Wah Ustad, Namaskaram Amma

Both performances started on an extremely slow note, gained pace halfway and then had a third as well as final phase of near-frezy. The parallels apart, there was no specific culural history common to back up the pattern.

Ustad Shujaat Khan is a senior Hindustani instrumentalist of the country’s classical music tradition, while Kapila Venu from down south is a much younger practitioner of India’s only surviving traditional Sanskrit theatre. No direct scope for a compare-and-contrast. Yet, when the famed sitarist was succeeded on the stage by one of today’s top actor-dancers of Koodiyattam, the crowd at a Delhi venue this week sensed this element of curious overlap in their presentation kinetics. 

The mutuality did not end there. If Shujaat played a 50-minute piece on a lesser-heard melody-type, Kapila presented a story that is rarely staged in Nangiarkoothu—the woman’s solo form that is an offshoot of the multi-cast art that is Koodiyattam. The national capital, thus, found the inaugural evening of a two-day cultural endeavour bringing out two kinds of aesthetic sensibility, but blended by uncanny similarities.

Pancham was the raga the middle-aged maestro of the Imdadkhani school of music chose at the opening of ‘Mahima—The Return of the Guru’ festival organised by the Raza Foundation in memory of modern painter Saiyed Haider Raza who died last year. On her part, Kapila structured her Purana-themed choreography on ‘Soundarya Lahari’, the classical literary work eulogising the grace of Hindu goddess Parvati. 

The Nangiarkoothu performance of 90 minutes was primarily a face-and-body expression as well as an expansion of the first of the 103 shlokas (stanzas) of Soundarya Lahari, a chunk of which is believed to be penned by 8th-century philosopher-theologian Adi Shankara—who originally hailed from a village in present-day central Kerala, not far from where Kapila, 33, lives and runs an institution founded by her father-guru. 

G. Venu, who set up Natana Kairali Research, Training and Performing Centre for Traditional Arts 42 years ago in the temple town of Irinjalakuda in Thirissur district, had himself conceived this chapter of Nangiarkoothu. A trained artiste, he set its stage proceedings a decade ago for his only daughter to perform, thus add to the repertoire of Nangiar Koothu that boasts of an antiquity of one-and-a-half millennia and has sensed a fresh bout of life over the past five decades.

The plot, in a nutshell, profiles the tenacious and successful attempt of Parvati, as the daughter of Himavan (Himavat, the mountain lord), to become the wife of Shiva after having developed a deep adoration and love for her matted-hair hero with a third eye. Typically, the show unfolded through hand gestures and eye-centric emoting set to unhurried rhythmic cycles—on the large copper drums called mizhavu (by Kalamandalam Rajeev and Nepathya Aswin) to the accompaniment of the damaru-shaped edakka (played with one stick, by Kalanilayam Kaladharan) and the little cymbals by Saritha Krishnakumar, the only other female artiste (who sits cross-legged on one side of the stage).

Just as Parvati’s wistful mood lends itself to thoroughly ponderous mudras at the start, the pick-up of the plot lends a reason to gain speed midstream—only to eventually generate rounds of relatively brisk action, thanks to the wedding revelry. 

That kind of a high-pitch glory marked the culmination of Shujaat’s sitar, too. Pancham, which is close to the more familiar Rageshri raga (minus the ‘dha’ in its scale, as the instrumentalist-vocalist put it), sounds unmistakably romantic. Giving it a broader explanation, the artiste said ‘Pancham’ used to be called ‘Hemant’ by iconic Pt Ravi Shankar, incidentally, a professional rival of Shujaat’s late father Vilayat Khan, another renowned sitarist of the 20th century. 

Incidentally, Shujaat at the Mahima festival evening, too, had two mizhavu of sorts—to put it in a lighter circumstantial context. Somewhat out of the puritan line, it wasn’t just one tabla that accompanied his sitar. Amjad Khan and Arunangshu Chaudhury came up with long rallies of taps and rolls on the pair of drums, lending a racy climax to the concert that had bloomed from a meditative alaap and medium-paced jor-jhala. 

The second day of the January 17-18 festival, at Triveni in Lutyens’ Mandi House, saw Hindustani vocalist Ashwini Bhide-Deshpande of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, followed by an Odissi recital by Madhavi Mudgal, a disciple of late patriarch Kelucharan Mahapatra.

The Raza Foundation, helmed by cultural scholar Ashok Vajpeyi, is planning to host more programmes “in keeping with the artist Raza's desire to support up-and-coming artistes in all fields of art”.

(The videos show earlier shows of the artistes.)