The tale of a storyteller
Dr.Velu Saravanan from the Performing Arts Department casts a spell by his storytelling skills on his young audience.
Even before the evolution of language, stories have been told through signs, symbols and other means. Since then, stories are being narrated through various mediums using a variety of techniques. The symposium on Rabindranath Tagore held by Sahitya Akademi and Auroville Tamil Heritage centre at Auroville saw one such story being narrated by Dr.Velu Saravanan who is popularly known as “Velu Mama” among the kids all over Tamilnadu. He narrated the time tested short story The Home-coming of Rabindranath Tagore translated in Tamil as Rajaakaalam by another Poet laureate none other than our own Ettaiyapuram Poet, Bharathiyar.
The story depicts the vexations of a 13 year old boy named Phatik Chakravorti. As he matures into adolescence from childhood, he is forced to leave behind his widowed mother and go to Calcutta with his uncle Bishamber, where he struggles with the new world he is thrown into. When he pesters his uncle to take him back to his village to his mother, he asks him to wait till the Rajaakaalam which is the vacation time. Very soon after his futile attempt to escape back to his village, Phatik Chakraborti falls sick. The story ends when his mother arrives and takes him back to their native village. Dr.Velu Saravanan who is now an Assistant Professor, teaching Performing Arts in Pondicherry University, narrated the whole story in full throttle and moved many members of the audience to tears.
Usually a joyful children theatre artist Velu surprised many of his viewers with his gestures and articulations evoking the tragic rasa. Dr.Velu Saravanan effectively portrayed the pains of an adolescent boy when separated from his mother. Some of his crew members enacted the characters that Phatik Chakravorti interacts within the story. The songs in the story were used by Dr.Velu in his rendering where Mr.Murugavel came into play from behind the screens. The sufferings of a boy in the transition between childhood and adolescence who feels that he is a burden to everyone in the world were animatedly narrated by Dr.Velu.
Ponnivalavan
Research Scholar, Film Institute, Chennai
