Anna Rao Gangavalli

Rangbhoomi Auditorium recently witnessed a dance theatre production, ‘Rebel Ranis’, by Keelaka Dance Company. The production was the result of a collaboration between senior Bharatanatyam guru Jyotsna Lata Shourie and her senior student Aneesha Grover from Delhi. The script was by Aneesha and the choreography by Jyotsna Shourie.

The focus was on four characters: Kaikeyi, Sita, Karaikkal Ammaiyar and Draupadi. These are the heroines who narrate and play out their stories, presenting an intensely emotive slice of life, not legend, as seen from an insider’s perspective. Shattering stereotypes, the subtly tailored kaleidoscopic visualisation, brimming with colour, made for an exhilarating experience.

From the start, the audience was gripped and drawn in, and the tightly packed hour-and-fifteen-minute timescale did not allow for any let-up in pace. The dialogue and dance were seamlessly fleshed out in a bravura fin-de-siècle tone, as the Rebel Ranis briefly spoke and the incandescent energy of the dance took over.

The drama opened with the four heroines perched on high seats, exchanging their stories in a witty dialogue. The thread linking them is the fact that they all stretch the boundaries in a male-dominated society: Kaikeyi, being a warrior queen versed in politics; Sita, the slayer of Ravana in the apocryphal Adbhut Ramayan; Karaikkal Ammaiyar, who gives up all societal norms in search of Shiva; and an assertive Draupadi, who breaks taboos.

A melange of music styles, from jazz to Carnatic, embellished the soundscape, including the Ravanashtakam, heralding the dramatic entrance of Ravana. The Shiva Panchakshari appropriately set the mood for Karaikkal Ammaiyar.

Aneesha Grover was Kaikeyi in the first sequence as she described her upbringing. In a violet aharya, she was portrayed as learning all the skills as a princess that were identical to those of a male counterpart. Her father, Aswapati, wished her to gain experience in warfare and politics. However, these talents proved to be more of a burden than appropriate to the role she was destined to play.

Apart from the occasion when she accompanied Dasaratha to the battlefield, where she proved her valour by helping him win, thereby obtaining the boons that would prove to be her bane, she was relegated to wifely duties in the antahpura of the royal household. The memory of a matching duet showcasing her martial skills with Dasaratha is all that lingers.

Her sagacity and courage are forgotten, diminished in the savage arc of the terrible act of sending Rama, Lakshmana and Sita into exile. We hear, in her own words, a trenchant justification.

Nandita Kaalan Mehra as Sita dominated the next scene. She was no fragile queen needing the solace of a protecting male presence. The ‘Adbhut Ramayan’, from a Shakta perspective, envisages the story of her victory over a thousand-headed Ravana reigning in Pushkar, more terrifying than the Lord of Lanka.

Nandita’s orange-and-green dress was elegant. Rama and Ravana, played by male Chhau dancers Sagar Vashisht and Benjamin Jacob, gave a scintillating display of somersaults and cartwheels as they lunged and leaped in the battlefield scene, creating fireworks on stage with their athletic display.

Fit and chiselled, they duelled with vigour, and finally an exhausted Rama is overpowered and rendered unconscious by his antagonist. Nandita’s aquiline countenance flashed with rage as Sita’s gentle visage transformed. The cosmic form of the multi-armed Goddess Mahakali, warrior of darkness, emerges.

Laughing hysterically, with bloodshot eyes and an outstretched tongue denoting her ferocity, she charges into the demon and his army ranks, decapitating the Asura’s thousand heads in a flash and destroying his armies.

Ravana’s myrmidons in black capes sported face masks resembling an amalgam of silvery metal and ruby-stained glass, giving an Art Deco look. They pranced and capered, looking like fiends from Dante’s Inferno. Nandita, to sum up, depicted a Sita who would not have needed Lakshmana to ward off Surpanakha but would have been quite capable of doing so herself!

Amrita Sivakumar, in a green-and-yellow dress, gave a finely etched portrait of the great Saiva saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar. She liberates herself from a mundane housewifely existence by the grace of Shiva.

As she prays to the Lord in despair, requiring a mango to serve to her husband, divine grace makes it appear. She gives up all the norms of human society to smear ashes on herself, denoting complete renunciation, to follow the ascetic path to self-realisation.

She does not care in the least, even shunning clothing, wandering ardently and unclad in search of the Lord.

Harini Iyer was Draupadi in a draped pink saree. She explains that, though being fire-born, she had to undergo the travails of a life full of perils while still being the rock-like support of her five husbands, enduring even the unendurable.

A leering, malevolent Duryodhana, sly Shakuni and a dignified figure of pathos, Yudhisthira, stole the scene. (Sagar Vashisht, Ravi Yadav and Benjamin Jacob.)

As the dice fall with a guillotine-like regularity, all the wealth of the Pandavas evaporates. When Draupadi herself is staked and lost, Duryodhana, intoxicated with victory, decides to humiliate their queen.

He staggers in a louche, unsteady manner, indicating his bare thigh with a repulsive gesture. Leering malice oozed from Dussasana as he evinced satisfaction in physically dragging Draupadi to the palace hall. He is whirled around and collapses with the intervention of Krishna as he dismally fails in trying to disrobe the Pandavas’ consort.

A Tamil jazz song, whose lyrics embroidered upon the theme of unleashing righteous wrath and which was sung by Harini Iyer, became the leitmotif of the finale. It received a standing ovation as the production signed off with a grim recital of the statistics of atrocities against women being committed in contemporary India.

It was a warning against the complacency of a society residing in the illusion of having achieved feminine empowerment, which is still a distant goal for many.

Dolly Thakore graced the occasion as a guest and congratulated the artistes on their proficiency.