Ranga Shankara: A decade of precious moments

Boy with a Suitcase

I LOVE THEATRE. As much as I love writing, reading, travelling  ~ or even breathing, I guess.

At school in Jaipur, I loved being on stage. Transforming into an 8-year-old boy in shorts at 15, playing Red Indians and cowboys, Minnie Mouse voice, silken ponytail, and all. Or being an ancient crone in a ghost story, with my hair powdered and streaked, my brow artfully etched with eye pencil.

But what I loved just as much was watching scenes come alive once the curtains went up.  Especially when Geoffrey and Laura Kendall’s Shakespearana troupe visited us at Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls’ Public School annually. Their dramatic opening line still lingers in my memory, words I took with me to Stratford-on-Avon and the recreated Globe theatre in London, ‘When Shakespeare played, the stage was bare, the throne of England was a chair in Shakespeare’s time…’

I felt so at ease while reviewing English theatre in Madras (not yet Chennai) during my first decade at Indian Express, especially brilliant productions at the Museum Theatre by directors and players like Vimal Bhagat, Ammu Matthew, Mithran Devanesan, and Nirupama Nityanandan.

When I relocated to Bangalore in May 1992, I went into mourning. As a viewer, I felt theatre during the Deccan Herald festival fell flat at Chowdiah Memorial Hall, so large, so impersonal, with acoustics more suited to music than theatre. Even Ravindra Kalakshetra, where I watched my first magical Ratan Thiyam play, seemed cold when compared to the Museum Theatre.

As if in answer to my prayers, Ranga Shankara was inaugurated in J.P. Nagar in October 2004. I have been in celebration mode ever since. The intimate space is perfect and heart-warming. So is the endearing warmth of its founder Arundhati Nag.

Now that Ranga Shankara turns ten in October 2014, I look back with wonder ~ and tenderness and incandescent joy. As a theatre buff, I would like to offer a personal tribute by sharing ten random, unforgettable moments through which I celebrate the first decade of Ranga Shankara. Here goes:

Arundhati Nag

~                ~  Listening to Arundhati Nag share the theatre’s raison d’etre in 2004, during an interview I did for The Hindu Sunday Magazine: “This theatre will strive to bring Karnataka to the centre stage of world theatre, as well as to bring world-class theatre to the common man in Karnataka.”   A dream achieved, quite irrefutably.

~              ~  The dazzling 35-day global inaugural festival from October- December 2004. It included Mysore-based Rangayana’s Kudiyattam-influenced Maya Sita Prasanga. And Habib Tanvir and his Naya Theatre’s spectacular Charan Das Chor in Chattisgarhi. And Imphal-based Chorus Repertory Theatre’s stunning presentation of Ratam Thiyam’s visually poetic Ritusamharam. I was enthused enough to attend 27 of the shows!

                 ~   November 2004. Lahore-based Ajoka Theatre’s Ek Thi Nani, in which theatre veterans Zohra Sehgal and Uzra Butt played out a plotline parallel to their own lives as sisters. Sehgal, then 92, had a fever when she stepped off her flight. But her never-say-die spirit saw her through to a standing ovation, bypassing coughs, pills and improvisations. I salute them both, onstage and off it. 

Measure for Measure

·                           ~ November 2005. Director Simon McBurney and his Euro-British Complicite theatre set the stage on fire with his interpretation of Measure for Measure as a take on the Bard for our time.  Electrifying both as drama and social commentary. I even interviewed McBurney between two back-to-back performances, the chai he requested brought to us by young playwright Swar Thounaojam. More recently, Swar’s plays have come to life at Ranga Shankara.   

·                          ~ June 2006. Germany-based Gracias Devaraj and Uwe Topmann in Nino D’Introna and Giocomo Raviccio’s ‘Robinson and Crusoe,’ a rollicking tale of two warring soldiers marooned together. Enacted in English and (yes!) gibberish, it had an audience of mainly schoolchildren rocking with laughter in their seats. As adults, hugging our knees on the steps and in the aisles, we joined in.   

·                        ~ April 2008. Under the Mangosteen Tree, directed by Rajiv Krishnan of Perch from Chennai. That was in its initial avatar as Sangathi Arinhya, a celebration of Malayalam writer Vaikom Mohammed Basheer’s life, personality and brilliant stories through a tight-knit, evocative production. In tandem with black-and-white images of Basheer’s life by Punaloor Rajan and a Moplah food festival at Anju’s in-house café.

·                    ~ June 2011. The stellar Indo-German premiere of Boy with a Suitcase, which I found rivetting enough to revisit thrice with different friends in tow. A Ranga Shankara collaboration with Mannheim’s Schnawwl Theatre, it captured dilemmas about culture, continents and identity brilliantly, especially through outstanding performances by M.D. Pallavi and Shrunga B.V.

·                  ~ March 2012: Director Sunil Shanbag’s Stories in a Song, his tribute to music as theatre (in collaboration with Shubha Mudgal and Aneesh Pradhan). Spanning seven theatrical anecdotes  (some apocryphal?), it encompassed notes from Sufi geet to Kajri, brilliantly held together by seasoned performers

·                  ~ October 2012: An outstanding global Shakespeare festival. Still luminous in memory thanks to plays like Atul Kumar’s Piya Bahurupiya (Twelfth Night) in nautanki style, the Tblisi-based Marjanishvili Theatre’s Rogort’s Genebot  (As You Like It) in Georgian (a play within a play, with backstage onstage and exquisite costumes), and even a Kiswahili rendition of The Merry Wives of Windsor, notable for its impeccable comic timing.

The Kitchen

·                 ~ August 2013. Roysten Abel’s totally experiential theatre in The Kitchen, inspired by Rumi’s kitchen at Konya in Turkey. Its highlights included a 22.5 ft. high set, 12 mizhavu drummers from Kerala live, and two actors cooking payasam from scratch onstage for the audience to taste when the last notes died down. Calling sight, sound, taste, smell and touch into play, we experienced theatre as a microcosm of life.

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          Thank you, Ranga Shankara for bringing the best of local and global theatre to me. For energizing me to dash from Cooke Town to J.P. Nagar every time you bring a good play to Bangalore. For tempting me with sabudana vada and akki rotti at Anju’s Café, so I am never late for a show.

         I had not imagined such a dream run when I first watched the staircase, the toilets, the café, the box-office and more fall into place over slow months in 2003- 2004.

          What can I wish you now, dear Arundhati and Team Ranga Shankara? Cheers to the next brilliant decade! And perhaps the next hundred years? 

          Bangalore loves you. So do I.

Book review: Bengali Belly Laughs - Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta's 'Bong Mom's Cookbook'

 Total disclosure, thrice over.  I am a cookbook addict. They spell perfect bedtime reading to me.   I do not cook Bengali food at home. Whenever I want some desperately, I drop in on friends who have Bengali mothers. Yes, Bong moms.  

Believe it or not, I have never read a cookbook that made me laugh out loud at midnight or into the wee hours. Till now.  For starters, sample this:

Question: What do Bongs eat?

Answer: Anything and everything, as long as it is followed by Gelusil, Pudin Hara, Jowaner Aarak or Nux Vom 30.

               

           Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta’s got the recipe just right. She’s a New Jersey-based engineer who set up her own blog, Bong Mom’s Cookbook, in October 2006. It gets 120,000 hits a month. In a new avatar, it is this delicious, authentic, LOL book for Bongs – and the larger world beyond.

Her heady mix? One part US-based nostalgia for Bangali  cookery or ranna. Two parts real-time motherly zest for Sukumar Ray and rooted-in-India culture. Garnished liberally with humorous anecdotes, starring an extended cast of family and friends, her husband (a.k.a. H-man), and her two twinkle-tongued little daughters. Her light touch ensures that the fare dished up works like magic. Via kitchen and blog, she busts the myth that Bengalis survive on a diet of fish and rosogollas.    

Sandeepa deftly adapts traditional fare to everyday American reality. For instance, tossing mushrooms into a poppyseed-paste aloo posto. Just as smoothly, she whips up an image beyond Spiderman on weekend TV during her childhood:  “Ma spent those mornings entirely in the kitchen, her cotton sari damp and turmeric-stained, smelling strongly of Sunday, of mutton curry.”  It makes you want to cook Mangsho’r Jhol at once.

A tech-savvy woman, Sandeepa  sketches in Excel sheet estimates of mutton/ per head in grams as she toils over a dinner menu for 60 to mark her little daughter’s birthday.  She evokes her cross-legged Baba packing her flight-to-the-west suitcase with a pressure cooker, mustard oil and Bela De’s cookbooks in Bangla. She recalls her widowed Choto Dida feeding her leftover ruti  (chappati) with the bati chorchori of potatoes that weaves through millions of Bengali childhoods. Her diary-like stories make time and place collapse in a trice, creating a notion of Bengaliness sans borders.

 My favourite anecdote recreates the melodious tinkling of red and green glass bangles on the wrists of Manu’r Ma, the household help, as sun-dipped colours dance on the floor. With the acuity of a word artist, she brings alive the grinding of posto on the pockmarked black stone sheel-nora .  As deftly, she conjures up memories potent enough for Sandeepa to recreate vegetarian Fridays, a la her Ma, in the US.    

Her recipes worked brilliantly, whenever I reluctantly took a break from her stories. I tried the Posto’r Bora (poppyseed fritters) and Dhone Pata Chicken that H-man wooed her with in Bangalore. Her pages occasionally reach beyond boundaries to include sharing Machha Besara (an Odia fish curry). For, to Sandeepa, food “is life wrapped in a soft egg roll with slices of crunchy onion and bites of feisty green chilli. It has something to tell. Always.”

To me, her family-centricity ripples through this laugh-riddled cookbook.  It is about how Sandeepa mastered Dhokar Dalna step-by-step from her Ma  in Kolkata over Skype, while the latter concentrated on her maid’s mastery of dust under the table. Or her Ma’s theories of why pizza-scoffing children are less intelligent than those on a diet of macher jhol- bhat.  

Sandeepa’s attention to detail seasons her pages. As do her jottings on a perfect onion paste for curry or the Bengali addiction to mustard. Tongue-in-cheek, she addresses questions like: Are Bengali Brahmins vegetarian? What do Bongs eat for breakfast? How come folks originally from East Bengal can eat hilsa on Saraswati Puja, while those from West Bengal cannot?

She brushes aside carping about her non-authentic cabbage sabji or the demerits of making bhapa-doi in the oven.  Denied the green chilli chicken at ‘Oh Calcutta!’ en route from Kolkata airport to her parent’s home, she recreates her own version.

Cook, eat, blog. That was the game plan when Sandeepa set out on this journey. Her authentic, slice-of-life sharings of Bengali life in a wired world win over both the reader and the cook. Take a bow, Bong Mom’s Cookbook, no matter the avatar.  

(Originally published in The Hindu Business Line on June 28, 2013)

Art: Kochi-Muziris Biennale -- The spice of global art

Kochi: The Arabian Sea beyond the biennale locations

“I was imprisoned for eleven years. In my cell, I saw the moonlight but not the moon…  We aspire towards a freedom that will lead us towards creating an art without fetters. This unfettered art will be our moonlight.”

~ Zarganar, artist from Myanmar, 2012

It is early March. We are in Kerala as art aficionados. Pouring sweat, we walk through Jew Town to a background score of waves lashing the rocks. After three days across 3,00,000 sq. ft. of mainly site-specific art by 80-plus artists from 24 countries at the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), due to conclude on March 13, we need time out. 

Mandalay House: Type 'Justice'

Our encounters with art deconstructed, then reconstructed in terms of ideation and execution, have been soul-deep, even searing, at the first Indian biennale’s 14 locations across Kochi, Mattancherry, Ernakulam, and the legendary port of Muziris. At saturation point, mere sculptures and paintings seem almost passé. Instinctively, we freeze – and almost turn away – when we chance upon KMB’s logo metres away from the 16^th century Paradesi Synagogue.

But we emerge from Mandalay Hall in Jew Town electrified by a video loop of Zarganar, Myanmar’s most famous comedian, sharing his life behind bars. Close by, a taped note invites us to type ‘Justice’ on a rickety Corona typewriter. The result on paper reads: ‘O-u-t-r-a-g-e.’ We feel inextricably altered, connected to a global network of art, as protest, as politics.  

The biennale impacted individuals as deeply as the host city of Kochi, with its cosmopolitan, multicultural history as focus. From December 12, 2012, the mega-show redefined disused colonial warehouses and bungalows, never open to the public before, as sites of artistic exploration. Alongside, it celebrated current excavations at Muziris, the ancient port buried by a 14^th century flood. Today, Kochi – declared a Biennale City by its mayor – is no longer a dot on the Spice Route, or the Indian gateway to Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Galvanized by the KMB’s three lakh footfalls by February 28, the Kerala government has pledged to build 100 galleries in 100 panchayats. Is an art revolution underway?

Bose paints a Tata Nano to raise funds

Post 20-plus curatorial trips abroad and 124 studio visits, KMB’s artistic director/ co-curator Bose Krishnamachari points out, “Biennales democratize art, taking it from the confines of galleries, and mix it with people and places, removing the elitist tag… Recent studies have proved their soft power and economic contributions to the host city.”

The biennale venues throng with designers from Montreal and Chennai, artists from Vadodara and Bengaluru, curators from Mumbai and Kolkata, in addition to anthropologists from New Delhi. In Kochi, even idiappam vendors and fisherfolk refer to the KMB today. A middle-class family with adult children recently took a train to the biennale from south Kerala on the recommendation of their barber. Hotel bookings have soared by 80 per cent. Like us, most entered the biennale as sceptics, but left as converts.

Artist Riyas Komu, co-curator of the biennale, notes, “Anything that happens in Kerala gets discussed, equally by a professor or a barber. So, Kochi is the perfect venue for an Indian biennale.”

Subodh Gupta installation, Aspinwall

However, this artist-led initiative met major obstacles en route, raising troubling questions:  Why does India have an art market infrastructure, but inadequate museums? Why was the government-sponsored Triennale-India, founded in 1968, last held in 2005? 

The Kerala Government’s initial Rs. 5 crore allocation was mired in media mayhem. Local trade unions had to be mollified to unload artwork. Miffed local artists vandalized art, including installations by South African artist Clifford Charles.

But the Kochi Biennale Foundation trustees deftly transformed protest into pride. Through theatre sketches in rural Kerala. Through outreach programmes at schools. Through a campaign with shopkeepers, auto-rickshaw drivers, even pedestrians, each holding a poster in Malayalam: “It’s my Biennale.” Pushed to the wall, the foundation raised the requisite Rs. 13.5 crore through corporate donors, embassies, and the art community. 

The community includes feted Indian artist Subodh Gupta. His boatload of found objects at the 160,000 sq. ft. trading compound of Aspinwall House, reflects socio-economic transformations that mesh into Kochi’s stories. “For the artist, his boat is the universe that floats leisurely upon the waters of destruction to reach the land of regeneration,” writes Gupta on the wall.

Buoyantly afloat, the biennale leaves behind upgraded pan-Indian art-handling and shipping facilities, all shipshape for 2014. And a network of supportive mentor-curators including Sarat Maharaj (South Africa), Thierry Raspail (France), Adriano Pedrosa (Brazil) and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery, UK). Chris Dercon, director of the Tate Modern gallery, London, frames the KMB against the globe’s 150-plus similar expositions: “This is probably a biennale which is able to redefine and revaluate the life of biennials in general.” 

Atul Dodiya photo installation, Aspinwall

Was the compliment justified? We felt it was. For Bose and Riyas aligned art and locations impeccably, ensuring about 50 percent pan-Indian representation. For instance, Atul Dodiya’s photo-installation, ‘Celebration in the Laboratory,’ is spread out amidst peeling plaster, chipped tiles and random railways signs. His subjective portrait gallery embraces the who’s who of contemporary Indian art, including M F Husain, K G Subramanyan, and Nilima Sheikh, shoulder-to-shoulder with critics, curators and gallerists.  

Outdoors at Aspinwall, swaying palms smile as giggling, pigtailed schoolgirls in blue tunics clamber up gunny-bags to peer into Srinivasa Prasad’s outsize, suspended  ‘cocoon’ of thorny bamboo, binding wire and steel cable. As they whisper in wonder, demystified art becomes a desirable experience. For, to Prasad, Kochi was “the perfect template to create beautiful artwork.”

Carlos Garaicoa's tapestries, Durbar Hall

A ferry ride away, we gawk at Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa’s tapestries at the renovated century-old Durban Hall, his videos melding the weaves with revolutionary squares in his faraway land. Within the black drapes at Rose Street Bungalow, we watch Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s documentaries of dissent.

Seated on the wooden floor at Moidu’s Heritage Plaza, a former coir godown, we tune in to Australian artist Angelica Mesiti’s ‘Citizen’s Band,’ a four-channel video installation of extraordinary adaptations of traditional music to new environments. Such as Cameroon-born Lois Geraldine Zongo’s akutuk or water percussion in a Paris swimming pool. Or Mongolian Bukhu Ganburged playing his morin khur or horsehead fiddle while throat-singing in downtown Sydney. Over 21 minutes, geographies collapse. Transiting cultures sans visas, we are in tears.  

Mesiti with the water drummer on video, Moidu's

KMB’s spice-inspired olfactory work reaches its acme with Brazilian Ernesto Neto’s udder-like cotton installation at Moidu’s, overlooking the Arabian Sea. We can smell, touch and almost see aromatic turmeric, cumin and cloves through the yoking of the global and the local as he perfects the genius of simplicity. 

Ernesto Neto's spice installation, Moidu's

At Dutch-style Pepper House, Nairobi-born, Amsterdam-based Ibrahim Quraishi salutes the 1960s Fluxus anti-commerce movement with his installation of white ‘Islamic Violins.’  Crafted in Pakistan, perfected in the Netherlands, they are accompanied by video in Kochi.   

How does one gauge the impact of this Kochi Biennale? Perhaps by this story doing the rounds in Kerala. Of two children overheard at dusk at Edapally. One says to the other, ‘Let’s play now. I am Bose. You are Riyas Komu…”

As for Bose and Riyas, they are already immersed in a grand dream of a Rs. 72 crore edition in 2014. At Aspinwall, Bose frenetically paints a donated Tato Nano in his unmistakable style, to be auctioned at a fund-raiser. Coming up? Perhaps a commissioned borderless curator in tune with the cultural sensitivity of Kochi, which still hosts 13 communities. Perhaps 15 public sculptures on the road from the airport to Fort Kochi.

Post-biennale, the world views Kochi both as a historical mother-lode and a site of infinite possibilities. If, like Zarganar’s moonlit art, this mega-show does not define India as a global contemporary art port of call, nothing ever will. 

Ibrahim Quraishi's 'Islamic Violins', Pepper House

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My article was originally published in The Hindu Business Line on March 8, 2013:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/weekend-life/kochi-creative/article4482163.ece/