Tales of South India

Rajaraja Has Landed!

 

I have some very exciting news - my book, Rajaraja Chola, King of Kings, has been published by Aleph Book Company and is out in the big wide world, in bookstores, libraries and online, for anyone who might be interested. It has been a labour of love for the past several years. The book is no longer "mine", in the safe cocoon of my computer and accessible only to me, but has been released into the vast unknown, where I have no control over how it will be received, what people will make of it. This is nerve-wracking, to say the least, but in an oddly satisfying way. After all, that has been its destiny all along.

Of Gifted Voice

Earlier this year, I had a most delightful afternoon in the company of Keshav Desiraju, along with my brother and sister-in-law. We were distantly connected - a tenuous familial tie across several marital bridges, the kind that makes sense only in India. His book on the life and music of the great Carnatic musician MS Subbulakshmi, Of Gifted Voice, had just been published, and the time flew by as we discussed our favourite musicians and music and a good deal more. And less than two months back, I presented a review of his book to the Sunday book club of the Madras Club, a monthly get-together of a wonderful assortment of booklovers who talk about a book (or several) that they have read (one that is preferably in the Club’s library, an incentive for people to make more use of its fantastic collection). This meeting was to be a special one, as Keshav himself would be in attendance (all virtually, thanks to the pandemic). I was in equal parts excited and nervous, as you can well imagine.

In Which I Turn Art Critic

How simple my school and college years were! A voracious reader, I read a great number of books, many of them by dead white men (and a few women too) and (mostly) enjoyed them for what they were. I never thought - oh, these are not my stories, this is not my reality. I could, and did, relate to the characters and their experiences, and if I didn’t, I revelled in the new worlds they opened up to me, because that is what great literature does.  It never occurred to me to reflect upon the dark forces of colonialism, post-colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism and all the other multiple isms that no doubt run rampant through those books and weave such a tangled and suffocating web over that most important question of all - who, and what, am I?

An Efflorescence of Salons

Our first salon had been a dream come true for me. For years, I had imagined hosting an evening of music, dance, poetry, literature and animated discussion, and the salon, when it finally happened, was outstandingly fulfilling beyond my wildest fantasies. I could have happily basked in the success of this salon for an indefinite length of time, but then the requests and questions started trickling in. When are you having the next salon? I missed the first salon, could you please have another one? I heard all about this salon thing from a friend of a friend and would love to be invited to the next one. And then, from my fellow salon hosts, much younger and infinitely more energetic and industrious than I was, am, or ever will be, an email which countenanced no excuses, dithering or procrastination. The email presented Salon 2 as a fait accompli, complete with date, and a theme: conflict.

Tales From My 'Hood

 

This post is going to seem pointless and meandering. Like a crazy summer bee, it will buzz around, dipping into the graphic arts, whizzing distractedly through what might be called, if one were inclined to be polite about it, a poem, humming alongside a few photographs, and then finally fizzling to a close in a thicket of prose and Shakespearean verse.

However, I assure you, that there is a message in the madness. A purpose to the perambulations. A reason for the rhymes, a goal for the graphics.

I’m sorry. I get absorbed by alliterations at times.

This is an ode to my home, Harlem. I know what you’re thinking. Harlem? She’s going to be shot dead any day! We knew she was crazy, but not so crazy as to live in the Crime Capital of the Universe!  She should just cut her losses and leave! To that I say, to borrow a byline from a bordering borough, Brooklyn (that will be the last of the alliterations, I promise),

 

Fuhgeddaboutit!!

So just relax, and allow me to take you  on a merry romp through psychology, history, literature and more; running through the narrative is a glittering thread that stitches together South India and Harlem.

 

A Salon Blossoms in Harlem

By day - and often also by night - they are mathematicians, doctors, scientists, researchers, engineers, bankers, students of an exhilarating array of disciplines that probe the vast arc of human interests and scholarship, from Sanskrit to creative writing to spinal cord regeneration to economic policy. And in the precious nooks and crannies, the cracks and crevices of their spare time, a whole other side blossoms into being: that of singers, dancers, writers, poets, actors and artists. They yearn for their yin to harmonize with their yang, for their right brain to achieve balance and symmetry with their left. They seek to synchronize their creative impulse with their logical and rational selves and send shoots and leaves and tendrils towards the heavens to capture the ethereal and elusive pleasures of sunshine and light while putting down roots that snuggle securely into the comfortable security of soil and earth.

Of Red Earth and Pouring Rain

It is after a lengthy break that I am back. I will not bore you with the many reasons for my absence, other than to assure you that many - most - of those reasons are irreproachable and would find a sympathetic ear with even the sternest of school teachers. Since I am far removed from the world of school teachers this fact is of no relevance whatsoever. What is of relevance, perhaps, is the blog post that follows. For those of you, if indeed you even exist, who greeted my return with euphoria, expecting to read one of my mad tales or music reviews or travelogues, I am afraid that I have to warn you to to be prepared to be hit on the head with a sledgehammer. What follows is a densely detailed account of the history and development of Tamil Literature.

No, I am not joking.

If you were wondering what the title of the post has to do with Tamil Literature, it is from a lovely poem from the Sangam-era work of poetry, the Kurontokai.  Here is A.K. Ramanujan's exquisitely evocative transalation:

What could my mother be to yours?

What kin is my father to yours anyway?

And how did you and I meet ever?

But in love our hearts are as red earth and pouring rain:

mingled beyond parting.

 

Meanwhile, in a Small Sliver of South India...

Last evening, my husband and I were at the Asia Society in New York, to attend a reading and performance by William Dalrymple and Vidya Shah and her orchestra. This event was arranged in conjunction with the Society’s current exhibit on Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857. The evening was, for the most part, interesting and entertaining. Dalrymple’s narrative, drawn largely from his book, The Last Mughal, was studded with entertaining anecdotes that brought his characters to life. Vidya Shah complemented and supplemented his stories with songs and poetry from the great and little-known poets and songsters of that era.

Infinite Beauty

On the last Tuesday of January 1913, on a clear, cold winter’s morning in Cambridge University in England, a 35 year old mathematician of rapidly growing fame and esteem opened a letter. The letter, thick and unwieldy, bore the grime and wear-and-tear of a long journey, and a ragged line of stamps, unfamiliar and exotic. It started with the words, “Dear Sir, I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum............”

Another Time, Another Place

Many moons ago, in a now nostalgically-remembered era when cell phones and iPods were a rarity, when people wrote and spoke in full sentences and looked each other in the eye, when food was merely food, when men and women could agree to disagree politely without shouting each other down and when human beings walked around being themselves and were not defined by a thicket of labels, in that long-ago time, I was a pawn in a corporate American arena.

The Street Wall Journal

For as long as I can remember, the walls abutting the streets of my beloved Madras have been a canvas, a battleground, for all manner of posters, paintings and graffiti. Depending on my inclination and mood for the moment, I viewed those walls as riotously colorful, madly imaginative,often hilarious representations of the city's political and entertainment landscape, or as messy, garish, tasteless eyesores that defaced every inch of blank wall space. One look at those walls, and you got an instant picture - literally - of who was in power, and who was vying for it, with political party members and supporters falling over themselves to outdo one another in their fawning, often ridiculous depictions of their political leaders. Come election time, the poster madness rose to a fever-pitched frenzy, and they were often the only means by which many of the city's residents were made aware of who the candidates were, and what party they represented. Movie stars, gods and goddesses, mythological demons and revered, long-dead heroes of yore, all made their appearance on the walls of Madras, taking these already larger-than-life candidates into the glorified realms of the divine, the super-hero and the noble, or the vile, despicable and beastly. In America, television is the primary medium for election campaigning. In Madras, it was the walls.

A Junkie and a Monkey

Here is the Ramayana on drugs. It is a far cry from the black and white world of the evil Ravana and the squeaky-clean Rama, the pious Sita and loyal Hanuman. A Ramayana where a lustful Ravana, burned out on angel dust, kidnaps Sita, his mind clouded over by passion and desire. Where Rama and Lakshmana, wandering, frustrated and helpless up and down India looking for Sita, dull their pain with endless joints and pipes. And then Hanuman enters the story, a "hardcore ex-con tattooed" Hanuman who rallies his drugged-out monkey army with a big, happy substance abuse recovery-house reunion. What follows is a war - of monkeys and junkies, everybody high, everybody in a fog, in a fuddle, on cocaine, on LSD, a tangled disarray of tarnished minds and bodies. A war of relapsed junkies, and only Hanuman has the cure: the Sanjeevani herb.

A Meeting of Worlds

Recently, I attended an event at the Asia Society in New York, to mark the U.S. release of Namita Devidayal’s book The Music Room. This book – which I highly recommend – is a story of several musical journeys and lives: the author’s, from being reluctantly pushed into it by her mother, to the music becoming something that she could not live without, a source of solace in times of melancholy or trouble, an escape to a zone of serenity and beauty; that of her guru, the modest and reserved Dhondutai Kulkarni, who dedicated herself wholly to her music and never married, blessed with the voice of a nightingale, bearer of the keys to the magic, riches and glory of the Jaipur gharana of Hindustani music, yet who struggled to make ends meet, uncaressed by fame and fortune; of the flamboyant and theatrical Kesarbai Kerkar, she of dazzling musical brilliance, beloved and worshipped by hordes of admirers, male and female, inheritor of a precious musical legacy from the hands of the great maestro Alladiya Khan, who brought this style to life; of Alladiya Khan himself, and his gharana, distinguished by its lilting eloquence, seamless melding of double ragas, serpentine taans of filigreed intricacy and beauty, and variety of swara patterns.