A mono-act musical play is a particularly fitting tribute to the Hindu saint, poet and musician Soordas, who (legend has it) was ostracised by his parents for being blind, forcing him to leave home at the age of six and tackle life shorn of any support. Despite this, he went on to become the foremost disciple of saint Vallabhacharya, a proponent of Vaishnavism, and pen thousands of bhajans about Lord Krishna that shot him to fame and garnered the patronage of Mughal emperor, Akbar. Expect to see these and countless other milestones of Soordas’s 105- year life, depicted solely by the composer, lyricist, singer and actor Shekhar Sen.

Sen’s fascination with Soordas was planted in his childhood, spent singing bhajans of the great medieval poet. He was struck by the depth of Soordas’s devotion, and the astoundingly vivid details with which he describes Krishna’s early years. “Initially, I was very apprehensive about whether to portray a blind person for two hours – a very tough task. But when I started writing [the play] I realised that people with sight can only see the world [in a 180-degree view], while those without sight are able to see the world [in] 360 degrees,” said Sen in a phone interview with Time Out. Soon a wide audience will get the chance to appreciate Soordas’s extraordinary vision through 36 songs set to his poetry. Composed by Sen using traditional ragas, the songs are interspersed with dialogue to give a fuller picture of Soordas’s life and times. “Just as you would read Shakespeare to know about the culture of England and Tolstoy to understand the culture of Russia, I wanted to portray the best representatives of Indian culture.”

Soordas is Sen’s fifth musical monologue, having previously portrayed great Indian personalities including Tulsi, Kabeer, Vivekanand, Sanmati and Saahab. He has devoted eight hours a day for the last 15 years preparing for these roles – a gruelling process which demands keen focus and dedication to memorise some of the most canonical poems in unfamiliar dialects. For his portrayal of Soordas, he will be singing the poems in Brij Bhasha, the medieval dialect of their writing, while also single-handedly depicting 28 other characters that were vital to the blind sage’s life.

Talk about a tall feat, but one that Sen feels is entirely necessary given the exacting nature of these roles. Disenchanted with the commitment of our current theatrical actors who “use theatre only as a stopgap when they do not have enough work in television or films,” Sen has always been reluctant to share the stage. And besides, he would be hardpressed to find another actor as passionate about devotional music. “You have to understand that it’s only in our culture that we have words like sabda-brahman (transcendental sound) and our great sages have shown us a path towards attaining salvation through their bhajans,” exclaimed Sen.

It’s little surprise that Sen feels so strongly about the power of music. He is the son of Bengali parents who were eminent Gwalior-gharana singers in his hometown of Raipur, who held doctorates in music. After earning his bachelor’s in commerce, Sen trained to be a singer alongside learning the violin, sitar and kathakali at Kamala Devi Sangeet Mahavidyalaya, where his father was the principal. He moved to Mumbai in 1979 and was later signed by HMV as a ghazal singer, but his real calling lay in composing bhajans. Recognising this, he threw himself headlong at devotional music. Since the release of his first album in 1987, comprised entirely of bhajans, he has gone on to write, compose and sing 200 more devotional songs.

Even more impressive is the fact that he has performed almost 1,200 shows for eager non-Hindi speaking audiences across the globe including Suriname, Singapore, US, Indonesia and Belgium. Sen accounts for his broad cross-cultural appeal by pointing to his plays’ overarching meaning, which often transcends language. To illustrate this point Sen recounts a tale about his first show in Chennai, for a mostly Tamilspeaking audience. At the play’s end however, he was greeted by an old Tamilian woman, who put his mind at ease. “I did not understand a word of your play,” she said. “But let me tell you that this was the best evening of my life.”

NCPA Fri June 14.