Bharatanatyam exponent Saroja Vaidyanathan passes away at 86

The dancer and choreographer’s greatest legacy remains teaching generations of students at the first-of-its-kind Bharatanatyam institution in Delhi

She was battling cancer for some time now (Express photo by Abhinav Saha/Archive)

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In the late ’80s, Delhi-based Bharatanatyam exponent Saroja Vaidyanathan’s son CV Kamesh, an engineer, asked if he could marry 19-year-old dance student Rama, Delhi-based senior dance exponent Yamini Krishnamurthy’s disciple who’d come to take lessons from Vaidyanathan. Times were different and relatively more conservative and his concern and discomfort stemmed from the fact that the two came from different castes. Vaidyanathan told him that she believed that her caste was dance, and that she was elated since the girl came from her caste of dance.

Vaidyanathan had created her world of Bharatanatyam with constant fixing, fitting and adjustment – first with her own family, which opposed the idea of dancing in front of an audience, and then with her IAS husband who let her learn and teach but accepted the idea of performance much later and did not let her dance in public for many years.

So steeped she was in Bharatanatyam and finding ways to pursue it that the concepts of strictly regulated social communities defined by caste didn’t affect her. What remained was her focus to satisfy an inner need and passion to dance. The dance exponent and guru, who taught many generations of dancers and remained one of the very significant matriarchs of the art form in the Capital, passed away on Thursday, two days after her birthday and after dealing with lymphoma for many months. She was 86.

Delhi-based Bharatanatyam exponent Geeta Chandran, whose association with Vaidyanathan goes back about 40 years, told The Indian Express that she always looked at Vaidyanathan as an institution builder. “Mainly because at the time (early ’70s) there were private teachers and gurus but her Ganesa Natyalaya was probably the first performing teacher-guru institute. She got it affiliated with a university and had children take proper exams. The number of students she taught is daunting and that’s a great legacy… She felt that we lacked a community of dance and worked towards it,” said Chandran.

In Delhi, many in the art circle initially thought that she was an officer’s wife and was pursuing dance as a hobby. “But she proved them wrong and made it clear that she is here to stay, and stayed the course,” says Chandran.

Classical dancer Saroja Vaidyanathan. (Express archive photo)

Born in Bellary in Karnataka and raised in Chennai, Vaidyanathan was a badminton player who fell in love with dance after watching dance performances by actor and Bharatanatyam exponent Kamala Laxman (cartoonist RK Laxman’s first, wife who later came to be known as Kumari Kamala).

Being raised in a family of bureaucrats and academicians, music and dance weren’t considered high arts at her home, but Vaidyanathan pursued her father to learn. She trained in dance under Lalitha Sastry, a disciple of Muthukumaran Pillai in Chidambaram, and Carnatic music from P Sambamoorthy

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She performed the conventional, older style of Bharatanatyam till she was 16, a time when a producer walked into her home and asked her father if his daughter could work in films. Angry at the prospect, he got her married six months later to an IAS officer posted in Bihar, who was fine with dance training and learning at home but not performing in public. “As a senior officer’s wife, it wasn’t considered a good thing. It was even called nautanki,” Vaidyanathan would say often.

For about 10 years, Vaidyanathan got into the domestic role, had two children, and did not dance on stage. She, however, kept practicing the style she had learned, taught children, and honed her skill. Her husband’s transfer brought her to Delhi, where she found a number of opportunities in the dance world. The times were changing and many people, including government officers, suggested to her husband that Vaidyanathan should enter the proscenium.

Vaidyanathan began to dance, only performing at programmes and venues that her husband would approve of. She, however, was happy that she could finally be on stage. After teaching for a while in a government-allotted house, determined, she decided to open a dance school – Ganesa Natyalaya – in 1972 and taught a number of students over the years. The institute, situated in Qutub Institutional Area, is now run by her daughter-in-law and well-known Bharatanatyam dancer Rama Vaidyanathan.

“Over 50 years, she has created a golden legacy. And what better testimony than the love and admiration of thousands of students she trained around the globe. Her meticulous dedication, sense of perfection, elegance, beauty, and charm….. this legacy will always remain undiminished,” said Bharatanatyam and contemporary dance exponent Anita Ratnam.

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Vaidyanathan also wrote books, including “The Science of Bharatanatyam and The Classical Dances of India”, “Bharatanatyam– An In-Depth Study”, and was conferred the Padma Shri in 2002 and Padma Bhushan in 2013, besides the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2008.

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