A decade after her death, India now appreciates her body of distinctive works.

Malini Nair

Dec 30, 2016 · 11:30 am

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Chandralekha was quick to laugh but what she always laughed loudest at was the idea of “legacy” – of a sacred institution, unquestioning disciples and a style of dance frozen in time. That is why, when the legendary dancer passed away in 2006, it had almost seemed like the death of a body of distinctive work.

The one choreography that survived the finality of her departure, however, was Sharira, her last and most minimal work – an unhurried exploration of the idea and power of female sexuality.

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Created with contemporary dancer Padmini Chettur and kalaripayattu wizard Shaji John in 2000, Sharira had left its audiences stunned. The tempo defied the word slow. And almost the entire performance is marked by the refrain of the female dancer’s legs lifted and parted, the pelvis rising, falling and undulating to the ati vilambit pace of dhrupad by Gundecha brothers.

Sharira demanded complete audience attention for its running time of 63 minutes. In the immediate years following Chandralekha’s death, the choreography was staged a few times. But some years later, the buzz around it dried up.

Way ahead of her times with her unapologetic stance on the play of abstraction, physicality and sexuality in her dance, Chandralekha was anyway never the most popular of dancers in her life, nor the darling of the Chennai dance establishment. Her quest for something beyond the prettiness and piety – she hilariously called it the “dollification” – of conventional bharatanatyam did not make for easily ingestible art.

But just when it seemed that Chandralekha would remain no more than an abiding subject for dense academic works on dance, Sharira came alive again. Over the last year and a half, it has been performed over a dozen times across the country. (In her own lifetime, Sharira was staged only five times over six years.)

Not just that, Chandralekha’s life and dance philosophy have become subjects of great interest at literature melas, theatre festivals and thinkfests. The legacy she scoffed at is now a part of the curriculum at no less than six new dance study programmes.

“There is immense curiosity about her today and not just in dance circles, but also in theatre, and other arts,” said Sadanand Menon, Chandralekha’s long-term partner, writer and light designer. “There is hunger for archival material on her, interviews, videos, anything.”

To Menon’s utter surprise, he was invited to speak about her at a dance conference at the Karthik Fine Arts, one of Chennai’s oldest cultural citadels. Chandralekha’s time, it appears, has finally arrived.

“There has been, in the last year and a half, an immense acceleration of interest in her, especially in Sharira,” said writer-yoga practitioner Tishani Doshi, who moved into Chettur’s role two years later after Sharira debuted.

Doshi added, “It is not as if we have been chasing this because Chandra herself was ambiguous about the idea of ‘preserving’ her work. This revival of interest I think it has to do with the fact that in the last eight or nine years of its existence, life itself has accelerated so fast that this profound exploration of time and space that needs complete audience participation now seems to take us to another place.”

It has been a decade since Chandralekha passed away on December 30 and usually a three-day arts festival is held to mark the day at Spaces, her beachside home in Chennai. This year, there was a staging of Sharira, and a musical tribute by Carnatic vocalist TM Krishna. Besides these, her senior dancers who were a part of her earlier creative years are reconstructing a portion of Sri, a 1991 choreography that melded concepts of woman power, fertility and nature. It is a tough task, since none of her works were notated or documented, except through videography.

“She hated being videographed, especially during rehearsals,” recalled Menon. “So we had to settle for filming the performances and then you had no control over angle or lighting. Most of it was anyway in low, quiet ambient light. So the recordings aren’t much help. If you asked her ‘after you, what?’ she would throw up her hands and say ‘Up and in the air’.”

So the 25-minute segment for Sri had to be assembled using the memories of the older dancers and the talent of young artistes who were never trained under Chandralekha or exposed to her ideas.

“Of course, it does not match up with the actual experience of doing group work with Chandra but it is an effort to make her work accessible for other dancers,” said Padmini Chettur, who joined Chandralekha in 1991, six years after Chandralekha performed her groundbreaking work Angika. “There is so much greed today for the clarity she brought to working with multiple bodies on stage, for the physical values she embodied – the way she used the spine to energise space for instance.”

Chandralekha’s use of yoga and kalaripayattu were considered revolutionary in her time but there is hardly a dancer today who does not practise one or borrow from the other in choreographies. “It is a pity they just borrow the radicalities of her works, the kalaripayattu moves, the red sari and big bindi – she is considered very glamorous now – but not the thinking behind it,” said Chettur. “Her philosophy extended beyond dance, to how to live, eat, dress, deal with the body.”

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The death of the Indian dancer Chandralekha, at the age of 78 from cervical cancer, ends an era of creative choreography and inventive endeavour in India. She was many things to many people; acknowledged as an icon by her admirers and acolytes, she was loathed by her detractors. Her work was charged with ideas and concepts that challenged traditional notions of what constituted the classical dance of India. She was a controversial but towering figure.

A Gujarati by birth, she was born Chandralekha Prabhudas Patel in the small town of Wada, in Maharashtra. Her father, a medical doctor, was a confirmed agnostic, though her mother was temple-going and devoted to ritual. Her early years were spent in Saurashtra, in Gujarat, and in Aden and Mumbai (formerly Bombay).

After quitting her law studies in Mumbai, she went to Chennai (formerly Madras) to learn dasi attam, the south Indian dance style practised by generations of temple dancers. Her guru was the well-known Ellappa Pillai, though she was also influenced by Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi Arundale. Balasaraswati was the last great devadasi, or “female servant of the gods”, the euphemistic label for temple dancer or courtesan. Arundale, on the other hand, was the Brahmin danseuse, respectably married to the theosophist George Arundale.

It was Balasaraswati’s influence that was the more lasting on Chandralekha. In production after production, she contravened and flouted the Brahminical Arundalian ethos and agenda. The opening prayer section which prefaced dance programmes was abandoned because she understood dance to be not a celebration of the gods but rather a celebration of man and woman – especially woman. She demanded power and passion from her dancers, and the choreography was often explicit and reminiscent of the erotic sculptures of the Khajuraho temples.

“Celebrations of the human body” is how Chandralekha described her dance productions. Because the primordial power of woman is what fired her imagination and creative instincts, she became the high priestess of shakti, the powerful female principle. High priestesses never marry nor are they shackled by the pruderies of social norms.

In 1950, at Tiruvannamalai, in Tamil Nadu, at the exact time that the mystic Sri Ramana Maharishi died, Chandralekha witnessed a meteor streak across the star-filled night in the company of two men. One was the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and the other the Bengali poet Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. Both treasured the memory of the occasion, which was recorded by the writer, critic and stage-lighting designer Sadanand Menon, later to become Chandralekha’s live-in partner and soulmate.

What caused serious consternation in India was her assertion that, as a part of the independence movement, many spurious claims were propounded with regard to India’s ethical and moral superiority. In this respect, it was not Indians alone who were guilty. They were actively supported by India lovers in the west who could see nothing wrong with India or Indians.

This false impression, Chandralekha believed, also impinged on the arts. Therefore, dance which represented religiosity was financed and officially encouraged, while that which dealt with secular and humanist issues was ignored or, worse still, discouraged. Bravely, Chandralekha became a crusader for equality, human rights, women’s rights, secularism, pluralism and the environment. Her forthright statements to the media, and her accentuated make-up, did not make her popular with the orthodox middle classes, who viewed her as a woman not meriting respect.

However, the faithful flocked to learn from her at Mandala, her centre at Elliot’s Beach, in Chennai. Technically, she fused Bharatanatyam with yoga and Kalarippayattu, a martial art from Kerala, which horrified the purists. Abroad, she was hugely popular, and such dancers as Pina Bausch and Susanne Linke worked with her enthusiastically. Many regarded her as an Indian Martha Graham, though she said she owed nothing to the American modern dancer and choreographer. On the contrary, she always claimed that she was more faithful to the ideals of Indian art and aesthetics than many who were riding on the wave of post-empire philistinism and euphoria.

Chandralekha’s many productions, notably Angika, Lilavati, Prana, Sri, Yantra, Mahakal, Raga, Sloka and Sharira, have become the exemplars of modern Indian dance, based on her premise of the indivisibility of sexuality, sensuality and spirituality. Her many tours took her three times to the Tokyo summer festival; twice to Hamburg’s Festival der Frauen; the Avignon festival; the Asian Dance festival, Hong Kong; the International Sommerscene, Copenhagen; the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival; and various venues in London, New York, Chicago and Canada. In 1990 she received the Gaia award for “cultural ecology” in Italy, and the following year the Dance Umbrella award in Britain. These were followed by honours from India’s Sangeet Natak Aakdemi, the national academy of music, dance and drama.

Chandralekha was a poet and graphic designer of distinction, and a lover of trees. “My sole achievement is in having planted 75 neem trees on my plot of land near the sea,” is the sort of throwaway line she was prone to. She was cremated – according to her wishes without any religious ceremony – by Sadanand Menon and her longstanding friend, the painter Dashrath Patel.

· Chandralekha Prabhudas Patel, dancer and choreographer, born December 6 1928; died December 30 2006