She belonged to the greats, when great dancers walked upon the stage of the world. When Mrinalini Sarabhai stepped on to the stage at the Palais de Chaillot, Theatre National at Paris in the early 1950s with her troupe, there was a moment of stunned silence. This was after all the City that had welcomed Nijinsky, the great Russian ballet dancer, adored Uday Shanker and been home to ballets of breath-taking virtuosity and choreographic imagination.
Mrinalini’s repertoire that evening consisted of moments of controlled brilliance with items from Bharatha Natyam and Kathakali, but it was when she unveiled a ballet sequence of an underwater world that the audience held its breath. The front of the stage was veiled with a thin gauze of blue-green fabric. Behind it, the dancers led by Mrinalini re-created a scene of such eloquent beauty that the normally staid audience erupted again and again in spontaneous applause. That evening and forever in my mind, Mrinalini Sarabhai had conquered the world of dance.
I must have been about 10 at that time. Since those days, of course, I’ve had occasion to meet the daughter Mrinalini at her mother Ammu Swaminathan’s house at Madras, as it was known then. They were an extraordinary family of exceptionally gifted and exceptionally articulate individuals, with Ammu herself as the Matriarch, who was nevertheless as free spirited as the best of them. To be invited to a coffee morning on a Sunday at her Gilchrist Avenue home set in its sprawling garden was to be initiated into a way of life that was of the spirit, as it was high-spirited.
It was a similar kind of house that Mrinalini, the dancer, mother of her dancer daughter Mallika, and environmentalist son Karthik, guardian of the Sarabhai legacy at Ahmedabad in memory of her famous scientist husband Vikram Sarabhai, presided over at Darpana. There was the same coffee. The same excellent iddlies and sambhar set on an intimate circular table and standing at the centre, as if paying a floral tribute to Mrinalini herself, was a small bronze statuette of a Deepalakshmi, holding one small hibiscus in both her outstretched palms. Every object in that room reflected some aspect of Mrinalini’s lifelong association with dance as well as arts and crafts of Gujarat and the country.
For instance, at the Sarabhai Textile Museum there is a section devoted to South Indian Bronzes that Mrinalini was able to source and showcase. The section on South India alone indicates how despite becoming very much a citizen of Gujarat, she remained a daughter of the South. Mrinalini was fortunate in having an able dancer in Mallika. Does one feel sadness today that the grace and passion of a Mrinalini has passed? Or the sense of exhilaration Mrinalini will walk with us whenever there is a remembrance of an India that exists in as many dimensions of ideas, words and yes, dance that she was able to conjure upon the stage of her life.
Her Impressions
An avid writer, one of Mrinalini’s authorial works vividly recounts an incident from her early childhood when she removed her two golden bangles and gave it to Gandhi, ‘the toothless old man’ as recounted later in her book. “It was my first voluntary gift for freedom,” she wrote.
Dr Homi Bhabha, the famous physicist, was a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore with Sir CV Raman. One day, one of the students of the Institute came to Ramgopal’s studio because he planned to build a theatre for the workers. This young man was interested in dramatic activities. The young man was Vikram Sarabhai.