Here is a dance drama in Senthamizh to know more about Mahendra Varman.Danseuse Swarnamalya Ganesh and her troupe paid their tribute to the Pallava king at a kutcheri
CHENNAI: Pallava king Mahendra Varman, who had rock-cut temples built in Mahabalipuram, was a self-confessed ‘eccentric’. Many historians who have read and discovered a great deal in Mahabalipuram will stand testimony to that. Danseuse Swarnamalya Ganesh and her troupe Ranga Mandira paid the perfect tribute to the king at Tamil Pechchu Kutcheri held by Tamil Heritage Trust and Tamil Virtual Academy. “The performance was also a tribute to Michael Lockwood who translated the two plays written by the king — Mattavilasa Prahasana and Bhagavadajjuka,” she said.
He was known as ‘Sankirna Jathi’ (an expert in a special music system called Sankirna Jathi) and Vichchitra Chittan. These formed a part of the dance drama too. “The team asked me to work on just Mattavilasa Prahasana but I wanted to make it a play on the king himself. The man in the 7th Century had the ability to make fun of himself and his administration,” she smiled. Mattavilasa Prahasana translates to ‘drunken farcical sport’.
The performance began with the introduction of Mahendra Varman, who was a great scholar with knowledge about everything under the sun. “As a child, I had performed Mattavilasa Prahasana and it was in Sanskrit. But here I wanted the play to be understood by those who know the story and those who don’t,” added Swarnamalya. The farcical drama pokes fun at the problems that prevailed among Kapalikas, Pasupathas, Buddhists and Jains in the Pallava kingdom. “Both plays are relevant even today. Bhagavadhajjuka is about a bhagavan and a courtesan. The moral of the play is that when god (in this case Yamaraja) wills, a bhagavan can become a courtesan and vice versa. Nobody is superior. The sheer thought of equality, amused me,” she explained.
While Swarnamalya was keen on putting up a dance drama on a big scale, the political and natural situations in Chennai for the past few weeks did not favour her. “In the end, it became a play reading of sorts. I was ready with the script but could not put together the team as we couldn’t meet. We met three days before the performance and rehearsed it,” she shared.
While she wrote the dialogues and script of the dance drama, they took the inscriptions and shlokas as lyrics for the songs. “Though the dialogues in the play are in Sanskrit, I noticed that he used Prakrit, which is a colloquial form of Sanskrit. Hence I took the liberty of infusing colloquial Tamil along with senthamizh,” she adds.
And the result was extraordinary indeed! The dialogues were a mix of English and Tamil and even a child could understand. Some comical relief was also provided where Tamil film dialogues were used. “Michael happened to watch the performance on YouTube and he wrote to me that I had brought out the characters alive. That made my day,” she smiled.
The dance-drama had Jayakumar Bharatwaj on music, Nattivangam and a few characters by Aravind, Mannargudi Srinivasan on violin, Kiran Pai on the mridangam, and Swarnamalya was accompanied by her disciples Deepika Vaidyanathan and Kuzhali Jagannathan.