By Karthik Ranganathan
Some stereotypes are hard to break. For instance, filter
coffee and Chennai. Stereotypes rooted in rigid tradition and scaffolded by an
elitist sense of culture and aesthetics are harder to break. But they must
be broken. For everybody's sake.
The December music season in Chennai is one such stereotype with its sabhas, the local regulars, and the annual NRI visitors. Most performers and patrons are from the middle class and classes above and the historically privileged castes. Performances, even if some are free, are
attended only by a narrow sub-section of the local populace. So much that the entire event ends up becoming an exercise
in exclusion along the lines of caste and class.
In a recent interview with noted film critic Baradwaj
Rangan, actor Kamal Hassan while talking about his interest in arts, mentions
"“This kind of exposure to the arts you can get only in two places –
either a Brahmin household or a community dedicated to art. I didn’t have a
choice. I was born into this Brahmin atmosphere.”". The December music
season has ended up reinforcing this, whether incidentally or by
design, ensuring that the knowledge of certain art forms remains firmly
ensconced within a few communities. The December
season, often touted as being the finest exposition of Tamil arts and culture, promotes only those deemed "fine arts" or "classical
arts" such as Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam.
Villupaatu, Karagaattam, Poi Kaal Kudhirai. Apart from finding a mention in school text books, these words seldom have a meaning beyond that to many of us. In fact
their significance often ended with actor Ramarajan and Tamil cinema. Do these art
forms and others such as Therukoothu and Parai Aaattam, which are close
to the everyday lives of people, often reflecting social issues in their performances,
need to become a part of the December season? Or is a constant invocation to the divinity a pre-requisite for an art form to reach these rarefied heights?
Did the art forms get excluded from public discourse because
of the communities they thrived in, or did the communities get neglected
because their forms were not “arty” enough?
The Urur-Olcott Kuppam Maargazhi festival promises a change,
taking music and the musicians out of the sabhas to a fishing hamlet right along the sea. It also promises to bring more neglected
art forms back into mainstream consciousness.
The villupaattu performance by children from the kuppam and
the kattaikuttu performance (a form of rural street theatre), amid performances by artists such as Unnikrishnan, are but a
start.
The festival will truly become inclusive when it manages to
go beyond religious and political boundaries, marrying celebration with dissent,
while destroying notions of the pristine and the populist. The tapestry of performing arts in Tamil Nadu is way too diverse to be defined and trapped within the narrow
confines of sabhas in Chennai.
--
Karthik Ranganathan, who works in a semiconductor company in Bangalore, has his roots in Madras. He is passionate about natural learning, unconditional parenting, human rights and environment. He loves music, occasionally writes on issues close to his, and cycles pretty much everywhere in and around Bangalore.
No comments:
Post a Comment