Bharatanatyam has gained an unmistakable identity all over India and abroad and this image is not restricted to the field of the arts. Just one small example is the fact that Bharatanatyam dancers are featured in television commercials to promote a range of products from sporting events like cricket and football, to chocolates, washing machines and health food!

In many places, Bharatanatyam has become more of a community activity than an art form, indulged by teachers who think they are gurus and students who imagine they are stars. Unprecedented popularity in South India and abroad wherever the teachers have settled after marriage, has made the arangetram, an auspicious debut performance, a mandatory social event on the scale of a wedding.

A host of sabhas and festivals attract dancers and incite their ambitions, but those who stay the course rarely have the scope or support to become prima donnas. Instead, their initial training gives them the courage and conviction to start dance schools wherever they settle in a repetition of the cycle. By treating it as a cottage industry, they make it a viable profession.

With an unlimited pool of parents who want their children to dance, there are always a fresh batch of students. Teachers produce school shows and motivate their wards to perform whenever and wherever they can. Such a huge democratic situation has produced innumerable dancers. From tiny tots to teenagers, they take to the stage and sincerely hope to be recognized.

The process of acknowledging Bharatanatyam as a classical art worthy of nurturing in spite of a blanket ban on the original custodians of dance, the devadasis, in temples and public places began in the 1930s. Studying this twentieth century history of Bharatanatyam is a worthwhile exercise for many of us who believe that this dance form has a future beyond the current trends.

Rukmini Devi who started Kalakshetra, the now famous school of Bharatanatyam in Madras (now Chennai), proved that a model for institutionalizing Bharatanatyam could work in early twentieth century South India. A dance school was unheard of in those times. But just as amateurs became film stars, and lawyers became film directors, women without the previously necessary devadasi background, entered the field of classical dance, making it one more path on the map of culture and national pride.

 

Rukmini Devi had her own vision for dance, as part of a liberal educational institution which she founded with expert mentoring by her husband, Bishop Arundale, a theosophist and educator. The dance school developed at first under the strict guidance of traditional teachers, the male nattuvanars. Rukmini Devi’s innovation was to then rely on teachers trained by them, who stayed the course, until Kalakshetra became a reliable source of Bharatanatyam dance training, including both practice and theory. Over time, the method became standardized, with a detailed curriculum, and enough incentives for the students to perform in in-house productions of dance dramas that enacted mythological stories with a broad appeal targeted towards the newly emerging audience for dance.

Nothing happened miraculously. Like building an edifice by hand, the school crafted good students who developed as efficient dancers in Rukmini Devi’s home productions and eventually went on to become teachers themselves through an organic process that was slowly honed over the years. The ideals of the founder could begin to see their fulfilment as the institution grew. With authority, Rukmini Devi adapted the dance towards her vision of a classical form.

A harmonious whole developed with the assiduous hard work of a committed team: a school, annual campus performances, limited tours outside and a holistic education that included the allied arts. Rukmini Devi herself managed the direction right through her life. Her own arresting personality gave the institution a remarkable image which rested on her reputation as a theosophist, disciple of the famous Annie Besant, at one time even designated by her as World Mother, a member of the Brahmin community, a good speaker of English, and a very beautiful, internationally travelled socialite.

While such a development of Bharatanatyam was taking place in a quiet corner of Madras on the banks of the Adayar river, various gurus who migrated from their respective villages to the same urban ambience, adapted their lifestyle to the setting, adopted new students and put their own authoritative stamp on the developing art. The gurus played a pivotal role, helped by institutions, government, and enlightened scholars and researchers. Over a period of fifty years or more, the popularity of this dance form increased. What the dance depicted was poetry, often, the words of saints and composers who were already well known. Added to this was a remarkable identity given to the dance by the lyrics of freedom fighters like Subramania Bharati. Dance entertained, with a good measure of nationalism pervading its content.

 

Its presence in cinema, which projected it as a beautiful visual, heightened by the accompanying music based on the classical Karnatic style, brought to new audiences. Trained Bharatanatayam dancers took to acting in films, where they seemed to have a natural advantage. Dancers of South India even stormed the Bombay cinema scene as stars who knew how to move.

The years after independence saw the growth of Bharatanatyam outside Kalakshetra, with the commitment of dancers who sought the gurus, going so far as to even seek them in distant villages. Small schools with worthy students mushroomed everywhere, including Delhi, Bombay and other places. The government in Delhi created a culture cell, the Sangeet Natak Akademi, and one of the first dance forms to get the ultimate status of ‘classical’ was Bharatanatyam. The reputation of Bharatanatyam was being established nationwide. It is clear that this dance was popularized not by Rukmini Devi or Kalakshetra alone, but by a group of teachers and solo dancers who staked their claim to recognition at the national level with the clear motive of putting it on the map of Indian cultural excellence. National awards testified to the importance of this art, with both gurus and dancers being suitably recognized. An added encomium was the performance of Bharatanatyam at state banquets by dancers like Indrani Rehman. The image of a new India included Bharatanatyam.

 

While such developments took place on the national scale, Rukmini Devi broke new ground in her niche in Adayar by creating a series of dance-dramas based on Valmiki’s Ramayana. This is her single most significant contribution to Bharatanatyam. Dancing in a group was known to the Tamil people in their folk traditions. They also knew of exclusive performances oriented to temple ritual in enactments of Puranas by the Bhagavata Mela tradition, in shows held once a year in a cluster of village temples. The actors learnt Bharatanatyam from nattuvanars as part of the necessary training to enact mythological tales. Rukmini Devi studied and used this genre to create her own dance dramas.

But much of what she brought to the form was guided by her own aesthetic tastes: in exquisite costumes designed and made for her by an Italian designer, in lighting created specifically for the stage, and in the placement of large groups of dancers to create a harmonious effect that was modern without losing any of its Indianness.

Over a lifetime in dance, Rukmini Devi went from being an outsider to being a legend. She lived till a ripe old age and left a legacy of Bharatanatyam dance dramas as an authentic product of the Renaissance of art in modern India, seen with pleasure to this day.

 

Kalakshetra continued almost unchanged, as an institution, for two decades or more after Rukmini Devi’s demise, but not without running into rough patches. The problems of governance, legality of societies and trusts and foundations, clouded the school for a while. But somehow and sometimes at great personal cost, the old hands who had been there for decades kept the show going with a completely self-effacing attitude. Thus the school with its aims and values, its dance training, structure of courses, technique of practice, was well guarded from any attempt at dilution or erosion.

Change came in the form of government sponsorship. With it also came younger bosses like Leela Samson, an old student, and now Priyadarshini Govind who never studied there. Thus the elements are in place for Kalakshetra to continue as a niche of solid Bharatanatyam education.

The million dollar question remains: What next, not just for Kalakshetra, but for Bharatanatyam? Can there be new horizons to conquer? Is it possible to envisage an institution which fulfils the hopes and aspirations of the dancers of today and prepares the dancers of tomorrow? Can Kalakshetra, which has been a memorial of sorts to Rukmini Devi in a one-dimensional way that was not her vision, find a new horizon?

 

I wish to share my thoughts and ideas on the possibilities for further growth and development. First, the most obvious reasons for choosing Kalakshetra as the centre for the future Bharatanatyam are in the existing infrastructure that it inherits. The extensive campus has enough space for tangible expansion. Being in Chennai, with its record as a pivotal source of patronage for more than a hundred years, means that the art form will continue to develop along with its most enthusiastic and knowledgeable audience. Since there are numerous other dance schools with many students, there will continue to be both a wide pool of potential students, and a natural competitive force pushing students towards excellence. Kalakshetra itself has been at the forefront of adaptation, adoption, and transformation, so it is natural that it be so once again.

The doors of Kalakshetra should be opened to Bharatanatyam of multiple banis, particularly those styles which are vanishing. While it is true that Kalakshetra was initiated into the Pandanallur style, it certainly underwent a change with the introduction of uniformity. Today, outside Kalakshetra, there are about a dozen dancers and teachers who follow the bani of gurus like Vazhuvur Ramiah Pillai, Tanjavur Kittappa Pillai, Tanjavur Ganesan Pillai, Pandanallur Subbaraya Pillai, Kanjivaram Ellappa Pillai, to mention the most well known.

In a recent seminar, some of us showcased our approach to the varnam based on our guru’s teachings. I myself spoke briefly about my early involvement in music, and my guru Kanjivaram Ellappa’s musicality as well as his sound knowledge of laya (rhythm), and melody. I was able to demonstrate two rare varnams which I learnt from Kanjivaram llappa, the Todi Varnam Dhanike, and the Bhairavi Ata Tala Varnam, Viriboni. The unequivocally positive response from younger dancers and dance lovers was gratifying, and illustrates the hunger for such technically precise dissections of the art form. The audience was able to identify the difference between current practice and the well tuned artistry which had been a legacy of traditional gurus.

The stamp of distinctive and distinguishable style shone in the very interesting amalgam of nrtta – the pure dance – and abhinaya – the expressional dance, which was a hallmark of Guru Ellappa’s choreography. Such banis of Bharatanatyam deserve to be passed on to another generation in whatever suitable format one can device for such an exercise. I can envisage such mentoring, in intense sessions, as being very beneficial to students.

 

The Kalakshetra style of Bharatanatyam must, of course, continue to be taught and the old productions performed. But the big campus, shaded with tall trees and touched by the breeze from the Bay of Bengal has room enough for a new school as well, with a broader vision. Other southern styles could be welcomed. An artistic director, appointed to work independently of the old school, could formulate an overarching plan. This alone will give credence to the original vision of Rukmini Devi. She knew that the old and the new have to coexist in art, as she herself took the old into her hands and crafted something new with her sense of aesthetics, and her artistic sensibilities.

In her time, she named her school Kalakshetra, literally meaning a sacred place of pilgrimage for the arts. But surely she did not mean it to be a shrine where anything new would be looked upon as sacrilege. From my own observation and study, I can state that she was an incomparable innovator of her times. Her idea of modernity was not a blind foray into popular culture as it is perceived today. That era, the early twentieth century, allowed unique experiments, where popular culture borrowed from the traditional and classical streams. Cinema and drama drew their material for the new venture from mythology, found actors, actresses, dancers and singers from among traditional performing communities, composers from classical Karnatic music and designers from traditional craftsmen. Popular culture, which today seems to mean western influenced Bollywood, in her time was undefined and unprecedented and had no qualms about leaning heavily on the old traditions of music, drama and dance.

 

In the Indian tradition of dance, particularly the classical styles, one talks of the gurushishya parampara. This refers to the transmission of knowledge and practical training from the teacher to the taught. Parampara, to put it briefly, is the continuum of knowledge in an unbroken chain. A close association of intense training and easy familiarity helped in the preservation of not only technique, but also repertoire and even the ethos of particular traditions. We do not have the privilege today to experience the old gurukulam, but we do have a new generation of teachers and students of dance who are eager to take on its in-depth study, revive lost repertoire, share the hands-on knowledge of music they may have acquired, compose new dances and so on. They want to research, and explore the many streams of tradition to understand the core ideals of this art. They would like to strengthen the case for classicism.

Rukmini Devi started an international school for the arts, with a firm foundation in theosophy and multiculturalism. She never shied away from the Hindu idea of dance. There was from all accounts a special pride in our culture. It was also a sophisticated view of the arts. The serious intent with which Rukmini Devi worked speaks volumes for her innate sensitivity.

 

Rukmini Devi never set out to create her own version of dance, as someone like Martha Graham did. She saw to it that whether it was Bharatanatyam or later Kathakali, or the Bhagavata Mela, authentic gurus initiated the teachers and students at Kalakshetra. It was a feat which was achieved with some difficult twists and turns. But she did it. Nor was she one of the ‘Oriental dance’ exponents who took superficial elements and dabbled and mixed. When later she did use Kathakali in her Ramayana plays, as an innovative element for the powerful male characters, and boldly did away with some aspects like the elaborate make-up, nobody questioned her for having watered down Kathakali. Maybe nobody dared! But maybe it was because her choice felt right to the audiences watching her work.

One can write volumes on Rukmini Devi’s work, but suffice it to say that she broke new ground and sustained her work with invention, originality and a certain modesty which made her almost enigmatic. To break new ground today in Kalakshetra is perceived by many as crossing the Lakshman rekha. But this is not a valid excuse for doing nothing.

Let us dream, then, of this New School: students would learn a new repertoire, new skills like choreography. A research wing would nurture scholars and writers. A professional performing company would source dancers based on their proficiency and not on the bani of their guru and be kept busy throughout the year. Guest choreographers and music directors would take artist’s residencies in the school. Courses in costume design, lighting and stagecraft would be started to benefit students not set on becoming performers. As in the early years of the Russian ballet and Diaghilev in Paris, contemporary Indian painters could be involved in set design for new productions. The school could house a black box theatre, with all the technical facilities that one finds in such spaces anywhere in the world.

Even if the school can handle only Bharatanatyam technique to begin with, courses in Chhau or Odissi can be introduced as summer courses to expand technique. The increasingly popular martial arts can be a part of the curriculum that focuses on the whole dancer, as can yoga and other physical disciplines like Pilates. A range of new music to accompany the dance is waiting to be explored. Chennai being a big centre for film production, a course in filming dance could be exciting. With all the other disciplines at hand, dance on film could take off in any direction.

 

Thus, the possibilities are immense. Dance schools abroad can be studied to produce a template adapted to suit our particular needs. Once launched, the school will attract a large number of students on a journey towards true professionalism with a passion for dance energized by creativity. It only requires liberal thinking, and a will to look beyond the past, to embrace worthy new ideas and recharge an old tradition of dance unique to our part of the world. One can’t hope to find a new avatar of Rukmini Devi, nor would she have wanted to be so enshrined. No longer a temple, this new school would fit the other meaning of kshetra – a field.