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All About Kamala's Sister Rhadha - The Other Dancer in Bhakta Kuchela!

April 21, 2012, 12:08 pm
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On a coupleposts I’ve featured a lovely, rare “twin” dance from the 1961 Malayalam film Bhakta Kuchela starring Kumari Kamala and an unknown dancer.  There was a suggestion the unknown dancer might be Kuchala Kumari (of Konjum Salangai fame) who was credited in the film, but she looked different enough to still leave me curious of the Bhakta Kuchela dancer's identity.  Well my friends, I’m so excited to confirm that the unknown dancer is none other than Kamala’s younger sister, Rhadha!  Here is the dance; Rhadha is the shorter dancer on the left at the beginning, and apart from her occasional asynchrony with Kamala I think she does a great job:


I had read about this Rhadha person accompanying her famous sister Kamala (and other sister Vasanthi) in a film and on stage, but wasn’t able to find much other information. As I reread the excellent articles about Kamala from Sruti magazine, a look at some of the pictures of her sister Rhadha connected that distinctive nose to the girl in Bhakta Kuchela, but I couldn’t say for sure. When I tracked down the article about Rhadha, “The Dancing Heart,” written by Rhadha's close associate Sujatha Vijayaraghavan in issues 279 and 280 of Srutimagazine, the pictures it featured confirmed 100% that the Bhakta Kuchela dancer was indeed Rhadha! Just take a look- it’s unmistakable:

Left: Sruti Magazine    Right: Bhaktakuchela

All About Rhadha

While it was thrilling enough just being able to find some of the film work of Kamala’s younger sister Rhadha, the discovery became even sweeter when I learned that Rhadha is an award-winning dancer in the Vazhuvoor style of Bharatanatyam who still dances, teaches, and choreographs to this day!  So why does it seem she was so little known until recently?  Perhaps The Hindu says it best, noting that until fairly recently Rhadha “languish[ed] in virtual anonymity in the shadow of sister Kamala who was the guaranteed applause getter.”

"The Dancing Heart" article is an excellent read for getting a broad picture of Rhadha's life (and can I just say how much I LOVE Sruti magazine? I might have to write a post of devotion soon).  Rhadha, who has also been called R. Rhadha, Smt. Rhadha, and Guru Rhadha (that second "h" in her name came about when she consulted a numerologist at a low point in her career), seems to have been born on December 31, 1941, and started off as a child dancing a bit in some films and later on stage with older sister Kamala and younger sister Vasanthi. Curiously, other than “a few jatiswaram-s and padam-s” and some items while traveling on trains with Kamala's entourage, Rhadha was never systematically taught by Vazhuvoor Ramiah Pillai (Kamala’s famous guru) and instead learned most of her Bharatanatyam directly from her sister Kamala who was a “strict taskmaster” to Rhadha and other sister Vasanthi. Rhadha was, essentially, “Kamala’s first student.”

While I had read about Rhadha and Vasanthi performing with their sister Kamala in the Sruti articles about Kamala, I had the impression that their inclusions were fairly random and not a regular affair.  But "The Dancing Heart" article revealed that the sisters, particularly Rhadha, were quite involved in Kamala's performances.  "The sisters danced at many official receptions for dignitaries like Dwight Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth II, Chou En Lai, Marshal Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan."  Rhadha danced with Kamala on her tours to such countries as Japan, Malaysia, and the U.K.  At one point Rhadha learned vocal music and even "gave vocal support to the lead singer for Kamala's performances."  What I'm not clear on is if these tours were billed only as Kamala performances and the sisters just provided supporting dance roles or if the tours were billed as "Kamala and her sisters" and the sisters actually had solos.  Other articles have given the former impression. 

It was revealing to read about problems within the family; Kamala's divorce apparently left her "shattered," and when she remarried she moved away from her sisters and became isolated and alienated from them.  Kamala performed solo (and Rhadha and Vasanthi as a duo) for some time until things were later apparently  patched up with her sisters.

From Sruti Cover, Issue 279
Rhadha seems to have started coming into her own once Kamala permanently moved to the US and some of Kamala's former students switched to Rhadha’s care. She must have impressed some folks in the dance world because suddenly the Music Academy “offered her a performance opportunity in its mid-year series.” An observer called it “vintage Kamala,” and she was soon invited to be featured in a dance festival a few months later. The ball then started rolling! “Soon Rhadha was flooded with requests from mothers to take their daughters as pupils.” Her insistence on one-on-one teaching and strict adherence to the Vazhuvoor tradition were notable. By 1987, she was invited to present the dance-drama Nauka Charitram which garnered further staging invitations from sabhas and was even telecast by Doordarshan and released on DVD. Over the last three decades she has produced and choreographed many dance-dramas and taught many students at her dance school in India, Pushpanjali.

But her greatest honors perhaps came in 2007 when she was awarded both the Sangeet Natak Akademi award and the Aacharya Choodamani (Sri Krishna Gana Sabha) award. Her dance performance at the Sangeet Natak Akademi Awards Festival earned praise. At the age of sixty-five, she danced with such energy and skill that she “put youngsters to shame.”

Everything I’ve read of Rhadha paints her as a tireless performer and humble artist who simply loves to dance with a passion.  And what kudos go to Kamala for teaching and shaping such a wonderful artist!

Rhadha’s Film Work

From the Sruti article and videos I’ve seen, here is Rhadha’s known filmography, though I'm sure there are some more songs floating around out there:

• Vethala Ulakam (Tamil, 1948; aka Vedala Ulagam) – Her debut around the age of 6; dragged a chariot as a toddler in the Pavalakkodi sequence
• Penn(Tamil, 1954) – Danced as a beggar girl
• Vilayattu Bommai(Tamil, 1954) – Danced in the song Kalai Chelvame Vazhgave
• Sivangangai Cheemai(Tamil, 1959; aka Sivagangai Seemai) – Played one of Kamala’s friends; danced in the song "Kannangarutha Kili" and had a couple short speaking parts (Edit 11/12 - She also danced with Kamala in Kottu Melam Kottungadi)
• Bhakta Kuchela (Malayalam/Kannada, 1961) – Danced with Kamala in "Vikrama Rajendra" song
• Chenda (Malayalam, 1973) – Danced with sisters Kamala and Vasanthi in a number choreographed by Muthuswamy Pillai. Kamala has mentioned the film’s name as Chenda in an interview or two, but I have seen only the songs from that film and the sisters' dance was no where to be found. Perhaps they perform a dance as part of the film and not in the songs?
• A Doordarshan Play (Ananda Thandavam?) – She played the role of a dancer and danced a “Khamas tillana” in a 1980s “Doordarshan play produced by Krishnaswamy Associates.” In looking at their website, I’m guessing the TV serial she starred in was Ananda Thandavam. If only I knew where to buy the VCD outside of India!

Other than the Bhakta Kuchela video featured at the beginning, the only other videos from the list above I've been able to find are Rhadha's dance and speaking parts in Sivagangai Seemai!  Here they are:

"Kannam Karutha Kili" - Rhadha is the dancer on the left singing to her sister Kamala on the right; it's a very sweet performance with humorous group choreography excellent, crisp print quality. And it's a Kamala dance never featured before on this blog? Yay! 

Rhadha's Speaking Parts - Google Video has the whole film up, and Rhadha can be seen starting at 27:07 as the girl to the right of Kamala who speaks a few lines.  Edit 11/12 - Apparently Google Video deleted all of its old hosted uploads! Cwy!

In 2010, Rhadha released a DVD titled Bharatanatyam The Vazhuvoor Traditionin which she demonstrates "the adavu-s (basic movements) and part of some of the well known items of the Vazhuvoor repertoire."  I'm very interested to get a hold of this DVD and see the almost 70-year-old in action!

Not to Be Confused With...

Researching Rhadha and her sister Kamala has revealed some strange coincidences!  Regarding Rhadha, there is another former dancer also named Radha (Viswanathan) who is easy to confuse with the Rhadha of this post!  The other Radha (Viswanathan) was coincidentally apparently Vazhuvoor Ramiah Pillai's first disciple and danced with Kamala in the film Meera in the Bala Meera/Krishna dance before later switching to singing.  Weird! But it's Kamala for whom strange coincidences abound.  Her first marriage and second marriage surnames were really similar: she was first Lakshman, then Lakshminarayanan.  To top that, her first husband R.K. Laxman married another woman named Kamala after his divorce with "our" Kamala!  So now there is another "Kamala Lakshman!"  (Wouldn't that be weird, to remarry someone with the same name...)

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This Blog Noted in The Asian Age!

April 25, 2012, 6:24 pm
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I was thrilled when Ranjana Dave, author of the Mahatandava blog, correspondent at The Asian Agenewspaper, and content coordinator for the Pad.ma online archive, interviewed me for an article she was writing on how the internet has changed access to rare dance footage for the better.  The finished article, "Dance moves from reel to internet," turned out to be an excellent piece about the subject and the current state of rare and archival dance clips.  The article especially focuses on Satyajit Ray's Bala documentary that I recently uploaded, and Ranjana offers some very interesting facts and insight.  She confirmed that the narrator's voice was indeed Satyajit Ray's, an identity I had questioned despite the credits stating so!  She also notes that, technically, all films released before 1952 (which would include Uday Shankar's elusive Kalpana) are considered out of copyright in India.  I can do some dangerous things with that information! ;)

My blog gets coverage near the end of the article, and Ranjana has written in such glowing terms that I am honored!  I've never thought of myself as a "curator" before- isn't that such a great term?  But my favorite would be the adorable terming of the folks that work to keep access open as "dedicated foragers." A big "thank you" again to Ranjana for the coverage, kind words, and writing such an excellent article!  The subject of dance archival access deserves the biggest audience it can get!

And that ends Minai's tooting of her own horn. :) To my knowledge this is my first "official" media mention which is very exciting!  Here's a capture of the article from the Asian Age epaper edition on April 5:

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Kalpana (1948) to be Screened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival!

April 27, 2012, 3:39 pm
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"WHAT?!" That's what I said when I first heard the news this morning from commenter gaddeswarup and an online contact (thank you!).  It's true: Uday Shankar's 1948 film Kalpana (Imagination) will be screened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival as part of the Cannes Classics program.  The festival website has these notes about the film: "Restored by the World Cinema Foundation from a copy of the original negative preserved by the National Film Archive of India. With thanks to Shivendra Singh and family of Uday Shankar.  The print was restored by the Cinematheque of Bologna and the Immagine Ritrovata laboratory."  The Scorcese-chaired World Cinema Foundation doesn't have any information up yet about it or any other restored films for 2012.

I'm stunned by this news, frankly.  Richard at the Dances on the Footpath blog and I have both blogged about the film and the difficulty of seeing it.  When Richard first blogged about it here, he received a slew of stunning comments from people who had seen the film or even had a copy, and then he broke the exciting news that Martin Scorcese was restoring the film.  The film then made the #1 spot on my "holy grail" list post, where I discussed the feeling that something was fishy regarding Scorcese's supposed restoration of the "only copy" of the film given that so many other prints were clearly out there.  I began to doubt that the whole thing would ever materialize, especially when I talked to various online friends and read tidbits here and there that noted complicated issues within the Shankar family over ownership of the film. But given that the Cannes page notes "thanks" were given to the family of Uday Shankar, it appears that any issues within the family must have been cleared up!  I'm guessing that while there are many other prints out there floating around, they are probably either not in the best of quality or not in the complete form of the original theatrical release.  I'm hoping these are two things Scorcese resolved through his foundation's restoration of the film, because then their print will truly be the best copy out there!

This news is monumental because it has exponentially increased the chances of us common folk getting to see the film!  While I can't just whisk myself away to France next month to see it, I'm very curious if the film will get released on DVD or at least on legitimate online streaming sites.  MUBI.com is one such streaming site that looks promising; they currently feature a small group of Cannes film festival favorites that can be watched online, and they have a page for Kalpana(they call it by the English name Imagination) though it's not available to watch at this time...but maybe it will be in the future!  Can you imagine!  Watching Kalpana streaming at home! Dream come true. :)  And even if it doesn't get streamed online, there are sure to be small clips from it made public as part of Cannes coverage and publicity features. 

More Information on Kalpana

Over the past few months I've been able to track down some excellent articles mentioning or analyzing the film Kalpana, and I thought this would be a great time to note some of them.  One of the most interesting is Urmimala Sarkar Munsi's "Imag(in)ing the Nation: Uday Shankar's 'Kalpana'" (abstract here, and it is also part of the book Traversing Tradition: Celebrating Dance in India).  Regarding the announcement of Scorcese to restore the film, Munsi notes that the subsequent flurry of media interest "spells the beginning of a resurgence of interest in Shankar’s work in terms of its holistic contribution, his seemingly apolitical and often criticized understanding of the medium of art and, most importantly, his idea of nation and citizenship."

Until recently I had thought the film was mostly just a slew of pretty dance sequences with perhaps a mythological narrative.  But Kalpana is much more complex; Munsi gives this fascinating description:
"Shankar worked through his film text by choosing certain issues and developing his dance sequences (or mostly fitting his existing choreography) within them. The narrative worked on two levels in order to create the images of the ‘existing’ and the ‘imagined’/‘ideal’ nation. At the level of existing reality, the great tragedy of the Bengal famine, the transition from a feudal/agrarian to an industrial society with a different face of oppression of the ruling class, the emergence of an elite, moneyed class which had the power as well the voice of authority, carried the main thread of continuity of the storyline. This ‘real’ was juxtaposed with a constant and at times undistinguishable transference to the dream where the imagined ‘ideal', mythical, magical, or supernatural was woven in. This was where Shankar incorporated all his popular dance creations around mythical themes, not always caring about sequencing them in a relevant manner with the storyline. Here he also wove in his own idea of the imagined independent nation - addressing issues of land-man relationship, education and women’s emancipation, different phases of male-female relationships, the ideal structure of an institution for teaching art, patronage, and so on."  
Another fascinating article, "Honoring Uday Shankar" by Fernau Hall, gives a critical analysis of the film.  From the article:
"As a stage director and choreographer, Uday Shankar was a master: he regulated every detail of the performances with great care, the dancing was highly polished and disciplined, the curtain went up on time, and, in fact, the Uday Shankar performances set a new standard of theatre professionalism in modern India. In the film world, however, he was a total amateur; and he made his task hopelessly difficult by combining the roles of principal dancer and choreographer (in which he was expert) with those of actor, producer, director, scriptwriter, and supervising editor, even though he knew nothing about these highly skilled professions. 
Instead of playing safe and using a simply constructed script for Kalpana, Uday Shankar did the opposite: he devised an extremely complex structure, making use of many flashbacks and dream sequences. In fact the story was a thinly disguised autobiography, with Uday Shankar ("Udayan") trying to raise money to make the film Kalpana but in the end finding himself rudely rejected by the prospective backers.

In between the acted scenes there were countless dance sequences, some created for the film and some taking the form of fragments from Uday Shankar's stage pieces; there was also a sequence of Manipuri dancing arranged by Amobi Singh. Unfortunately, nearly all the dance sequences were so badly directed and edited that they appeared confused; some of the newly choreographed pieces were much closer in style to the banal, sentimental commercialized sequences common in Hindi films than to those presented by Uday Shankar on stage, and the fragments of the stage pieces were much too short to make an impact, even if they had been well directed. And yet ... strangely enough there were two well-directed, well-photographed, and well-edited dance sequences that showed what a magnificent film Uday Shankar could have achieved if he had worked in the same way throughout the film, making good use of his intelligence, imagination, and flair for technology. Then his idealism, his love of India, his longing to see a resurgent India, and his hatred for the degradation he saw around him would have been preserved for posterity. As it was, Kalpana - with all its flaws - stood out boldly among the other Indian films of the day…"
"One of Shankar's main reasons for making Kalpana was to raise money to keep Almora going, but commercially the film was a flop. Almora was never revived, and he made no more films."
Last, Susheela Mishra writes in her book Some Dancers of India,
"When I saw Kalpana soon after its release, I had enjoyed identifying snippets from his various dance-items, ballets, autobiographical episodes in Almora and so on.  But recently when I saw it again on a projector (courtesy: Sangeet Natak Akademi, Delhi), I agreed fully with the detached assessment given by his friend in a recent article in The Illustrated Weekly, December 15, 1990, "As for Shankar's dances which sparked the idea of this film, there just are not any to rave about.  All he has bestowed are measly snatches and snippets which do justice neither to his own dance nor to his gift as a choreographer.  An opportunity truly lost, for there is no film-record of Shankar's work anywhere else either." 
 I'm dying to see this film!  Who's going to Cannes and will smuggle me in their suitcase? ;)
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Visual Proof of Malavika Sarkar - Kathak Dancer and Ananda Bhairavi Star!

May 13, 2012, 5:05 pm
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Back in January, I had posted about the 1983 Telugu dance film Ananda Bhairavi and its star Malavika who performed some of my favorite film Kuchipudi sequences.  I had lamented the fact that there seemed to be no information available on the "Malavika" person--not even her last name (though I made a tenuous guess she might be Malavika Venkatsubbaiah- wrong!).

I certainly wasn't prepared for what happened next.  My wonderful commenters came to the rescue!  After a lengthy comment thread full of increasingly-wonderful finds, Gaddeswarup spoke to the male dancer in the film (Bhagavathula Venkata Rama Sarma) and reported back that the actress was indeed Malavika Sarkar who was a Kathak dancer (Lucknow gharana) and learned Kuchipudi for Ananda Bhairavi after being approached for the role by director Jandhyala.  I was stunned and amazed that she learned such crisp Kuchipudi just for the film!

At that point I figured that the research trail had come to its end.  The dancer had been identified and a bit of her history revealed, but it seemed that we would have to be content with that as no more information seemed available.

Which is my I'm so excited to report that I found a short description and photo of Malavika Sarkar in the "Contemporaries" section of Sunil Kothari's 1989 book Kathak - Indian Classical Dance Art!  Here is the photo and Kothari's description:


 "One of the bright stars in Kathak, young Malavika Sarkar was trained initially in Kathak by Prem Shankar.  Later on she studied intensively under the guidance of Lacchu Maharaj and soon made the grade on account of her natural gifts.  She took part in many dance-dramas choreographed by Lacchu Maharaj.  She has a natural grace and has imbibed Lacchu Maharaj's style in a commendable way.  She runs a dance school Lacchu Maharaj Nritya Niketan in Lucknow.  She is active giving solo recitals."  

The visual confirmation of her identity is such a treat! Those large, almond-shaped eyes are certainly hers.  Now there can be absolutely no question who the dancer in Ananda Bhairavi was and what form of dance she was trained in.   

Given that Kothari's book was published in 1989 and Ananda Bhairavi released in 1983, it's clear that she continued performing Kathak after the film and likely much beyond.  I wonder, though, how her stint with film "Kuchipudi" was received.  Did it affect her Kathak training at all?  Were purists upset?

It is disappointing that there seems to be no information online about her dance school, "Lacchu Maharaj Nritya Niketan." Even the school's mention in the listing of "Addresses of Dancers, Teachers, and Academies" in Reginald Massey's book India's Kathak Dance, Past, Present, Future has no address listed!  I wonder if the school is still around today and especially if the "bright star" of Kathak still performs.  The mystery remains...

I'll close with the "Thillana" song from Ananda Bhairavi featuring Malavika as the Kuchipudi dancer.  I wonder what Malavika thought of the Kathak dancer in the number! :)
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Minati Mishra's Odissi Dances in Arundhati (Oriya, 1967)

May 15, 2012, 8:57 pm
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I've found the remaining Odissi dances of Minati Mishra in the 1967 Oriya film Arundhati!  I'm simply stunned.  I had figured I would never get to see any of the film's dances other than the rare Bharatanatyam-Odissi one from my favorite black-and-white classical dances post because Oriya/Odia films are very difficult to come by (in fact, I haven't the first clue how to get my hands on one).  Perhaps Arundhati's 1967 National Award (Best Feature Film - Oriya) has been a factor in its availability.

I found the dances by performing a quick Google search after happening onto the news of veteran Odissi dancer Minati Mishra being one of the recipients this year of the Indian Padma Shri award (here's video of her accepting the award - what a fancy ceremony!).  2012 has indeed been the year of ridiculously amazing discoveries on this blog!

Below are the wonderful, rare dances, uploaded by YouTuber hellodebabrata.  It's incredibly rare to see such classical Odissi in Indian films, though I suspect there is likely some filmy license taken such as increasing the speed and other minor deviations.  But given how respected a dancer Minati was, I assume the alterations are minimal.  Surely there are more of these wonderful dances hiding in the archives of Oriya cinema (such as Baje Bainsi Nache Ghungura from my Holy Grail post).  Occasionally there is a disgraceful bar/graphic that appears, but it only last a few seconds!  Embedding is disabled on all the clips, so please click on the image to link to the video.

Namami Bighnaraj - The most classical of the bunch, this dance begins with the dancer's invocation of offering flowers before beginning her performance.  The first half features a good amount of expressional dance/abhinaya whereas the second half offers plentiful pure dance flourishes!  The hallmark Odissi poses, like the tribhangi and chauk, are clearly evident.  Only downside is this song has no english subtitles, boo!

Dekhiba Para Aasare - A group dance performed by five Odissi dancers, this number is a change of pace and features some simple group spatial choreography.  I love the stylized entrance walk of the dancers and the move where they walk slightly backwards with short steps of only the heels (I'm sure it has a name!).  Improving upon the last number, the subtitles suddenly turn on about halfway in this one. 

Abhimanini - This is the dance that I featured previously, and Minati seems to switch almost entirely to the Bharatanatyam idiom (which is most evident starting around 1:32) with a teensy bit of Odissi thrown in for good measure.  For me, the most thrilling portion is the last two minutes where she performs beautiful pure dance and descends down the stairs.  And finally - English subtitles all the way through!

Aren't they just wonderful dances!  There is also a folk dance in the film, if you're interested.

Last, a bit more info on Minati Mishra: She is currently considered "the oldest performing Odissi dancer of the world today" and just last year gave a nearly one-hour solo Odissi performance at a festival celebrating her "commitment to and continuity with Odissi" (The Hindu).  She began learning Odissi under "the trio of gurus Pankajcharan, Debaprasad and Kelucharan Mohapatra" (The Hindu) in the 1940s, a time when "the classical dance form of Odissi was not even born" and "conservative Oriya society" considered dance an inappropriate activity for women. She also learned Bharatanatyam at Kalakshetra for a time but soon returned to Odissi will full-time devotion (The Hindu).
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Full-Length Bhavantarana is Now Up!

June 4, 2012, 6:01 pm
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I would like to thank La_Surrealiste for posting in the comments today that the film/documentary Bhavantarana on the late Odissi Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra is now posted full length on YouTube--and it's fresh, only two days old!  The Indian Diplomacy folks who had previously posted the short snippet (see my post here) must have had a change of heart and decided to give all of us eager dance enthusiasts reason to rejoice! The one hour-plus Bhavantarana is up on YouTube!


The film/documentary is shot in a soft light with lengthy periods of silence and the sounds of nature contributing to a relaxing and contemplative atmosphere.  Among all the sequences of Kelucharan performing solo, there are three solo female performances, what appear to be reenactments of Kelu's earlier life experiences, and many camera pans that linger on the natural environment.  Quotes from various ancient texts liberally appear to give the performances context and meaning.


I feel this very artistic film went quite "over my head" in the sense that I don't have the background or language understanding to comprehend everything being presented, especially the textual quotes and mythology and their relation to the dances.  I sensed that the film is trying to make a point beyond simply presenting Kelucharan, pieces of his life story, and his dance.  There is quite a lot going on, despite the lingering pace.  This site gives the following interpretation:
"The film begins with Shahani’s historical-materialist claim to the origins of all sculpture in performance: it has a stone sculptor chiseling a human form from a piece of stone. The human form is effectively linked to legendary Odissi dancer (and Mahapatra’s student) Sanjukta Panigrahi. Described by the director as a film ‘about hunger’, it returns the dance to both the labour that it celebrates and the improvisations that continue to defy codification and control. Many of the dances, including the spectacular Navarasa (the nine ‘rasas’ that form the sum total of Indian aesthetic experience) sequence at the end, were choreographed specially for the cinema."
While I don't have any intellectual analysis to add about the film, I can say that I found many of the dances captivating, particularly those in the last 30 minutes, and I ended the viewing feeling like I had watched something mysterious and magical.  While it took me a while to get warmed up to Kelu's dances, the longer I watched the more I was intrigued.  Kelucharan's "gambling" enactment at 23:37 was delightful and creative.  But it was the "nine rasas" performance, taking up the entire end of the film starting at 46:42, that had me spellbound.  The portion starting around 50:00, where he is front-lit against the dark background, brought tears to my eyes by the end.  Such emotive expression of the human body!  Kelu feels it so deeply that I, the viewer, felt it too.  What followed it was so interesting - almost an Odissi tandava perhaps, to my eyes and ears. 

Music in Odissi dance has always struck me as being so gentle, welcoming, and peaceful, its notes always positive and uplifting. The song starting at 42:42 exemplified this for me- simply gorgeous. 

I was hoping the little girl who dances near the beginning would be identified, but it wasn't clear if she was.  The credits identify the dancers as Sanjukta Panigrahi, Moushami Sahoo, Sidheshwar, and Kumkum Mohanty.  Clearly Sanjukta was at the beginning, Sidheshwar was the gotipua dancer, and KumKum was the student being corrected by Kelucharan... but was Moushami Sahoo the little girl?  Is "Battu" a style of dance, or her character's name?  Searching on that name came up with nothing, which makes me very curious!


I'm so happy that this film is finally out there for the world to see!  What will be next. I would love to hear folks' interpretations about the documentary - do comment!
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A Better Quality Bala AND Sanchari, Bamboo Flute, and Kuchipudi Revisited Posted Full Length!

June 8, 2012, 6:05 pm
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What a coincidence!  I just discovered that not even a month after I had posted Bala (1976) on YouTube a much better-quality version was posted by the imagineindia channel which appears to be linked with the "Imagine India International Film Festival Madrid" that took place in May.  The quality of their version is excellent with no pixelation or compression, sound perfectly synched, and a rose-tinted sepia appearance.  If only I would have waited a few weeks it would have already been up online, amazing!  Oh 2012, my love for you has no bounds!


Imagineindia's channel also has what I understand is another rare film of Satyajit Ray, Pikoo's Diary.  Other non-related channels have uploaded Sukumar Ray and The Inner Eye, both also quite rare apparently.

While that is quite awesome, I am even more excited to see that Sanchari, Bamboo Flute, and Kuchipudi Revisited are now all posted full length! I was so excited about the discovery of the full-length Bhavantarana on Monday that I didn't check to see if any other Indian Diplomacy hosted documentaries I blogged about had been posted in full!

Sanchari (1991, Dir: Arun Khopkar) - A beautifully-shot look at Bharatanatyam.  The beginning features some nice practice scenes (the dancers at 3:47 are my favorite- those jumps!), and starting at 5:51 the focus shifts entirely to Leela Samson; first with scenes of her getting ready for a performance, and then 23 minutes of solid Bharatanatyam performance with some brief interruptions.  My only irritation with the video is that, unlike the preview clip, it appears to "shake" left and right and some of the lower-frequency voices sound warbled.  I left a comment about it on YouTube but I don't think the uploaders understood what I was saying! I think something went wrong when it was encoded or uploaded, given that the preview clip is fine.  For those who might not know, Leela Samson is a very-well known member of the classical dance community in India.  In addition to being the chairperson of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the former director of Kalakshetra (from 2005 to her controversial resignation  in April), she also is currently the chairperson of the Indian Central Board of Film Certification!



Bamboo Flute (2000, Dir: Kumar Shahani) - "A musical journey into the history, myth and evocations of the melodic rhythms of the flute," this two-part film features some beautiful dances by Bharatanatyam artist Alarmel Valli and the late Odissi Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra accompanied not to traditional Carnatic music but to the flute melodies of Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia.

In part one, Alarmel Valli begins dancing at 2:00.  The striking and precariously-seated rock that she soon dances next to is the "balancing rock" in Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu.


In part two, Alarmel Valli performs starting at 10:23 and Kelucharan Mohapatra from 23:08 to the end of the film.  According to an interview with Kumar Shahani, both Valli and Mohaptra apparently conceptualized/choreographed their own dances.  Shahani specifically asked Valli to give "Vatapi Ganapatim" including a ghatam accompaniment a "manifestation through the dance" (The Hindu).


Kuchipudi Revisited (1998, Dir: Yamini Krishnamurthy) - In this documentary, "Swapna Sundari, one of the renowned exponents of Kuchipudi, traces the origin, evolution and changing nuances of the dance form..." I love listening to the teacher (V. Radhey Shyam) reciting the rhythmic syllables (sollukattus) at 8:30; he is thrilling to watch and so natural and playful.  At 12:19 Swapna demonstrates a Tarangam number--that classic Kuchipudi style where the dancer balances on the edges of a plate.  But my favorite portion starts at 26:07 when two dancers demonstrate the differences between Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi--a subject that confuses all newcomers to Indian Classical Dance!  Leela Venkataraman's interview clips interspersed throughout are nice to watch; she seems so approachable and down-to-earth and makes some interesting observations about the form and its history.  Vedantam Satyanarayana Sarma, the famous practitioner of female impersonation in Kuchipudi and whose images are seen in many books on Kuchipudi, can be seen performing at 55:03.

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Series Kick-Off: Remembering Film Choreographers

June 24, 2012, 9:14 pm
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Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a project to identify the choreographers and masterminds behind all of the classical-oriented film dances I’ve featured on my blog to date.  It had dawned on me that I’ve never given enough credit, or even thought, to the choreographers behind all of these wonderful dances.

Umrao Jaan and Chori Chori
The result of my research has been absolutely fascinating.  A relatively small group of people was responsible for most of the classical film dances I’ve featured on this blog, which as a whole forms a collection that I think represents most of the best classically-oriented dances in Indian films (though there are still some I haven’t yet covered, especially of Kathak).  Not only was a small group responsible, but also that group was comprised largely of surprisingly eminent and respected traditional practitioners of classical dances: traditional Bharatanatyam nattuvannars from hereditary families (and some the products of the institution Kalakshetra) for Tamil and Telugu films, Kuchipudi gurus/nattuvannars for Telugu films, renowned Kathak dancers and gurus for Hindi films, and Kerala Kalamandalam trained artists for Malayalam films.  Essentially many of the kind of people that you wouldn’t expect to associate with the glamorous cinema world.  Expanding beyond this small group, one also  finds classic and modern film choreographers who created some beautiful work and, of course, classical dancers themselves who designed their own dances to stunning effect.

Therefore, this post serves as the series kick-off or introduction! In the series, I plan to not only show examples of the many film dances but also examine the surprising involvement of the traditional community and pull together some engaging research I’ve found.  Here’s a rough outline of what I envision the series will look like, with some teasers:
  • Bharatanatyam Nattuvannars– Even the great stalwart Meenakshisundaram Pillai had a stint in films! And guess who Sayee-Subbulakshmi’s guru was...
  • Kuchipudi Gurus/Nattuvannars– All the golden 70s-90s Kuchipudi film dance hits can be attributed to just two people...
  • Kathak Gurus – Some of the film-style Kathak dances closest to authentic Kathak were created by, you guessed it, big-name, authentic Kathak gurus... 
  • Kathakali/Kerala Dance Gurus – It’s all about the Kerala Kalamandalam...
  • Dancers – Roshan Kumari, Shobana, Sridhar…
  • Choreographers – Some of Hindi cinema’s most well known, artistic dances can be attributed to another small group of people!  Heeralal earns my eternal devotion...
The Goal: Bringing Awareness to Regional Film Dances

But I’m hoping for more than just reporting on the results of a painstakingly-researched pet project or offering a way to locate similar choreographies from a known enjoyable dance.  I’m hoping to contribute to information/research on dance in Indian films that moves past the narrow-focus of Hindi films and expands to cover India’s most prolific “regional” film industries outside of Mumbai.  Because, let’s face it, if you want to see some good classical-inspired dancing in Indian films, you need to head down south, by and large. 

The general lack of awareness of the rich, classically-oriented dances in South Indian cinema is frustrating.  It’s acknowledged by scholars in the field that there is an “absence of any comprehensive documentation on the subject” as Arundhathi Subramaniam says in her essay “Dance in Films” (“New Directions in Indian Dance,” Sunil Kothari).  What’s deliciously ironic about her statement is that she is referring to “dance in Hindi cinema” only, which actually has in the past decade or so started to receive some scholarly attention (Sangitha Shresthova, Ajay Gehlawat, and many others).  Expand beyond “Bollywood” though and the lack of information is appalling!

Subramaniam's Hindi film emphasis is explained by her historical description that when “cinema acquired a ‘voice’,” “Hindi cinema…stepped in to play the vital role of pan-Indian cinema – a functioned conferred upon it by an increasingly patriotic zeitgeist that sought to construct a homogenous unifying national identity.”  She then notes how common “creative loans from folk and classical dance idioms” were and that choreographers like Gopi Krishna and Uday Shankar and dancers like Vyjayanthimala and Padmini influenced “the approach to dance in film in the ‘50s.”  But as this post series will show, when one moves to the southern regional industries the folk and classical dance influences are much stronger and offer rich opportunities in historical, political, and sociological analysis due to who the choreographers and dancers were and the cultural mileu they lived in.  I find it completely fascinating, and I don’t know why more folks don’t take up this topic for academic research!

One of the few mainstream articles I’ve found on classical Indian film dance, “Classical Dance Fades from Big Screen” by Malini Nair, clearly illustrates what results from the lack of information and recognition of regional film dances.  Nair says, “even masters like CV Chandrasekhar today point to Aplam Chaplam as one of the most crackling onscreen displays of Bharatanatyam…The Sai sisters went on to do one more dance in Hindi films (Man Bhavan Ke Ghar; Chori Chori) before disappearing.”  First of all, Azaad’s "Aplam Chaplam" dance was remade from Mallaikalan, and the original’s “Neeli Megan" dance had a much more authentic Bharatanatyam-based dance than its spiced-up Hindi remake.  But since the article restricts itself to Hindi films, what about Vyjayanthimala’s awesome authentic Bharatanatyam Alarippu in New Delhi, and Kamala's brilliant dance in Chori Chori?

But the most egregious error in the article is regarding “the Sai” or Sayee-Subbulakshmi (aka Sai-Subbulaxmi) sisters.  They had other, folksier numbers in a handful of Hindi films, not just “one more dance.”  And they most certainly did not disappear!  As Richard at the Dances on the Footpath Blog and I have discovered, their best classical work was found in their many Tamil dances.  By restricting the topic to Hindi films, all of these dances remain forgotten and the practitioners are written off as having vanished!  Shame, really.

The misconception appears to continue in Indian film dance scholar V.A.K. Ranga Rao's article on Vyjayanthimala in Sruti magazine (Issue 314).  “Apart from Hiralal and brother Sohanlal, there were very few south Indian dance directors.  Muthuswami Pillai did a brief alrippu-tillana number in New Delhi (1956), and Dandayudhapani Pillai Oonchi Oonchi Dukan in Pehli Jhalak.”  I suppose that is fairly accurate if the article is referring only to Hindi films, but it goes on to mention some of Vyjayanthimala’s Tamil classical numbers!  What about their choreographers? 

And beyond these specific examples, a recurring theme on my blog has been remembering the classical dances of Kumari Kamala/Kamala Lakshman/Kamala Lakshminarayanan who has largely been forgotten in popular film dance history despite her vast body of work featuring a small number of Hindi film dances (such as Kismet, Meera, and Ram Rajya as Baby Kamala and Chori Chori, Yahudi, Jwala etc as Kumari Kamala). 

Thus forms the series kick-off!  I may post other things along the way, but over the next few weeks (months? :)) I should be cranking out the posts.  Any and all feedback welcomed!
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What's Next for Kalpana (1948)?

July 10, 2012, 10:25 pm
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I decided to take a stroll at the World Cinema Foundation's website today, and look what is on their homepage front and center!


It's an imaginative image from Kalpana!  I'm almost convinced the middle and right women are Lalitha and Padmini, respectively! (Could the one on the left be Ragini?  I'm not so sure).  Lovely to see an image of Padmini in her debut film (as Richard at the Dances on the Footpath blog noted some time ago).  And even more wonderful that this image is the face of the WCF website at present...well, until the animation changes. :)  This of course means that they have updated the "Restored Films" section for 2012 with a page dedicated to Kalpana (though it's the same info and photo from the press kit material on the Cannes website). 

After the flurry of press about Uday Shankar's Kalpana playing at the Cannes Film Festival and its momentous screening on May 17, I've been eagerly awaiting more information about the film and any possible distribution.  I had this fantasy of finding a deluge of excited blog posts and articles about the film and maybe seeing a rare clip or two.  But then I remembered that Cannes is a high-falutin' event for film-world folks, not us small peons, and that interest in Kalpana is somewhat of a niche thing.  While there's been a dusting of coverage of the film screening in some major newspapers (see the end of the post) and some brief blog chatter, I was hoping for a monsoon!

On a whim I decided to contact the World Cinema Foundation regarding if Kalpana would be distributed in any way and figured I would either not get a response or receive a generic reply.  But given that 2012 has been the year of luck at this blog, I soon received a gracious response from a Foundation representative!
Regarding distribution – recently, the WCF has received a few requests for KALPANA to screen at various festivals, cinematheques and film societies. As soon as those are confirmed we will post them on our website. Due to a backlog of titles, KALPANA will probably not be released on DVD for at least another 1-2 years. We apologize for the delay but in the interim please keep checking back for other WCF DVD releases. 
Notice that the rep was not discussing if Kalpana would be released on DVD but only WHEN!  And while we'll have to wait a couple years or more, the news that there is a light at the end of the tunnel is astonishing.

I was surprised that the rep didn't mention the site MUBI.com.  The New York Times ran an article back in 2009 announcing that Scorsese had "decided to embrace digital distribution for movies restored by his World Cinema Foundation" and all films restored by the WCF each year would be viewable online at theauteurs.com (which is now MUBI.com) and Netflix and iTunes.  I'm guessing Netflix and iTunes didn't turn out to be viable options given their recent history, but MUBI has been going strong and they do have a page reserved for Kalpana. 

How heartening it is to hear how much Scorsese understands the importance of these rare films. On the MUBI.com page announcing the "first line-up of films restored with the aid of the World Cinema Foundation," Scorsese wrote, "They don’t deserve to be kept a secret. They deserve to be known."  Absolutely!

The rep also mentioned the film's requested screening at various festivals, etc.   The WCF's screening schedule page is not yet updated, but I've read at least one account of a screening at the film festival in Bologna so I'm sure there are others.  And what about it being screened in the most obvious of all places, India? It's not looking good at present.

So all of us eager fans will just have to be patient and wait for a DVD and possible online release! I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

Interesting Article Snippets

Some revealing details about the film and its Cannes screening have popped up in various news articles in the past few months.  Here are some of my favorites:

Mamata Shankar related that Uday's widow, Amala Shankar, had spent years contacting people in high places to get Kalpana restored but none showed interest.  Uday's brother, sitarist Ravi Shankar "took the initiative for the restoration" and met with Martin Scorsese, but soon someone "claimed copyrights over the film" (source).  It was Shivendra Singh who revealed that "Uday Shankar had given the film to his second wife" (The Hindu), so I think it's reasonable to assume she was the one claiming copyright.  The F.I.G.H.T C.L.U.B. blog featured an interview with Shivendra Singh that revealed some apparent details in how difficult getting the cans of the film to the WCF was and his key role in that fight.

The most adorable thing I read about the film's screening was coverage of Uday's widow and Kalpana actress/dancer, Amala Shankar, attending the screening and beaming with delight.  "At the end of the film, the audience gave a standing ovation to the film, with shouts of “Bravo!” directed at Amala Shankar, the film’s heroine and Shankar’s wife, present in the audience. “At 93, I am the youngest film star you have at Cannes this year,” an emotional Amala told the audience. “We Indians believe in the concept of rebirth, and I feel I have taken a number of births to have got the chance to stand on this stage tonight, on an occasion like this. This is all the more special because this is the country where I met Uday when I was 11 years old" (DNAIndia). 

Most shocking was the revelation that Uday "thought he was too old to [be] dancing on screen in 'Kalpana', so after shooting 80 solo and partnered dance sequences, he edited out nearly all of them," but Amala "insisted on putting at least three or four of his dance sequences in" (source).  80! And only a few were sliced back in? All that footage!

Last, I enjoyed reading Scorsese's response to the question, "Why did you take up the mammoth task of restoring Kalpana?" He said, "I have watched this creation of Uday Shankar and was fascinated by its content and choreography. I was in regular touch with the maestro's wife, Amala Shankar, and daughter Mamta Shankar. There is a unique rhythm in the film which is heart-touching..." (Scorcese Speaks: A New Life for Indian Classics)

The end!  Yes, I'm still working on my choreographer series... stay tuned! :)

Related post: "Kalpana (1948) to be Screened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival!"
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Rare Video Clips of Devadasis, Uday Shankar & Simkie, Ram Gopal, and More

July 14, 2012, 7:54 pm
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What a stunning find!  The wonderful commenter Gaddeswarup recently sent me a video from the site BritishPathé.com, and I'm grateful he did because when I explored the site further I found it houses some priceless footage of Indian dance.

British Pathé, a former film and newsreel company that "documented almost every aspect of everyday life in Britain and around the world in the 20th century" (BBC), has digitised its extensive archive ("90,000 videos from 1897-1970") online with free and full-length viewing for any visitor.  Given that Britain ruled the Indian subcontinent until 1947, the archive has a substantial number of clips of Indian events and every day life from the first half of the 20th century: independence, visits from British royalty, disorder and protests, ceremonies and weddings, festivals, politicians, dances, and much more.  Much of the older footage has a strong Orientalist tone; pictured on the left is a nice dance-related example from Indian Peeps (1930).

All of the videos can be purchased and downloaded, but since the listed duration of the videos for purchase are the same as their previews, I don't see any incentive to purchase them at exorbitant prices (30 Euros for a one-minute clip!).  What's most entertaining about the site is the descriptions; the catalogers given the job of dutifully describing each scene in every video must have gotten tired at some point because some of their phrasings are hilarious!  But I'm glad they went to that trouble because it allows the video events to be text searchable.

Unfortunately, none of the videos can be embedded, so you'll have to click on the lovely preview images to link to the video. Enjoy!

Devadasi Footage from the 1930s

The most important find has been a silent clip titled "Maharanee of Baroda" circa 1930-1935.  Starting at 8:06, two devadasi dancers perform in front of their musical ensemble.  The footage is stunning - the dancers are dressed exactly like those in old archival photos from this time period and before; it's as if the old photos have come to life!  They begin by dancing what looks like the alarippu portion of a Sadir/present-day Bharatanatyam performance, then move onto a more free-flowing, folksy dance style, and then return to Sadir/Bharatanatyam around 11:30.  The musicians and their instruments are fascinating; I've read accounts of how bagpipes used to be part of Sadir performances before the dance form was recreated as Bharatanatyam- I wonder if the musician on the right is an example of what is meant by "bagpipe."  Last, we must of course remember that this was a staged performance for the camera, but its historical value is immense.

No embedding on all videos; click image to link

One question I had while watching: If the video was really filmed in Baroda (a city in what is now Gujarat in northwest India), why are there south Indian devadasis performing?  The answer to this question was revealed when I remembered a picture of similar-looking devadasis (on the left) in Mohan Khokar's "Century of Indian Dance"exhibition catalog.  The description to that image says, "A set of talented devadasis were part of the dowry of Chimnabai, a Tanjore princess who was married to the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, in 1883.  The devadasis stayed back and entertained the Court and thus Bharatanatyam came to north and west India."  Aha! The dancers in the video must have been descendents of the devadasis brought to Baroda with Chimnabai.  However, the video dancers look so similar to the picture that it makes me wonder if the picture was taken much later than the 1880s and is really them!

Uday Shankar and Simkie Dance Footage

"Radha and Krishna (1932)" - This is additional footage of Uday Shankar and Simkie that I don't think has been widely available before!  The choreography is quite similar to the video below, but it features a lovely closeup at the beginning and some interesting inspirations from Kathak and Kathakali by Shankar at the end (the description calls it a "flourish"!).   Gotta love how the opening misidentifies the performance as a "characteristic Brahman dance"; clearly the makers didn't know who the performers were and their connection with modern dance in India!  But it fits with the Orientalism of the time period.


"Sinuous Sidelight (1931)" - Remember the wonderful Uday Shankar and Simkie footage that Richard at the Dances on the Footpath blog found a while ago?  This clip appears to be from the exact same footage, and while it is not interrupted by shots of Ravi Shankar and family and can be watched almost full length, the last 20 seconds or so are cut off at the end.  This version (by BritishPathé not Pathe-Nathan) identifies the performance as a "Hindu dance" and then feels compelled to point out the "bizarre instruments" with an intertitle.


Ram Gopal Footage

"Indian Dancer 1947" - While there are some clear vague inspirations from Bharatanatyam and  Kathakali, Gopal seems to be going for a more Uday Shankar-esque pan-Asian look with the southeast Asian headress and costuming.  Though I've not yet read much about Ram Gopal and how "authentic" his dance was supposed to be, I can see why "westerners" in particular found him so fascinating to watch given his extremely expressive face and controlled eye movements inspired by Kathakali.  Curiously, he barely moves his torso (no "statuesque" poses) and focuses almost exclusively on his face, arms/hands, and feet.


"Indian Dancer 1947 (2)" - Another video shot in the same location as the above, this time other dancers join Gopal around 1:15.  At 1:32, he performs alarippu-like movements with a male student or company member, I presume.  After seeing Gopal's headdress, I think I understand where Bhaskar got his inspiration from (see this post)!


Also, over at the Pad.ma archive, there is rare color footage of Ram Gopal dancing.  I can't figure out how to link to the video at all on their latest interface, but if you go to Pad.ma it's the video titled "The dancer Ram Gopal wants to see himself in colour, 8mm, 1938." 

Other Interesting Videos

"Pakistani Dancer 1953"- While the dance of the cute little girl here is nothing to write home about, the voiceover explains the clip's value.  The little girl is Nargis, daughter of Bulbul Chowdhury, "Pakistan's leading dancer" at that time.  A tribute article to Chowdhury describes him as the "pioneer of modern dance in Bangladesh [formerly East Pakistan]" who took inspiration from Uday Shankar and "helped break down Muslim conservative attitudes towards dance."  The man standing behind Nargis looks exactly like Bulbul so I think it's safe to assume it's him.  How wonderful to find a rare video clip of him in 1953, a year before his death.


"Royal Wedding in India 1946" - At 1:09, a young woman dances for the guests at the wedding for the royal heir of Junagadh state in present-day Gujarat.  She simply waves her arms around gracefully and the performance doesn't seem fit for the grandeur of the surroundings!


"Hindu Dancers 1929" - Last (and definitely least) we have a classic "white people doing 'exotic' 'hindu' dance" paced as slow as a tortoise.  Reminds me a bit of the Ted Shawn/Ruth St. Denis style.


Last, I'll close with a link to a video from another digital archive associated with the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge; it's a Kathakali performance from the early 1930s.
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Kalavantulu/Devadasi Dances in the films Muddu Bidda and Periyar (An Ode to Davesh Soneji's Latest Book)

August 16, 2012, 6:41 pm
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I've been posting a bit less frequently lately because I've been completely distracted by the discovery of a decent amount of fascinating scholarly research and writing on the subjects of the history of India's "classical" dance forms and "devadasi" women, the movements in the early to mid-twentieth century to "revive" these dance forms and mark traditional practitioners as degenerated and debased, and the history of early cinema and sound recording in South India. 

One of my favorites among the scholars writing on these subjects is Davesh Soneji whose most recent work has greatly inspired me and fueled the fire for this post.  Soneji has worked on two very fascinating compilations, first as the co-editor for Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India and second as the editor for Bharatanatyam: A Reader.  The former has some enlightening essays, and includes the excellent piece "Memory and the Recovery of Identity: Living Histories and the Kalavantulu of Coastal Andhra Pradesh" by Soneji himself that I linked to full-text in my post on devadasi-like dances in South Indian films.  The latter work I found particularly valuable in the way that it provides an excellent overview of the varied and complicated history of what we today call Bharatanatyam. 

But it's Soneji's latest work, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (click the link to preview at Google Books), that astounded me by presenting perspectives and bits of information that I've hardly seen in most other scholarly writing on the subject. For this post, I initially wanted to simply present videos I tracked down of two "devadasi" film dances Soneji discusses in the book and highlight the intriguing details he unearths.  But it's flowered into a fuller, but still brief, overview of the "secular" aspects of devadasi dance in South India that Soneji highlights. Or rather, this post is basically a long string of quotes from Soneji's book because I cannot possibly say it better than he does. :)

For those that may not be as familiar with the history of "devadasis" in South India, I thought Soneji's overview was worth quoting in full:
"From the late sixteenth-century Nayaka period onward, devadasis have functioned as courtesans, secular dance artists organized in guilds called melams, and temple workers, some of whom performed in the public spaces of certain Hindu temples.  However, these communities have always occupied an ambiguous status in South Indian society.  On the one hand, devadasis possessed a degree of social agency in that they were not restricted by the norms of patrifocal kinship.  They lived in quasi-matrilineal communities, had nonconjugal sexual relations with upper-caste men, and were literate when most South Indian women were not.  On the other hand...courtesans were commodities regularly bought and sold through the intercession of the court.  In other contexts, as the concubines, mistresses, or "second wives" of South Indian elites, they were implicated in a larger world of servitude focused on the fulfillment of male desire.  Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, vociferous social reform movements in South India aimed to dislodge communities of professional dancing women from their hereditary performance practices.  Over the next hundred years, their lifestyles were criminalized on the basis of their nonconjugal sexuality, which was understood as prostitution.  The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act, implemented in 1947, officially outlawed the social, ritual, and aesthetic practices of these women." 
Soneji's focus on the functions and lives of the "devadasi" community outside of their temple work is supremely interesting.  At one point in the book, he outlines his concern, “But why do we not hear of the secular "salon performances" of devadasis in cultural histories of South India?  Why are historical representations of dance in South India linked almost exclusively to temples and temple culture?  How has the use of the term "devadasi," full of ritual and religious connotations, eclipsed possibilities of thinking about the nonreligious lives of professional dancing women in this region?"

Soneji is careful to point out the word "devadasi" is a term that, especially today and in the media, is often "falsely linked" with "unrelated and distinct groups of women" with performing/dedication or prostitution functions (such as the Dalit girls dedicated as jogatis to the goddess Renuka-Yellamma-Mariyamma) that do not necessarily descend from the "devadasi" community that is the subject of his book and had the unique characteristics described above.  He supplements his "use of the term devadasi with the language of courtesanship, rarely used with reference to professional dancing women in South India" which he chooses in order to "foreground the modernity of devadasis social and aesthetic lives not as "temple women" but instead as professional artists in a shifting colonial sexual economy, exceeding the trope of devadasis as essentially religious subjects.."  The "focus on the temple-based and religious lives of some devadasis in scholarly and popular writing....have reified historical narratives about the "degeneration" of devadasis and, in a sense, have come to justify the politics of revival and the reclamation of a "temple history" for modern Bharatantayam dance by its middle-class, upper-caste practitioners." In addition, the focus has "fixed devadasis in the past, and in idealizing their practices has shifted attention away from women in contemporary devadasi communities."

I can't do any sort of justice to the remaining wonderfully insightful and wide-ranging information in Soneji's book, so I won't even try to summarize it or discuss it further, at least for now...I simply highly recommend it be read in full!  Note: As I heavily quote Soneji throughout this post, I am not using the diacritical marks he does in transliterating Sanskrit, but I am leaving them as is.

"Devadasi" Film Dances

Much to my absolute delight, there are two film dances that Soneji discusses (yes!! Scholars are paying attention to film dances and their historical and archival importance!!).  The first is a kalavantulu dance in the 1956 Telugu film Muddu Bidda, and the second is a temple dance in the 2006 Tamil film Periyar.  I've known about the Periyar dance for quite some time, but the Muddu Bidda analysis provoked me to immediately aqcuire the film and make the description and measly screencaps come alive on screen, which I'm very excited to share here.

Muddu Bidda (Telugu, 1956)

In the chapter "Whatever Happened to the South Indian Nautch? Toward a Cultural History of Salon Dance in Madras," Soneji presents what he calls “the first critical account of salon culture in Madras [Presidency] in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."  As introduced above, he discusses how the "professional women dancers who performed in artistic guilds (melams)…did not have much, if anything to do with temples.  Even in communities...where temple dedication was a key marker of status and ritual privilege, normally only one girl in each generation would have such honors.  Other girls in the household would simply become nondedicated courtesans who lived in the quasi-matrifocal home and participated in the nonconjugal sexual lifestyles associated with these communities"

He then focuses on the “Telugu-speaking parts of the Madras Presidency" where "professional guilds" composed of several courtesan performers (known as kalavantulu or bhogamvallu) "were contracted to perform in the homes of Brahmin and non-Brahmin elites” and also perform at temple festivals and "high-society" weddings.  "Most of the women were trained in music and dance by one community elder, who would usually be the troupe leader" known as a nayakuralu.  The nayakuralus "directed the troupe in the sense of producing and negotiating performance contracts, and also by playing the talam or cymbals during the performance.  For the most part, male dance masters (nattuvanars) did not accompany courtesans in this region as they did in the Tamil-speaking regions.”

The javali is a dance genre Soneji feels was the "most representative performance genre" of salon performances.  He describes how the javali is a genre of dance very similar to the padam but “unabashedly erotic, sometimes sarcastic, and always upbeat” and unique in “the very context of its performance, the relationship it proposed between dancer and audience.” He then notes, “Like the culture of salon performance itself, the history of the javali is unfinished.  It has eluded critical historicization and has traveled through salons into the writing of Orientalist scholars, and moved into the cinematic imaginary, only to be neglected as an "inappropriate" dance genre in the contemporary world.

The “cinematic imaginary” he is talking about is the bhogamvallu dance scene in the film Muddu Bidda.  The dance is a javali named “Amtalone Tellavare” which "describes a married woman after a night of illicit lovemaking.  She wakes in the bed of Krsna, who is "full of desire" (makkuvato gopaludu), and sings: "In the meanwhile, dawn has come.  Ayyo! What can I do?"  The ever-helpful Gaddeswarup, who comments here regularly, graciously translated the gist of the full song for me.  The song describes a woman whom Krishna flirted with the night before, and she talks of the ways he seduced her (his youth, eating pan, touching her cheek, laughing, speaking erotically) and how the morning came so soon and now she is afraid her husband will be hurt. 

Krishnajyoti
Soneji notes that this film dance is important for many reasons.  First, the identities of the actors.  The main dancer is the actress Krishnajyoti who was from a “kalavantulu family in the coastal Andhra Pradesh region.”  The women playing the troupe leader is "Surabhi Kamalabai (1913-1977), a woman born into a community of Telugu drama artists and the first woman to act in a Telugu film (she played the role of Lilavati in the 1931 Telugu film Bhakta Prahlada)."  The man assisting the trouple leader is "a Brahmin dance-master from the all-male kucipudi village tradition.  The film was made at a time when kucipudi was being reinvented as an urban, "classical" dance form in Madras, and thus the idea of Brahmin men as teachers (and thus custodians) of courtesan dance was ubiquitous."

Second, the structure and presentation of the dance. The “distinctive feature of javali rendition in that region [coastal Andhra Pradesh]--the gaptu-varusa, or improvised dance sequence, at the end--undeniably marks the technical and aesthetic continuity of javali rendition in the courtesan community."  Soneji notes that while a young boy in the film is reprimanded for watching the bhogamvallu performance, the film "seems to celebrate the culture of courtesan dance, leaving the viewer confounded by a spectacle that animates the simultaneous desirability and vilification of the courtesan and her art, an anxiety that is so much a part of reform discourse in this period."

Third, the film “in many ways represents one of the last official nods to the culture of the salon in Telugu-speaking South India” as it was released the same year that Andhra Pradesh added an amendment to the 1947 Madras Anti-Devadasi Act to not only ban “temple dedications, rituals, and temple-oriented performances by devadasis” but also “performances by women from hereditary courtesan communities at marriages and other private social events.”  Prior to this amendment, “salon performances by courtesan troupes [had] continued well into the 1950s” in South India.

With that said, here is the dance (the javali begins at :55)

While the dance wasn't quite what I was expecting (especially with the lack of defined hand gestures), it's incredible to see the visual record of a woman (and perhaps other women) from the kalavantulu community and the way bhogamelam's of the region could have been performed (although Soneji doesn't address if the adaptation has been heavily altered for popular film tastes).  And of course, it shows us an example of a salon javali, a genre which Soneji laments "like the salon lives of devadasis, slipped through the cracks of historicization and historiography."

Periyar (Tamil, 2006)

In the chapter "Subterfuges of 'Respectable' Citizenship: Marriage and Masculinity in the Discourse of Devadasi Reform," Soneji discusses how devadasis were "constructed" as prostitutes and takes a look at the legislation that resulted from "twentieth-century reform movements [that] promised to grant devadasis full participation as citizens in the emergent nation-state only if they were able to "reform" themselves through marriage."  One of the prominent voices of the "devadasi abolition" movement was Muvalur Ramamirttammal (1883-1962) who was adopted by a "dasi" as a child and was later active in the Congress party, the Self-Respect Movement (Dravida Kazhagam [DK] launched by E.V. Ramasami Naicker [Periyar] who "was a strong supporter of devadasi abolition"), and later the Progress of Dravidians movement (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam [DMK]), both of which were enormous movements in South India.  She seems best known for the novel "Tasikal Mocavalai..." she published in 1936 that "provides a fictionalized account of what Ramamirttammal claims to see around her--unscrupulous, money-hungry devadasis who ensnare young men ("minors") into their deceitful world of pleasure."

Soneji notes that Ramamirttammal held deep "convictions about the respectability of monogamous conjugality," and "the connections between Ramamirttammal and marriage run deep in public memory and continue to be invoked through mechanisms of the state." The footnote notes an example of this in the 2006 Tamil film Periyar, "directed by Gnana Rajasekharan and partially funded by the Tamil Nadu State Government" which "contains an interesting scene featuring Muvalar Ramamirttamal" and Periyar.  Soneji describes it as follows:
"The scene opens with a devadasi dancing in a temple mandapa before a large image of the god Siva-Nataraja.  The song she sings is about her oppression, couched in the metaphoric language of bhakti.  Suddenly, Ramamirttammal bursts onto the mandappa accompanied by a young man who has come forth to marry the devadasi.  Periyar too arrives, and after a lengthy debate with the audience gathered at the  mandapa about the oppressive nature of devadasi culture, Periyar marries the couple right there and then...these kinds of popular depictions of Ramamirttammal inevitably frame the 'normalizing' of non-Brahmin women's sexuality as one of the key features of non-Brahmin respectability..."
I've not had any luck locating this film online or on reputable DVD, but there are some clips available from the 2010 Telugu dub (I think), Periyar Ramaswamy Naiker.

Here is the scene that Soneji describes above:


Unfortunately, the scene ends right at the point that Ramamirttammal enters, so we miss seeing the debate and subsequent marriage.  Even still, it’s fascinating to see a filmic representation of this piece of cultural history, and one that is quite a contrast to aesthetics and spirit of the Muddu Bidda javali above.

OK, I think that's enough Soneji quotations for one post. :)
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Found: Devayani's Classical Dance in America Ammayi (1976, Telugu)

August 19, 2012, 11:10 am
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Yay! Another dance from my Holy Grail post found!  This time it's Devayani's Kuchipudi-esque dance in the song "Ananda Tandavamade" from the 1976 Telugu film America Ammayi (American Girl), a remake of the 1975 Tamil film Melnaatu Marumagal.


TeluguCinema.com's excellent retrospective on America Ammayi and interview with Devayani give details in her involvement with the film.  She was approached for the role by director Singeetham Srinivasa Rao after he saw her debut arangetram dance performance in Madras (Chennai).  Since she was trained only in Bharatanatyam, Devayani learnt Kuchipudi from the eminent Vempati Chinna Satyam (who sadly passed away just a few weeks ago).

While Devayani says Vempati Chinna Satyam was one of the dance directors for the film, she says her dance in Ananda Tandavamade was composed by Sree Satyanarayana (I assume she means KV Satyanarayana who also was involved with films like Swarna Kamalam and Srutilayalu), and assistant Shoba Naidu (well-known disciple of Vempati Chinna Satyam).  While she clearly has training in Bharatanatyam with the crisp way she holds herself, I find her upper body really stiff and her extremely long arms look lanky and awkward at times especially with the overly-fast pace she's been given.  Her ballet training seems to show through, particularly in the way she gracefully moves her arms and hands, and the light "skipping" movements of the feet look a bit unnatural.  Every so often there seems to be some Bharatanatyam moves snuck in for good measure.  Overall, though, I think she did a nice job.  I love the setting of the Nataraja Swami Temple of Chidambaram, and its architecture and karana sculptures are used to wonderful effect.  Isn't it wonderful to see a white woman in an Indian film performing traditional dance, and doing it fairly well, rather than the trope of the exoticised scantily-clad gori backup dancer.  And most of all it is wonderful to finally be able to see this dance!

Devayani and the "French Wave" in Bharatanatyam

So who is Devayani? Originally raised in France as Anne Chaymotty, she trained in Ballet when she was young and fell in love with Bharatanatyam after seeing the Kalakshetra dance sequence in Louis Malle's Phantom India.  She started learning Bharatanatyam first in France through Amala Devi (of Ram Gopal's troupe) and fellow French woman Malavika (originally Christine Clien) who learned the dance in India.  Then she traveled to India on the Indo-French Cultural Exchange Programme scholarship and studied under Kanchipuram Ellappa and more fully (for three years) under Muthuswamy Pillai who introduced her arangetram (and later she studied with a few others like Kalanidhi Narayanan, Swarnamukhi, Yamini Krishnamurthy).

Devayani and Malavika were part of a large number of French nationals who traveled to India to learn Bharatanatyam and largely returned to France.  Almost all of them seem to have learned from the traditional nattuvanars Kanchipuram Ellappa and V.S. Muthuswamy Pillai.  According to Sruti's feature article on Muthuswamy Pillai (Issues 319 and 320), the trend first started with Menaka (originally Verushka) who learned from Ellappa and Padma Subrahmanyam and continued her training with Muthuswami Pillai after Ellappa's death.  "Menaka was followed by an unbroken line of students from France, who came to India with the sole purpose of learning from Muthuswami Pillai" and who took Indian names permanently even after they returned to France.  Said Muthuswami Pillai humorously, "You see, they used to come in hordes, some fifty or sixty tourists.  All of them hopped, skipped and jumped as a group (ellaamaa kuthikkum) maybe for two months or fifteen days or even a week.  And paid me according to the number of classes."  But then Pillai found that some among these hordes were especially dedicated and made Bharatanatyam their full-time profession.

The wave of French students marked the beginning of a distinct second half to Muthuswami Pillai's teaching career, one which saw him inspired to create new adavus and movements, especially when his last and most prized disciple, Dominique Delorme, arrived in 1987.  In 1990, Pillai was awarded the "Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres" award (somewhat similar to the Indian Padma Shri) which he traveled to France to receive.  He passed away from ill health in 1992 at the age of 71 leaving a legacy of a new style of Bharatanatyam.  Heads up - I'll be focusing on the first half of Muthuswami Pillai's career on my post about him in the coming soon (I promise!) Remembering Choreographers series.

"Padma Shri" Devayani

What's interesting about Devayani is that she did not just learn the dance in India in the '70s, star in a film, and return to France.  She was awarded the Indian Padma Shri in 2009, and the reason seems to be based on how she has spread knowledge of Bharatanatyam through performances (not only in France and India but over many countries in the west) and through positions like Artist In Residence through the Arts Council of Great Britain (she was the first "Asian dancer") and her selection as "the only representative from India invited to participate in the World Culture Open at Seoul in South Korea recently" (The Hindu).

The most important factor of her Padma Shri award seems to be that she has made India her home, a fact which was highlighted in her inclusion in the 2008-09 Incredible India campaign.  While the campaign noted she was "one of the foremost exponents of Bharata Natyam in the world," Devayani steps it up a notch on her website with the assertion that she is "the foremost exponent of Bharata Natyam."  I highly doubt the dance community in India considers that last statement true!  The thing is, the fact that she admits that in the '90s she began performing fusion dance (apparently combining Bharatanatyam with Ballet and Arabic dance) and the Orientalist vibe I get from her website and Narthaki.com interview leads me to believe that she's followed a different path than someone like, say, the American Sharon Lowen who performs Odissi/Chhau/Manipuri and also had a role/danced in a Telugu film (Swarnakamalam, though her dance is cut from all prints I've seen).
Melnaatu Marumagal

For comparison, here is the Bharatanatyam dance song from America Ammayi's inspiration, the 1975 Tamil film Mel Naatu Marumagal, that I featured on a previous post.  The American character was played by an actual American girl who is rumored to have studied at Kalakshetra. I think she does an excellent job.



More Information/Sources

Natyacharya V.S. Muthuswami Pillai (Sruti, Issue 319 and 320)
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Anjana Banerjee’s Bharatanatyam in Chhandaneer (Bengali, 1989)

August 25, 2012, 11:59 pm
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I first learned of Anjana Banerjee whilst browsing YouTube for Bharatanatyam dance videos a while ago.  You might have seen her infamous video titled “Anjana Banerjee – Hilarious Bharatanatyam Dancer” where she gives a performance that is so incredibly bad it's deliciously hilarious!  Take a look at this priceless piece of Doordarshan TV history:


The uploader references a complimentary quote on Narthaki.com about Anjana's dance skills, and when I first saw the video a while back I thought “oh Narthaki must have mixed her up with a dancer of a similar name” because how could a dancer like that possibly be taken seriously in any way?  And how did she get on TV in the first place?

Luckily for us, that is not the only recent dancing video of Anjana online.  There seems to be a bunch of people who have taken it upon themselves to upload short preview videos ripped-off from DancingIndia.net (which itself is a rip-off site that rips-off other people's videos and DVDs and resells them as proprietary downloads).  The videos are recognized not only by the "DancingIndia.net" watermark but also by their randomly-numbered titles with misspelled words and, most humorously, inserts of the uploader's opinions in the titles.  So one may find titles with things like ru1bbish1 (rubbish), crappp, crappiest grp, idiotonscats (idiot on skates!), longjaaw (long jaw?), fatkid, or simply...supercow. :D

Among these lovely collections can be found a few more recent Anjana Banerjee performances.  In the two below, she gets the distinction of having "faat horrror" in the title. :) I love the second video, where the introduction speaks glowingly of her dance as an "exposition of rhythm and melody." There are a handful more that are slightly-less-atrocious, like this and especially this in which she looks a bit younger and has more energy.



 Anjana's Dances in Chandaneer

To my amazement, a visitor emailed me this week regarding a 1989 Bengali film called Chhandaneer (The Nest of Rhythm, directed by Utpalendu Chakrabarty), and after some research and finding the movie in full online (legally through Angel, who never cease to be awesome), I quickly discovered that the film was about a Bharatanatyam dancer!  Bengali films in my experience simply do not feature as many dances as Hindi or South Indian cinema does, and when they do it tends to be either mujras or Tagore dance (I have a post in the works about this...among so many others!) with a few exceptions like the Odissi dances in Yugant or the brief Bharatanatyam practice scene in Unishe April.  And that is why finding the film Chhandaneer, which revolves completely around an accomplished Bharatanatyam dancer who marries a blind musician in rigid pursuit of high art, is incredible!  (Thank you Elena!)

As I searched for more information on the film and who the the lead character/dancer "Seema" was enacted by, IMDB.com credited the role to Anjana Banerjee (as did the BFI).  I vaguely remembered her name but didn't know why.  A quick search on YouTube confronted me with the iconic, hilarious dance I'd seen a while ago.  "It couldn't be!" I thought at first.  But then I watched all the dances from the film closely and it was unmistakable that the dancer was the same Anjana Banerjee with a much younger appearance and energy filmed long before she clearly aged, gained weight, and suffered from a serious case of dance amnesia...or arthritis.

Just take a look at one of her best dances from the film:


Can you believe it! How could someone dance so decently here and fall so far later? Amazing.  In case you're still thinking "no way! that's not her!" just take a look at these two picture comparisons:

Same distinctive nose
Same mole near her right eye
I did a bit of web sleuthing and discovered a bit more about Ms. Banerjee.  She is Anjana Banerjee (aka Anjana Banerji, Anjana Banergi, Anjana Bandyopadhyay) of Calcutta/Kolkata in West Bengal. According to her website (no longer available now but archived through the Wayback Machine), she studied under a few Bharatanatyam gurus including K.N. Dakshinamoorthy (K.N. Dandayuthapani Pillai’s younger brother) and Kittappa Pillai, participated in dance events around India, and seems to have been noted for being not only a Bharatanatyam dancer from Bengal but also for her experimentation with dancing Bharatanatyam to Tagore songs which she discussed in this article over at Boloji.com.  It’s hard to judge if the praise from the media she quoted on her old website is really just conciliatory fluff, but I did notice a few mentions of performances by her over the past decade online, so she does seem to have at least kept active and had (and might still have) a dance school called Nritya Kutira.

What is very interesting about her role as a headstrong Bharatanatyam purist in Chhandaneer is that it seems to reference actual events from her dancing life, which implies she may have been fairly well-known in West Bengal at the time as a Bharatanatyam dancer and the film was featuring or perhaps capitalizing on her local fame.  In the scene below, she is interviewed about and then is shown demonstrating her blending of songs by Rabindranath Tagore with Bharatanatyam which as noted above she experimented with in real life.  I'm sure this inclusion also helped the dance be more relateable to Bengali audiences who are very familiar with Tagore (and of course the Bengali language) as opposed to Bharatanatyam's traditional music and languages.



Another surprise in the film is the famous dancer Yamini Krishnamurthy’s appearance at the end to introduce the stage performance of Seema.  It’s really her!  She is woven into the story as the childhood guru of Seema, though she is not seen until the end (I don’t believe the teacher in this scene is her, but another actor).  Here is Yamini’s small part (she's seen starting at 9:12) – no dancing, unfortunately:



The Remaining Film Dances

Credits Dance - Seema (Anjana Banerjee) is introduced with a fast-paced performance overlayed on the beginning credits.  After a short break, she resumes dancing again at 3:44 introduced by some beautiful South Indian temple imagery.


Academy Dance - Her abhinaya-focused dance at the “Madras Music Academy” (that’s a real shot of the outside of the famed Academy at the beginning).  Wouldn't it be great if the stage at the Academy really looked like a '90s Doordarshan TV classical dance set! :)  The lyrics in this film, penned by Satarupa Sanyal, won the National Film Award for "Best Lyrics of 1989" "for the rare poetic heights reached."


Practice Scene #1 - I just love classical dance practice scenes! She doesn't get to practice long before she is rudely interrupted.


Practice Scene #2 - Interrupted again!


Seema teaching a group of students, and interrupted yet again!


Another abhinaya-focused dance bathed in a soft, warm light.  Doesn't she look completely different from her other dances in the film?  And might this be a Tagore song?


Seema's dramatic ending dance in a filmy costume (and Yamini Krishnamurthy in the audience).


How intriguing this discovery of Chhandaneer has been! I had no idea that the iconic "hilarious" YouTube dancer had such a history. I've not given any attention to the actual story of Chhandaneer because I thought it was simply awful - unrealistic, little character development, strange acting, and unlikable characters!  To be fair, the English subtitles disappeared on and off so I didn't fully understand the whole story.  I wonder if the film was a dud in its day, especially since there is very little information online about it. But even if the film really is as bad as I perceive it is, its value lies in its novel dance content and its giving us a peek at what the infamous Anjana Banerjee looked and danced like in her younger days. 
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Three New 1950s Kamala Dance Finds

September 20, 2012, 10:16 pm
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I've been working on my "Remembering Film Choreographers" film series for a while now, but the first nattuvanar post is taking much longer than I thought!  I keep finding new research (and contradictory claims) and new angles and ways of approaching the subject, so in order to make my introductory post the best it can be I'm taking lots of time to read and synthesize...and keep continually re-editing my post... over and over. :)  I hope it will be ready in the next 2-3 weeks, but I learned my lesson about not giving timeframes for specific postings!

In the meantime, I thought I would post about three new Kamala dances I've come across recently.  Two are from the rare Tamil film song uploads of YouTuber "Kandasamy Sekkarakudi Subbiah Pillai," and the third was graciously sent to me by a visitor.  I've had the Mohanasundaram one on my big master spreadsheet of Kamala's film dances for a while, but the other two I have never read any references of before! Yay, new Kamala film dances to add to the list!

Sarvadhikari (Telugu, 1951) - Ore Ayaaramaa Sogusaaga - I've listed this one first because the number is so charming with interesting, creative non-classical choreography peppered throughout.  It starts at 1:05:01 with a Kathak-based dance by Kamala with some awkward footwork and then transitions into a cute folksy number with some nice group choreography at 1:06:41.  But it's the third segment, starting at 1:08:19, that is the most creative with its musical harmonies, rhythmic isolations, and dramatic conclusion as Kamala looks over the backup dancers perched on the staircase.  I initially found the Tamil version of this song at KSSP's channel, but the Telugu version at Rajshri is in much higher quality so that's what I've embedded below; the dances appear to be the same with some slightly different editing and reshots for the sung words.   Curiously, Tamil film and dance expert Randor Guy neither credits nor mentions Kamala's dance in his overview of the film at The Hindu. 


Mohanasundaram (Tamil, 1951) - Oyilaana Mayilaadam Paar Seylaana - Another non-classical number with lots of dramatic musical variety.  Nothing really caught my eye until the unusual final two segments--especially the last one in which Kamala dances furiously with sharp knives in her hands.  She even tries to trick us at the end with some feigned stab attempts!  I hope none of the crew were harmed by her haphazard flinging of the knives off-camera at the end... :D  Though I suppose Kamala's dance is not nearly as nerve-racking as Padmini and Lalitha's knife dance two years earlier in Mangayar Karasi (1949).  While Randor Guy does list Kamala in the credits, he doesn't discuss her dance at all in his review of the film.


Charanadasi (Telugu, 1956) - Maruvakuma Mano Ramana - A big thanks to TS Rao for sending me this dance number! Compared to the two dances above, this one is a much more traditional, classical-based "Kamala dance."  The film was made or dubbed in Tamil as Madharkula Mannikam. Given that Kamala married her first husband R.K. Lakshman in 1952, we can refer to her as "Kamala Lakshman" instead of "Kumari Kamala" for this one.

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The Devadasi Video Mystery Solved! Gujarat and its Bharatanatyam Legacy

September 30, 2012, 5:55 pm
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Back in July, I discussed a stunningly-rare video clip I had found at BritishPathe.com featuring two South Indian devadasis dancing some clear Sadir/Bharatanatyam along with their musical ensemble filmed allegedly between 1930 and 1935. I initially was perplexed as to why South Indian devadasis would be performing at a royal function in Baroda, a city now known as Vadodara in the northwest state of Gujarat which is over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away from Tamil Nadu state. Then I remembered a picture of two devadasis (left) who looked eerily similar from Ashish Mohan Khokar’s “Century of Indian Dance" exhibition catalog, and the picture’s description noted how Tanjore devadasis were sent to Baroda with the dowry of the Tanjore princess Chimnabai when she married the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, in 1883.  Were the dancers in that photo the same as the video?  And if so (which is a RARE FIND!), who were they?

No embedding; click image to link - Dancing begins about 8:06

The big break in figuring out their identity came when dance enthusiast Ragothaman (a contributor at the blog Bharatanatyam and the Worldwide Web) sent me some excellent material he had found that identified the dowry dancers said to be sent in the early 1880s as Gauri and Kanthimathi (also spelled other ways, Gawri, Gaura, Kantimati, etc.). The only problem was sources say Gauri was born in 1871 and Kanthimati in 1872, which would mean they were around age 60 when the video was filmed in the 1930s.  The video dancers certainly don't look 60!  Another possibility was that BritishPathe identified the video incorrectly and it was really filmed much earlier, but given the photos and dates below this is highly unlikely.  I think it's safe to say that the video dancers are not the famous Gauri and Kanthimathi. At first I was really disappointed by this news, but then a bit more logic and research revealed a fascinating history!

Gauri and Kanthimathi's Replacement Dancers

While the video dancers are not Gauri and Kanthimathi (more on them later), I'm convinced they are the court dancers who officially replaced Gauri and Kanthimathi after their retirement. There is a discrepancy among sources (Kothari, Sundaram) regarding exactly when they retired from court services, but the more plausible citation is that they served for 32 and 35 years respectively, putting their retirement date sometime in the 1910s or early 1920s. The video was filmed sometime in the 1930s, about 10-20 years after the point when Gauri and Kanthimathi retired and the new replacement dancers would have came to Baroda.  The appearance of the video dancers backs this up; I've been told they look like they are in their 30s, so rewinding 10-20 years would mean they were pre-teens or teens when they were brought to Baroda which is as expected. Their service ended in 1950 when the royal family stopped maintaining court dancers.

What truly convinced me that the video dancers were Gauri and Kanthimathi's replacements and not just random dancers were the following four photos. 

The first is the cover of the 2003 issue of Attendance: The Dance Annual of Indiawhich Ragothaman graciously alerted me to.  In correspondence with the publication's compiler/editor, Ashish Mohan Khokar (whose work I praised and admired in previousposts), Khokar revealed that the photo was gifted to him personally by the Maharaja of Baroda!  It shows the royal court dancers performing in the Darbar Hall of the Lakshmi Vilas Palace built by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III in 1890.  Though hard to see, the dancers look just like those in the video, especially in their weight and height differences.


I found the similar image below at gaekwadsofbaroda.com, a site celebrating the current/past gaekwad royal family. Crucially, it identifies the photo as "Darbar for the Presentation of Jubilee Medal at L.V. Palace 01.01.1936."  The ceremony appears to be different from the one in the photo above given the different sari designs of the (same) dancers and the position of the royalty seated at the back center.  But the date matches the general timeframe of the BritishPathe video!


But it was this picture that really confirmed the video dancers were the replacements.  The image is a color version of the black-and-white photo at the top of the post, and it is from Life magazine with the caption "Baroda Nautch Girls."  The close-ups make the identification clear.  Comparing this photo with the palace photos and the video confirms that they are all visual captures of the same women, the replacement dancers!  Most importantly and as noted in my original post, Ashish Mohan Khokar identified the black-and-white version of the photo as the devadasis brought from Tanjore to Baroda.  Given the research listed in this post and after further discussion with Khokar, we can now safely say that the women were not technically the "original" devadasis (Gauri and Kanthimathi), but their replacements.  As Khokar termed it to me, the "continuity of Kanthimathi and Gauri style."
  
 

Comparing the Life photo with a screenshot from the BritishPathe video

Unfortunately, the two facts that remain unknown is how the replacement dancers relate to Gauri and Kanthimathi and what their names were.  Khokar believes they would have likely been either their daughters or students.  The latter seems most likely given that Sundaram describes all of Gauri and Kanthimathi's children and none of them could have been the replacement dancers due to their gender, occupation, or date of passing.  Kothari wrote that when Gauri and Kanthimathi retired, "two more dancers came to Baroda and served there until 1950 [...] Of the two pupils of Gaura who came to Baroda, one Saraswati Kalyanaraman is at present in Bombay and conducts a dance school."  I've read that over a few times...does it imply one of the replacement dancers is Saraswati?

The Originals: Gauri and Kanthimathi
 
Marabu Thantha Manikkangal - Kanthi at 8:00
So we've identified who the dancers in the video were, but what about their predecessors, Gauri and Kanthimathi?  Researching their history has revealed some fascinating information about their dance and the legacy of Bharatanatyam in Gujarat.  A few sources have been extremely helpful in forming this post.  I am supremely grateful to Ragothaman for translating and scanning portions of the Tamil book Marabu Thantha Manikkangal (Women Who Gave the Gift of Tradition) written by B.M. Sundaram.  Sundaram gives the most detailed description available of Gauri and Kanthimathi and their dowry troupe along with two rare photographs of Gauri Kanthimathi.  It took Sundaram almost 14 years to gather the rare information for his book by traveling around Tamil Nadu, and he had previously written two similar books about "the talented nattuvanars of yore" and "nagaswaram and tavil vidwans" (The Hindu).  Clearly he has compiled some invaluable information!  A few other sources were useful for cross-referencing Sundaram's information, namely Sunil Kothari's Bharatanatyam: Indian Classical Dance Art, Sapna Rangaswamy's "Artistes at the Royal Darbaar" article at Narthaki.com, and Davesh Soneji's Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (which I previously wrote glowingly about).  For details on the Maharaja and Baroda political life, Fatesinghrao Gaekwad's Sayajirao of Baroda: The Prince and the Man is fairly helpful (and downloadable for free).

Gauri and Kanthimathi's Troupe and Dance

The alliance between the royal families of Tanjore and Baroda happened when the Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III married Chimnabai I of Tanjore in December 1880/January 1881 and was officially invested with power in December 1881, though his powers were curbed until 1883 (Gaekwad). As part of the wedding dowry, a troupe of temple dancers and musicians were sent to Baroda. It was the first time a southern dance troupe had settled in the north.  The ensemble comprised of the temple devadasis from Tanjore/Kumbakonam, Gauri, Sarada, and Kamu; nattuvanars Kannuswamy (Pillai) Nattuvanar and Kuppuswamy Nattuvanar; and the following musicians: Muthukrishnan (Nagaswaram), Karandai Ratnam Pillai (Thavil), Ramaswamy (Otthu drone), and Vadivelu Pillai, Sabapathi, and Subramaniam (Mridangam). Sarada and Kamu were soon replaced by Nagaratnam and finally by Gauri's cousin Kanthimathi in 1891.

Sundaram and Kersemboom give some delightful details of the lives and dances of Gauri and Kanthimathi. Maharaja Sayajirao had instituted a "Kalavant Khatha," the State Department of Artists, that employed and managed the performers.  Gauri and Kanthimathi, who were responsible for their troupe and appearance, were together paid 433 rupees every month (while the nattuvanar, mridangist, and thuthikarar collectively got only 282 rupees).  They performed twice a week for the Maharaja Sayajirao after he finished his dinner.  Sayajirao, who did not know Tamil or Telugu, was known to say “I do not need to understand the language as the message of the lyrics is shown through abhinaya.” Gauri and Kanthimathi choreographed five new dances for the king, mostly in Hindi, using the mudras and adavus from Bharatanatyam along with other creative movements as they each enacted various scenarios:
  • Radha Krishna dance 
  • Kite flying dance “Laal Patang Ki Jarthu” – A kite in flight is nearly thwarted before the two make peace 
  • Scorpion dance “Kaajupakari” – After fainting from a scorpion sting, a friend tries to gather herbs to save her life 
  • Madhumatta dance “Door Sakshagir” – An alcoholic Muslim man tries to tempt his Hindu Brahmin wife with a drink 
  • Snake dance “Naadar Mudimelirrukum” 

The book features the following two rare pictures of Kanthimathi in her older years, the first of which is also found on the cover:

A Picture of the Original Dowry Troupe... Could it Be?

While browsing the Bharatanatyam module on Wesleyan University's Accelerated Motion website, I saw the iconic image below that had been featured as part of Ashish Mohan Khokar’s Century of Indian Dance exhibition artwork/poster. When I clicked on the image, the popout description read: "The melam or troupe of Kannuswami Nattuvanar (1864-1923) in Baroda. Kannuswami Nattuvanar of Thanjavur with two devadasi dancers and musicians [...] The image was taken at the turn of the century when Kannuswami Nattuvanar was invited to perform at the court of the Gaekwad princes of Baroda in northern India."


Did you catch that? The nattuvanar standing in the center is Kannuswami (Pillai) Nattuvanar, who we know from the sources above was one of the two nattuvanars who came to Baroda with Chimnabai’s dowry!  This is a picture of him!  But that's not all!  He has quite a pedigree and would have brought his expertise to Baroda.  He was a direct descendent (grandson) of Sivanandam from the famous Tanjore Quartet who codified the modern Bharatanatyam format, he passed along his knowledge of nattuvangam to Kandappa Pillai (his nephew, the first guru of the famous devadasi Balasaraswati), and his grandson Kittappa Pillai was a guru to many modern artists. This chart from Sunil Kothari's book outlines Kannuswami's Tanjore Quartet lineage visually, though not everyone could be listed due to space:


I don’t think the troupe picture was taken at the “turn of the century,” especially since Sundaram notes that Kannuswamy Nattuvanar returned to Thanjavur in 1893 and was replaced in Baroda by Vadivelu. I think the picture was taken in the early 1880s, when the troupe went to Baroda! If that's true, then it is highly likely that the devadasi dancers in the picture are either the originals, Gauri and Sarada, or perhaps later with Gauri and Kanthimathi!  Could it be?  Their age appearances seem to match this theory.  In 1881 when the troupe came to Baroda, Kannuswami would have been 17 (born 1864) and Gauri would have been 10 (born 1871); Gauri looks a few years older than 10, so perhaps the picture was taken a few years later?  To be fair, it’s also possible the picture could be of a troupe of Kannuswami’s photographed while he was in Thanjavur after 1893, but since the description of the picture notes it was taken when he was invited to perform at Baroda, I think it’s the dowry troupe!

Gauri and Kanthimathi's Legacy

What's fascinating about Gauri and Kanthimathi is that they were not just two devadasis who came to a different region, danced in the court, and faded away.  They, along with the other artists who surrounded them in Baroda, brought Sadir/Bharatanatyam to the region and through their descendents and royal patronage, the dance form survived and still lives and breathes in Gujarat today.  The patronage and attention Maharaja Sayajirao gave to the performing arts were critical in maintaining an artistic bent in Baroda.  His court, starting with Gauri and Kanthimathi and troupe, maintained a number of artistes which by 1916 had risen to forty-eight (Gaekwad). Soon after he came into power in the 1880s, he had laid the foundation for the first music college in India, Gayan Shala.  The Music Conference in Baroda he began also featured musicians, dancers, and other performing artists and drew visitors from all parts of India. (Gaekwad).  While important in maintaining support for dance and music in Baroda, Sayajirao's influence "remained largely confined" to the court and festivals (Thakkar).

It wasn't until the dance "reformist and revivalist movement" starting in the 1930s that greater awareness and respectability came to Bharatanatyam (and other dance forms) and it was placed "on the larger national agenda" as an important piece in the revival of India's "cultural heritage." (Thakkar).  In the 1950s, after India became independent and arts patronage shifted to state institutions, the Maharaja Sayajirao University (referred to as M.S. University or MSU) was formed (from funds established by the late Sayajirao himself) and among its offerings were programs in music and dance, including Bharatanatyam.  Thakkar notes that these programs were the first of their kind in India and "soon began to draw enthusiastic response from students not only from Gujarat but from all over the country.  Tamilnadu's Bharatanatyam thus took deep root in the common cultural consciousness of Gujarat."

The traditional community was an important part of the continuity of the art form and its newfound awareness and popularity.  Kanthimathi's son Kubernath Tanjorekar, who learned the dance from her and later learned nattuvangam from Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai (Kothari), began teaching more widely as dance gained more respectability.  He was employed as the nattuvanar in the Baroda court from 1948-1950 and then invited to be a professor of dance at MSU (Tanjore...). 

But it was the new, non-traditional entrants into the dance form who perhaps had the most influence through their work at MSU in its founding years.  Anjali Hora Medh, the first Gujarati dancer to learn Bharatanatyam at Kalakshetra and bring it back to Gujarat, was employed as a visiting dance professor at MSU. (Thakkar)  Joining her was Mohan Khokar (Ashish Mohan Khokar's father!), who had also studied at Kalakshetra, who not only taught dance but also helped form the curriculum and soon became the head of the dance department (Khokar).  Around this time and a couple hours away in Ahmedabad, Mrinalini Sarabhai began her Darpana Academy of the Performing Arts.  I was surprised to learn that well-known Bharatanatyam artist CV Chandrasekhar, also a Kalakshetra graduate, took over as head of the dance department in 1980 (Khokar).

Sayajirao and his influence are not forgotten.  This year, MSU's Faculty of Performing Arts are celebrating the 125th anniversary of the establishment of their division by Sayajirao in 1886.  The royal family is also celebrating the 150th birth anniversary of Sayajirao (born 1863).  And Bharatanatyam itself is today "the single most popular dance form for Gujarati girls to learn and perform" (Thakkar).  This trajectory can be tracked back to Gauri and Kanthimathi and the Maharaja who gave them patronage.  Today, "one can still see [Gauri's] statue Tanjore Nautch Girl and the sculpture of her head installed in Fatehsinhrao Museum" at the Laxmi Vilas Palace (Chaturvedi).

Revisiting the Video Itself

I've enjoyed repeatedly watching the BritishPathe video for its historical value.  There are a couple things I didn't touch on much in my initial post.

First, the visual record of how a pre-revival Bharatanatyam musical ensemble might have looked like is fascinating.  From left to right, the musicians appear to be a drummer (mridangam?), second nattuvanar, harmonium, lead nattuvanar, and a type of bellows possibly called tutti.  Can you imagine how different from today the music must have sounded like!  There are many references to "bagpipes" or "bellows" being used as a drone pitch in pre-revival Bharatanatyam.  Soneji provides a picture of a tutti that was "exclusively used to accompany devadasi dance in the Pudukkottai region." Even Balasaraswati's arangetram in 1925 featured a "basic drone pitch that was made with a small bagpipe called tutti" (Knight). During the reconstruction of Bharatanatyam, many changes to the dance form were made including altering the type of instruments used. 




Second, I love how the video humanizes the artists.  There are lots of small humorous moments in the dancers' performance: teetering and almost losing balance as one enters the stage, squinting against the bright sunlight, and throwing their fabric piece over the harmonium when finished with it! 

What a discovery this has been!  What luck to come across a video that has such a rich history and provides such astounding historical value.

Sources:
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Dance in Early Indian Cinema: Some Video Evidence

October 12, 2012, 9:10 pm
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What was dance in early Indian cinema like?  It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I considered this question worthy of pursuing video evidence of.  I had read how the vast majority of India's silent and early sound cinema was either lost or destroyed in fires with the teensy remainder securely locked up in places like the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) with occasional public screenings.  Certainly not viewable anywhere online, I assumed. But I was wrong!

When I recently learned about IndiaVideo.org's lovely "Celebrating 100 Years of Bollywood" series (thanks Gaddeswarup for your comment!), I was thrilled to see publicity pictures from India's earliest silent cinema, Pundalik (1912), clips from the first official indigenous Indian feature film Raja Harishchandra (1913), and also pictures from India's first sound film Alam Ara (1931).  I hadn't realized this year is the start of Indian Cinema's Centenary celebrations (meaning Indian cinema is in it's 100th year of "life" which will culminate in its 100th birthday in May 2013)!

Through recommend videos on the YouTube sidebar, I quickly learned that presumably non-professional YouTubers have uploaded Raja Harishchandra (1913, in the form of the 1967 National Film Archive documentary, D.G. Phalke, The First Indian Film Director1870-1944) and Kaliya Mardan (1919). Each upload looks absolutely authentic due to many scenes matching screencaps found at the NFAI and in books about silent Indian cinema.  Both videos were uploaded in the past few months, and I assume it's not a coincidence that the NFAI just last month released a DVD of both films (Raja Harishchandra in partial form with only the surviving reels, and they added a third film, the 1931 Bengali silent, Jamai Babu).  Perhaps as the DVD was in the making, some of the prints were "leaked" and folks outside of the official process uploaded them for public view?  I'm curious if the DVD prints are different from what is online, especially since Kaliya Mardan looks like it came from a VHS tape with the tracking lines at the bottom. 

Left: Raja Harischandra (1913)         Right: Kaliya Mardan (1919) - Click link on video

  

As one would expect of me, I immediately noticed the dances in these films!  In Raja Harishchandra, beginning about 36 minutes in a character (Tukaram?) begins playing what looks like hand cymbals and then an energetic group of men can be see moving down the street rhythmically moving from side to side and jumping up and down with religious devotion.  I've been told they are dancing to a Bhajan which is a characteristic of the Bhakti movement.  While this isn't quite meant to be a "dance" in and of itself, in Kaliya Mardan the dances, while in a devotional setting, are clearly and distinctly dance!  Two unmistakable folk dances surrounding Krishna are in the film: one male-focused dance with sticks at 28:16 and the other a female-only dance at 35:40 with what appears to be tree branches, rope and/or sticks.  There are also expressive depictions by the women starting at 31:15.  I'm completely surprised to see such early filmic representations of dance!

Kaliya Mardan's Folk Dances (click images to link)


Krishna's childhood role in Kaliya Mardan was played by Phalke's daughter Mandakini.  Near the beginning, after the introductory title card which states "study in facial expressions by a little girl of seven," Mandakini enacts "a few of the nine emotional aesthetic moods [navarasas] of the Indian classical arts - humour, anger, wonder, etc. [...] This range of emotions becomes the basis of the ensuing narrative" (Josephson).  But perhaps that's making the scene a bit too serious--Mandakini is simply adorable!

Accounts of Dance in Early Indian Cinema

The best and most comprehensive writing about dance in early Indian cinema I've found is VAK Ranga Rao's 1995 article "Dance in Indian Cinema" which covers not only Hindi cinema but also Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.  While Rao had some limitations (and makes a few mis-statements) due to YouTube and some recent scholarship not yet being available, he makes some fascinating points that most other articles on Indian cinema dance mention only in passing or with little depth.

Regarding the existence of dance in Indian silent film, Rao specifies "there is one silent example extant in NFAI, from Lankadahan (1917) of Dadasaheb Phalke, which clearly shows that a trick sequence must have employed the technique of music dictated movement (a kissin' cousin of dance!) to achieve perfection of timing in splitscreen double-exposure."  He then describes some of the features of early sound film dance noting that everything about early talkies was "no different from that of the contemporary stage" and dance was often used only to show the "pleasures" of a "celestial court," "suggest the pomp and splendour of a royal durbar," allow the audience to "revel in the joy that is Krishna" or occasionally play a key-role in furthering the plot.  He also describes a "small tributary" called Stage Dance, meaning "numbers performed on stage as dance not as part of a drama" that featured slight influences from dance forms like Kathak, Nautanki, street dance, juggling, tumbling, and mujra.  These dance forms "were more or less faithfully reproduced for the screen, according to those who worked in the early talkies, and those who saw them at the time and recalled them years afterwards."  After 1935, a "steady, gradual divergence" happened with films coming into their own.  He also notes that western influence, especially from Hollywood musicals, influenced the look, choreography, and music of films starting around the late 1930s with films like Ali Baba (Bengali, 1937) and Kacha Devayani (Telugu, 1938). 

Kamlabai (source)
While Rao only notes one sequence in silent films that can qualify as a sort of "pre-dance," I've discovered there are many more examples of proper dance claimed by film scholars.  As proven above, Raja Harishchandra and especially Kaliya Mardan both featured dance in devotional settings.  But it appears the first solo dance-as-seduction number appeared in the second year of Indian cinema. In Phalke's second film, Mohini Bhasmasur (1914), "God Vishnu, incarnating as temptress Mohini, lured the demon Bhasmasur to his doom, through a seductive dance" (Ramachandran).  While in Raja Harishchandra Phalke had to resort to casting men in female roles since no suitable women would agree to act in films (Hansen), in Mohini Bhasmasur Phalke persuaded Marathi stage actress and dancer Kamalabai (aka Kamlabai Gokhale) to play the role of Mohini, thus making her the first official woman to act in Indian cinema (though Kamalabai's mom Durgabai Kamat played the goddess Parvati in the film and technically shares the credit) (Kapse; Pande; Schulze).  Oh how I wish this dance were available! I suspect it was probably quite underwhelming in terms of specific, developed movement, but I'm highly curious if it followed in any way the style of "Mohini Bhasmasur" film dances decades later, like the 1950s one in Mayabazar made well-after the dance revival movements in the 1930s.

A few other silents are known to have featured dance content.  Hanuman's character performed an "athletic dance in rage and grief" in Phalke's1917 film Lanka Dahan (Rajadhyaksha), and Shakuntala Janma (or Vishwamitra Menaka, 1919) featured the character Menaka performing a "voluptuous dance to seduce Saint Vishwamitra" resulting in the birth of Shakuntala (Ramachandran).  

Moving into the 1920s of Indian silent cinema, many accounts of "dancing girl" characters can be found and their dances are clearly depicted in a negative light.  Certainly this was a reflection of the fervent anti-nautch/dance sentiments of the 20s.  Rajadhyaksha and Willemen's Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema names a few film examples, including Gunsundari (1927) in which a husband "frustrated with his housewifely spouse takes up with a dancing girl," Mojili Mumbai (1925) which featured the common film theme of that time of a "dancer of ill repute named Roshanara, based, apparently, on a real cabaret dancer of that name," Pati Bhakti (1922) that contained a dance sequence Madras censors labeled "obscene," and Andhare Alo (1922), a Bengali film that featured stereotypical scenes of drunkenness and courtesan dancing.  Dancer Susheela Devi "did some of the earliest cabaret sequences in the 1930s" and would dance in the actual cinema halls in South India during pauses in movie screenings (Randor Guy). 

It seems that the depiction of dance in Indian films appeared to shift somewhere around the late 1930s.  This was also the time in which the dance reform movements were taking shape and becoming more widely known. In 1938, an unsuccessful Tamil film Jalaja was released with the goal to “create an awareness in the ordinary cinemagoer of the classical forms of dance” (Ranga Rao).  1938 was also the year Baby Kamala at age 4 started getting noticed for her Kathak dancing in Bombay and danced in her first obscure film, Valibar Sangam (Tamil).  And once we cross over into the 40s, film dance really starts to mature and many of film dance's superstars, such as Baby Kamala, Padmini and Lalitha, and Vyjayanthimala were introduced or popularized.

Early Cinema Dances Available Online

Since India's earliest feature film was up online, I could not resist seeing what other treasures from pre-1940s cinema might be available.  I wondered what dances if any the films would hold and what the dances would look like given the attitudes towards dance in early twentieth century India.  Luckily, I've found quite a few examples!  Certainly these dances are in no way a "representative" sample of dance from that time, but they are instances, some of which are fantastic.  There must be more out there despite my attempt to search as comprehensively as I could from known film titles of various regional languages.  It's not surprising that quite a few of the dances online are from Prabhat Films, not only because of the studio's reputation at the time for technical excellence but also because many of Prabhat's films were recently released on DVD (and are available for purchase at places like Induna). 

In the silent cinema era pre-1931, the only other film dance I've been able to find is the short dancein A Throw of Dice(1929, Prapancha Pash in Hindi), but it cannot count as an indigenous Indian film since it was technically a coproduction between German director Franz Osten and Indian producer Himansu Rai (and it's goal was creating a look and feel of exoticism and orientalism).

Once the timeframe shifts to talkies in 1931 and beyond, quite a few dances can be seen!  I've only found four examples from 1931-1935, the era that Rao describes as faithfully reproducing what was seen on stage at that time.  Three seem to somewhat fit the bill of his assessment: the outside stick dance and swirling dance in Maya Machindra (Hindi, 1932), the solo court dance with faint Kathak/Rajasthani folk dance inspiration in Agnikankan (Marathi, 1932), and Chandamukhi's courtesan dance in Devdas (Hindi, 1935-6).  But the fourth dance, in Amrit Manthan, is so awesome and special I've saved it for the "awesome" section below!

Moving past 1935 into the late 1930s, the number of dances available online increases, especially as 1940 nears.  My two favorites videos are embedded below, but there were many others I found: a nice group stage dance in Dhoop Chaon (Hindi, 1939), a home/practice scene in Duniya Na Mane (Hindi, 1937), a lovely male-female folk dance in Jhula (Hindi, 1939), a playful male-female folk dance in Navjeevan (Hindi, 1939), folk dance and second folk dance in Mukti (Bengali, 1934-5), courtesan dance in Nartaki (Hindi, 1939-40), and the apparent courtesan dance in Aadmi (Hindi, 1939).  The dances availableonline from the 1937 Bengali film Alibaba do not seem to be the ones which inspired glowing descriptions of "rare sophistication" and Hollywood influence, especially one called the "the Marjina-Abdallah sequence which long set the standard for film musicals" (Ranga Rao; Rajadhyaksha). 

Achhut Kanya (Hindi, 1936) - A delightful stage dance about bangles!
The film was cleaned up and uploaded (with English subtitles) by the ever-awesome Tom Daniel.

Wahan (Hindi, 1937) - What mesmerizing, repetitive string music this tribal number has!  The group choreography is nicely framed from a camera perched up high.  I wish it was much longer--so infectious!


Three AWESOME 1930s Film Dances

I've saved the best three for last.  These three dances completely changed my perception of what dance in 1930s Indian films could have been like:

Raitu Bidda (Telugu, 1939, dir: Gudavalli Ramabrahmam) 
"Dasavatara Shabdam" 

I almost fell off my chair when I first saw this!  The spinning "sun" backdrop is visually imaginative for a solo dance of the time.  But it's the performer and dance style that are most notable.  Rumya Sree Putcha confirms the performer is hereditary Kuchipudi dancer Vedantam Raghavayya, and he performs a "Dasavatara Shabdam" or "Dasavataram" Kuchipudi solo piece that "relates the ten avatara or reincarnations of Vishnu."  The film dance is an amazing historical artifact because, as Putcha notes, the lyrics and much of the choreography are unchanged from what is danced today, which means the number provides visual proof of the stylistic continuity in solo Kuchipudi going back to at least 1939.

The number seems structured to first include a description of the incarnation in a stylized, rhythmic pace, and then when the percussion swells the incarnation is named as Raghavayya shows its corresponding hasta (hand gesture); the ten avatars of Vishnu as named by Sunil Kothari are Matsya (fish), Kurma, (tortoise), Varaha (boar), Narasimha (half-man, half-lion), Vamana (dwarf), Parashurama (wielding an axe), Lord Rama (wielding a bow), Balarama (with a plough), Buddha, and Kalki; I assume those are the same ones named in the film number, though it's hard for me to hear some of them.  I love how some of the hand gestures, like for fish and tortoise, are made to appear similar to the living object.

Here it is in all its spectacular glory:


Putcha notes Raitu Bidda was the "first Telugu movie to feature both Kuchipudi dance and a hereditary Kuchipudi dancer," and it appears the director invited Raghavayya to choreograph a dance that would "characterize the rural feudal setting the film dramatized."  Vedantam Raghavayya was well-known for his dancing and film direction, and I'll have a lot more on him and other Kuchipudi film dances/choreographers in my upcoming Kuchipudi Choreographers section of the "Remembering Choreographers" post series.

What I love about the number, beyond all the obvious goodies above, is that it is from an early South Indian-language talkie.  India's first official talkie, Alam Ara (1931), understandably gets all the attention since it was first, but there were other regional  talkies released later that same year, like Kalidas (Tamil) and Bhakta Prahlada (Telugu), marketed/released to those regions.  Moving past 1931, outside of early Marathi, Bengali, and Hindi films, I've found hardly any extant clips online of Tamil or Telugu or other South Indian-language films before 1940.  Which is why this dance number is all the more rare, historic, and exciting!


Amrit Manthan (Marathi, 1934, dir: V. Shantaram)

While this number starts out looking like a nicely-lit folk dance, it soon stuns the viewer with its overhead camera shots framing the dancers as they create geometric patterns and move as a single, snake-like unit.  I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw it.  Only three years after sound came to Indian cinema and a dance number shows such creativity in moving the camera from its static frontal position.  These advances were likely possible given that Amrit Manthan was the "first film produced in the new well-equipped studio of Prabhat at Pune" (Prabhatfilm.com).


While Prabhat films co-founder S. Fattelal was responsible for the art direction (Rajadhyaksha), where did the inspiration for this creativity come from?  All signs point to the iconic Hollywood choreographer, Busby Berkeley.  I first read of this connection in Randor Guy's write up of the 1936 Tamil film Mohini Rukmangadha in which he describes a 21-person song-and-dance sequence with "stunning top angle shots showing the dancers in incredible and dazzling kaleidoscopic patterns of circles, crawling snakes, and blossoming flowers" in which director "Soundararajan drew inspiration from the Hollywood icon of choreography, Busby Berkeley."  Berkeley's top shot technique "appeared seminally in the Cantor films" (Wikipedia), and given that a Tamil actor was called "the Eddie Cantor of India" and at least one Tamil film was based on a Cantor film plot (Randor Guy), it seems some of Eddie Cantor's films were released and known within India.  Low and behold, two of Cantor's pre-1934 films show the likely inspiration for Amrit Manthan: Whoopee! (1930) and "Yes Yes!" from Palmy Days (1931).  It's unmistakeable--check it out:

Whoopee! (1930, Hollywood) - Amrit Manthan's Clear Inspiration



Chandrasena (Marathi 1935, dir: V. Shantaram - Also made in Hindi and Tamil)

The use of silhouettes, lighting contrasts, and large set pieces provide for some striking visuals to accompany the music.  Just like Amrit Mantan above, S. Fattelal was credited as the art director. The inspiration for the silhouette idea and the costumes seems to come directly from Prabhat Films' famous and iconic logo (left) which was supposedly designed by Fattelal himself!  Whereas in the logo the strings of balls or jewels hang off of the back, in the film dance it's the dancers' upper legs that are heavily covered with the accessories. 


Selected Sources:
  • Hansen, Kathryn.  "Stri Bhumika: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage."  Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 33, No. 35., 1998.
  • Josephson, Matthew.  "Review: Light of Asia: Silent Cinema in India, 1913-34."  Film History.  Vol 7.  Issue 1.  1995
  • Kapse, Anupama Prabhala.  The Moving Image: Melodrama and Early Indian Cinema, 1913-1939.  Dissertation.  University of California, Berkeley, 2009.
  • Kothari, Sunil.  Kuchipudi: Indian Classical Dance Art. 2001.
  • Pande, Mrinal.  "Moving Beyond Themselves: Women in Hindustani Parsi Theatre and Early Hindi Films."  Economic and Political Weekly.  Vol. 41, No. 17., 2006.
  • Putcha, Rumya Sree.  Revisiting the Classical: A Critical History of Kuchipudi Dance.  Dissertation.  University of Chicago, 2011.  (Features an EXCELLENT chapter titled "Signs and Symbols: Kuchipudi and the South Indian Film Industry).
  • Ramachandran, T.M. 70 Years of Indian Cinema (1913-1983). 1985.
  • Ranga Rao, VAK.  "Dance in Indian Cinema." Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-five Years, Volume I, Music and Dance.  EdsBimal Mukherjee and Sunil Kothari. 1995. 
  • Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen.  Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema: New Revised Edition. 1999. 
  • Schulze, Brigitte.  "Poetic-Painful Lives of Women-Performers Vis-a-Vis High-Caste Moral Modernity as Remembered by Kamalabai Gokhale, and Retold by Brigitte Schulze." Between Fame and Shame: Performing Women - Women Performers in India.  Eds Bruckner, de Bruin, Moser.  2011.   

Note: In the book Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change, Gokulsing and Dissanayake make the significant claim that Phalke choreographed Kamlabai's dance in Mohini Bhasmasur (1913) and list his specific dance inspirations.  They first quote T.M. Ramchandran (page 253) in single quotations, and then make the Phalke choreography claim afterwards without quotations which would lead any reasonable reader to think that the information came again from Ramchandran but is paraphrased instead of directly quoted.  Well, I've looked at page 253 in Ramchandran's book (he's one of my sources above), as well as the entire chapter and most of the entire volume, and I did not find a single statement regarding the claim that Phalke choreographed the dance or used the stated inspirations.  It's a shame the information is misrepresented, as I've already seen the misquote used as a source in another piece of academic writing!
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    Found: Sharon Lowen's Odissi Dance in Swarnakamalam (Telugu, 1988)

    October 31, 2012, 8:16 pm
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    In my post on Bhanupriya's classical dances in Swarna Kamalam, I noted to my astonishment that there was supposed to be a scene in the film after Bhanupriya's "Cheri Yashodaku" hotel number where American-born Odissi dancer Sharon Lowen danced Odissi!  None of the copies of the film I'd seen (EVP DVD, Universal DVD, TeluguOne's YouTube upload) included Lowen's dance.  I couldn't imagine why it would be cut out, and I promptly put the scene on the top of my "holy grail" list.

    I'm happy to announce that the scene has been found, and it's all thanks to commenter and friend Gaddeswarup who graciously took the time to have the scene converted and sent to me (thank you!!) after discovering it.  I'm so excited!  Take a look (note: the quality is fairly low, and there is a short glitch near the beginning):


    Bhanupriya's irritated head-bob at Venkatesh (I'll refer to them by their real names) starts out the number on a humorous note, but it quickly shifts tone to reveal a thoroughly classical Odissi performance by Sharon Lowen framed by an idol of Lord Jagannath.  Her performance is intercut with shots of Bhanupriya dreaming of dancing Odissi herself (which is at odds with her consistently-irritated expression throughout the performance).  Bhanupriya's attempt at the s-shaped Tribhangi posture at 1:55 is extremely stiff compared to Sharon's gracefulness.  There's something about Sharon's performance that seems to be not in top form here and almost as if they have her dancing too quickly.  I like some of her other TV performances a little better (see the end of the post).  But for an outsider, I think she does a fantastic job.

    The late Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, legendary in the performance and reconstruction of Odissi dance, is credited as one of the dance directors. I presume he choreographed Sharon's number only because all the other songs have other credited dance directors.  Initially, I wondered if he was seated somewhere among the musicians (or reciting the vocal syllables), but surely the director would have focused the camera on him a few times if he was.  The musical composition Sharon dances to is beautiful and gentle.  Sharon says it was composed by the late  Bhubaneswar Misra (a prolific composer of Odissi music) who called it "the only time he had been able to fully orchestra his composition."  Clearly, this number had the participation of some of the best artists in the Odissi world at the time.

    I've always found Sharon Lowen quite fascinating.  For one, she's a white chick (like me) who became deeply involved in Indian dance.  But more importantly, unlike many "Westerners" who come to India to train in various classical dance styles, Sharon has made India her second home for over 30 years and has dedicated her life to the practice of Odissi, Manipuri, and Chhau.  But most crucial of all, from everything I can gather, she is well respected in India for her dance ability and was/is considered one of the leading dancers of Odissi.  She trained under Kelucharan Mohapatra and has toured the world extensively.  And she practically passes for Indian with her enormous, expressive eyes and dark hair.

    But Sharon Lowen's involvement in Swarna Kamalam and the inclusion of Odissi dance in the film has been puzzling to me.  Swarna Kamalam is a Telugu film about the classical dance tradition of Andhra Pradesh, Kuchipudi.  While Orissa and its classical dance Odissi is only one state away, my impression has been that Odissi doesn't have as much traction in Andhra as Bharatantayam from neighboring Tamil Nadu does.  Curiously, at Sharon's 2010 TED presentation "Transformational Story Telling Through Dance," she was introduced as "so well recognized within India for her craft that she was featured as herself in an award winning Telugu language film where her character inspired the film's heroine to honor her own culture and traditions."  Were audiences in late-80s Andhra Pradesh familiar with Odissi dance and Sharon Lowen?  The film itself paints her as well known.  When Sharon's character is first seen, she is asked amidst the clicks of a photographer, "How is the response to Odissi in the south?" and she responds, "Very good. People really respect fine arts in the south."  Then Venkatesh introduces Sharon by her real-life name to Bhanupriya and describes her real-life origins and dance, as if he knows her personally!

    While Andhra audiences may not have been so familiar with Odissi or Sharon Lowen, it appears K. Viswanath (who directed a series of pioneering South Indian films on classical art forms) was familiar.  Sharon said Viswanath searched "for a dancer to inspire his Swarna Kamalam heroine to value her inherited dance tradition" and invited her to play herself in the film.  After a bit more research, I noticed some of Sharon's connections to Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh.  Three years before Swarna Kamalam's release, Sharon gave an Odissi performance (accompanied by Kelucharan Mohapatra) in Hyderabad and many other Indian cities as part of her international "Festival of India-USA" tour.  In 1988, the same year as Swarna Kamalam's release, Sharon says she was a member of the advisory board created to establish the "Sarojini Naidu School of Visual and Performing Arts" at the University of Hyderabad (aka Central University, Hyderabad), and she appears to have maintained relations with the school given she was a visiting professor there many years later in 1996.  Were these activities what made her known to K. Viswanath?  Or perhaps earlier associations with him brought some of these opportunities to her?  In any case, her association with Hyderabad is very interesting given the cities she most associated with were in Orissa and her home in New Delhi.

    Sharon's participation in Swarna Kamalam greatly enriched the film's dance content.  The song "Shiva Poojaku," though it features mostly vaguely classical-inspired dancing with a few segments of Kuchipudi, Mohiniattam, Manipuri, and Odissi-costumed dancing, appears to be shot mostly around Bhubaneswar, Orissa at such locations as the Bindu Sagar tank at the Lingaraj temple and the Shanti Stupa on the Dhauli Giri hills near Bhubaneswar.  The Orissa emphasis is curious because at this point in the film Sharon Lowen and her Odissi dance have not even been introduced yet!  But I'm sure that Sharon Lowen's involvement and her Orissa connections had something to do with the locations and dance styles. :)


    What I like about Sharon Lowen is that she seems to have a very realistic and level-headed view of India and Odissi dance free of exoticism.  Regarding her first travels to India, Sharon once remarked,“I didn’t feel I was entering unfamiliar territory. I didn’t come here like a wide-eyed tourist looking for monuments and elephants. I had a fairly good knowledge of Indian history and art. And, I chose Manipuri (she later trained in Odissi and Chhau) since I had learnt a little bit of it during my college days and was fascinated by it.”

    Last, there is an interesting parallel between Sharon Lowen and another "Western" dancer named Illeana Citaristi, who came to India about the same time as Sharon to learn similar dances.  Like Sharon, she also worked in the film world and got a national award for her choreography in Yugant (1995) which featured some modern works but also two delightful Odissi dance practice numbers.

    More Videos of Sharon Lowen

    Heroines of Kalidasa - Sharon Lowen - National Program of Dance

    More:
    Odissi by Sharon Lowen (80s-90s British TV)
    Sharon Lowen Odissi Part 1, Part 2 (80s-90s)
    Introduction to Indian Classical Dance (filmed a few months ago)


    Sources and Further Reading

    SharonLowen.com (official website)
    "Perspectives of Chhau by a Performing Artist, by Sharon Lowen" at Chhau Dance Sangam
    "Sharon Lowen, the Dance of Discovery" (Michigan Today)
    "For the Love of Odissi" (The Hindu)
    "Destined to Dance" (The Hindu)
    "Portrait of an American as an Indian Classical Dancer" (The Tribune)
    "At Home, but far from Home" (The Financial Express)
    "Life Prospers When People Live in Peace" (The Hindu)
    "So Many Parallels in Our Life" (The Hindu)
    "Classical Indian Dance Concert at UVM" (University of Vermont)
    "Philosophies/Methodologies/Pedagogy - Training Students in the Classical Performing Arts of India" by Sharon Lowen
    Review of Swarnakamalam at Cinema Chaat
    Review of Swarnakamalam at Marapuraani Chitralu
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    A Clear Copy of Kamala's Tandava Dance in Sivagangai Seemai

    November 22, 2012, 10:49 am
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    Finally! A clear copy of Kamala Lakshman's dance in Sivagangai Seemai (Tamil, 1957) has been uploaded by the awesome YouTuber Kandasamy Sekkarakudi Subbiah Pillai.  This is my favorite film dance of Kamala's (second place would be her dance in Paavai Vilakku). It's not classical Bharatanatyam-based at all, but her training in the form gives this brilliantly-choreographed tandava-style dance incredible energy, precision, form, and speed.  The cinematography, music, and overall presentation are the icing on the cake.  It is entirely and unusually creative.  Kamala dances in four segments, each about a minute long and separated by scenes of the last speeches of the ruling Marudhu brothers/family before they are hanged by the British.  Behold what I can only describe as FIERCE:


    Sivagangai Seemai ("Land of Sivagangai") is set in Sivagangai in Tamil Nadu around the turn of the 18th century "when the East India Company was struggling to establish supremacy over South India" (Guy). It tells the story of the Marudhu brothers who ruled Sivagangai at that time and "took on the British" by issuing a proclamation in 1801 urging "the people of every community to throw out the British" from India (Kolappan). Given that this was decades before the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, some have questioned the claim that the Sepoy Mutiny was "the first war of independence" in India. After the battle in Kalayarkovil near Sivaganga, "the East India Company ultimately destroyed the brothers" by hanging them in late 1801.

    From what I can gather, it appears that Kamala plays the wife of one of the Maradhu brothers. Her dance is a response to the agony of her husband's hanging and the brutal end of their family's fight, way of life, and community. Richard at the Dances on the Footpath blog aptly called it a "suicide dance." It's essentially a film-style tandava dance in the spirit of Lord Shiva's rudra tandava, a dance of absolute grief and anger and symbolic of the "the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, as well as the daily rhythm of birth and death."

    The presentation and choreography of the dance is absolutely brilliant!  The atmosphere is eerie, dark, and filled with shadows.  The music's rhythm is frantic and passionate, and Kamala matches every beat with incredible speed and vigor.  I've never seen her dance this quickly and emphatically!  Pieces of the choreography are fantastic, like the way the camera tracks her quick rise at 1:00 makes her appear to fly off the ground and defy gravity, or the backbend spins at 1:50 which look completely creepy.  Her hair is long and loose, whipping and tailing her movements and at times gleaming in the light.  As the dance progresses, Kamala moves to the upper perches of the temple grounds, the majestic South Indian-style temple rising in the skyline and the architecture and camera angles creatively framing her performance.  The grand finale sees a tumultuous thunderstorm serve as the backdrop to the last moments of her dance, and her life.  I wish I knew who was responsible for this dance, as the credits I am told do not identify a dance director or choreographer (only art direction as Balu).  Randor Guy totally dropped the ball on this one and doesn't even mention Kamala's dance! :)

    Kamala does not only perform an amazing dance in the film; she also has a prominent acting role making Sivagangai Seemai one of the few films that she acted in (along with Konjum Salangai (1962), Jwala (1971), Paavai Vilakku (1960), Lavanya (1951), and some smaller roles in her early films).

    New Sayee-Subbulakshmi and Rhadha Dances!

    I recently learned that the Sayee-Subbulakshmi sisters perform a dance in the song "Muthu Pugazh Padaithu"!  The most exciting portion of the dance is the last third beginning with the fast-paced rhythmic interlude at 3:27.  Look at those fantastic walking backbends (how do they not fall over!).  Randor Guy says the nattuvanar K.N. Dhandayuthapani Pillai choreographed their dance and it "attracted a lot of attention."  How wonderful to get to see it in such a clear print as well:


    And as I blogged about previously, Kamala's younger sister Rhadha performs with her in the folksy song "Kannankaruthaa Kili Kattazhagan Thotta Kili." But in watching these new uploads from the film, I discovered Kamala and Rhadha also dance in another folksy song "Kottu Melam Kottungadi" (below).  Kamala also "sings" in a few songs like Sivagangai Seemai, Kanavu Kandaen (happy), and Kanavu Kandaen (sad).  There is also a cute group dance (that doesn't have Kamala/Rhadha/Sayee-Subblakshmi in it), Saanthu Pottu Thalalanga. 


    The film was apparently a commercial failure but is well-remembered as "among the best historical films made in Tamil" and beloved for its beautiful and patriotic songs with lyrics written by the eminent Tamil poet Kannadasan.  Many online sources say the film was released in 1959, but The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema and Randor Guy both say it was 1957, so I'm sticking with that date.

    Sources:
    Guy, Randor.  Blast From the Past - Sivagangai Seemai (1957).  The Hindu.
    Kolappan, B.  Rare Insights into Lives of Marudhu Brothers.  The Hindu.
    Documentary on Maruthu Brothers.  The Hindu.
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    Rare 1930s Tamil Film and 1950s Padmini Dance Footage from Ellis Dungan’s Collection

    November 29, 2012, 6:59 pm
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    Hiding in the most unlikely of places, the West Virginia State Archives in the US, are documentary films and video footage shot/directed by the late Ellis Dungan, an American who made a number of Tamil films in South India from 1935-1950. In the collection are two incredibly-rare videos with footage I assume has not been available publicly until now.  The first video is “Inside India,” a documentary on South Indian village life that has an extended stage dance sequence by "Travancore Sisters" Padmini and Lalitha.  The second video is a compilation containing footage Ellis took while directing the Tamil films Sati Leelavati (1936), Seemanthani (1936), Iru Sahodarargal (Two Brothers, 1936), and Ambikapathi (1937), and it reveals rare images of film stars and technicians and gives a visual glimpse into how Tamil films were made in the 1930s.  The thanks for unearthing these videos goes to a wonderfully-knowledgeable online contact, Sreenivas Paruchuri, who sent these links to me.  Thank you! 

    Inside India - Featuring a Padmini/Lalitha Dance (at 7:39)!


    This documentary at first appears to be just a montage of scenes from village life in South India with a staid, explanatory voiceover. But at 7:39, an audience and stage appear as the voiceover explains, “There are numerous dramatic troupes that travel from village to village in Southern India and evening performances are given in the streets.  Here the people in the village witness one of the most popular musical dramas, Mathura Veeran, the story of Princess Bommi being wooed by Veeran, a commoner.” As the curtain withdraws, the performers are revealed to be Lalitha and then her sister Padmini! The duo doesn't perform much abstract dance and instead focuses on enacting the lyrics of the story for their first act. In their second act, the sisters appear in horse costumes in what looks like a Poikkal Kudirai Aattam “dummy horse” folk dance! Isn't Padmini absolutely luminous here?  The legend the voiceover refers to is that of the folk deity Madurai Veeran, which was the subject of the 1956 Tamil film of the same name which Padmini acted and danced in (and it has a Lalitha/Ragini dance too).  RajVideoVision just recently uploaded a legal copy of the whole film on YouTube!

    What remains unknown is when this documentary was filmed. My guess for the dance portion, based on Padmini’s facial shape and appearance, is around 1950-1952 or so given the similarity to her early film appearances from this time. While Dungan is said to have returned to the US soon after his hit film Manthiri Kumari released in 1950, he made frequent trips back to India and made his last film there in 1962, so Inside India conceivably could have been filmed right before he left or when he returned later. I wonder why he didn’t identify the famous sisters by name in the documentary. Surely Dungan would have known who Padmini and Lalitha were given that they danced in Manthiri Kumari and he was familiar with the Tamil cinema world. I also wonder if this is really an “authentic” drama stage performance or if it’s been manufactured for the documentary. Were Padmini and Lalitha in performing drama troupes at this time?

    Footage from 1930s Tamil Cinema Sets/Filmings

    While the West Virginia Archives calls this video “15 minutes of Dungan’s home movie film of movie-making in India,” it is no simple home movie! It is incredibly rare, silent footage of the movie making process in South India in the 30s and features many shots of actors, technicians, musicians, and producers of the time period as well as the filming and set technology. It also shows Dungan himself and in action! It is very likely that this is the first extant video footage available for some of the lesser-known people in the shots. And to my absolute delight, there are two short dances!

    Here is the video, which I’ve separated into the four films it features below:

    Sati Leelavathi (1936)


    This film was Dungan’s official directorial debut. Starting at :43, we can see shots of what appear to be film producers or technicians. The first clear shots of Ellis are at 1:00 and 1:20—he looks so out of place! :) Soon after, the title cards for the film are shown (including a valuable technician credits card). Next are various shots of the filming and technical equipment, cameras, and microphone boons, and Dungan himself directing. At 4:22, the shooting of the child marriage scene is featured. A dancer can be seen performing some simplistic abhinaya for about 20 seconds starting at 5:38, and the periya melam musicians are also seen playing auspicious music for the wedding. Randor Guy says there was a cabaret dance in this film featuring dancer-actor Susheela Devi, but I don’t think she’s the same dancer as the one in the wedding scene above. Sati Leelavathi was the first film of MGR; he had a small role as an inspector.  A known photo of him in the film is on the left below.  The right is a screencap from Dungan's footage.  Could it be MGR?  Doubtful...but then there's that unibrow...and that cleft in the chin...

    Left: MGR in Sati Leelavathi (source)    Right: ? in Sati Leelavathi


    Seemanthani (1936) - At 6:26


    The footage here initially focuses on the stars of the film, T.P. Rajalakshmi as the princess and M.R. Krishnamurthi as the prince. T.P. Rajalakshmi was the heroine of the first Tamil sound film, Kalidas (1931), and she was the first star of Tamil Cinema and the first woman director and producer of South India.  To my delight, there is a short dance scene at 7:04 beginning with a shot of the woman’s feet and salangai bells and then moving upwards to frame her upper torso and her gaudy, shiny costume. Maybe she is the cabaret dancer Susheela Devi that Randor Guy spoke of? The footage progresses with a marriage scene and more shots of the crew and set, including a man holding the iconic clapperboard. I especially like the shot of Ellis eating with his hands at 12:00.

    Iru Sahodarargal (Two Brothers, 1936) - At 12:08


    This footage is mostly casual and lighthearted with a focus on the actors and technicians and not the actual shooting of the film. Iru Sahodarargal was the second film of MGR in which he had a minor role of a policeman (The Hindu).

    Ambikapathi (1937) - At 14:11


    This film's footage is the only one that is not clearly identified with title cards, but I think it starts at 14:11 right after the beautiful sunset shot of the temple-silhouettes against the skyline. At 14:30, we see the stars of the film, hero MKT (M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar) and heroine M.R. Santhanalakshmi, first among the group and then in a closeup. Ambikapathi was the film that made MKT “the first superstar of South Indian cinema, elevating him to the status of a cult figure” (Randor Guy).  Could this be the earliest video footage of MKT available?  The footage closes with some outside shots and Dungan wearing his characteristic hat. 

    More About Ellis Dungan

    What remarkable video finds! More and more libraries and archives are moving their collections online with public access, and I hope that more of these discoveries keep coming!

    So why are these videos housed in the West Virginia State Archives, you might ask?  After Dungan's time in India, he returned to the United States, settled in Wheeling, West Virginia, and continued making documentary films, many of which were about West Virginia and are now considered "classics" garnering him recognition in the state and even an induction into the "Wheeling Hall of Fame."

    Dungan (NOT Duncan as been mistakenly reported and printed in some accounts) has a very fascinating history.  He was born in Ohio and attended the University of Southern California to study cinema.  While at USC, he and American Michael Omalov and Indian Manik Lal Tandon became friends, formed a group, and made a studio film.  Tandon invited Dungan and Omalov to work with him in India, and Dungan got his first experience shooting scenes in Tandon's 1935 film Nandanar (which is now the 1942 version of which is legally on YouTube) during Tandon's absences.  But Dungan's big break came when Tandon declined an offer to direct another Tamil film due to his busy schedule and suggested that Dungan direct it instead.  The fact that Dungan was a "Hollywood-trained technician and filmmaker" sealed the deal.  The film was Sathi Leelavathi (1936)!  This was "the beginning of a new era in Tamil film-making" with Dungan "making a major contribution to it" (The Hindu).

    Dungan had originally "planned to stay in India only six months but became so enthralled that he remained for 15 years and became known throughout that country for directing and photographing feature films," and "he worked with India's greatest movie stars and created 17 films in the Tamil and Hindi languages, including 12 of feature length" including such hits as Sakunthalai (1940), Meera (1945), and Manthiri Kumari (1950). He is credited with introducing Hollywood techniques to Tamil cinema (Randor Guy has discussed a few, like the flood sequence in Kalamegham (1939) and the brilliantly-edited song "Nandha Balaa En Manalaa" in Meera (1945)). I'll let Randor Guy's words take it from here: "A brilliant film technician, [Dungan] was equally at home with the lights, editing tools, screenwriting, make-up and direction. He studied the customs, rituals, and the beliefs of the period of the film he was making. As he did not know Tamil, he insisted on involving himself heart and soul in the making of the film from day one. He took an active part in every session of the story discussion of his films with his writers and assistants. And had every line and word translated into English." 

    I've listed some interesting sources about Dungan at the end of the post, but the most fascinating source appears to be Dungan's autobiography A Guide to Adventure written with Barbara Smik.  From snippets of it posted online (see the section called "Reminiscences by Ellis R. Dungan" which relate his rare accounts of working with M.S. Subbulakshmi), it is clearly a rich account of Dungan's workings with specific film personalities in India and reveals information and tidbits not previously available save for the work of people alive today who can remember the time period, like Randor Guy.  I'm very interested to read how Dungan approached his work in a country he knew little about and whose language he did not speak.  Was he understanding and open-minded, or a product of the time period and common "Western" views about the "East"? Ashish Rajadhyaksha in the Encylopaedia of Indian Cinema says that Dungan made propaganda shorts during World War II (like Returning Soldier with T.S. Balaiah), and the Wheeling Hall of Fame says that when Dungan returned to the U.S. in 1950, he was "in demand in Hollywood as a cinematographer for jungle adventure stories" like Tarzan Goes to India and The Big Hunt.  The Hall of Fame also notes that Dungan returned to India in the early 90s and was greeted with an "elaborate reception" featuring film industry leaders and government officials.  In an excerpt from his book, Dungan noted that when he got up to speak at the event, his emotions overcame him and rendered him absolutely speechless.  A very amazing man, indeed.

    Sources and Further Reading:
    Wheeling Hall of Fame: Ellis R. Dungan
    The West Virginia Encyclopedia: Ellis Dungan
    He Transcended Barriers with Aplomb (The Hindu)
    He Made MS a Film Star (The Hindu)
    Americans in Tamil Cinema (The Hindu)
    Blast from the Past: Seemanthani (Randor Guy, The Hindu)
    Full of Technical Innovations [Meera] (Randor Guy, The Hindu)
    Blast from the Past: Iru Sahodarargal (Randor Guy, The Hindu)

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    Film Classical Dances of Roshan Kumari

    December 8, 2012, 7:04 pm
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    I’ve found two new Roshan Kumari film dances online! One seems to have not been available for public view until recently thanks to Angel (Basanta Bahara) and the other shows her dancing pure Kathak in a Films Division documentary (Kathak) that I've uploaded.

    I’ve bloggedbefore about her exquisite Kathak in Indian cinema, but I’ve never done a dedicated post and thought it was high time.  For a nice overview of Roshan Kumari’s background, I recommend a visit to an informational page about her created by one of her students, Mukta Joshi.  I also recommend visiting Richard's post about her at his Dances on the Footpath blog, where I'm quite sure I first learned about Roshan.

    I want to get straight to talking about her exquisite Kathak.  What I love most about her style, and what is featured in most of her film dances, is her explosive nritta (pure, non-interpretive dance).  Most of the Kathak found in Indian films tends toward the courtesan/Mujra style of Kathak with a focus on abhinaya (expressive interpretation), lyrical poetry, and a slower pace to show off the dancer's feminine charms.  In cases where the pace quickens to feature footwork and spins, the dances still aren't up to par and the dancer's lack of lengthy Kathak training usually shows (or in the case of Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje, the dancer (Gopi Krishna) is clearly trained but "spices up" the dance for film so much that it strays from classical Kathak).  Film Kathak often features close-up shots of the dancer's footwork, but it's almost always a shadow of the real thing.  There are a few film dances, however, that are gleaming exceptions to the rule in their presentation of rhythmic, technical Kathak, and the star of this style is undoubtedly Roshan Kumari.  She is responsible for the best technical Kathak in Indian cinema, I say! 

    Roshan's dance style was certainly a product of her training in the Jaipur gharana (style) of Kathak.  Sunil Kothari describes the central feature of the style as “an astounding quality of rhythmic wizardry” that is “austere,” “forceful, and virile” as opposed to the Lucknow gharana which has more focus on delicacy and beauty. Likewise, Kothari described Roshan’s recitals as “scintillating, forceful, and vigorous revealing the salient features of Jaipur gharana" with an "element of delectable precision in her nritta.”  Roshan was well-known for her taiyyari (technical prowess) and passed the skill along to her students (Singh, Kothari).  While many critics were impressed by her energy and skill, some saw her style as more “austere” with “understatement more than overstatement even in the abhinaya sequences” (Thought), and one reviewer went as far as to call her "inexpressive."

    Given how I seem to prefer the geometrical flourishes and rhythmical wizardry of "pure dance" in many styles of Indian classical dance, I absolutely love Roshan Kumari’s style and find her film dances simply enthralling.  Such precision in Kathak is rarely seen on screen!  I will now present all of her film dances that I am aware of, including the two new ones that I am excited to present: Basanta Bahara, and the Films Division documentary Kathak.

    Roshan Kumari's Film Dances

    Jalsaghar (“The Music Room,” 1958, Bengali)– The jewel in Roshan’s film dance crown is certainly her dance in Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar.  According to Pallabi Chakravorty, Roshan performs a "trivet," a fast-paced dance item popular in the Jaipur style but rarely performed today.  Her dance in the film, set in 1920s Bengal, is the final of three concerts of impressive music and/or dance hosted in the music room of the central character of the film, a Zamindar (land-owning, feudal aristocrat) whose place in society has faded (Hossain) and who “pawns the family jewels to keep up with the opulence of his ancestors and with his rich upstart neighbour” (Rajadhyaksha).  Roshan begins dancing at :44, but the musical introduction is required watching to set the mood.  Her effortless, grounded chakkar spins at 2:08 are the perfect antithesis of most Kathak seen in film (and did you notice they're so fast the flowers in her hair fall down at one point!). This dance is simply sparkling, and the way it slowly builds to the climax is nothing short of spellbinding.


    Mirza Ghalib (Hindi, 1954) - This historical film is set in the time of the “magnificance of the court of the last Mughal” and follows the romance of the Indian poet Mirza Ghalib and a dancer (Worldcat).  Roshan Kumari’s dance seems part of the display of riches and artistry in that period of the court and is quite similar to her dance in Jalsaghar though much shorter.


    Basanta Bahar (Bengali, 1957) - In many descriptions of Roshan Kumari, she is said to have danced in a few Bengali and Hindi films, one of which is Basant Bahar.  It turns out it is not the 1956 Hindi film Basant Bahar but the Bengali film of the similar name, Basanta Bahar, directed by Bikash Roy.  The “a” makes all the difference. :)  At first I thought it might be a remake, but a commenter over at Richard's blog noted it has a different plotline.  Roshan's performance appears to be part of a montage with architectural images from various regions of India and faces overlayed on the screen.  Her style here is much more loose and freeform but with the same speed one expects of Ms. Kumari.  The number is filled with lots of delightful touches, like the sharp way she throws her dupatta off her shoulders or the beautiful extensions she makes.  With her loose hair and less "textbook" costume, she looks so much younger than her other film dances even though they were filmed around the same time.  We finally get to see some nice closeups of her sans the shadows of Jalsaghar!  I sense that some of her spins are sped up with editing since they look much too fast to be real.   Her performance ends with a shot of her controlled, blazing footwork.


    Kathak (1970) – Films Division Documentary - This is the other new dance of hers I found!  Roshan appears at 12:04 following an explanation of how the coming of the Mughals transformed Kathak by emphasizing abstract dance and adding things like the pleated skirt and the “salami” gesture at the start of the performance (where the hand raises towards the forehead).  Technical, abstract dance was her forte so this placement is not a surprise.  The documentary also features the performances of Damayanti Joshi, Uma Sharma, Sudarshan Dheer, and Shambhu Maharaj.  The quality is not great, but it's out there for public view with keywords!  


    Parineeta(Hindi, 1953) - Here we have a double-whammy with Roshan Kumari and Kathak dancer Gopi Krishna as peformers! Gopi Krishna wows with his effortless turbo-spins (as I call them!) and Roshan has delightful form in the way she holds herself.  At first it seems like the song will stay in a simple, folk realm, but at 2:15 it shifts into a beautiful display of technique.  I love the way Roshan's voluminous skirt folds open as she spins, and the head-to-toe pan shot of each dancer as they perform their footwork is a nice touch. A surprisingly wonderful number!


    Two other films Roshan is said to have danced in are Waris and Jhansi Ki Rani, though I’ve watched both and could not see her (though for a time I thought she might be in Jhansi Ki Rani but decided against it; see my pictoral comparison in this post).  Perhaps there were Bengali versions of these?  I've also read a few comments online claiming she was in a couple more songs but none have actually been of her.  She also supposedly choreographed from some films like Lekin, Sardari Begum, and Gopi, but I'll be confirming that in my upcoming choreographer series which...is still in progress. :)

    Sources:
    Chakravorty, Pallabi. Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women, and Modernity in India. 2008.
    Hossain, Razeeb.  "The Music Room." South Asia Journal.
    Kothari, Sunil. Kathak: Indian Classical Dance Art. 1989.
    Rajadhyaksha, Ashish and Paul Willemen.  Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema: New Revised Edition. 1999.
    Singh, Shanta Serbjeet. Indian Dance: The Ultimate Metaphor. 2000.
    Thought. Volume 25. "Roshan Kumari and Kathak".
    Worldcat. "Mirza Ghalib."
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