Love, affection and story-telling are the core of kathak’s emotional canvas. In life and performance, Maya Rao, world-renowned kathak maestro, used these powerful emotions to conquer hearts and break boundaries. She changed the course of kathak’s journey. She blended classicism with the geometry and dynamics of choreography. Now, she tells her own story in Maya Rao, A lifetime in Choreography, an autobiography on the life and work of the 86-year-old veteran. The book will be released in July. For the first time, the Department of Kannada and Culture and the Karnataka Sahithya Academy have come out with a book on a dancer and her art.
Maya’s dream to learn kathak was born after she watched the great maestro Uday Shankar performing at the BRV Theatre in Bangalore with his ballet troupe of musicians and dancers. “I was only 12 and was enchanted. Luckily, my father was also impressed with Uday Shankar’s performance.” After much gentle persuasion, her father Hattangadi Sanjeev Rao finally allowed her to take up dancing. Initially, she was taught Hindustani Classical music—vocal and instrumental (dilruba) from Rama Rao.
Today, at 86, Maya Didi, as she is dearly addressed by her disciples and fans, attends dance recitals and festivals whenever possible and spends her evenings in prayer, chanting and meditation. According to her, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and the Aaditahrudaya Stotram gives her inner peace and strength. She has lived in the golden age of the Indian performing arts. “Today, there are a lot of talented dancers. But the talent is not being channelised properly. There are far too many festivals and the scenario has become a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’, one,” she says.
Maya Rao excelled in kathak through sheer perseverance and determination in spite of not receiving family support in the beginning. She was born into a Konkani family of engineers from Mangalore. Her family settled down in Bangalore. Girls were not encouraged to dance in the 1930s. But she was fortunate to come under the tutelage of a remarkable guru like Shambhu Maharaj whom she met in 1955 in Delhi after getting a government scholarship to learn dance. She was introduced to Sohanlal, a kathak exponent from Jaipur, who had settled down in Bangalore with Ram Gopal, a celebrity in his own rights. He had a studio where he invited many gurus to train dancers. Sohanlal was her first guru. He taught her kathak from 1942 to 1944. The attraction of directing dances in films lured him to Bombay. It was in 1947 that Maya met acclaimed music composer M S Natarajan whom she married years later in 1964. Natarajan was a flautist and a dealer of rare art books with a creative bent of mind.
Maya left Bangalore in 1951 and went to Jaipur to continue with her practice of kathak. As she was equipped with an Honours Degree in English, she could get a job at the Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls’ School. She taught there for a couple of years. “At the school, dance was part of the curriculum but there was no good teacher. I came in and filled the gap,” she says. But she herself couldn’t make much progress in her beloved dance form. Most of the gurus had left Jaipur to seek better opportunities in Mumbai or Delhi. Maya’s elder brother, Manohar Rao, was based in Ceylon, as he had his own business there. He knew Chitrasena, a highly reputed Kandyan (a dance form that originated in Kandy region of Sri Lanka) dancer. He encouraged Maya to come to Ceylon to learn Kandyan from Chitrasena.
Maya also did a three-year course in choreography in Moscow where she had initially felt quite miserable as she was forced to learn ballet and had to endure the cold, harsh winter. “My Russian interpreter had misunderstood me. He thought that classical dance meant only Western ballet!”
Maya returned to Delhi where she set up the Natya School in 1964. After receiving encouragement from the legendary Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay who was the then vice chairperson of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, she created ballets. She then shifted to Bangalore in 1986 with her daughter Madhu Nataraj at the invitation of then Karnataka chief minister Ramakrishna Hegde who was a great patron of the arts and made her in charge of the SAARC Festival being held there. She not only created a school for dance and choreography in Bangalore but also did a lot of research on dance and wrote several articles on the subject. She says, “Today, the system of arengetrams and rangapraveshams has become a commercial, money-making trend. The event is an occasion for rich parents to show off their wealth. In my view, it’s not necessary.”
Steps to glory
■ Maya Rao took kathak to South India. She not only propagated the art through training, concerts and festivals but also designed a comprehensive and exhaustive syllabus.
■ She is the recipient of several awards, including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, for dance and choreography.
■ She was the first Government of India scholarship holder (1955) to study kathak under the guidance of Padmashri Shambu Maharaj of Lucknow Gharana. She also trained with Sunderprasad of the Jaipur Gharana.
■ She is the only Indian with a PG certificate in Choreography from the former USSR.
■ At the Sriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra in Delhi, art and creativity met patronage. It led to many ballets like Amir Khusrau, Ramayana Darshana, Hoysala Vaibhav, Surdas, Krishnaleela and other works.