Meghnadbadh Kabya: A super rendition

Meghnadbadh Kabya (Slaying of Meghnad) was the most significant literary work by the greatest flawed genius of Bangla literature, Michael Madhusudan Dutta (1824–1873). It was published in 1861, the year Rabindranath Tagore was born.

To briefly explain the qualifier “flawed genius”, right since his days in Hindu College (Presidency College later), there was plenty of evidence of Madhusudan’s literary talent. But he was also snooty, quite shamelessly opportunistic (he converted to Christianity not out of faith, but to cadge a ticket to England from the colonial masters), and famously undisciplined. Thanks to his luxurious lifestyle and lack of self-restraint, Madhusudan went through long spells of penury and ultimately, drank himself to death. Had it not been for the consistent financial and moral support from Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar – who I believe was among the three greatest Bengalis in modern history – Michael possibly would have died much earlier, and Bangla literature would have been poorer.

Meghnadbadh Kabya, a tragic long verse in nine cantos, is exceptionally brilliant both in terms of its content and literary style.

In this poem, Michael looks at an episode from the Ramayana from a contrarian perspective. Indrajit, also known as Meghnad, was Ravana’s son and a great warrior. He had almost killed Rama and Lakshmana twice.

But in the morning just before he was to join the battle, while he was worshiping Shiva in the royal temple of Lanka, Laxman entered the palace “like a thief” with the help Bivisana, one of Ravana’s brothers. Meghnad welcomed Laxman as a guest, but rebuked him for being such a coward and asked him not to fight an unarmed man. But Lakshman killed his defenceless enemy anyway, making a mockery of the so-called “kshatriya dharma”.

A proof of literary genius is that catch phrases used by great writers become idioms in their language. Meghnadbadh Kabya in particular and Madhusudan’s poetry in general abounds with such gems. Here’s one that my mother often quoted when she had to refer to a troublesome adversary:

Raban swoshur momo, Meghnad swami, amiki dorai sakhi bhikari Raghabe?

Ravana is my father-in-law, Meghnad my husband, could I be scared of that beggar Raghava?

Michael once wrote:

Kato je aishwarya tabo e bhabo mandole

Sei jane, banee pado dhare je mastake

What treasures abound

In your boundless universe,

Know only those,

Who’ve embraced the feet

Of the Goddess of Letters.

Watching fine plays (and films) too is embracing the feet of the Goddess of Learning. And last night, I discovered a new treasure trove: The theatre group Naye Natua and Gautam Halder’s rendition of Madhusudan’s epic verse at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata.

It was two hours and twenty minutes of solo-acting by Gautam, supported by two drummers and four other musicians, every one of them joining in chorus too. Gautam recited and sang, acted and danced while effortlessly transiting from one character to another, playing every character of the story including both the combatants Meghnad and Laxman, with effortless ease but with tremendous passion and physical exertion.

If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have known that such performance was humanly possible on stage. And the beauty of the performance was that he hadn’t left out even one word of the original. Michael Madhusudan’s language contains lots of Sanskrit words and even educated Bengalis may not follow it entirely. But despite that, Gautam and his team kept the audience spell-bound, no one – well almost no one – moved or checked their stupid cell phones during the performance.

It was a captivating show, and almost flawless. After many years I was watching a play at the Academy of Fine Arts with every seat occupied. For average performances, there are 20 to 200 viewers and it was indeed heart-warming to notice that fine performance is still appreciated in a city where ignorance is bliss officially, filthy language is heard everywhere, and uncouth behaviour is considered normal.

I’ve been watching plays since when titans like Sambhu Mitra, Ajitesh Bandyopadhyaya, and Utpal Dutta straddled the theatre stages in Bengal. After their departure, there was an inevitable period of lull, and personally, I lost touch with the Bangla theatre as I moved away.

Yesterday, I realised that the tradition of Bangla theatre is very much alive. The flame burns with equal brightness and the pursuit of the pinnacle of excellence continues unabated.

19 November 2017

Photo of Michael Madhusudan Dutta courtesy: Wikipedia: By Unknown - Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51736483

Picture of the stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwBWXwJgUns

Thotadhahalli In the Land of Coffee

In a way, the desk that I’m writing on is like a sepia photograph. Made of teak and intricately carved, it can be a hundred years old. It’s five in the morning, dark outside, but the world is far from silent. Sibilant sound of air rustling through thousands of silver oak trees is interspersed with gusts of rain lashing the tiled roof of our cottage. But unlike yesterday, the birds are quiet. Are they too soggy and dispirited after the long night of relentless rains?

Welcome to Thotadhahalli Coffee Estate, a short five-hour drive from Bengaluru, but it’s actually on another planet. Two days ago, on a sudden impulse we drove down to this place, which is 10 kilometres from the coffee capital of the country, Chikmagaluru.

As we left the tarred road that goes to Shimoga at Kaimara, Google Map died peacefully and Mother Nature filled our world completely. Fortunately, there were signposts to tell us that our destination was at the end of the narrow alley covered with black soil.

The bungalow, like the other planter’s bungalows, is large. On one side of the main building is a cemented flat space for drying coffee beans. On the other side are the cottages given as home stay. As we enter, quaint charm of a faraway past greets us.

Around a lush green garden, there are cottages with wide verandas with dark red floor and roofs covered with vermilion Mangalore tiles supported by solid carved rosewood pillars that have the stamp of the refined taste one comes across all along the Malabar Coast, in the Raja Rao country. The cottages and the verandas are strewn with ancient wood carvings, gold-inlayed Tanjore paintings, and artefacts from around the world. And not one of them is kitsch!

If you can turn your eyes off the pieces of art and look at the garden again, you will be greeted by orchids, aerophytes (plants that grow without soil, drawing sustenance from moist air), and bonsai plants, while majestic oaks that provide shade to coffee plants sway in the background.

It is a planter’s home, but it could well have been an artist’s – everything has a touch of class here, including the brass lock on our door which has the head of a soldier stamped on it with the inscription “Field Marshall Sir Thomas Biyami”. When did anyone make such a lock last?

Back to the 21st Century, our hosts Pallavi and Prakash make their guests feel at home, literally. The food offered is refined Coorg fare, and every meal is different from the previous one. While we have food, one of our hosts makes it a point to come and check that everything is fine.

Well, everything is, when old-world charm meets the convenience of modern amenities, with the added blessing of the absence of the TV and the Internet.

Ah! As I come to the end of another page in my diary, birds have just been waking up and filling the sky with warble, and the ground below is taken over by the aroma of the finest Arabica coffee. And the sky is clearing up; it’s time to go for a lazy walk through the coffee estate which has denser foliage than most jungles.

Thotadhahalli / 04 August 2017

Quaint portraits of an enchanting city

I would say Paul Fernandes is to Bangalore what Desmond Doig is to Calcutta and Mario Miranda to Bombay. Like them, Paul too has drawn intimate pictures of the city he loves. And he's drawn them with some brio. Bangalore is fortunate to have someone like him to record its moods for posterity. Stylistically, Paul is closer to Mario than to Doig and although he hardly enjoys their kind of fame, he too has an artist's insight and a superb grip on his pen.

I heard Fernandes’s name and saw his cartoons only a few days ago, thanks to Yahoo.com.  It was love at first sight for me. Paul has captured the languid spirit of what used to be Bangalore in the 1960s and 70s. His cartoons remind me of a time when I was in college and used to visit Bangalore to spend time with my dad who lived there alone. 

This Coffee House was a favourite joint for my old man. Many a time we had coffee, toast, and an omelette at this place. The present Coffee House in a narrow street parallel to MG Road is an apology of its past. And I am sure there you won’t find a waiter carrying a huge dosa, two chutney bowls, and a pyramid of coffee cups for an off-site customer.

Here is another lovely cartoon by Paul Fernandes.

I think this picture vividly captures Bangalore streets forty or fifty years ago. A snoring potbellied cinema watchman against the backdrop of Clark Gable kissing Vivian Leigh, and a thief rolling tyres with the careless abandon of a frolicking child, with no one around to witness this bizarre crime actually bring alive the loneliness of Bangalore streets of the time. I remember, many a late evening when I walked from Cubbon Park to Shampanghi Tank Road, where dad had his digs, through a steady drizzle – it it used to drizzle all the time – not a soul would be on the road some days. A few cars would occasionally whoosh past only to accentuate the sparseness of the scene. 

To bring out that loneliness through the antics of a comical watchman and an adorable outlaw requires the sensitivity and imagination of a top artist.

The South of India is essentially a conservative place. Those days, it was much more hidebound and so was Bangalore. One would rarely come across women in anything other than the traditional sari. Premarital – no I am not talking about sex – relationships were possibly less common than extra-marital liaisons. Heterosexual interactions were restricted to cousins within families. I guess there was a lot of suppressed libido underneath the genteel veneer of the city. No wonder that Tokyo by Night would run to full houses for three weeks or more in Bangalore, despite the smallish town having as many as seventy movie theatres. I wonder if this carefully-hidden-but-known-to-everyone fact could be expressed more brilliantly than what Paul has done in the cartoon below! And if you click on the picture to get a better view, you won’t miss the disgust writ large on the face of the only lady in the picture. Her husband – who is equally aghast – is holding her head to make sure she doesn't get a glimpse of what happens in Tokyo by night! 

The police constable in bell-bottom half pants with a protruding paunch was a cartoonist’s delight since the beginning of history. Sad was the day when he started wearing trousers. Paul too takes a keen interest in him. In the picture below, the caption reads: Potential guest at Cubbon Park Police Station. I can’t remember if I saw the police station, although I used to walk or jog in the Park almost every day during my short stays there. Looking back, Bangalore in general and Cubbon Park in particular was such a peaceful and tranquil place those days! It does seem the policemen posted there had no more serious business than dealing with delinquent kids. This picture indeed says a lot about the peace and quiet of the city of yore.

It used to rain throughout the year in Bangalore and it was a place where I felt sleepy all the time. The people were exceedingly gentlemanly and rather laid back. Through Paul’s paintings, the quaint past of the city seems to be winking at its feverish present.

Kolkata, Thursday, 31 May 2012

If you are from Bangalore, you can see the pictures at aPaulogy, which is open from 11 am to 7.30 pm on weekdays and Saturdays. The address is: 15 Clarke Road (Opp. Au Bon Pain), Richards Park Entrance, Richards Town, Bangalore - 560 005.


The pictures are courtesy yahoo.com. To see more of Paul Fernandes's pictures on line, please copy-paste this URL: http://in.lifestyle.yahoo.com/photos/apaulogy-where-art-meets-cartoon-slideshow/

An image from the USA

You will find this painting (Gas, 1940, oil on canvass, 26” x 40”) by Edward Hopper in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. What you see here is a photograph of the original taken with a digital camera. Of the many paintings and other images that I have seen in the US, this one seems to catch the essence of the country with rare insight.

There is only one man in the wide open space … A vast country where very few people live. (The cities are exceptions.) Another implicit message is Americans’ love for cars and roads. This country has a fantastic network of highways and every individual, from 16 to 86, drives. A person under 21 cannot buy alcohol here, but one is eligible for a driving license at the age of 16.

The contrast between natural and artificial lights adds an element of drama to the picture. But as I looked at the painting for a long moment, what overwhelmed me was the loneliness of the filling station attendant. The partly hidden and apparently unimportant character is a typical American elderly man: lonely and unsupported, he has to fend for himself. Many in the US cannot afford to retire even when they are 70, because the cost of living, particularly the cost of medical care, is prohibitive. And adult offspring almost never live with their parents.

Consequently, many people go through a long and forlorn evening in their lives. You will often find these men on the roads of New York, talking to themselves. You will find them sitting at railway station food courts with an empty coffee cup in front, reading an old newspaper, solving a crossword puzzle, or busily noting down nothing on a jotting pad.

The man in the picture must be tired and listless after a long day. Perhaps no one is waiting for him at home. A few hours later, when night descends, if he is still alone, he might recall this Bob Dylan song:

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand,
Vanished from my hand,
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet,
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy and there ain't no place I'm going to.

Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) was a prominent American realist painter who is famous for his personal vision of modern American life. He brought out the stark realities of human suffering during the great depression like no one else has possibly done. Like all great painters and writers, what he leaves unsaid is more important than what he says explicitly.