The evening of
Sunday, the 3rd of March 2002. The carefully manicured verdant sward of
UDITA overlooked by soaring apartment blocks, providing occupants of the
UDAYAN condoville a unique grandstand view of the multi-layered permanent
open-air stage set against the shimmering cascade of a forty feet wide
waterfall. The expectant crowd settles down, waiting for the performance.
Lightning scars the night-blue sky; a heavy drizzle scatters the
disappointed crowd. Some leave, but most stick on hopefully. Stars sparkle
out a little later and the crowd reassembles. Dr Mallika Sarabhai steps up
on stage in an ashram maiden’s ochre robes to recount the astonishing
concatenation of events that brought Darpana, Schubert and Shakuntala
together.
In 1977, the German director Jorn Thiel, while making a documentary on
Schubert for SDF TV, was handed a manuscript by the curator of a museum.
Preoccupied with his work, Thiel put it aside in his car and forgot about
it. When the car was sent for servicing, this manuscript surfaced and
Thiel was astonished to find that it was an unfinished composition by
Schubert entitled “Sakuntala” (1820). Thiel took it to the Munich
Philharmonic Orchestra, who filled in the gaps. But who would stage the
performance? Someone mentioned to him the Sarabhai mother-daughter duo.
Serendipitously, as Thiel was changing trains in one station, he found
himself staring at a poster: “Mallika Sarabhai dances here today”. They
met in October 1978. Early next year the performance was filmed.
What sets Mallika apart is her constant awareness that “Time present and
time past are both present in time future.” She is no Lady of Shallot
spinning enchanting tapestries in an ivory tower, jealously guarding
aesthetics from the rude touch of reality. Deliberately she took the
audience out of the sylvan ambience to remind us all that here was a
German Christian composer so inspired by a Hindu play that he bridged the
civilizational chasm by music, while in Gujarat today Indians are
slaughtering one another in the name of religion.
Dr Sarabhai introduced the theme as taken from Mahabharata without
mentioning that it was Kalidasa’s play and not Vyasa’s original that
inspired Schubert. Vyasa’s heroine is a rare picture of a nubile orphan
who is mature and self-assured enough to fight for her rights and plan out
her future at the shortest notice, quick to grab Fortune by the proverbial
forelock. She has nothing of the helpless, swooning romantic heroine of
Kalidasa in her. Dushyanta is the opportunist, ever ready to grasp the
easiest way out of a situation. The scenario is indeed vastly different
from Kalidasa’s romantic, hedonistic world. Moreover, Mahabharata
is not just a man’s world. It is the women who mould its men. In the
Epic-of-epics, through the murky fog of the noisome fumes of lust, hatred,
ambition and greed, we glimpse a few statuesque figures radiating beauty,
power, grace and an inflexible determination: Devayani and Sharmishtha,
lust-crazed Yayati’s unforgettable queens who create the dynasties that
rule the country; Ganga and Satyavati, ruling over doting Shantanu and
deciding the fate of the kingdom; Gandhari and Draupadi, loser and winner
in the holocaust but both surrounded Niobe-like by the corpses of their
children and brothers; Kunti, raising five heroes alone yet, curiously,
leaving them after the pyrrhic victory to welcome death in a forest-fire.
Perhaps the most significant of them is Shakuntala, for our country takes
its name from her son Bharata.
Vyasa’s Shakuntala arrives with her son to confront the king who remembers
all, yet denies her. She launches a frontal attack on him that contains
the most direct utterances in Indian tradition on a wife's status. One
expected that Mallika, with her commitment to women's empowerment, to have
incorporated these in her presentation:
A wife is a
man’s half;
A wife is a man’s closest friend;
A wife is Dharma, Artha and Kama;
A wife is Moksha too;
A sweet speaking wife is a companion in happy times;
A wife is like a father on religious occasions;
A wife is like a mother in illness and sorrow; …
A man who has a wife is trusted by all;
The wife is a means to a man’s salvation…
No man, not even in anger, should displease his wife;
Happiness, joy, virtue, everything depends on her.
She is the hallowed soil in which he is born a second time.
--[Sambhava Parva, 74.40, 42, 43, 50, 51]
When Dushyanta
insults her parents, Vishvamitra the Kshatriya-turned-rishi and Menaka the
celestial nymph, as lustful and abuses her as a slut, Shakuntala’s
indignation flares up in a splendid flash of pride:
My birth
Dushyanta is nobler than yours.
You walk on earth, I roam the sky. [82-83]….
A pig delights in filth even in a flower garden;
A wicked man finds evil even where there’s good [89]
She ends with a
calm prophecy of her son’s inevitable succession to Dushyanta’s throne
even without his help. Later, the king explains that he had decided
against accepting them because his subjects would have suspected him and
not considered his son of pure birth [sloka 116].
Kalidasa's Abhinjnanasakuntalam (The Recognition of Sakuntala)
was translated into English by Sir William Jones in 1789. Jones first came
to hear about Indian Natakas during his sojourn in Europe in 1787.
He began to investigate these on his return to Calcutta. Pandit Radhakant
pointed out to Jones the similarity of these Natakas to English
plays staged in Calcutta and, as an example, gave him a Bengali recension
of Sakuntala. Ramlochan, a Sanskrit teacher of Nadia, helped Jones
read the play and in 1789, Joseph Cooper published the English translation
of Sacontala. The impact of this work was soon felt in Europe. By
1791, Sacontala was translated into German by Forster and by 1792
into Russian by Karamsin. Translations in Danish (1793), French (1803) and
Italian (1815) appeared soon after. In particular, Goethe was deeply
influenced by the play, as he wrote in a letter:
"The first time I came across this inexhaustible work it aroused such
enthusiasm in me and so held me that I could not stop studying it. I even
felt impelled to make the impossible attempt to bring it in some form to
the German stage. These efforts were fruitless but they made me so
thoroughly acquainted with this most valuable work, it represented such an
epoch in my life, I was so absorbed it, that for thirty years I did not
look at either the English or the German version...It is only now that I
understand the enormous impression that work made on me at an earlier
age."
No wonder he modelled the jester in the prologue of Faust (1797) on the
vidusaka in Abhinjnanasakuntalam as noted by Heinrich Heine. Goethe’s
friend Schiller wrote of the play, "In the whole world of Greek antiquity
there is no poetical representation of beautiful love which approaches
even afar."
But what of Schubert’s composition? Here is an extract from a posting on
the World Wide Web:
“DISORIENTED
EXPRESS Issue 52-A 14th February 2000, e-mail address: metzke@san.rr.com
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828), one of the great men of classical
music but also one of the greatest failures in music history in the
realm of the theatre. He wrote, or started to write, sixteen works for
the stage. Only two were ever performed in his lifetime, and none holds
the stage today. Half a dozen were left unfinished, usually because they
were rejected by the Viennese opera management even before the music had
been completed. And such is the case with the present case, "Sakuntala,"
a fragment begun in 1820 but quickly abandoned - only a few sketches
remain - when the play on which it was based was essentially laughed at
by opera management. Schubert wrote wonderful music, but he had
absolutely no sense of drama. The play has not survived so we have no
idea what it was about, and no way of knowing just how bad it was, but
apparently it was pretty awful. It remains to this day the one and only
Schubert stage work of which not one note has been performed for the
public, anywhere, ever. (One would guess from the title that it was
probably one of those faux-Turkish silly comedies so popular in that
era, with slaves or captured Crusaders falling in love with concubines
or Ottoman princesses. Half the composers in Europe did one of those.
Two or three aren't bad. Mozart's "Abduction from the Seraglio" is the
best. Mostly they are utter rubbish.)”
What the play
was about is quite apparent to anyone who has heard of Kalidasa. Our
Internet correspondent is ignorant of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra
having performed this “pretty awful” piece, and of the remarkable impact
it creates on any audience when choreographed inimitably by Mallika
Sarabhai.
The Kolkata crowd watched enraptured that March evening an amazing use of
the landscape in Mallika's choreography that had taken her just two hours
to finalise. Once the performance began, its impact was so magnetic that
almost immediately the entire crowd moved forward to get closer to the
massive stage. Last year she had performed at Daulatabad fort. In UDITA
every depression, elevation, flight of steps, the entire meadow was used
with remarkable imagination to create the forest, Rishi Kanva’s ashram,
Dushyanta’s wooing of Shakuntala, the royal palace and courtroom,
Shakuntala oblivious of Durvasa’s fury loosing the signet ring while
bathing, the fishermen netting their catch (Mallika’s son Revanta
performed the role of the fisherman who cuts open the fish and hands over
the ring to the king), and finally Dushyanta’s discovery of his rejected
beloved and their son Bharata (played by Mallika’s daughter). The finale
came with a striking torch-lit procession in the surrounding darkness that
accompanied the reunited couple and their son to their palace.
An extremely unusual fusion of Western opera music and Indian classical
dance incorporating ballet movements, it brought to life every nuance of
the major incidents of Kalidasa’s play through mudras and miming. Even the
bee from which Dushyanta rescued Shakuntala, the fawn and each plant and
vine from whom she took leave—all were figured forth in Mallika’s
exquisitely sensitive and graceful dance. Kept to an absolute minimum, the
voice-overs in Sanskrit, such as Durvasa’s curse, had a resounding impact.
A single
viewing is just not adequate to take in the beauty of the production. The
very amplitude and massive dimensions of the open-air stage militate
against an instant appreciation of the multifarious nuances and delicate
touches that scintillate in Mallika Sarabhai’s production. That evening
the truth of Goethe’s apostrophe came home to me:
Would you
the young year's blossoms and fruits of it's decline,
And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured, feasted and fed,
Would you the earth and heaven itself in one sole name combine?
I name you, O Sakuntala, and all at once is said. (1791)
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The evening of
Sunday, the 3rd of March 2002. The carefully manicured verdant sward of
UDITA overlooked by soaring apartment blocks, providing occupants of the
UDAYAN condoville a unique grandstand view of the multi-layered permanent
open-air stage set against the shimmering cascade of a forty feet wide
waterfall. The expectant crowd settles down, waiting for the performance.
Lightning scars the night-blue sky; a heavy drizzle scatters the
disappointed crowd. Some leave, but most stick on hopefully. Stars sparkle
out a little later and the crowd reassembles. Dr Mallika Sarabhai steps up
on stage in an ashram maiden’s ochre robes to recount the astonishing
concatenation of events that brought Darpana, Schubert and Shakuntala
together.