February 5, 2012
Yesterday evening, the ITFoK featured the Manganiyars concert. We were at the Karthika Thirunal theater by 6:15. A new print-out stuck to the wall at the entrance forbid entry of non-vegetarian food into the theater. I wonder if the notice-makers knew that the Khamaycha instrument used by the Manganiyar is made from goat skin and goat intestines.
The concert was announced to be one hour long and it started promptly at 6:30. Audience kept coming in for the next half an hour at by the end of the evening, easily 300 odd people were in the auditorium.
The Manganiyars launched into the concert as soon as they sat down. None of the painfully obsessive instrumental or vocal tuning that characterises most of the classical and other concerts during our times. Well before microphones and stages, the Manganiyars have been singing.Theirs is the confidence of the centuries.
Since they are an Islamic community, the songs reminded frequently of qawwalis. But they opened the evening with an invoking of Ganesha. Later in the concert, there was a song about Krishna and Radha as well.
All except two of the troupe had incredibly stylish, prominent mustaches. The bespectacled Dholak player and one of the younger Khamacha players controlled their mustaches from dominating the face. The melancholy of the Khamachya brings to my mind a longing. Unlike the accompanying dholak which sounds a lot like a rushing stream or pouring rain, the Khamaycha wails for rivers lost, streams dried up. But there is a greenery in that memory...an inexplicable energy in the nostalgia. A trust in the rhythmic cyclical nature of life.
All the men wore turbans. Most of them had the familiar toned down ones with mixed shades of dark green, red and orange. Couple of them wore glossier ones with yellow and blue thrown into the mix giving a candy-like appearance. One Khamaycha player wore one with just two shades of yellow. He looked and sang like Sain Zahoor, Coke Studio fame. May it is because he looked like him that I thought he sang like him too.
The dholak player used the bottom half of his kurta as a fan as frequently as possible. I noticed that the stage did not have any fans. The singers might be from Rajasthan but they stage lights are a different kind of heat.
There was a vocalist who resembled writer Khushwant Singh and he wore a pure white turban. He was brilliant in the couple of songs that he led. The simultaneous loudness and depth of his voice was fascinating. A captivating conviction in his delivery.
45 minutes into the concert, Achan leaned over to tell me, "aa leftil irikunna aal ithuvare onnum padiyila" (the guy sitting left most hasn't sung anything till now). Though the concert was free, I think Achan was looking for full value of his time and didn't like someone simply tagging along with a troupe. As if he heard Achan's murmur, the man soon switched to leaning on his knees.Then he pulled out two pairs of Khartals, polished thin wooden planks held inside the palm and struck together. We call them 'Chaplankatta" in Malayalam. The celestial singer and gossip, Narada, carries them with him along with the Veena.
The Khartal performance was absolutely mesmerising. The combination with the dholak just blew the audience away for over 10 minutes. The man could pull off incredibly high frequencies of tapping the planks together, almost vibratory. Once the audience had been brought up to that high, the entire troupe launched into the immensely popular "Damadam Mast Kalandar." The audience enthusiastically clapped along. Some of them a little bit too enthusiastically scaring the mosquito families in residence.
More than a handful of young men touted their extra long lensed cameras on stage, getting a little too close to the musicians while they were performing. Given a chance, some of them looked ready to sit in the middle of the troupe handling their lenses.
Though not on the scale of Roystan Abel's internationally acclaimed "Manganiyar Seduction", this Manganiyar concert gave Thiruvananthapuram a wonderful musical evening.
This morning I attended what was easily the biggest wedding I have ever been to. With nearly 4000 guests, virtually a whos who of Thiruvananthapuram was there. The wedding was "managed" by an event management group whose volunteers dressed in neat "Kasavu" sarees were ubiquitous. A crane camera kept swooping over the audience providing shots for the numerous TV screens. Half the guests had to sit outside the hall and watch everything on such screens.
The feast was rich. Bottled water instead of the steel tumblers. Two rows of curries on the banana leaf instead of the usual single row. 4 kinds of 'payasam'. Unniyappam and kesari (sojji) as extra.
A live full-fledged classical violin concert for the entertainment of the guests. A few hardcore Carnatic music enthusiasts sat around near the concert actively head bobbing and clapping along. I wondered if they were also arranged by the event management team.
Since the bride's family hailed from Chennai, there was some mix in the ceremonies. The bride was brought onto the dais under a white cloth shade carried by 4 men. The recorded music that played when she walked in, possibly intended to be an Indianisation of "here comes the bride", sounded a bit like something from the Titanic soundtrack! More grim than ceremonial!
She wore a couple of wide diamond necklaces that literally dazzled. I guess any necklace worth 1.5 crores is supposed to dazzle! "It will give so many husbands sleepless nights" remarked the aunty standing next to me. True enough, most of the dressed up, deck up female guests were keeping a keen eye on the jewelry.
The luminary guests included two central government ministers, Shashi Tharoor and couple of others members of the parliament, three or four Kerala state ministers, plenty of top administrative and police offices, chiefs of all the major state political parties, movie directors like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, singers, actresses etc. When the director general of police was ushered in and made to sit behind an ex-Minister who was only recently released from prison, the politically aware among the crowd chuckled.
The bride and groom looked a little too young, possible in their early twenties. I couldn't help reflecting on the shades of child marriage where two young ones go through a ceremony that primarily ensures a transfer of wealth.
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