From the Editor’s Desk

Finding Voice

The year was 2016, the plush corridors of the Leela Palace Hotel suddenly resounded with a haunting rustic voice. Teejan Bai had arrived on stage for the Bangalore Poetry Festival. Dressed in a light pink saree, carrying her Tambura and wearing beautiful tribal jewellery, Teejan bai took the stage while raging with fever that nobody in the audience knew about. She had popped some pills earlier in the evening and looked as robust as my childhood memory of her.

As I sat in the dark, I remembered my father's mesmerised face as he spoke of her performance of the Pandavani. Traditionally a male bastion, Teejan had broken those barriers, to take her song and poetry into international stages. On that evening I was reminded of the glorious culture of performance poetry in our country, hasya kavis in Hindi, Kobi lodai in Bengal, Vidrohi's verses in JNU and Pandvani in Chhattisgarh. All of these traditions harked upon a culture of poetry being performed on stage, where sometimes the audiences sang, laughed and even danced with you.

That evening in the confines of the intimate gallery at the Leela, Teejan Bai stormed on through her performance, magnificent in her stride, her song, the musicians around her in awe of her prowess, and her ability to take on an entire society that had denied her the permission to perform this ancient art of singing the Mahabharata, of becoming characters both male and female. She had repeatedly sounded worried earlier behind the stage about losing voice, and yet, both memory and voice had not failed this artist.

More and more poets falter on stage, we become a murmur prone to shutting out the world, writing a whisper of ourselves. What used to be a collective voice, now singular in the corridors of quiet. Should we find that chorus again? How, and how I wonder. I had asked her about the large silver kamarbandh that she wore around her waist, 'Iska bojh bada bhari hai'(this weighs you down) she had replied with a smile.Teejan Bai is dead, long live her voice. Her soft pink saree, and the gentle smile, her robust voice telling people that here stood an uneducated woman daring to sing before you, remained with me  though.

It is August of 2026, mid way through the year, here's to regaining lost voice, finding new ones and reinstating old hesitants.

Read on dear readers

Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury
Managing Editor, The Bangalore Review