When the prelude to the performance of Chama Chaluve began with the director of the play, Mandya Ramesh, greeting the audience with a humbling addbidde kanrakka-kanranna , one got a whiff of the passionate, earthy flavor of the jaanapada experience that was to follow.
Its 100th show ran to a full house at Ravindra Kalakshetra in spite of the rain, last Sunday. That’s not a surprise, considering all the shows in its four years have had full houses!
Avarana Trust presented this play written by Dr. Sujatha Akki and performed by the students of Mysore’s Natana repertory school run by Mandya Ramesh. Chama Chaluve is a modern folk rendering of the legend of Chamundeshwari and Nanjundaswami, the reigning deities of Mysore and Nanjangud, respectively.
The stage is dominated by a huge mask of the goddess with her bright red tongue sticking out in all its grandly grotesque glory, in the background. The play starts with Nanjundaswami’s jaatre scene where the chariot being pulled by devotees gets stuck, when a wise man begins to narrate the legend – and an almost cinematic shift takes place on the stage. The narrator begins a resonating Om which continues into the next scene in a matter of a blink, as the chant of Mahishasura, the asura king praying to Shiva seeking the blessing of immortality. He is granted the ‘next best thing to it’: death by a woman, and the power to regenerate millions of minions when a single drop of his blood touches the earth. And that’s how it all begins. Chamundi, a sudra princess takes him on, assumes her warrior avatar of Shakti, gains several pairs of arms and her lion mount, and with the help of her alter ego, Urimari, who spreads her tongue on the earth to prevent the villain’s blood from spilling on the earth, slays him in a valiant fight. The sequences leading up to it are indeed dramatic for their craft: the fourth wall is left in smithereens as Mahishasura’s cryogenic incarnates emerge ululating shrilly from everywhere creating the illusion of millions. Disha Ramesh, who plays Chamundi, displays a gamut of subtle expressions in this long scene – going from smug, to angry, to valorous, to tired and helpless, and back to confidence and then angry triumph – not pausing in her stylized movements, all along. That is just the backdrop to the actual story. Having thus emerged victorious, Chamundi falls for the wooing of a twice-married, wandering medicine man, Nanjunda, and the rest of the play is dedicated to this complicated relationship, moralizing on conjugality, love, jealousy, caste-based discrimination, all discussed in a non-political, emotional way. Jaanapada, which is essentially an oral discourse, is unbound by Vedic and high canon logic, thus free to mix shaivite and vaishnavite narratives in local legends, creating forms of entertainment and instruction as part of the subaltern bhakti cultures, and lead to explanations of prevalent forms of worship. Divinity, here, is to sanctify solutions and not to hold pedantic sermons over! True to this tradition, Chama Chaluve employs situational comedy, slapstick and characteristic ribaldry, and mixes and matches situations in a highly energetic performance that leaves the audience spellbound for two hours.
The costumes and props show professional skill in their design and make. The powerful singing by the dappu and dhol wielding mela set and maintain the tempo of the entire performance. Megha Sameera – who also doubles up as Vishnu – shows much talent with the percussion. The music by Pichalli Shrinivas and Devananda Varaprasad displays the fact that hybridity is an essential part of the jaanapada style that doesn’t hesitate to borrow from any prevalent form of the time: one of the songs is set to the tune of the old Hindi film song, ek pardesi mera dil legaya !
Every member of the large cast exhibits immense dedication to his/her role and does not once show fatigue in the performance that clearly demands high stamina. All the members have trained rigorously in the Natana school – many of them starting as children.
When complimented for mentoring these dedicated young artists, Ramesh attributed it to mannina guna , modestly returning to the earth its due. Can jaanapada be any more grounded?
