Bhakti commonly understood as personal devotion, is a far more complex and encompasses the great search for meaning in life. But people’s inability to comprehend this concept in its entirety used to rattle Bharatanatyam exponent, Padma Shri Geeta Chandran. With the curiosity around bhakti steadily building inside her feisty soul, she began to study and subsequently experience it through her own prism. In time, bhakti impacted her creative journey. Now, 45 years since her arangetram (dance debut) in 1974, she has embraced the overarching idea of bhakti in her every performance, including an upcoming solo, titled Samagama Leela.
Here, Chandran will travel through time, portraying the essence of bhakti. “I begin with a Shiva shlokam (a couplet) highlighting Shiva-Nataraja at Chidambaram and then go to the NA-M-Shi-Va-Ya shlokam of Adi Adi Shankara,” informs the dancer, adding, “There’s a piece by Hita Hari Vallabh, an Ashtachaapy Kavi who writes Vaishnav poetry in the Haveli Sangeet tradition of North India, a Dasar Kriti, a song from the Bharatanatyam repertoire, a Kabir song by poet Kabir Das, and finally a Sankeertan, a group-singing tradition in the Bhakti movement.”
Despite the shifting meaning of bhakti , place-and people-wise, it’s the Vedic rituals and prayers of ancestors paying tribute to nature that Chandran calls true bhakti. “It’s an acknowledgement that behind the most evidence-based science and technology, there’s still an ‘unknown factor’. All the more, for each of us who have seen a seed germinate, a bud bloom or a baby born, we realise that, while these phenomena can be explained by scientific theorems, they also contain aesthetic joy and wonder. To me this is bhakti.”
For Chandran, her foray into classical dance began at five when her mother took her to meet the famous Swarna Saraswathy, who taught Bharatanatyam in Delhi. Upon her mother’s instruction, Chandran offered a plate of betel leaves, a coconut, bananas, and an envelope with some money to Saraswathy, bowing down, “With that act, I was given forever to dance,” she says.
Her ideas were born as part of temple rituals of South India. “It enshrined and amplified the devotion that the community felt towards their place of worship and the presiding deities. Bhakti in dance was also linked to its expressions in architecture, sculpture, paintings, crafts, textiles and also philosophy, literature and poetry. Bhakti in dance is a function of various strands that culminate as a single aesthetic experience,” she says. That’s how she explored Draupadi’s angst, Kaikeyi’s stigma, of why all Puranic tales are filled with violence and gore through dance in later years.
The rebellion has quietened now as other perspectives have enriched her world view. The search continues as before but now it’s more inward, as that’s where her curious spirit finds solace.
Samagama Leela
On: June 29,6:30pm
At: CD Deshmukh Auditorium, India International Centre,40 Lodi Estate