The dEvadAsI and the Saint

rshankar · Post by **rshankar** » 01 Jan 2009, 20:48

I just read Sriram V's wonderful book on the Life and Times of Bangalore Nagaratnam. It was a very excellently written book that made fascinating reading, and, re-reading I am sure! It brings out the ambience of an earlier, unhurried era that has made a monumental contribution to our arts and culture. It also brought to life vividly the 'anti-nautch' movement and its credo of 'throwing the baby out with the bath water'. It is a very compelling read, and I strongly recommend it. To me, the concluding chapter, where the author talks about his sources, held a key message - we, in India while seeming to venerate the past, treat the artifacts that go with it with scant respect. Preserving correspondence, wills, and other documents and recordings related to public figures seems to be sadly neglected, and it seems to me that we stand to lose from this lax, laissez faire attitude of ours. I wonder if this because we have not yet realized that history is no longer a predominantly oral tradition, but a series of carefully documented facts.

As an added bonus, on page 179, I found a reference to Ogirala Sri Veeraraghava Sarma (discussed here on the forum at http://rasikas.org/forums/viewtopic.php? ... saka.html), whose compositions Ms. Nagaratnam is supposed to have commended!

Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with the author or his publisher!

cmlover · Post by **cmlover** » 01 Jan 2009, 21:02

Even if great sages like Agastya, VashiShTa, Vyasa, Narada were the issues of dasis, then no wonder it took a dasi to bring out the greatness of St Thyagaraja. No wonder CM is indebted to them as much as bharatanATyaM!

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 02 Jan 2009, 03:23

Preserving correspondence, wills, and other documents and recordings related to public figures seems to be sadly neglected, and it seems to me that we stand to lose from this lax, laissez faire attitude of ours.

Amen. In many cases, even when such materials are available, they are all locked up in individual families' vaults. For whatever reason, they do not want to make them public property and donate to a museum. As a contrast, in this litte 14000 people town we live in, there is a small road side museum/house which has documentation on public display about how this town was settled back in the early 1800s, along with correspondences that give you an idea about how life was then.

With our composers, the culture affords them a saintly status and paranormal and miraculous occurrences, that a lot of people really believe that they lived so far back in an era that is completely unreachable to history and real documentation. But the fact is, many senior citizens today probably heard from their grand parents and great grand parents about the trinity. And I am sure it is part of their family stories even today. In my family, the general family stories easily go back to the early 1800s.

There is a lot of work that can be done in capturing the oral histories of great people like the trinity.