The iconic Bharatanatyam dancer, Dr Padma Subrahmanyam, the creator of a new style called Bharatanrytam, is a scholar, innovator, author, and teacher par excellence. She is also a musician, with a mastery of Carnatic music. To celebrate the silver jubilee year of Bharata Nritya School of Dance, its artistic director, Roshmi Bandyopadhayay, a disciple of Dr Subramaniam, had invited her to the inauguration of the silver jubilee year, held towards the end of 2023 with a two-day festival with the collaboration of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and Infosys Foundation, a cultural outreach programme.
The romanticised poignant tale of Sultan Bazbahadur of Mandu and Rani Roopmati, a leaf from Indian history that happened in the 16th century and which has never seized to inspire poets, political and social historians, or the culturally inclined, was presented in a dance drama format by Roshmi Bandyopadhayay.
Roshmi had chanced upon fragments of a script by Roopmati Bazbahadur in her parental home. She had the musical score for the piece composed by her father, Tarun Ganguly. Her mother Krishna and her Guru Balakrishna Menon, a student of Guru Gopinath, founder of Kerala Natanam, were in the roles of Roopmati and Bazbahadur, respectively. They had danced in the Kerala Natanam genre. Roshmi and her repertory members performed to Tarun Ganguly’s musical composition, recreating the dance pieces in Bharatanrytam style, which she had learned from her guru Padma Subramaniam.
A beautiful interactive session was held the next morning by Dr Padma Subramaniam on Natyashastra and National Unity with a live demonstration by Gayatri Kannan at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity. Her deep study of the Natyashastra and its implications is phenomenal. The session resembled a class-room situation. She had clarity in what she said, and the contents of her spoken word were like a river flowing unhindered. She said that the phrase “Ved-Vak” is an irrefutable phrase that shows that the Vedas are sacrosanct and are the basis of the culture of the Bharata, which was lost and the esteem of the people had taken a nosedive. English education started at Calcutta and Madras by Macaulay in 1835 buried the spirit of India, before which there was a better understanding of the whole sub-continent.
Coming back to the Natyashastra she pointed out that Nepala, central and south-east Nepal, Magadha, Anga, northern part of Santhal parganas, Pundra (now in north Bangladesh), Malda in West Bengal, Vanga-Central Bengal, Pravanga in the south Bengal, Antargiri Rajmahal in Bihar, Bahirgiri, in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, Mallavartaka in Bihar, Sumotra in Murshidabad in West Bengal and Tamralipta– an island which existed in the west of the mouth of the Hooghly river, Bhargava in Sikkim and Bhutan, Pragjyotisha in the Assam valley, or Kamrupa including Guwahati, Utkalinga in north Odisha, Odra south of Odisha and north of Mahanadi, Mahendra, northern part of Eastern Ghat, Pulinda in Nagpur region, some parts of Bankura region of West Bengal etc. come under Odra Magadhi mentioned in the Natyashastra.
She further said that the Vedas are in ‘Atibhasa’, which is Devbhasa and a language not created by humans, and that Sanskrit starts from ‘Kavya times’. As is popularly thought, the Vedas were not composed by Rishis or seers who could see and hear what was in the cosmos. Rishis were the receivers. For a proper understanding of the concept, Rishis may at best be compared to antennas. They received the Vedas, which are mantras.
Arya Bhasa actually refers to a refined language. The word Arya, she said, doesn’t refer to any two-race theory; there is no existence of a two-race theory in the scriptures. The word Sanskrit means refined. Jati Bhasa is the colloquial language of the people. Bharata, in his Natyashastra, has referred to the rich Prakrits of each region. These are Suraseni in the U.P. plains, Avanti in western India, Magadhi in Bihar, Prachya in eastern India, Ardha Magadhi in south-east India, and Dakshinatta in the southern region. So the entire region is connected to its own special language.
She also begged to differ from the scholars of the tenth century A.D., who said that Charis and Karanas are Nritta Karanas, and so they are ‘Rasa and bhava Vihinam’—devoid of Rasa and Bhava. She gave the example of Pandit Birju Maharaj rendering fast footwork with an abundance of Rasa to prove that Nritta Karanas are not ‘Rasa and bhava Vihinam’. Nritta can never be without Rasa and Bhava. Vidushi Padma Subramaniam has always taken elements from the Natyashastra Nritta Charis and Karanas with ‘Sattva bhava’. The Sanskrit word Sattva, meaning goodness, is one of the three gunas, or “modes of existence,” according to the shastras. Without Sattva, whatever one does will evoke monotony and boredom because of the lack of emotion displayed through expression. The performer will suffer for his or her dance, which in turn will also make the audience suffer. There has to be a state of inner joy in whatever one does. To quote from the Bhagavad Gita, “Work is worship”. The work will become enjoyable if it is taken as ‘worship’. A difficult work will become easy with an abundance of joy, and the net result will be the creation of Rasa, for enjoyment is nothing but Rasa.
Giving an example from her own experience, she said that she had performed her choreography of “Jatayu Moksha” with an orchestral piece from the beginning of the opera “Romeo and Juliet” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to establish the magic of the treatise Natyashastra, written single-handedly by Bharata. At this point, a video clipping of her path-breaking and much-acclaimed choreographic work, “Jatayu Moksha,” was shown to prove her point. The press was impressed by her presentation and said that Tchaikovosky’s overture fitted in so well with Ms Subramaniam’s choreography that it looked as if the music composer had anticipated Padma’s “Jatayu Moksha” a hundred years ago.
Vidushi Padma Subramaniam used the Sanskrit word ‘Anugraha’—which means ‘divine grace of God’—coming from a higher consciousness that has the power to transform, realise, and experience the nature of universal divine grace—to relate to her experience when she was invited to perform at the “Harmony and Development in Asia” by Japan. A number of recordings were sent to her to select a piece where the written words were in Japanese. A language not known to her. She relied on her hearing ability and chose a piece from the works of Miyagi Michio for her rendition, later to be told that he was a blind composer whose centenary was being celebrated that year.
Her advice to students was that they had to earn the ‘ashirwad’—blessings—of gurus to keep going. Aspirants need to invoke ‘Kriya Shakti’—one of three parts of the creative cosmic power called shakti. The other two parts are iccha shakti (willpower) and jnana shakti (the power to know).
Ms Subramaniam’s prime disciple, Gayatri, performed Durgashtakam compiled by her from Soundarya Lahari attributed to Pushpadanta as well as Adi Shankara and, of course, Kanakadharastavam by Adi Shankaracharya, and composed and choreographed a piece, a vandana on Durga, Lakshmi, and Saraswati. It was an aesthetic rendition of Dr Padma Subramaniam’s very own inimitable style of Bharatanrytam.
Dr Subramaniam spoke about the Varnam “Keno Darshan Dao na Hari,” which the great composer Salil Chowdhury had specially written for her, replete with the exact Lakshana, the grammar format of a Varnam, which has many lines of Sahitya followed by swar and lyrics for swar and then the refrain. Her disciple, Roshmi Bandyopadhayay, regaled the audience with her flawless presentation of the Varnam.
The writer is a senior dance critic