

means "knot" (52). Neither of these translations appears in either colonial
or more modem dictionaries. In his mid sixteenth-century Lexicon
(1560), Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas defines ruro as both "pit" [cuesco
defruta] and "egg" [huevo] (349), and Gonzalez Holguin's early seventeenth-century Vocabulario (1608) renders rwrw as "kidney" [rifiones],
"fruit [fruto de arbol] or "pit" [pepita o hueso defr~uta](322). Frank
Salomon explains that some contemporary Quechua dialects also use the
term ruru or lulun to refer to roundish objects such as eyeballs (personal
communication). A comparison between the Spanish-Quechua and the
Quechua-Spanish sections of both colonial and modem dictionaries suggests that colonial Quechua speakers from the Cuzco region and many
modem dialects conceive of pits/fhiit and kidneys as essentially the same
thing and that this is the base meaning of the term ruru or ruro. The
pit/fruit conjunction obtains from the fact that different categories and
developmental stages of fruit are conceived as different kinds of ruru as
indicated by an accompanying adjective. This is consistent with the
Quechua conception of life in general as a series of gradient changes
(Salomon 232; Allen). Furthermore, all the other secondary referents
associated with rum have their own base terms. The standard Quechua
term for "egg" or "huevo," for example, is runtu. The use of such terms
in compound words and phrases confirms their "base" or "root" definitions. All compound expressions containing the term ruru and runtu
relate to, or build upon, the base meanings of "friiit" and "egg" respectively. The use of the term ruru to refer to "eggs," then, appears to be a
metaphoric extension justified by the shared characteristic of roundness.
It is unlikely that colonial dictionaries documented all of the metaphoric

possibilities this term may have inspired. Thus, the translations of the
word by both Barranca and Pacheco Zegarra, which imply a metaphoric
extension to include the referents "grains of com" and "knots" respectively, may represent legitimate metaphoric uses of the term ruru current
in the colonial period.
I have found no explicit evidence to corroborate either of these uses of
ruru, but there is a cognitive basis for metaphorically extending the
semantic field of the term to include both grains of com and knots. Of
course, grains of com are hard roundish objects. There is no record of any
archaeological khipu ever containing grains of com, but the knots of a
khipu are also roundish and have a certain resemblance to pits and kid-

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neys: single, overhand knots are easily associated visually with pits or
grains of com; the figure-eight knot used to represent a single unit in the
ones position may look like a kidney; and a tightly drawn long knot often
creates a crescent-like shape even more visually similar to a kidney. There
also may have been a practical reason for employing ruru metaphorically to designate individual knots on a khipu. The standard Quechua term
for knot was quipu or quipo. So, in the Quechua metadiscourse dealing
with khipu, there may have been a need to distinguish between the larger
device and individual knots.
The second controversial passage reads as follows: "Cai Quipupin can
quillinsa" (Tschudi, Ollantay 100). Barranca and Markham both translate
this to mean essentially "In this quipu there is charcoal" (Barranca 46;
Markham, Ollantay 94). While admitting that the term quillinsa refers to
carbon or charcoal, Pacheco Zegarra argues that in this context, it is used
in a kind of metonymy merely to denote the color black (108). The normal term for "black" isyana, but the use of a color metonymy of this type
is consistent with some contemporary Andean cultural and linguistic
practices (Frank Salomon, personal communication) that may have roots
in earlier periods.
Pacheco Zegarra does not elaborate on the complex issues involved in
the difference between his translation and those of Barranca and
Markham. He does not explain, for example, that the standard meaning of
ruru is neither "grain of com" nor "knot" but rather "fhiit/pit/kidney";
and he merely asserts that the term quillinsa is used to refer to the color
black. Although both Pacheco Zegarra's and Barranca's translations are
possible, their accuracy depends upon the nature of the khipu depicted in
the play rather than any inherent nature of the semantic field. Of course,
the play is a representation, and hence does not necessarily refer to any
real khipu practice at all, but the description of how the khipus are deciphered implies certain khipu conventions. Ideas about such conventions
must have come from somewhere. In addition to linguistic and philological perspectives, an understanding of the status of knowledge about the
khipu in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the history of this
medium leading up to this period provide valuable insights into the khipu
that appear in Ollantay. Working back from the nineteenth to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is possible to reconstruct an outline of
the history of this medium that establishes a suggestive relationship
between colonial practices and the khipu readings in the play.

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Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, very little was

known about the khipu. Coincidentally, Johann Jakob von Tschudi published both the first description of an archaeological khipu in 1846 (Peru
425-27) and the first transcription of an Ollantay manuscript in 1853. The
description and illustration of Tschudi's khipu from Pachacamac also
appeared in Rivero iand Tschudi's AntigUedades peruanas in 1851 (104).
However, these texts contained only fairly general observations of a single khipu. During the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century, the
prevailing view, as Pacheco Zegarra's text indicates, was that most of the
extant khipu had either completely deteriorated or been hidden away by
the Indians (51-52). In 1864, Jose Perez reinforced this view in an article
claiming that archaeological khipu had a tendency to disintegrate when
handled (56). Unbeknownst to Perez, however, the khipu he describes,
originally published by Alexander Strong in 1827, was fi-audulent; and it
is doubtful that Perez ever even saw or handled it himself. Rivero, who
was familiar with at least one authentic archaeological specimen, was
also duped by Strong's fraudulent khipu (Rivero, "Quipos"), and in 1882
Markham and other experts authenticated two apparently fraudulent
khipu for the National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in
Florence, Italy (Loza, "Quipus" 51). The problem throughout most of the
eighteenth century was that nobody knew exactly what a khipu was supposed to look like, which made even the experts susceptible to deception.
With the gradual emergence of Peruvian archaeology in the nineteenth
century (Bonavia and Ravines), authentic archaeological khipu began
appearing in Museums and attracting the interest of academic researchers.
It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, when the
availability of a sufficient number of archaeological specimens made possible an informed understanding of the material nature of the khipu. Prior
to the formation of large museum collections of khipu in Berlin, New
York, and Lima, scholars relied primarily on the written descriptions that
appear in colonial chronicles. Eighteenth-century writers drew their information about khipu almost exclusively from the Inca Garcilaso de la
Vega's Comentarios reales (1609). Nineteenth-century scholars had
access to a few travel accounts, at least one description of an archaeological khipu, and a greater number of colonial texts; but they continued to
rely primarily upon Garcilaso's Comentarios as the most authoritative
source of information. This is the evidence cited by Pacheco Zegarra
against Barranca's translation of implicit khipu conventions in Ollantay.

Brokaw

45

nowhere in the chronicles such as Garcilaso's Comentarios or any later

writings does it say that objects such as com, carbon, or anything else for
that matter, are inserted into khipu (110).
This raises an interesting question about the rationale behind the original translation. According to Pacheco Zegarra (109-10), Tschudi claims
that there are a variety of objects which may be inserted into a khipu: coca
leaves, small sticks, pebbles, and so forth. Other than archaelogical specimens, of which there were very few at the time, and written descriptions
by colonial chroniclers or other nineteenth-century travelers like Tschudi
himself, the only source of information available would have been personal observation of nineteenth-century ethnographic khipu in actual use.
It is quite possible that at least one type of ethnographic khipu in the eighteenth and nineteenth nineteenth centuries contained the kind of objects
ascribed to Tschudi's description by Pacheco Zegarra. If so, I would argue
that these khipu probably derived from colonial innovations in khipu
practices.
Many scholars assume that beginning in 1583 the Spaniards universally condemned the khipu, prohibited their use, and bumed as many as they
could find (Loza, "Du bon usage" 156; Salomon 113). The corollary of
this assumption is that this campaign to destroy the khipu intermpted the
continuity of the medium, resulting in the loss of khipu literacy with its
associated conventions, but there is no evidence to support these assertions. The Third Lima Council did mandate the buming of khipus in
1583, but this order applied only to khipu related to indigenous religious
practices that threatened to undermine Catholic orthodoxy (Tercer concilio limense 191). The order in the Tercer Concilio with regard to the
buming of khipu does not make this distinction explicitly, but the Tercer
cathecismo's instructions that the Indians create khipus in order to facilitate the confession of their sins makes it very clear that the Third
Council's order was not a universal condemnation of all khipu {Tercer
cathecismo 482-83).
Most modem claims that the Spaniards bumed large numbers of khipu
rely directly on the Tercer Concilio and/or indirectly on claims made by
other scholars such as Jesus Lara. In La cultura de los Inkas, for example, Lara claims that there was a large scale buming of khipus during the
conquest, but he cites no source for this assertion (1: 351-52). In La
poesia quechua, Lara alleges that the Extirpacion de la idolatria del Peru
(1621) by Joseph de Arriaga describes the destmction of khipu (50), but

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I have been unable to find any such account in this text. Arriaga does
record an account of the buming of idolatrous objects, but he does not list
any khipu among them. Lara may have misread the term quepa [a kind of
tmmpet], which does appear in Arriaga's list (94). Only a few pages earlier, liowever, Arriaga actually advocates the use of khipu for confession
(89). As far as I am aware, there is only one recorded instance of a
Spaniard buming a khipu, but it is an isolated case with political rather
than religious motives (Avalos y Figueroa 151). Furthermore, there are
numerous texts that refer to the use of khipu in both religious and secular
interactions between Andeans and Spaniards well into the seventeenth
century (Arriaga 94; Solorzano y Pereyra 1: 53, 2: 308-09; Vasquez de
Espinoza 2: 758, 807; Perez Bocanegra 111-13). Thus, the Tercero cathecismo, Arriaga's text, and several other chronicles from the period reveal
that attempts by religious officials to encourage the adaptation of the
khipu for Spanish religious practices were particularly wide-spread both
before and after the Third Lima Council in 1583. Thus, although the
Spaniards may have bumed certain types of khipu used in what they identified as idolatrous practices, there was never any universal condemnation
or prohibition of khipu use. On the contrary, both the church and the colonial administration advocated the use of this medium.
The adaptation of the khipu for ecclesiastical purposes may have contributed to the production of khipu such as the one that accompanies the
so-called Naples documents (Hyland; Cantu) and the twentieth-century
ethnographic khipu described by modem researchers: the Chipaya khipu
studied by Teresa Gisbert and Jose de Mesa (Gisbert and Mesa 497-506),
the khipu from Rapaz (Ruiz Estrada), and, although not ecclesiastical in
nature, possibly the Taquile khipu discussed by Ravines and Mackey
(Ravines; Avalos de Matos; Mackey). All of tiiese khipu differ rather
markedly from archaeological specimens. Unlike pre-Hispanic archaeological khipu, twentieth-century ecclesiastical khipu legacies often contain objects attached to their cords. If the corpus of archaeological khipu
is an accurate sample of this medium as used in the pre-Hispanic period,
then the twentieth-century practice of attaching objects to cords would
derive from innovations in khipu practices motivated by new contexts of
use and their associated institutions in the mid- to late colonial period and
thereafter. Ecclesiastical khipu would have been particularly susceptible
to such transformations, because there were no conventional precedents
for the information the priests wanted them to record.

Brokaw

47

Moreover, this ecclesiastical khipu tradition was uniform in neither

extension nor intension. In spite of the general recommendation in the
Tercero cathecismo, there was never any organized pan-Andean campaign to adapt the khipu for ecclesiastical use. The legacies of ecclesiastical khipu traditions that have survived appear to be the result of individual projects whose conventions were idiosyncratic to the communities, parishes, or individuals that developed them.
Ecclesiastical khipu practices were contemporary with, but different
from, the more traditional khipu that inspired them. These ecclesiastical
khipu would have been much more accessible to observation by travelers
such as Tschudi than the khipu used in more traditional contexts such as
those whose legacy Frank Salomon has studied in Tupicocha. Tschudi's
description of khipu conventions cited by Pacheco Zegarra, then, may
have derived from his personal observation of ecclesiastical khipu during
his early nineteenth-century travels in Peru. In any case. Barranca and
Markham's translation of the passages in Ollantay implying the insertion
of objects in the cords of the khipu is more consistent with the conventions of these ecclesiastical khipu that can be traced back to the colonial
period than with pre-Hispanic archaeological specimens or even the modem non-ecclesiastical patrimonial khipu from Tupicocha.
Neo-Inca activists in the eighteenth century who may have had an
interest in reviving the khipu for either symbolic or practical purposes
would have been aware of Garcilaso's general description of this device,
but even more infiuential would have been the observable ethnographic
khipu practices of the eighteenth-century itself. In general, the acculturated Inca elite did not live in indigenous communities where they might
have been exposed to more traditional khipu. So, like Tschudi, the most
prominent and accessible ethnographic khipu would have been the surviving ecclesiastical khipu practices that the Church had actively promoted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The conventions of these eighteenth-century ecclesiastical khipu may have already
included the insertion of objects that researchers would notice later in
twentieth-century practices.
Eighteenth-century Inca descendants were not interested in the institution of ecclesiastical khipu literacy as such. They would have viewed
such khipu, along with many other surviving indigenous traditions, as
corrupt and degenerate vestiges of a more illustrious past. Nevertheless,
any awareness of ecclesiastical khipu practices would have informed in

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BCom, Vol. 58, No. I (2006)

some way their reconstruction of what they saw as a lost authentic Inca
tradition. Thus, if there ever were any eighteenth-century performances of
Ollantay, they may very well have employed neo-Inca khipu props containing kemels of com and pieces of charcoal, inspired by similar conventions of ecclesiastical khipu.
There are very few manifestations of what we might call neo-Inca
khipu in the eighteenth century, but as in the case of the Ollantay
episodes, all of them relate to a kind of "letter" function. In considering
these neo-Inca khipu, it is important to keep in mind the nature of khipu
literacy. There is a tendency to think of khipu literacy in the same way we
think of alphabetic literacy: as a conventionally homogenous system. Of
course, even alphabetic writing often incorporates non-alphabetic signs
such as Arabic numerals, but I would argue that the khipu was probably
an even more heterogenous medium that may have employed different
types of semiotic conventions at different levels of literacy. The khipu
was an ubiquitous device in the pre-Hispanic Andes, used for recording a
variety of information types at several different social, economic, and
political levels. The most basic level consisted of pastoral khipu used to
keep track of fiocks. Another, more complicated literacy involved records
of community obligations and labor tribute. In pre-Hispanic times, the
highest, most complex level would have been dedicated to a kind of Inca
historiography (Brokaw). Unlike modem alphabetic literacy, however,
khipu literacy was not conceived as an independent institution in and of
itself. Each level with its specific content and conventions of representation was tied to institutional stmctures. This is not to say that there would
have been nothing in common between the different levels of khipu literacy, but the adaptation of khipu conventions to different types of content
would not have been as immediately transparent as in the case of a phonographic medium. It is unlikely, therefore, that any given level of khipu literacy would have survived for any significant period of time after the dissolution of the institutions with which it was associated.
The pre-Hispanic "letter-writing" use of the khipu that appears in
Ollantay is not very well documented in colonial sources. Such letter-khipus would have been carried by chasquis, the relay runners posted along
Inca roads used to transmit information throughout the empire. Indeed,
the messenger carrying the khipu in Ollantay is sometimes referred to as
a chasqui. Most colonial descriptions of the chasqui system do not mention the khipu, but in one of the first chronicles of the Pemvian conquest

Brokaw

49

before the Spaniards had even leamed the indigenous terms chasqui and
khipu, Miguel de Estete describes messengers mnning from post to post
carrying knotted strings (51). Guaman Poma's Nueva coronica also contains a drawing of a messenger carrying a khipu with an alphabetic tag
identifying it as a letter (1: 202[204]). The link between pre-Hispanic letter-khipus and the chasqui system would explain the lack of any more
detailed information about this particular category of khipu, because the
chasqui system dissolved rapidly after the conquest along with most of
the other high-level Inca administrative institutions. Eighteenth-century
neo-Inca revivalists and rebel organizers, however, may have resurrected
a kind of chasqui system as well as the use of khipu as part of their ideological project.
As the Inca renaissance began feeding into revolutionary movements,
reviving the khipu may have served as both a doubly symbolic gesture
and a strategically astute maneuver. There is some evidence to suggest
that some of the rebellions against the Spaniards that took place in the
second half of the eighteenth century, the most famous of which culminated in 1780-1781 with the insurgency of Tupac Amam II, may have
employed a kind of khipuin some cases in a symbolic way, and in others perhaps as a means of communication.
Fray Matias Borda relates an episode involving the use of a knotted
cord during the rebellion led by Julian Apasa/Tupac Catari near La Paz in
1781. Borda's account claims that the Indians no longer used khipus
(217), but on at least one occasion a messenger carried a knotted rope that
functioned as a kind of letter (209-11). The knot in the rope evidentiy held
some kind of symbolic significance related to the carrying out of Tupac
Catari's instmctions to kill all the Spaniards. Borda makes it very clear
that the rebellion produced official paper work in alphabetic script (21718), but this use of knotted cords may have been an ideological gesture,
a symbolic incorporation of an organic Andean medium.
William Bennett Stevenson describes another rebellion that took place
in 1792 near Valdivia, Chile, in which a system of colored, knotted cords
was used to communicate among Andean leaders:
In 1792 a revolution took place near Valdivia, and on the trial
of several of the accomplices, Marican, one of them, declared,
"that the signal sent by Lepitram was a piece of wood, about a
quarter of a yard long, and considerably thick; that it had been

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BCom, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2006)

split, and was found to contain the finger of a Spaniard; that it

was wrapped round with thread, having a fringe at one end
made of red, blue, black, and white worsted; that on the black
were tied by Lepitram, four knots, to intimate that it was the
fourth day after the full moon when the bearer left Paquipulli;
that on the white were ten knots, indicating that ten days after
that date the revolution would take place; that on the red was
to be tied by the person who received it a knot, if he assisted
in the revolt, but if he reftised, he was to tie a knot on the blue
and red joined together: so that according to the route determined on by Lepitram he would be able to discover on the
retum of his chasqui, or herald, how many of his friends would
join him; and if any dissented, he would know who it was, by
the place where the knot uniting the two threads was tied." (1:
50-51)
\xi Amerique pre-historique, Jean Francois Nadaillac produces a very similar version of this account, probably based on Stevenson's text (458). It
is unclear exactly what relationship these Chilean knotted cords might
have had to earlier khipu traditions, but they are not consistent with what
is known of archaeological khipu.
All of these military letter-khipu and the use of chasqui-\iks messengers appear to form part of the revolutionary branch of the eighteenthcentury Inca renaissance. There is no question that the Andean rebellions
of this period drew from, and built upon, the neo-Inca revivalist movement, invoking Inca symbols and attempting to revive Inca practices with
the ultimate goal of restoring Inca political sovereignty; but indigenous
leaders of these movements normally had more direct ties to indigenous
communities than the urban Inca elite who were the primary participants
in the Inca cultural renaissance. Unfortunately, relatively little is known
about the full extent of the Inca revivalist project, and even less about the
specifics of its relationship to rebellions that took place in the same period. Nevertheless, Jose Antonio de Areche's sentence pronounced against
Tupac Amam II and his family clearly indicates that the Spaniards saw a
direct relationship between Inca revivalism and indigenous insurgencies.
In the same document ordering Tupac Amam's dismemberment, Areche
bans the use of traditional Inca clothing and symbols, the use of the title
"Inca," and the representation of comedias that serve to perpetuate the

Brokaw

51

memory of the Incas. He also reemphasizes the official policy that the
Indians should be taught Spanish as a means of acculturation (771-73).
Shortly thereafter, Spain banned Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios
reales in Peru, and ordered that all extant copies in the viceroyalty be confiscated (Valcarcel 1971, 3: 267-68).
Ollantay may have been one of the provocations for Areche's prohibition of indigenous dramas in 1781. Bruce Mannheim has dated the version of Ollantay copied in the Sahuaraura manuscript to sometime
between 1690 and 1780 (148-50). It has become commonplace to assert
that Antonio Valdez, whose manuscript was the first to come to light,
organized presentations of Ollantay for Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui,
known as Tupac Amaru II. If this is tme, these representations would
probably have taken place prior to the rebellion itself Lienhard has
described this scenario as a legend (78nl7), because critics have perpetuated these claims without citing any source. The "legend" originates
with Clements Markham who states that Antonio Valdez was a good
friend of Tupac Amaru II, and insinuates that he transcribed the play from
the oral tradition in order to present it for the rebel leader (Markham 106;
Ollantay 6; Incas 145, 148). Markham implies that he obtained this information in 1853 from Dr. Pablo Justiniani, an elderly priest from Lares
who was a friend of Antonio Valdez, who remembered the Tupac Amaru
rebellion, and who made a copy of Ollantay from Valdez's original manuscript. Although there is no other evidence that corroborates the link
between Ollantay and Tupac Amaru II, it is consistent with the kinds of
cultural practices involved in the Inca renaissance and their relationship
to revolutionary sentiments.
The fact that Areche does not include the khipu in his prohibition order
suggests that this medium was not a very prominent part of Inca revivalism, neither in its strictly cultural nor in its revolutionary strands. The
lack of any more extensive documentary record of eighteenth-century
khipu would appear to confirm this conclusion. Nevertheless, the incidents recorded by Borda, Stevenson, and Nadaillac indicate that knotted
cords at the very least played a symbolic role in the rebellions that took
place near La Paz in 1781 and later in Valdivia in 1792. These practices
may have been inspired by Tupac Amaru's rebellion in Cuzco, which was
also the center of the Inca cultural renaissance.
The dearth of detailed information about the eighteenth-century Inca
renaissance, the specifics of rebel organization and communications, and

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the relationship between them makes it impossible to provide a more

complete description of khipu use in eighteenth-century insurgencies,
their relationship to ethnographic khipu practices, or their function in
indigenous ideological projects. Furthermore, the lack of any records
relating to the production and perfomiance of Ollantay in the eighteenth
century prevent any more definitive elaboration of its role in that context.
Nevertheless, if Markham is correct about Valdez's staging of Ollantay
performances and his relationship with Tupac Amaru, then it may be no
coincidence that records of military letter-khipu only appear after 1780.
This admittedly circumstantial evidence has highly suggestive implications for the role played by Ollantay and its khipu in the late eighteenthcentury neo-Inca rebellions. As explained above, the two relevant scenes
in the play involve chasqui delivering military letter-khipu that communicate the status of Ollantay's insurgency. Thus, the inspiration for resurrecting this medium in its "letter" function as part of an eighteenth-century ideological project and military strategy may have come from the
military khipu-letters that appear in Ollantay. Rebel leaders may have
adopted this medium to serye multiple purposes as a powerful symbol of
the Inca past, an ideological altemative to the hegemony of European literacy, and a strategically advantageous medium of secret communication.
With regard to the implicit semiotics of the khipu inscribed in the play,
there is no definitive way to reconcile the philological argument corroborating Pacheco Zegarra's translation/interpretation, which is consistent
with most archaeological khipu, and the ethnographic argument supporting Barranca and Markham's version, which reflects the kind of ecclesiastical khipu practices identified in the twentieth century but originating
in the colonial period. This indeterminacy of the Quechua text, however,
may constitute the most significant evidence of all for understanding
Ollantay's khipu as well as the play itself In many respects, the eighteenth century is a transitional period that on the one hand inherited many
indigenous traditions as part of'a pre-Hispanic legacy whose vitality continues through the present, and on the other hand fed into the independence movement of the nineteenth century with its new ideological
alliances and tensions between Creoles, mestizos, indigenous elites, and
the indigenous masses. Ollantay presents a dramatization not only of the
events of a story set in a time before the conquest, but also of the formal
transculturation of indigenous narrative traditions, and of the transcultural responses to social and political contexts through which the negotiation

Brokaw

53

between semiotic and material practices takes place. The indeterminacy

of the Quechua meta-discourse on the khipu in Ollantay, then, also dramatizes this mediation between the continuity of a pre-Hispanic tradition
and socio-political particularities of eighteenth-century transcultural
processes.

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