Three women, hailing from non-dance families; from totally different regions of India — Maharashtra, Gujarat and Karnataka — contributed significantly to Indian dance from 1930s onwards.
First, Leila Sokhey, stage name, Madame Menaka. Born to a mixed British-Bengali parentage, she made Pune-Mumbai-Khandala a happening hub for Indian creative dance.
For that we go to the climes of the 1930s. Near hedonistic excesses prevailed in parts of Europe, especially in Germany between the two world wars (as seen in many films and fashion statements of the period like in the television series ‘Babylon-Berlin’) and Indian dance companies (read uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews) travelled to Europe to showcase Indian ‘creative’ dances. Which meant a ‘taste of India’, basically. These pioneers, Uday Shankar, Ram Gopal, Madame Menaka, had seen and learnt a smattering of classical Indian styles but eschewed its strictness for loosely structuring something hybrid of their own. It was perhaps their own unconscious response to Orientalism as propounded and produced by Western artistes. India’s artistic response was never in the face. As a civilisation, India didn’t have to prove anything, especially to the West. We were not even defining dance; we just did it.
Madame Menaka thus started a whole genre, which was celebrated and liked even as offering at Opening Ceremony of Berlin Dance Olympiad, 1936. Today 80 years later, in her native region Pune, senior Kathak talent, Shama Bhate is reviving that choreographic vision through the first-ever focus on MOVEMENT. Not just dance but choreography too? Madame Menaka strode high on the world stage.
Dancer Menaka
The month of May also is the starting point of the Mrinalini Sarabhai birth centenary. And Maya Rao too was born in May.
Dynamic daughter
Mrinalini Sarabhai, from Kerala boasting a great lineage, married Vikram the scientist in Bangalore and made Ahmedabad her home. She created many pioneering works like ‘Manushya’ and an institution Darpana that her daughter, Mallika still runs and does it with dynamism. Mrinalini brought graciousness to dance. She was the most kind, evolved, truly cultured dancer India produced. She nurtured and furthered many forms in the dry, desert kingdom founded by Ahmed Shah. Today, Ahmedabad is the most happening city of Gujarat.
Maya Rao of Malleswaram (that’s a city in itself, culturally, like Mylapore is to Madras), Bengaluru, went all the way to Delhi those days to learn Kathak from a traditional super master like Shambhu Maharaj and she helped him codify and write notation in a language universally understood — English. Her students are a legion. She too reflected goodness of and in art, and of heart — a quality in short supply in this current century! Today her daughter Madhu continues her work in Kathak and choreography in Bengaluru.
Maya Rao
Three choreographers, three ladies and three pioneers, who broke the mould, moved ahead literally and artistically and forged a new direction for dance. What a time that was and what gifted women role models. India is proud such grand dancers were born on its soil.
The writer, a critic and historian, is the author of several books and edits attenDance, a yearbook
