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Another centenary celebration
ANOTHER CENTENARY celebration likely to get off to an early start, on February 28, is that of Rukmani Nilakanta Sastri, who over a 50-year period became Rukmani Devi Arundale, then `Aththai' to generations of dancers whose art she brought out of the closet Bharatanatyam had been pushed into. Kalakshetra is planning a year-long programme that will lead up to a grand centenary celebration on her 100th birth anniversary, February 29, in 2004.
About a decade after the Jiddu Krishnamurti controversy referred to in this column this past week, The Hindu was at it again, taking on Annie Besant for encouraging the marriage of 16-year-old Rukmani Nilakanta Sastri to 40-year-old George Sydney Arundale, an English Theosophist, who had come out to Madras to head the school Besant had founded in Adyar. It is fortunate that all those who had opposed the marriage did not succeed; it was this spring-autumn marriage in 1920 that enabled Rukmani Devi Arundale's genius to flower and allow her to pass on the torch she first lit.
To do that, the "changed person" that she became, after watching Anna Pavlova dance in Australia in 1926, determined to become a part of the "fascinating world of movement and expression". Back in India, she watched two sisters perform in a sadir programme one day. She felt, she later recalled, that she had been "ushered into a new world of rhythmic beauty and meaning". She was never the same person again, her husband was to say; she committed herself, in her words, "to finding young people who would dedicate themselves, along with me, to the revival of this beautiful and profound art as an intrinsic factor in the cultural renaissance of India."
To this end, she began learning sadir from Gowri Ammal of the Mylapore Temple, and Pandanallur Meenakshisundaram Pillai and, in 1935, at the International Theosophical Conference in Adyar, she revealed for the first time what she had learnt from them - but in a most revolutionary way. Taking the dance out of the temple, private salons and the occasional stage, she performed under the Society's famed banyan tree, wearing costumes and jewellery she had herself designed based on the ancient sculptures, dancing against a bare black backdrop, with the musicians and gurus on the side and not facing the audience as was traditional.
All Madras, indeed, all India, was shocked that a Brahmin woman had performed in public "the art of the temple harlots". But that did not stop her - and as Rukmani Arundale danced in public over and over again, George Arundale unperturbedly meditated in the wings. Calling what she danced `Bharata Natyam', Rukmani Devi now more than ever set herself the task to get others to follow where she had led and become as proficient as her in the dance of the Sage Bharata. And so, encouraged by Besant and Arundale, she established in 1936 in the campus of the Theosophical Society in Adyar the International Society for the Arts. She would later relate that she started it "with no money, no land, no building and just one student under one tree that was our only classroom". By the time she danced in public for the last time, on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of what had by then become known as Kalakshetra, The Temple of Art, the institution had its own 100-acre tree-shaded campus in Tiruvanmiyur, where it had moved in 1963, and had had a galaxy of teachers from all over the South to teach Bharatanatyam, Kathakali and Carnatic music. Painting and textile designing and weaving had also been added to the curriculum. And Kalakshetra had fulfilled the dreams of a woman who never gave up, no matter what the opposition.
Today, they still learn music and dance under the trees in an institution run like a gurukulam of old, but they also dream of fulfilling Aththai's one unfulfilled dream, having it declared a deemed university. May be Kalakshetra will receive that recognition on Rukmani Devi Arundale's 100th birthday next year. May be there will also be a presentation of her life's story in the art form that she had made her own, the dance-drama. Such a drama would also have to remember her contribution to Montessori education in India, and her life-long propagation of animal welfare and vegetarianism. Meanwhile, the year-long programme and next year's as well will be something for Kalakshetra rasikas to look forward to.
S. MUTHIAH
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