Collaborations – or collabs, if you would like to call them that way – are the in thing now.
This is the case not just on Instagram, but also during the Margazhi month in Chennai. Popular harikatha exponent and cultural commentator Dushyant Sridhar vouches for that.
A few weeks ago, Dushyant walked the ramp with mridangam legend Umalapuram K Sivaraman for Marvellous Margazhi, an event that celebrated the who’s who of the cultural scene. During the first week of January, he will be on stage performing with renowned Carnatic vocalist Sudha Ragunathan, who will embellish and sing songs pertaining to a few spiritual stories that he will narrate.
There are more such collabs in the pipeline. “I take up a story or subject and rope in a competent musically-trained artiste to sing a song pertaining to that,” he explains. Singers like Palghat Ramprasad, Sunil Gargyan, Amrita Murali, Anahita and Apoorva, Archana and Aarthi have been part of these sangita upanyasams, as he refers to it. “It combines the best of music and discourse. Apart from this, I also do ‘katha nrityam’, where I speak and a dancer elaborates on it visually with her art form,” he says.
Dushyant Sridhar, vedic scholar and cultural commentator
| Photo Credit:
Johan Sathyadas
Audience engagement
During the inauguration of the 99th annual festival at the Music Academy recently, Oscar winner AR Rahman had commented on the “need to attract younger audiences to classical music concerts”. Do harikatha discourses too suffer from the lack of youngsters among its audiences? Dushyant avers, “In all humility, I’d say that the number of people coming for such discourses is atleast five times that of audiences to music and dance. There is a lot of scope for this art form. Among audiences, there is an urge to understand “why”. If a singer delivers a number like ‘Angaraka’ (written by Muthuswami Dikshitar), you get to listen and relish its raga (Surutti), but you don’t know why… which is where we come in.”
From the Bay Area in the US to interior Tamil Nadu towns, Dushyant’s lectures have drawn audiences from several age groups – primarily because of the cultural examples he gives to explains stories from ancient scriptures. “ More than 60% of my audience today falls in the 15-45 age group. On a weekday at Dallas or Chicago, my lectures have 1,300 people, mostly working professionals, coming in. Many of them walk in with laptops, work a bit and then close it to listen to the stories,” he says.
Lectures galore
Based in Bangalore but busy travelling the world with his discourses, 39-year-old Dushyant has emerged as an important cultural voice in recent times.
Apart from his solo harikathas and collaboration with the musical fraternity – he has completed 50 shows of a devotional dance production (Agre Pashyami) with veteran danseuse Anita Guha and team — Dushyant also regularly takes groups of people to various culturally-significant places. This year, he has Kerala, Cambodia and Egypt on the list. “We discuss many aspects of the significance of these places, which we experience first hand,” he says, “Anybody can join us. There is travel, recitation and bonding with people. It is the commonality between cultures and countries that we wish to embrace through these tours.”
