When once asked how she’d like to be remembered, the great Bharatanatyam danseuse Balasaraswati reportedly said “as Dhanammal’s granddaughter”. Dhanammal was no ordinary grandmother, she was the vainika of the 20th century, descended from a long, illustrious line of court musicians and dancers of Thanjavur. Through her, Bala was steeped in the family wealth of music, even as she decided to take to dance. She was as great a musician as she was a dancer, and the only dancer to be awarded the Sangeeta Kalanidhi award by the Music Academy, Madras. Balasaraswati’s own delightfully understated view? “She didn’t know if she was a great dancer, but she knew she was a great cook.”
Balasaraswati, Her Art and Life, is a welcome addition to the recent flurry of books of the lives of India’s great artistes. One must applaud the sense of mission that led Knight to complete his late wife Lakshmi’s project. It offers a priceless insight into Dhanammal’s family, one that moved away from Thanjavur and for three generations, settled in Madras. So the life described here is not that of the devadasi attached to a temple, and her ritual duties and dance-as-offering, but of three women — Dhanammal, Jayammal and Balasaraswati — who belonged to that matrilineal tradition and practised their hereditary connection with the arts in a largely urban setting.
Born in 1918, Bala was destined to play a part in history, at a time when a series of legislations culminated in a 1947 law that banned dedications of devadasis and their performances in temples. Dedicated at the age of four at a Kamakshi Temple in Thanjavur, she was one of the last of nattuvanar (teacher) and devadasi (student), and upheld the practice of art as she had learnt it. Knight believes “she didn’t represent the hereditary tradition… she was the hereditary tradition”.
A madman kindled in her the joy of movement. Inspired by Gauri Ammal’s performances, she wanted to learn dance. Reluctantly given permission by her blind grandmom, who first wanted to know if she had a squint, a good set of teeth, was good looking and could sing well, Bala began to learn from Kandappa Pillai, “my first and only guru”. He didn’t hesitate to resort to harsh methods, such as branding her hand with burning coal, while instilling the basics in her. She also learnt abhinaya from Chinnayya Naidu and later from Vedantam Lakshminarayana Sharma. She never got over being abandoned mid-flight, when in 1938, Kandappa Pillai left to join Uday Shankar in Almora.
Knight charts the ups and downs of Balasaraswati’s professional career, the years in which she did not perform, to the years she blazed a trail across the world, including numerous residencies and hundreds of performances in the US. He describes her fluctuating relationship with, and indeed her dependence on, her mother and chief vocalist Jayammal. Battling various forms of ill-health — a malfunctioning thyroid, tuberculosis, rheumatoid swelling, diabetes and cancer — she never allowed it to get in the way of practising and performing for her shows.
We get a rare glimpse of her personal life with her patron R K Shanmukham Chetty, 26 years her senior and father of her only child Lakshmi Knight. Most poignant is the revelation that Shanmukham, India’s first Finance Minister, had left mother and daughter without an inheritance. Here Knight ventures into the recent history of Bharatanatyam — airing petty resentments against Rukmini Devi, charging her and Uday Shankar with ‘institutionalising’ the arts, assuming a ‘reconstructed’ version of Bharatanatyam to be accepted fact without having defined its terms, remaining silent about the work of other nattuvanars like Muthukumara Pillai, Ramiah Pillai, Ellappa Pillai in the context of this ‘reconstruction’ — that he contributes to the weakest part of the book.