The Soul of The Mahabharata It is impossible to find anyone who is fond of India and isn’t aware of the Mahabharata. Everyone at some point in their lives has heard someone or the other narrate stories from the thousands of tales that clutter the epic. No other story from India has been eulogized, rewritten, interpreted, translated, sung, narrated, danced to, choreographed, given scores of subtext and meta-narratives and philosophized for centuries now. It continues to be India’s greatest war, ever fought. But what is it about the rustic voice of a bashful balladeer woman that transforms these oft-repeated stories into an ethereal experience? Armed with a simple Tambura to her boisterous and overpowering voice, when Teejan Bai sings these songs in her Pandvaani style, the epic becomes an unforgettable encounter. I’ve had the fortune of spending good time with Teejan Bai and documenting her life over the years. This time we were all camped at the scenic IIM Calcutta campus that hosted SPIC MACAY’s first international convention. This gave me another excellent opportunity to spend more time with her. Catching up over Chai, one could see how she stood strong against tide to keep her art going high, through good and bad times. First few enquiries of her health went unheard as if she didn’t want to be asked about it. “What is the deal about bad health? My hands and legs are fine. My voice is fine. Haan! I’ve got some fever and that’ll come down with a tablet. Sab upar wale ka Kripa hain!” she added. We decided to start from her very beginning as a performer. “Aap ko tho sab kuch pata hain! Fir kya bolna? Aap jo pichle baar likhe, who abhi tak mere paas hain!” she said as I felt slightly happy and mighty proud about the fact that an iconic artiste like her could cherish an article I wrote as budding journalist over fifteen years ago. After much pursuing, she agreed to speak about her life and journey. She opened her world, her thoughts and poured her heart out. “Aap aaj kal Bangalore mein hain kya? Pehle Bambai Dilli me the na?” she asked with a familiarity in her sweet pastoral voice. Remembering an older meeting from almost fifteen years ago, her memory of it was clearer than what I had expected. “Mujhe yaad hain pehli baar Bangalore jab aayi thi. Woh Maya Madam show karwayi thi. Wahan ke chief minister saab bhi aaye. Main Samjhi ki koun hamare bhasha jaanege, koun hamare kala dekhenge. Par sab log bahut taareef kiye. Abhi tak wohi mera sabse bada show tha Dakshin bharat mein”, she recollected about her long association with Bangalore. Teejan Bai was introduced to art-loving audiences in South India by Kathak queen, the late Dr Maya Rao. Teejan was invited to perform during SAARC’s ‘Dakshini’ festival in the mid’1980’s and the then chief minister Ramakrishna Hegde heaped high praise on her. This began her long association with performing in South India. She narrated events from memory like they all occurred last evening. She visited Bangalore, a decade later to perform at the opening of the Ranga Shankara annual theatre festival few years ago. A turbulent graph and a star is born Sukhwati and Chunuk Lal Pardhi belonged to the traditional community of bird- catchers. Poverty drove them to make mats and brooms before taking to humble and poor peasants struggling with abject poverty in Ganiyari village, about fifteen kilometers near Bhilai, Teejan was the oldest of five children. The family could barely manage a daily meal and a girl child was considered an unnecessary burden in most cases. A simple roof over their head was luxury and they lived in a roadside shack where Teejan grew up. All that they had was her grandfather who was a Pandvaani artiste. He earned bread for the family and became Teejan’s first source of inspiration. “I learnt the art from my Nanaji while he did his rehearsals. He never taught directly. Girls were never allowed to think about performing, let alone learning. Even he did not come to know that I had become his silent disciple except once when he caught me at his door”, she recollected her early life as a kid. As per village customs, she was married off at age twelve. Binding down a freethinking teenager was impossible and an abusive first marriage came to an abrupt end. Out of concern for the depressed teenager, her grandfather decided to keep her busy with his art and Teejan’s interest in Pandvaani increased, much against the wishes of her family. “I chose the Kapalik style of Pandvaani, where the narrator depicts scene from the epic and improvises consistently. This gave me more freedom to think, to enact the dramatic elements, to be fearless and to make the story mine,” she said. Till then, women who performed had always preferred the Vedmati style, where the performer sits and narrates the story to a small gathering. Teejan had already stirred up a hornet’s nest by going against the grain. The highly conservative village community she belonged to, ostracized her as girls never performed, more over Teejan was stubborn about the way she did things. “I would be insulted every time I left my village with the Tambura. I tried to convince them that I am going to sing the stories of Mahabharata. They would taunt me saying “Yeh anpad gawaar ladki fir se kahan jaa rahi hain dekho! Isko kisne bualaya kahani sunaane?”, she continued about her initial years as a performer and the humiliation she faced. Her persistence paid and she gave her first performance on a makeshift stage in a Chandrakhuri village in Durg district for a princely sum of ten rupees! This made news in her own village as no girl had ever achieved this sort of fame. Slowly they began accepting her and her style of art, with much hesitation. She decided to take some informal training under Umed Singh Deshmukh. Invitations from surrounding villages started piling up. She had, by now, mastered the art of Pandvaani and created her own genre in presenting it. Habib Tanvir, the famous theatre personality from Bhopal noticed her and recommended her performances to several other festivals. Soon Teejan Bai was performing for the Prime Ministers and heads of State and was hailed as the world’s first female exponent of Pandvaani. But hardships continued at home. "People in my village called me characterless because I sang and danced in public. My second husband used to beat me and stop me from performing. What could be more painful for an artiste than not being able to perform? I can never forget that difficult path I have left behind”, she says. “"Indian women have this amazing ability to tolerate things, keep the pain to their hearts and continue doing what they are supposed to do, I did exactly that," she adds. Over the decades, she remarried three times but never stopped performing even once. From a shy village girl to a cultural ambassador Over the centuries various versions of the epic have evolved. Classical, folk and many other traditions have taken the same stories and made their own adaptations to present them in varied artistic ways. Several scholars have written their own interpretations. What are the roots of Pandvaani? What version does Teejan follow? “I follow the version by Sabal Singh Chauhan ji. It is loosely based and inspired from the Sanskrit version by Bhasa. But the stories all come to the same. Even other versions have the same Pandav and Draupadi. Everyone’s versions are fine. No writer is right or wrong”, she says. My curiosity about Pandvaani increases as to how long would she take to render the entire story in her own charming style. “From the Adi Parva to the Swargaarohan Parva, it would take me a hundred and twenty full days and nights to complete the entire story of the Mahabharata. I have been fortunate to narrate the whole story several times. I am not a machine to go on and on full days and nights though. But if you leave me to my good mood, I can even complete the whole story in two months.” she says. I’ve met several people who consider Teejan to be a bit of a diva. She has a reputation of being moody, often eccentric and sometimes a tantrum-throwing queen. Knowing her well enough, I was always curious to know what keeps Teejan Bai’s mood going? “Artistes are moody people. That is because art has its own moods and shades and they, as artistes are nothing but instruments of their respective art forms. Do you know, it hasn’t been even many days since my younger son died? Do you know what a mother feels when she sees her own son dying? I have emotions but can’t be loud about expressing them. I can’t keep sitting at home and crying either. I am also an artiste. I use my art as a medium to express my pain. When I deal with episodes like Kunti-Karna Samvaad or how Subhadra deals with the death of Abhimanyu in the battlefield of Kurukshetra, I remember my own son and can’t stop my tears. Only those who know what I’ve gone through will understand what I am putting into my art. Real art comes from one’s own life experiences. But god has meant me to do this work so I have to.