As a child I thought that Bharata Natyam was pronounced Bhaarat Natyam, and that it had something to do with India’s ancient name, Bhaaratavarsha. Indeed, “Bhaarat Natyam,” to me was nothing less than the dance of India. As a kindergartener in New York City in the mid-sixties, I was the authority, among my small circle of acquaintance, on all things Indian. Patiently I explained to them, time and again, that in India we had not lived in a tepee, but in regular houses made of bricks and cement. And though there were innumerable occasions when excited children came up to me with the claim “I know how to speak Indian,” and proceeded to gravely intone “HOW!” with one palm raised, in the popular imitation of the American Indian greeting, I tried my best not to sound too superior in relieving them of their misconceptions.
“There’s no such language as Indian,” I often explained. “We speak Hindi.” I think I must have known that there were many other Indian languages besides Hindi, but I would have been hard put to name them. However, no challenger with superior knowledge appeared to burst my bubble until I started asking questions for myself, some years later.
New York was – then as now – a great crucible of culture, with plenty of opportunities for those who cared to take them up. Since I was too small to be able to take advantage of most of these, my cultural exposure was limited to accompanying my parents and sisters to evenings of Indian music and dance, and even the occasional Hindi movie being screened by some Indian students’ club at Columbia University. Though I remember many music events, such as Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Allah Rakkha in their legendary partnership of Sitar and Tabla, the dance performances were the ones that became graven images in my mind and soul.
On the way home from such performances, in the noisy anonymity of the roaring subway trains, I would chatter about the performances, asking questions and delivering enthralled critiques. At home I would reinvent entire dance dramas, enacting all the roles myself. Indian classical music inspired me, and I would make up the dance steps to go with it. Apart from indulgent smiles of the grown-ups and my own fun, however, I did not achieve anything much to fuel my pursuit of dance. The one thing that did get fuelled was the desire to learn this great art. I did not think in terms of any particular style. I only wanted to learn Indian dance. But in that great big city, in the days when a chance meeting with a fellow Indian on the road automatically turned into an invitation home for a meal, there was no place I could be sent to fulfil my dreams.
Moving with the family to Geneva, Switzerland, after seven years of battling the tepee fallacy, brought surprises of a different kind. Though I was startled to find that all Indians were referred to as “Les Hindous,” I was delighted at last to find a teacher of Bharata Natyam. And so began my first lessons in Bharata Natyam, under Mrs Malik, one of the Indian Embassy wives who provided dance classes to the Indian and local community. Just as I thought life was getting really grand, “Aunty Malik” stopped taking classes as she had to leave Geneva for her diplomat husband’s next posting. The dream that had come true for a few months went into hibernation once more. But two years later, a professional Bharata Natyam dancer and teacher, Smt. Rajamani Mohan, came to Geneva and began conducting classes. She too left the city after a few months to settle in Holland, but her greatest gift, as far as I was concerned, was to leave her daughter, Padmini, in charge of the Geneva students.
Then it was that a bond of friendship and adulation was forged between Padmini and me. She was young and approachable, she laughed a lot, never made things seem difficult, and seemed to be bubbling over with the joy of life. I was shy and quiet outside my home, never much noticed in a group, no good at talking to strangers, but I loved Padmini and she loved me. I basked in her encouragement and lived from week to week for my dance classes. When I reached the pre-university year in school, and all my elders and teachers were looking forward to sending me to one of the better universities in the United States, Padmini did not bat an eyelid when I said I wanted to go to India and specialise in Bharata Natyam.
Perhaps she understood that I was searching for something more than dance lessons and performances at social functions of the expatriate Indian community. We never analysed these things. But she supported me in her loving way, never taking decisions for me, never even suggesting solutions, but always being there with her big eyes in a small, smiling face, armed with a cup of hot chocolate to soothe the frayed temper and wash away the tears that threatened to flow. To Padmini I owe a debt of gratitude, for inspiring and encouraging me to go to Kalakshetra and for teaching me how giving the human heart can be.
There is another person to whom I owe an immeasurable debt. That is Mrs Carol Winkel. She was my English teacher, and would have proudly recommended me as a student of literature to the best colleges America had to offer. Yet she read the turmoil in my soul and gave me the courage to try the road less taken. A real Guru sets you free. Carol Winkel, whose grammar lessons still ring in my ears, and whom I remember whenever people compliment my writing, was a real Guru.
When at last I landed in Kalakshetra, Chennai, as a teenager in love with Bharata Natyam, but nevertheless more American than Indian, I myself could not fathom the hugeness of the change that awaited me. It was just as well, really, for if I had imagined it accurately, I might never have dared to come. My Kalakshetra experience was in every way a dream come true, and dreams can be both lovely and horrifying. Also, though I had the feeling that this was the place I had unconsciously been looking for all my life, there was a surreal quality to it as well, that sometimes filled me with awe, and at others, plain exasperation.
In Kalakshetra, if the dance training was rigorous, life in the hostel was even more so. If getting up at five in the morning to do exercises seemed tough, it was even tougher to understand and communicate in Tamil. Not only was I an Indian turned Yankee suddenly arrived in the traditional ambience of South India, I was a North Indian Yankee! The little girl who had proudly proclaimed “We speak Hindi, not Indian!” – now confronted with a language, food, dress habits and climate alien to any she had seen in her own visits to the family hometown – found herself wondering, “Does anyone here speak Indian?”
But as the Gurus at Kalakshetra drilled my lanky limbs into recognisable postures and symmetrical movements, I grew accustomed to all the aspects of India that I had never known before, experiencing its diversity first hand, learning to revel in its beauty, laugh at its incongruities, and see that for all its variety of customs, languages, creeds and art forms, India was indeed one nation. The vision that I acquired at Kalakshetra has stayed with me, as did one more lesson.
Smt. Rukmini Devi Arundale always emphasised that art and life were not separate compartments. Your attitude to life would reflect in your art, and vice versa. Along with this conviction, she never wavered from the one underlying current that, to her, gave meaning to all art. This was the undercurrent of devotion. Dance, or any art, was not meant for entertainment, but for worship, for spiritual uplift, she told us.
On leaving the beautiful but sheltered environment of Kalakshetra, I realised that putting those cherished principals into practice was not easy in a world that seemed to have moved into a new century of technology and professional gloss while I plodded through five blissfully cloistered years. But more and more, as time goes by, and the stalwarts who made Kalakshetra great fade from public memory, I am aware that for me, what they believed and taught and practiced holds more and more relevance to life.
For me, that is enough. That is why this personal statement is not about the intricacies of a particular school of dance, or about performances given, about material achievements or productions mounted. Dance suffuses the various facets of my life now, and since life cannot be confined to a few poses and rhythmic patterns, my experience of dance too cannot.
Of course, it is for the audience to judge whether my dance lives up to the ideas stated here. Anyway, I do hope that whenever I perform, people can catch glimpses of the wonders of childhood, of friendship and discovery, of longing and happiness and sadness and confusion, of lasting love and a continuing search. That is Bharata Natyam for me, today as yesterday. In life as in dance, each day is forever new and fresh, each moment ripe to reach for the stars. There are plenty of chances of falling, no doubt, and God knows I have failed and fallen often, but still I know that each day is another chance to reach out, again, and again, because that is the way to the Light.
