Play Enchantment stages Pandit Ravi Shankar’s life as a confluence of art forms

When Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus premiered in 1979, it startled audiences by portraying Mozart not as a saintly prodigy but as a messy, fragile, all-too-human genius. With Enchantment, playwright-director Gowri Ramnarayan attempts something similar for Pandit Ravi Shankar: to show us not just the sitar maestro, but the man behind the myth.

Gowri Ramnarayan’s play, Enchantment, humanises Pandit Ravi Shankar

“Liberty in art is never licence, but interpretation,” Gowri says. “My fidelity was not to dates, but to his emotional journey that carried the weight of memory.” She braids theatre, music and dance into one tapestry, not in imitation of ancient theories like the Natya Shastra, but from instinct and training. “In Enchantment, I used music and dance not as pastiche, but as organic fusion. Since my protagonist is a dancer turned musician, it seemed natural that this story should be told in a theatre of confluence.”

The production, staged by JustUs Repertory, combines recorded tracks of Ravi Shankar himself with live dance and performance. Vocals by Bombay Jayashri, alongside Aditya Prakash, Vignesh Ishwar and Chaitra Sairam, merge with tabla, flute, and violin, creating what Gowri calls “compositions where I heard the moans of yearning, trills of wonder, the silence of meditation. They resonated with the inner arc of the story and evoked the protagonist’s changing moods.”

If Shaffer’s Amadeus was refracted through Salieri’s envy, here it is Ravi Shankar who revisits his life. “When he narrates his own story, we are drawn by memory. Its selectivity, tenderness, evasions, regrets, honesty,” Gowri explains. “The dramatic tension lies in the audience listening to him not as an omniscient narrator but as a man trying to make sense of himself, to himself.” For her, theatre achieves something other forms cannot. “A book narrates, a film illustrates, but theatre breathes in real time with real bodies, with blood flow and pulse beat. The audience is sitting with the protagonist, listening to him, sharing his ups and downs, his regrets and his triumphs.”

She is equally clear-eyed about her subject’s flaws. “His unappeasable hunger drove him to greatness, but it also brought conflict in his personal life. In balancing apotheosis with controversy, I did not soften or sensationalise. I let both stand side by side. Because only when we see his fallibilities can we truly measure his ascent.”

For actor Yohan Chacko, stepping into Ravi Shankar’s psyche meant embracing paradox. “Ravi Shankar wasn’t just a saintly sitar player, he was passionate, flawed, restless, constantly reinventing himself,” he says. “That paradox— between discipline and desire, tradition and rebellion — was what I latched on to.”

On stage, he says, the goal was to ground him: “To show the fragility behind the genius, because that’s where audiences connect.” The ragas themselves became his guide. “The ragas weren’t just background, they were the bloodstream of the play, my metronome and compass.” And what lingers after the performance? “The sense of searching,” he reflects. “He leaves me with that unfinished journey inside me just out of reach.”

If Yohan is the heartbeat, Aarabi Veeraraghavan supplies its shifting chorus. She plays every other character in Ravi Shankar’s world, a task she calls one of her most complex yet. “The first step is to flesh out each character and their peculiarities. I find that writing about that character helps me do that. My dance training helps me embody multiple voices and bodies without losing coherence,” she says.

“This has been one of the most complex things I’ve had to do on stage, and it’s required much unlearning and relearning.” Each role demanded versatility but also restraint. “I have learnt to be ruthless in eliminating excesses. Be it gestures, affectations or even lines I am particularly attached to. This process has pushed me into unfamiliar skins and taught me to see the narrative from their eyes.” And though she embodies many, she sees her role not as a bridge but “more as a commentator, observer and the voice filling in the gaps.”

Dance, too, is inseparable from this storytelling. For Renjith and Vijna, every interlude was more than choreography. “Being part of this biographical play was a fulfilling experience. Dance, with its inherent narrative quality, allowed abhinaya and movement to merge seamlessly with the music. In this work, each dance interlude is a character in itself, therefore setting the dance felt effortless and it also gave scope to explore movements based on the meaning of each act,” they say.

For Gowri, such synthesis underscores Ravi Shankar’s insistence on dialogue between East and West. “Musicians build bridges where politicians build walls,” she says. “In his music, dialogue is not dilution. It is enrichment. At a time when the world is shrinking into enclaves, his life insists that cross-cultural encounters are not betrayals but an expansion of the self and the human community.”

The premiere is also a fundraiser for REACH, a Chennai-based NGO that has been working on tuberculosis care and awareness for 26 years. Through Nakshatra centres in private hospitals, REACH provides free treatment, nutritional support and counselling. “Our aim is to hand-hold patients from diagnosis to cure,” says co-founder Dr Nalini Krishnan.

And when the lights go down, Gowri knows what she wants to linger. “I want them to leave not merely awed by his greatness, but wondering how genius is often born in conflict, nurtured by paradoxes. If that question lingers in their breath, in their heartbeat, then the play has done its work.”

Enchantment premieres on September 12, 7 pm, at Museum Theatre, Egmore.

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