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These are hard times for dancer Mallika Sarabhai. Ever since she took a stand on the Gujarat riots, she has found herself at loggerheads with the Gujarat government. Now the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has come up with a proposal to build an amphitheatre just 500m from her Darpana Academy’s state-of-the-art amphitheatre Natarani.
“When we built Natarani, it was our gift to a state which did not have a single theatre. It only had halls. If the state feels that it is not something they value, so be it. We will continue with what we’ve been doing,” she says confidently. “It will not diminish our audience to any extent because we have a global reach. A small part of our audience is from Gujarat. I happen to be there only because I was brought up in the place and my family built half the city.”
And no, the lady doesn’t want to take her theatre to other places. “That’s an easy thing to do. Most people who migrate say that there aren’t enough opportunities. I’ve never thought of settling abroad, neither has any other member of my family. We felt we were the privileged ones and needed to create opportunities for others,” she says.
As she walks the talk in the green environs of Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens, she seems remarkably at peace. For she is involved in a major project — bringing the multi-arts Vikram Sarabhai International Arts Festival out of Ahmedabad (where it’s been held for the last 30 years). The Festival’s first stop is the India Habitat Centre in the Capital. “My two favourite audiences are Calcutta and Pune. It would make more sense to showcase it in such cities where there is a serious audience for the arts. But then whether one likes it or not, Delhi is the Capital. Next year we want to take it to five other cities,” she says.
Her audience is a mélange of the traditional theatre lovers, the Page 3 crowd and “of course those who attend shows because they come free”. Says Sarabhai, “My fellow artists complain that people aren’t ready to pay for the arts, not even Rs 50. It’s a sorry state. I intend to change that and I’ve started it with Natarani where you have to become a member. At least I know my audience is not seated out there merely because it’s free. As an artist and producer it’s very important.”
Sarabhai has choreographed the three shows travelling with the festival — Hot Talas Cool Rasas, Staying Alive and Western Woman. The first of them has already travelled around the world and got rave responses in the US. While it meanders through classically inspired pieces, comical pieces, poem inspired pieces to those that are rhythm inspired and address dark issues, Staying Alive scripted and directed by Shivani Tibrewala is a dance opera that looks at the issue of suicides. In Western Woman, the director Rita Maffei, also a well-known Italian actress, showcases her journey through India.
“On a fellowship with Darpana, Maffei came as a foreigner with images of a philosophical India, a country with the mystical Hare Rama Hare Krishna image. This piece explores her confrontation with her own fears and perceived notions,” says Sarabhai who’s taking the opera to Italy next month.
The Festival itself is a tribute to her scientist father Vikram Sarabhai who co-founded Darpana in 1949 along with wife Mrinalini Sarabhai. “Had it not been for him, Amma would’ve never started an institution. She would’ve stayed a dancer who would maybe have had her own group. Papa felt very strongly that in a state like Gujarat where there were no classical arts, if you wanted an audience, you had to create one,” says Sarabhai.
Her childhood memories provoke stories of how all her mother’s shows were previewed for him first. She laughs as she relates an incident that her mother told her about — a piece that Mrinalini created and worked on for six months. At the end of its preview, Vikram took a look and said no. “That was the end of it,” she says. “So when Papa died in 1971, we thought what would be a tribute to his lasting love for the arts?” Thus was born the Vikram Sarabhai International Arts Festival four years later in 1975.
The danseuse herself doesn’t believe in demarcating the various art forms. She professes to have learnt to create boundary-less spaces since she famously worked with Peter Brooks on the Mahabharata. She came out of the experience with two lessons: “One, that these boundaries of what is dance and what is not theatre, or what is theatre and what is not music, are false. Secondly, for my politics and activism, the arts are the greatest vehicle. Since then most of my work has broken these boundaries. Why should you have to limit yourself? That doesn’t mean you’re a Jack-of-all-trades. It means you’re an ace of all trades,” she insists.
If performing with Brooks and living in Draupadi’s skin has been a life-changing experience, so has been the aftermath of the riots when she had the Gujarat government filing case after case against her. However, be it dealing with charges of human trafficking or ‘stealing the pans and pots of the owner of Darpana Café’, Sarabhai says she’s emerged a stronger person in more ways than one.
“I’ve had to forego a lot of socialising that I needed to do to be polite. And which I don’t need to do anymore because most of these people didn’t have the gall to stand up. I’ve made wonderful friends across the globe, people whom I didn’t know at all. It separated the wheat from the chaff,” she says.
Having finished with her major productions for the festival, Sarabhai is going into a third production — a piece based on Harsh Mandar’s book Unheard Voices. “It talks of an entire portion of society we pretend we don’t see. It still is the larger section of society. I just read that Delhi is having a mall where a belt will cost Rs 25,000 and a watch Rs 5 lakh. That is one kind of a dodoland for me,” she says.
One of the country’s leading exponents of Bharatnatyam and Kuchipudi, the stage is not the only place where she displays her multi-facetedness. She is a noted filmmaker, a familiar TV anchor, a doctorate from the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad) and a social activist espousing all kinds of causes. It is a dynamic personality that comes to the fore as you come across the dancer in her short stylish hair and signature large bindi. But in spite of her well-groomed image, Sarabhai is one of those performers known as “the woman who is not scared to look ugly”. In fact that is the compliment she cherishes most.
And what with being a mother to a 15-year-old daughter, Anahita, who’s an aspiring human rights lawyer and a 21-year-old son Revanta, who has followed in her footsteps, and enough projects to keep her busy throughout the year, Sarabhai has little time left for anything else. She laughs as she says, “Basically, doing nothing is not a state I am
familiar with.”
Photograph by Rupi