05-09-2009, 04:43 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-09-2009, 04:56 PM by Bharatvarsh.)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->HOMER IN INDIA.
Publication Date: 20-NOV-06
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-59...R-IN-INDIA.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Excerpt from the article:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->According to the Rohet aunts, the Dev Narayan epic--which, recited in full, could take almost a month of eight-hour, nightlong performances--had been written down only some thirty years ago. The person who did this was a distant neighbor and friend of the aunts, an elderly but feisty-sounding Rajasthani rani (or princess) named Laxmi Kumari Chundawat. I discovered that Laxmi Chundawat was still living in Jaipur, and we arranged to meet there, in her family's town house.
I found the old lady sitting on a cane chair on the veranda of an inner courtyard. She was a poised and intelligent octogenarian, whose fine bones were obscured by thick librarian glasses, which perched heavily on her nose and gave her expression a rather owlish gleam. She told me that she had been born in the family palace at Deogarh, from which her father had ruled a huge semi-desert principality. The purdah system--the seclusion of women--still operated then as much for Hindu aristocratic women as for Muslim ones, but in 1957 the Rani had shocked her family by emerging from the zanana and standing for the Rajasthan Assembly.
"The area where the story of Dev Narayan was set was in my father's principality and in my own constituency," she said. It was during her time in the assembly that she became interested in the epic, but she also became increasingly fearful that it was under threat from television and the cinema. "When I realized that the epic about him was beginning to die out," she added, "I determined to do something about it."
In the early nineteen-seventies, the Rani began inquiring if any of the local bhopas still knew the entire saga by heart. Many knew the outlines, she discovered, and some knew parts in detail, but none seemed to know the entire story. Eventually, however, she was directed to a village near Jaipur where an old gray-bearded bhopa named Lakshminarayan lived. She persuaded him to come to her house, along with another bhopa ("to encourage him"), while she went to Delhi and bought a tape recorder.
"He came to stay with me for ten or twelve weeks," she said. "He used to sing and I used to write. We did nothing else except this, six or seven hours at a time. It is astonishing that any individual could remember such a long work. In my printed edition, it takes six hundred and twenty-six pages.
"The bhopa told me he was only four years old when his father began to teach him to learn it by heart," the Rani continued. "Every day, he had to learn ten or twenty lines by rote. His father gave him buffalo milk so that his memory would improve.
"Anyway," she added, "I've arranged a performance of the Pabuji epic for you tonight. Mohan Bhopa is coming here at seven. So you can ask him all about it then." <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devnarayan
Publication Date: 20-NOV-06
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-59...R-IN-INDIA.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Excerpt from the article:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->According to the Rohet aunts, the Dev Narayan epic--which, recited in full, could take almost a month of eight-hour, nightlong performances--had been written down only some thirty years ago. The person who did this was a distant neighbor and friend of the aunts, an elderly but feisty-sounding Rajasthani rani (or princess) named Laxmi Kumari Chundawat. I discovered that Laxmi Chundawat was still living in Jaipur, and we arranged to meet there, in her family's town house.
I found the old lady sitting on a cane chair on the veranda of an inner courtyard. She was a poised and intelligent octogenarian, whose fine bones were obscured by thick librarian glasses, which perched heavily on her nose and gave her expression a rather owlish gleam. She told me that she had been born in the family palace at Deogarh, from which her father had ruled a huge semi-desert principality. The purdah system--the seclusion of women--still operated then as much for Hindu aristocratic women as for Muslim ones, but in 1957 the Rani had shocked her family by emerging from the zanana and standing for the Rajasthan Assembly.
"The area where the story of Dev Narayan was set was in my father's principality and in my own constituency," she said. It was during her time in the assembly that she became interested in the epic, but she also became increasingly fearful that it was under threat from television and the cinema. "When I realized that the epic about him was beginning to die out," she added, "I determined to do something about it."
In the early nineteen-seventies, the Rani began inquiring if any of the local bhopas still knew the entire saga by heart. Many knew the outlines, she discovered, and some knew parts in detail, but none seemed to know the entire story. Eventually, however, she was directed to a village near Jaipur where an old gray-bearded bhopa named Lakshminarayan lived. She persuaded him to come to her house, along with another bhopa ("to encourage him"), while she went to Delhi and bought a tape recorder.
"He came to stay with me for ten or twelve weeks," she said. "He used to sing and I used to write. We did nothing else except this, six or seven hours at a time. It is astonishing that any individual could remember such a long work. In my printed edition, it takes six hundred and twenty-six pages.
"The bhopa told me he was only four years old when his father began to teach him to learn it by heart," the Rani continued. "Every day, he had to learn ten or twenty lines by rote. His father gave him buffalo milk so that his memory would improve.
"Anyway," she added, "I've arranged a performance of the Pabuji epic for you tonight. Mohan Bhopa is coming here at seven. So you can ask him all about it then." <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devnarayan