Many decades ago, sometime in the mid-1980s, I arrived in Paris and knocked at my painter friend SH Raza’s door early in the morning. He was awake. As soon as we settled down to the morning tea, he asked me who Teejan Bai was. He added that the Parisian high society was abuzz with scandal since Teejan Bai had stated in an interview, published the previous day in the French daily Le Monde, that “French women are beautiful, but they are so flat-chested!”
Teejan Bai, a dark-skinned, well-endowed woman from Chhattisgarh, was a Pandavani performer who narrated episodes from the Mahabharata with pithy and sharp comments, relating them to current affairs, to the eternal dilemmas and contradictions of humans. A solo actor, a dancer, a singer, she was all rolled into one, her body and an ektara her only physical assets.
No stage set, no complicated light arrangement, not even a public address system was required for Teejan’s art.
It was an art that teased and brought the grand epic of Mahabharata to the utterly ordinary, infusing it with the earthiness of Chhattisgarh.
In her narrative, the classical was folk, and the grandeur and the heroics were teased into being everyday occurrences. Teejan creatively, and significantly, transformed the distant and inaccessible narrative into its inevitable everydayness. The living and the grand, the awe-inspiring and the interrogative were all pulled down, as it were, to be located and rooted in the mundane, and the earthiness and mess of daily life.
Pandavani, a popular folk form of Chhattisgarh, is the narrative art of telling the tales of the Pandavas from the Mahabharata. Teejan Bai, born and brought up in the lowliest of social and economic circumstances, almost single-handedly transformed this art into a vehicle of not only the epic episodes, but also of social and moral criticality. She was very nearly the first woman performer in the exclusively male-dominated Pandavani. She took this Chhattisgarhi genre of creative expression to the national and international levels.
Teejan, through her self-chosen art, converted the lowliness of her circumstances into depth. She was able to transgress the conventional constraints into a bold, open-ended arena of moral and social interrogation. The irony of a low-caste woman making a foundational text, a classic of Hinduism, come alive could not be lost on her audience, nor its contemporary relevance be overestimated.
It became Teejan Bai’s Mahabharata. She seemed to be possessed by it. On the stage, she almost owned it. Classics are classics because they allow constant discovery and reinvention. However, reinventions in performance often do not get the recognition that scholarly or intellectual discoveries and explorations of the same classics get. In our time, if Buddhadeb Basu (Bengali), Durga Bhagwat and Irawati Karve (Marathi), and Dharmveer Bharati (Hindi) have discovered the Mahabharata and reinterpreted it in literature, Teejan Bai has done so in performance.
We came to know of Teejan Bai through theatreperson Habib Tanvir in the late 1970s. He was already creating a new kind of modernism in theatre by engaging the energy and vitality of some of the folk performers of Chhattisgarh. When Teejan Bai performed for the first time in Bhopal, we were struck by the many elements of her performance; and the ease and confidence with which she handled a variety of emotions and experiences: love, longing, grief, tenderness, waiting, wonder, shock, challenge, resolve to fight, retaliation, contemplation, moral dilemma, burning questions. She smoothly moved from one to the other, as she did from enacting a variety of characters such as Krishna, Duryodhana, Karna, Bheema, Arjuna, Draupadi, and Gandhari. While they were part of a narrative being said and sung, suggested and enacted, each one emerged with a marked and distinct persona.
She spoke, sang, whispered, shouted, wailed, laughed, and, in a manner, wove them together in her unending, almost interminable, episodes from the great epic.
In between, with humour and sarcasm, she would punctuate the narration with bits of contemporary happenings, commenting sharply on their import and implication. In her performance, we, who watched her, were transported to an epical time, in which the past and the present seamlessly merged. Teejan Bai spoke to the great epic Mahabharata, but she also addressed the clumsy, chaotic, clueless ‘Mahabharata’ we currently live in.
Teejan Bai had a troubled personal life, a depressing ethos of social stigma. But she fiercely protected her art from being soiled by it, refusing to carry the suffering visibly. Perhaps she was, in this respect, an unsuspecting classicist who did not use art for self-expression. And yet she was a woman, her female presence and gesture undeniable, and sometimes stark. She was a woman who was telling us stories and episodes from a classical past, revealing aspects of our eternal human condition.
She became a human voice, a human presence, a human oracle, reaffirming that we are all human beings who have a lot to share with each other: songs, stories, strengths, foibles, dignity and arrogance — all markers of irrepressible humanity.
Teejan Bai was admired by lakhs of people, both in India and abroad. She received many honours: the Rajya Shikhar Samman of the Madhya Pradesh government, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan. She emerged as the most admired and awarded folk performing female artiste in India.
She travelled far and wide and carried both the Mahabharata and the Chhattisgarhi fragrance all along. I recall that when she went to Paris to perform for the first time, she was scheduled to give about a dozen concerts, but performed twice the number due to public demand.
From singing on small chabutaras and under trees in rural Chhattisgarh, she rose to perform in hallowed halls and glittering spaces, both within India and elsewhere. But she remained the same Teejan, always narrating and singing in Chhattisgarhi, in a sari, with an ektara in her hand.
She occupied the stage, as it were, for more than half a century. She has now left. If there is a heaven, the ultimate resort of gods and heroes, Teejan Bai must already be performing before them, singing to them their own tales, which might have disappeared from their memory due to widespread divine amnesia. She might also be reminding them how they were like other humans — earthy, fallible and lovable.
— The writer is a Hindi poet-critic and art lover based in Delhi. As Secretary, Culture, Madhya Pradesh, in the 1980s, he brought Teejan Bai to international prominence