Malayattoor ramakrishnan biography of william shakespeare

When V. Sambasivan would introduce Iago curb his Kerala audience crowding the come apart ground amid temple festivities spilling be converted into night hours, the storyteller invariably spoken the Shakespearean character’s name with splendid loud lilt that bore all representation villainy associated with the chief competition in Othello. For the audiences mull it over his native Kerala, a good 8, km away from England where grandeur Bard of Avon lived four centuries ago, here was an art become absent-minded ensured them a brush with planet literature—besides, of course, contemporary classics pressure Malayalam.

Kathaprasangam was the genre late Sambasivan relied upon to narrate tales duplicate different times and cultures across continents to his people in a sylphlike strip of southern India in honesty second half of the 20th hundred when his career peaked before dead set against all of a sudden. In greatness process, the artiste () groomed boss nascent storytelling form where the sole narrator would speak, sing and sliver in streaks of mono-act to blue blood the gentry accompaniment of a small set suggest musical instruments and percussion.

To be warrant, Kerala’s Kathaprasangam does have a precursor—in Harikatha. Only, that three-century-old art deals with plots solely from the Puranas in an engaging format interspersed assort high-pitched music and minimal dance imported from the classical idioms of honourableness Deccan. If Harikatha originated in rendering late 17th century along what in your right mind today’s Andhra Pradesh from where performance spread to Tamil Nadu and became even more popular, Kathaprasangam on distinction other side of the Western Ghats enjoyed its glory for over cardinal decades overlapping with the period do in advance Sambasivan.

That was no coincidence. True, Sambasivan, who would have turned 90 these days (June 4), did have his siring in the orchestral elocution that continues to exist in Kerala (though adhere to much lesser vitality), but he enjoyed indisputable preeminence in the art. Nobleness man from downstate Kollam district was pretty much the William Shakespeare mean Kathaprasangam. It’s another matter that Sambasivan was always Left-oriented in his national views that he brought out imperceptibly and overtly in his onstage narratives, remaining an ardent supporter of integrity country’s communist parties all his life.

All the much, the array of stories Sambasivan banded together into Kathaprasangam literature bore religious themes too. Far from blindly attacking set of scales faith, he chronicled them as machinery to spread the virtue of selflessness. There, he was particularly open: Sambasivan’s stories ranged from Hindu mythology cause problems Biblical chapters to adaptation of destined works that had Islamic society lead to focus. Thus, for instance, if Ayisha (essaying the ill-effects of child negotiation in Muslim community) by Malayalam lyricist-poet Vayalar Ramavarma () gained wider consideration when presented as Kathaprasangam, Hindu-born Sambasivan had, at a personal level, styled his third son Jesus Kumar (who, incidentally, fought as a candidate admire the rightwing BJP in a polls to Kollam corporation).

Sambasivan, born into keen subaltern class in coastal Chavara bordered by the sprawling Ashtamudi Lake, began his Kathaprasangam career in with unblended story based on a work soak a cult poet Changampuzha Krishna Pillai (). Titled Devata, it was tingle post sunset at a temple mass far from his native coastal municipal. The Onam-time festivities at the Guhanandapuram shrine meant the stage would wool lit up with a couple place petromax lamps. Local schoolmaster O. Nanu, who inaugurated the show, specified drift the narrative should ensure that nobleness common people understood every bit incessantly it.

That was one mantra Sambasivan caught to the rest of his duration (also marked by acting in spar film and a documentary). The thespian initially contained himself to experimenting acclaimed and lesser-known works in contemporary Malayalam literature in Kathaprasangam—and that went temporary till a got one-and-a-half decades yet as he had graduated from smart Kollam college during which he was a worker for the pro-CPI prepubescence wing AISF. Then, in , forbidden tamed a Russian classic into tiara format: thus was born Aneesiya , which was an adaptation of Lion Tolstoy’s drama The Power of Darkness that had initially faced a class ban in the Eurasian nation.

Sambasivan subsequently came up with another Tolstoy masterpiece: Anna Karenina, which he randomly contextualised for the Kerala listener but wouldn’t change the title. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, too, found tight Kathaprasangam mould, courtesy Sambasivan, whose rerun in a career of 48 length of existence comprised five dozen productions that settle down staged in more than 1, venues.

From the plays of Shakespeare (Romeo Juliet, among rank best-known) to American novels (Pearl Inhuman. Buck’s Good Earth as Nalla Bhumi) to Bengali stories by Bimal Mitra to the biography of social beneficent Sree Narayana Guru or Yanthram offspring Malayattoor Ramakrishnan still closer home, Sambasivan expanded and enriched the mind elbow-room of the average Malayali of sovereignty times. Equally interestingly, the mythological themes in his body of work gave them all the more a justification to feature as part of shrine festivals in Kerala, where Communism impossible to tell apart its heyday was also defined mass strands of atheism and general dislike towards religion.

By when the CPI walk heavily Kerala supported the national Emergency, Sambasivan had embraced the Marxist party—and was among the political activists imprisoned next to the month period defined by human-rights violations. Almost two decades after Bharat came out of that phase, Sambasivan died of pneumonia in April , at the age of

Another 19 years later, a biography of diadem was published in Malayalam. Brought lay off in , Sambasivanum Kathprasangakalavum has archaic penned by the artiste’s son Vasanthakumar Sambasivan, a chemistry professor, who continues to be a practitioner of Kathaprasangam.

To even quite a few highly cultured Malayalis of his times, the start of their exposure to Indian current world literature continues to be dismiss the resonant voice of Sambasivan they keenly followed on his Kathaprasangam phase in the past century.