CULTURE
A collage of answers
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Mirrors and Gestures is a unique, archival document of the lives and thoughts of nineteen women dancers, writes ANJANA RAJAN.
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MIRRORS and Gestures: Conversations With Women Dancers by C.S. Lakshmi is a rich document of the lives and thoughts of 19 women dancers whose experience spans the period from pre-Independence to the present day. Published by Kali for Women, the work is an important archive, since it provides meticulous transcriptions of the conversations the author had with these unique women, some of whom are no longer alive. C.S. Lakshmi's own writing and sensitivity to the issues involved, however, only surface briefly in the introductions and in her dedication to her mother. The rest of the book is in the form of questions by Lakshmi and answers given by her interlocutors. The transcripts even include details such as the tape being switched off for some time.
The attempt must have been to render utmost authenticity to the record, and in that sense it has become a unique archive, but since it is a written version of an oral transmission, it lacks the natural flow of both. However, her choice of presentation is explained when she says that she felt "the dialogue itself and certain dialogic conventions reveal a great deal about how the dialogue took place. I also felt that there was no need to maintain an illusion of continuity since in reality, there were interruptions of several kinds, interruptions that shaped the dialogue".
Why the author's dedication seems significant is that she mentions how her father was against her venturing far from home for higher studies, while her mother supported her. "But as the train entered Madras...my mother leaned towards me and said softly into my ear, `Now all your dreams will come true.' To Alamelu, my mother, an artist and a dreamer, I dedicate this work."
This little episode carries in it the essence of so many women's lives spent in struggle, submission, adventure, failure and success. It matters little that India is one of the few countries that can boast of having had a woman Prime Minister and several women ministers. Their stories all seem to contain similar ingredients of fathers, brothers, or other male relatives who discouraged them or "supportive" men in their lives whose major claim to approbation seems to be that they "tolerated" their womenfolk going in for public lives.
But since that is a fact of life not only in India but just about all countries — when the Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher was said to have brought a cabinet meeting to a close on realising she had forgotten to buy a favourite item from the grocery store for her husband, the incident was lovingly reported by the international press — it becomes necessary to see how women who are role models deal with it. And this research is necessary in any reconstruction or study of history.
The author explains that she chose the methodology of oral history because she "did not want to see them with blinkers on". She also does not wish to "ghettoise" them as women or as women artistes but attempts to "try and understand them as women sharing a historical context, living and functioning as women and as artistes, in a patriarchal society that fixed them in particular ways. Their varied lives and expression would thus form a collage which would contain a thousand different answers spoken in a thousand different voices."
To an extent she has succeeded in creating such a collage. Though the questions seem at times tedious or repetitive, they are probably necessary to the clarity of the narrative as told by the protagonists themselves, who are aware of much more than the lay reader.
From Sita Pooviah, the highly educated nationalist and nation builder who danced Kathak with her sisters and was a disciple of Guru Sunderprasad, to Zohra Segal, the veteran actress who began her career as a dancer trained in Germany and toured the world with Uday Shankar before running a dance school with her dancer husband Kamesh Segal; from Sucheta Joshi born in 1912 to current stars Leela Samson and Malavika Sarukkai; from the iconoclastic Chandralekha to the Jhaveri sisters brought up in traditional Gujarati society; and others including Shantha Dhananjayan and Sudharani Raghupati, the images are vibrant and revealing.
At another point Lakshmi explains, "I was not looking for information I could quantify; I wanted a window opened so I could look into their lives, and a door opened to let me in ... quantification or specific information was not the purpose of the intended study... I wanted to look into their eyes, sit across them and talk, to have a dialogue of a different kind."
This spirit cannot be said to have come through as clearly in the book as must have been apparent to the interlocutors, but the book is a valuable and gripping read, nonetheless, not only for artistes of all genres, students of sociology and history, but to anyone who loves a good tale.
Mirrors and Gestures: Conversations with Women Dancers, C.S. Lakshmi, Kali for Women, 2003, Rs.400.
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