The day we received news of the maestro’s death, a friend, Jayaram, called to share his memories of Bhimsen Joshi with me. He recalled a 1970s concert on the Health League grounds of Hyderabad. He remembered in particular the unforgettable Purya Dhanashri of that evening that lasted an hour and a half and was primarily responsible for the concert going on well past midnight. I did not know Jayaram then, but we were connected forever by that concert, for I too sprawled on the sands and listened transported to another realm that night.
My wife and I were fortunate to be in Hyderabad for a decade starting in 1971. Through my classmate and close friend Gourang Kodical, a disciple of tabla ustad Shaikh Dawood, we were exposed to some of the finest Hindustani music the twin cities offered then, not all of it in large halls or fancy venues. The ritual Guruvar mandal, a homage every Thursday to their teachers by local musicians was in the form of impromptu recitals by some of the finest local musicians in a tiny little apartment in Hyderabad’s own version of the chawl. The place was the residence of Bhaskar Rao Udgirkar, and the congregation had commenced in 1954. My wife’s music teacher Vajendra Ashrit, Shanker Daspremi, Vasudeva Rao Lasinkar, U. Govind Rao and Ramesh Hyderabadkar were some of Gourang’s friends and associates behind the mandal.
In addition to the up and coming, we also heard renowned musicians like Bhim Shankar Rao or Pandit Jasraj’s disciples like Girish Wazalwar and Chandrasekhar Swamy at the Guruvar Mandal. Promising young sitarist Pandurang Parathe was yet to migrate to Madras and the film world, while his senior M. Janardan had already done so, and Kartik Seshadri, Janardan’s younger fellow shagird of Ravi Shankar, was winging his way to the USA.
The whole gang from the mandal was present at all the major concerts held at Hyderabad during those years of relative plenty in terms of classical music there. They were generous to praise good music but caustic in their criticism of shallow imitation or artifice of any kind. Of course, they were biased as hell—aren’t we all?—and God save the musicians who strayed from the strait and narrow path! Countless cups of tea were imbibed, not to mention cigarettes and bidis—the self-effacing tabla wizard Ustad Shaikh Dawood led the bidi brigade—as some of the soirees we attended tended towards all-night affairs. The nip in the winter air as we sat mostly in the open at these concerts added to the excitement of the whole experience.
It was through our wonderful friends at the guruvar mandal that we became regulars at the Pandit Motiram Punyatithi that his sons celebrated every year in Hyderabad. All three of Motiram’s sons Maniram, Pratap Narayan and Jasraj had sung together in the early anniversary concerts, while I managed to hear the duo of Pratap Narayan and Jasraj and later Jasraj by himself. Those were memorable concerts, the best live vocal performances I had heard up until then. We were also to be thrilled by the virtuosity of four young instrumentalists answering to the names of Amjad Ali Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shiv Kumar Sharma and Zakir Hussain.
One unforgettable Ravi Shankar concert at Ravindra Bharati in 1974 was made more so by an announcement the sitar maestro made midway through the recital. “I regret to bring news of the death of two great musicians today,” he said. He was referring to the incomparable Amir Khan and southern film music legend Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao. The news meant that I would never listen live to one of the greatest Hindustani vocalists of our time, certainly my personal favourite musician. It was deeply depressing.
I was much more fortunate in the case of Bhimsen Joshi, who was the second member of a mutual admiration society whose other half had been Amir Khan. Legend has it that Amir Khan asked his students to listen to at least 25 concerts of Joshi before they ventured to ascend the performance stage. And Bhimsen Joshi always maintained that his Abhogi was Amir Khan’s gift to him.
At the concert Jayaram described, no one left the venue even as it stretched to some four hours. The singing was sheer joy, with Bhimsen Joshi traversing three octaves with seeming effortlessness. It was an amalgam of meditative depth, incredible taans, perfect laya control and absolute swara precision, so typical of the singer’s non-drinking years. His subsequent performances in the twin cities during my years there never equalled the pristine glory of that concert.
I had to wait until he came to Madras in the 1980s, when he had banished the demons from his life, to savour the old Bhimsen Joshi magic again. When he mesmerized Madras audiences at the Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, he had for decades worked assiduously at making the Kirana gharana his own, incorporating the influences he had sought all his life from all the masters he admired no matter what school they belonged to. It was the Bhimsen Joshi gharana.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
The good grandson
This land is your land, this land is my land
From the hills of Kerala to the Himalayas
From the vale of Kashmir to the Almond Islands
This land was made for you and me
I first heard this Indian version of Woody Guthrie’s patriotic verse from my sister, who like thousands of other young Indians, had come under the spell of the charismatic young man who led the idealistic Moral Re-armament or MRA in India in the 1960s. I was to hear several such inspiratio
nal songs that my sister and her friends brought home from MRA meetings, which centrestaged that unlikely icon with a squeaky clean image and a fan following that threatened to rival that of the Beatles.
Tall, handsome Rajmohan Gandhi—the eldest grandson of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and C Rajagopalachari—of the aquiline nose and aristocratic features and bearing had come under the influence of Frank Buchman, the American who called for 'moral and spiritual re-armament' as the way to build a 'hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world', following World War II.
MRA India came into being on 2 October 1963, when 70 volunteers led by Rajmohan Gandhi marched across India advocating a clean, strong and united nation, covering 4,500 miles in 40 days. It was a programme of moral and spiritual reconstruction to foster change in private and public life based on a change in motivation and character.
Another unlikely hero of the movement was the late West Indies opening batsman Conrad Hunte. Like born again Christians, they had seen the light, but theirs was a message of world peace and moral rectitude that went beyond personal religion; it claimed to be one of transformation of the world that began with the individual.
As a slightly cynical young man, I had been a somewhat amused onlooker of what appeared to me to be a propagandist movement that sought to indoctrinate young people everywhere with grandiose ideas of changing the planet by adopting what Rajmohan Gandhi calls “the moral high ground”. Worse, some of us skeptics suspected ulterior motives, even a CIA plot to wean youth away from Communism, behind the whole movement.
Yet despite my intuitive skepticism, I could not help developing a sneaking admiration for my sister’s idol. When he spoke, he spoke with passion, conviction, a sincere desire to change the corrupt, warring ways of the world.
Soon MRA went out of my world, as my sister grew out of it and moved on to watching cricket and following the fortunes of a certain Nawab of Pataudi. And there, my indirect association with Rajmohan should have ended—but for my discovery of Himmat, the brilliant little weekly magazine he founded in 1964 and edited for the next 17 years. The moral high ground was still the fuel of Rajmohan Gandhi’s spiritual engine, but his splendid prose and the irrepressible courage and optimism of his writings made a huge impact on me and some of my friends. Himmat was a no-frills, monochromatic (literally) magazine which met national and international issues head on. It covered itself with glory during the Emergency declared in June 1975, while most of India’s press “crawled when asked to bend”.
I first met Rajmohan Gandhi many years ago during his mother Lakshmi Devdas Gandhi’s funeral. “Oh, the off spinner,” he said to me when someone introduced us, a flattering acknowledgement that he knew I was a cricketer. When I met him last week, he again talked cricket briefly before we went on to other subjects. “I only know your cricket, not your later incarnations,” he said.
It was a moment for my family to get his latest book A Tale of Two Revolts: India 1857 & the American Civil War autographed, and inform him that our library included his biographies of his two grandfathers, besides many of his other works. “Must be groaning under the weight,” he said.
A visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Gandhi was visiting Chennai for a brief lecture session for the benefit of visitors from the Netherlands. At 75, he still looks fit and alert physically and mentally, with no loss of the probing honesty that characterises his writings on his illustrious ancestors.
To my pleasant surprise I learnt from Rajmohan that MRA is still alive and kicking—recovering from the downslide caused by rampant materialism post-globalisation—but rechristened Initiatives of Change International. And its conference and training facility, Asia Plateau, a “verdant 64-acre centre of reconciliation, dialogue and introspection,” in the hills of Panchgani, Maharashtra, is still frequented by people from all over the world.
Rajmohan Gandhi is prominent in a number of initiatives to improve relations between Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan and the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. A true inheritor of the moral and intellectual qualities of both Gandhi and Rajaji, he believes, “One step of reconciliation, one step of bridge-building, one honest attempt to restore a divided relationship – and terrorism, extremism, receive a blow.”
And he is convinced that “if we demand rights and equality only for our group and not for all, they are no longer principles but just a political platform.”
From the hills of Kerala to the Himalayas
From the vale of Kashmir to the Almond Islands
This land was made for you and me
I first heard this Indian version of Woody Guthrie’s patriotic verse from my sister, who like thousands of other young Indians, had come under the spell of the charismatic young man who led the idealistic Moral Re-armament or MRA in India in the 1960s. I was to hear several such inspiratio
nal songs that my sister and her friends brought home from MRA meetings, which centrestaged that unlikely icon with a squeaky clean image and a fan following that threatened to rival that of the Beatles.
Tall, handsome Rajmohan Gandhi—the eldest grandson of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and C Rajagopalachari—of the aquiline nose and aristocratic features and bearing had come under the influence of Frank Buchman, the American who called for 'moral and spiritual re-armament' as the way to build a 'hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world', following World War II.
MRA India came into being on 2 October 1963, when 70 volunteers led by Rajmohan Gandhi marched across India advocating a clean, strong and united nation, covering 4,500 miles in 40 days. It was a programme of moral and spiritual reconstruction to foster change in private and public life based on a change in motivation and character.
Another unlikely hero of the movement was the late West Indies opening batsman Conrad Hunte. Like born again Christians, they had seen the light, but theirs was a message of world peace and moral rectitude that went beyond personal religion; it claimed to be one of transformation of the world that began with the individual.
As a slightly cynical young man, I had been a somewhat amused onlooker of what appeared to me to be a propagandist movement that sought to indoctrinate young people everywhere with grandiose ideas of changing the planet by adopting what Rajmohan Gandhi calls “the moral high ground”. Worse, some of us skeptics suspected ulterior motives, even a CIA plot to wean youth away from Communism, behind the whole movement.
Yet despite my intuitive skepticism, I could not help developing a sneaking admiration for my sister’s idol. When he spoke, he spoke with passion, conviction, a sincere desire to change the corrupt, warring ways of the world.
Soon MRA went out of my world, as my sister grew out of it and moved on to watching cricket and following the fortunes of a certain Nawab of Pataudi. And there, my indirect association with Rajmohan should have ended—but for my discovery of Himmat, the brilliant little weekly magazine he founded in 1964 and edited for the next 17 years. The moral high ground was still the fuel of Rajmohan Gandhi’s spiritual engine, but his splendid prose and the irrepressible courage and optimism of his writings made a huge impact on me and some of my friends. Himmat was a no-frills, monochromatic (literally) magazine which met national and international issues head on. It covered itself with glory during the Emergency declared in June 1975, while most of India’s press “crawled when asked to bend”.
I first met Rajmohan Gandhi many years ago during his mother Lakshmi Devdas Gandhi’s funeral. “Oh, the off spinner,” he said to me when someone introduced us, a flattering acknowledgement that he knew I was a cricketer. When I met him last week, he again talked cricket briefly before we went on to other subjects. “I only know your cricket, not your later incarnations,” he said.
It was a moment for my family to get his latest book A Tale of Two Revolts: India 1857 & the American Civil War autographed, and inform him that our library included his biographies of his two grandfathers, besides many of his other works. “Must be groaning under the weight,” he said.
A visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Gandhi was visiting Chennai for a brief lecture session for the benefit of visitors from the Netherlands. At 75, he still looks fit and alert physically and mentally, with no loss of the probing honesty that characterises his writings on his illustrious ancestors.
To my pleasant surprise I learnt from Rajmohan that MRA is still alive and kicking—recovering from the downslide caused by rampant materialism post-globalisation—but rechristened Initiatives of Change International. And its conference and training facility, Asia Plateau, a “verdant 64-acre centre of reconciliation, dialogue and introspection,” in the hills of Panchgani, Maharashtra, is still frequented by people from all over the world.
Rajmohan Gandhi is prominent in a number of initiatives to improve relations between Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan and the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. A true inheritor of the moral and intellectual qualities of both Gandhi and Rajaji, he believes, “One step of reconciliation, one step of bridge-building, one honest attempt to restore a divided relationship – and terrorism, extremism, receive a blow.”
And he is convinced that “if we demand rights and equality only for our group and not for all, they are no longer principles but just a political platform.”
Saturday, January 8, 2011
A Kathakali maestro turns 80
It was a surreal morning. The venue was the beautiful cottage-like auditorium inside the late dance diva Chandralekha’s residence facing Elliots Beach in south Chennai. Most of those who had gathered to celebrate Kathakali maestro K.P. Kunhiraman’s 80th birthday were either close to or past his age, in spotless white dhotis or saris. The others present were young dancers and students of music and dance, trying to drink in the atmosphere of a bygone age.
Kunhiraman sat inside the cottage with Buddha-like calm, accompanied by his American kathakali dancer wife Katherine—Keki to all—by his side and their daughter going around taking photographs. There was a gentle hush as forgotten memories were rekindled and recalled, as silent tears were shed for a way of life that would never come back—a way of life that one speaker of the morning described as a shining example of simple living and high thinking.
The great actor K. Ambu Panikkar, Kunhiraman’s father, had spent the last eight years of his life at Rukmini Devi Arundale’s Kalakshetra, teaching Kathakali. After his death, Rukmini Devi invited Kunhiraman to come and learn the art in the gurukula system, with his father’s friend and colleague T.K. Chandu Panikkar. Kunhiraman stayed at Kalakshetra for the next thirty years becoming one of its most celebrated and revered dancers, with unforgettable performances in the Ramayana series and other dance drama programmes. He also helped his guru train some of the greatest names among male dancers to perform at Kalakshetra and elsewhere in the decades to come.
Keki and Kunhiraman moved to Berkeley, California in the 1960s, “with one change of clothes and one set of Kathakali purushavesham costume in his suitcase,” as Keki wrote in a recent tribute to her husband. “I had told him we would be ‘missionaries in the jungle’, and at times would find ourselves in the cannibal’s pot,” she continues. “Friends came to meet him, tiptoeing silently into the bedroom to see the hundred-year-old crown hanging in the closet as if it were a new baby.”
Five days later, after his first performance in the US, at the Gala Galactic Festival of Martial, Healing and Performing Arts, Kunhiraman was shocked to see hippies leaping around the park playing music, and bearded yogis standing on their heads in the grass.
Recovering from the eerie experience in time, the Kunhiramans made many friends and settled down to start their school Kalanjali. Over the years, they had a steady stream of students Indian and American, and they kept recharging their batteries by visiting India annually to watch and participate in the Kalakshetra Art Festival and other events.
According to Keki, Kathakali never really caught on in the US: it had too much dancing for theatre people and too much theatre for dancers, “but there were triumphs and adventures with Kathakali that we had never anticipated.”
“We performed at the American Theatre Convention, numerous community events, our own productions, we took Kathakali to New York, Texas, Nebraska, Arizona, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and many other places.”
When Kunhiraman received the first choreography fellowship ever given to an Indian artist from the National Endowment for the Arts, the duo produced Keechaka Vadham, which was to be repeated many times over the years.
Embarrassingly once Kunhiraman mistook his daughter’s Halloween makeup for his green Kathakali makeup, and when he was dancing the role of Keechaka, and sweating profusely, his whole face ran off with the sweat!
The Kunhiramans have graduated from performance through teaching to “looking back.” To start from almost nothing and make a life in the US in Kathakali was a satisfying experience, despite the disappointment at not establishing the art more deeply in that country. “Perhaps if we had been willing to use the tradition as a language to express new ideas, and create new fusion theatre using the robust technique it would have survived in a mutant form, but neither of us wanted that, and in retrospect, we do not regret holding on to our original resolve, “ Keki says.
One of the speakers at the birthday celebration described how helpful the Kunhiramans had been to her when she visited Berkeley in the 1990s, and remembered her shock at being woken up by Kunhiraman in full Kathakali mask and make-up one morning. “I have made nice sambar for you. Please don’t wait for us for lunch as we are going out for the whole day.”
Rukmini Devi Arundale integrated Kathakali seamlessly into the dance drama format that she invented at Kalakshetra. It was a triumph of innovation that gave male dancers a great platform. Kunhiraman was perhaps the greatest exponent of the art form in a long line of distinguished performers the institution spawned.
His 80th birthday celebration, initiated by the renowned husband and wife team of Shanta and VP Dhananjayan, served to bring together several members of the large extended Kalakshetra family in a poignant reunion filled with memories of a glorious past. Keki and Kunhiraman were overwhelmed by the love and warmth of the exchanges among the participants, some of whom had come from as far as the US.
Kunhiraman sat inside the cottage with Buddha-like calm, accompanied by his American kathakali dancer wife Katherine—Keki to all—by his side and their daughter going around taking photographs. There was a gentle hush as forgotten memories were rekindled and recalled, as silent tears were shed for a way of life that would never come back—a way of life that one speaker of the morning described as a shining example of simple living and high thinking.
The great actor K. Ambu Panikkar, Kunhiraman’s father, had spent the last eight years of his life at Rukmini Devi Arundale’s Kalakshetra, teaching Kathakali. After his death, Rukmini Devi invited Kunhiraman to come and learn the art in the gurukula system, with his father’s friend and colleague T.K. Chandu Panikkar. Kunhiraman stayed at Kalakshetra for the next thirty years becoming one of its most celebrated and revered dancers, with unforgettable performances in the Ramayana series and other dance drama programmes. He also helped his guru train some of the greatest names among male dancers to perform at Kalakshetra and elsewhere in the decades to come.
Keki and Kunhiraman moved to Berkeley, California in the 1960s, “with one change of clothes and one set of Kathakali purushavesham costume in his suitcase,” as Keki wrote in a recent tribute to her husband. “I had told him we would be ‘missionaries in the jungle’, and at times would find ourselves in the cannibal’s pot,” she continues. “Friends came to meet him, tiptoeing silently into the bedroom to see the hundred-year-old crown hanging in the closet as if it were a new baby.”
Five days later, after his first performance in the US, at the Gala Galactic Festival of Martial, Healing and Performing Arts, Kunhiraman was shocked to see hippies leaping around the park playing music, and bearded yogis standing on their heads in the grass.
Recovering from the eerie experience in time, the Kunhiramans made many friends and settled down to start their school Kalanjali. Over the years, they had a steady stream of students Indian and American, and they kept recharging their batteries by visiting India annually to watch and participate in the Kalakshetra Art Festival and other events.
According to Keki, Kathakali never really caught on in the US: it had too much dancing for theatre people and too much theatre for dancers, “but there were triumphs and adventures with Kathakali that we had never anticipated.”
“We performed at the American Theatre Convention, numerous community events, our own productions, we took Kathakali to New York, Texas, Nebraska, Arizona, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and many other places.”
When Kunhiraman received the first choreography fellowship ever given to an Indian artist from the National Endowment for the Arts, the duo produced Keechaka Vadham, which was to be repeated many times over the years.
Embarrassingly once Kunhiraman mistook his daughter’s Halloween makeup for his green Kathakali makeup, and when he was dancing the role of Keechaka, and sweating profusely, his whole face ran off with the sweat!
The Kunhiramans have graduated from performance through teaching to “looking back.” To start from almost nothing and make a life in the US in Kathakali was a satisfying experience, despite the disappointment at not establishing the art more deeply in that country. “Perhaps if we had been willing to use the tradition as a language to express new ideas, and create new fusion theatre using the robust technique it would have survived in a mutant form, but neither of us wanted that, and in retrospect, we do not regret holding on to our original resolve, “ Keki says.
One of the speakers at the birthday celebration described how helpful the Kunhiramans had been to her when she visited Berkeley in the 1990s, and remembered her shock at being woken up by Kunhiraman in full Kathakali mask and make-up one morning. “I have made nice sambar for you. Please don’t wait for us for lunch as we are going out for the whole day.”
Rukmini Devi Arundale integrated Kathakali seamlessly into the dance drama format that she invented at Kalakshetra. It was a triumph of innovation that gave male dancers a great platform. Kunhiraman was perhaps the greatest exponent of the art form in a long line of distinguished performers the institution spawned.
His 80th birthday celebration, initiated by the renowned husband and wife team of Shanta and VP Dhananjayan, served to bring together several members of the large extended Kalakshetra family in a poignant reunion filled with memories of a glorious past. Keki and Kunhiraman were overwhelmed by the love and warmth of the exchanges among the participants, some of whom had come from as far as the US.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
A glimpse into Kathak training
The Natya Kala Conference of the Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, a major event of Chennai’s annual music and dance season, has over the years attracted some of the finest exponents of India’s classical dances and other dance forms. The title Nrithya Choodamani was this year awarded to Gopika Varma, a practitioner of Mohiniyattom, a dance genre from Kerala.
One of the highlights of the Conference has been the conduct of lecture sessions in the morning, which have for decades drawn experts ranging from Singhajit Singhji and Astad Deboo to Kalanidhi Narayanan and CV Chandrasekhar to engage in lively discussions of topics crucial to their art, followed by even livelier interactions with the audience. Many of these discussions generate a great deal of debate and audience participation, even if half the time the only heat that results is in the form of hot air.
This year the discussions focused on the abhyasa-sampradaya or the evolution of teaching-training traditions of the five major systems of Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Odissi and Kathak, traditional natya, “culminating in today's repertoire and presentation”. A contemporary acharya of eminence led each deliberation, while both well known performers and students demonstrated the path traversed by the art form to reach its present status. Each day’s deliberations proved to be an eye-opener to those not familiar with the rigour and science behind the training methodology unique to each genre of dance.
The popular vote for the best session went to the last one on Kathak, because it served not only to showcase some of the brilliant techniques and levels of accomplishment attained by today’s practitioners, but also to dispel a few myths about the perceived lack of sophistication of the art form relative to the southern dance forms.
Anchored by Sangeet Natak Akademi secretary Jayant Kastuar, himself a past Nrithya Choodamani, the session was led by senior gurus from the two major gharanas of Kathak—Jaipur and Lucknow—and made eminently watchable by dance demonstrations by three representatives of each school, veterans, current stars and senior students. Jai Kishan Maharaj, past master of the Lucknow gharana, and Rajendra Gangani, pillar of the Jaipur gharana, led their disciples on a thrilling journey from the first exercises they practised as young students to the most complex compositions they perform on stage today.
In addition to the Birju Maharaj clan, which was represented by two of Jai Kishan’s brothers, and three musicians from the Gangani family who assisted Rajendra, there were vocalists, sarangi players and percussionists on stage. Gauri Diwakar did the star turn for the Lucknow gharana while Swati Sinha played her role to perfection from the Jaipur side.
Remarkably, there was perfect coordination between the two different gharanas on display. The camaraderie and chemistry were to be seen to be believed, the Ganganis appreciating and encouraging the Maharajs and vice versa. We learnt how at the Kathak Kendra, New Delhi, where the teaching methods have through the decades been codified and structured to develop a common vocabulary, the two gharanas have gained by observing absorbing each other’s ways. It was most heartwarming to see the two senior gurus working in tandem to make the demonstration meaningful and fruitful for an audience largely untutored in the nuances of Kathak. Two senior students of the Kendra, Dhirendra Tiwari and Quincy Kendell Charles, gave a high quality display of expression and footwork.
The high point of the lec-dem was the impromptu display of footwork by Jayant Kastuar in his south Indian silk veshti—which he had donned in his capacity as anchor for the morning—at the instance of the Ganganis, who even managed to persuade the portly Jai Kishan Maharaj to magically transform himself into the thieving boy Krishna caught with butter all over his face.
To those of us who believed Kathak offered no more than fast-paced footwork and twirls and pirouettes, the variety of expressions and the poetry—even if largely based on the Radha-Krishna theme—the two teams demonstrated that morning were quite a revelation. Accustomed over the years to rivalries and claims of superiority made by the different schools of classical dance, it was refreshing for a south Indian audience to see how well nearly a dozen artists belonging to two different gharanas worked to a common purpose, illuminating the lecture with some outstanding nritta.
That the youngest were students and the oldest over sixty, that they came from different parts of India, and that one of them was a UK-born mathematician turned dancer of African descent made the whole experience even more enjoyable.
Just a day earlier, MS Dhoni’s men, with fifteen years separating the oldest and youngest team members, again from different parts of India, coached by a South African and supported by staff from different parts of the world, had beaten South Africa comprehensively in their own backyard.
Jayant Kastuar, Jai Kishan Maharaj, Rajendra Gangani and their talented artists won over the hearts and minds of a highly demanding Chennai audience. Amidst the general gloom surrounding the future of the Indian classical performing arts, thanks to lack of support from the government and the media, such events give us hope.
One of the highlights of the Conference has been the conduct of lecture sessions in the morning, which have for decades drawn experts ranging from Singhajit Singhji and Astad Deboo to Kalanidhi Narayanan and CV Chandrasekhar to engage in lively discussions of topics crucial to their art, followed by even livelier interactions with the audience. Many of these discussions generate a great deal of debate and audience participation, even if half the time the only heat that results is in the form of hot air.
This year the discussions focused on the abhyasa-sampradaya or the evolution of teaching-training traditions of the five major systems of Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Odissi and Kathak, traditional natya, “culminating in today's repertoire and presentation”. A contemporary acharya of eminence led each deliberation, while both well known performers and students demonstrated the path traversed by the art form to reach its present status. Each day’s deliberations proved to be an eye-opener to those not familiar with the rigour and science behind the training methodology unique to each genre of dance.
The popular vote for the best session went to the last one on Kathak, because it served not only to showcase some of the brilliant techniques and levels of accomplishment attained by today’s practitioners, but also to dispel a few myths about the perceived lack of sophistication of the art form relative to the southern dance forms.
Anchored by Sangeet Natak Akademi secretary Jayant Kastuar, himself a past Nrithya Choodamani, the session was led by senior gurus from the two major gharanas of Kathak—Jaipur and Lucknow—and made eminently watchable by dance demonstrations by three representatives of each school, veterans, current stars and senior students. Jai Kishan Maharaj, past master of the Lucknow gharana, and Rajendra Gangani, pillar of the Jaipur gharana, led their disciples on a thrilling journey from the first exercises they practised as young students to the most complex compositions they perform on stage today.
In addition to the Birju Maharaj clan, which was represented by two of Jai Kishan’s brothers, and three musicians from the Gangani family who assisted Rajendra, there were vocalists, sarangi players and percussionists on stage. Gauri Diwakar did the star turn for the Lucknow gharana while Swati Sinha played her role to perfection from the Jaipur side.
Remarkably, there was perfect coordination between the two different gharanas on display. The camaraderie and chemistry were to be seen to be believed, the Ganganis appreciating and encouraging the Maharajs and vice versa. We learnt how at the Kathak Kendra, New Delhi, where the teaching methods have through the decades been codified and structured to develop a common vocabulary, the two gharanas have gained by observing absorbing each other’s ways. It was most heartwarming to see the two senior gurus working in tandem to make the demonstration meaningful and fruitful for an audience largely untutored in the nuances of Kathak. Two senior students of the Kendra, Dhirendra Tiwari and Quincy Kendell Charles, gave a high quality display of expression and footwork.
The high point of the lec-dem was the impromptu display of footwork by Jayant Kastuar in his south Indian silk veshti—which he had donned in his capacity as anchor for the morning—at the instance of the Ganganis, who even managed to persuade the portly Jai Kishan Maharaj to magically transform himself into the thieving boy Krishna caught with butter all over his face.
To those of us who believed Kathak offered no more than fast-paced footwork and twirls and pirouettes, the variety of expressions and the poetry—even if largely based on the Radha-Krishna theme—the two teams demonstrated that morning were quite a revelation. Accustomed over the years to rivalries and claims of superiority made by the different schools of classical dance, it was refreshing for a south Indian audience to see how well nearly a dozen artists belonging to two different gharanas worked to a common purpose, illuminating the lecture with some outstanding nritta.
That the youngest were students and the oldest over sixty, that they came from different parts of India, and that one of them was a UK-born mathematician turned dancer of African descent made the whole experience even more enjoyable.
Just a day earlier, MS Dhoni’s men, with fifteen years separating the oldest and youngest team members, again from different parts of India, coached by a South African and supported by staff from different parts of the world, had beaten South Africa comprehensively in their own backyard.
Jayant Kastuar, Jai Kishan Maharaj, Rajendra Gangani and their talented artists won over the hearts and minds of a highly demanding Chennai audience. Amidst the general gloom surrounding the future of the Indian classical performing arts, thanks to lack of support from the government and the media, such events give us hope.