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 The last film of Kumar Shahani - Ileana Citaristi e-mail: icitaris@gmail.com February 28, 2024 I got in touch with Kumar Shahani for the first time after seeing his maiden film Maya Darpan which ends with Chandralekha's choreographic sequences of Chhau dance performed by dancers clad in white, red and black performing on a red surface which keeps on appearing and disappearing projecting a carousel of powerful and fragmented messages. Chandralekha's fascination for the Chhau idiom and my connection with her during the East West Dance Encounters of the 80s had been one more reason for me to approach him. From then, I started visiting him whenever I was in Mumbai and spent quite a lot of time sitting in the veranda of his Napean Sea Road apartment, listening to his fascinating and erudite talks on dance, music, films and politics. When from 1996 onwards I organised the Festival of Films of Performing and Visual Arts in Bhubaneswar I managed to show three of his equally iconic films Khayal Gatha, Bamboo Flute and Bhavantarana, all three powerful statements of his deep understanding of music and dance not only as aesthetic tools but as visuals impregnated with epic, philosophical and spiritual connotations as well. How to forget in Bhavantarana, the image of Kelucharan Mohapatra's veins and muscles totally merging in colour and intensity with the texture of the stone which he is sculpting almost as if creator and creation are made of the same matter! Or the delicacy of Birju Maharaj's rendition of the song Mujhe Chedo Na abhinaya while the camera does a semi-circle around him and the light intensifies on his expressive face in Khayal Gatha?  We had already started to talk about the possibility of doing a film on my story but it got finalised only when Kumar came to Bhubaneswar in 2009 to attend a film festival and visited my house. He was impressed by the squared small windows looking on the Bindusagar letting in the ripples of the light "... reflected up from the Bindusagar across and from the blobs and drops of water held in the foetus folds of plants that seem to float upon the land" and again he writes "... suddenly the diagonals in the room hiss like snakes, the phallus is like the lotus opening out, the arati from the Lingaraj temple rings in the truth of the great deity of Sangeeta, bestows grammar upon babble, rescuing us all from the Inferno". Few pages which encapsulated my story from a turbulent and dark past to the liberation found through the Odissi and Chhau movements in this land of Odisha. And I started to see my house, its angles, its windows, its geometry with new eyes. Each space and corner got transformed by the angle of the camera and the projection of his imagination offering transitions between past and present and again past in a continuous flux and re-flux beyond time and space.  The first days of shooting passed on peacefully and successfully in locations in and around the house. I understood quite soon that Kumar did not like to give explanations in terms of answering 'why this' or 'what is the meaning of that'. His way of creating was akin to poetry, not to prose and the images were pregnant of associations and ancient references and were supposed to speak by themselves. I immersed myself in what he was creating and followed his instructions. Each ambience and scene was carefully planned, with maximum care to each details. I was made dressed up like a mendicant invoking alms at the doorstep of an old temple while the song Ahe Nila Saila was played in the background. Had I not come knocking at the door of an entire culture in search of a sense to give to my life? In another scene, I was made to lay down with my nude skinny back exposed while a motherly figure with a full round body dressed in a sari worn like a typical Odisha village woman massages my skin with movements resembling a dance ritual. Sequences of dance executed near or on islands inside water bodies alternate with dramatized unrehearsed scenes where I wake up from a nightmare or I seem to be lost inside the dark interior of a church until the door opens into a fully enlightened piazza of Venice with a female mendicant couched on the flight of steps. And in between all this there are scenes of mythological references to Rama and Sita being ferried on a boat by an old boatman on the Mahanadi river or of a teenage girl whose touch makes a dried tree come back to life.  When the shooting which had to be suspended in 2009 for lack of funds got revived in 2013 some more scenes have been added like the one in a discotheque where I am dressed up in western cloth and have a hairstyle like that of Monica Vitti, an Italian actress of the 60s. I am in a freewheel conversation with actor Rajat Kapoor about my rebellious years during the 70s and 80s in Italy and how at present rebellion did not hold any more meaning because the tradition I had found was not imposed on me but was the result of my search. There are also few reminds to the Bhavantarana film which Kumar wanted to be somehow connected with this and the film title itself Priye Charu Shile from Jayadeva's ashtapadi is a reminder of that. I have to confess that it was only when, few months ago, I got the chance to see the film in its totality that all the puzzles got solved and I got a glimpse of what Kumar wanted to express. Until then I was wondering how all these different scenes which looked so isolated in themselves could ever form a coherent and meaningful sequence. But then the magic happened, even without a linear narrative the main threads in my life, the discovery of my femininity through the Odissi dance, the answers to my philosophical quests for a form of expression which would be at same time physical and spiritual, immersed in a cultural context of interconnected realities, were all there suggested through cues of deep and intense inner connotations. Although the film was completed years ago, for a series of unfortunate circumstances it could not be published till now and by the time it was ready few months ago to be shown to Kumar for a final revision, he was too weak to be able to be present for the screening. One only hopes that one day this film which took so many years in the making can be published and can be added to Kumar's list of iconic masterpieces. Trailer of Priye Charushile  Dr. Ileana Citaristi is an Italian born dancer, who trained under Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra in Odissi and under Guru Hari Nayak in Mayurbhanj Chhau. She founded Art Vision in 1995 in Bhubaneswar. She has authored 'The making of a Guru' on Kelucharan Mohapatra, 'My Journey: A Tale of Two Births', Traditional Martial Practices in Odisha.' Post your comments Please provide your name and email id along with your comment. All appropriate comments posted with name and email id in the blog will also be featured in the site. |
