In 1949 a 30-year-old physicist convinced his 31-year-old classical dancer wife that there was much more to the performing arts for a nascently independent India than just artistry. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, a pioneer of India’s space and atomic programs, told Mrinalini Sarabhai, a highly respected classical dancer and choreographer, about the potential of the arts to engender a socio-cultural transformation in a country emerging from centuries of subjugation. The result was Darpana Academy of Performing Arts which was set up on the banks of the Sabarmati River, not too far from Mohandas Gandhi’s ashram.
As the academy celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding, Dr. Mallika Sarabhai, daughter of the Sarabhais and herself a highly respected dancer, choreographer, actress, writer and social activist, carries on the glorious tradition. The academy has over the decades trained over 35,000 students from across India and the world in its quest to create well-rounded, well-informed and independent individuals. Mallika Sarabhai spoke to MCR from Ahmedabad.
As the academy celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding, Dr. Mallika Sarabhai, daughter of the Sarabhais and herself a highly respected dancer, choreographer, actress, writer and social activist, carries on the glorious tradition. The academy has over the decades trained over 35,000 students from across India and the world in its quest to create well-rounded, well-informed and independent individuals. Mallika Sarabhai spoke to MCR from Ahmedabad.
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00:00In 1949, a 30-year-old physicist convinced his 31-year-old classical dancer wife that there
00:17was much more to the performing arts for a nascently independent India than just artistry.
00:22Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, a pioneer of India's space and atomic programs, told Mrinalini Sarabhai,
00:29a highly gifted, respected classical dancer and choreographer, about the potential of the
00:36arts to engender a socio-cultural transformation in a country emerging from centuries of subjugation.
00:43The result was Terpana Academy of Performing Arts, which was set up on the banks of the
00:49Sabhamati River, not too far from Mohandas Gandhi's ashram. As the academy celebrates the 75th
00:56anniversary of its founding, Dr. Mallika Sarabhai, daughter of the Sarabhai's and herself,
01:02a highly respected classical dancer, choreographer, actress, writer and social activist,
01:09carries on the glorious tradition. The academy has, over the decades, trained over 35,000 students
01:15from across India and the world in its quest to create well-rounded, well-informed and
01:21independent individuals. Mallika Sarabhai spoke to MCR from Ahmedabad.
01:26Welcome to Mayengshar Reports, Mallika, and it's always a great pleasure to have you.
01:30Thank you. It's always lovely talking to you.
01:33Congratulations on the 75th year of Darpana. It's quite extraordinary.
01:39I think it's particularly extraordinary because if you look at arts institutions
01:46across the country certainly, but I'm sure more than the country, by the time they turn about 40 or 50,
01:56they start archiving and writing their own obituary. And for me, what is exciting is that
02:03we are producing newer and newer things constantly changing with the technology changes.
02:09And I think, I think that's exciting. I think the fact that we are 75, but carry our weight
02:18and our age very lightly, but we're still with a great legacy.
02:22Indeed, indeed. Speaking of that, Mrinalini Ben and Vikram Bhai, your distinguished parents,
02:29were 31 and 30 respectively when they founded Darpana in 1949.
02:34That means they lived not just their formative years between it, but even I think a significant
02:42part of their lives before India's independence. How do you think that shaped their philosophy
02:47as it relates to Darpana and art as a tool for socio-cultural transformation?
02:53I think that particular vision came as Amma started seeing society. I don't think it started
03:09with that purpose. I think it started with the purpose that both of them valued the arts and found
03:15that large tracts of India knew nothing about the classical arts. And Papa felt very strongly that
03:23if you wanted to build an audience in an otherwise alien region, you needed to break in through
03:31the children. And then the children would be your first converts, if you like, and then their parents
03:37and then larger society. So he was the one who insisted that Darpana was started. Amma was, I think,
03:43quite happy having her own group of dancers and performing and not teaching at all. But it was Papa who persuaded
03:51her that unless she taught, she would not build an audience in Gujarat and North India.
03:59It's a remarkable segue for me because I had a question related to that. I found it quite striking
04:05that a physicist, and that to a distinguished one is that, took to the idea of the arts as a tool for
04:14socio-cultural transformation. Tell me a bit about that because I'm sure you would have discussed those
04:19things. Well, you know, I think Papa loved the arts. He was brought up in a family where all of them
04:29learned music, all of them learned dance. I have a wonderful photograph of Papa and Ahmedabad's first
04:38mayor, Chinubhai Chimanbhai, at a fancy dress party with Papa dressed as a samurai, and Chinubhai Chimanbhai
04:48dressed as a clown. So obviously, the arts and things of communication were not alien as they are
04:58perhaps today. You know, when we are so buried in our silos that perhaps we don't look around enough to
05:06see the connections. We see the differences more than the connections. And I think I have always had memories
05:14of Papa walking into his room with him listening to classical Western music. And my love for Western
05:20classical music comes from Papa's love for it. And Papa, when we were children, whistling bridge on the river
05:28sky, and teaching Kartike and me to march around our Kashmiri carpet. He was filled with music. He was either
05:37whistling or he was humming or he was singing. And I think Amma captured his imagination about dance.
05:48And then it sort of coalesced into the fact that he thought all the arts were important and humanized
05:53people that his foray into physics and atomic particles and cosmic ray physics was not so different
06:04from the concept of Shiva as the cosmic force, which is why our home is called Chitambaram, Chitambaram,
06:11where the heart roams free, where the soul roams free, both scientific and philosophical.
06:17Indeed. And I thought that when Amma started doing her experiments using dance to talk about things
06:26like dowry issues or hatred against Dalits, I think Papa felt it was very right that a thinking artist
06:38should be reflecting back to society. And for him, for instance,
06:42is the insistent on bringing television to India so that every last village could leapfrog into an
06:52educated, aware space rather than wait for teachers to percolate down into the villages, which they still
07:00haven't done. I think it was very much looking at everything through the eye of it being a communicative
07:09medium to better lives. And I think that is really where their sort of paths intersected.
07:17Right. You know, Dharpana's mission became sharper when Mrinalini bin first came to know about
07:23young girls in Saurashtra jumping into Wales, some of them with their newborns, because they were under
07:30constant harassment for dowry from their in-laws. Tell me a bit about that, because that's perhaps the
07:36defining moment for Dharpana. I think so too. I think so too. Amma was learning Gujarati while we were
07:43children. And Jayanti Dalal, the famous writer, and Umashankar Joshi, the famous poet, both of whom
07:52spoke very good English and therefore Amma could relate to them. Most people in Ahmedabad didn't speak
07:57good English and Amma had no Gujarati. And both of them suggested that she learn Gujarati not from the
08:03kakka barakharis that we normally teach children through, but that she reads the newspaper and they
08:08found her a teacher who would come and teach her through the newspapers. And she was very puzzled
08:13by these constant reports of Saurashtra women, Jabril Nguyen, and Cori Kerasino with themselves as
08:18one. And she discussed it with Jayanti Dalal and Liki Mazumdar, who was also an English literature person,
08:24and Umashankar Pai, and they told her about Dauris. And in spite of the fact that they later came to hear
08:30about the Salem girl children deaths to avoid the Dauri and Tamil Nadu, at that time she had never heard
08:38of Dauris. And she was so horrified that she started researching into it and used Bharatanatyam, the language
08:46of Sringara, for the first time we talked about hatred and violence. And she was very, very astute
08:52with the fact that she referred to that a lot of non-Tonal speaking or non-teleague speaking people
08:58rejected Bharatanatyam because they said, we don't understand the language. So she did away with language
09:04and she took the bowl, the shunnas as we call it, of the rhythm, which we repeat in Kapak and Bharatanatyam
09:13as phonometric words, like .
09:19Right. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like gibberish in that sense. And she imbued them with emotion,
09:27which they had never been, so that whether you spoke any language or not, if I said,
09:32Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom.
09:40You know, the audience immediately understands the emotion of what is going on, the mockery,
09:46the violence, the hatred, the pathos. And it was a major breakthrough in the world of Indian dance,
09:55both content and the use of symbols, spoken symbols as a language.
10:04Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom, Tati-gin-a-tom.
10:07That perhaps explains why Prime Minister Nehru, when he saw one of the performances
10:14put up by Miralai Ribban, that he ordered a white paper on dowry debts.
10:19That's right.
10:20Tati-gin-a-tom.
10:20Tati-gin-a-tom.
10:25You know, Panditji and my grandmother, Ammachi, my maternal grandmother, had worked together.
10:32She was in the Constituent Assembly, she was a member of Parliament. And so Panditji knew Amma
10:38as a child who was growing up. And Sarosin and Naidu and family were also very close to Ammachi
10:44and Amma and so on. So whenever Amma would dance in Delhi, whenever he could, he would just
10:51unobtrusively slip in and slip out. And he would normally leave at the interval. And Amma always
10:58had a very classical first half and all her experimental work in the second half. So when
11:03somebody came and told her that Panditji was in the audience, she wrote a note saying, please don't
11:08go in the interval today. And so he stayed and he saw memory is a fragment of eternity
11:15and came back and said, what are you talking about? And Amma told him. And that is when he said that
11:20this is a tragedy and we must find out about it, which is when the whole term dowry death got
11:28defined as a term and the whole tragedy got defined as something that was happening widespread in the
11:34country. And it is ironic that those very social ills that prompted your parents to set
11:42derpana, set up derpana 75 years ago, have not been eliminated. Sorry?
11:50Are still prevalent today. Exactly. So if anything, in some sense, they've become even
11:54worse in some areas. How do you look at that? Yeah. You know, I often say of people who work with me here
12:05in darpana that we have them for eight or 10 hours of the day. And we try and teach them the light
12:16rather than constant darkness that our politicians and the people who control our religions and the
12:26people who control or want to control society would like to would like to make the power in our lives.
12:34But for the rest of the time, they are dealing with their families, their husbands, who might be
12:39constantly being fed on WhatsApp university or their wives who are listening to gossip.
12:44Social change is a very slow phenomenon. And I think we've just had our 75th anniversary
12:56students annual day. And for this time's annual day, I borrowed or took a book which is called
13:06She's a Girl. It's by a woman called Aparna Jain. And there are two books,
13:11boys will be boys and she's a girl. And they talk about people of our generation
13:18who are icons and who people don't know about because the media doesn't report them.
13:23So the book on girls, for instance, has Gauri Lankesh, it has Indira Jaisingh, it has Tista Setalwar,
13:30it has Leela Sheth, it has Bhavri Devi, it has the women who are fighting the Bhopal gas tragedy 40
13:36years after. So we took six of those women and we created dance pieces to them. And we asked our 200
13:45children to research into these women. And there were seven and eight year olds on their parents' phones
13:52trying to Google these women and find out in different languages. And it was an extraordinary
13:58performance. And I would like to think that 200 children and their parents now have
14:06current day icons that their children can aspire to. So every incremental step is, it's a David and
14:17Boliath fight really, because all the powers that meet that have all the money, that have all the
14:23armies that sell all the arms that are destroying Gaza.
14:27So with the aid of technology, a lot of the villainy gets mutated into something much worse,
14:42whether it's pornography, or it is the lynching of Muslims in India, or it is houses being bulldozed
14:49in Kashmir over the last three days. You see it in very graphic, very intimate contact. And that's
14:57hard to fight. But but we will fight it. And we will hopefully change people day by day and person
15:05by person. And maybe incrementally, it might not come to a huge amount. But even if one can change
15:15maybe 100 families, so that there are no dowries in those 100 families, maybe that 100 will multiply
15:21into 1000. Maybe there will be girls here who who grew up and say, I will not get into the
15:27managed market because I've spent seven years at Darpana and they've taught us something different.
15:32Maybe.
15:33To change gears a bit, I believe some 35,000 practitioners of various classical dance forms
15:44from across the world.
15:45I won't call them practitioners. We've had over 35,000 students who have all been through rigorous
15:53training. Perhaps not even one percent are practitioners, but they all carry something
15:58deep and philosophical and resonant inside them. And I constantly meet people in strange spaces.
16:07You know, I'm dancing in Lubbock, Texas, and somebody comes up to me and says,
16:12Malika, you don't know me, but I was your senior at Darpana. I have never danced since then. But please
16:18tell Mrinalni Ben that those seven years have given me the character to be able to face any crisis in my life.
16:25And I think that is more important than me turning out racehorses as dancers. It's much more important
16:31for me that people become stronger, more grounded and more humane because of what they did for the seven
16:38years here. So these are not people who necessarily pursue dance as a career. They just, okay, it's a way of life for them.
16:51They probably came because their mothers wanted to learn and never could, never had the opportunity.
16:57But you know, Mayank, seven years is a significant time that they spend with us.
17:02It is, yes. Even if it's just three hours in a week, we try and weave in value education, democracy.
17:10What does it mean to be a citizen? What does it, what does it mean to be an egalitarian person,
17:16demanding equality, demanding justice? All this through allegedly teaching them Bharatanatyam.
17:24Tell me a bit more about that because, I mean, I'm interested to know for the sake of my viewers,
17:31what it is that a student who comes to Dharpana and commits for seven years is exposed to in terms
17:37of daily routines? Well, they come and we have a very, very worked out syllabus. So there's the first
17:45two years, then there's the next three years, and then there's the next two years. And that goes through
17:51a particular Bharatanatyam syllabus, which is called the Margam. The Margam is a path
17:57and starts with just footwork, then add foot and hand, but no meaning. And then in the fourth year,
18:06you come into lyrics, which means you come into Abhinaya expression, and you start to have to
18:12use the face, not only the body. And it's incrementally, it's a very, it's a very, I mean,
18:19it's handed down 200 years, but it's an extremely well thought of curriculum of how a child as she
18:27grows up. So by the time she's 13 or 14, she probably has had the first pangs of love. She probably has
18:36had the first pangs of attraction. So when the heroine says, I long for you, she's beginning to
18:42understand what that means. Nowhere near, but she's beginning. She at least knows of a pang she felt when
18:49she saw somebody. And it's the physical body that gets trained first before the mind and the soul start
18:56getting involved. So they spent seven years, we exposed them to this, we exposed them also at Natrani to a
19:03lot of world dancing. Young dancers, different styles, what people are doing with dance, how you can use
19:11dance for communications, how people are emerging with using dance theater, dance puppetry, you know,
19:19all of that. So their entire horizon of the arts is very, very wide because we have close to 50
19:27performances every year of which they see at least six or eight. And then in class, we discuss it.
19:32How do you see the difference between ODC and Bharatanatyam? Where do you think ODC comes from?
19:37What were the influences that made it what it was? So that understanding of philosophy and religion gets
19:44different. When Krishna takes away the Gopika's clothes, is it because he's a dirty warrior or is
19:49there something else? What does it mean? What do these myths mean in today's terms? What do these
19:55right and wrong things mean when you are facing corruption every day? You know, so my teachers are
20:02trained to bring current affairs and value education into it because schools don't give it and parents
20:10don't give it. The question of right and wrong of ethics is not part of today's conversation. So when
20:15we say, do you think that this is right? So one of the women in the annual day event was a woman who
20:25fought superstition. She fought the fact that innocent women were made into witches when a witch doctor
20:34failed. And she fought it all her life. And at the end of that sequence, our seven-year-old
20:41turned to the audience and said, do you believe that a woman who is menstruating shouldn't come into
20:46your house? Ask yourself. Do you believe that a widow shouldn't come to a wedding? Ask yourself. So,
20:53you know, seven-year-old children asking this to parents actually makes them stop and think. And
21:00children know what they're talking about because we've discussed, they have researched it. What is
21:05menstruation? Why is it not dirty? Why is it part of natural living? And so on and so forth. A lot
21:12of these taboos and so on that so many educated and rich people and middle class people practice
21:19get confronted through the mouths of babes. Right. At what age do your students normally join? Seven. Seven.
21:28That's really early, right? Well, you know, Bharatanatyam is hard on the legs and Amma always felt that
21:37children would become bow-legged if she started earlier. So, if for instance, a six-year-old comes who
21:43is big built, then we will take her in. So, it's not so much age as size and strength.
21:49How, how frequent is it that a student or students after seven years may not necessarily become great
21:59or even good dancers, but become better human beings? I would like to think at least 80 percent.
22:06a question that occurred to me this morning while I was writing up a few, uh, it, do you, do you think
22:23given the serious mission of Darpana, your shows may often end up being somewhat
22:29teaching heavy or sermon heavy at the cost of the inherent joy of dancing? Do you? No, no, no, I don't.
22:38No, I don't. Because one of the things that we learned from Amma's choreography
22:43is that it had to be entertaining. You had to keep bums on seats. It could not become average prop.
22:49And one of the, one of the horrible things that NGOs have done is that they have taken music and
22:54theater and completely, completely ruined them. And so people think theater is bad. No, we are
23:02professionally trained dancers, actors, filmmakers who continuously have to keep our audiences in their
23:11seats. Our audiences. We are performing across the world all the time. So that balance, it still has to
23:19be amusing and, and entertaining and fun and, and whatever, even if it makes you sad. And even if
23:25you disagree with my point of view, you still want to sit there and watch it because it is watchable,
23:30because it is something that is electrified. Who, who designs, do you personally get involved in
23:37designing or upgrading your curriculum from time to time? Yeah. Tell me about that, because I'm, again,
23:45I'm very curious about a process like that. Do you sit down with your fellow teachers and say,
23:53these are the changing times and this is what, say, for instance, during COVID with my artistic director,
24:00Yadavan, we created a set of hundred videos. I see. Where each foot movement and hand movement
24:10was videoed as you would never see it in a teaching process if you were face to face.
24:15I see. Because it was at an angle which you never see. You're always looking down at the foot.
24:21Right. But here you were looking at the foot so that if the foot was doing this or if this heel was
24:28going up, you were looking at it from here, from here and from here. That's fascinating. And we gave these
24:36hundred videos and in the summer, the children are supposed to be looking at their class specific
24:42videos and correcting their own things. This is how we use technology, for instance. Right. Right.
24:49In our assessments, which are every three months, we video the children and we call in the parents
24:56and the child and we show them the video and we tell them what is working and what is not working and
25:02why we are giving a certain grade because we can actually show it to them. Right.
25:10So and curriculum wise, the basic curriculum doesn't change, but the way it is packaged changes.
25:21Are you the only sort of school of its kind? Because I don't know if something like this exists
25:27elsewhere in India, something which is so elaborate and so thought thought through.
25:36I think we are probably the only institution where the teaching wing is geared to the here and now
25:45and the hurly burly of the world around us rather than teaching this guru shisha parampara.
25:51Something I don't think is relevant today for me to live in a bubble is not a luxury that I think
26:02any of us can take. And if my seven or eight year old is going to have a bad touch in the rickshaw in
26:11which she goes to school, I need to have prepared her for that. Right.
26:15A normal Kathak or Bharatanatyam training will not prepare her for that. But I think, I think
26:26intersectionality is a word that's used all the time. I think dance has to be a part of life and
26:31life has to be a part of dance. Right. Or music or whatever.
26:35You know, Miralini Bhai saw a lot of the evolution of Darpana, unlike Vikram Bhai. My question is,
26:44how would Vikram Bhai look at if he were alive today?
26:48Papa would be thrilled. Papa would be thrilled at what I'm doing. Amma and Papa, Karthike and my brother
26:54and I often tease each other and say, you know, ostensibly I became an artist and he became an
27:00environmentalist. Right. And ostensibly Papa was a scientist, Ramma was a dancer. But we are all
27:07working towards human development and the development of India. Indeed.
27:11With different roots. But what are we really doing? What is Karthike doing? He's trying to
27:15improve the life of the last Indian through talking about environmental issues and climate change and
27:21water and so on. And that's really what we are trying to do at Darpana as well, is to empower people
27:27to lead better lives, to lead lives where they demand justice, where they demand rights of a citizen,
27:34and when they demand dignity. What vision do you have for the, say, next 50 years of Darpana?
27:42My dear Mayank, are we going to be around in 50 years? We might practically die.
27:48Somebody will carry on, right? I think, I think just coping with the changing world today,
27:57yes, one has a vision, but I think just coping with the scurrilous world
28:06that we live in, that dismembers every day, every single day, you pick up the news and something more
28:15has gone. Right. Something more of what we consider humanity, of what we consider
28:22civilization has been dismantled. And to keep an integrity and a core within that is already a
28:36lot to ask for. Right. So yes, I would like to see that Darpana continues creating work that is,
28:47in some senses, a mirror to society, so that society may think to think differently of issues that it
28:56otherwise gets brainwashed about. I would like to think that Darpana will continue teaching life rather
29:04than dance, teaching life through the arts. And that we will be able to be a tiny, tiny, tiny part
29:13in making a difference to humanity.
29:20To conclude, the offering as part of your 75th anniversary is I was, you sent me the material
29:26Meanwhile Elsewhere by Yadav and Chandran. It is described as an experience that shifts between dream and memory.
29:34Tell me a bit about that.
29:36You know, there is a book by Italo Calvino that has been a favorite of mine for many,
29:43many years. It's called Invisible Cities. And it is a conversation of imagined conversation between Kublai
29:49Khan, who was taking over the world and Marco Polo, who was the person who traveled the world and brought
29:56back news to Kublai Khan. Kublai Khan is so established, he's never moved. He doesn't know what his conquered
30:04territories are. And Marco Polo is the kinetic energy. It's the Shiva and the Shakti. Shiva without Shakti is Shava,
30:13a dead body. Kublai without Marco Polo, bringing in that energy, bringing in the descriptions of invisible cities.
30:24But it is really a relationship between two people, a relationship of imagination, a relationship of memory,
30:31of nostalgia, of things you have never seen, of things that you are never able to articulate
30:41till you see something.
30:42Right.
30:43I think Yadavan has managed to do that. And we've now had 12 performances. And we have had the most
30:49extraordinary responses from all sorts of people. I mean, we had a conference of climate change and
30:57climate change action here. And all of them came to see it. And in the amongst the audience was the
31:05head of the United Nations climate change program and UNESCO's head of climate change and the chief
31:11builder of Amsterdam city. And they were in tears. They said, you know, everything we have been speaking
31:18about, we see in your performance in a way that touches our heart and our mind and our soul more
31:26than any amount of our lecturing or teaching can do. It's just become a phenomenon. And I'm very much
31:34hoping to bring it to America. So we are already in conversations with people. It's a complex project.
31:41We are first taking it around India, and maybe in a year and a half or two years, bring it to America.
31:48Look forward to that.
31:51Well, on that note, Malikaben, I want to thank you for your time. It's always riveting to talk to you.
31:58But it was a great pleasure to do that. And again, congratulations on the 75th anniversary.
32:04Thank you. Thank you.