Recently based on my personal collection and the evolution of four decades of Bharatanatyam dance costumes, an exhibition titled ‘When the Pleats Dance’ was curated by designer Sandhya Raman in New Delhi. Planning for the show made me dip into my trove of treasured memories to reveal what my earliest costumes have meant to me as a dancer.
I vividly remember that Vijayadashami day when my mother took me to my first dance Guru, Smt Swarna Saraswati, whom I greeted with a puja thali in my hand. I so clearly remember that on that day I was wearing a pattu-pavadai (long silk skirt), a bindi on my forehead and several bangles on my wrists, all mandatory accessories for any auspicious occasion in south India. I was five years old.
Those days, salwar-kameez was not the costume worn to a dance class. We would wear salwars with narrow pochas (bottoms) and over them skirts with narrow plentiful pleats. And of course with the blouse. The older students would wear half-sarees.
My first costume was stitched when I was to participate in an annual day celebration of my Guru’s dance school. I remember it well. It was a dark green kanjivaram saree with a traditional red border that had golden zari checkwork. The artist who stitched it was the wonderfully talented Ganapathy Sir, as he was universally called. In those days, he was the only tailor in Delhi who could stitch dance costumes for all styles of classical dance.
In fact, I would love to go to his small barsaati terrace) work place in the crowded Paharganj where loads of sarees, fabrics, borders and dress materials would be haphazardly spread. I also loved going there because I would get to sometimes glimpse at senior dancers and gurus whom I would otherwise only get to see performing on stage. Ganapathy Sir would proudly show us costumes of the top dancers of the time: Yamini Krishnamurty or Indrani Rehman. He would sometimes shift with his sewing machine to Yamini akka’s house when there were many costumes to be stitched in a hurry.
For us, Swarna amma would always supervise the initial costume design and also finalise its fitting. After that it was up to my parents (and later even my husband) to chase Ganapathy Sir and have them delivered on time. On many occasions, he would deliver them only to the green room minutes before one went on stage.
For my arangetram (debut), I had three costume changes, which meant four costumes were stitched. The first one was made out of the wedding saree of my mother’s elder sister, which she especially wanted me to have. She was very fond of dance herself, but none of her three sons wanted to become dancers. So her saree came to me. It was a beautiful blue silk saree with a unique fern patterned zari/gold border. My second costume was yellow with a pink border stitched in the saree costume style comfortably designed for dancing the padams. Then for Andal, I wore a heavy red saree with a broad gold border and also sported a thick garland that almost reached my ankles. For the last piece in my repertoire, kurathi (gypsy dance), I wore a long pavadai (skirt) made of chinnalampetti silk and a contrast blouse.
—geetachandran@gmail.com