Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life

RECOUNTING A RHYTHMIC LIFE

- Anecdotes are central to the history of performance in India

Name of the book: Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life

Writer : By Douglas M. Knight Jr

Publisher: Tranquebar,

Price: Rs 599

Pages: 350

Writing about icons is not easy. One is usually confronted with an immense amount of biographical material that has been self-consciously produced for the public domain. Consequently, there is a repetitive strain in the narratives that celebrate the icon in question. In the case of Bala, the celebrated danseuse of the 20th century, the problem is further compounded as she belonged to a family whose artistic location and achievements tend to fit a particular mode of narration. This emphasizes the very special status of the family she belonged to, the access the family enjoyed to a very specialized repertoire and how, in terms of artistic conception, they tended to mark out a very distinct style that was seen at variance with the more mainstream and standardized conception of classical music and dance that was being articulated and assembled by new consumers and publicists. The narrative has also stressed the relocation of Bala’s family to the United States of America where they enjoyed a very special reception, which enabled her and other family members to transmit what they saw as significant elements of the musical and dancing tradition they were born to but that did not enjoy the same currency in post-1950 India.

To what extent does Douglas Knight’s biography of Bala expand this narrative or refine our understanding of Bala, her life and labour? How does Knight’s intimacy with the family provide us with a more ‘emic’ perspective? How does this augment our appreciation of the sociological changes associated with the art form of Sadr or Bharata Natyam in the 20th century? How did Bala articulate her artistic vocabulary or pedagogic method?

Some of these questions find interesting answers even if these are not explicitly addressed. Part of the strength of the book lies in its rich visual material — photographs that the author has access to and which give us a fascinating glimpse into the life of young Bala and her initial appearances on stage, her friendships and foibles. Knight is an insider researcher and is thus able to make use of anecdotes in a way that gives his work a very special depth. In terms of analysis, however, it does not depart from what is conventional wisdom by now on the social history of music, dance and performance in the 20th century.

What is different about Knight’s treatment is the style of narration that stands out. It reads like a collage of reports and reviews and this is effective in lending a more intimate sense of Bala the dancer and of her anxieties as an individual. Anecdotes are central to this style as they carefully build up an edifice of the dancer’s life in terms of her personal experiences as well as of her training years under remarkable masters. Thus we have, for instance, the story of how Bala worshipped a local deity, the Karumari amman, and of her experiences with mediums and what these engagements meant to her. We also have her recollections of her trainer, Vedantam Lakshminarayana Sastri, who was supposed to have had astounding physical control. “He could sweat on command, weep at will, make his hair stand out, change the colour of his skin. Yet his true genius lay in his enormous variety of improvisational techniques.” Bala, we are told, was like a sponge absorbing everything that was taught. Equally impressive was the way she articulated a conceptual vocabulary of dance and spoke about her notion of fidelity and purity. This was an imagination that eschewed all unnecessary accoutrements of props and costumes. It is tempting to see in this a challenge to the style that her celebrated contemporary, Rukmini Devi Arundale, had put together and which seemed to be at complete odds with the ideas that Bala represented and embodied in her dance. However, it is refreshing to see that Knight does not fall into this kind of polarized representation and simply focuses on how Bala addressed her legacy and presented it at home and abroad.

Bala’s life in America, her association with Wesleyan College, the training she imparted to students and to her daughter, Lakshmi, form the concluding sections of the book. In a way this is part of the fascinating after-life that a particular strain of classical dance and music enjoyed in the US and how this served to provide a more complex layer to the modern history of Indian music and dance that was not merely confined to the imagination of the nation and its publicists.

As a biography, this book is informative and comprehensive. It has excellent illustrations that capture the several nuances of Bala’s life and her social experiences, her aspirations and childlike fancies. It also conveys a sense of intimacy that the author enjoys with his subject without becoming excessively sentimental or adulatory. What is missing, though, is a historiographical context in which Knight might have wished to place his work. Given the recent proliferation of books on performance and performers, it would have helped if he had chosen to reflect on the methodology that he adopted and on how his treatment of an icon like Bala is different from other and similar biographies, or on how and why anecdotes are central to the construction of the history of performance in India.

LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

Published on December 30, 2011

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111223/jsp/opinion/story_14914970.jsp