The earth under a Teejan sky

In every region in India, villagers claim that the Pandavas, during their agyatvas, stayed there. In Chhattisgarh, several local popular stories have been woven into the epic over the years. The stories of the Mahabharata, here, are called Pandavani, the stories of the Pandavas.

Originally, the Pandavani was strictly restricted to men. Teejan became the first Pandavani woman storyteller. She drew inspiration from folk tales and rituals and from the local understanding of the shastra. With her defiance of community norms, Teejan had also opened the doors for young female kathakars to battle against the customs of a conservative rural society.

I had the fortune of “directing” Teejan ji in three separate productions over the years: The Hidden River for the NCPA in Mumbai (1995), Mother Daughter-Father Son for Ariane Mnouchkine of Theatre de Soleil in Paris (1994), and Sangram Aur Azadi for the sesquicentennial of 1857 at the Red Fort in Delhi (2007).

We had gathered in Mumbai to unravel a series of powerfully enacted vignettes that would reveal the delicate story of union and balance struggling to survive in a polarised world. Teejan, known for demolishing male bastions, decided to play the invincible Bhishma, demolished by Shikhandi, without whose help even Bhima couldn’t succeed. Great gurus invited as part of my Hidden River workshops had watched for the first time Teejan making gender fluid.

Everyone was exceptionally moved by Teejan’s simultaneous tenacity and vulnerability and was inspired to follow her act with their unique artistry highlighting female-centric representations. Today, few artists across genres see each other perform.

My second reference is the play we created in Paris on an idea given by Ariane Mnouchkine to explore the vulnerable world of parivarik parampara in this age of mass and multiple transmissions. Ariane and Teejan loved each other, and we all bonded over being together in Paris to create a totally new theatrical production on traditional transmission. This was the link I needed for Teejan to tell us how she would choose someone to hand over her legacy to.

She found Rambha, a tenacious young relative, who took on the challenge, and every night of the performance we all watched spellbound as the magic of transmission went beyond the call of duty of student-teacher.

Teejan never had a child of her own, but the mother and father in her made her look after a whole “kunba” of accompanists and their families.

The third anecdote related to my last unrecorded foray in theatre. When the offer to create an inter-medial manifestation came up to celebrate 150 years of 1857, I jumped on the idea of celebrating the courage of sepoys, retelling their stories. I could only think of Teejan amidst 2,000 artists. Teejan chose to narrate the tale of bravery and defiance implicit and explicit in the story of Abhimanyu in the chakravyuh.

Teejan Bai often espoused the magic of reaching out to breathing audiences, “saans leti janta”, under the open sky she yearned for. Working for the Bhilai Steel Plant for 30 years, she could create an audience. In the end, paralysed and unable to speak, she did regret that artists can never take on the “maidan-e-jung” as a “khulla manch” of their own lives. For her, nurturing emotions and needs meant more than “chahaks” and “jajmans” (fans and patrons).

The writer is the founder-trustee and chairman of Asian Heritage Foundation