At a time when women, especially widows, had few means, Bahinabai Chaudhari, a poor Maharashrian farmer, faced her circumstances with grit and resilience. As she worked to sustain her three children and herself, she composed Ovi (lyrical folks songs made of couplets) in the Khandeshi dialect, capturing the beauty of the earth. “She was illiterate, still she recited such beautiful words, which are now being studied in universities. For example, in one of them, she says the soil is like a blanket that mother earth has wrapped around the fields, and when the seeds buried underneath sprout, they are like her goosebumps. She has such beautiful imagery in her poems,” explains Bharatanatyam dancer Vaishnavi Dhore, adding, “The only reason we have her work now is because her son wrote them down when she recited them to him”.
Dhore recently brought Chaudhari’s work to life with a performance titled Bahinabai Chaudhari – The Voice of the Soil at Bangalore International Centre (BIC), Domlur, and plans to return in January.
The songs convey a bouquet of moods, with verses, in Dhore’s words, speaking of ‘spirituality, being a common woman and even the smallest things in nature’. As she explains, “I selected the songs according to their moods and imagery. One speaks of motherhood, while the next is a fun one about the changeable reactions of the mind and another about being separated from her husband and learning to stand up for herself. There are so many poems that we had to leave out a few because they didn’t suit for dance.”
The performance saw Chaudhari’s songs set to music composed by Dhore’s collaborator-singer Shruthi Veena Vishwanath and played by artistes on the dotara, ghatam and nattuvangam. For her dance, she tried to bring out the physicality of a farmer. “As my body has been trained in Bharatanatyam for 24 years, my vocabulary is Bharatanatyam, but I tried to challenge myself by trying to convey the body language of a farmer through this vocabulary – how can I best the cutting of crops, the goosebumps and the sprouts?” To bridge the language barrier and weave a story from the verses, the Khandeshi songs were interspersed with narrations in English.
Starting with Delhi last year, Dhore has taken the performance to cities across India; however, Bengaluru is the first to witness it with live music. Despite most outside Maharashtra being unfamiliar with Chaudhari, Dhore says her poetry has found resonance everywhere. “There are people who get emotional. It has also been amazing to hear from audiences that they are going back and researching Chaudhari and her poems for themselves.”