Chandigarh, Friday, July 17, 1998

Focus on Punjab’s culture IT was Shakespeare who said in his “Julius Caesar”: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now”. And theatre person Dr Rani Balbir Kaur voices the same emotion when she animatedly declares, “I am bent on making people cry”... Village themes OVER the past decade or so, several young artists have made their presence conspicuous on the firmament of Chandigarh. To name a few are Prabhinder Lall, Bheem Malhotra, Ram Pratap Verma, Madan Lal, Gurjind Sandhu, Manohar Lal, Sadhna, Deepa Bajaj, Amarjit Virdi and Anju Pasricha.Inder Singh Oddaru is another important name in this genre... Child artiste from Chamba AT her young age she has to her credit seven first prize trophies, two Pandi V.D. Paluskar Awards and first class certificates from Sharda Sangeet Vidyalaya, Nada Brahma Mandir, Bandra, Mumbai, and several certificates from Swar Sadhna Samiti, Dhobi Talao, Mumbai... ART & SOUL: Caring for the past

Focus on Punjab’s culture By Sonoo Singh IT was Shakespeare who said in his “Julius Caesar”: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now”. And theatre person Dr Rani Balbir Kaur voices the same emotion when she animatedly declares, “I am bent on making people cry”, while talking passionately about her television serial, “Jane Kahan Gaye Vo Din,” based on India’s freedom movement, which she will be shooting for the national hook-up. Armed with a team of local actors and a technical crew from Bombay, “Jane Kahan Gaye Vo Din” will be focussing on the affluent culture of Punjab and the polish and finesse that one associates with the “good old days”. “My serial does have a few biographical shades to it, but it is more about breaking set moulds and cliches. Like the stereotyped versions of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. I want to present a time when even with different religious identities everybody lived and functioned as one single unit”, says Rani Balbir. Director of Folk Workshop, which conducts professional courses in the basics of acting based on the Stavinslavsky mode of theatre, and now of Harbans Films as well, which soon shall start courses in cinematography and video and digital editing in Chandigarh, Rani Balbir Kaur hates the use of the word “workshops” as it is used today. Admonishing the amateur theatre workshops that have spread throughout the city today she says, “Such workshops are only means to churn money and are more of a ‘make-do’ variety. Theatre is a very tough line and one has to ‘forget’ oneself in order to devote the desired time and energy”. Chronicling the journey of her group, Folk Theatre Workshop, that started in 1975 she states, “Having to its credit productions like ‘Ghasi Ram Kotwal’ with Pankaj Berry, ‘Three Penny Opera’ with Anupam Kher and ‘Mirza Sahiban’ with Seema Kapur, I do not want to claim that my group will churn out actors after a three-month course. What I’m aiming at is an appreciation course in theatre and its nuances”. After a blank background in theatre provided to students in schools and colleges, which is also replete with trite traditions, how difficult does it become to educate a 20-year-old on the different aspects of theatre? “As teachers of the theatre department we do have to erase the cluttered minds of the children. And it is quite unfortunate that here the sensibilities towards art, culture and theatre seem to be missing. We cannot talk of theatre appreciation without an audience, because theatre also connotes the involvement of an audience. If an audience can’t be cultivated, what support systems do we talk of for the theatre?”, she laments. A small city like Chandigarh has theatre operating at the same proportions as the city itself, but with a theatre department in Panjab University that has the names of Neelam Mansingh and Mohan Mahirishi associated with it, the crowds that most productions draw is quite dismal.”I agree that nobody should be allowed to come to theatre without a ticket. Painters like MF Husain and Satish Gujral have shown that free art has no respectability, whereas ticketed art has a demanding market!”The two-month course, under the banner of Harbans Films, that Rani Balbir has started would be an exposure to High Band Betacam video cameras and the 16 mm and 35 mm film format cameras, along with training on writing scripts, special effects, dubbing and subtitling and the works. Though herself armed with the knowledge of film-making from Austen, the USA, Rani Balbir has invited professionals from Poona’s Film and Television Institute and from the film industry itself to provide her students with that “cutting edge”. Audiences at all levels seem to have lost the habit of theatre-going in favour of the habit of movie-going, and television is becoming a popular medium of drama. Is that why the switch? “Cinema and theatre”, Rani Balbir explains, “are inexplicably related to each other. And I do not believe in the pretense that cinema is bad. For me any medium where my creative energies would evolve is viable”.

ART & SOUL Caring for the past by B.N. Goswamy THERE are monuments, and then there are monuments.Years ago, I recall the prolonged discussions that went on between the Director of the Rietberg Museum and the Denkmalshutz office of city of Zurich. The subject was the necessity of felling a tree or two for providing a subterranean passage from one of the museum’s subsidiary buildings to the elegant Villa Wesendonck which houses the great collections of the museum. The Museum is situated in an exquisitely laid out, undulating park, green as emerald and studded with stately trees, some of them old, very old, whispering ceaselessly of the past. The museum’s expansion plans included the construction of three underground floors as exhibition space; the necessary funds running into several million francs had been secured; but — here was the rub — these two trees had to make way. But argue as the Director would, the city administration’s office, the name of which translates roughly into the “Office for the Protection of Monuments”, had dug its heels in. These trees were “monuments”, a part of the heritage of the city, and they simply would not be felled. The construction plans as conceived had eventually to be abandoned and an alternative had to be found. The monuments stayed.It all came back to me again when we went to stay with some friends in the French part of Switzerland recently. Autigny is a quiet, unpretentious village that Elizabeth and Hans Jecklin, great Indophiles, live in. But their home is referred to —in the official records and by the residents of the village — as the “Schloss”, the word meaning technically a castle but often only a nobleman’s home, the most prominent residence in the area, something akin to a haveli in our part of the world. The Jecklins had bought the place a few years back, but moved into it only recently. To move from the heart of the bustling city of Zurich to these quite surroundings already meant something: but in some ways the move also meant for them coming to terms with other centuries, for this elegant and stately house, this “Schloss”, has on it the patina of time, carries about it a strong aroma of the past. When one sees it now, with all the calm it exudes, its quiet efficiency, its innovative use of space and its understated appointments, one can form no notion of the turbulent times the house has seen and been through on its own. Or of the long and difficult process of negotiations after which alone the Jecklins were able to keep it and give it its present shape. For the house has the status of a heritage building, a “monument”, and is thus subject to firm rules and much supervision by local or state authority. It was almost a ruin when the Jecklins bought it in 1993, but the ruin had a history. It had been under private ownership and had been all but abandoned some 30 years ago and yet the county office had an almost complete record of its past. I was able to see a part of it. The document had astonishing details. Most of the interest of the local authority in the house arose from the fact that it had old, even if decaying, murals on its walls, and painted wooden ceilings, some of them evidently done in the 18th century by a painter quite well-known in these parts, Michael Vogelsang of Solothurn, to whom other and better preserved work in the area is ascribed. But there was dense information on everything else too: the nature of the facade, the changes it had gone through after the 13th century when it was built, the flooring, the woodwork, the stairs, the cellars, the ceiling, even a track of the time when its gothic windows were widened to accommodate the baroque taste of a different owner. And so on. When the Jecklins bought the house and wished to make it habitable, to put it to their own modern use, the local authority had to sanction every single detail. Where a new wall could be put in, to what extent the flooring could be changed, what could be done to the windows or to the stairs had to be negotiated, each detail having to be reduced to writing. The painted ceiling and the murals on the walls presented the greatest difficulty. The painted ceilings, the authorities agreed, could be restored and added to a little at the fringes to give them a finished look without distorting the original intent of the painter, Michael Vogelsang whose signatures in initials still survive on a coat of arms painted as a panel on one of the ceilings. The murals, however, presented a far more serious difficulty: they were utterly dilapidated for the most part, the authorities agreed, and restoring them to their original or approximate state would cost a small fortune. But they could not be painted over or removed. A compromise solution was therefore carefully worked out: the murals would be left as they are: in front of them, however, leaving a small gap, the new owners were permitted to put in false walls, painted white and bearing a new and contemporary look. Behind them, however, nearly all over the house, the old murals remain, asleep in time as it were. At least for now. Only a small fragment of the old murals, a delightful square panel, has been exposed and conserved, as a reminder of a sort. In it one can discern the figure of a monkey on a tree, looking straight out at the viewer, peering out on the present as it were from its perch in the past.Timely intervention to the history of the Autigny Schloss has been added another chapter recently. It appears that, before the Jecklins bought it, the place was acquired by another person who went about making changes to the building without proper authorization. One of the things he wished to add to the structure was a pair of small towers. This could be done only by having them made elsewhere and then lowering them from a helicopter on to the roof. Just as the helicopter started hovering over the site, the villagers tell, the police arrived and put a stop to the operation!Strange? But perhaps only for us who see bits of history being destroyed in our towns and villages day after day before our very eyes. Sometimes by none else than the sarkar itself.

Village themes By Prem Singh OVER the past decade or so, several young artists have made their presence conspicuous on the firmament of Chandigarh. To name a few are Prabhinder Lall, Bheem Malhotra, Ram Pratap Verma, Madan Lal, Gurjind Sandhu, Manohar Lal, Sadhna, Deepa Bajaj, Amarjit Virdi and Anju Pasricha.Inder Singh Oddaru is another important name in this genre. The State Museum, Shimla, in collaboration with the Department of Languages and Culture, Himachal Pradesh, had mounted an exhibition of his paintings at its galleries recently.Oddaru, a product of Chandigarh Art College, had made his debut in the world of art with a one-man show after passing out in 1976. Since then he has been regularly participating in exhibitions, camps, seminars and workshops on art.Oddaru is a recipient of Punjab Lalit Kala Akademi awards in 1979 and 1995. At present he is teaching art at Kendriya Vidyalaya, Badhowal Cantt (Ludhiana). There were in all 22 paintings and drawings at the exhibition. Painting village themes comes naturally to him because of his upbringing there. He simplifies his forms to symbols varying from figurative to abstract expression. His line is firm and fluent, expression is emotion filled and the transparent use of oils never hides the texture beneath the feelings. The delight and pleasure that he gets through his artistic expressions is similar to the days of his early childhood in a village of Punjab, says Oddaru. The rustic simplicity and earthy fragrance that he has lived through form the core material for his paintings and drawings. The passion for the opposite sex and the freedom that one needs to fulfil one’s urge is what stands out in his work. To him sex and freedom are the two vital necessities of life to keep the spirit of a human being alive. His colours which run through his lines like blood in the veins emote feelings of sex and freedom, the two most suppressed desires in man.

Child artiste from Chamba By Balkrishan Prashar AT her young age she has to her credit seven first prize trophies, two Pandi V.D. Paluskar Awards and first class certificates from Sharda Sangeet Vidyalaya, Nada Brahma Mandir, Bandra, Mumbai, and several certificates from Swar Sadhna Samiti, Dhobi Talao, Mumbai. She is a child artiste, Neha Bedi, who brought kudos to Chamba (Himachal Pradesh) adding lustre to her name. The 11-year-old Neha is a daughter of Naresh and Praveen Bedi of Chamba. She is currently studying in the seventh standard at St Joseph’s Convent, Bandra (W), Mumbai.Bharatnatyam has instilled a new rhythm to her life and become an integral part of her daily routine. She has been regularly participating in various classical dance competitions. She has also vindicated her guru’s confidence by emerging successful in all these competitions.Neha started learning Bharatnatyam at the tender age of six years by joining Nateshwar Nritya Kala Mandir, Bandra, Mumbai, as a disciple of renowned Guru Chhaya P. Khanvate. Under the watchful and professional tutelage of her illustrious guru, Neha has been able to pick up fundamental as well as nuances of this fine art in the early stages itself. By virtue of her achievements, she has twice been invited by reputed institutes to perform Bharatnatyam — first at the Shastriya Bal Kalakar Utsav organised by Nehru Centre and Swar Sadhna Samiti at Nehru Centre in September 1995 and then at the fourth Bal Kalakar Sangeet Sammelan organised by Archana Nrityalaya Dance Academy, Dadar, Mumbai, in September 1996. Neha is constantly encouraged and supported by her parents and elder sister. Her Bharatnatyam Arangetram is one of the most significant occasions in her life as it was a stepping stone in her pursuit of a more meaningful and satisfying Bharatnatyam learning.