In memoriam
Chandralekha in retrospect 1928-2006
STILL in the process of coming to terms with Chandra’s death, which has not yet sunk in – do not expect, therefore, a formal obituary or a memoir stricken with grief – I am compelled to grapple with some critical questions that were sparked by the ceaseless struggle animating her life and work. In the sheer power and radiance of her personality – ‘a living Shakti’, as one section of the media idealized her – and in the inspirational force of her numerous productions, it is easy to forget that there was an intense vulnerability underlying the turbulent process of her life and work. Likewise, in the lyricism of her utopian and occasionally florid statements about the body and cosmos, one can fail to recognize the sheer precision of her self-reflexivity. These quiet moments of reflection were likely to be found in conversation with her, while staring into the sea outside her home in Besant Nagar, where I was fortunate to catch some moments of her being.
Two such moments linger. ‘You know what I like about being here,’ I remember her confiding on one such still and moonlit night, ‘you could be anywhere.’ A glimpse into the cosmopolitan world of a quintessentially Indian urban nomad, linked at an almost partisan level to the conceptual power of Indian corporeal traditions and cultural practices, but also capable of crossing borders, both within and beyond the body, and across national borders.
Another moment of being, more prescient in the context of her death: ‘What I’m likely to leave behind are some points of reference.’ At one level, this can be regarded as an exceptionally modest, if not disingenuous, statement in the context of the landmarks in Chandra’s multi-faceted oeuvre as a choreographer, writer, designer, and cultural activist. But, in the relatively neutral description of ‘points of reference’, Chandra also enables us to reflect on her resolutely incomplete legacy, as well as on the questions that continue to animate her vision in the struggles of the here and now.
Legacy: the word is like a fishbone stuck in one’s throat. What legacy can one presume to claim for a woman who dreamed, somewhat maliciously, of a ‘still-born grandfather who died as soon as he was born?’ This iconoclastic reference in one of Chandra’s ’68 Poems, which had shocked me when I had included it in my book Chandralekha: Woman, Dance, Resistance, continues to provoke. In the paternalistic and claustrophobically familial context of Indian traditions, how does one live without the psychological ballast and social sanctions provided by family and community? In a radical gesture of which she never made a big deal, Chandra had dropped her family name (Patel) in her teens, when she was already living with Harindranath Chattopadhyay, a man old enough to be her father. For her, these choices were not ‘radical’; they simply determined what she had to do with her life at a particular point in time.
More combative, not least because she faced more opposition in this regard, was Chandra’s uncompromising contempt for the institution of marriage and the burden of having children, in which she refused to see any significance for a woman’s self-realization. For some feminists, this represented a closure, if not self-denial, but Chandra never wavered in the exhilarating joy of being a single woman with all the trials and risks, and inevitably, the absence of a biological legacy, that go with the pleasures of solitude. As the men in her life were compelled to accept – with the embrace of solitude, one can be sure, there was no dearth of male partners – Chandra was her own woman. Dependent as she was in her last years on her live-in companion Sadanand Menon, whose selfless devotion has renewed my understanding of seva, she was uncomfortable about being ‘coupled’ with him. And this extended to all friendships, with her intimate women friends, as well as with dancers and other artists: ‘Let us be together, but let us also be free of each other.’
Today Chandra is free. Instead of grieving about her disappearance from our lives, we should be rejoicing in this fact, even while questioning our own readiness to deal with the points of reference that she has left behind.
The dubious question of legacy becomes more challenging in dealing with her parampara: a word, I should add, that I have never heard her use in conversation. Not that she undermined the tutelage of Guru Ellappa Pillai, to whose nattvangam she danced her first adavus, and for whom she had an enduring and loving respect as someone who could guide and ‘protect’ her during actual performances with his sound musicianship. However, once she had assimilated the rudiments of Bharatanatyam’s ‘grammar’ from him – ‘grammar’, I emphasize, not ‘theory’, which she interpreted more politically – she lost no time in ‘historicizing’ the dance form itself in her first choreographed production of Devadasi (1961): a metacritical interpretation of dance that was way ahead of its time.
From Chandra, we learn not to fetishize the privilege of inheriting an artistic legacy through a particular parampara. As much as she loved Bharatanatyam, it could not be upheld as an absolute. Rather, it needed to be questioned, and then later, deconstructed, and reconstructed, not just at formal levels through linkages with the psychophysical energies of yoga and the material context of the martial arts, in which Chandra made pioneering interventions through her landmark production of Angika (1985). More critically, the parampara had to be questioned ideologically, both in relation to the patriarchal and brahmanical premises of Bharatanatyam, whose mythological and occasionally sexist narratives could be not endorsed without seriously compromising her own values as a freethinking, independent, modern woman.
Ironically – and this is where the value of legacies can be upheld – it was the premier institution of Bharatanatyam, Kalakshetra, under the august leadership of Rukmini Devi that came to Chandra’s rescue in 1984, when, out of the blue, she was invited to participate in the East-West Dance Encounter in Mumbai. This invitation precipitated Chandra’s ‘return’ to dance after her 13-year old self-imposed exile as a dancer, following her production of Navagraha in 1971. The transitional years between 1971-84 were heady and volatile, spent in travel, random creative pursuits, and then – under the direct impact of the Emergency, and the short-lived promise of a new secular democratic front – an astute exploration of the cultural dimensions of activism through her organization Skills, which trained activists in the techniques of screen-printing, poster design, street theatre and critical thinking.
Returning to 1984, it is clear that without Rukmini Devi’s generosity in lending Chandra four Kalakshetra dancers to revive the tillana that she had originally choreographed for Devadasi, Chandra’s ‘return’ to dance might not have materialized. Furthermore, Rukmini Devi had the extraordinary grace to acknowledge the striking ‘originality’ and ‘geometric’ vision of Chandra’s choreography. Her forthright statement, ‘I have never seen a tillana like this’, was clearly at odds with the vituperative criticism that Chandra was to receive from numerous diehard neoclassicists who condemned her ‘innovations’ and ridiculed her understanding of ‘tradition’, in addition to accusing her for ‘bringing too many beards on to the stage’ (read: martial artists).
While the benefits of institutionalizing dance should not be undermined, despite the mushrooming of Indian classical dance factories worldwide, it is mandatory to emphasize that Chandra never wanted to institutionalize her practice. At one level, she had a genuine horror of the bureaucratization that is inevitable in any institutional process, which was linked in her mind to the oppressive memory of Rukmini Devi surrounded by files on a desk. On being questioned by an indignant Chandra why she was subjecting herself to the burden of administration, instead of giving her vision to others, Rukmini Devi’s poignant answer was in the form of a rhetorical question: ‘Who needs my vision?’
Herein lies the crux of the challenge that we face in Chandra’s death. With no institution, no permanent dance company, no systematized pedagogy, no computerized archive, Chandra’s legacy is already in the process of being erased, rather like the waves washing away the sand on Elliots Beach. However, even if there is no legacy in an institutionalized sense, what are the elusive and intangible ways by which Chandra’s vision has been registered? How, indeed, can these internalizations continue to catalyze other creative and political processes in the here and now? I would stress the political as much as the creative, because, in Chandra’s radical aesthetics, there can be no clear-cut division between these categories. However, the ‘political’ in question cannot be readily annexed to activist agendas and the immediacies of the realpolitik; rather, it needs to be embedded within the language and energies of the body.
From Angika to Sharira – both words referring to the ‘body’ – spectators of Chandra’s productions have travelled via the mediation of Bhaskaracharya’s mathematical treatise on Lilavati, Muthuswamy Diskshitar’s navagraha kritis which provided the yogic base for Prana, into the more dramatic rendering of a woman’s oppression and self-realization in Sri, through the exploration of the sensual, the erotic, and the spiritual dimensions of the ‘inner body’ in Yantra, Raga, and other visionary productions. Over and over again, the focus is on the body itself, risking the obvious charges of formalism and high modernism.
Why the body? Because, as Chandra never failed to point out, we are not aware of our bodies and their inner potentialities and capacities to resist the sources of mechanization and brutalization in the world. It should not be forgotten in this regard that Chandra’s ‘return to the body’ was not precipitated by any desire to create a new dance production; it came out of the pain of being attacked by the mechanisms of the state when she, along with Sadanand, was charged in 1982 with sedition in relation to their allegedly anti-state activities connected with Skills. Even though the charge of sedition was eventually lifted, the intervening period was traumatic for Chandra. It was also a profound learning process about the restorative power of the body that proved to be a turning point in her life.
Listening to her recall this seminal learning process, I will never forget her articulate these words to me, because I could hear the struggle underlying their articulation:
Within the body there are resources on which you can draw to get back your spine. It is like the earth which has the secrets of reviving itself. When there is a crisis in life, and a crisis in the body – when the spine feels chill – you can become ‘normal’, accept ‘security’, submit to ‘norms’ that are not your own. It is only through creativity that you can resist brutalization. You learn to confront. You don’t ‘cope’. A ‘fight’ emerges within yourself, not with the other. A fight with the other can only further brutalize you.
These words, I believe, are still crying out to be fully understood and activated in the Indian context. No sector could be more immune to, or derisive, of their content, than those activists and ideologues advocating social and political transformation, for whom the body is, at best, some kind of instrument for social change, but, more often than not, a mere receptacle that needs to be fed with adequate nutrition and, if possible, politically correct doses of ‘consciousness’. Overly verbal, tied up in argumentative knots and polemical divides, rich in strategy but poor in imagining creative solutions, razor-sharp in analysis but phlegmatic in dealing with the more intricate tasks of introspection and listening, the Indian world of activism has a great tendency to echo and embody the brutalizing manifestations of ‘the other’ which it claims to oppose. Chandra’s particular route of confronting brutalization through an inner knowledge of the body is just one possible strategy of resistance, but it is well worth considering.
However, in the absence of creative infrastructures for incorporating the insights of the body into projects relating to engaged citizenship – we have a lot to learn in this regard from the formative interactions between dancers and NGOs in Brazil – Chandra found herself exploring the micropolitical potentialities of resistance in the body within a more rigorously determined artistic framework. This does not mean that she enclosed herself in an ivory tower. Simultaneously, along with her productions, she continued to ignite provocative debates in social forums, as, for instance, on the contradictory dynamics of recontextualizing a secular feminist imagery from Hindu religious icons and symbols, prone to fundamentalist readings. Chandra challenged the didactic imperatives of Indian feminism, and its penchant for black-and-white, ‘fist’ imagery, which she regarded as an anti-aesthetic and deculturalized politics.
Yet another much-publicized showdown took place during Chandra’s bold exhibition on Stree: Women in India at the Festival of India in Moscow. Here she took on the Indian Consul T.N. Kaul who protested vigorously against the inclusion of Aravindan’s film Sahaja on the concept of ardhanarishwara, with the priceless statement: ‘Hum to poore mard hain.’ Without caring to deflate this crude assertion of Indian masculinity, Chandra reiterated that the exhibition was not going to be about ‘Mrs. G’ (rumoured at one time to be the only ‘man’ in her cabinet), and that the greatest achievement for Indian women, particularly in the subaltern sectors, needed to be traced to the creativity underlying their strategies of survival.
In retrospect, I applaud not so much Chandra’s chutzpah in countering high-handed, bureaucratic interference, but her conceptual foregrounding of androgyny in an exhibition committed to women’s empowerment. It should be pointed out that Chandra was not affirming a politics of alternate sexualities. More precisely, she was highlighting the extraordinary beauty to be found in the art of female impersonation, whereby an artist of the calibre of Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra could actually ‘become’ Radha. For Chandra, this process of ‘becoming’, or, as she put it more vividly, the ‘genuine anguish of becoming’ could illuminate femininity, at infinitesimal levels – in the curve of the body that Guru Kelucharan was able to shape in his metamorphosis as Radha, which would make Chandra cry.
‘I don’t cry,’ as she once confided, ‘when something is sad. I cry when I see something beautiful.’ In Guru Kelucharan’s ‘becoming’ Radha, there was, at least from Chandra’s point of view, no semblance of a man appropriating a woman’s sensibility, body, and being within the protocols of heterosexual patriarchy. Rather, there was a celebration of ‘femininity’ and a tangible illumination of those invisible dimensions of fantasy which are, at once, linked to sexuality and free of its disciplinary regimes. As a term, Chandra’s frequent invocation of ‘femininity’ was always somewhat opaque, until it got clarified one day in her presence. During a rehearsal, we were watching one of her former gymnasts doing some virtuoso exercises on stage, but without any real spark or animation. The energy was missing. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked Chandra, to which she responded instinctively, ‘He’s lost his femininity.’
Such are the subtle insights to be found in the vision of Chandralekha, located in the inner energies and recesses of the body; in the slow process of movement rather than its quick, bravura renditions; in that minuscule stretch of the spine which also evokes an immeasurable distance; in the mystery of directions, with the same movement having totally different dynamics from left to right, and from right to left; in the split-second time-lag that exists between a dancer’s breath and the musician’s accompaniment; and, ultimately, in the mandala of the body that holds the cosmos and in the sudden splaying of legs in a yogic headstand or sirsasana, wherein the entire earth can be felt to rotate. In all these seemingly ‘small’ interventions, Chandra has broken enormous ground.
Her last production Sharira was, in many ways, a crystallization of her entire journey. In an almost miraculous economy of constantly evolving minimalist movements, always pulsating, even while appearing to be still, this combination of movements held together by two non-dancers, with no background in classical dance whatsoever, exemplified a state of rigor that was at once sensual and spiritual in a totally non-sensational anti-spectacle. Unlike in the earlier productions where the juxtapositions of Bharatanatyam, kalarippayyatu and yoga were distinct, here in Sharira there was an alchemy of languages, at once contemporary and traditional, ancient and modern, not unlike the dhrupad sung by the Gundecha brothers that accompanied the movement of Sharira in startling synchrony. On seeing and hearing this synchrony, it became clear to me that our so-called Indian tradition is also ceaselessly avant-garde, resonating within the immediacies of the here and now.
To realize that Chandra had arrived at this stage of sublime impersonality in her artistic career, at the very point in her life when her body had broken down, moves me deeply. Somewhat too heroically, she accompanied Sharira for its last performance to the Frankfurt Book Fair in a wheelchair, when her spine was no longer erect, though her voice continued to be strong. I am going to miss this extraordinarily gutsy and beautiful woman, my friend and mentor, at levels that I am not yet able to fathom.
What I can acknowledge is that without Chandra, I would never have had access to the exclusionary world of classical dance, and to its hallowed concepts like rasa, which she was able to flesh out in the down-to-earth language of practice. In the space of her Mandala theatre, I have listened – with no exaggeration – to my heart beat to the breath and inner pulse of the silent movement on the stage. To her iconic representations of the Naravahana and the herb-goddess Sakambhari, I have seen the sky open and the clouds pass in wondrous ways. Beyond these representations, if there is a legacy from Chandra, which even she would accept despite her mutinous opposition to the commemoration of legacies in general, it is to be found in the grove of trees that she has left behind on Besant Nagar, once a wilderness of sand without a blade of grass. In those trees, and in their continued nourishment, Chandra lives.
Rustom Bharucha
Papiya Ghosh 1953-2006
SHE worked on the dispossessed, the exiled and the hopeless. As a historian, Papiya Ghosh was not necessarily concerned with the mainstream. For her the migrant workers of Bihar were of great concern, and among them the Muslims, who were shortchanged doubly. Her work spanned all those within the sub-continent who belonged and yet were marginalized. The displacement of individuals through the actions of individuals or the caprice of history bothered her. Her posthumously published work, The Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent, is a lasting testimony to her intellectual concerns. These stories were to her the real stories to be told loudly and clearly, just in case those who did not have a voice were forgotten.
Papiya Ghosh loved stories. Every event had to be narrated in the form of a kahani. She needed every detail about colour, texture, smell and sound to be part of the narration. She herself told fantastic stories, and her anecdotes were told in a masterly mixture of English and Hindi, where like criss-crossing streams the two languages and phrases she had invented merged effortlessly into one another.
Papiya is now dead, and the ghastly manner of her departure cannot be rendered as a ‘kahani’ in the way she liked to listen and speak. A friend who knew her told me recently of the effort she has made in order to get the Papiya we knew back to mind without the events of 3 December intervening. We, her friends, were so used to listening to good stories in Papiya’s company that it is difficult for all of us to comprehend the manner of her departure.
For me, the first memories of Papiya would always be that of her rooms in the Public Entry building of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Her hospitality was matchless, and her room the very picture of beauty and order. She hated clutter, disorder and ugliness in all forms, and her immediate environment reflected her finely honed aesthetic sensibilities. It was in these rooms where gossip achieved metaphysical heights, quarrels were sorted-out, and friendships for life made.
She had a pet name for all her friends. Those who were not her friends, but amused her were also rechristened. The list included Dolly, Sally, Awareness, Victoria, Imelda, Earl Grey, Molly, Reindeer, Savvy and so on. I was Tiger, named so after I growled at a speaker in one of the weekly seminars at the Institute. And of course, she was Polly. We became these names, for her, and for each other.
The centre of her intellectual life was driven by a deep consciousness of her identity as a Bihari and as a liberal. If these two identities came in the way of each other and stood in antagonistic opposition, Bihar eventually won hands down. She stayed on in Patna despite threats from the land mafia because leaving would not merely mean geographical displacement, but abandoning an idea and an engagement.
When I visited her in Patna in 2000, her greatest regret was that Auntie Ghosh, her mother, was no longer there and would have loved to meet me. She played some Rabindra Sangeet, and when I remarked that a particular composition was my favourite, Papiya tearfully told me that it was Auntie Ghosh’s favourite number too.
In 2001 and 2002, Papiya came to Hyderabad and pronounced that my new flat was ‘khoob bhaalo’. She loved the view from the hilltop, where she gazed fondly at the view of the Golkonda fort. She loved the dinner Peacered (her name for him, a translation of Shantilal), my cook, had made for her, and he was rewarded with several pictures taken of him in the kitchen with his paraphernalia around.
Four days before she passed on, we spoke on the phone for a long time. She always asked for the well being of the living as well as the dead. Papiya never failed to call me on the death anniversary of my grandmother, and she even remembered the day our favourite dog, Sumo, died. She sent up prayers for all of them. Her generosity and her sense of empathy were boundless.
Today when I look around, the beautiful porcelain coaster on which I place my morning cup of coffee was given by her. The wooden elephant from Indonesia on my shelf was a birthday present from her. A small porcelain bowl on my desk was her gift when I left the Institute. There are at least two dozen books on my shelves that were given by her over the years. If these objects are also part of a story, then, the manner of her departure only heightens one’s awareness of how narratives take a different turn and change the very way in which stories are begun, continued and come to an end.
Papiya was constantly sending up duas for everyone, especially her friends. Maybe, we, her friends, did not regularly send up enough ‘duas’ for her. Maybe, we never felt that someone so vivacious needed prayers. The Almighty shortchanged her in the end.
Jyotirmaya Sharma
