Mid-season blues

FOR QUITE a while, we have been awash in a tide of music, lipping over our ankles and, now, at the mid-season stretch, foaming and bubbling, so to speak, at knee-level. I look around for support and find a group of college girls singing under the auspices of Kartik Fine Arts. And what were they singing? The songs the Naalvar - those saint-architects of the Tamil Saivite consciousness, The music was simple, unadorned. The introductions by Mr. T. V. Venkataraman were succinct and lucidly appropriate. A rapt audience filled the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Hall. Pretty good for a pre-lunch session on a working day. Why don't we have more of these in the morning sessions?

The mood persists. Hell-bent, sorry heaven-bent, on salvation, I slip into the Parthasarathy Swami Sabha to listen to a religious discourse. On a pre-lunch forenoon, over a hundred listeners are present, waiting patiently, as opening time (9-30 a.m.), passes. Forty five minutes later, the performer arrives and the audience is on its feet in respectful greeting. I follow suit hesitantly feeling it would be bad from not to do so. As he takes his seat, the listeners on the first row prostrate themselves on the dusty floor. My courage fails at this point and I try to merge into the background. Now, nothing would be more misguided than to dismiss all this in a fit of elitist withdrawal. Remember, it is a traditionally developed art form in which performer and audience co-operate in wordless agreement to build up the necessary atmosphere.

The performance is not Harikatha but its less glamorous cousin, Upanyasa. The performer is still a true artiste lacing his talk liberally with quotations from Sanskrit and Tamil scriptures, working them smoothly into the flood of his eloquence. In this case, the artiste came up nobly to expectations. The fluency of his Tamil was enviably rich. After the invocatory hymns, he launched out, unhesitatingly, on that story our ears had been flapping to hear, as fascinating on the hundredth time as at first hearing. At the end, we rose with the familiar feeling that we had notched up some brownie points in that register Chitragupta maintains up there. This too is a part of the act. Let me repeat Upanyas a is a cousin, not a poor cousin, of Harikatha. But it should confine itself, as indeed it does, to puranic themes and cater for a niche audience. Harikatha has wider opportunities as illustrated by that occasion, sometime ago, when the legendary career of ``M.S.'' was rendered, in splendid Harikatha fashion, by Revathy Sankkaran.

From Deivam to Devadasis is a short step. Or Devar-Adiyal if you wish to call them by their proper name, that valiant tribe of temple dancers who kept alive the art of Bharatanatyam through thick and thin. But one cannot live on remembrance of times past. For Bharatanatyam, the present is parlous. There are a few distinguished performers - you can count them on the fingers of one hand - who are a delight to watch. But they operate strictly within the tradition and tempt you, in effect, to turn your back on the present. The one concert, by a middle-order performer I had picked up at random, gave no room for cheer. The theme and format was traditional and obviously failed to strike a spark in the audience which was sparse anyway. All very sad.

East-West encounter

The dance recital of Daksha Seth at the Krishna Gana Sabha was different. It placed traditional Kathak beside contemporary dancing for a comparative view. The traditional numbers retained their indigenous character. The contemporary numbers especially those with one male and one female dancer, displayed intricate patterns of movement and stillness which seemed to evoke the spirit of Khajuraho more effectively than Malavika Sarukkai's version. In the end, the cultural distinctness of the two forms, Indian and contemporary, remained. Uptodate, the most successful East-West encounter in music I enjoyed this season remains the Aruna Sayeeram - Dominique Vellard concert. The other was in theatre, a German production of Tempest in which Shakespeare and Kathakali with Indian music thrown in) blended with ease, to create a strikingly original view of the play.

Music, now that is where the action is, is the ``happening'' place. Theme concerts abound. It is now Unnikrishnan's turn to sing a concert of Siva Sthuthis. He is doing a compact alapana in Kambodhi as I enter. I think of Gopalakrishna Bharathi, that prince of lyricists as I settle down. But Unnikrishnan is thinking of Sivan on Sivan and it is `Kaanakkan Kodi.' No matter. Whatever he sings is lapped up by the capacity crowd, with the verandahs crowded and the walls propped up by standing rasikas. Is a cult developing here, one wondered. Remind you of any similar cult figure? Elvis the pelvis? No, not quite. I suppose Unnikrishnan visits the U.S., like all the others, annually or oftener. But if he had only been born in the U.S. around the time of Sinatra, he would have given old Frank a run for his money.

N. VAIDYANATHAN

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