Realistic actor, director
By Rama Sharma
A WELL-KNOWN amateur theatre personality in Shimla, Bhupendra Sharma’s life story reads like the smaller version of “Mujhe Chand Chahiye,” the popular on-going tele-serial on Zee TV.

A many-quintal image
By Suman Sachar
THE four-foot-high idol of goddess Durga in the temple at Baroh is a unique piece of art. The eight-metal alloy (ashtha dhatu) having been used to make a many-quintal image, the Durga idol usually seen and found seated on her vahan, the lion, is an impressive figure standing erect with all 18 visible arms carrying gadda, chakra, shankha, trishul, bow, sword, sickle, pushpa, maya, monster’s skull, dhan and ashirwad in the hands.

Cultural feast at festival
By Sanjay Manchanda

THE three-day festival of Gardens beginning today will present a rich fare of cultural bonanza to the art lovers of Chandigarh and its surrounding areas. To cater to diverse artistic tastes, the Chandigarh Administration has designed three select top-notch evening performances so as to avoid an overdose of cultural events during the festival.

Hans Raj Hans has been picked as the popular star who will perform at the Sector 10 Leisure Valley, Chandigarh, on the concluding day. Artiste of “Aja nach lai” fame and more familiar with youngster through MTV and Channel V for his foot-tapping remixes “Gur nalo ishq mitha” and “Long gwacha”, Hans is expected to bring the city alive on February 28. It will be a rare feast for his Chandigarh fans as he is famous for singing to packed houses at Wembley Hall, London, Maple Leaf Garden, Toronto, and Madison Square Garden, New York, where people clamour for $ 100, $ 50 and $ 25 tickets.

With more than 30 CDs under his belt, Hans tries to stick to the tradition and purity of Punjabi folk. He is the first singer of Punjab who has picked up compositions of prominent contemporary social themes into his songs. Hans Raj’s performance is being sponsored by the North Zone Cultural Centre, Patiala.

The middle evening’s highlight at Leisure Valley is one of the country’s best Kathak exponents, Prerana Shrimali. Sometimes described as the “Jewel in the Jaipur crown”, and at other times as one of the most poetically sensitive and aesthetically pure dancers, Prerana is today known as a superb Kathak performer of the Jaipur style of this North Indian classical dance.

Combining the spiritual with the sensuous, the erotic with poetic restraint and the technical with a new choreographic vision and ceaseless vitality, Prerana has been a dancer of traditional Kathak in al its purity, complexity and subtlety. In her repertoire, the conventional verses have been gradually replaced by poems of some of the major poets, namely Kalidas, Amaru, Amir Khusrau, Meera, Padmakar, Dev, Ghalib and modern masters such as the French poet Yves Bonnefoy. Endowing the inherited with new meanings, fresh insights and igniting them with a glow of the here and now has been her force.

Prerana has evolved over the years a poetics of lyrical intensity and aesthetic richness with the classical resonating the contemporary. In her distinctive style, the vision and the meaning are negotiated with ease and sensitivity through the traditional grammar, creating provocative abstractions, new gestures and figurations and compact compositions. They, while enriching the overall repertoire of Kathak itself, also reveal its inherent potential for an imaginative apprehension and exploration of reality.

Today’s evening performance, also at Leisure Valley, features the only Kuchipudi duo of the country — Raja and Radha Reddy. The duo, who has performed all over the world in front of many heads of governments, will perform Kuchipudi dance for the first time in Chandigarh. They also run a regular training centre in Delhi to train people in learning the art of Kuchipudi.

For the first and second day’s cultural evenings, the Administration has collaborated with the Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi.

Another feature of the festival will be the North Zone Cultural Centre’s Kalagram crafts fair that will be held at Leisure Valley up to March 7, 1999.

Realistic actor, director
By Rama Sharma

A WELL-KNOWN amateur theatre personality in Shimla, Bhupendra Sharma’s life story reads like the smaller version of “Mujhe Chand Chahiye,” the popular on-going tele-serial on Zee TV.

Coming from the back waters of Pahal village in Shimla district, where his only association with acting was through the Ram Lila and Kariala, a folk style theatre in HP, he was pleasantly surprised when picked up by the National School of Drama, Delhi for a month-long training at the Intensive Theatre Workshop held in July, 1985. Only 30 participants had been invited from all over India. His natural flair for acting as well as directing plays while a student at the university made him stand out in a crowd.

When the Young Theatre Directors Workshop was organised by the NCPA in Bombay in 1995, Bhupendra was also invited and he rubbed shoulders with eminent theatre personalities like Amol Palekar, Naseeruddin Shah and Nana Patekar. Behind all this was Bupendra’s hard work which he had consistently put in to rejuvenate Kariala in Himachal. His conviction that theatre must reflect people’s desires, aspirations and their cultural continuity, made him a spontaneous, experimental yet realistic actor as well as director. He improvised dramatic elements and in the process honed his acting skills.

Bhupendra’s hard work and innovation paid dividends and he won the first prize as lead artiste in Ba-Mulahiza-Hoshiyar put up at the zonal theatre festival organised by the Sangeet Natak Academy at Hisar. Simultaneously he was declared the best director-actor in Rang Nagari, in 1993. After that he started getting roles in films and tele-serials being shot in or around Shimla. He appeared as a gay in Yash Chopra’s Dillagi where his famous line Mera naam Salman hai, par log mujhe pyar se Salma kahete hain made him known all over India. Again in film Achanak, featuring Manisha Koirala and Govinda, he played the role of an assistant director as the film story included the shooting of a film within the film.

When a collection of folk stories of Uttaranchal by Raja Bundela and Ved Rahi were tele-serialised by Cinevesta’s Prem Kishan Bhupendra played the role of a village old man to perfection in Saye Devdar Ke. He says he portrayed only the real and ethnic Bhupendra.

Thirtyfive-year-old Bhupendra is a postgraduate in Hindi and working with the Telecom Department at Shimla. He feels theatre may bring creative satisfaction and also fun to a certain extent, but does not provide with livelihood security. Hence, the need for a regular job for this traditional hill boy with family responsibilities.

He floated the Nuv Yug Amateur Theatre group where all the 25 members, though regular employees of DoT, are devoted to theatre. J.K. Sethi is a fine singer and has acted in plays at Tagore Theatre, Chandigarh, and done assignments for Holland TV as well. Another member, Nachhater Singh, has acted in many plays held at Gaiety Theatre, Shimla, and recently bagged the best actor award for the Shimla Amateur Dramatic Club one-act play “Chhata Mej.”

Though the group has brought laurels to DoT at various zonal and national drama competitions and cultural programme, yet there is no effort on the part of the department for promoting theatre activities. There is no place for rehearsals and no provisions for recognition of talent. Bhupendra, the livewire behind the group, suggests the formation of recreation clubs within the department and that grants through welfare funds be utilised to promote cultural and drama activities, and honour outstanding artistes. Headed by the Head of the Department, these clubs could also organise competitions at regular intervals.

He feels that a true artiste may not need reward, but it would encourage new talent to come forward. He feels since the department is governed by the All-India Rules and Regulations, no deviation is possible at the regional level by way of special increment or out-of-turn promotions but there is a scope for evolving rules at the regional recreation clubs to extend honour to such artistes.

A many-quintal image
By Suman Sachar

THE four-foot-high idol of goddess Durga in the temple at Baroh is a unique piece of art. The eight-metal alloy (ashtha dhatu) having been used to make a many-quintal image, the Durga idol usually seen and found seated on her vahan, the lion, is an impressive figure standing erect with all 18 visible arms carrying gadda, chakra, shankha, trishul, bow, sword, sickle, pushpa, maya, monster’s skull, dhan and ashirwad in the hands.

The idol of Nav-Durga is rare in the artist’s expression of the Devi’s staring eyes and grim face. It seems as if the metal-made image is lost in deep contemplation.

The one-and-a-half-foot high pedestal, on which the idol has been installed, lends grace to the divine figure with two apsaras dancing with bowed steps to make obeisance to the goddess.

Baroh is a small sleepy village worth visiting. It is situated only 42 km from Palampur, 40 from Dharamsala and 29 from Kangra.

The house that Morris built

BY the literature I continue to receive from there, I am put in mind from time to time of the wonderfully stimulating year I spent — a long way back — at the National Humanities Centre in North Carolina. In the mail arrived the other day, a copy of their periodical, Ideas, which served as yet another reminder. This time of men who entertained, however briefly, a vision in 19th century England. And it came from a lively article by Elizabeth Helsinger on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that nostalgic, crusading movement which sought to rescue life from the sterile academicism then beginning to encircle it.

In it had come together some of the most prominent poets and painters of the period, men with a certain social and revolutionary fervour — Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Millais, Hunt, among them — but also others like Williams Morris, with whose name the great Arts and Crafts Movement is enduringly linked.

Morris — “poet, artist, craftsman, decorator and social reformer”, as he has been described — has always interested me. For this man, at once a dreamer and an activist, addressed himself in his day to the very issues that we are trying to grapple within our own times: issues such as the erosion of moral values in an increasingly mindless industrial age, the rapid decline in taste, our failure to preserve a sense of integrity in our crafts.

The battle that he joined with the purveyors of superficial “exhibition art” was daunting, but he sallied forth again and again coming at the problem from every conceivable angle: producing new designs in his own, reviving skills that were all but lost, even founding a company with the intent of bringing good taste back into the lives of men and women. With the fusion of life and art as his aim, he spoke movingly of craftsmanship — the “universality of craftsmanship”, to be more precise. It is in this, he said again and again, that the salvation of our age would lie.

The magnificent Kelmoscott Press, the founding of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, the establishment of the manufacturing and decorating firm of Morris, Marshall, & Faulkner, were all parts of a grand design in his mind. William Morris’s was a life of seminal importance, for he influenced the thinking, and the taste, of an entire generation.

What was greatly absorbing in Helsinger’s article was her description of the house that was built for Morris by his architect friend, Philip Webb: the “Red House” it was called. Like the house in which Morris’s friend and colleague, the greatly admired Rossetti, lived — the Tudor House — this was no ordinary residence, for in these homes were gathered all those things and ideas that the two friends stood for in their lives and advocated to others.

Like men possessed, the two poet-painters, joined enthusiastically by their wives, went about collecting, designing, furnishing, decorating. Through the style they were evolving, they were making a statement. In the Red House were “simply constructed but richly painted settles and cabinets, wall murals, decorated beams and ceilings, and embroidered hangings, interspersed with stained glass and painted tiles, all more or less medieval in inspiration.”

Rossetti meanwhile filled his Tudor House with “eclectic combinations of the old and the exotic: eighteenth century furniture picked up from obscure second hand shops; imported Chinese tables and Japanese pots; Oriental lacquerwork and bronzes; bamboo and rattan furniture from India; Dutch tiles”. There, “odd pieces of jewellery or Renaissance consumes, spilled out of drawers; books, pictures and prints vied with mirrors of every shape and curious framing on the walls; ....”

Reading these descriptions, one would naturally start wondering whether there was clutter here, or eccentricity. But apparently this is where the over-arching organising principles that Morris and Rossetti had mastered, and their innate respect for craftsmanship, kept the interiors strictly within the limits of good taste. Not severity, nor asceticism, but essentially good rhythms, harmonious taste.

The emphasis on manual skills in that depressing machine-driven age took the form of objects that Morris made himself, and encouraged others to make, with his own hands: hand-painted, hand-woven, hand-dyed textiles; hand-printed books; wallpaper, furniture. One reads about the deep impression that these homes made upon contemporaries. To many the “Morris look”, with its utter lack of pretence, its “artistic negligence”, came to stand for the avant-garde in this field.

These men came to live the ideas they believed in. In their homes, where the prefabrication of modern civilisation was not allowed to intrude, and where the “culture of beautiful objects” prevailed, building and furnishings were intended to give pleasure in use, not to conform to rules of symmetry or display a given style.

It was all about restoring value to the aesthetic in the world of goods. In the final analysis, Morris’s Red House was “a remembered dream”. In his long work, The Earthly Paradise, there are lines that evoke the felling:

Think, with what, joyous hearts, what reverence/

What songs, what sweet flowers we should bring it thence/

What images would guard it, what a shrine/

Above its well-loved black and white should shine ....

A confusion of ends

When one speaks of William Morris, it is not easy to put out of mind the efforts we in our own land are making — and the desperate need to make them — in respect of saving the integrity of the crafts, and those wonderful skills that belong to our craftsmen. There is no dearth of ideas, or even of persons who really care for the crafts. But, as in so much else, all ideas seem to flounder, ever so quickly. Take the case of the much-touted Suraj Kund crafts fair close to Delhi. The last time I saw it, it had turned into a circus of sorts, a bazaar where the greasy hand of commerce was upon everything. But then who cares, as long as there is the comforting glare of publicity, and the crowds keep coming?