I am trying to imagine Malavika Sarukkai playing basketball. Checked uniform, pigtails, scrubby knees. It’s an image that refuses to coalesce. We are sitting under a red silk cotton tree. The trunk is stout, the flowers are magenta and fleshy, and over the course of our conversation, they drop fleetingly into our coffee cups like benedictions. I take in the particular curve of Sarukkai’s elbow, the way her eyes dart and torso sways. When she speaks, the body speaks too. Aramandis , abhinaya , ashta-nayika — all this I can see. Three-point field goal? Not so much. But she is telling me about her childhood in Bombay. Two sisters growing up in a city by the bay. One bookish, “Give her a book and she’d drown in it” (of her sister, the acclaimed poet Priya Sarukkai Chabria), the other dabbling in Bharatanatyam, but who disliked dancing in front of people, who preferred running around with friends instead and, yes, playing basketball.
Sarukkai began taking Bharatanatyam lessons when she was seven. When guests visited their dance school, her guru would call her mother, who was working at The Times of India , and say, bring Malavika. “I used to dread it. I did it because I had to. They’d say do this item or that item,” she laughs. “Nobody says ‘item’ now.” But on one level she concedes she must have liked it. “Dance was a world that I went to and nobody came into that world. It had a certain peace, which I could not find in the outside world, which was very disturbed, very fragmented. So running away into dance was a sanctuary.”
After her
For over a decade Sarukkai worked rigorously and devotedly with her gurus, performing, on an average, 40-45 times a year. “I believed in their worldview, and what they were teaching me, but then I began feeling a little unsettled with what I was actually saying with my dance. I started moving in my own direction, but I was very respectful of dance. I really like the classical, the matrix. I find it inexhaustible.”
Here is another turning point, dancing the Lalitha Lavanga on stage: “I did this movement for tree (gestures with both hands raised, back arched), and it felt so wonderful. I could feel like a tree, but if I did this (gestures with one hand, the traditional pose), it was too symbolic. I was searching for something — not symbolic, but awareness. An awareness of the tree. Then I started calling it ‘treeness’ and ‘birdness’, more of the essence rather than the specifics. People didn’t understand why I was going in that direction… I don’t think many questions are asked of tradition, but if you do question it and want to find your own links then you’re on a lonely path, because nobody is interested.”
A word that emerges frequently as we talk is sadhana — practice, riyaz , tapasya — whatever you want to call it, she says, you have to live it, invest in it. And while she says that you don’t create choreography for applause, you create it for itself, you still need an audience for the work. And if the work doesn’t make a ripple or cause a stir, which is what happened with her early investigations, then it’s the worst kind of criticism. Over the years though, Sarukkai has managed to draw huge crowds along with her, to sit in the grove of her sanctuary. “I’ve stuck on this path but it has been a huge effort. It’s not only about being convinced about what you’re doing, but taking the risk to do it again. Constant risk. I won’t give up because I believe in it too intensely.”
Sarukkai has always been a solo performer, but recently, in Mumbai, during a weeklong tribute to her work, she danced with a group for the first time. “When you’re dancing solo, the improvisation is extensive, because you can just take off like a springboard and the musicians will follow. With a group there’s a certain discipline of space, you have to be more aware of the frame.” She also mentors young dancers — only a clutch, who can survive the marathon. “It’s not just about dance,” she says, “It’s about pushing them to go within and find the movement from inside, to find the centre, and ask questions… I don’t think there’s that thirst in dancers to push boundaries, to discover, to possess it… If you’re not thirsty you don’t seek and you don’t search and you don’t find. I think that’s what we have to change.”
As a dancer myself I’m curious about Sarukkai’s thoughts on how dance changes as the body ages. How does maturity alter the physicality of a performance? Sarukkai believes that physicality is something you’re more aware of when you begin dancing, but as you move and age with the body, there are other levels beneath the annamaya sheath that reveal themselves — energy fields, prana. “When you’re able to touch this energy, it contours movement differently, you go further, you think, ‘How can I send this energy? How do I actually sculpt space? What do I do with my body, which is my instrument, which is the site of the sacred?’ We have nothing else to do. We just get on the stage and we dance, and everything rests within it.”
For Sarukkai it’s essential that the dancing body have a porous membrane to allow influence, but also to distil it. “Dance is not something that’s created in studios. Dance is from everything. Whether it’s sculpture or painting or forest… We have to be open to influences. We have to have empathy. If you don’t have empathy you cannot dance… I tell my dancers, ‘Dance for dance’s sake. Dance lives in that luminosity, and when we stop, it stops.’”
This ephemerality of dance and, by extension, life is something Sarukkai understands well. What she loves most about Bharatanatyam is its precision and geometry. And presumably she extracts this from her students with maddening rigour. As a dancer of Bharatanatyam though, what she is after are the moments. Moments of bliss, which displace the centre. “It can be a second,” she says, “But if you’re able to touch it even momentarily, it’s like brilliance, you’re free of yourself. What a relief. Just imagine! Always it’s ourselves, our fame, whatever we’ve gained, it’s such a burden.” It’s a curious play of opposites. In the practise of dance you seek the centre, in the performance, you long to be free of it. Stillness, movement. Horizontals, verticals. “Because dance is living,” Sarukkai says. “Dance doesn’t live in books. It lives in dance. People can write and write about dance, but you know what, dance is in the body.”
Throughout Sarukkai’s journey there has been one constant that has moved with her. Not husband or lover or child, but her mother, Saroja Kamakshi, whom she calls a fellow-traveller. Her mother passed away in 2013, but when she is spoken of there’s a complete shift in the body, a fullness in the eyes. “I wish you could have met her — she was courageous and brave and so free-spirited… we walked the same path, shoulder to shoulder… Do you have anybody like that?”
I ask the inevitable: marriage, children? Was it a conscious decision not to? Sarukkai is not in a hurry to answer. “I think my generation felt like we had to choose. I started so young, and it was always dance, dance, dance. Things came in the periphery but they never lasted, never took root, dance just sent it all away.” She remarks how this new generation of dancers are getting married — maybe men are changing? Maybe women feel they no longer have to choose? “When you’ve travelled long and discovered deep, you can look around and say, I could have done this or that, but you can’t regret, because what you’ve received from life is bounty.
“Between birth and death there’s a passage and we have to ask, what are we doing in our life? Dance has allowed me to touch the inner layers of myself, which I could never have done otherwise. For this I’m grateful. Sometimes I feel lonely — hugely lonely, especially after my mother, and I feel singular about it, but I’m still travelling. I’m still a pilgrim. I want to dance the way I want to dance. I want to live it. I want to exult in it. I want to embrace it. I want it to embrace me.”
(Tishani Doshi is a poet and novelist based in Chennai)