Bonding with the best
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Vyjayantimala talks about her dance today and yesterday, life as a star, and writing about it all. ANJANA RAJAN
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PHOTO: Sandeep Saxena
A touch of gold Veteran Bharatanatyam dancer Vyjayantimala in New Delhi
What is the secret of her ageless charm?
The clichéd phrase insists on creeping into the head when one meets the vivacious Vyjayantimala Bali, hears her full throated laughter, follows her no-nonsense opinions on art and life and Indian culture.
Perhaps no scientist will ever be able to figure it out. Maybe the secret is in not keeping too many secrets. But even though the veteran Bharatanatyam dancer and film star has revealed her life through her autobiography, “Bonding…A Memoir”, all her fans already knew she was as unfading as all the bright colours she has a preference for.
Co-authored by Jyoti Sabharwal, the book, brought out by Stellar Publishers, was launched in New Delhi recently with enthusiasm. Born to dance, Vyjayantimala says discipline was always a part of her upbringing.
Not only the discipline of Bharatanatyam and the rigours of a film career, but also the well regulated rhythms of a traditional South Indian household, with its religious rituals and its codes of conduct. But writing requires another kind of discipline, and, she admits, writing this memoir was not a cakewalk.
“Dancing is ingrained into me,” she smiles, “but writing…it was a slow process”. Not because she had never written before. She had written dance-related texts, but this autobiography required a collation of decades of experiences from her career in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu films, from her ongoing Bharatanatyam career, and her forays into politics and…everything and everyone else she has made room for in her life.
What’s more, the writing had to be squeezed into time gleaned from constant touring and performing, but, she says, she made notes constantly.
It helped that her habit is to “go about everything in a focussed way.”
Also, she had access to the cuttings her father had saved ever since she was a child artiste, and the stories her grandmother Yagamma had told her. “Then to put them together. It was quite tough!”
Past and present
A staunch believer in traditional Indian culture, she has no problems relating either to the past or the present. Some audiences and practitioners of Bharatanatyam feel the classical arts have lost their relevance. Among the eight nayikas, some ask, where is the harried working woman of today, the ill-treated daughter-in-law, the battered woman?
Ahalya, Sita, Tara, Draupadi, all of them went through agony, she replies, adding, with conviction, “What happened in the Mahabharata is still happening today. What didn’t happen in the Mahabharata cannot happen.
That’s what it says! I myself have brought out the anguish of Sita. Today’s women, what they suffer, the agony of separation, and so many other emotions, they are there too.”
That is why, she says, she returns to the word bonding. “You are bonded so much to what happened in the past. You cannot say I’ve nothing to do with the past. The past is very much linked with us, and today what we are doing is going to become the future.
The whole cosmos is one big Omkara — a circle, and we are all playing our parts.”
We are all bonded, and who wouldn’t want to bond with the best?
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