Morning Raga

“The rustic south. An aura of Carnatic music. A diaspora of ploughed soil. Early morning moistness. The breath of dried chilies.

The Andhra Pradesh countryside.

In a village, not far there once lived Swarnalatha (Shabana Azmi), a talented singer who always aspired to sing before a huge audience. One fine day, she gets this chance and beckons her dear friend, Vaishnavi to accompany her on the violin while she sings. The stage is set in the city, not far from her island village. After convincing her husband, the two women with their sons (one each) board a mofussil bus to the city on the much-awaited day. Tragedy strikes and the bus tumbles and skids across the brink of the bridge. Swarnalatha’s son and Vaishnavi get killed.

Left with fault and remorse, Swarnalatha self-imposes exile. Never to sing again. Never to cross the bridge to the city”.

That was the first 7 min of the film, in brief. The rest is a luminous tale of loss and redemption. Every character in the film finds his or her lost self in ways that are forever unpredictable and surprising for there lies the power of music to heal and unify even the splintered of souls.  

Twenty years cross, and two characters emerge into this unfinished tale. Abhinay (Prakash Rao), Vaishnavi’s son returns to the village to open up the hardly healed wounds of music. And Pinky (Perizaad Zorabian), the boutique owner’s daughter, struck with guilt enters the story for the fateful bus accident was caused by her father’s drunken health.

Amidst these fragile relations, Mahesh Dattani’s Morning Raga, an English language film with smatterings of Telugu takes the viewer on a journey into the pastel shades of emotions and that of the smudged fortitudes of rural India. Where traditional values of Swarnalatha drench this pictorial in emery, modern uprooting of Abhinay and Pinky cry for a change, a revolution to let Swarnalatha sing. Once again. Across the symbolic bridge to the city.