On a humid afternoon at Saptaparni, Banjara Hills, as the Varnam Craft Collective opened its doors, storyteller Deepa Kiran and singer Harini Rao gave the audience a kind of evening with Stree Nama which will be remembered for a long time. In 90 minutes Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, Chityala Ailamma, Gauhar Jaan, Iqbal Bano, Bangalore Nagaratnamma, and Durgabai Deshmukh stepped out of history’s margins and into vivid, story life.
“I have done a lot of these events, which have been women oriented. It’s a personal interest to me. I think it’s a very beautiful space for art — to reach another and to inspire them without being overt. I genuinely enjoy the model of spreading the fragrance of the flower (referring to women protagonists who inspire), so everyone is drawn to that,” begins Deepa, post her performance.
The idea for Stree Nama itself grew out of an almost accidental meeting. She had known of singer Harini Rao’s work for years, and Harini of hers, though the two had never actually seen each other perform. She shares, “Since I’ve collaborated in the past with other musicians, we both had this thought of how about we collaborate sometime. Then somehow this occasion came up, and we realised that we are very aligned in this aspect, that she’s also interested in stories of women.”
Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, Chityala Ailamma, Gauhar Jaan, Iqbal Bano, Bangalore Nagaratnamma, and Durgabai Deshmukh lived in different eras, different regions, under vastly different circumstances. Asked what binds them together, the storyteller didn’t hesitate: “The obvious thread, of course, is each of them are women who took charge of agency, who worked towards their personal sovereignty in terms of whether it was art, whether it was music, whether it was dance. I think the common thread is one, reclaiming agency, not waiting for anyone else to start it for them. They took charge, they noticed what was amiss, they didn’t sit and just complain about it. Some of them had support, some of them did not, but eventually, having taken charge, the support did come.”
Some of these stories, however, demanded real excavation. Chityala Ailamma’s account, in particular, proved elusive. She highlights, “You don’t find material about her in English. I actually went to the bookstores that have Telugu publishing books. I picked up books about her — I don’t know how to read and write Telugu — so I sat down with Telugu journalist friends of mine, and they looked up the book, something authentic, and then we put all that together.”
One discovery, born entirely of research, became a highlight of the evening. While reading around Chityala Ailamma’s story, the storyteller came across a Telangana folk tradition called Uyyala Patalu. Despite the name, she explained, these are not lullabies meant to put a child to sleep, but a way of keeping the memory of legendary figures alive, ‘something like Bathukamma’. Remarkably, such a song exists even for Chityala Ailamma, who was neither a musician nor a dancer.
Research for Stree Nama turned up moments delightful, and impossible leave out. Regarding another protagonist Durgabai Deshmukh, she recalls, “In 1923, during an event, young Durgabai was a volunteer, who worked as a volunteer and managed the entrance. She had to check the tickets of each person who came in. And she stopped this gentleman and asked, where is your ticket? And everyone else came and said, ‘hey, that’s Jawaharlal Nehru ji’. And she said, ‘oh, that’s okay, but he doesn’t have a ticket, he cannot enter’. She refused to let Nehru ji enter — which gives us such a beautiful insight into the mind of this person: principles, justice, those kind of things.
Later in life, finding no women’s hostels in Hyderabad where she could study, Durgabai simply advertised in the paper — are there other women who want to join in and let’s live together so we can work, we can study.”
Asked how music helped audiences feel these stories in ways words alone might not, the storyteller offered a reflection that was almost a philosophy of her craft. “Oral storytelling creates the visual of the actual happening, you basically get to vicariously experience what you otherwise would never actually experience. Now, music is again an art form which touches emotions, and it does so in different auditory ways. There is a theory called the Bonny Theory — when we listen to music, our mind visualises. We tend to think of music as something that soothes us, which is all true, but it also has an element of visualisation. So when you have story and music working together, it’s like the warp and the weft — they create a completely different kind of handloom pattern,” concludes the storyteller.