ART OF SRIMATI BALASARASWATI
K.
CHANDRASEKHARAN
[This
talk was delivered on the occasion of Smt. Balasaraswati, the celebrated exponent of Bharata Natya, completing fifty years of her dance experience.]
It
was, I believe, in the middle ’thirties that the Madras Music Academy first
announced a performance by Smt. Balasaraswati
at its premises “Gana Mandir”
in Thambu Chetty Street,
George Town. The building had only a small hall where people could not be
seated comfortably if the number exceeded a hundred. Bala,
as she is familiarly called by her admirers, was just then in her teens with a
dark, tall figure which was not prepossessing. The audience was not prepared
for any engaging change in the atmosphere by her art. The late Kandappa Nattuvanar conducted the
Natvangam and the music was rendered by Smt. Jayammal, the mother of the
dancer. No doubt the spectators were ready for the high quality of music, as Smt. Jayammal’s powers of singing
had been acclaimed as a mine of suggestiveness along with sweeping curves of a
voice which normally could explore the depths in order to make the Rasikas Sway to the lingering melodies. None seemed
confident of a feast for the eye or the ear from the
slip of a girl standing in the confined arena. Soon after, when the first few
items of Alaripu, Sabdam
and Jatiswaram went through their usual formula, the
tour-de-force of the art, namely Varnam, began. A Kambhoji Varnam was with rare
verve and exactitude to the finish. Her costume was of the earlier type with
something like a close pant over which the was wound
tightly and with little sense of loveliness. But everything of physical aspects
got completely obscured the moment her Abhinaya began
weaning away the audience. Even so early in her age, the graceful movement
backwards in unison with the Laya claimed
special attention from Rasikas. Contending facial
expressions and speechless messages from her lively eyes transported the
members of the group sitting opposite. Of them, one was the then already very
widely known Udaya Shankar
whose avidity to know more of the art of Bharata Natya
had made him seek this opportunity. His appreciation exceeded all bounds when
at the end he conveyed his earnest desire to have some of the items filmed and
taken with him. But it did not then fructify and it was given
to Sri Satyajit Ray to fulfils that dream on a later
day in the early ’seventies.
Balasaraswati’s
inheritance of a chaste tradition in music descending from her famous
grand-mother of imperishable memory, helps her
considerably in the exposition of Bharata Natya.
Unless one has a good grounding in music of the correct type, the movements of
the body and the footwork would all end in mere mechanical execution. The
mainspring in Abhinaya for interpretation of ideas is
the endowment of a rich imagination which Balasaraswati
has in abundance. A happy blending of inborn gift for inventiveness with a
sense of devotion to tradition marked her out from the rest of danseuses, however gifted they may be in the skill of
display of movements and gestures. Indeed, if one may be bold to assert, her
somewhat ungainly figure gained the absorbed attention of art-initiated Rasikas to feel that had she been more attractive in her
person, people would have remained without ever entering into another world
created by her people with delicate damsels pining for love, youths longing for
their sweethearts, mothers in ecstasies over their darling little ones, sages
in deep meditation and heroes in triumphant tread on the battlefields. Her own
winsome figure would have shut out the vision of a panoramic procession of
different persons in difference straits whose joys and sorrows were shared for
the moment by the onlookers through the art of Abhinaya
which was uniquely her own.
It
is not everyone who takes to the classical art of dance that can take us to
another world of experience. It is no doubt difficult to dance without missing
the Laya expressed by beat of the feet, the
vigorous gyrations of the body or the movements in consonance with the music.
The gingle of bells and the swaying of the agile body
can make any audience attentive to what is happening before its eyes. For a few
moments everything would gain an impression, but the moment the gestural language begins to convey meanings there would be
a perceptible slowdown enthusiasm. Sometimes a section of the audience would
even get bored. They scarcely would pause to inform themselves that the arts of
dance and music are full of their own lexicons, idioms and grammars just as any
other language. Further they should know that there can hardly be any reason
“why every such language should not be atleast as
complex and full of resource for the expression of both concrete and abstract
ideas.”
Today
there is certainly greater initiation into the knowledge of angaharas
(movement of the limbs), rechakas (movements
of the neck, hip, etc.) and hastas (symbols),
employed in the course of a Bharata Natya dance. If
form in poetry can reveal the mood and the sentiment as effectively as the
words employed, can we not in the same manner imagine the capacity of the gestural articulation to satisfy our avidity for the same
experience? The Nritta
sequence in a full-length Natya moves the Rasika as nothing else does. Without the Nritta elaboration earlier, mere Abhinaya
would easily appear bereft of the sumptuousness of the art. The abstract and
the concrete form an integral whole even as Raga Alapana
and Kriti rendering inviolably unite for perfecting
of the melodic treatment.
Smt. Balasaraswati
is not only an adept in her presentation of themes for Abhinaya
which would allure hearts inclined for aesthetic enjoyment through wordless
speech, but has a repertoire of selections of Padams
and Javalis that have not their equals in any
others. In the realm of interpretations, she is again without an equal. Her
decorations are not devoted to her own personal appearance on the dais but to
her Abhinaya creations derived from a spirit of
mystical experience. If she portrayed Krishna as a child, it was by gradual
lifting us to the ultimate stage of the opening of the mouth of the child to
reveal an entire cosmos within; if she imagined Krishna as an adult, she would
not be satisfied till she planted him in his chariot with Arjuna
ready to carry out His behests of doing his duty alone without waiting for
results; if she showed the blowing of the conch by Krishna, it would be to make
Him turn towards the four directions implying that the blowing was not the mere
challenge to fight but the spreading of the message of His Gita
to every corner of the universe. Rare springs of imaginative rendering of the Abhinaya endeared her art to the Rasikas
who were ready for them.
With
the years her outlook has also become more and more Godward.
If she prays to the Goddess Kantimati, the mother of
all, she takes indeed time to recover from the experience of a Higher presence in the vision she had created. Her melody
preserves subtler nuances of Bhavas. She is
not any more the dancer, but the creative genius of elevating moments for Realisation, and the duration she engages herself in
confers upon the earnest seeker of serenity real rewards of unforgettable
sublimity. Her art, in short, has not been lost to us to despite her
disinclination to continue its practice in public. Her singing compensates for
us the role of a maturer mind in transcending the
limits of all languages in order to enter into a region where speechlessness
alone dwells
It
is India’s glory that as long as she retains her national temperament, her
various arts would little change their basic nature. The predominance of
lyricism in poetry, gestural articulation in dance,
lines in painting and melody in music–all bear out her subjectivism. Her
traditions have peculiar bias to things of the spirit in every bit of human
activity. It is said that the poet once remarked, “my future is my past.” Smt. Balasaraswati’s future is
her own past of unfading Abhinaya full of
interpretations of the mysticism of the soul.
–By
courtesy of All India Radio, Madras