Mallika Sarabhai: 'Dance Allows Me The Freedom To Bring A Radical Change'

Mallika Sarabhai’s Past Forward is a multidimensional radical postmodernism deconstruction of a traditional form of Indian Classical. Where rap music from Gully boys meets Begum Akhtar’s thumri leaves you mesmerized as we time travel in an hour. Her brilliance once again left us spellbound deconstructing the traditional Bharatnatyam dance form and infusing it with current affairs and her juxtaposition of Indian Carnatic with rap music interjected with “Shut up” breaks all multisensory and multicultural barriers. It shatters all ceilings as she boldly says women are breaking all ceilings. 

With her performance we take off on her journey, once through the roller coaster of caste poilitics and identity, gender inequality, classical allusions and sangam literature going back to Tagore’s “aaji jhoro jhoro mukhoro badoro diney” from Begum Akhtar’s rendition in the background.

We are not stuck in cultural stagnation in a time capsule but transported from neuro-cerebral to artistic overtures by her feminine mudras. Once she is a Nayika extolling her Shringara rasa and faith in some Shakti the very next piece is her wrapping up herself like a terrorist with a headgear using props. Not only is her study of “Abhinaya'' in Bharatnatyam grammar yet surreal as we time travel.

Sarabhai has no qualms grooving to the hip hop beats to various rhythms. A cornucopia of images, of mixed feelings leaves the audience spellbound and gob smacked as we time travel with her. Effortlessly through the Bharatnatyam trajectory she express issues of gender based violence and world peace. The show, Past Forward, was a multidimensional musical and neuro sensory experience which casts a spell on the audience for an hour. 

In a conversation with SheThePeople, Sarabhai spoke about her roots, her journey - how she became a dancer, her childhood and early influences. Mallika Sarabhai comes from a family where there has been no gender biases between women and men for 4 generations. The Kerala side of her family, was matrilineal and, women have fought for women's rights. So it was very natural for her to become an activist. She credits her parents’ fulfilment with their own careers, so they didn't want to foist a career onto her. The fact that she became a dancer was an accident. Her family never asked or insisted that she become a dancer.

She saw her mother dancing, and it was part of her everyday lifestyle, her becoming a dancer was an accident much later in her twenties while she danced her way through depression. The one thing she didn't want to do is dance when she was growing up. She saw how hard her mother worked at it, and thought that she didn't have it in her. Even though she learnt dancing since childhood, because her friends were learning to dance she didn't have the sadhana to be the kind of hardworking dancer that her Amma was. Instead she went into films. She also did a Management course.

“I did all sorts of things till one day I had a eureka moment”she said“all I want to do is dance."

When asked about her activism and radical influences within her dance she explains that it is only because she has a through knowledge of the fundamentals of dancing that she can improvise. Once she was an established Bharatnatyam and Kuchipudi dancer, a lot of her colleagues warned her at the early stages that going into something radical, would finish her career. “That was 40 years ago. I'm still at it.” 

She says “if people think that you have taken a shortcut because you don't want to learn the grammar before you start creating poetry, I think there's an issue, and I also have an issue with that. Once you've established your credentials as being able to know the technique inside out so that you can get up and do it at any time, then I think that gives me or anybody the freedom of using my language to say whatever I want to say. Like poetry.”says Mallika Sarabhai.

The subaltern voice is the alternate voice that Sarabhai has always been known to have in her real life experiments as we read in her self help memoir Free fall and through her radical performances from Sita’s daughters in 1970’s to those revived in 2014. 

Mallika Sarabhai lives by her own terms and she often talks about “whether one is going to live one’s own script or the script of others” as she uses dance as a tool for social change. 

On remembering her mother Mrinalini Sarabhai

Mallika Sarabhai says “My mother is very much in inside me. Sometimes I'm on stage and I raise her hand, and somewhere there is a torque. That's not my arm. That's Amma's arm. And it's it's a wonderful feeling. It's a feeling of being suffused with her.”

She has been uniquely positioned in her life enjoying the best of both worlds as to how the arts and sciences can co exist with her mother being the celebrated dancer and her father the renowed scientist, Dr Vikram Sarabhai. 

In many of her interviews she talks of “Conference of the birds” which addresses many existential questions such as “wealth” or “materialism” and at the end holds a mirror in front of us as beings of society interacting with each other. The Covid taught her many things as she walked through the sanctum sanctorum of the Darpana campus and worked on her book she honed her skills as a writer and while she fought physical illness her indomitable spirit became stronger.

Indeed what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. “I think I am an internal replace with eternal learner, so I'm always trying to learn something new to be able to enrich my craft more or enrich my art more,” she concludes.