Exceptional skill, one couple
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Meet Baul singer Parvathy Baul and her equally talented and innovative husband Ravi Gopalan Nair
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MUSICAL DUO Parvathy Baul.
She's only 29, has been singing since she was 16, yet sounds like she has been doing this for decades together. Watching her perform is enigmatic. With a smile on her face, strumming the ektara as she sings and tapping a tasa, doing petite dance steps, you cannot help but imagine what goes through her mind when she sings. "I don't know," she says. "I never thought about it." That's Parvathy Baul for you. A Baul singer, Parvathy discovered Baul — the people, their music and their way of life at Shantiniketan where she studied as a young adult. "Tagore had always encouraged them and I got an opportunity to interact with them," she says of her introduction to an art form that has taken over life.
Bauls are yogis who give up association with the material world. Bauls don't believe in segregation of the sexes and in fact believe that men and women can teach other many things. "We believe in living together as a community," Parvathy explains. They also carry an ektara that signifies their attachments to the world by only a single string. Her teachers were the famous Baul gurus, Sanatan Das and Shashanke Gosai but Parvathy also believes that what she has learnt has come from self-evolvement. She doesn't sing to preach or to spread any kind of a message, she's probably not evolved enough to do so, she says. And as much as Parvathy would like to someday write her own songs, she seems rather apprehensive at the moment. "I could never think of becoming a mahajon. Mahajons are great people who bless people like me by letting us sing what they create," she says
For someone whose music is so profound and spiritual, Parvathy says she does find bliss in some place she performs. Her favourites remain the shrines of Japan and the Baul sanghs, where Baul singers meet.
Husband Ravi Gopalan Nair.
Parvathy's husband, Ravi Gopalan Nair accompanies her whenever he can. Ravi is an Andi Pandarams — a puppeteer, as they are called in Kerala met Parvathy10 years ago when she was in Bengal and heard about Ravi who was based in Kerala. Parvathy was adamant to meet him and learn how to work on herself. Today, they live in harmony near Trivandrum in Kerala. An artiste in his own right, Ravi prefers to stay away from the limelight and insists that the focus be on his wife. A puppeteer, mask maker and inventor of a new technique of performing by which he helps the performer evolve physically and mentally as an artiste and otherwise, Ravi has travelled extensively around the world to create and then fine-tune his own findings.
Ravi also makes glove puppets or Pava Kathakali a kind of puppet that originated in Andhra Pradesh in the 14th-15th century. His method of helping artistes evolve is rather complicated and he himself is at a loss of words to describe it. "I don't advertises and don't anything called short-term or crash courses. I work with artistes for long periods of time. Sometimes I add to them and sometimes I even take something away from their performances. The whole process involves doing it subtlety, without affecting the artiste," he says
Prod him further to describe his techniques and give it a name and he says, "Some things just cannot be described or defined. Doing so takes away the essence of the thing itself," he says.
R.V.K.
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