In its third year the Adishakti Ramayana Festival in Puducherry was able to achieve a near perfect balance between the splendour of performances and the intensity of its intellectual component. As in previous years there were performances drawing from the Ramayana but the presence of scholars like Romila Thapar, Ashis Nandy, Paula Richman, Gulam Mohammad Sheikh as well as Paritta Koanantakool and Pornrat Damrhung from Thailand and Sal Murgiyanto and I Wayan Dibia from Indonesia and Edin Khoo from Malaysia, testified to a deepening of the festival's vision. This also placed huge demands on the involvement expected from its spectators, a group seeking an undiluted cultural and intellectual experience comprising students and faculty of JNU's School of Arts and Aesthetics as well as writers, painters, musicians and cultural critics who had gathered at Adishakti's ecologically tuned space.
Understanding plurality
A large chunk of spare time was built into the leisurely and relaxed structure of the festival. But the sheer movement in diverse positions and ideas that seemed to come alive with internal inconsistencies from one session to another was an indication that understanding plurality was going to be a gruelling affair. The opening notes were struck by Romila Thapar's solidly historiographic, rigorously argued and seemingly unassailable talk which highlighted the variations in the Jain and Buddhist Ramayanas in relation to the Valmiki Ramayana . Thapar speculated that the latter's emergence as a hegemonic text in the early medieval period marked the transition from a clan-driven social structure to formal monarchy.
Ashis Nandy, one of India's foremost public intellectuals, spoke unequivocally in favour of the epic culture and its ability to reconstruct the past in myriad ways, calling for greater hermeneutic rights to creative artistes working on or taking off from the epics.
Sal Murgiyanto, the leading dance critic of Indonesia, took his listeners to the raw centre of his self. Reflecting on his deep faith in the idealised characters from the epic, in particular the Sugreeva Bali episode, he demonstrated how this had helped him put together an ethical code for his own life growing up in a traditional village in Java and making his way in the world as a dancer. His colleague I Wayang Dibia from Bali explained the concept of taksu , that complex combination of charisma and spiritual power that lies at the heart of a successful performance in the context of Balinese performance.
A comparison
Counterpointing the Indonesian presentations, Eddin Khoo's talk titled “Storm Clouds” was a brilliant account of the politics of culture in Malaysia in the last three decades of the “Mahathir project”, an official policy which supports heavy industrialisation in pursuit of its desire to be a model economically advanced Muslim state but which is disquietingly silent about the hybrid foundations of Malay culture. Khoo traced the modern nation state's uncomfortable relationship with its diasporic history to a skewed desire for a puritan Islamic culture purged of its myriad pasts. Disturbingly, this had led to the proscription of the shadow puppet traditions in the North Eastern district of Kelantan.
Leading Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun performed the demon in traditional Khon dance. Never straying from a very centred, pared down serenity, Pichet's frame reflected the changing nuances of Ravana's musculature.
Maya Krishna Rao's Ravanama , a solo piece, created specially for this festival brought Ravana and Sita alive on a bare, dark stage and kept the audience riveted even as they struggled to engage with their own instinctual and inchoate responses to the piece. An eclectic soundscape comprising Kathakali music and pop, provided the cues for a series of improvisations. Ravana and Sita, appeared before us, not flattened into a familiar form determined by a storyline, but as an alternate experience stirring us with the immediacy of unfiltered performance at once iconoclastic and pure.
Festival director, independent writer and critic Rustom Bharucha, whose approach is very deliberate and marked by a deceptive quietude, was closely involved in providing dramaturgical inputs to the artistes, particularly those who created new works. His vision for the festival played off performance with related discussions.
“I was taken by surprise by the festival. I had not worked out the inner connections in many cases and though one had a plan there was a more subtle juxtaposition of energies that eventually emerged through the interplay of critical discourse and performance. In each case the plurality was operating on more registers than I had imagined,” says Bharucha.
Time after time the essentially simple and pliant plot line of the Ramayana and its key characters demonstrated the epic's capacity to speak for others across time and space. Tamil writer C.S. Lakshmi's talk was a tribute to the creative instinct mirrored in every retelling of the epic as well as the craft of writing. We responded with effortless empathy to Lakshmi's personal narrative and the pain of her veena-playing mother who had to set aside her beloved instrument for years.
High emotion
The emotional arc of the festival ended with a rousing Kattaikkuttu presentation by mainly teenage girls from Kattaikkuttu Sangam, Kanchipuram, in a production titled “RamaRavana”. Here, Rama makes a brief appearance as a churlish husband who informs Sita that he has waged war to right a wrong and not to rescue her, while Ravana, even in defeat, seems the more gracious and wronged man. This was a fine and robust production grounded in its folk art roots using traditional material and investing it with a mature critical energy; its spirited performances broke through all barriers, drawing for the first time, during the eight-day festival, crowds from the neighbouring villages of Puducherry as well.
Leading visual artist and scholar, Gulammohammad Sheikh shared a 150 miniatures in a presentation titled “Visualising the Ramayana”.
One of the most stimulating and unforgettable sessions of the festival, the artist-scholar combined a deep knowledge of his subject with a sense of wonder of how aspects of the Ramayana narrative can be uncovered only through subtle processes of visualisation.
After three years of the festival, Adishakti and its founder director Veenapani Chawla have succeeded in creating an audience and a model for the exploration of traditional texts in diverse performing arts and scholarly reflections, which can speak intelligently to serious audiences outside the confines of academia and the compulsions of the performance circuit in big urban festivals.
