Monday, April 30, 2012

PEACOCK FEATHERS IN A TERMITE-EATEN TEXT-BOOK - 9


The Home-Grown Artists

Even our obscure village had its share of performing artists. One or two writers too. These people were given special status and were accommodated in the front row during weddings.  The venue would be the bride’s place, normally. People crammed into the space around the house breathing fresh air scented with agarbathis, panineer , cigarette-smoke and  jasmine flowers. Ladies were keen to border their hairdo with jasmine flowers. The tang of the back-waters added to this melee. Then, the hearty smell cooking rice ….like a shaft of sunlight through early morning mist. It buoyed us up. The artists were quite satisfied with the adulation they received in such gatherings.

Aziz T.M. - Untitled


My earliest remembrance is about a couple of Kathakali artists. My grandfather’s younger cousin was a popular artist. He was already past his prime and had almost retired from active stage when I was still a child. I had a faint memory of him walking across the audience to reach the stage which was at the ground level itself. Probably Balivijayam, now I deduct, as it had heavy fights which scared the hell out of me. Krishnan Kutty, a soft-spoken villager was another artist who had lesser roles but a regular.  I tried to identify him while performing but always drew a blank. None of my classmates could. So we did the next best thing to release our frustration;  we made a very poor rendering of alarcha ….."Okya"……whenever  Sivankutty, his son was around. To our dismay,  Sivankutty took our pranks always in his stride.

V.Sambasivan, the man who brought Shakespeare to the semi-literate coir workers made a cascading effect throughout Onattukara. Anybody who could memorize a three hour long story and give an output as a potpourri of music, mono-act and mimicry turned celebrities overnight. A class-mate of mine, Subhagan and his sister Sudheera, formed a Kathaprasamgam duo and started giving performances. Unlike Sambasivan who always depended on well-known literary works, the duo took off-beat themes from the Puranas. My paternal uncle, Sadanandan developed them, wrote the text and the lyrics. He was a primary-school teacher preferred to work in the more pristine environs of punchappaadams of Kuttanaad. The spare time was spent in writing plays, ballets, kathaprasangam and even Ottanthullal. He wrote “Mahabali Vaikundathil” exclusively for the duo. The brother –sister duo learnt everything by heart, the text, expressions and even the gestures. Here is Mahabali taking a long trip from Paathalam to the abode of Mahavishnu to ask him a couple of questions. “Thrikkunnappuzha Sadanandan” as my uncle was popularly known always thought there was more to puraanas than met the eye. He didn’t make his students uneasy by teaching stories like Mahabali and Ekalavya verbatim. The Maha Bali he created ventured out from the dungeons to meet the Lord on a one-to-one basis. The injustice done to him was questioned.

"Man" - Aziz T.M.- water colour on paper - 2000


Punnachchirayil Bharathan , yet another  villager (and father of Subhagan and Sudheera) vowed to take Mahabali to the stage. Bharathan was not exactly comfortable enough to do so. He had been falsely implicated in a police-case and was finding it difficult to make both ends meet. In one of the rarest of rare cases of burglary that happened in our village, the house-owner said that he heard a voice similar to that of Bharathan. The police whisked him away in no time and he was at the receiving end of their hospitality for a while. It took its toll years later when he developed TB, a dreaded disease in those days. Bharathan looked frail and unhealthy though he smiled refreshingly always.

So, I placed myself behind the stage when the when the brother-sister duo was replaying Mahabali Vailkundathil. I had a better idea of their memory-hardware than their father!  As expected, Subhagan would suddenly draw a blank but his sister managed.  When Sudheera’s chip failed, it caused a shut-down! The Harmonist could buy time by playing a basic note repeatedly but there was the limit. Bharathan who handled percussion used to get furious, giving a strong pinch each time at his daughter’s bottom. Then he prompted the remaining text.

It was a hilarious sight to me!

I had a personal score to settle with them…While I was about to take exams in the second standard, combat-ready with my slate and its compatible pencil, Subhagan came rushing and staked a claim on my pencil. In fact the slate-pencil was a present from my mother. I treasured it so much that I used it only for writing exams. When I refused to part with it, Subhagan came back with his sister and confiscated the writing instrument. She substituted it with a cheaper one. Surprisingly, the lost property was found in a couple of hours’ time and I immediately rushed out to prove my innocence. There at the ferry, I stood standstill …late by a whisker.

Hey Subhagan…Here is your pencil …Now return mine

I yelled.

Sudheera was diplomatic.

Don’t worry;  we shall get a new one for you.

She never did.

Ah yes. Thrikkunnappuzha Sadanandan wrote ballets too. After the initial run of popular puranic stories, he veered towards the off-beat. He wrote one with Karnan in the lead. The hero had rebellious elements in him who always argued for his limitations. Naturally nobody was prepared to produce it and thus he found his own ballet-troup “Kerala Nrtha Kala Kshetram”. Karnan Ballet was its first production and was inaugurated by writer Kakkanadan. Karnan Ballet ran into full night and one such programme was enough to keep the village folk engaged. Armed with the success of his maiden production, my uncle went on to write “Ravanan Ballet”. Here, Ravanan was not an anti-hero, he was the real hero. Even managing Rambhapraesham without the guilt element. In the end, the war seemed unstoppable as Ravana used Chandrahasam to counter Rama’s missiles. Lord Shiva appeared in the climax scene to declare Ravana couldn’t be vanquished, making it a win-win situation.

Ravunni Aasan who later enacted Aravindan’s Kummaatti was a prominent player in all his ballets. Barring a couple of professionals like him, the rest of the artists were picked up from farmers, fish-mongers and the like. One had to walk the way to Unneedaparambil, have tea and just ask for a role. Previous experience or training no bar. The deal was struck minus the signing amount. The returns would be nil or very nearly equal to that!

Ravanan Ballet costed my uncle dearly. He had to sell off major chunk of his property to pay off debts. Still he managed to produce more, till the fag-end of his life.

My own maternal uncle, Vijayappan who joined the movies after rechristening his name as ‘Thrikkunnappuzha Vijayakumar’ was a writer of sorts. He never completed matriculation, in fact he got fed up with studies when he failed to make it at the eighth standard more than once. Even with such academic credentials, he managed to write a play and got sponsors to stage it as well.  He authored and published a book “Thyaga Hema”. You guessed it right; Hema is the name of the heroine, an embodiment of all virtues and qualities of the world!  She has been treated very badly by life but she refuses to give up selflessness. (Hence the prefix!). You guessed it right again, she is afflicted by TB and dies a tear-jerker death. My uncle wrote under the pseudo name,  K.V.Thoppil , as it was fashionable to write under such exotic names those days.

The opening lines of his novel went like this…

“Khora khora bhayankaramaya mazhayum pemarium…..”

There weren’t any takers for his novel and the debts were mounting. The practice of writing-off NPA was not in vogue then. The only escape-route left was to make a bee-line to Madras city without a train –ticket and resurface at Kodambakkam. He did all sorts of odd jobs there, slowly climbing up the ladder. Producing and directing a film was his most cherished dream. A variant of Thyaga Hema was already in mind.  He was sure to script his magnum-opus someday and had the title ready,  “Beena”. Whenever he came home during breaks between assignments, he worked on the script. There was a friendly toddy-shop by the river which used to come alive during the evenings and it doubled as his studio. Obviously he worked during the day-time. Hangers-on watched him at work were given free welcome-drinks. However, they were in no mood to desert him and continued to give him company till he called it a day. He did manage to make the film which had a star-studded cast with Jayabharathi ,Sathar , Unnimery  etc, in leading roles. The music by Kannur Rajan was excellent. Beena was released in the late seventies (alongwith a Kamala Haasan movie “Eetta” directed by I.V.Sasi). Yes, Beena failed miserably at the box-office. All of us expected that he would come back to our native place as a pauper. It never happened. He had married too, a nice girl from the tinsel-town, who stood by him through thick and thin. He pulled on at Madras with his family. Though he quit the film-field, he did odd jobs again to support his wife and two daughters. He too had a refreshing smile on his face, always.

I met him recently and I felt happy by his mere presence. His wife was there too, supplementing to it, gracefully. There wasn’t any need to talk.

Everything was taken care of.