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Novel idiom

PENNING HER EXPERIENCES Gitanjali Kolanad

Canada-based Bharatanatya dancer Gitanjali Kolanad isn’t reticent about speaking her mind, even if it means saying things that aren’t particularly popular.

That’s why she has increasingly turned towards writing about Chennai’s fascinating world of classical dance and music in recent years, a world she has been immersed in since she was sent there as a teenager in the 1970s, her parents afraid she was being “corrupted by the West”.

“Very few people are actually honest about what goes on behind the scenes — there’s so much hypocrisy surrounding the practice of classical arts, and people just keep perpetuating the same myths,” says the Kalakshetra-trained dancer candidly during a phone interview from Toronto. “Lots of people say things in private, but never in public. I’ve just gotten to an age when I have nothing to lose anymore — no performance I want, no review I need written.”

The result is a series of brutally honest, sharply insightful short stories set in the Madras and Tanjore of the 1970s.

According to Gitanjali, they’re fictionalised accounts of her experiences upon arriving on Indian soil as a 16-year-old from Canada, seeing the city and its culture through unadulterated eyes, and unexpectedly falling in love with it all.

Recently, one of these stories, “The American Girl”, won the writer the second prize in the short story category at the prestigious CBC Literary Awards, the highest honour for unpublished works in Canada. Unlike most of her stories, which are set around Bharatanatya, this one peeks into the world of Carnatic music. But like her other stories, this one too is seen through the eyes of a young Indian girl from Canada, and explores taboo themes of sexual discovery and amorous intrigues, classicism and sexism in the world of the Indian classical arts, even as it lovingly describes the practice of these disciplines.

“I’ve been a dancer for 30 years, but I’ve felt like my experience of Bharatanatya, which is different from most, has never been heard,” comments Gitanjali, who returns to Chennai every year.

“I was never invited to speak at the Natya Kala conferences, for example.”

All that will change next year, when a collection of her short stories is published by Penguin India. With that, she hopes people will see her beloved dance form the way she sees it — a fresh, vibrant art pulsing with life and promise.

“People are so concerned with preserving Bharatanatya, like it’s something in a museum you can’t touch,” she says passionately.

“But I see it as something that’s constantly moving forward, not stuck in the past as some believe.”

And she has so much more to say that she’s planning a novel next. “I’ve even been thinking about a kind of Shobha De piece, but on the dance world,” she says, grin travelling down the telephone wires.

That, of course, would ruffle a lot of feathers, but it isn’t likely to stop this writer.

“Luckily,” she laughs, “there are no fatwas in the dance community!”

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