Puducherry-based Odissi exponent Sangeeta Dash was recently in New Delhi to receive the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award-2013 for her contribution to Odissi and to perform in the festival that accompanied the conferment of the honours. Sangeeta is part of the generation of artists that forms a bridge, as it were, between the newly resurgent India of the years following independence, and the ideologically globalised, economically liberalised India of today. Sangeeta began learning Odissi under Guru Durga Charan Ranbir in 1973. How much has changed in the dance field?
“There have been lots of changes,” says Sangeeta over phone from Puducherry. Underlining the essential difference that marks the target-driven society of today, she states, “When we were learning, life was very simple. We had that guru bhakti (devotion and complete acquiescence to the guru). We practised a lot and we had no ambition. I danced not because I wanted to become a great dancer but because I wanted to dance.”
In her initial years she trained under both Durga Charan Ranbir and Deba Prasad Das, as the former was very young. “I was his first student,” she recalls. “For the last six years I was only with Guru Deba Prasad Das.”
It was during those intensive six years that ended with Das’s untimely demise that the young Sangeeta began to understand his approach that is known as the Deba Prasad Das style. She had the freedom to discuss it with him and make suggestions too, she says. The dance creations that go under the name of this style today do not all adhere to the fundamentals of his approach, she feels. “Now things have changed a lot. In our style there was beauty in simplicity,” she analyses. But now, whether in the Deba Prasad gharana or any other, there is a trend for overreaching complexity, “new steps, too many steps, different types of costumes...”
She does not fault the creators of such work. “Before he could establish the style he passed away. We were only a few students of his and we got scattered. I don’t say they are good or bad,” she emphasises, but adds that whatever a dancer creates should have depth, with appropriate abhinaya and the quality of bringing internal happiness for the dancer.
“But maybe we have to move with the times,” she concedes. “The dance field is crowded also. You have to show yourself, promote yourself, because there is competition.” For her part, along with her Bhubaneswar-based cousin Gayatri Chand, also an Odissi dancer and author of a book on Deba Prasad Das, Sangeeta is trying to keep alive the principles of her guru’s approach to Odissi. “We are trying to maintain this style. That is why I try to keep on choreographing new pieces,” she says. Her interests lie mostly in choreography and teaching now, “and trying to read to have more understanding, and trying to work on my abhinaya,” she says. “And I want to research into Odiya literature.”
It must have been about 20 years ago, I say to Sangeeta, that the Sangeet Natak Akademi selected her, along with a few other young classical dancers of promise, for its young dancers’ festival, as an indication to the world at large that these were artists to be taken note of. “More than that,” she says candidly, “it must be about 25 years.” Does she feel that initial boost helped to support her career?
“In my feeling it is the SNA that brought me to the limelight. They were looking or a representative of the Deba Prasad Das style, and before my guru passed away he suggested my name. I didn’t go to them because I didn’t have any idea (of applying for performances). I performed in many of the festivals after that.”
As for the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award that came to her some decades later, she says it has made her “very happy,” but, again, she was not working towards it. “I cannot carry it alone,” she points out. “I owe it to my family, gurus, friends, students, parents.” Perhaps her cup of joy would have been full if she could have brought her mother along to Delhi when she received the Award, but she succumbed to cancer in December. (The information had come out in November.) This has only strengthened the dancer’s conviction that on the one hand “if you believe in your work you will surely get the fruit, even if late,” and on the other, “God doesn’t give all the good together, but balances it out.”Sangeeta’s approach to life is the essence of her dance. While it is necessary to understand how the limitations of physical age can influence the technique of dance, she says, a dancer must also take advantage of that very age. “My aim is to realise the divine. It sounds big but that is what I wish for.”