How Malavika Sarrukai has spent over 50 years carrying the classical while rethinking what Bharatanatyam can be

It’s interesting how Sarrukai’s approach to presenting this age-old piece, which she saw as a young girl being performed by T Balasaraswati — the last of the great dancers from the Devadasi lineage and one of the most revered dancers in the history of modern classical dance — is far away from emulation. Of Balasaraswati or other masters or her gurus and so many artistes who have performed this before her. At the Capital’s Kamani Auditorium, in a concert titled ‘Darshan’ presented by Bharatanatyam exponent Rama Vaidyanathan’s Madhavi Foundation, one saw Sarrukai’s approach through evolution, where four compositions were delineated depending upon how much and what Sarrukai saw when peeking inside a story or feeling that evening.

“The manodharma (imagination) happens on the spot, when there is mastery over the piece, technique, a sense of poetry, along with musicians who have the wherewithal to follow, to improvise, to change, to shift and to read dance. So what I did yesterday was not what I did earlier. It is changing. But to change, you need to invest… Be it any performance, it is all about the artiste putting in that sense of prana (life) into the dance,” says Sarrukai in a conversation on a humid afternoon at Delhi’s India International Centre.

This sense of life is critical to most of the works that Sarrukai has touched or invented under the aegis of Bharatanatyam in the past decades. She has performed at sacred as well as secular spaces — temples and the proscenium — and danced numbers from mythology as well as other traditional pieces from the repertoire. But she’s also looked vividly at contemporary themes, including climate change, created a production inspired by the Chipko Movement, looked at the significance of the warp and weft of the handloom, presented the transcendence of Amir Khusrau’s poetry, portrayed Hanuman in a solo piece and looked at some older compositions with a feminist lens, among others.

Sarrukai’s work has always been about experiences that affect her. Her latest work Beeja – Earth Seed, which will premiere in Delhi in September, will talk about the instability of the planet and “allow the subaltern voices to speak.” The deer, the swan, the birds, the trees — they all will have a voice in the production. As for the humans, they aren’t in the main role. She got the idea while visiting friends in Uttarakhand’s Landour, where she found a tree with a placard that read ‘I was once a tree that held its ground.’ “Look at the floods in Texas, the forest fires in Spain and LA. We are the ones who have created havoc. The production celebrates the planet but it also asks questions about where we are going — important in these times,” says Sarrukai.

Vaidyanathan, who invited Sarrukai to lead the festival this year, has been fascinated by the level of expertise and excellence the Chennai-based dancer brings to the dance form. So much so that she calls herself a “fan”, a rare moment in a world where dancers rarely admit to admiring other dancers. “Her artistry is so nuanced… her ability to evolve her vocabulary but at the same time maintain strict levels of aesthetics, excellence and loyalty to the dance vocabulary is something which has astounded me. She is able to widen the canvas of the form and make the dance an extension of herself,” says Vaidyanathan, who is drawn in by Sarrukai’s ability to bring in a “modern sensibility to normal mythological stories within the parameters of the dance form.”

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Before Sarrukai moved to her home, Dharini, on Chennai’s Seaward Road with a dance studio and the trees that have seen her grow into the dancer she’s become, she lived in an apartment at Mumbai’s Nepean Sea Road and went to Cathedral School in Fort. No one danced in the family but Sarrukai’s mother, Saroja Kamakshi, absolutely wanted her seven-year-old daughter to dance and would drive her to Matunga every day to the home of guru K Kalayanasundaram. There, a reluctant Sarrukai had to be coerced to climb to the third floor through the cramped wooden staircase and learn the Tanjore style of Bharatanatyam.

Sarrukai’s mother, instrumental in making sure that her younger danced, towers above all else in her dance life. She wasn’t a dancer, worked for a magazine and was not involved with choreography. But she could think of deeper ideas, goad her daughter to think harder, to look at the contexts and content with a newer outlook. Then there were costumes, finances, and managing a career. “She was my sounding board. Everything was run past her,” says Sarrukai about her mother, who passed away in 2013. She was also the only one allowed in her green room in those last moments before Sarrukai stepped on the stage. Among all of this, she was also raising two daughters — Malavika and her older sister Priyadarshini — as a single mother.

In Sumantra Ghosal’s documentary on Sarrukai, The Unseen Sequence (2013), Kamakshi talks candidly about the unravelling of her marriage. “It was good that I got through my marriage and finished with it. Otherwise, I would have never been able to do all the things that I did,” she says.

At this time, dance became a sanctuary for Sarrukai. After her arangetram at 12 and after she decided to be a professional dancer at 16, Kamakshi moved to Chennai to her family’s home. “How does one practise (in an apartment in Mumbai), because you are constantly disturbing others,” says Sarrukai. In Chennai, they lived in a joint family and Sarrukai shared a room with her mother, albeit on the ground floor. “It was my living room, my study, my bedroom, my dance room where I practised,” said Sarrukai at a seminar organised by Raza Foundation while describing the concept of ‘space’ in dance.

Malavika Sarrukai at the India International Centre, Delhi (Tashi Tobgyal)

They lived frugally and struggled but Sarrukai kept dancing. She also trained under TN Rajaratnam Pillai and received her training in abhinaya from Kalanidhi Narayanan. For the first 20 years of her dance life, Sarrukai danced and performed what her gurus taught her, which was the margam or the traditional repertoire. She took the dance world by storm with her geometric lines and intricate footwork and travelled all over the world. But about 30 years ago, when Sarrukai began to choreograph herself, by which time Bharatanatyam had become a language for her and moved beyond the ‘items’, she began to “respectfully question” the repertoire.

There were times, for instance, when she wasn’t happy with representing a tree with the plain tripataka mudra, a hand gesture used to denote a tree among other ideas. Sarrukai was concerned about how the tree felt when the birds stood on it or when its leaves rustled. She wanted to use the human body’s physicality to represent these ideas and energies. “I decided to remove the decorations. Now I could say more with less,” she says.

On occasion, she’d become a courtesan and instead of traditionally complaining about how the man promised her jewellery and gifts, she turned her nayika into a sarcastic woman. Sarrukai starts this piece by adorning her jewellery and showing it off. She then asks the man, “What happened to all your promises?” A feminist nayika, who was not a victim or dependent on the man to provide, felt radical. Or when she didn’t want to do a piece about a woman chastising her companion for not touching her with the hands that touched another woman. “Is this relevant today? Do I want to say this?”she asks.

What strikes Ghosal, who remains a creative collaborator with Sarrukai, is her refusal to give up on her work. “And that is not easy. Dance is not particularly funded and is a lonely journey especially for a solo dancer… and one compromises for various reasons, including economics, time constraints, an artiste’s growing years. Malavika just refuses to give in to any of these pressures and holds on to the core concept of her work,” he says.

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Not following tradition, blindfolded and questioning it, put Sarrukai on a difficult path, especially when everyone was celebrating the traditional repertoire. “But I wanted to do what was more honest,” says Sarrukai, who felt that for any gesture or a footwork design to be a part of her dance, there had to be a need for it to be there. “I followed the style exactly the way that my gurus taught. I was a very good student. I danced the way they wanted. It was real for me then. But what is real for me now? Context is also important. One doesn’t have to discard tradition but extend oneself. When I extend, I do so with responsibility. When you respect a discipline so deeply, there will be caution when you stretch,” says Sarrukai.

The criticism arrived almost instantly. There was discomfort with an artiste pushing tradition. In 2006, dance critic and musicologist BM Sundaram wrote in The Hindu, “…Luckily, this program was billed only as ‘dance’ and not as ‘Bharatanatyam”. Sarrukai sent a rebuttal speaking of her right over tradition as well as finding newer meanings.

In an article that dancer Anita Ratnam wrote in her dance newsletter Narthaki, she mentioned the rejection of the Khusrau piece in Delhi. “Not swayed by her brilliance, fans of Malavika Sarukkai almost unanimously rejected her experiments with costume and movements in her New Delhi performance… Even her most diehard fans had harsh words about her adventures. Why cannot an artiste try out a new silhouette?” she asked. “It still continues. People still talk,” says Sarrukai. None of it has stopped her from choosing her themes, stories and the way she wants to use the grammar of Bharatanatyam to represent them.

In recent times, when the Carnatic world has been debating inequities in the music and dance traditions, including vocalist TM Krishna raising issues of caste and gender among others, Sarrukai, who is a firm believer of everyone’s right to learn and dance, feels that in the discourse, a topic like pay disparity between a vocalist and dancer of the same stature or dancers being grossly underpaid, is not even acknowledged. “Bharatanatyam is not a prerogative of Brahmins. Dance is meant for everybody. A lot of people are learning. When I was learning from my Bharatanatyam guru (who was not Brahmin), did we ever speak about this? We all co-existed beautifully. But the gatekeepers all over the world are the same… Patriarchy has always been part of the scene. If you really need to be inclusive, you need graciousness, you need empathy…. Between music and dance, music is considered high art and dance is somehow not so high. A senior musician will get much more money than a senior dancer. It is unequal, it is exploitative. But nobody wants to talk about this… One has to present the full picture. Then let people decide. If you show the half picture, it brings in the divisiveness,” says Sarrukai.

The situation for the younger dancers, she says, is worse — they get a “ridiculous amount that will barely cover the cost of coming to the Sabha,” she adds. “And yet they dance. My heart goes out to them. They are up against the odds. I have been up against the odds. Why does Krishna not speak about this? No one is talking about changing the scene for dancers,” asks Sarrukai. This is perhaps why, to make a living, many dancers teach “when they should be training themselves,” says Sarrukai.

To address some of these issues, Sarrukai, a winner of the Sangeet Natak Akademi award as well as a Padma Shri, set up a trust named Kalavaahini, which helps with fellowships for dancers who want to choreograph new works, besides dance residencies where she helps dancers hone their technique and discuss deeper ideas of dance. She also runs a dance festival in December during the Margazhi season and presents many dancers. But funds are always short. How does she manage to do it all? “It’s exhausting,” she says. But amid all that exhaustion, Sarrukai continues. To try and make an age-old art form speak to the complex world of today. Like she always has, she is willing to take on the rigour.