Dancer & visionary

Rukmini Devi, the first woman from a ‘respectable’ family to perform Sadir, the dance of the devadasis, was instrumental in transforming it into today’s Bharatanatyam. This biography offers an intimate portrait of an extraordinary woman.

At a seminar last year in Mumbai, Leela Samson, dancer and the current head of Kalakshetra, was  asked about the future of classical dances. It may seem bleak in a city like Mumbai, she countered, but come to Chennai and you’ll find that the demand for  Bharatanatyam teachers exceeds the supply.

But Chennai was a very different city in 1935 when her guru Rukmini Devi (1904-1986) first took the stage at the Theosophical Society in Adyar. She was the first woman from a ‘respectable’ — and that too Brahmin — family to ever perform the dance of the devadasis in public.

What Rukmini performed that evening was not even called Bharatanatyam; it went by the name of Sadir, a dance performed by temple courtesans to please their rich patrons. Of course, it was a classical art and women from devadasi clans like Balasaraswati and Gowri Ammal were masters in their own right. But it certainly was not an art for fine young ladies.

This was not the first time Rukmini had shocked Chennai’s polite society. She had married an English theosophist, George Arundale, who was much older than her. She had taken the outcry with quiet dignity and it was with the same determination that she took the stage at Adyar.

By the time Rukmini’s sensational dance ended that evening, Sadir had transformed into  Bharatanatyam as we now know it. So stunning, refined and spiritual was her performance that overnight, the art shook off the air of seediness it had been enveloped in for years.

In the decades that followed, Rukmini Devi took Sadir, expunged its erotic (sringara) elements, endowed it with high aesthetics, and pretty much saved it from terminal decline. It is anybody’s guess what would have happened to Sadir after the abolition of the devadasi system if Rukmini Devi had not defied conventions. That young middle class girls today can’t do their arangetram fast enough is a tribute to the tireless work Rukmini put in to salvage the dance from its dodgy moorings.

Leela Samson’s book could not have come at a better time. Today, among younger dancers who take pride in performing bold sringaric items with great confidence, there is a tendency to sneer at Kalakshetra for sanitising/brahminising Bharatanatyam, draining it of its sensuousness and investing it with too much bhakti. Leela sets in perspective and context a lot of Rukmini Devi’s ideas which in this time and age may seem really hard to comprehend.

As a student and now inheritor of the Kalakshetra leadership, no one could have been better suited to the job than Leela. She is, of course, Rukmini Devi’s shishya and also a very gentle, reflective and self-effacing scholar. It would be unfair to expect a scathingly critical appraisal of her guru in this book. So if you are looking for crackerjack stuff about the controversies that dogged Rukmini Devi’s life or the goings on at Kalakshetra, look elsewhere.

But in her own understated way, the author does point out that this colossus in the world of dance was not without her weaknesses: she was exacting, impatient, intolerant of imperfection, in many instances incapable of judging people correctly, and often so inward-looking that she intimidated the people around her.

Leela also addresses thorny issues like Rukmini’s tussle with the Theosophical Society, which turfed her institution out of Adyar with little ceremony, her alleged differences with Balasaraswati, and her reasons for taking out what she considered ‘vulgar’ elements from dance.

This is a painstakingly researched book that spans 80 years of Rukmini Devi’s life — from her turbulent childhood and youth to her very productive old age. Even if you are not much into classical dance, this book would read as a great document of the decades it captures.

Historical figures, including statesmen such as C Rajagopalachari, and theosophists Annie Besant, HS Olcott and Charles Leadbeater walk in and out of the pages of the book.
Rukmini Devi came from a family of traditional but highly educated and liberal Brahmins. Remarkably, her father actually took one of his daughters back home after she walked out of a bad marriage; remember, we are talking early decades of the 20th century here. His colourful and dramatic telling of the Ramayana and Mahabharata shaped Rukmini’s creative sensibilities. As did his horror of anything even marginally ugly or vulgar.

Rukmini Devi was, of course, a great crusader for the arts, but above all she was a humanist and aesthete. Few youngsters know that as a Rajya Sabha MP, she almost single-handedly pushed for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. She set up the Kalakshetra weaving centre and revived interest in the temple motifs in handloom saris.

It is rare to come across larger than life figures like Rukmini Devi today. For a close insight into a world and times that most of us know little about, this is a great book.