Creative Work

At Odds With Even Love — an evening of song, story, and letters that brings together queer narratives and letters from late 20th-century South Asia with 17th-century padams, the erotic poem-song genre of Karnatik music (South-Indian art music). Premiered in Chennai on the first anniversary of India’s decriminalisation of homosexuality, the piece has since travelled to over twenty venues across India, Nepal, and the USA. Each performance is interactive, and audiences draw letters to be performed that evening, and the gathering culminates in the audience writing letters to their loved ones that travel with the show, adding to a growing archive of queer love, longing, and loss—now with over a hundred contributions in multiple languages. The work unfolds as a provocation to hear kanatik music queerly, unsettles heteronormative listening, and convenes worlds attuned to the political aesthetics of intimacy and difference.

Ways of Invocation – Longing for Water

In Land is Calling through the Body, a classical padam – a Telugu-language song of longing — redirects its desire from absent lover to absent water. The padam that anchors this performance is attributed to 17th-18th century composer Muddu Natesa Pillai and belongs to the Carnatic repertoire of amorous and devotional poetry. The repeated verse “My desires for you lie withered and dry” becomes an invocation of loss and ecological yearning.

Dance: Navtej Johar; Music: Balakrishnan Raghavan; Video: Anuj Chopra Transliteration and Translation: Balakrishnan Raghavan Location: Chamaru Village, Punjab, India Film 2’24” 2022.

Sound Scene. This exhibit features vocal recordings of seven 18th-century songs from South India that describe the celestial planetary compositions of the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, which directly correspond to the days of the week from Sunday to Saturday.

This exhibit has three entry points, through which you choose to experience these aural ancient planetary worlds across geometric shapes, rhythmic cycles, or the days/planet’s name.

Annanmar Katai – Curated by balakrishnan Raghavan, Annanmar Katai (The Elder Brothers Story) is a 15th-century Tamil oral narrative epic/ballad and is the story of three twins, two elder brothers, and their younger sister. This exhibit is based on Brenda Beck’s collection of the Tamil oral epic, Annanmar Katai, at the ARCE. Recorded in the 1960s in an unelectrified village near Coimbatore in South India, this is a rendition of the Annanmar Katai in the style of Udukkai Pattu (hourglass drum song) by lead bard Erucanampalayam Ramasami and his nephew, Olappalayam Palanisami. The Annanmar Katai is about the lives and conflicts of artisan-trader, feudal-farmer, and tribal-hunter communities. It is a story of three generations of jealousy, quest for power, childlessness, magic, gods, monsters, love, and rivalry. Brenda Beck’s collection at the ARCE is 44 hours long and is the two bards’ recording of the Annanmar Katai across 19 evenings. The archive also has photographs of the performers, the performance space, the temple, and the audience.

YouTube The music video by Balakrishnan Gayathri Raghavan: an original piece produced for the “Performing Voices of Bhakti” Bay Area fellowship!

In this video, Bala sings the poetry of two bhakti saints: Ravidas/Raidas, a Dalit cobbler who lived in 15th-century CE Varanasi, and Nammalvar (9th century CE), who was born into a peasant caste and is celebrated for his Tamil poetry to Vishnu. The two compositions in this project are inspired by raag Gauri, which is common to both South and North Indian art music traditions. Ravidas’ Begumpura is part of the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, and is compiled under the set under the raag Gauri. In line with the utopian imagination of Begumpura (the city with no sorrow), the raga and the composition lend themselves to the long note intervals, aspirational and mercurial leaps, and are often associated with longing, separation, and gestured toward hope and union

A video project by Balakrishnan Raghavan for the Performing Voices of Bhakti Fellowship, 2024. Voice: Balakrishnan Raghavan Guitar: Alex Wand Video Composite & Photography: Saul Villegas of Moderno Mixing: Alex Wand Poems: Naam Avan Ivan, Nammalvar (Tamil), 9th Century CE. Begumpura, Ravidas (Punjabi), 15th Century CE. Composition: Balakrishnan Raghavan Translation: A K Ramanujan, John Hawley, Balakrishnan Raghavan. A.K. Ramanujan, “Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu” (Princeton University Press, 1981). John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, “Songs of the Saints of India,” (Oxford University Press, 1988).

YouTube. Can the call for the secular come from a deeply religious place? How do I make space for other beliefs while I intensely experience my own? Can I perform my rituals in ways that simultaneously consolidate my belief and accommodate others?

The poem, sung in free verse, is a celebration of Allah being the greatest light, written by the great Tamil Nationalist poet Subramania Bharathiyar, and is juxtaposed with a Bhakti poem from a few centuries ago on lord Shiva, both in Tamil.