William Blake’s poetry and art gets adapted for this performance by Susheela Raman and Jeet Thayil in Puducherry

Like a lot of people, musician Susheela Raman was introduced to William Blake with the poemThe Tyger. When she was older, and moved to the UK from Australia, she would hear the song ‘Jerusalem’ everywhere: at weddings, funerals, public events…

“People hardly sing hymns in England any more but everybody there knows ‘Jerusalem’. Once I began to discover Blake for myself, I soon found out that his influence is everywhere and so many things refer to him,” she recalls. Soon, she began to discover the somewhat latent world of Blake’s visual art. “He has a very unique position as not only one of the most important figures in poetry but also in visual art, and his work has had a really global impact, on literature, poetry, music, film and visual arts especially animation. Anything where the imagination is paramount.” 

So, it is no surprise that William Blake is the muse and medium for a unique project that marries music and spoken word titled, A Golden String, set to take the stage on March 29 and 30, in Puducherry. For this project that has been in the making for a few years, Susheela and Sam Mills, her partner in music and life, have collaborated with poet Jeet Thayil. 

“In 2018, I made a record in Indonesia called ‘Ghost Gamelan’ and for that I recorded a version of Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’. That project finished early because of the pandemic and Sam Mills, my husband and musical partner, and I were locked down in London and really began to drill deeper into Blake’s poems and also found that the words went well with the music we were writing. It felt organic and natural to pursue that and so we wrote a set of songs based on Blake’s poems,” she says. For the duo who has done a lot of music around spiritual traditions, in India and elsewhere, like Sufi Qawali, Tamil Tevaram, and Syrian Christian chants, Blake’s words sat right in with their sound’s psychical intensity. 

Susheela adds, “He was also against convention and orthodoxy, always his own person, and I felt some affinity with that. In music, I have always tried to make my own version of things and not conform to anybody’s else’s rules, or serve anyone’s agenda. I’m not sure that any art can be policed and still be alive.” 

Blake worked at a moment in time in London when it was very difficult to speak one’s mind and there was repression of free speech because the government was fearful of rebellion and dissent, so he had to be very inventive and use metaphor. 

“Perhaps that resonates with how public expression works now,” adds Susheela. “Blake made up his own mythology, as a kind of map of the self, with the character ‘Urizen’ representing the inner controller that keeps us in line, in the form of the fears, preconceptions and prejudices that we carry.  Against that deadening presence, the creative spirit he calls ‘Los’ struggles endlessly. These oppositions are always there and that is the nature of life and why we need our imaginations and free spirits.” 

The musicians felt that the best way to perform would be to pair the songs with recitations of other Blake poems while creating visuals from Blake’s visionary paintings and engravings. The poems were first performed with different people reciting in London and then in India with William Dalrymple in Jaipur and the Bengali film director Q in Goa. 

Poet Jeet Thayil

This time, poet Jeet Thayil, who has always loved Blake, came in for a collaboration. “I was 13 when I found ‘The Sick Rose’ in an anthology in my father’s library,” recalls Jeet.

“The poem sets itself in opposition to the watery yearnings of the Romantic tradition. It’s a rebel yell, irresistible to the young reader. Well, here I am, 50 years later, and it still thrills. It thrills to hear Susheela’s electric human version, and to be a part of it. The poem is two stanzas, eight lines, thirty-four words. That’s it, that’s the entirety of it. And to think of the spiritual meanings of that number, thirty-four: completeness, wisdom from experience, an open channel to the divine and its opposite: the word ‘devil’ occurs thirty-four times in the Bible.”

Susheela reiterates that the event is definitely not going to be a genteel poetry evening. “It’s closer to an alternative rock kind of energy,” she says.

“The show is theatrical but raw and direct because it is simple. It’s just voices and a guitar but that works because the words have so many layers and it leaves them space to resonate. Less is more, as they say,” says Susheela. The musicians are also working on translations of the texts into Indian languages including Tamil and Malayalam and will start performing them next year. “We have already performed it in French in Paris. It works really well. This is a ‘Golden String’  we can keep following.”  

Musician Sam Mills
| Photo Credit:
Andrew Catlin

A Golden String will be performed on March 29 and 30 , 7.30pm at The Spot, Puducherry. Tickets are available on urbanaut.app