A defiant dancer has shifted the spotlight to the margins of the kathak world

“My job as a nurse is taking up too much of my time. There is very little time left for my dance after the relentless schedule I follow as a nurse. Then I have responsibilities to my own parents and to my in-laws. There is hardly any time to eat regular meals sometimes. In spite of that, I teach a couple of students. I am slowly giving up my dream of opening a big dance school where I live.”

— Sutapa Mondal, nurse, mother, caregiver and kathak dancer from Kakdwip in south 24 Parganas, in ‘Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India’.

Most dancers in Pallabi Chakravorty’s writings on kathak are like Sutapa, unknown names living on the margins of the rarefied world of high art. They do not have the privileges of class, caste or gender. They are middle-class and working-class women who land up unfailingly for kathak classes defying quotidian odds, they are teachers in mofussil dance schools, they are Bollywood’s item girls and reality show aspirants.

They are what Chakravorty, a kathak dancer and anthropologist, calls “everyday dancers”.

Chakravorty’s pioneering work, Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India, published in 2008, was the first work of scholarship to question biased narratives around kathak – its history, its feudal establishments and its ideas about classical purity. The book flagged, for the first time, the skewed dominance of male lineages, the erasure of the tawaif legacy, the tyrannies of the gharana system and the guru-shishya dynamic.

Every classical form has had that one book that upended the status quo. Scholar Davesh Soneji did that for Bharatanatyam through Unfinished Gestures – Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India and Anurima Banerji for Odissi through her monograph, Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State. For kathak, it was Chakravorty’s Bells of Change, which she followed up with This Is How We Dance, her work on the evolution of Bollywood dance and reality television shows and how they disrupted the old elitist order.

Chakravorty, who is known for her blunt criticism of the hierarchies fostered by classical arts, was in Mumbai last month to speak on her parallel journeys as an anthropologist and dancer. At an illustrated talk hosted by Beej, a dance institution focused on alternative kathak, she challenged the boundaries between classical arts and the unbridled aspirations of those who sweat it out in suburban dance studios to make the cut in reality shows.

“We are always told in classical dance that there is a hierarchy, yours is the higher, purer, more spiritual dance while what others do is lesser, easier,” said Chakravorty. “We have to do away with these artificial boundaries that do not allow dancers to reach out to each other.”

Questioning the past

Sanjukta Wagh is the founder of Beej and an acclaimed kathak dancer who takes a questioning approach to the form she follows. For dancers like her, Bells of Change is something of a Bible in how to rethink tradition.

“Bells of Change gave us an alternate history of kathak,” said Wagh. “Pallabi put the classroom and ordinary dancers at the centre of her narrative, not the great legends. She also contested the temple narrative, which changed how we look at kathak today. Her emphasis on inclusivity in dance is inspirational. At Beej, we believe in non-traditional approaches to kathak but even we never thought of engaging with Bollywood dance or the world of reality shows.”

Chakravorty is a rare dancer-academic who allows the two aspects of her life to spill into each other. A professor at the Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, she also runs Courtyard Dancers, a community-centred arts organisation whose productions include highly political works, such as Mahatma is Fasting on the Gujarat riots, Asunder on the Partition and Reinventing Nautch.

“These are powerful, independent works,” said Wagh. “But for all that, she is not acknowledged enough in India. Her book is not included in the outdated syllabuses of our dance schools, nor do we get to see her repertory’s work because what she says does not go down well with the traditionalists.”

Much of Chakravorty’s field work for Bells of Change was rooted in the kathak schools and studios of Calcutta. Her home turf is her first dance school, Nupur, run by the indomitable Bandana Sen, a guru whose dedication to the art did not get the recognition it richly deserved. It was here, as a young learner, that Chakravorty first started asking questions about kathak’s inequities.

“I was always aware and disturbed, even as a young dance student at Nupur, by the entrenched politics of kathak – the Brahminisation, the gendering,” she said. “What the famous baijis of Calcutta performed was kathak too, what Gauhar Jaan did was kathak too, as was what Madhubala did in Mughal-e-Azam. When the state institutions for kathak were set up in the 1950s, all these narratives were denied their place and the dance was homogenised, erasing all its regional roots.”

Her intent, she says, has never been to deny the richness of traditional kathak. “That would be reactionary,” she said. “But there is also no denying that the feudal relics of the past, especially the guru-shishya parampara and gharana system, allowed for toxic behaviour.” Ironically, it took 14 years after Bells of Change for the classical arts to wake up to the reality that the revered guru-shishya system left room for abuse of power.

Fall into disrepute

Contemporary kathak has a variegated history, not all of it male-centric, Hindu or devotional, although that remained the popular narrative till recently. It was in part a performative storytelling art perfected by upper class kathaks (tellers) of the Krishna/bhakti lore, and in part a music-centric art of the highly talented courtesans. Besides these, it had folk strands too.

By the 1930s, with the anti-nautch movement at its peak, the form became the monopoly of male-led kathakar clans of Uttar Pradesh, mostly from Varanasi and Awadh, that were primarily focused on bhakti lore. But scholars such as Chakraborty and Margaret Walker have argued that the overwhelming place given to these clans erases the priceless contribution of the tawaifs to the art. “The story of the nautch dancers and their artistic genre, the methods of transmitting the artistic practices and their interaction with women of other socio-economic classes, religions or castes, is marginalized in the history of Kathak,” Chakraborty says in Bells of Change.

Both varieties of kathak – the romantic thumri of the courtesans as well as the muscular ras of the kathaks – bloomed in the Awadh court under the patronage of Wajid Ali Shah. But with the death of the feudal world and the anti-nautch movement, it took many struggles for women from elite families, such as the pioneering Madame Menaka (Leila Roy) of Calcutta in the late 1930s, to re-enter kathak.

Chakraborty says that Calcutta and kathak have a long history, though the city rarely counts as a kathak site – that place is reserved for Lucknow and Jaipur for their gharanas and Delhi for its modern institutions of dance.

It was Wajid Ali Shah who took kathak and other classical north Indian art forms to Bengal when he moved to Metiabruz after Awadh was annexed by the British. Here kathak became a popular form of nautch patronised by both the Bengali elite and the British, says Chakraborty. That is until the Bengal renaissance and its emphasis on rediscovering the Sanskritic and textual roots of Indian classical arts made the kathak of the courtesan a disreputable thing.

Sense of fulfilment

In 2017, she wrote what she calls her “optimistic” book, This Is How We Dance, on modern film choreographies and dance reality shows. Once scoffed at, the jhatkas of these arenas are now making their way into dance classes, she points out. “Dance is a really difficult profession because only a few become famous, the rest are left to struggle and languish on the margins,” she said.

Among those who languish on the margins, as she says, are those who dance for the sheer love of it, for the pleasure and the feeling of freedom it gives from the tedium of everyday life. Homemakers, mothers, professionals, teachers, students who commute long hours for the dance classes for the sheer joy of the practice. It is enough, they say, to dance in a group, to teach small children in small towns, perform at community events, without fretting about the limelight.

As one dancer tells Chakravorty: “...my sense of fulfilment acquired through riyaz can be compared to a blossom. It is when you water a plant for many years and one day it flowers – my feeling is like that flowering. It is like growing, climbing higher, progressing, irrespective of the destination. The process is important. In this dance you are a student all your life.”

Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.