Beyond all that song and dance
ANJANA RAJAN
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Veteran dancer Padma Subrahmanyam on classical arts and the media.
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Photo: V. Sudershan
HERITAGE HEADLINES Padma Subrahmanyam in New Delhi
Some people have eyes that can convey a host of emotions in a flicker. Padma Subrahmanyam’s eyes can do all that, without even flickering. Crowds of devotees, a longing nayika, teasing Krishna, the towering Trivikrama, a horse drawn carriage
230;any and all of them materialise on stage, solid as life, thin as air. She looks, and her audience sees a spectrum of emotions. But when she speaks of matters close to her heart, what is overpowering is a sense of compassion, which tempers her most ardent convictions with gentleness.
She has no patience, she says, when dancers trained under great gurus willingly undergo elementary courses in universities just to acquire a degree, whose comparative value with their earlier training is almost nil. A believer in the guru-shishya tradition, she feels it can be integrated with institutional learning to create optimum conditions for passing on the arts.
In Delhi for a recording with Doordarshan, which is preserving her dance drama “Meenakshi Kalyanam”, created in 1942, in the digital format, the veteran is equally at home with the stage and screen. Daughter of the well known film director K. Subrahmanyam, she has seen both the media grow and change with a changing India. Films and television may be popular, but the number of students aspiring to learn classical dance only seems to grow. A dance school in Kerala even achieved the dubious distinction of presenting 200 arangetrams (stage debuts) in a single programme. But, she points out, if such schools boast students in the thousands, it shows how many families want their children to learn classical dance. Then why does the print and electronic media still sideline classical dance coverage? Currently the veteran, who was one of the first dancers to popularise karanas as an intrinsic part of Bharatanatyam, is working on a temple and art centre project in Tamil Nadu dedicated to Bharatamuni, the legendary author of the Natya Shastra.
Preserving heritage
“The media has to help preserve heritage. Take Doordarshan. They should take care not to reduce the dance content. Why should DD compete with the private cable channels? As a government broadcaster, at least it should not worry about revenue. DD should work for the sustenance of the heritage.”
Seeing a Kathakali dancer painted on an Air India plane bound from Kerala for the Gulf region, she says she felt thrilled. “That is the kind of pride the Information and Broadcasting Ministry (under which DD falls) people should have in our dance. And if they think people are not interested in dance, it is just not true.”
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