IN CONVERSATION
Soldier for dance
NIRUPAMA SUBRAMANIAN
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Pakistani danseuse and choreographer Nahid Siddiqui talks about her revolutionary fervour for the cause of Kathak.
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For Siddiqui, who thinks of herself as a deeply spiritual person, the arts have no religion, no national boundaries. "Any beautiful thing belongs to everybody," she says.
Dedicated: Nahid Siddiqui has pursued dance despite facing many obstacles.
LISTENING to Nahid Siddiqui talk is to watch her dance — the hands move, gracefully fluid and expressive; the fingers arch and bend to make a point and the eyes have an eloquence all of their own.
"Dance is such a compulsion with me, it is from within me. I am dancing all the time. Obviously one is aware of the technique, but it is a passion first. I was dancing even before I learnt how to dance. My mother tells me even now, Nahid, there was just one thing with you when you were small, dance, dance, dance," says the eminent Kathak danseuse and choreographer.
Wrong passion
But as Siddiqui was to realise, in Pakistan, hers was the wrong passion, thanks to the branding of dance as anti-Islamic and Indian, therefore, first discouraged by the State, and later banned. That despite this, she made a name for herself in the world of Kathak, speaks of her dedication to dance and her resolve.
In the 1960s, when Siddiqui was growing up in Lahore, it was still possible to find dance teachers leftover from the pre-Partition era. Some dancers were still performing in those days. Siddiqui was fortunate to have supportive parents, and to find a guru to train her. As a 15-year-old, she started with Maharaj Ghulam Hussain, whose father was a disciple of Birju Maharaj, and later travelled to Lucknow to train under the Pandit himself.
In the years that followed, Siddiqui was acclaimed as one of the greats of Kathak, but the Islamisiation of Pakistan under the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul Haq ensured that her most productive years as a performer, teacher and choreographer, were all spent abroad.
Banned from performing in 1978 by the Zia regime on the charge that she was promoting values that were against Islam, and branded as an Indian spy for her Kathak-themed serial "Payal" on Pakistan TV — the regime pulled it after five episodes — Siddiqui fled her country.
She was allowed to leave only after giving a written undertaking that she would never perform anywhere abroad without the prior permission of the Pakistan government. Wisely, she did not keep that pledge. From the United Kingdom, where she lived for more than two decades, Siddiqui, literally had to make a new start to make a name for herself. Her first stop was at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in London, as its first Kathak teacher. "I was also the first and only Pakistani teacher there," she reminisces.
Ironically, while the Zia regime banned Siddiqui, it turned a blind eye to the mujra, patronised by Pakistan's rich. Officially, the only performing arts allowed were folk dance and music. "Pakistan's darkest years were the Zia years. Something so bad happened to us then, that everything else, all the others, have looked better," recalls the dancer, who has been back in her country since 2004, and is determined to pass on her knowledge of Kathak to younger generations in Pakistan. "Especially being a woman, I believe it is my duty to clear the mess for the upcoming generation," she says.
For Siddiqui, who thinks of herself as a deeply spiritual person, the arts have no religion, no national boundaries. "Any beautiful thing belongs to everybody," she says. She is a strong believer in schooling the young in the arts, particularly the performing arts, as a way of eliminating violence in societies by channelising their physical and mental energies.
Uphill struggle
But it is still an uphill battle for Siddiqui in Pakistan. She has started teaching to a few students in Lahore but laments that the country has no institutions left that can serve as vehicles of culture and art or that can impart training in the classical traditions, which have all but disappeared. "The standards have fallen so much, we have no teachers, no connoisseurs, no critics," Siddiqui says.
The ban on Siddiqui went with the Zia regime, and she was even given a state award by the Benazir Bhutto government, but according to her, no government since Zia has done anything for the performing arts. What about the Musharraf regime's efforts to promote culture as part of its enlightened moderation project?
"Only talk," she says, with a graceful wave of the hand. No more evidence is needed of the state's attitude towards classical dance than the fact that a no-objection certificate from the government is still required to hold a dance performance, and even then it has to be disguised as something else, such as theatre.
"After Partition, in order to build our own identity, we started to reject many things from our common (Indian) heritage and traditions. Dance was something we rejected. We had to deny what we were, and in that process we brought in religion to justify it," Siddiqui says. "That is how a nation's choices and priorities have been determined, on what we have been given."
She rues how the government has treated the performing arts and its exponents. "In other countries, they are treasured as national assets," she says. Persuaded to make short annual visits to Pakistan after the first three years of her self-exile in London by friends who wielded influence with the regime, she would hold underground performances for a select audience of friends each time. "I felt like a revolutionary solider — of dance," she says of those days.
Crtical acclaim
After returning to live in Lahore, Siddiqui has given eight performances — openly — to appreciative audiences, most recently in Karachi. Commenting on her work, Zia Moyehddin, the well-known art critic (also Siddiqui's ex-husband) wrote last year that "what distinguishes her work from that of other celebrated dancers is her realisation that creativity is not a rearrangement of known modules and formulas: it has to involve a new exploration of truth. She understands that basic emotions — anxiety, joy, longing, disgust, humility, despair — need not be expressed in the clichéd mode. In her experimental pieces she has shown that they can be interpreted, naturalistically, without flouting the Kathak tradition".
Siddiqui, who travelled to India in 1985 for a Kathak festival in New Delhi, and in 1997 to Bangalore, plans to visit the city again for the Habba festival later this year. Her dream: "to have something like Kalaskshetra in Pakistan."
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