Last year, Pallavi Krishnan thought one day that she would replay that audio-visual record—after almost a decade’s break. It was in 2001 that the Mohiniyattam artiste staged Rabindranath Tagore’s famed Rituranga on the stage, thus adding to the south Indian classical dance’s repertoire a composition based on seasonal songs by an iconic humanist from her state of Bengal. Now as she sat in her central Kerala home and viewed again on the video screen that piece of self-designed innovative work, it wasn’t nostalgia that overtook Pallavi. Far from it, the danseuse thought she should re-fashion that group item she had herself conceived and executed.
“I found that much of it required rework,” notes Pallavi, who stays in a leafy locality of Thrissur after having spent the first half of her life in coal-rich Durgapur and culture-dense Santiniketan. In other words, her quest to enrich the aesthetics of Mohiniyattam had only enhanced over the years. Soon the project to choreograph it afresh started. Eventually when the new-look Rituranga was staged this year, it was Gurudev’s 150th birth anniversary.
The production essays the six desi ritus, starting from summer and ending with spring, but Pallavi has for a while now been a seasoned danseuse herself. For somebody with familial moorings in northeastern Bangladesh to have settled in a pocket of southwestern Deccan is in itself curious. Pallavi’s story, though, is about cultural assimilation—not a happy-go-lucky wandering. Even as a child growing up in the bustling industrial city of Durgapur, where her father Ratish Acharjee—originally from Kumilya in what was East Pakistan—was a superintendent engineer with a multipurpose river valley project, Pallavi sought to explore the charm of classical dances—without upsetting her formal studies. Thus she had undergone training in Kathak and Bharatanatyam by when she finished her graduation in Botany.
At this stage, her family moved to Calcutta. But her love for the arts led Pallavi to Santiniketan—in 1990. “The Visva-Bharati University there had two departments of Indian classical dances: Manipuri and Kathakali. I chose to join the second one,” she recalls. “With Manipuri and Rabindra Sangeet as subsidiary subjects.” Her master, Kalamandalam Sankaranarayanan, gave her classes to equip herself to present a few female characters in the Kerala dance-drama. “I staged roles like that of Pootana, Sati and Panchali.”
That was when her tutor noted in her the potential to branch off to an art form that was completely feminine. Pallavi nurtured plans of joining Kalakshetra in Chennai, but Sankaranarayanan directed her to his alma mater on the banks of the Bharatapuzha. There, at Kalamandalam, she learned Mohiniyattam for two years from 1992, primarily under Leelamma and Padmini—and, around that time, got married to a Malayali: art critic K K Gopalakrishnan. A national scholarship she then won enabled Pallavi to go for higher studies under Delhi-based Bharati Shivaji. “I, though, learned under her mostly at Nrityagram (off Bangalore) and Guruvayur (in middle Kerala).”
That phase led her to notice a curious trend: “Mohiniyattam may be Kerala’s own classical dance, but the people of the state most got to see it only in bits and pieces. Bharatiji broke it.” And, Pallavi, later. “Today, yes, you get to see full-fledged Mohiniyattam shows more regularly.” All through, Pallavi continued with novel works based on Salanbhanjika, Vikramorvashiyam and Panchabhoota.
As for Rituranga, the hour-long work is eclectic in more ways than one. It has the shlokas in Sanskrit, for they are excerpted from classical writer Kalidasa’s Ritusamhara and rendered in Kerala’s ethnic Sopanam genre. The songs, which expand the theme, are Tagore’s, and tuned to Rabindra Sangeet style. Surely, it isn’t a single-tracked pursuit.
