Regaining the lost glory of poetic play

If you were a Telugu teacher in the good old days, you were singing in the class room. Well, it wasn’t  exactly singing in the strict sense of the word, but one would tunefully recite the poems from the text. A Telugu teacher who could not ‘sing’ a poem was considered a blot on the fraternity. But then, those were the old days where the Telugu pundit was a pundit in the real sense of the word, knowing both his ancient literary texts and the basics of music.

Nowadays, this singing has almost completely gone out of the curriculum. Not only because the contemporary teacher cannot sing poems, but also because the syllabus has become more modern with blank verse, short story and essays occupying quite a significant. But there is one place where the Telugu poem is still sung and enjoyed both by the singer and the listener. That is the Padya Natakam in Telugu. Telugus are extremely proud of this poetic heritage. Padya Natakam, which we claim as a unique genre not to be seen in other languages, has its origin from the late 19th century. In a play of not less than 3 to 4 hours, there are just a few dialogues in between and a series of singing poetry. All the major dialogues are in poetic form; the characters burst out singing as in opera; these actors need to be proficient in literature, music apart from the four Abhinayas. They need to concentrate at one and the same time on emoting, speaking, singing and gesturing.

All this makes it a unique performing art. Starting from Vemuri Gaggayya, Peesapati, Raghuramaiah, Sthanam Narasimha Rao (to name a very few) to the present day Gummadi Gopalakrishna there have been a number of excellent artistes. The duo who made this poetic play a household name are Tirupati Venkata Kavulu. Their poetic play based on Mahabharata, and especially the scene where Arjuna and Duryodhana visit Krishna to ask for his boons, and the famous scene in which Lord Krishna visits Duryodhana’s court to make an ‘amicable’ settlement between Pandavas and Kauravas are known as classics in this genre. In fact, there is hardly any Telugu person alive who does not know at least one poem from this text, written in the beginning of the 20th century.

Full report here New Indian Express