A naayika filled with songs and stories

Kisko aisi baat ho karen mauj piya sang jo apan… (The ones who are lucky enough to be in the company of their beloved one...) Sumathi Murthy’s voice rose clear in the salty stillness of the evening at Spaces in Besant Nagar, Chennai. “This is a beautiful Sufi composition in raag Gaud Malhar,” she explained, “and Sufi poetry upholds love and is unmindful of the genders of the lover and the beloved.”

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons and our allies in the audience at the Nirangal (Colours) queer performance festival listened attentively to this beautiful poem that valourised the union of lovers on a moonlit monsoon night with fine wine adding to their intoxication. In a context like ours, where same-sex love has come to be despised, we all transported ourselves, albeit for a few minutes, to the world of this song where love was celebrated and lovers could be together.

At this event, one among a series of events marking Chennai Rainbow Pride 2010, Sumathi was simultaneously foregrounding her identities as a Hindustani musician and a queer woman. Later, in an interview with me, Sumathi laughs: “I was always uncomfortable singing for Krishna. You know, that’s what you are told to do. To sing for Krishna. But I always had images of women in my mind when I sang. So I cannot tease out my queer identity and my identity as a Hindustani musician.”

Her confidence in personalising her art, she believes, is in keeping with the spirit that her teacher infused in her. “Pandit Ramarao Naik was not just my teacher. He was my best friend and guide for many many years,” Sumathi reminisces about her teacher, who constantly urged her to be experimental and to find her own path.

With over 22 years of training in the Agra-Atrauli gharana, Sumathi now sings more in niche spaces than in commercial ones. She remembers, “Well, initially, I did perform at a lot of commercial venues, but I became unpopular in those spaces once I began to seriously experiment.”

It all started with her performance on thumris, where she shared her research on the history of the form and the stories of the women who sang thumris. Perhaps due to the gender politics inherent in such an exercise, Sumathi began to lose out on commercial opportunities. But she speaks with great excitement about how, in some senses, the women who sang the thumris were also the naayika (heroines) of these thumris. The genre then was then considered a lesser form due to its romantic erotic content, and women were allowed to sing only thumris. “Women were not allowed to sing dhrupads, for instance, which is a very devotional genre. They were not supposed to sing long aalaaps,” she explained at the Nirangal event, before she began her performance with an aalaap in raga Behag.

What she calls “the openness of khayals” excites Sumathi. Many khayal compositions do not mention gender at all, thus lending themselves to queer interpretations. Those that do appear to be gender-specific could be queered by tweaking one or two words that referred to the gender of the addressee. When asked about people’s reception of this queered nature of her work, Sumathi says, “Of course, there are people who think it is a great crime to take these liberties. But I am not changing the form. I am just making it relevant to myself and, in the process, to many others. If the word khayal literally means thought, it can accommodate mine! The raag or the taal do not change.”

Many people know Sumathi for her work with LesBiT in Bangalore. As a group for lesbian and bisexual women and transmen, LesBiT was started five years ago with support from Sangama, a well-known human rights organisation. Sumathi and many others have managed to create a safe support space for queer women and transmen, besides successfully using theatre as a tool for advocacy and awareness. LesBiT is now a registered organisation and continues its much-needed interventions in crisis involving LBT persons.

“Our approaches have to drastically change if we are working with queer women,” Sumathi explains. “We must recognise that we are working not just in a heterosexist world but also one in which any talk of women’s sexuality is taboo. So it is not easy to talk about the issues faced by lesbian and bisexual women and female-to-male transgender persons.”

Web-based collectives and public health programmes, like those around HIV/AIDS, cater predominantly to men and those who have been biologically male. Sumathi believes in the power of theatre as not just a tool for advocacy efforts, but also as a space that helps people cohere and support each other. LesBiT group’s play Musical Chair, directed by Mangai, a Chennai-based theatre activist, is a testimony to this.

Sumathi’s own script, Sanchari, again directed by Mangai, fuses her gender politics and her proficiency in Hindustani music. Weaving together the different legends and other narratives on the ragam Kalyani, this one-actor play performed by Ponni Arasu, uses music as a space more respectful of different ways of being gendered than the world outside is.

“I dedicated that play to my teacher, Pandit Ramarao Naik, on his 100th birth anniversary. He was the most amazing teacher in the world, and my best friend while growing up,” she says with affection.

Just when you wonder how daunting her work must be and how difficult her path as a queer woman, activist and a Hindustani musician, she playfully hums this Khyal in Thodi raag: “Haari dhayya, bhant dhoobar bhayi…” (Oh my god, it has become so difficult to cross this road…)

— aniruddh.vasudevan@gmail.com