For a few moments, the stage was drenched in rain. Drum skins thundered; umbrellas shivered and swayed; and the actors — R. Rohini and Niran Vicktor Benjhamin — with their upturned and happy faces in make-believe rain had the audience smiling. And suddenly a voice rose (in Varaali ragam) in praise of the rain god. Revathy Kumar, vocalist and dancer, sang and danced the Varuna Sandhi. It was beautiful and moving, much like the entire performance of Lotus Leaves, Water Words .
Directed by Prasanna Ramaswamy, winner of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award 2013 for theatre — Lotus Leaves, Water Words is a continuum of her work from 2014 about the Cauvery. Titled The Flora and Fauna of the South: A Disappearing Landscape Etched in the Written Word , it was performed at The Hindu Lit for Life 2014. In both, Ramaswamy uses texts from various sources — ancient and contemporary — and weaves in song, satire, drama and dance. The props are minimal; the stage near-empty; and the performers use hands, eyes and voice to bring to life the story of rivers and waters and people. Yet, it’s only when the people come into the picture, that harmony disintegrates; and the avarice, resulting anguish, prayers and penance for water, pollution and punishing struggles for a mere bucketful… take over the narration.
Last year Ramaswamy worked on two motifs: one was the Cauvery itself (which she explored through the poems of the Azhwars and the Silapadikaram and, in the 20th century, to Kandasamy’s Sayavanam ). Another was the ‘living territories, occupations and cultural expressions of the communities around it (explored through Perumpanatrupadai from the Sangam literature all the way to Koola Madari by Perumal Murugan in the 20th century). “While the canvas last year rested on texts celebrating the 2000-plus years of texts from Tamil, this year it includes those from oral traditions that are both from ritual and performing disciplines, like the Rig Veda or Varuna Sandhi,” says Ramaswamy. She places, in between them, a stinging and side-splitting satire by Kashinath Singh (extracted from Kaun Thagwa Nagariya Lutal Ho ) and a stirring and hard-hitting text from an article by journalist P. Sainath. And she rounds it off with Bharathi’s work. “Bharathi has become a part of my system, and he takes centrestage here with his energising poetry.”
It is through these unlikely and diverse texts (in Sanskrit, Tamil and English) that Ramaswamy explores an astonishing array of (and wholly contemporary) preoccupations — development, urbanisation, cash crops transforming traditional paddy fields, and skewed water policies hurting and depriving a marginalised people. “For me, inter-textuality is not merely a style of working on a script, but that seems to be the only way — as I’ve discovered over the years — I’m able to work. This platform,” Ramaswamy says of Lit For Life, “allowed me even more freedom, and that’s something I enjoyed greatly.”
