Odissi Odyssey

Dancer is the Dance


Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra played a pivotal role in giving the odissi dance its due, writes Nirupama Dutt

As his feet make rhythmic movements, the world around him breaks into a joyous dance. ``I have seen in him the graces and powers of the divine Natraja,’’ comments renowned Odissi teacher Guru Sri Ramani Ranjan Jena about Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, celebrated doyen of Odissi dance. In a rare tribute to the maestro, famed dancers from home and abroad got together in Delhi early July, on the festive day of Guru Purnima, to celebrate his 75th birthday, though the maestro insists it is the 76th.
Each dancer performed a dance choreographed by the Guru. ``It feels very good to receive such love. I am fortunate,’’ he remarked. But when asked to name his favourite pupil, he gave a mischievous smile, and said, ``I don’t want to play favourites, I love them all. I would to hurt any one of them.’’
It’s difficult indeed to make a choice. The list is formidable with names like Sanjukta Panigrahi, Sonal mansingh, Gangadhar Pradhan, Madhavi Mudgal, Protima Bedi, Sharon Lowen, Sharmila Biswas and Kumkum Lal. There are also those who have just imbibed from him, seeing him dance, like Bharatnatyam dancer Leela Samson and Odissi exponent Ranjana Gauhar, Gauhar says: ``I often tease Guruji affectionately that I am his Eklavya, for though I have not trained under him, I am his devoted disciple.’’
The living legend was born in Raghorajpur, a small village in Puri district, in 1924. Interestinly, to turn away the evil eye and counter the overpowering influence of the stars in his horoscope, his name was changed from Madan Mohan to Kelu, meaning a street performer. And this street performer willed himself to be the high priest of one of the most exquisite classical dance forms. He says: ``Odissi was not born in a day. It was a long process. Things were taken from different sources and built anew.’’
His own life, training and creativity had a major role to play in the dance form. His father was a patchitra painter and his mother, a deeply religious woman, was devoted to the arts. When he was five, his mother encouraged him to learn Gotipua, a folk dance performed by young boys dressed as girls. The story of Radha-Krishna formed the core of the dance. It was a rather crude form of street entertainment enjoying wide popularity. Mohapatra learnt in the akhada of Guru Bal Bahadra Sahu for three years without his father’s knowledge. But when his father learnt of it, he sent him to Puri to join the Raas Leela troupe of Mohan Subdar Deb Goswami. For 10 years, he learnt Vasihnava devotional acting and singing.
The young boy excelled in the role of Krishna and became his teacher’s favourite. But then something happened. Mohapatra went to see Kangan, the Ashok Kumar-Leela Chitnis film, which is today considered a classic. However, he got a slap from his teacher for watching the film. Angry, Mohapatra left the troupe to work as a labourer in a betel farm. Tending the farm and selling paan leaves in Puri for a year, he found time to practice his dance and hone his skills as a percussionist.
In 1945, he joined the Radhakant Raas Party as director. Here he found his life partner. His co-dancer Laxmipriya and also discovered his talents as a choreographer. He researched Gotipua and Mahari dances. The latter was the dying art form of the temple dancers. To these he added what he imbibed from studying the friezes of the temple sculptures.
The Odissi, which was later considered the most graceful and lyrical dance forms in the true classical tradition, was taking shape. With Independence, came an enthusiasm to revive the Indian art forms and many intellectuals and dance Gurus in Orissa put their heads together to bring alive this classical dance but Mohapatra made the most significant contribution.
His disciple Sonal Mansingh won the final recognition for the dance form. The Guru recells: ``Initially, many people made fun of me and told me that I was trying to promote some tribal dance of Orissa. But I was determined to work on this dance and get it worldwide acceptance.’’ When Mansingh performed in the Museum Theatre in 1968in the presence of classical doyens like Rukmini Devi Arundale, Mr S Subbulakshmi and Dr. V Raghavan, the dance formally got its rightful place. Rukmini Devi addressed the august audience and declared it a classical dance, no less than Bharatanatyam. ``Guruji never demanded any fees from us. We gave him what we could,’’ says madhavi Mudgal, who was a professional kathak dancer before she moved to Odissi.
Mudgal recalls an interesting anecdote. In 1970, Mudgal and Tejashree, film-maker V Shantaram’s daughter, were to be Radha and Krishna in a dance-drama on Gita Govinda, produced by renowned vocalist Pandit jasraj and his wife, Madura. Mohapatra was doing the choreography. After touching the costumes of the two and decorating their foreheads with the traditional chita, he touched their feet and said a prayer. ``I was dumbfounded. Later I realized that in all of us, he saw only the deity, says Mudgal.
Over the years, Mohapatra has given many performances abroad and accompanied his disciples on the mridangam. When asked about the innovations that can be made to the dance, Mohapatra says: `` It’s like an ocean. You can keep taking from it and adding to it but the traditional base can adding to it but the traditional base can never be discarded.’’ The Guru can be a hard taskmaster. Jhelum Paranjape, a talented young disciple, saya:`` He once rapped me hard on the fingers because I was getting a mudra wrong. It hurt but I held back my tears because he does not like tears. Later he felt he had been harsh and asked if it was still hurting.’’
Sharon Lowen says: ``I remember how he would teach us to walk like a beautiful young maiden. He would sway in front ever so graceful and we would try to clumsily follow him like ugly ducklings.’’
Asked if he still is waiting to accomplish something, he says: ``Yes, I do not have a dance which would fully explore with exquisite grace the world of the Navrasa.’’ So the obsyssey is still on.

Madhavi Mudgal says it in Words

Think Before you Dance

Madhavi Mudgal shares her thoughts on dance and dancers in a cosy baithak, reports Nirupama Dutt

When does a work of art find completion? When it meets an appreciative audience, of course. It is really the old tale of the Narcisus brooding a thousand years until it meets the human gaze. So it is in the order of things that the artiste comes closer to the audience. Both artiste and audience could not have had it better when Odissi dancer Madhavi Mudgal came face-to-face with a wide range of connoisseurs at Rasik: Meet the Ariste, a monthly series organized by Seher in baithak style at the basement theatre of the India Habitat Centre. The first in the series which took off on the first
Saturday of November featured Madhavi, but not in isolation. Her contemporary and equally celebrated Bharatnatyam dancer Leela Samson played the catalyst in the role of a moderator.
For once the two of them were not dancing but sitting with mikes pinned to their blouses talking dance. Which made Leela wonder if they had got so old that instead of dancing they were sitting and talking dance! But talking has its uses and more so in the adda style of Bengal which is hard to come by in the hurry-scurry of Delhi or happens in very small, exculsive groups. And going by the large turn-out of Rasiks, Sanjeev Bhargava and his Seher seem to have done it right.
Madhavi first came through as the young girl growing up amidst music and dance. She was born to it, of course, being daughter of the celebrated musicologist Pt. Vinay Chandra Mudgal of the Gandharva Mahavidyalya. And this girl instead of becoming a singer like her brother Madhup Mudgal found her feet tapping to the beat. It was kathak first along with her studies for she reached right up to the final year of a course in architecture when she finally took the decision to dance her life away as it were.
``Why did you change from Kathak to Odissi?’’ asked Leela. ``I found Kathan restrictive in the chakara and and footwork. The element of showing-off was too strong. Odissi gave me room to explore the creative impulse better,’’ was Madhavi’s answer. But towards the close of the tete-a-tete, with a couple of demonstrations thrown in by Madhavi and her students, a former student’s mother pointed out to the dancer that Kathak gave an abandon whereas Odissi was fixed in composition. So Madhavi turned to do a bit of Kathank to show that even that was bound.
Among the many things that surfaced in the evening –from the emotional life of a dancer to the nights awake after the performance, from the theme shows which seemed to have stepped into the realm of classical dance to the retirement age of the dancer—the strong motif was of the `thinking dancer’ to which Madhavi referred time and again. In fact, both Madhavi and Leela have a reputation for belonging to the breed of thinking dancers. That does not make them less feeling or performing. It is that they have the capacity to make conscious choices and articulate and defend them. But painter Jatin Das (incidentally there were quite a few painters at the meet ) wanted to know what this `thinking dancer’ was all about! A valid intervention and Madhavi admitted that thinking was not necessarily the yardstick for creativity.
When asked the `awful question of who her ideals in dance were, Madhavi’s quick reply was ``Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra and Birju Maharaj ‘’ Both these names came up more than once as dancers who were the dance and one could not tell one from the other as Yeats once said. But Leela was not letting off madhavi so easily. ``Tell us who is your ideal from among your contemporaries’’. Madhavi had Leela blushing when she replied, ``you and I mean it.’’
The evening, which strectched over two hours, was made very lively with audience participation. When the talk of what was classical and contemporary got too complex, poet Ashok Vajpayee got up and said, ``These classical dancers as we know them and see them are a creation of this century and so it was a case of the classical being contemporary too.’’ Rasik Vasant Sathe gave the comic relief to the evening with his comments on arts and artists. But when he said ``Modern art has gone beyond every thing,’’ Mumbai-based painter Prabhakar Kolte was quick to retort: `Well, politics has gone beyond everything else. ‘’ The Baithak was a sure success with so many think thanks around.

Indian Express, November 1999

Bharatnatyam Exponent

Dance is her Destiny

Malavika Sarukkai shares her thoughts about her art and life in a chitchat with Nirupama Dutt

SHE is acclaimed as the most accomplished Bharatanatyam exponent today who has polished her art to such an extent that it is a spontaneous overflow from her being. Reviewing her performance at the Edinburgh Festival, Alice Blain wrote in The Guardian: “The Bharatanatyam of Malavika Sarukkai was, her divine performance as intricate as lace.” The headline of the story is: ‘A goddess dances at Edinburgh’.
Well, the goddess is in town and talking to her is as great a pleasure as watching her lively steps on stage. Talking of journey, she says: “I feel certain things are predestined. My mother started me on Bharatanatyam when I was just seven. A child of seven does not know that she will be a dancer but I enjoyed dancing.” She was first trained by Guru Kalyanasundaram of Thanjavur school and then Guru Rajarathnam of Vazhuvoor school. She also learnt Odissi from Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra and his disciple Ramani Jena.
How did destiny intervene? The nayika smiles, “Well I do believe in destiny and I have seen it driving me to dance and little else in my life. Even when I was not making an active choice, circumstances would be such that other things would fall away. So dance has been my destiny.” Malavika gives one example that when she joined college after school she felt that she was wasting her time. Her mother Saroja Kamakshi, who had longed to be a dancer but was strained in music, was supportive and withdrew her daughter form her academic course in college. “I was lucky to have here for she could understand just what I felt.” After that it was dance all the way.
A single woman, Malavika has been able to give all of herself to her art, perfecting the art to a point that the dancer becomes the dance. She says of her art: “I have complete conviction in the classical. I do not see the classical as antiquity that has to be preserved. It is living and organic. Within that there is tradition. I would say my dance is traditional but the energy that I enthuse it with is contemporary.”
How would she define dance? Malavika says: “Classical dance gives a complete experience and it deepens as you go deeper into the art. Dance has the elements of rhythm, beat, philosophy, poetry, religion and mythology. It is a complete languagein itself. It requires long years of training and practice for here one sings with the body.” And so she sang with her body on the Sabbath like never before including the special piece on Hanuman seeing Rama for the first time because it is the favourite one of her hosts: the Goswamys. Having danced here two years ago on their invitation she considers Chandigarh like home.

Bindaas in Dance

She likes to dance her own dance and she does it exceedingly well. Nirupama Dutt on Aditi Mangaldas

Electrifying! That is the most befitting adjective in describing the art of Aditi Mangaldas who was schooled in Kathak under renowned Gurus but who chose to go her own way, and on the strength of her classical training, she has evolved her own dance vocabulary. In the city to dance at the three- day dance fiesta, Aditi is very forthright in talking about the direction her art has taken, even if it has raised eyebrows of the ‘pundits’.
How was she able to break free thus from the very classified structure of classical dance? “It happened so because I came from a family liberated with responsibility. My father’s side, they were all entrepreneurs and my mother’s side was made up by academics. I grew up with discussion all round me and learnt never to take anything at face value.
One of the leading dancers in the country today, she excels in both traditional and contemporary idioms. She started learning Kathak from Kumudni Lakhia at Ahemdabad at the age of five. Her second Guru was the great Birju Maharaj at Delhi. Looking back in gratitude at the care they put in grooming her, Aditi says: “From Kumudniji, I learnt how the body relates to the dance and from Maharaj, I learnt the relationship of the soul to the body.”
But at twenty-five, she broke free, for she says: “I felt that I had to do my own dance. I was absolutely bindaas about it, even if it meant hurting my mentors who would have rather had me following the path of tradition. It has been an exciting phase after that and while traditional Kathak is taught at her Drishtikon Dance Foundation in Delhi, she experiments with her repertory of dancers schooled in the classical. How did she deal with the criticism that came her way? “If it is constructive criticism, I am open to re-thinking. I am like a bamboo that survives the storm best and yet remains a bamboo and does not turn into a banyan.”
Well said and the evening that followed the tête-à-tête, found Aditi dancing out the song of the seasons at its poetic best.