In Kabir, her melodies trust

CHENNAI: A dancer, singer, theatre actor and an artist, she is all rolled into one. But there is one common factor that connects all of Bindhumalini Narayanswamy’s interest — Kabir. The dohas (couplets) that we studied in school might have seemed simple with just a message, but for Bindhumalini it is a way of life. “Everytime I read them, I find a different dimension and meaning to it,” she says during the course of our chat. An alumna of The School KFI, she will be performing on the last day of Satkriya, a fundraiser to shift the school from Adyar to Thazhambur, along with Vednath Bharadwaj.

Though she was born into a family where everyone learnt music and dance, it was when she joined The School that her interest in arts became serious. “I joined The School when I was in Class 11, when everyone else was worried about getting into IIT. My sister, writer Jaya Madhavan, was working there and I expressed my interest casually one day to join KFI, as I really like the fact that we could choose our subjects. To my surprise I was taken mid-term,” she recalls.

Bindhumalini was never an ardent listener of music, though the radio was on 24x7. “Carnatic music was always in the air while growing up. But one afternoon, I was listening to Bhimsen Joshi’s songs and that made a deep impact on me. When I joined National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, I was on a quest to find a Hindustani teacher and that ended a year later with Ustad Abdul Rashid Khan who was 99 then, in 2007,” she says.

In her tryst with Hindustani music, she also met Vedanth, with whom she usually performs. “He had come up with an album Mathi Kahe in 2007 and wanted to perform the songs. But at the time, all the songs were distributed to other singers. So we started looking for Kabir songs and we chanced upon Pundit Kumar Gandharv’s record and there was a song Naiharwa. Though I didn’t understand what it meant, I wanted to perform it,” she says. It was then that she was introduced to Kabir that changed the course of her life.

“By then I had decided I wanted to become a performer of Hindustani and I found that Kabir resonated well with me. While Carnatic music was all about Rama and Krishana, Hindustani was about the beloved. But Kabir speaks about death, letting go, looking within, saying hello to the god you pray to, etc. His form of nirgun poetry made sense to me,” she shares.

In 2011, when Jaya wrote a book Kabir —The Weaver Poet, she was called for a reading and Bindhumalini got closer to the mystic poet. “She felt that a reading alone is not enough and asked me if I will sing some of the couplets, whereas our cousin, a dancer, would dance to it,” she says.

The experiences with Kabir kept snowballing and she collaborated with Vedanth on his second album. “He had hit a roadblock and he brought me on board. We began brainstorming, then met with people who could guide us along the journey. Shabnam Virmani, who was into Kabir Project then, was one among them.

She introduced us to the Rajasthan Kabir Yatra (2012), my first ever first huge Kabir performance,” she says adding that Kabir’s songs started becoming meditative and helped break all the conditioning in her head. “I started realising that the bhakti poets sang what they sang in that moment. Dikshitar or a Thyagaraja did not plan to sing a verse, but it just happened out of that spiritual experience. That’s exactly what I feel with Kabir.”

For their performance at Satrkriya, Bindhumalini and Vedant will share glimpses of mystic poets like Purandradasa, Kabir, Amri Khusro and Meera in their blend of western, Carnatic and Hindusthani music.