To hell with respectability

ANYONE who flagrantly defies social conventions must be prepared to face social censure. A young woman who keeps men’s company, decries marriage as an outdated institution and motherhood as something which diminishes creativity in a woman is not likely to get away lightly. However, there is a woman who did all that and still enjoys the respect of countless people and is acclaimed as a multi-dimensional innovator of dance, choreography, poetry and painting. She is the Gujarat-born Chandra Patel, known as Chandralekha.

Chandra, as she is known to her friends, was a born rebel. It appears that she inherited rebellion from her father who was a non-conformist; she also inherited involvement in Hindu mythology from her mother who practiced Hindu rituals in her home. Chandra admits to her ambitions "to run naked, wild and free". She condemned the family as an institution because it restrained creativity, marriage as corrosive of human personality and motherhood an over-rated institution. Her biographer Rustom Bharucha notes: "Perhaps there is no subject in the world that angers Chandra more than the much mythological virtues of motherhood. Deeply and uncompromisingly, she distrusts the institution of marriage to which she ascribes all the major problems of the world, including social injustice, political and economic exploitation, and continued enslavement of women. Most of all, she refuses to accept motherhood as a natural urge, an intrinsic part of women’s creativity (Chandralekha: Woman, Dance, Resistance — Harper-Collins).

Needless to say, Chandra never took on a husband. And although she had many gentlemen friends who shared her life, she had no children. She had more important items on her personal agenda.

Chandra spent her college years in Bombay. At the age of 17, she migrated to Madras and has spent most of her life in Chennai: dancing, teaching dance, writing, painting, creating new dance forms and active participation in women’s liberation movements. While she was still in her teens, she befriended Harindranath Chattopadhyay (Sarojini Naidu’s brother) who was 30 year older than her. Hiren Da or Baba as she called him did not believe in platonic friendships. He was a poet and a great wit. It is more than likely that Chandra was inspired by him to write unconventional poetry. In her collection 68 Poems, she has a cruel one on her aunt who was in the habit of breaking wind in public:

I have heard it said of my aunt
With a wee little fart
She blew up
Her marriage pandal
in fact
It flew up
In the air
Parents, guests, groom and all.

In Madras she started learning Bharatnatyam from Guru Elappa Pillai. A man who was to remain a life-long friend was a fellow Gujarati, Dashrath Patel. She had her arengratram (first solo appearance) in 1952. It was a thundering success: she was well and properly launched. The next two years she was dancing in different cities of India, Soviet Russia and China. Among the people she got to know were Pandit Nehru, Martin Luther King, Uday Shankar, Vallathol and Ustad Vilayat Khan. Her first production Devadasi won acclaim. She was not happy because she sensed that it was not her talent but her figure — that people admired. Two more men came into her life. Sadanand Menon and Kamadev. One was a journalist, the other a dancer living in London. Together they experimented with new dance forms which were depicted in Navagraha and more explicitly in Angika. Among her female friends were dancer Asha Puthli, now settled in New York, and Indira Jaising, now practising in the Supreme Court. Of her relationship with men, she wrote: "We explored relationships at different levels, physical, sexual, sensual, emotional and sentimental." She maintained that the most enduring were three without physical contact.

Chandra set up her own centre Skills on Elliots Beach where she trained artisans, dancers, poster-painters and actors for street theatres. A major setback in her life came in August, 1982, when the centre was raided by the police. She and Sadanand were charged with sedition. There was no truth in the charge but the harassment went on for eight months. She was able to recover her equipoise. She wrote: "Within the body there are resources on which you can draw to get back your spine. It is like the earth which has the secrets of reviving itself. When there is a crisis in life and a crisis in body — when the spine feels chill — you can become ‘normal’, accept ‘security’, submit to ‘norms’ that are not your own. It is only through creativity that you can resist the brutalisation. You learn to confront. You don’t cope. A ‘fight’ emerges within yourself, not with the other. A fight with the other will further brutalise you."

Chandra’s dance, dramas continued to be performed in India and abroad.

She received as much applause as hooting from dance critics. She remains unphased. She’s hooked on to three primary colours: red, black and white representing earth, body and blood which are prominent in figures of Goddess Kali. Chandra sports a mop of snow-white hair, an outsize red bindi on her forehead and wears saris with broad black or red borders. They have become her trade marks. She can be spotted from a mile because no woman looks like her; no woman is like her. You often see her on the T.V. screen. You will see her again being interviewed by me on Star T.V.

Modern poetry without tears

I have little patience for modern poetry. Most of it is in blank verse, devoid of lyricism or the music of words and flies off the tangent without rhyme or reason. It gives me a feeling of inadequacy. I don’t like it.

However, there are a few modern poets whose collections I make it a point to read. Among the top on my list of Indian poets is Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. After 13 years of silence, he has come out with a new collection The Transfiguring Places (Ravi Dayal).

Most, not all, the poems are in Indian settings and about Indians. Like an impressionist painter, Mehrotra brings places and people alive with a few simple, well-chosen words.

There is something very authentic about whatever he writes. You want to read him again and again. As illustration, I produce an extract from a poem Looking Up dedicated to Anglo-Indian writer Allan Sealy:

Not everything the ears hear
Can the tongue repeat: family lore,
The pied myna’s call,
The blathering
Of a loose-tongued door,
The secrets that crawl,
Out of dead servants’ mouths.
My own snaps shut,
And I fall asleep listening
To the clickety-clack of the train.

***

It is taking me back
To the house I just locked
It is winter.
I’m sitting in a wheel chair,
A rug wrapped around the knees,
Watching postmen go past the front gate
With nothing for me
The afternoons
Getting longer each year,
And the light not dimming.

Mango shopping

As the fruit-seller puts down his basket of mangoes, Mrs Banto examined a few and asked him, "Are they real langdas?"

"Yes, behanji, "he replied, "they are langdas (lame) that is why I am carrying them on my head."

(Contributed by J.P. Singh Kaka, Bhopal)