Dancing Queen

IT could not have been a worse tribute to a blazing 40 years of public life as a prima donna in the world of Indian dance, but Sonal Mansing...

IT could not have been a worse tribute to a blazing 40 years of public life as a prima donna in the world of Indian dance, but Sonal Mansingh, the accomplished Odissi dancer, has pirouetted into a celebrity trial that is threatening to spin out of control. The week has seen her contemporaries in dance and theatre, not only pleading with the President of India to intervene and sack her as Chairperson of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, but has threatened to rake up the past and throw the dancer off her feet.

In this new blood sport, Mansingh is caricatured as the beauteous, power- mad, self-promoting schemer, who has used her status and political connections to continue to perform and dominate the centrestage despite being a venerable 61 years. Mansingh would like you to believe she is the victim of boorish male prejudices and professional envy. 8216;8216;I have no sugar daddy, political godfather or patron. I am a dancer and that is all I want to be,8217;8217; Mansingh says rather eloquently, much to the amazement of her opponents. What is she doing on so many state boards and trusts, they ask.

But the pertinent question is: why are reputations so fragile in a world where divinity, devotion and surrender are the heartbeats of classical dance?

Sonal is an 8216;intellectual dancer8217;, say her contemporaries, who can never be in the divine league of divas like the late Odissi exponent Sanjukta Panigrahi, Rukumani Arundale, Bala Saraswathi or Yamini Krishnamurthy, for whom the language of dance sublimates the moment. Her critics, however, acknowledge her gritty determination to pursue and learn dance, exploring and seeking knowledge in ancient texts and stone, poetry and paintings, and breaking with the rigid conventions of tradition, to join the league, which had similar notions of liberation.

MANSINGH8217;S good fortune could be the envy of any newcomer8212;as a free-spirited young dancer, she started with Bharatnatyam, and was not only supported by her grandfather, Mangaldas Pakavasa, then Governor of Gujarat, and her mother Poornima Pakvasa, a liberal, she had a doting father-in-law too8212; Dr Mayadas Mansingh, an educationist from Orissa, who introduced her to her guru, the late Kelucharan Mohaptara.

Later, her collaboration with the late Dr Jiwan Pani, an Oriya scholar, helped her incorporate allied performing arts into the classical stream like the folk Chhau, Paala, Sabda, which are the building blocks of contemporary Odissi dance today.

Soon, she was performing all over the world and hailed as a researcher, orator and choreographer, producing ballets interpreting themes from the feminine mystique to the inequalities of caste, Mary Magdalene to Sita Swayamvaram, the Geeta Govinda to Shiva Tandava, from Gujarati Asmita to Mera Bharat Mahaan. She was on every prestigious board, from the National Culture Fund to the Indira Gandhi National Centre of Arts to the SNA today, she has won national and state awards, including the Padma Bhushan.

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But was it the pain and loneliness of her secret heart that made Mansingh hard, ask her critics. She had left her husband, an IFS officer Lalit Mansingh, as she could not stand hosting receptions as a diplomat8217;s wife. She met and married a German art director at Max Mueller Bhavan, Delhi, only to split again. She survived an almost fatal car accident in Germany, in 1975, all to come back to dance.

8216;8216;Sonal is one of the most beautiful and intelligent woman I8217;ve ever met,8217;8217; says noted critic Shanta Sherbjeet Singh, who has followed her career from the 1970s, 8216;8216;but I don8217;t know what went wrong, but it did go wrong badly.8217;8217;

Singh is one of the 60 signatories to the petition to the President asking for Mansingh8217;s expulsion from the SNA, along with luminaries from the dance and theatre world. Says Kuchipuddi dancer Raja Reddy, a victim of Mansingh8217;s tongue-lashing, 8216;8216;Beauty and publicity are not enough to make a good dancer, you need sadhana, dedication, it transcends above mere determination.8217;8217;

So, is Sonal being faulted for not having divine discontent but earthly malcontent? If a choreographer had to produce a ballet on Mansingh8217;s life today, it would be a solo performance, because Mansingh travels alone.