CULTURE

An enticing evening
Rana A Siddiqui

QAWWALI has an important role to play in the musical kaleidoscope. It entices audience from all walks of life and largely owes its popularity to Hindi films. Recall Hai agar dushman zamana from Hum kisi se kum nahin and Ae meri zohra jabin from super-hit Waqt? Even though the puritans among qawwals find such digressions disgusting.

They argue: "Qawwali has little to do with cupid. Instead, it invokes God and lauds his wonderful creations."

Nonetheless, a qawwali evening is never devoid of songs of love, treachery and wine. This feeling found an echo in the sufi and other kalams rendered by the famous duo, Ghulam Sabri and Ghulam Warsi, at Kamani Auditorium, New Delhi, organized by 1CCR (Indian Council for Cultural Relations) a fortnight back.

The evening began with a sufi piece in praise of Hazrat Ali (a khalifa in Islam); the latter is personified as the sky and a manifestation of God’s charisma. This was followed by Ameer Khusro’s - a sufi - saint and musician - famous number, Chaap tilak sab cheeni, mose naina mila ke, which had the audience swaying to its melodious tune. However, his qawwali on the theme of love and disloyalty found a more attentive audience. Here is a nugget:

Ishq shahon se choota, na gada se choota,

(Love could not be abandoned by kings or weapons, how can we abandon it when God could not?).

Amid the beats of tabla, claps and harmonium, the singer added a humorous touch by showering his attention on a gathering of ladies, making them blush, forcing him to exclaim: Maine aankh unkse milai to chera unka zard hua.... (When I saw her eye-to eye, her face turned red).

The famous nazm, ‘Bewafa tera yun muskurana yaad aane ke kabil nahin hai’, was intended to appease the gentry in the front row.

As Ghulam Sabir put it later, "Each time we perform, we have to take care of a not-so-serious audience also…’’

In any such programme of music and song, wine is always the predominant theme.

Here, too, it found a mention at a number of places. Its magic, though, paled when compared to a human being’s own enigmatic influence:

( I have a spell that the wine does not have. It if it had any, the bottle that contains it, would have danced )

But then he begs God to pour enough wine in hell, where he (the poet) might land, so that he can swim through and reach the heavens !

The audience, by now under the mesmerizing spell of the music, were the beneficiaries of another euphonic treat in Rag Darbar : Phool rahi sarson sakal bun (The mustard flowers are growing in the entire vegetation) and the famous Ameer Khusro number, Phool khile bagiyan main, aamad fasle bahar (Flowers bloom in the garden, heralding the season of splendid times).

The last offering was the most celebrated ‘Dumadum Mast Kalandar, enticing the audience, coaxing them to sway, clap and sing with the qawwals.

The number had another attraction, the tabla played by Mr. Inayat Khan.

A fitting complement to the evening came from the hooters; they had nobody to heckle and got immersed in the music.

ARTSCAPE
The follies of an old flirt
Our Correspondent

WHAT if our senior citizens fall in love and let the younger generation suffer because of their flirtatious tendencies? They might find their heart and house devoid of all values and valuables by the time they realise their folly.

This was the message given by a two-hour hilarious comedy staged by the theatre group ,Common People, in Anjaam-e Flirt, on October 14 at LTG Auditorium, New Delhi. The play was scripted and directed by Sanjeev Kant.

The play starts with the death of Ram Prasad, the protagonist. He is an ideal man in all respects, whose wife is spiritually inclined, but with a practical bent of mind. The messengers of death come to fetch him, but throw a fit because of his puritanical character. They leave him in the mortal world to commit a sin "within five days." Thus, the reborn Ram Prasad falls in love with Rasbhari, an old woman in the neighborhood, whose granddaughter is in love with his grandson. The girl leaves the boy, convinced that in a house where an old flirt lives, the younger generations must have crossed all limits of flirtatiousness.

Thus, begins the task of separating the two oldies by taking to task the preacher of love in kirtans and bhajans, a sadhu, whose message of love moulds the protagonist's life. On the other hand, his wife brings home a thief in the guise of a blind sadhu. This sadhu , with the help of his guru and a girl, symbolically called Maya , walks way with all valuables of the home, fooling the entire family under the spell of fake spiritualism and love.

The message conveyed, more in actions than in crisp dialogues ,provoked a belly-aching laughter throughout the play. The extended scenes at times seemed to weigh heavy. The song sung by the sadhus,Main Ramta Jogi (from the film Taal) and their uncanny behaviour , the protagonist's romantic behavioural changes, the grandson's restlessness conveyed through dialogues, his meek and docile father and the nepotism suggested even in heaven, compensated for shortcomings like immature acting by Maya and the unimpressive décor..

This five-year-old group of 25 persons, including freelancers, has played five successful plays so far, including Tajmahal ka tender and Tughlaq, recently.

The New Ram

Since October17 a dance drama, Ram- a paragon of exemplary virtues, is being presented by Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra, New Delhi. The play will be staged till November 11.

.Based on extensive research into the text written by Valmiki and Tulsidas, this dance drama boasts of a "new interpretation of the character of Ram."

It adds a new dimension to the character of Ram through the popular proverb, to err is to human, to forgive divine.

Apt costumes, ornaments, deviance of dance forms as martial, classical folk forms in choreography and an exhaustively researched music score are the highlights.

Ram is being played by well- known artist Ravi Chauhan and Kakoli is enacting the role of Sita in the dance drama. Directed by Shoba Deepak Singh, the vice -chairperson of the kendra and a Padmashree, the dance drama has dialogues by Neelabh and Arvind Kumar.

Shades of woman in different strokes
Our Correspondent

NEVER have been various facets of human life so widely portrayed, depicted and written about as in the 19th century. The period has been a source of inspiration for most of the painters too. This inspiration is revealed in the 20 beautiful paintings (of his total 300 works) by famous Krishna Shamrao Kulkarni (1916—1994) on view at Kumar’s Art Gallery at Sundar Nagar, New Delhi.

Titled ‘Life of Forms in Art’, the collection from Kulkarni’s paintings in the 1970s and ’80s covers his “human approach at least in four forms”, as Mr Virandra Kumar, the owner of the gallery and a connoisseur of art, puts it. Predominant among these forms is woman. Woman as a mother, both human and divine (devi), then as a beloved as in Radha-Krishan paintings, and as a lover as in the Couple, Amazement and Compassion. The other forms of the woman are also exhibited in Bride, Conceived, Shringar and Young Girl.An untitled painting (acrylic on canvas) draws maximum attention at the gallery. Painted in a mix of bright, brown and black accompanied with bright orange to enhance the effect of the dark, shows a figure in form of a bird on a tree having large, stern eyes which gives an image of a devi, a la Kulkarni trademark. Interestingly, the artist paints his Devi forms in predominantly black.

Amazement (acrylic on canvas, 1982) displays soft lines suggesting man and woman in perfect unity of thought and action. The common energy flowing out of the union is shown in white, green and orange lines homogeneously running through both the lines. It depicts the amazement as felt and experienced by the couple during the blissful union, hence the title.

Though his other painting on man and woman (Couple, acrylic on paper, 1982) also suggests togetherness, it differs in the treatment. It is a depiction of both divine and human union and is painted in dark shades of brown and yellow.

However, his Bride (acrylic on paper, 1982) painted flat in broken planes and bright shades of green, orange and white does not exude happiness. May be, the pain of separation from the parents dominates the happiness to be experienced later! Or may be the artist was trying hard to break free from the traditional, happy cubist forms and reach novel plasticity through his geometrically abstracted figures.

Another form of woman in Conceived (acrylic on paper, 1982) is again in flat lines. It shows her in a pensive mood in shades of predominantly green. The black outlines suggest a dilemma in her mind

Kulkarni’s inclination towards spiritualism is pretty lucid in Web of Life (acrylic on canvas, 1976) which displays a human figure in meditation and in another painting showing a Sufi in bright shades of orange and black. The orange shades here seem to have been used to show a Sufi’s happiness out of a direct attainment of energy emanating from God. In the works of this spiritualist and cultist, orange, green, blue, black and white are recurring shades. The expressions remain stern as in Egyptian paintings of gods.

The cost of the paintings measuring one to four feet range from Rs 60,000 to Rs 2 lakh. (Prof Kulkarni was also a vice-chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi, chairman of the UP Lalit Kala Akademi and Dean, Faculty of Music and Fine Arts in Banares Hindu University).