Guru Mayadhar Raut, Odissi exponent who helped codify the artform, passes away at 94

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by SPIC MACAY (@spicmacayofficial)

Born in Kantapanhara in Cuttack, Raut was fond of music and dance since a young age. He was a school boy when noted Odissi literary figure and dramatist Kalicharan Patnaik, who knew Raut’s father and ran a drama troupe called Sakshi Gopal Natya Sangh, asked for a nine-year-old Raut to join the troupe. It’s here that the young boy began learning Gotipua, which had emerged in Odisha from the Davedasi tradition and was performed by boys dressed as women in praise of Lord Jagannath. This was followed by his training in Odissi under Guru Pankaj Charan Das. He then moved to Kalakshetra in Chennai and learned the ropes of Natya Shastra. In 1948, Patnaik came up with the term Odissi for the dance form, mirroring the name of the music that accompanied it.

Some years later, in 1952, after Kala Vikas Kendra – the first institute in India where Odissi was formally taught – was founded, Raut began to teach Odissi alongside the form’s foremost name, Kelucharan Mohapatra. Sometime later, Raut and a few others formed Jaynatika, an organisation that worked on the need to standardise the mudras (symbolic gesture in dance) of the form as various people were performing varied versions of the same thing and attempted to make the form Shastra-based, thus consolidating and expanding the study of the art form. Raut’s contribution is significant in giving Odissi its classical status.

After he moved to Delhi in 1969, he also trained several students, many of whom are now prominent dancers, including Ranjana Gauhar, Kiren Segal, Aloka Panikar and Vanashree Rao, among others.