It is rare to see one play pack several subversive elements. It is even rarer that such subversion is aesthetically woven into the fabric of the play, and does not come across as propaganda. Sanchari is one such play.

Playwright Sumathi Murthy is also an accomplished Hindustani musician. She has chosen music as the subject of her play and has highlighted the several layers of hierarchies and oppression embedded within what we perceive as just a thing of beauty. In A. Mangai's direction and in the solo performance by Ponni Arasu, the Kannada play's interwoven politics of gender, sexuality and art come through with power and punch. Sanchari was staged in Delhi in January, at the annual festival of the National School of Drama.

The play unfolds as the story of Raag Kalyani, narrated by the protagonist, Kalyani. She describes, with a sense of achievement and confidence, her life as a beautiful raga (raag/ ragam) traversing various regions of west and south Asia, taking various forms depending on the nature of the music and the musician caressing her.

At the very outset, we see Kalyani emphasizing the indeterminacy of her origins, the impossibility of establishing whether she is from medieval Greece, ancient Persia or Arabia. She takes pride in the fact that she is a wanderer, does not belong to one place or one man. She is a 'sanchari', she moves about; if she stays in one place for a while with a composer or a musician, it is on her own terms.

When she thus makes her origin and parentage irrelevant, Kalyani reminds us of the famous Tamil proverb that forbids us from going in search of the origins of a sage and a river – both considered holy. By taking pride in her self-proclaimed state of being a 'lawaris', a vagabond, Kalyani aligns herself with the holy wanderers that religious narratives tell of.

At the same time, she rejects attribution of 'holiness' to herself by recounting tales of her relationships with different singers and composers at various times in history at various places. She does not mind being called a whore. She describes how she has even been a courtesan adorning the various courts of the Sultanate period, including in Akbar's court; her presence in Krishnadevaraya's court in southern India is also well-known.

Kalyani is very careful in teasing out the different nature of her relationships with different composers and singers. Often, in speaking of musicians and their relationships with the ragas they sing, our imagination is colourless and de-sexualized. Kalyani would not have such boredom! She spells out that while her relationships with Thyagaraja and Balamuralikrishna are childlike, with Swathi Tirunal of Kerala and Sadarang (also known as Niyamat Khan, 1670-1748) she had romantic rendezvous. Her most erotic relationship, however, was with Mogubai Kurdekar (1904-2001) , a female vocalist of the Jaipur gharana.

Throughout the performance, Kalyani continues to reject the violence of one story, one narrative, and any one way of looking at her.

As an one-actor show, Sanchari works very well; it is in keeping with the spirit of Kalyani, which emerges from the play's text – an independent, no-nonsense, travelling woman who stays, if she stays, on her own terms. Ponni Arasu makes full use of the props, the most important of which is a long, trailing piece of cloth that starts at some indeterminate point in the sky, symbolic of Kalyani's untraceable origins, and winds around the whole stage and imaginary space. As she narrates the story, Ponni continues to handle this complex cloth, takes it here and there, works with it, brings it alive, makes it stand for all the complex journeys that Kalyani has undertaken, and all the exquisite relationships she has experienced.

Without Mangai's judicious direction, it could still have happened that the play is a piece of "high art" dealing in ragas of Hindustani and Carnatic schools of music and the various star composers and singers of classical Indian music. Mangai's longstanding engagement with non-classical performance art forms comes to bolster that part of the script which talks about how Kalyani was once also considered an impure form, an outsider, by the likes of the 17th century musicologist Venkatamakhi. Mangai makes Kalyani rap and dance in addition to verbally questioning the authority of the so-called "high art".

One of my favourite moments is Kalyani's story of how she meets Maharaja Swathi Tirunal of Travancore. The way Ponni Arasu depicts Kalyani losing herself in the pleasure of being sung by Swathi Tirunal comes back to us when we see again her interpretation of the pleasure Kalyani derives when Mogubai sings her. These two moments of pleasure have been beautifully directed and performed. Kalyani's admission of jealousy at Swathi favouring Raag Behag over her, makes her very human and vulnerable, and so does her open confession of those feelings to Swathi before she goes her way.

The several lessthan-20-seconds audio recordings (for copyright reasons) of various songs in Raag Kalyani/ Yaman form a parallel collage to the text. They defy being organized into one neat picture, too. For, how can you form one coherent "high" narrative with 20-seconds of Kishori Amonkar, S P Balasubramaniam, Mogubai Kurdekar, Lata Mangeshkar, Balamuralikrishna, Shankar Mahadevan, Farida Khanum, et al!

True to her being a 'sanchari', Kalyani moves on, taking a million forms, cozying up inside several songs, flowing through the music of many artists, wafting as a wordless alapana, cascading through swift swara patterns, lilting in an old Hindi song, teasing in the lines of a ghazal, echoing in the distant voice of the Baul singer…. She moves on. It is in her nature to move on

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