Chandralekha RIP

Chandralekha passed away December 31st, here is a tribute from her partner. I saw a very powerful piece that she had choreographed for women's day in Delhi last year, it combined dance, yoga, sexuality and philosophy.

RAINBOW ON THE ROADSIDE

Iconoclastic dancer Chandralekha passed away on December 31. Companion Sadanand Menon remembers

On January 13, we will gather under the neem trees Chandra loved at 1, Elliot Beach Road, Chennai. There was not a blade of grass there when we first made it our home. Just a sandy acre barrened by the sea. The salt air ravaged everything until someone advised the sturdy wind breakers, the casuarina and the eucalyptus. After that Chandra turned the compound into a forest of banyan and mango and tamarind. But most of all, neem. There are 70 neems on the plot now. She was prouder of them than the entire corpus of her work.

Under these trees then we will gather. Through a scatter of recorded voice boxes, Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, Lin Hwai Minh, Sardono Kusumo, Georg Lechner, Kyoko Edo, Arundhati Roy, Indira Jaisingh, Kapila Vatsyayan, Romila Thapar, Vasu Gurukul — leading artists, writers, and intellectuals across the globe — will pay tribute. We will then gather at Mandala, the theatre she created and listen to her voice. And, of course, her laughter. That’s it. No speeches, no portraits.

Chandra often engaged with the concept of death. The idea of a Socratic death fascinated her — to take wilful hemlock, a peculiar poison that kills feet upwards, so you are conscious till the end. She took the news of her abdominal tumour sportingly. I was more afraid than her. She was a child when she had understood that in Sanskrit the root word for Yama — the God of Death — means balance.

I was in college when I met Chandra. I was 19. She would’ve been about 45. From the start, it was like walking through a door, a narrow path opening out into a wider, unimagined world. This was 1969. A time of great ferment. After May 1968, in campuses across the world students were on fire. We were a group of 20 or 30, high on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. One day, a dalit boy in our group returned from his village with news of terrible atrocities. Eighteen of us rushed there. For many, it was a first encounter with Indian realities. Someone came up with the idea of barging into affluent parties to raise money for the dalits. At one such party, while most people clucked with sympathy, there was a peal of laughter from one corner followed by a mocking voice. This was Chandra. She took our friend aside and scolded him severely for his naive charity. He was smitten. The next day, 20 of us marched to Chandra’s house. Not one of us remained unaffected. She read us our first lessons in real political understanding.

Over 1969 to 1973, Chandra’s house was a second home to scores of boys and girls. She lived in a small one-room house in Mylapore. The house belonged to Professor Chandrashekhar, the famous astrophysicist. His sister Vidya Shankar had been Chandra’s ‘sakhi’ for years and lived close by. Chandra had stopped dancing in those years. But for me — for many — this little room was an entry point into a whole new comprehension of humanity. Into new frontiers of knowledge. It was a churning, a discovery, an understanding of one’s own potential. Chandra had a fabulous library. Sanskrit classics, the European masters, contemporary greats, books on art, dance, music. People like Mohan Rakesh and Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Badal Sircar went in and out of her house. You went to watch the legendary Balasaraswati dance. You were introduced to Kelucharan Mahapatra and Kumari Kamala. You were fed on conversations about poetry and dance and philosophy. And then, there was Chandra herself. I came from a middle-class family who read but had no other aesthetic background. Introduced to Chandra’s world, I entered into a permanent state of excitement I have never recovered from.

An incredible, exhilarating openness — that is what most defined Chandra for me. She challenged everything. She loved intensely, fiercely. None of her friendships were casual. There were no ladders in her love. Everything was non-hierarchical, non-segmented. Life was a series of relationships — none of which ever fell off. She had time for everyone. She was impossible to possess. She lived with this great democracy of emotion. Sometimes, hostilities and subtle resistances eddied between those who loved her, but there was never any jealousy. There could not be. For the first 20 years that I knew her, Chandra refused to speak of her family. She had this immense need to remain unconnected. She was quintessentially a creature of unconventionality. Her father had something to do with this.

Chandra came from a family of affluent Patels, from Nadiad district in Gujarat. Her father was a doctor, and though Chandra left home when she was 17, he played a seminal role in her intellectual make-up. Their home had a massive library and he encouraged Chandra to read. When she was mesmerised by the Sanskrit text Amarakosha, he asked her to read the Bible. When she thrilled to the poetry of the psalms, he guided her to the sceptic Robert Ingersoll. When she was immersed in the Gita, he challenged the omniscience of Krishna. Chandra was 12 when she knew all of Kalidasa; 14 when she declared marriage the most undignified institution ever devised for women.

The other man who shaped her was Harindranath Chattopadhya, icon of the freedom movement, founder-member of ipta and the Progressive Writers Association, poet, singer, man-about-town. Baba, she called him, and there wasn’t a day since he passed away 17 years ago that she didn’t speak of him. He was in his 50s. She was in her teens. He was her entry point to a wider, unimagined world. He overwhelmed her with his playful vitality. She went with him to rallies. She met giants like Mahakavi Vallathol and Rukmini Devi Arundale. “I’m sure Baba and I were in love with each other,” she told me, “but we weren’t lovers.” Dashrath Patel, who founded nid in 1961, was in Chennai then, and the three of them lived together.

I became a part of Chandra’s life almost by accident. I can claim no exclusivity. Ten years after her sensational debut in 1951, Chandra stopped performing. She was searching for alternate content. For years she immersed herself in travel, accumulating experiences. Then in 1972, she met the dancer Kamdev and returned to dancing. They performed Navagraha together. That’s when she threw the student paltan out of Mylapore — “Get your schooling elsewhere,” she said. But after four performances, Kamdev decided to live abroad and the production fell through. Chandra began travelling again, giving her famed “body” workshops. She asked me to move in as a caretaker during her long absences. That’s how I became part of her daily life. It was a relationship of great endearment and great tension. The distance was too great, there was never any question of catching up. But a partnership grew between us.

Since college, a line from a biography of Dorothy Parker has always resonated for me. “She found everything about death disgusting, but most disgusting for her were the graveside emotions of the living.” So I cannot express Chandra’s absence. The silver hair is gone, the oversized bindi, the reds and blacks she loved, the laughter we all loved. But the sharpest for me has been the putting away of her beautiful Japanese wheelchair. It was her constant companion these last months, imbued with her passions — the right colours, the right textures, the Sambhalpur weave. The wheelchair now lies folded in a tiny cardbox in the corner of the room. Chandra has wheeled away in some other vehicle.
Jan 20 , 2007