First published in The Bengal Post
Of the Marathi author VS Khandekar, it was said that he was better known in Tamil Nadu than in his home state, especially in the 1950s, thanks to the excellent translations of his works by the likes of Ka Sri Sri or KS Srinivasacharya. What the Tamil Khandekar—as CN Annadurai once described him—did for Marathi literature, TN Kumaraswamy and (to a lesser extent his brother TN Senapati) did for Bengali literature. Many of us growing up in the 1950s and 60s owed much of our acquaintance with Bengali literature to Kumaraswamy or Ta Naa Ku, who amazingly enough, learnt Bengali in Madras.
What prompted him to set himself the task of bringing Bengali literary classics to Tamil readers is not clearly known, but he fell in love with Tagore’s writings even as a schoolboy. His son Aswini Kumar—the key person behind his centenary celebrations in 2007—recalls a story Ta Naa Ku often told of how the fiery Tamil poet Subramania Bharati sang aloud his own translation of a Rabindranath Tagore poem, but ecstatic as he was to come face to face with Tagore, was blocked by a sea of admirers who had surrounded him at the Madras Central Railway station in 1919.
Though Kumaraswamy translated Bankim Chandra, Sarat Chandra, Tagore and Tara Sankar Banerjee among others, Sarat Chandra was his favourite. He once said, “When I prepared myself to read prominent writers of modern Bengal, I discovered Saratchandra to be of a different quality of mind. Unlike Bankimchandra, he never intruded himself upon the readers. His aim was not to tell a story to entertain or touch our hearts but to force us to think and understand the deep and hidden significance of the problems of life. He was not of the type of novelist who took liberties to exaggerate, to create a world more beautiful, more consoling than ours.”.
Kumaraswamy took the idea of introducing Sarat Chandra to Tamil magazine readers to Kalki, the editor of Ananda Vikatan, in the late 1930s, when a rather insular mood prevailed in the field. “I read to him (Kalki) select passages from Saratchandra’s various novels and explained to him that the Tamil public would surely relish them, and that it would open a new vista to the future novelists of Tamil Nadu.” Tamil readers soon became familiar with such works as Bindur Chele, Swami and Dena Paona, thanks to the labours of Kumaraswamy. He also wrote on Sarat Chandra’s life and works in the Tamil digest Manjari, and condensed novels like Parineeta, Biraj Bau and Palli-Samaj.
An author himself, Kumaraswamy wrote short stories and novels of unusual sophistication and deep humanism. A keen follower of classical music, he learnt to play the nagaswaram, on which he played both Carnatic and Hindustani melodies. His reading was as diverse as his library was vast, its collection both both Indian and western. He was an earlier translator of Sangam verse into English than AK Ramanujan. A great admirer of Aldous Huxley and Ananda Coomaraswamy, he translated Coomaraswamy’s Gautama Buddha into Tamil.
A Gandhian to the core, Kumaraswamy once gifted an acre of his own land to Adi Dravidars who had lost everything in a caste war. The author of the commentary for AK Chettiar’s well known documentary on Mahatma Gandhi, he was part of a team involved in translating Gandhi’s works into Tamil, a project he quit over a matter of principle. And for all his devotion to Gandhi, he was an ardent admirer of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose as well, translating two of his works into Tamil!
Kumaraswamy loved to read, write and translate, but he was equally fond of discussing books and literature. Many a young writer came under his benevolent gaze and profited from his tendency to talk books for hours on end.
Kumaraswamy was a true renaissance man, of whom it can be said without fear of contradiction: ‘They don’t make them like that any more.”
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Queen of Song
First published in The Bengal Post
Thursday was MS Subbulakshmi’s 94th birth anniversary. She has been gone for nearly six years now, leaving a huge void in the lives of thousands of worshippers of her grand music and her near divine aura. Yet, she is ever present in those lives, to go by the number of families for whom the day starts with her Sri Venkatesa Suprabhatam broadcast every morning by All India Radio.
The sheer magic of her voice followed me as I walked through the streets of one of the humbler settlements of Chennai the other day, with home after home waking to the reverberant cadences of her chants. It was but a logical epilogue to a life whose funeral was attended by a remarkable number of mourners from the poorest sections of society, as quietly dignified in their grief as the elite and the cognoscenti among the varied assemblage at her earthly abode.
My earliest memories of MS Subbulaksmi are of concerts at Mylapore, Chennai, back in the late 1950s, when I, Carnatic music ignoramus though I was, could not help being mesmerised by her glorious voice, especially her tremendous reach in the higher registers. She was relatively young, and her voice was still evolving into the majestic form it achieved in her mature years.
The first time I saw her at close quarters was some ten years later at Vasant Vihar, the Greenways Road home of the Krishnamurti Foundation. It was at a mellow, meditative concert for the benefit of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the fortunate few who had gathered there were able to catch a glimpse of greatness up close.
My next memory of MS is from a cutcheri at the Madras University Centenary auditorium in 1969. I was seated next to her grandniece who was to become my wife soon afterwards—though neither of us knew it then.
By sheer fluke, I guessed the name of a raga right—it was a close shave, because I debated between two choices, and mentally tossed a coin before stumbling on the right answer—and that must have impressed my companion.
Marriage brought me into the privileged circle of those fortunate enough to know MS on a personal level. Amazingly, during home visits or at weddings, she would happily sing alone or lead a chorus with no concern for the level of accomplishment of her accompanists.
One unforgettable experience was listening to MS at a simple family ceremony in 1993, when she sang sitting on the rough floor of a house still under construction. She was in magnificent voice and the whole room was surcharged with emotion as her sonorous tones filled the place with an aura of sheer devotion.
My thoughts were full of my father who had passed away months earlier, and it was a rare moment of sublimation such as I had never experienced before.
Like everyone who has come into contact with MS, I was struck by her simplicity. Her essential goodness is foremost in the memories of most who knew her—as much as the sublimity of her music.
Thousands of ambitious parents must have paraded their offspring’s musical talent before her. Not only did she patiently listen to everyone of these amateur outpourings, she never hurt the feelings of the most cacophonic of their authors.
The harshest criticism was a smiling, “You must work very hard.”
She was a simple human being all right, self effacing, shy, anxious to make a good impression, even nervous about her English. But she always rose to the occasion. After practising her lines with Eliza Dolittle-like diligence (“How kind of you to come!” and so on), when Sonia Gandhi came to condole her husband’s death, she melted everyone’s heart by holding the visitor’s hands and spontaneously saying, “What is my grief before yours?”
It was the kind of grace that made her the magnificent icon she was..
Thursday was MS Subbulakshmi’s 94th birth anniversary. She has been gone for nearly six years now, leaving a huge void in the lives of thousands of worshippers of her grand music and her near divine aura. Yet, she is ever present in those lives, to go by the number of families for whom the day starts with her Sri Venkatesa Suprabhatam broadcast every morning by All India Radio.
The sheer magic of her voice followed me as I walked through the streets of one of the humbler settlements of Chennai the other day, with home after home waking to the reverberant cadences of her chants. It was but a logical epilogue to a life whose funeral was attended by a remarkable number of mourners from the poorest sections of society, as quietly dignified in their grief as the elite and the cognoscenti among the varied assemblage at her earthly abode.
My earliest memories of MS Subbulaksmi are of concerts at Mylapore, Chennai, back in the late 1950s, when I, Carnatic music ignoramus though I was, could not help being mesmerised by her glorious voice, especially her tremendous reach in the higher registers. She was relatively young, and her voice was still evolving into the majestic form it achieved in her mature years.
The first time I saw her at close quarters was some ten years later at Vasant Vihar, the Greenways Road home of the Krishnamurti Foundation. It was at a mellow, meditative concert for the benefit of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the fortunate few who had gathered there were able to catch a glimpse of greatness up close.
My next memory of MS is from a cutcheri at the Madras University Centenary auditorium in 1969. I was seated next to her grandniece who was to become my wife soon afterwards—though neither of us knew it then.
By sheer fluke, I guessed the name of a raga right—it was a close shave, because I debated between two choices, and mentally tossed a coin before stumbling on the right answer—and that must have impressed my companion.
Marriage brought me into the privileged circle of those fortunate enough to know MS on a personal level. Amazingly, during home visits or at weddings, she would happily sing alone or lead a chorus with no concern for the level of accomplishment of her accompanists.
One unforgettable experience was listening to MS at a simple family ceremony in 1993, when she sang sitting on the rough floor of a house still under construction. She was in magnificent voice and the whole room was surcharged with emotion as her sonorous tones filled the place with an aura of sheer devotion.
My thoughts were full of my father who had passed away months earlier, and it was a rare moment of sublimation such as I had never experienced before.
Like everyone who has come into contact with MS, I was struck by her simplicity. Her essential goodness is foremost in the memories of most who knew her—as much as the sublimity of her music.
Thousands of ambitious parents must have paraded their offspring’s musical talent before her. Not only did she patiently listen to everyone of these amateur outpourings, she never hurt the feelings of the most cacophonic of their authors.
The harshest criticism was a smiling, “You must work very hard.”
She was a simple human being all right, self effacing, shy, anxious to make a good impression, even nervous about her English. But she always rose to the occasion. After practising her lines with Eliza Dolittle-like diligence (“How kind of you to come!” and so on), when Sonia Gandhi came to condole her husband’s death, she melted everyone’s heart by holding the visitor’s hands and spontaneously saying, “What is my grief before yours?”
It was the kind of grace that made her the magnificent icon she was..
Friday, August 27, 2010
Champions of Carnatic music
First published in The Bengal Post
“There are good listeners,” the late Gangubai Hangal said to Shrinkhla Sahai, a young journalist, during the course of one of her last interviews, “but where are the performers?” She was speaking of the dearth of young musicians she believed existed in present day Hindustani music. In Carnatic music of the South, quite the reverse scenario exists. Plenty of young talent is visible on stages big and small, in cities and small towns, in India and abroad, but drawing young audiences is increasingly challenging, with the plethora of choices before a tech-savvy younger generation.
Happily for Carnatic music, its young practitioners have been proactive about sustaining their listener-base and building a future constituency of followers. True, without the tremendous support they have been enjoying for nearly two decades now from the subcontinental diaspora—and that includes a prominent proportion of Sri Lankan Tamils—the purveyors of south Indian classical music and dance would have been reduced to relatively small numbers, but their own efforts to take their art far and wide have been commendable.
Some of the leading musicians of today—a revealingly youthful brigade of under fifties—came together 25 years ago in a brilliant instance of intuition and foresight to form the Youth Association for Classical Music, “for the purpose of promoting Carnatic music amongst the youth, and providing a platform for talented youngsters.“ Over the years, YACM has conducted a successful slew of activities towards ensuring the continuance of the tradition and practice of Carnatic music. Its silver jubilee celebrations this month have been an unqualified success.
Other initiatives include Svanubhava—a big annual draw with young music students at the school and college levels involving concerts, lec-dems, quizzes and discourses by senior as well as current artists—and Sampradaya, an archival institution that has been organising monthly public interactions—which it calls Samvada—between old masters and young musicians, at once keeping the oral tradition alive and documenting these valuable exchanges for researchers and the general public.
One of the architects of such efforts has been the articulate and urbane vocalist TM Krishna, whose interests are wide and varied (he recently wrote a provocative article on the death penalty and did a spot of bungee jumping in New Zealand). The charismatic Bombay Jayashri Ramnath has been another. With her appeal to young listeners enhanced by a superb voice, complete absorption in her music and occasional forays into genres other than the purely classical as in film songs, jugalbandi and musicals, she has been a successful champion of Carnatic music among both the public and corporate audiences.
Chitravina Ravikiran has been a veritable global ambassador of Carnatic music and his fretless veena, creating a cerebral following not only among NRIs but also discerning westerners in the US, Europe and Australia. Festivals to commemorate the famed Trinity of Carnatic music, Tyagaraja, Muttuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri are now celebrated in all the continents.
Naturally, such widespread interest has created lucrative career paths in south Indian music and dance, but an even more exciting development has been the growing number of artists born and brought up outside India. It is not uncommon for youngsters who speak English with genuine American or Australian accents and very little Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, or indeed any Indian language, to master the enunciation of lyrics steeped in bhakti and complex metaphysics, in all these languages—and Sanskrit to boot. The total dedication of these youngsters and their parents may be a measure of their western upbringing but their reverence for the old masters and their guru bhakti can put the most devout traditionalist to shame.
Perhaps Gangubai Hangal’s lament over the current state of Hinustani music was overly pessimistic, but at its best, Hindustani music may struggle to match its southern counterpart in continuing to attract young professionals into its fold. The continuous fertilisation of the mainstream by a healthy inter-migration of people and ideas across continents has been responsible for this happy state of affairs.
The one downside of such churning has been the inevitable burgeoning of a variety of half-baked efforts at fusion. Here too, some of the leading musicians of today play a vital role in maintaining aesthetic values—by insisting on constantly offering the most authentic fare in their concerts and weaning young audiences away from cheap substitutes. The future of south Indian classical arts seems to be secure.
“There are good listeners,” the late Gangubai Hangal said to Shrinkhla Sahai, a young journalist, during the course of one of her last interviews, “but where are the performers?” She was speaking of the dearth of young musicians she believed existed in present day Hindustani music. In Carnatic music of the South, quite the reverse scenario exists. Plenty of young talent is visible on stages big and small, in cities and small towns, in India and abroad, but drawing young audiences is increasingly challenging, with the plethora of choices before a tech-savvy younger generation.
Happily for Carnatic music, its young practitioners have been proactive about sustaining their listener-base and building a future constituency of followers. True, without the tremendous support they have been enjoying for nearly two decades now from the subcontinental diaspora—and that includes a prominent proportion of Sri Lankan Tamils—the purveyors of south Indian classical music and dance would have been reduced to relatively small numbers, but their own efforts to take their art far and wide have been commendable.
Some of the leading musicians of today—a revealingly youthful brigade of under fifties—came together 25 years ago in a brilliant instance of intuition and foresight to form the Youth Association for Classical Music, “for the purpose of promoting Carnatic music amongst the youth, and providing a platform for talented youngsters.“ Over the years, YACM has conducted a successful slew of activities towards ensuring the continuance of the tradition and practice of Carnatic music. Its silver jubilee celebrations this month have been an unqualified success.
Other initiatives include Svanubhava—a big annual draw with young music students at the school and college levels involving concerts, lec-dems, quizzes and discourses by senior as well as current artists—and Sampradaya, an archival institution that has been organising monthly public interactions—which it calls Samvada—between old masters and young musicians, at once keeping the oral tradition alive and documenting these valuable exchanges for researchers and the general public.
One of the architects of such efforts has been the articulate and urbane vocalist TM Krishna, whose interests are wide and varied (he recently wrote a provocative article on the death penalty and did a spot of bungee jumping in New Zealand). The charismatic Bombay Jayashri Ramnath has been another. With her appeal to young listeners enhanced by a superb voice, complete absorption in her music and occasional forays into genres other than the purely classical as in film songs, jugalbandi and musicals, she has been a successful champion of Carnatic music among both the public and corporate audiences.
Chitravina Ravikiran has been a veritable global ambassador of Carnatic music and his fretless veena, creating a cerebral following not only among NRIs but also discerning westerners in the US, Europe and Australia. Festivals to commemorate the famed Trinity of Carnatic music, Tyagaraja, Muttuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri are now celebrated in all the continents.
Naturally, such widespread interest has created lucrative career paths in south Indian music and dance, but an even more exciting development has been the growing number of artists born and brought up outside India. It is not uncommon for youngsters who speak English with genuine American or Australian accents and very little Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, or indeed any Indian language, to master the enunciation of lyrics steeped in bhakti and complex metaphysics, in all these languages—and Sanskrit to boot. The total dedication of these youngsters and their parents may be a measure of their western upbringing but their reverence for the old masters and their guru bhakti can put the most devout traditionalist to shame.
Perhaps Gangubai Hangal’s lament over the current state of Hinustani music was overly pessimistic, but at its best, Hindustani music may struggle to match its southern counterpart in continuing to attract young professionals into its fold. The continuous fertilisation of the mainstream by a healthy inter-migration of people and ideas across continents has been responsible for this happy state of affairs.
The one downside of such churning has been the inevitable burgeoning of a variety of half-baked efforts at fusion. Here too, some of the leading musicians of today play a vital role in maintaining aesthetic values—by insisting on constantly offering the most authentic fare in their concerts and weaning young audiences away from cheap substitutes. The future of south Indian classical arts seems to be secure.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Vyjayantimala
“I really hope you don’t enter the concert arena. We singers will have to look for a new profession if you do,” said senior Carnatic vocalist Neyveli Santhanagopalan to the veteran dancer. He was among a handful of music and dance practitioners, rasikas, and critics assembled at an after-dinner ‘thinnai’ session—the rough southern equivalent of an adda—at the sleepy temple town of Tennangur in Tamil Nadu.
The year was 2008 and the lady, already in her seventies, was a key resource person in an annual dance workshop convened by Chennai-based Natyarangam. After wowing her audiences during the day with her unflagging energy and exquisite aesthetics, she was now entertaining us to the unexpected delights of her deep-felt and nuanced singing of rare gems from the oeuvre of the Tanjore Quartet of 19th century fame. She rendered for us her first public song, one that she recorded for All India Radio when barely six, film songs she had enacted, a song she had learnt from the late Carnatic music doyenne DK Pattammal, and best of all, some brilliant samples of the Dhanammal school of music to which learning dance from Kittappa Pillai had exposed her. By the time she finished, it was past midnight, and Santhanagopalan revised his original request. “You must perform as a vocalist soon,” he said. The delighted star of the evening almost blushed. “What happens to my dance, then?” she asked, with the innocence of a schoolgirl.
Vyjayantimala Bali turned 76 yesterday, Friday, 13 August, but her passion for her art is undimmed. Just the other day, she firmly declined a request to sing or dance at the function to be held later this month to award her the prestigious E Krishna Iyer medal, “because I am already practising for two performances and I cannot do justice to one more.” This uncompromising attitude marked her distinguished career in films as well as bharata natyam. Even as a young actress still finding her way around the industry, she demonstrated the courage of her conviction by turning down a Filmfare award for best supporting actress in the Bimal Roy version of Devdas, in which she co-starred with Dilip Kumar and Suchitra Sen. “My part as Chandramukhi was a joint lead role along with that of Paro in the movie. It was no supporting role,” she recalls, bristling with principled outrage decades later.
One of the two men she recalls with great affection and respect is still with us—Dilip Kumar who not only inspired her with his perfect, almost effortless acting, but also put her completely at ease on the sets in the numerous films they did together. Of her other favourite film person, she says, “Bimal Da had total confidence in me and encouraged me to give of my best as Chandramukhi, a role that demanded great histrionic skills, when all around us doubted my acting ability. After all, I was known only for my dancing talent and light-hearted roles in films. The results were there for all to see when the film was released.”
It has always been fashionable for film stars with classical dance training to refer to that art as their first love, as though acting in cinema were somehow an inferior calling. In Vyjayantimala’s case, not only was she a top dancer before she entered films, she refused to dilute her art in the classical dance sequences in films, though she was not averse to performing folk or exotic numbers—as in “Dhayyare dhayyare” in Madhumati, or “Kya karun Ram mujhe budhdha mil gaya” in Sangam. Never could anyone expect her to inject anything light or film-based into her classical dance performances either.
Vyjayantimala’s life can be divided into three phases. In the first, she was a child prodigy—shaped into a fine dancing talent by her beloved grandmother Yadugiri and mother Vasundhara—and an all round athlete in the making. The second phase was her sensational film career during which she was paired with some of the biggest heroes of Tamil and Hindi cinema. Marriage to Dr. Chaman Lal Bali brought her true happiness and a fulfilling second innings as a bharata natyam artist away from the world of celluloid. This was also the period when she took to golf and won amateur titles at the national level, and took up causes she believed in as a parliamentarian.
Today, she is the perfect picture of a consummate artist who has aged gracefully, one who has so much to pass on from her rich artistic past, a role model for young aspirants in every aspect of her art. She is an outspoken champion of tradition at a time when it is under siege from several powerful forces. Her attitude to new-fangled ideas can be summed up by her comment on Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas: “It is a distortion of Sarat Chandra’s classic.”
The year was 2008 and the lady, already in her seventies, was a key resource person in an annual dance workshop convened by Chennai-based Natyarangam. After wowing her audiences during the day with her unflagging energy and exquisite aesthetics, she was now entertaining us to the unexpected delights of her deep-felt and nuanced singing of rare gems from the oeuvre of the Tanjore Quartet of 19th century fame. She rendered for us her first public song, one that she recorded for All India Radio when barely six, film songs she had enacted, a song she had learnt from the late Carnatic music doyenne DK Pattammal, and best of all, some brilliant samples of the Dhanammal school of music to which learning dance from Kittappa Pillai had exposed her. By the time she finished, it was past midnight, and Santhanagopalan revised his original request. “You must perform as a vocalist soon,” he said. The delighted star of the evening almost blushed. “What happens to my dance, then?” she asked, with the innocence of a schoolgirl.
Vyjayantimala Bali turned 76 yesterday, Friday, 13 August, but her passion for her art is undimmed. Just the other day, she firmly declined a request to sing or dance at the function to be held later this month to award her the prestigious E Krishna Iyer medal, “because I am already practising for two performances and I cannot do justice to one more.” This uncompromising attitude marked her distinguished career in films as well as bharata natyam. Even as a young actress still finding her way around the industry, she demonstrated the courage of her conviction by turning down a Filmfare award for best supporting actress in the Bimal Roy version of Devdas, in which she co-starred with Dilip Kumar and Suchitra Sen. “My part as Chandramukhi was a joint lead role along with that of Paro in the movie. It was no supporting role,” she recalls, bristling with principled outrage decades later.
One of the two men she recalls with great affection and respect is still with us—Dilip Kumar who not only inspired her with his perfect, almost effortless acting, but also put her completely at ease on the sets in the numerous films they did together. Of her other favourite film person, she says, “Bimal Da had total confidence in me and encouraged me to give of my best as Chandramukhi, a role that demanded great histrionic skills, when all around us doubted my acting ability. After all, I was known only for my dancing talent and light-hearted roles in films. The results were there for all to see when the film was released.”
It has always been fashionable for film stars with classical dance training to refer to that art as their first love, as though acting in cinema were somehow an inferior calling. In Vyjayantimala’s case, not only was she a top dancer before she entered films, she refused to dilute her art in the classical dance sequences in films, though she was not averse to performing folk or exotic numbers—as in “Dhayyare dhayyare” in Madhumati, or “Kya karun Ram mujhe budhdha mil gaya” in Sangam. Never could anyone expect her to inject anything light or film-based into her classical dance performances either.
Vyjayantimala’s life can be divided into three phases. In the first, she was a child prodigy—shaped into a fine dancing talent by her beloved grandmother Yadugiri and mother Vasundhara—and an all round athlete in the making. The second phase was her sensational film career during which she was paired with some of the biggest heroes of Tamil and Hindi cinema. Marriage to Dr. Chaman Lal Bali brought her true happiness and a fulfilling second innings as a bharata natyam artist away from the world of celluloid. This was also the period when she took to golf and won amateur titles at the national level, and took up causes she believed in as a parliamentarian.
Today, she is the perfect picture of a consummate artist who has aged gracefully, one who has so much to pass on from her rich artistic past, a role model for young aspirants in every aspect of her art. She is an outspoken champion of tradition at a time when it is under siege from several powerful forces. Her attitude to new-fangled ideas can be summed up by her comment on Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas: “It is a distortion of Sarat Chandra’s classic.”
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Come August
(First published in the Bengal Post, 7 August 2010)
The December ‘season’ of Madras has been a unique event in the city’s cultural calendar for decades starting from 1927, when it debuted as an adjunct to the Indian National Congress’s annual meet. Exclusively focused on Carnatic or south Indian classical music, it grew from a festival of sorts into a major annual conference featuring not only concerts but also lecture-demonstrations of great quality and variety. It heralded the birth of the Madras Music Academy, now in existence for over 80 years and considered the Mecca of Carnatic music. Its annual award, the Sangita Kalanidhi, is a coveted honour, something every musician will die for—in fact, some greats have died before the august body could honour them. The magnificent bharatanatyam exponent T Balasaraswati has been the only artist other than a musician or musicologist to receive the award, but after some tentative attempts to feature dance alongside music in its annual conference, the Academy has in recent years added a separate dance festival to its schedule, held in January every year. Dance is celebrated annually by such major institutions as Kalakshetra—founded by Rukmini Devi Arundale—and Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, with the latter’s Nritya Chudamani regarded as probably the highest award in dance.
Neither music nor dance is any more the preserve of any of these institutions. Hundreds of sabhas—institutions supported by membership and sponsorship and headed by their sometimes all-powerful secretaries, the Tamil Nadu version of the impresario of the west—have sprung up everywhere. These conduct music, dance and theatre festivals galore during the annual ‘season’ often described as the Margazhi (the Tamil month from mid-December to mid-January) festival, but now expanded both forward and backward to include November and end-January.
Modern Tamil theatre peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, but gradually lost out to cinema and eventually to television, only comedies of the lightest variety that frequently offer no more than strings of jokes surviving the onslaught. Recent efforts to revive serious Tamil theatre seem to be succeeding, though it is still early days. Unfortunately, not many serious plays are being written in Tamil because of lack of performance opportunities and vice versa.
English theatre, in contrast, is alive and kicking. The Madras Players, among India’s oldest amateur English theatre groups, have been in existence for over 50 years, and have constantly reinvented themselves to stay relevant. It is the arrival less than a decade ago of Evam, a young team of theatre professionals, that galvanised the English theatre scenario in Chennai. Though their plays may not always belong to the highest class, the group have marketed themselves expertly and brought young audiences back to the stage. Amateur groups like Masquerade, JustUs Repertory, Theatre Nisha, The Boardwalkers, Perch, Stagefright, and ASAP have managed to transform a hitherto somnolent theatre space into a happening, exciting movement, even if not always producing high quality fare. The more than 100-years-old Museum Theatre, once an acoustic marvel and still a fine theatre despite the depredations of progress is no longer an oasis of excellence, with new facilities in the city like the Sivagami Pethachi auditorium and the Chinmaya Heritage hall offering excellent choices to theatre addicts.
Though there is year-round activity, the serious theatre action in Chennai nowadays starts in August with the Hindu Metroplus Theatre Festival. In its sixth year now, the festival has been a roaring success in the city, drawing sizable audiences who pay very respectable sums of money for their tickets. The festival has in the past two or three years assumed an international complexion, with participation from the US, Europe, Korea and Singapore. This year the festival is being staged at one of the finest theatre spaces anywhere, the Mutha Venkata Subba Rao auditorium inside the Lady Andal School premises. Seating a little over a thousand people, the hall is beautifully appointed and boasts excellent acoustics. It is state-of-the-art in every respect and makes theatregoing an enjoyable experience. It is the place to be seen at for young and old theatre enthusiasts.
The Hindu has also added a new dimension to the music scene of Chennai with its Friday Review November Fest, in which it showcases classical and folk music from all over the subcontinent as well as the west. Drawing an eclectic crowd, the festival carefully avoids treading on the toes of those occupying the traditional space in music and dance, thereby offering entertainment that is very different from ‘season’ fare.
August is also the month when Madras Week—increasingly threatening to turn into Madras Month—is celebrated with several city experts producing interesting programmes on a variety of aspects of the city’s life since its founding more than four hundred years ago. Add the New Festival—earlier the Other Festival—an alternative package of music and dance from all over the whole world, a host of arts and crafts exhibitions, film festivals of a dizzying number of nationalities, and that hardy perennial The Madras Book Fair in January, and the once month-long Madras season has well and truly entrenched itself as a 6-month long celebration of the best Chennai has to offer.
The December ‘season’ of Madras has been a unique event in the city’s cultural calendar for decades starting from 1927, when it debuted as an adjunct to the Indian National Congress’s annual meet. Exclusively focused on Carnatic or south Indian classical music, it grew from a festival of sorts into a major annual conference featuring not only concerts but also lecture-demonstrations of great quality and variety. It heralded the birth of the Madras Music Academy, now in existence for over 80 years and considered the Mecca of Carnatic music. Its annual award, the Sangita Kalanidhi, is a coveted honour, something every musician will die for—in fact, some greats have died before the august body could honour them. The magnificent bharatanatyam exponent T Balasaraswati has been the only artist other than a musician or musicologist to receive the award, but after some tentative attempts to feature dance alongside music in its annual conference, the Academy has in recent years added a separate dance festival to its schedule, held in January every year. Dance is celebrated annually by such major institutions as Kalakshetra—founded by Rukmini Devi Arundale—and Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, with the latter’s Nritya Chudamani regarded as probably the highest award in dance.
Neither music nor dance is any more the preserve of any of these institutions. Hundreds of sabhas—institutions supported by membership and sponsorship and headed by their sometimes all-powerful secretaries, the Tamil Nadu version of the impresario of the west—have sprung up everywhere. These conduct music, dance and theatre festivals galore during the annual ‘season’ often described as the Margazhi (the Tamil month from mid-December to mid-January) festival, but now expanded both forward and backward to include November and end-January.
Modern Tamil theatre peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, but gradually lost out to cinema and eventually to television, only comedies of the lightest variety that frequently offer no more than strings of jokes surviving the onslaught. Recent efforts to revive serious Tamil theatre seem to be succeeding, though it is still early days. Unfortunately, not many serious plays are being written in Tamil because of lack of performance opportunities and vice versa.
English theatre, in contrast, is alive and kicking. The Madras Players, among India’s oldest amateur English theatre groups, have been in existence for over 50 years, and have constantly reinvented themselves to stay relevant. It is the arrival less than a decade ago of Evam, a young team of theatre professionals, that galvanised the English theatre scenario in Chennai. Though their plays may not always belong to the highest class, the group have marketed themselves expertly and brought young audiences back to the stage. Amateur groups like Masquerade, JustUs Repertory, Theatre Nisha, The Boardwalkers, Perch, Stagefright, and ASAP have managed to transform a hitherto somnolent theatre space into a happening, exciting movement, even if not always producing high quality fare. The more than 100-years-old Museum Theatre, once an acoustic marvel and still a fine theatre despite the depredations of progress is no longer an oasis of excellence, with new facilities in the city like the Sivagami Pethachi auditorium and the Chinmaya Heritage hall offering excellent choices to theatre addicts.
Though there is year-round activity, the serious theatre action in Chennai nowadays starts in August with the Hindu Metroplus Theatre Festival. In its sixth year now, the festival has been a roaring success in the city, drawing sizable audiences who pay very respectable sums of money for their tickets. The festival has in the past two or three years assumed an international complexion, with participation from the US, Europe, Korea and Singapore. This year the festival is being staged at one of the finest theatre spaces anywhere, the Mutha Venkata Subba Rao auditorium inside the Lady Andal School premises. Seating a little over a thousand people, the hall is beautifully appointed and boasts excellent acoustics. It is state-of-the-art in every respect and makes theatregoing an enjoyable experience. It is the place to be seen at for young and old theatre enthusiasts.
The Hindu has also added a new dimension to the music scene of Chennai with its Friday Review November Fest, in which it showcases classical and folk music from all over the subcontinent as well as the west. Drawing an eclectic crowd, the festival carefully avoids treading on the toes of those occupying the traditional space in music and dance, thereby offering entertainment that is very different from ‘season’ fare.
August is also the month when Madras Week—increasingly threatening to turn into Madras Month—is celebrated with several city experts producing interesting programmes on a variety of aspects of the city’s life since its founding more than four hundred years ago. Add the New Festival—earlier the Other Festival—an alternative package of music and dance from all over the whole world, a host of arts and crafts exhibitions, film festivals of a dizzying number of nationalities, and that hardy perennial The Madras Book Fair in January, and the once month-long Madras season has well and truly entrenched itself as a 6-month long celebration of the best Chennai has to offer.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
A retrospective
“When do we start rehearsals?” was the crisp reply from Sundar (Dhritiman to the world) Chaterji to my wife Gowri Ramnarayan’s email to him attaching the first draft of what was to become her first play, Dark Horse, Walking Down Arun Kolatkar’s Lane.
The protagonist of the play, the reclusive, iconoclastic Mumbai-based poet, had died a few days earlier, and Gowri, who had literally hunted him down a decade earlier for a newspaper interview, had been moved by the power of his poetry to write a script that included a number of his verses to be enacted on stage.
One thing led to another and soon was born JustUs Repertory, the theatre group that was the brainchild of Dhritiman Chaterji and a few other theatre fiends, the late Bhagirathi Narayanan the most prominent of them. Nearly six years, six plays and some fifty performances letter, incredible as it may seem, the Madras Players, arguably the oldest English theatre group in India, recently collaborated with JustUs to produce a Gowri Ramnarayan Retrospective of three plays at Chennai. The shows on 2, 3 and 4 July this year were sell-outs, suggesting that the fledgling of 2005 has come some way from its tentative beginnings. And when we look back with nostalgia and some pardonable pride, we cannot help feeling that the journey would not have even begun without Dhritiman’s inspired recognition of the potential of the Dark Horse script.
Like most Indians of our vintage, my wife and I had been blown away by Dhritiman’s standout performance in Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi, back in the early 1970s. South Madras was hardly the place we would have expected to run into him years later. It was with incredulity therefore that I caught sight of this look-alike of his at a cigarette shop in the neighbourhood I used to frequent. I ran into him frequently, but it took me months to gather the courage to walk up to him one evening and ask him if he was Dhritiman Chaterji, the celebrated actor, fully expecting to be told he was very sorry to disappoint me, but he was Somasundaram or Mahalingam or Ramaswamy!
To my delight, it was indeed Dhritiman, who had moved here from Calcutta with his wife Ammu and son Pablo in the 1980s. Soon we became friends, and realised not only that he had no starry airs about him, but also that we shared common interests in the arts (and sport). We often ran into one another at literary events and the theatre, and even watched one memorable ODI together, when rain forced us to repair to the Madras Cricket Club bar after the game was abandoned. Watching his own films with him, ones directed by Ray in particular, with Dhritiman furnishing background information and sidelights, was a highly rewarding experience, as was listening to recordings of his conversations with the great master. Gowri and he memorably discussed Ray films for film buffs at the British Council once, and the seeds for artistic collaboration were sown.
It was thanks to Dhritiman’s initiative that we brought Dark Horse and a subsequent play by Gowri, Water Lilies, to Kolkata. With his iconic and powerful performances as Arun Kolatkar in the former and a Serbo-Hungarian author in the latter, Dada, as they all called him with great affection, was a huge influence on the younger members of the troupe. Not only did he set a great example with his no-nonsense, disciplined work ethic, always on time for rehearsals and always focussed on his role, he loosened up enough after the plays, to show the boys and girls the sights and sounds of the city, not averse to shaking a stylish leg in their company. Of course, they felt comfortable enough with him despite his star status to enjoy pulling his leg, claiming that his roles as writers in the two plays allowed him to carry the script hidden inside books on stage. They even go a step further to relate the apocryphal tale of how he once read from the wrong page of the script!
Today, JustUs Repertory has earned a reputation for serious theatre—strong scripts, well-rehearsed performances, good production values, and a striving for excellence—with its consistent showing in several cities in India, but the memory of our first foray outside Chennai, at the Birla Sabhagarh at Gariahat in the Hutch Festival of 2005 is inerasable, for more reasons than one. Dada had fallen ill close to the date of the show, and there had been some suspense about his making the trip, and we were understandably nervous about our Kolkata debut. Dada and the rest of the cast won the hearts of a an appreciative, even indulgent audience, and the live music of the play—composed by Gowri and sung by Savita Narasimhan—stole the show. We had arrived!
The protagonist of the play, the reclusive, iconoclastic Mumbai-based poet, had died a few days earlier, and Gowri, who had literally hunted him down a decade earlier for a newspaper interview, had been moved by the power of his poetry to write a script that included a number of his verses to be enacted on stage.
One thing led to another and soon was born JustUs Repertory, the theatre group that was the brainchild of Dhritiman Chaterji and a few other theatre fiends, the late Bhagirathi Narayanan the most prominent of them. Nearly six years, six plays and some fifty performances letter, incredible as it may seem, the Madras Players, arguably the oldest English theatre group in India, recently collaborated with JustUs to produce a Gowri Ramnarayan Retrospective of three plays at Chennai. The shows on 2, 3 and 4 July this year were sell-outs, suggesting that the fledgling of 2005 has come some way from its tentative beginnings. And when we look back with nostalgia and some pardonable pride, we cannot help feeling that the journey would not have even begun without Dhritiman’s inspired recognition of the potential of the Dark Horse script.
Like most Indians of our vintage, my wife and I had been blown away by Dhritiman’s standout performance in Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi, back in the early 1970s. South Madras was hardly the place we would have expected to run into him years later. It was with incredulity therefore that I caught sight of this look-alike of his at a cigarette shop in the neighbourhood I used to frequent. I ran into him frequently, but it took me months to gather the courage to walk up to him one evening and ask him if he was Dhritiman Chaterji, the celebrated actor, fully expecting to be told he was very sorry to disappoint me, but he was Somasundaram or Mahalingam or Ramaswamy!
To my delight, it was indeed Dhritiman, who had moved here from Calcutta with his wife Ammu and son Pablo in the 1980s. Soon we became friends, and realised not only that he had no starry airs about him, but also that we shared common interests in the arts (and sport). We often ran into one another at literary events and the theatre, and even watched one memorable ODI together, when rain forced us to repair to the Madras Cricket Club bar after the game was abandoned. Watching his own films with him, ones directed by Ray in particular, with Dhritiman furnishing background information and sidelights, was a highly rewarding experience, as was listening to recordings of his conversations with the great master. Gowri and he memorably discussed Ray films for film buffs at the British Council once, and the seeds for artistic collaboration were sown.
It was thanks to Dhritiman’s initiative that we brought Dark Horse and a subsequent play by Gowri, Water Lilies, to Kolkata. With his iconic and powerful performances as Arun Kolatkar in the former and a Serbo-Hungarian author in the latter, Dada, as they all called him with great affection, was a huge influence on the younger members of the troupe. Not only did he set a great example with his no-nonsense, disciplined work ethic, always on time for rehearsals and always focussed on his role, he loosened up enough after the plays, to show the boys and girls the sights and sounds of the city, not averse to shaking a stylish leg in their company. Of course, they felt comfortable enough with him despite his star status to enjoy pulling his leg, claiming that his roles as writers in the two plays allowed him to carry the script hidden inside books on stage. They even go a step further to relate the apocryphal tale of how he once read from the wrong page of the script!
Today, JustUs Repertory has earned a reputation for serious theatre—strong scripts, well-rehearsed performances, good production values, and a striving for excellence—with its consistent showing in several cities in India, but the memory of our first foray outside Chennai, at the Birla Sabhagarh at Gariahat in the Hutch Festival of 2005 is inerasable, for more reasons than one. Dada had fallen ill close to the date of the show, and there had been some suspense about his making the trip, and we were understandably nervous about our Kolkata debut. Dada and the rest of the cast won the hearts of a an appreciative, even indulgent audience, and the live music of the play—composed by Gowri and sung by Savita Narasimhan—stole the show. We had arrived!
Thursday, July 15, 2010
A road by any other name
(First appeared in The Bengal Post, Kolkata)
The first time I set foot on Shakespeare Sarani—in 1968 on my first visit to Kolkata—I was struck by how strange that sounded. What was the antiquity of the name, I wondered; was it the whim of some legislator who fancied the bard’s works? Where did the impulse to rename Theatre Road—back in 1964 to commemorate the great playwright’s 400th birth anniversary, I have since learnt—spring from? Where today is that wonderful spirit that could celebrate a writer from another continent, unsullied by parochial considerations?
Here is my favourite story about a road name from the same city of Kolkata—where else could it happen? Harrington Street, on which was situated the American Consulate, was renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani during the Viet Nam War. What a delicious piece of (no doubt deliberate) irony! Politically motivated the move might have been, but it was at least prompted by considerations beyond the need to accommodate narrow sectarian or local interests. Ideology rather than chauvinism was perhaps the driving force behind it.
The grand sweep of an extra-national vision appears to be lacking in the recent flurry of name changes for Kolkata streets, roads and avenues, with history taking the back seat and making way for populism. The only problem with such attempts to glorify personalities through road names is that they seldom work. Can you imagine the most devout worshipper of the venerable saint referring to Park Street as Mother Teresa Sarani or the most ardent Congressman calling Red Road Indira Gandhi Sarani, the new names given to these famous locations? How does anyone expect the average Kolkatan to call Ballygunge Circular Road by any other name?
In Chennai, decades after the state government renamed Mount Road—the arterial road that connects the city to St. Thomas Mount—Anna Salai, people still call it Mount Road. Many other such ‘reforms’ have met with a similar fate.
The city has a long history of street names receiving the wrath of its politicians and politickers, but of organic changes too, with often hilarious results. Hamilton Bridge during British times became Ambattan Varavadi, an adaptation of the name by the local populace, and eventually came to be known as Barber’s Bridge—a reverse translation of the word ambattan now considered derogatory but a perfectly acceptable Tamil word for barber back then. More recent examples of mutilation include the four Seaward Roads of Valmiki Nagar, a south Chennai suburb, by the corporation to read ‘C’ Ward Roads. D’Monte in D’Monte Colony has been variously misspelt as D Mandi or D Mondy, and Turnbulls Avenue becomes Turn Bull Avenue.
The drive launched a few decades ago to eliminate caste from the city’s street names overlooked the minor detail that the revised versions were not the real names of the persons commemorated. Official abbreviations like Krishnama for Krishnamachari proved quite ludicrous, while Nair Road and Chari Street posed serious challenges to the painters of the roadsigns: removing the caste left them with no name. At the same time, powerful lobbies seemed to be at work—or was it sheer ignorance?—in the retention of names like Muthuramalinga Thevar Salai.
The latest attempt to rewrite the history of the city’s streets is the announcement by the Mayor that 52 Chennai streets will have new names to pay homage to Tamil scholars acknowledged by the state government. While this will be the first mega swoop of its kind, British street names have been systematically replaced with Indian names for many years now as in other parts of India. Many old streets retain their British names despite these periodic attempts.
Though renaming streets has rarely worked, the names of political and other leaders given to new suburbs have naturally always stuck. No problem whatever with Indira Nagar, Nehru Nagar, Kamaraj Nagar, Gandhi Nagar, Kasturba Nagar and so on, but Rajiv Gandhi Salai for Old Mahabalipuram Road, Kalki Krishnamurti Road for Lattice Bridge Road, or Uttamar Gandhi Road for Nungambakkam High Road? No way. (‘Uttamar’ was an absurd attempt to Tamilise ‘Mahatma’ by someone in power who apparently knew neither Tamil nor Sanskrit. Elsewhere in the city are numerous Mahatma Gandhi Roads, each of which is of course known as MG Road, as in every other Indian city).
In his final decade, the late Semmangudi Srinivasier, doyen of Carnatic music and a great raconteur, was fond of regaling his friends with the story of how Yama, the god of death, took away his neighbour instead of him, misled by the old number-new number confusion that followed the renumbering campaign the corporation launched then. A decade later, the chaos continues, with Chennaivasis still unsure of addresses. They await the 52 new street names with bated breath, sure that they will add to their woes of missed letters and conducted tours by the city’s famed autorickshaws.
The author is Editor-in-chief, SRUTI magazine, author, translator, cricket columnist, teacher and former first class cricketer.
The first time I set foot on Shakespeare Sarani—in 1968 on my first visit to Kolkata—I was struck by how strange that sounded. What was the antiquity of the name, I wondered; was it the whim of some legislator who fancied the bard’s works? Where did the impulse to rename Theatre Road—back in 1964 to commemorate the great playwright’s 400th birth anniversary, I have since learnt—spring from? Where today is that wonderful spirit that could celebrate a writer from another continent, unsullied by parochial considerations?
Here is my favourite story about a road name from the same city of Kolkata—where else could it happen? Harrington Street, on which was situated the American Consulate, was renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani during the Viet Nam War. What a delicious piece of (no doubt deliberate) irony! Politically motivated the move might have been, but it was at least prompted by considerations beyond the need to accommodate narrow sectarian or local interests. Ideology rather than chauvinism was perhaps the driving force behind it.
The grand sweep of an extra-national vision appears to be lacking in the recent flurry of name changes for Kolkata streets, roads and avenues, with history taking the back seat and making way for populism. The only problem with such attempts to glorify personalities through road names is that they seldom work. Can you imagine the most devout worshipper of the venerable saint referring to Park Street as Mother Teresa Sarani or the most ardent Congressman calling Red Road Indira Gandhi Sarani, the new names given to these famous locations? How does anyone expect the average Kolkatan to call Ballygunge Circular Road by any other name?
In Chennai, decades after the state government renamed Mount Road—the arterial road that connects the city to St. Thomas Mount—Anna Salai, people still call it Mount Road. Many other such ‘reforms’ have met with a similar fate.
The city has a long history of street names receiving the wrath of its politicians and politickers, but of organic changes too, with often hilarious results. Hamilton Bridge during British times became Ambattan Varavadi, an adaptation of the name by the local populace, and eventually came to be known as Barber’s Bridge—a reverse translation of the word ambattan now considered derogatory but a perfectly acceptable Tamil word for barber back then. More recent examples of mutilation include the four Seaward Roads of Valmiki Nagar, a south Chennai suburb, by the corporation to read ‘C’ Ward Roads. D’Monte in D’Monte Colony has been variously misspelt as D Mandi or D Mondy, and Turnbulls Avenue becomes Turn Bull Avenue.
The drive launched a few decades ago to eliminate caste from the city’s street names overlooked the minor detail that the revised versions were not the real names of the persons commemorated. Official abbreviations like Krishnama for Krishnamachari proved quite ludicrous, while Nair Road and Chari Street posed serious challenges to the painters of the roadsigns: removing the caste left them with no name. At the same time, powerful lobbies seemed to be at work—or was it sheer ignorance?—in the retention of names like Muthuramalinga Thevar Salai.
The latest attempt to rewrite the history of the city’s streets is the announcement by the Mayor that 52 Chennai streets will have new names to pay homage to Tamil scholars acknowledged by the state government. While this will be the first mega swoop of its kind, British street names have been systematically replaced with Indian names for many years now as in other parts of India. Many old streets retain their British names despite these periodic attempts.
Though renaming streets has rarely worked, the names of political and other leaders given to new suburbs have naturally always stuck. No problem whatever with Indira Nagar, Nehru Nagar, Kamaraj Nagar, Gandhi Nagar, Kasturba Nagar and so on, but Rajiv Gandhi Salai for Old Mahabalipuram Road, Kalki Krishnamurti Road for Lattice Bridge Road, or Uttamar Gandhi Road for Nungambakkam High Road? No way. (‘Uttamar’ was an absurd attempt to Tamilise ‘Mahatma’ by someone in power who apparently knew neither Tamil nor Sanskrit. Elsewhere in the city are numerous Mahatma Gandhi Roads, each of which is of course known as MG Road, as in every other Indian city).
In his final decade, the late Semmangudi Srinivasier, doyen of Carnatic music and a great raconteur, was fond of regaling his friends with the story of how Yama, the god of death, took away his neighbour instead of him, misled by the old number-new number confusion that followed the renumbering campaign the corporation launched then. A decade later, the chaos continues, with Chennaivasis still unsure of addresses. They await the 52 new street names with bated breath, sure that they will add to their woes of missed letters and conducted tours by the city’s famed autorickshaws.
The author is Editor-in-chief, SRUTI magazine, author, translator, cricket columnist, teacher and former first class cricketer.
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