Issue 2 November 1983
A Dancer And Her Quest For Peace
Usha Narayanan is an unusual dancer. Her dance is inspired and informed by Arayar Sevai, a unique type of ritualistic worship in some vaishnavite temples. She didn’t start out this way. In fact, although she showed talent in dancing and singing even as a child, she never nursed ambitions of becoming a serious performer. There was much music in her mother’s family, and interest in music and dance, and coaching in both, continued for Usha through school, but she rarely went to recitals, as she lived mostly in cantonments and military quarters, far from the city, a consequence of her father’s job in Defence Accounts.
Usha married at the young age of seventeen and her lessons in dance and music continued. “Because I enjoyed dance and music I took my lessons seriously as I had earlier, but no thoughts of a career in dance crossed my mind. I learnt music from Sri L.T. Raghavachari who was a very sincere teacher.”
Great misfortune befell Usha who lost two of her three children under tragic circumstances. Shock and grief overrwhelmed her and she was filled with a deep need to obtain answers to basic questions pertaining to life and death. Self-realisation and a need ta come to terms with life became imperative. “But I was still in a state of shock and didn’t know what to do,” she told us. “That is when my husband advised me to take up dancing seriosly. After all dance is a kind of yoga or therapy.”
Usha then learnt bharatanatyam from Nana Kasar, a disciple of Parvati Kumar whose guru was Chockalingam Pillai. She received a scholarship (to learn bharatanatyam) and, after five years of rigorous training, became a performing artiste. “But all the time I used to tell my guru that I was in search of answers to my questions,” she told us. “That quest made me read all the books available on our dance.”
Usha wanted to discover whether dance was the means to an end or an end in itself. She learnt that, according to the sastras, devotion to the supreme is the final goal and dance is a means to achieve this final goal, although one can also dance for one’s own pleasure and one’s own satisfaction; but when one does that, it amounts to going inward rather than opening out.
Usha then tried to depict the emotion of bhakti in the traditional bharatanatyam mode and was yet deeply unsatisfied. To her it seemed everything—karma, the cycle of birth and rebirth, sin—was portrayed as dukkha or unhappiness. There was something missing. “How do you show antaryamitvam (God’s omnipresence)?” Bharatanatyam did not provide the answer. “I found I was doing injustice to dancing. I was not satisfied. A page from the Natyasastra seemed to be missing”.
Once again Mr. Narayanan showed the way. He suggested that Usha make a study of the ritual of Divya Prabandham sung in temples. She took his advice and what followed made all the difference. Watching the Arayars was, a mystical experience; she watched them dance and it cleared so many of her doubts. Divya prabandham was the answer, the dance in the temple was the answer She was filled with peace: She said to herself: “Now my life is complete. Today if I have to leave this place, I have no attachment to anything material!”
When we asked Usha what was the difference between bharatanatyam and Arayar Sevai, she explained it by illustrating it with one of her own experiences. “At the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, I was asked to do both bhartanatyam and Arayar Sevai. I entered the stage and first performed Arayar Sevai, the truly devotional part of my dance, I concentrated hard and the audience watched in rapt attention. Then I followed it with bharatanatyam which I did effortlessly. I slipped from the higher worship to the lower, secular dance. But in another programme I did the reverse, performing bharatanatyam first. When I tried to follow with Sevai, I suffocated. I couldn’t reach that higher plane. I realised Arayar Sevai is a direct communion with God; you forget your surroundings.”
Usha has made a keen study of the tradition of Arayar Sevai and she is continuing it. The Arayars usually do not easily part with their knowledge but have shared much with Usha because of her great devotion and piety. In the opinion of some, she has brought out into light an unknown form of ritualistic worship and is developing it into an art form. She has collected enough material to write a research paper, which she has in fact done, but she has not submitted it to any university. Once Sangeet Natak Akademi offered her a fellowship to carry out documentation work in this area but Usha lost interest when she was asked to obtain certification from the Arayars themselves that she was taught the art by them.
Will she teach anyone who is willing to learn Arayar Sevai from her? Usha’s reply to this question underscores her philosophy, her whole approach to dance. “I will, if the student comes to me in the true spirit of devotion and wants to learn this dance for the same reasons as I did. Not to make a career of it, but for reasons of bhakti. I will be only too happy to pass on my knowledge to anybody who has the same atitude as I have.”
V. Ramnarayan with
S. Muthumeenakshi
Monday, October 4, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Taking music to the young
First published in The Bengal Post
“I’m coming back from a long walk. I went to the temple after years. You know me, I rarely do,” the leading Carnatic vocalist said. He had left a concert halfway to do that. He had gone to pray for the future of Carnatic music, he said, appalled by the vocal atrocities perpetrated by the gifted young performer of the evening. “What shocked me was that people who should know better, musicians and rasikas alike, were obviously enjoying this insult to classical music,” he explained.
In his jeans and tee shirt, slim, youthful TM Krishna hardly looked the part, but he is among the strongest champions of tradition in his art. And he is outspoken about it, sometimes needlessly so, his well wishers feel. In matters concerning music, he tends to wear his heart on his sleeve, though he is also a cerebral musician with a penchant for research into the history and grammar of Carnatic music. For someone still in his thirties, Krishna is quite a veteran on the concert stage, a star, to go by his constantly growing fan following.
Krishna has used his star status to propagate the core values he believes in, for example, refusing to heed requests from audiences overseas for lighter pieces even if those were made popular by the stalwarts of yesteryear. Yet, within the confines of tradition, he does every now and then shock his audience by charting some unorthodox paths in concert rendition. And woe betide the critic who dare fault his approach, for Krishna can demolish such criticism quoting chapter and verse.
For someone with such strong views on the undesirability of tinkering with tradition, Krishna is acutely conscious of the need to take Carnatic music far and wide, to build a future constituency of listeners. Along with another stellar exponent of south Indian classical music, Bombay Jayashri (40), he has forged an unusual but effective team that has achieved remarkable progress in this objective.
Jayashri is a top ranking classical vocalist, with an unusual past—she started as a participant in college culturals and a singer of advertising jingles in Bombay—which explains the prefix to her name, an old Carnatic music convention. She kept honing her classical music skills alongside, until she moved to Chennai, came under the tutelage of violin maestro Lalgudi Jayaraman, and eventually made it big with her reverberant voice. Like Krishna, she too has a mind of her own, and treads an independent path, deliberately restricting her appearances in the Chennai concert circuit, for instance. Her interviews with the media can spring some unexpected gems. Example, her confession that she listens to Mehdi Hasan, Asha Bhonsle or Mohammad Rafi more often than the old masters of Carnatic music, or that her bhakti is to her music rather than the god she sings of.
One of the ventures in which the two have come together, Svanubhava, is in its third year, and growing every year. It is a three-day annual extravaganza of concerts, lec-dems, quizzes and workshops for students, conducted at a number of venues, including schools and colleges, where the participation has been extremely encouraging, and the level of discourse of a high order. The programme also attempts to bring practitioners of different performing arts on to a common platform. This year folk, theatre and cinema artists joined classical musicians and dancers.
Remarkably, Krishna and Jayashri have both attracted listeners from outside the usual Carnatic music circles, both in India and abroad. While Jayashri has occasionally taken part in experiments with Hindustani musicians, Krishna has stuck to the medium he knows best, insisting that the audience must accept his music in its authentic form. With Margazhi Ragam, a full-length movie of a Carnatic music concert released last year, they helped director Jayendra create a new art form, achieving a quality of acoustics and stage aesthetics hitherto unattained in the field.
Given their relative youth, they both seem headed for greatness in the decades to come.
“I’m coming back from a long walk. I went to the temple after years. You know me, I rarely do,” the leading Carnatic vocalist said. He had left a concert halfway to do that. He had gone to pray for the future of Carnatic music, he said, appalled by the vocal atrocities perpetrated by the gifted young performer of the evening. “What shocked me was that people who should know better, musicians and rasikas alike, were obviously enjoying this insult to classical music,” he explained.
In his jeans and tee shirt, slim, youthful TM Krishna hardly looked the part, but he is among the strongest champions of tradition in his art. And he is outspoken about it, sometimes needlessly so, his well wishers feel. In matters concerning music, he tends to wear his heart on his sleeve, though he is also a cerebral musician with a penchant for research into the history and grammar of Carnatic music. For someone still in his thirties, Krishna is quite a veteran on the concert stage, a star, to go by his constantly growing fan following.
Krishna has used his star status to propagate the core values he believes in, for example, refusing to heed requests from audiences overseas for lighter pieces even if those were made popular by the stalwarts of yesteryear. Yet, within the confines of tradition, he does every now and then shock his audience by charting some unorthodox paths in concert rendition. And woe betide the critic who dare fault his approach, for Krishna can demolish such criticism quoting chapter and verse.
For someone with such strong views on the undesirability of tinkering with tradition, Krishna is acutely conscious of the need to take Carnatic music far and wide, to build a future constituency of listeners. Along with another stellar exponent of south Indian classical music, Bombay Jayashri (40), he has forged an unusual but effective team that has achieved remarkable progress in this objective.
Jayashri is a top ranking classical vocalist, with an unusual past—she started as a participant in college culturals and a singer of advertising jingles in Bombay—which explains the prefix to her name, an old Carnatic music convention. She kept honing her classical music skills alongside, until she moved to Chennai, came under the tutelage of violin maestro Lalgudi Jayaraman, and eventually made it big with her reverberant voice. Like Krishna, she too has a mind of her own, and treads an independent path, deliberately restricting her appearances in the Chennai concert circuit, for instance. Her interviews with the media can spring some unexpected gems. Example, her confession that she listens to Mehdi Hasan, Asha Bhonsle or Mohammad Rafi more often than the old masters of Carnatic music, or that her bhakti is to her music rather than the god she sings of.
One of the ventures in which the two have come together, Svanubhava, is in its third year, and growing every year. It is a three-day annual extravaganza of concerts, lec-dems, quizzes and workshops for students, conducted at a number of venues, including schools and colleges, where the participation has been extremely encouraging, and the level of discourse of a high order. The programme also attempts to bring practitioners of different performing arts on to a common platform. This year folk, theatre and cinema artists joined classical musicians and dancers.
Remarkably, Krishna and Jayashri have both attracted listeners from outside the usual Carnatic music circles, both in India and abroad. While Jayashri has occasionally taken part in experiments with Hindustani musicians, Krishna has stuck to the medium he knows best, insisting that the audience must accept his music in its authentic form. With Margazhi Ragam, a full-length movie of a Carnatic music concert released last year, they helped director Jayendra create a new art form, achieving a quality of acoustics and stage aesthetics hitherto unattained in the field.
Given their relative youth, they both seem headed for greatness in the decades to come.
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