On the occasion of the recent DVD release of his debut film, Vanaja, here’s the first part of an interview with the film’s director, Rajnesh Domalpalli:
Can you talk more about how this film took some inspiration from a cry in Sophie’s Choice?
I remember seeing Sophie’s Choice a long time ago, before I joined Columbia, and the thing that stayed with me was the child’s scream, that moment of mother-child separation. It lingered with me for a long time. The first semester we had to write a synopsis and that’s when I decided to go back because I knew there was material there that would probably come out in the writing. To my surprise I found that the story began to meander. I started there with mother-child separation. I wrote about the experience, what it feels like through the child. The story began to take on elements that were peculiar to my own experience in real life, growing up in rural Andhra where my father used to work in dam construction. Those elements of life in rural Andhra are finally what got their way into the script and infused the entire film with a sense of a rural ethos.
How long ago did you have, and how clear was, the idea for this film? Did it pre-date you being in the MFA programme?
There are elements I explored a long time ago, when I was in IIT in India, I had written a short story that was picked up by the BBC, that was called The Dowry and that story was about a rape of a young girl, not young girl, but close to a twenty-year-old. That was another thing that worked its way into the film. I think that the earliest seeds of the film were multiple shades, that’s how I would put it. One set was Sophie’s Choice, the other set was my story that I had written in the 80s, so it goes back a long time.
Why kuchipudi dance?
Several reasons why. First, I love our dance and our culture. And I think when you love something you always will try to incorporate it into your work. The second is a the fact that I think our arts are, in general, in trouble because, as I said at several of the places, if you take for example our burra katha, the people who open Vanaja, two of the three are storytellers and they’ve both passed away recently, but when you see their sons, one of them has taken, two sons and a daughter, and two have taken jobs in construction, one is in plumbing.
Now, long ago, if you were to go back 50, maybe 70, years ago these people would have taken their fathers, their parents’ profession and would have carried it on. They would have been performing burra katha in villages and travelling. But they’re not, simply because they can’t make ends meet as burra katha artists.
In the evenings people would watch burra katha because it’s a very entertaining program, there’s comedy, pathos, so many things. Now it’s completely supplanted by TV.
If you take for example, janapatha geetham, which are folk songs, you will hear them in Vanaja in the background, and there again, in the rural areas where I would go and tape these songs, when I would ask the little kids, even the teenagers, “Ok would all of you just sing janapatha geetham?”, and they would say “No, we don’t want to” and I would say “Ok, what would you want to sing?” and they would pick the latest Telugu pop song, the latest Chiranjeevi song.
Somehow now a sense of what is good is really what is coming down from the West. We’re all guilty of that, I wear jeans, I listen to an iPod, and modernization is not going to change, it’s not going to go away. But I feel that we need to capture these elements from our past before they disappear. So coming back to your question, why kuchipudi, I feel all these art forms that we have, are something that we need to showcase.
How did you envision the dance sequences? When did you start work with the choreographer? Did you already have images in your head of what you wanted Vanaja to be expressing as she was dancing or did that come later?
In some ways, some of the things I had already planned. If you read the script, that the script specifies “here we have a tillana” “here we have a dance that has this tone to it” so they’re already there, the tone is already specified. What happened was Mamata started with basic steps in March of 2004, and I would say some time in October I think was where I sat down with the person who was teaching her, and we worked through the choreography of the dance, because it had to feel integral to the story also.
For one of the dances, the second dance, where she’s in a light mood and she’s calling the lover, and kind of boasting about her beauty, that song was written and composed by the music teacher Indiran Periade. The first one is a traditional kuchipudi item that goes back a long time. In the third one, the mood is kind of pining, where she’s calling her lover and is a lovelorn maiden, that was Jayadeva, an ancient poet and the music was composed by the same person who played the violin in the film, his name is Mr. B Narayana. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with carnatic music, but he is a disciple of Mr. Jayakrishnan, who I used to admire as a college student.
When Mr. Jayakrishnan had come to college I remember sitting right at the front row and writing a note that I wanted him to play Vijayvanti which is a nagum, and I remember kind of crawling up to him, he was at this podium, and I remember going very shyly and giving this note, and he played it. At the end he looked at me to see “Did you like it?” and of course it was great. I still remember that.
How old were you then?
I was about 19 or 20.
To be continued…