An excerpt from ‘Song of the Clay Pot: My Journey With the Ghatam’.
The story of my longing for the ghata, this biraha, needs some context. I have myself been intrigued by it and have spent considerable time reflecting and ploughing deeper into what on the surface seems inexplicable. Normally, we are tempted to place such experiences in the realm of the supernatural or miraculous. To my mind, this is just a lazy explanation. It only mystifies the art and the artist further, making them seem so distant and inaccessible. Not just that. It discredits the integrity of all human experiences. Therefore, to stop our inquiry on the level of the supernatural, I believe, would be a mistake, a trap that can fuel our own sense of narcissism and vanity. An experience itself may be incomprehensible; but what led to that singularly extraordinary experience is always worth exploring.
A convincing explanation to my question, I found when I read Constantin Stanislavski’s masterly work An Actor Prepares, where he says:
The best years of my growing up were in a small town that sits snugly in the lap of the Western Ghats. Everybody today knows Dandeli in north-west Karnataka. Tourism has now manufactured this place to suit its needs, making it attractive to tourists, most of whom simply parachute in, pay, plunder and leave. Whitewater rafting and tiger sightings are the tags that have pinned this place on the tourist map. But back in the 1990s, Dandeli was a quaint little town, its radius no more than five kilometres. To leave the town was to enter the thick deciduous and evergreen jungle, her wild and sprawling body draped every day in a myriad hues and doused in a heady mix of forest fragrances. Guardian deity, river Kali, the black one, kept constant vigil as she meandered for long distances through the jungle, before finding her home in the Arabian Sea.
The Dandeli town itself was vibrant and cosmopolitan. Its four prominent enterprises – power generation and industries manufacturing paper, plywood and ferrous alloys – had attracted people from across India. Like in most small towns, life was simple; choices were limited. But unlike many small towns where caste and religious differences are at best tolerated, Dandeli celebrated them. Navaratri, Eid and Christmas – each one was everybody’s festival.
