Moving reflections
ANJANA RAJAN
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World Dance Day Mrinalini Sarabhai’s recollections of a life in which the art was strong and the conscience clear.
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Photo: V. Sudershan
Mrinalini Sarabhai in conversation with dancers.
A lecture can be heavy going. There is always the danger that the speaker, no matter how erudite or experienced, may not be able to enliven the subject and successfully transform the written word into a vibrant oral expression. When Natya Vriksha organised a lecture to mark World Dance Day in New Delhi and invited Mrinalini Sarabhai, the doyenne of Bharatanatyam, to speak on the past, present and future of dance, this danger was gracefully sidestepped. The India Internatio
nal Centre session became one of the most pleasant and enlightening mornings ever, for both dancers and those who watch the art.
The mouthful of a title — “Bhootam-Bhavyam-Bhavishyam: Assessing Indian classical dance through the prisms of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” — was transformed into a spellbinding personal expression of the veteran dancer’s journey right from the British era to current times.
To be a classical dancer in the pre-Independence era, marry into a family of freedom fighters at the height of the civil disobedience movement, to establish Kathakali and Bharatanatyam in a community that respected only the art of commerce…the memoirs of such an individual had to be riveting, and ‘Amma’, as she is ubiquitously addressed, did not disappoint.
In those tumultuous times, an elaborate wedding was not possible, she recalled, but she and her Kathakali guru, Kunju Kurup, performed for the small close gathering, on her husband’s insistence that there must be some dance to honour the occasion. The result was that the Gujarat gentry exchanged in horror the news that “the great Vikram Sarabhai has married a devadasi”. Two mudras could sum up her relationship with the people then and now, she said, demonstrating disgust for ‘then’ and a reverent gesture depicting mother for ‘now’.
Ahead of her time
At over 70, she left many younger dancers feeling old, as Bharatanatyam dancer Ragini Chandrasekhar commented during the brief open house later on. Thanks to her sheer spirit of experimentation and adventure, she was always ahead of her times. Her innovations in the classical presentations, including tackling themes like dowry crimes and human evolution, would be considered modern even today. Early in her career she put into practice the realisation that “any problem dramatically shown on stage touches the heart.” Thus her choreographic piece on dowry death — her “first breakaway in Bharatanatyam” — was well received even in the Madras Music Academy, the bastion of a hallowed tradition, back in the 1950s.
Geeta Chandran, who coordinated, remarked that Amma’s recollections were vital to straighten the record in today’s performing environment where many young performers rush to claim “firsts”.
But if one might call Amma’s deeds avant-garde, her vocabulary was traditional. She laughingly mentioned that unlike her, Mallika Sarabhai, her daughter and well-known artiste and activist, “says she is not a dancer, she is a communicator.”
Not all of Mrinalini’s experiments could be termed successes. She recalled how she tried to convince her Kathakali troupe to try the “pachcha” make-up base created by a multinational cosmetics firm liasing with the Sarabhais. Not made from herbs and not freshly ground just before the performance, it was summarily rejected by the artistes, she smiled.
To a question on whether a child should learn two forms simultaneously she replied it was better to concentrate on one initially, saying she diversified at a later stage in her life.
Why have we failed to nurture the non-violence that drove our independence movement, asked a listener, to which Amma said she had no precise answer. But she added, touchingly, how she advises her students to live with conscience. “Look in the mirror every day and ask, who am I, where am I going and what am I doing.” That was the purpose behind naming her institute Darpana, she said.
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