Morning Raga

Morning Raga tells the very dramatic story of a Carnatic singer, Swarnalata (Shabana Azmi), who loses her little son and her close friend, who's also her violinist-accompanist, in a bus accident.

Twenty years after the calamity, the dead woman's son Abhinay (Prakash Rao) returns to the village to open up hardly healed wounds.
The light touch that Dattani lends to the inherently dramatic plot is a marvel of creative restraint. The narrative is carpeted with pastel shades of emotions and a surprisingly large amount of humour ladled out gently, like the subtle strains of the tanpura wafting softly into a room quivering with hushed voices.

Morning Raga is a raga recital played out at a tenor that's as gentle as the breeze blowing through the Andhra Pradesh village where Swarnalata, stoic in her grief-stricken remembrance of the past, comes face to face with her dead friend's adamant son.

"My mother did a lot for you. She's gone. But I'm here...or maybe that doesn't mean anything to you," Abhinay mocks the proudly grieving singer, prodding awake her most precious and indelible memories, provoking her into jazz-raga sessions with her friend's adamant son.

In this way she finds a son she lost, while the young man rediscovers a mother whose memory he embraced all his life.