DANCE : Tribute Tells Life of One of India’s Greatest Saints

For the first 30 years of his life, Shree Puramdara Daasa would have made the top of anyone’s Scrooge list.

Few would have predicted that one day he would become one of India’s greatest saints and would make enormous contributions to India’s classical music.

Puramdara Daasa will be the subject of a three-hour music and dance tribute sponsored by the Orange County-based Shree Haridaasa Tharangini (“Eternal River of Saints”) foundation on Saturday) at the Long Beach Convention Center.

A billionaire jeweler of his day--about 500 years ago--Puramdara Daasa could scale epic heights of self-serving miserliness. He declined, for instance, to surrender a few precious jewels to make a medicine that would save his sick father.

“What are his chances of living if we use these precious gems?” Puramdara Daasa is said to have asked, according to Keri Prakash, one of five founders of the presenting foundation.

“The chances are slim, but none at all if we don’t use them,” the doctor replied.

“Well, if he’s to die, let him die,” Puramdara Daasa answered.

So he let his father die.

The turning point in this miserable life, according to Prakash, occurred when an old beggar (actually, the story goes, it was the God Hari in disguise) asked for a few coins to pay for a religious ceremony for his poor son. After putting him off for six months, Puramdara Daasa finally gave him a worn-out nickel (in some versions of the story) or counterfeit coins (in others).

In desperation, the man sought the jeweler’s virtuous wife, who gave him her sole remaining personal possession, a diamond nose ring. Puramdara Daasa flew into such a rage that his wife was driven to attempt suicide. She was about to swallow a goblet of poison when the gods miraculously replaced the deadly liquid with the very ring she had given the beggar.

When Puramdara Daasa saw the miracle occur, he realized the degree of his errors, gave away all his money to the poor and became a wandering monk.

The story says that he went on over the remaining 50 years of his life to compose about 425,000 songs honoring the gods.

“People up to this time had been wrapped up in rituals and dogmas,” Prakash said. “He sang out simple poetry, with such meaning. He was an absolutely phenomenal person, perhaps the greatest human being who walked the soil. Nobody in India, if you take the sum total of all the composers after him, equaled what he did.”

Prakash agreed that the huge number of compositions credited to Puramdara Daasa is unverifiable. “Very few he actually sat down and wrote,” Prakash said. “But he had a lot of followers who took down a number of his compositions. What has survived are 1,300. Even to write 1,300 is a tremendous achievement. It is very popularly believed that he composed 425,000 songs. It could be an exaggeration, but not an exaggeration by far.”

The text and plot of the dance drama to be performed Saturday was conceived by Viji Prakash (Keri’s wife), a well-known Los Angeles-based bharata natya m dancer who maintains a branch of her Shakti Foundation for the Performing Arts in Orange.

Viji Prakash said she researched the master’s surviving compositions, preserved in about four thick volumes, and picked out the ones that would be suitable to tell his life story and philosophy.

“It was a mammoth effort,” she said, noting that it was especially challenging “to show what happened to him over the course of (his life), presenting this transformation in three hours.”

The program will present an uncommon diversity of Indian dance and music styles, bringing to the stage such notable artists as Lakshmi Shankar, one of the country’s foremost Hindustani-style musicians and sister-in-law of sitarist Ravi Shankar, and Chitresh Das, a well-known master of the Kathak dance style, among others. The major artists will choreograph and compose their own contributions.

“It’s always been my dream to do a program where musicians, dancers and everyone would come together,” Viji Prakash said. “Everyone has worked positively together.”

The foundation (formed in August) hopes Saturday’s tribute will launch an annual series of similar salutes.

“We are trying to bring to the public the messages which have been written, sung and preached by the various saints, philosophers, musicians and artists,” said founding foundation member Sampat Raghavan.

The foundation decided to start with Puramdara Daasa, whose birthday is on Saturday, because he was a combination of “music composer, saint, philosopher and social reformer,” Raghavan said.

“He is considered an incarnation of the sage Naarada,,” said Raghavan, “the originator of all music.”

The Shree Haridaasa Tharangini foundation will present the first performance of the dance-drama “Shree Puramdara Daasa” Saturday at 6:30 p.m. at the Terrace Theatre at the Long Beach Convention Center, 300 East Ocean Blvd. Tickets: $5 to $15. Information: (213) 480-3232 or (714) 740-2000.