The Pandavas have lost Draupadi in a game of dice. Dushasan is disrobing her. The audience waits for Krishna to come to her rescue with bated breath. But Draupadi pulls out one of her bangles from her wrist, which transforms into a Sudarshan Chakra. In the backdrop resound the words of the poet Pushyamitra Upadhyay, Suno Draupadi, shastra uthalo, ab Govind na aayenge (Listen Draupadi, take up arms, now Krishna is not going to come).
Dancer Sudhana Sankar’s interpretation of this episode from the Mahabharata, which was brought to life at her Bharatanatyam recital titled, Easier Done Than Said, last month in Delhi, resonates with every modern woman: ‘We are our own saviours.’The piece is a digression not just from how the scene pans out in the best-known version of the episode ‘Disrobing of Draupadi’, but also from the traditionalist school of thought where the dance form is restricted to performing religious or devotional stories.
“I had the toughest time understanding how to end the piece because the song that I chose, ironically, is a Meera bhajan, which obviously ends with praise for Krishna, but I didn’t want the narrative to be about Krishna, so I looked for verses to add at the end of the bhajan that would make sense to my version, and then I found the poem (by Upadhyay),” the Delhi-based dancer says.
The 26-year-old artist, who has been learning the art form since the age of six under the tutelage of her gurus Padma Bhushan awardee Saroja Vaidyanathan and Rama Vaidyanathan, is clear about her relationship with the dance form.
“I don’t want it to be too traditionalist because at the end of the day, you, as a dancer, also have to relate to it,” she says. Born into a traditional Tamil family, Sudhana was made to explore various kinds of cultural avenues, including Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam, as a child.
The latter stuck and she had her arangetram in 2009. Since then she has not just been honing her craft but also taking the tradition forward by teaching the dance form at Delhi’s Ganesa Natyalaya, where she trained herself. She was also appointed as a Bharatanatyam teacher by the Tamil Nadu government in 2018 and continues to teach the dance form at Delhi’s Tamil Nadu Bha- wan. Even as she continues to carry forward the heritage, she is striving to make Bharatanatyam relatable to her students.
Recalling the time when she wanted to give up the dance form because she could no longer relate to it, she says, “Back then I felt I had to be religious to pursue it, but eventually I realised that I had to develop my own dialogue with the dance form. Now my performances are all based on the rawest form of human emotions, and I can correlate all of it with my own life,” says Sudhana, who is also trained in hip-hop, contemporary and salsa.
Sudhana, however, asserts that her innovations do not violate the sanctity of the dance form.
“If you know the art form right, you can stay within the traditional framework and still communicate things that are relevant to the current times through your performance,” she says, explaining, “For instance, there’s no floor work per se in Bharatanatyam, unlike contemporary, where you do a lot of things on the floor. If that kind of movement is brought into Bharatanatyam, it is a completely different ball game, but you still stay within the technique. We don’t have partners in Bharatanatyam, but we can totally do that.”Striking the right balance between the old and the new is what she’s looking for.