Chandralekha, born on December 6, 1928 as Chandralekha Prabhudas Patel in a Gujarati family in Wada, Maharashtra, was an Indian dancer, choreographer and activist. She was born into a house of contrasting ideals, the daughter of an agnostic father and a devout Hindu mother. The agnostic and religious influences of her upbringing would later be clearly reflected in her work, which spanned six decades.
Known for her choreographic work, Chandralekha is known for introducing elements of yoga and Kalaripayattu, a martial art originating from Kerala, into dance, and what followed was a method in its own right. She integrated movements and techniques from yoga and kalari and created a world of images full of abstractions that aesthetically reflect sculptural postures and athletic strength.
Early years of the Bharatanatyam debutante
A young law student at the age of 17, Chandralekha gave up her studies to pursue further studies Bharatanatyama classical dance form originating in Tamil Nadu. She moved to Madras and stayed there for the rest of her life. In Madras, Chandralekha began taking intensive Bharatanatyam classes with Guru Elappa Pillai. She dropped her last name and only answered her first name. Soon she was known as Chandra among her peers.
Chandralekha – Courtesy: The Chandralekha Archive, SPACES, Chennai.
Chandralekha has credited It was a unique moment in her memory that shaped her reaction and attitude towards dance. It was in 1952, during her Arangetram, the traditional initiation into the world of Bharatanatyam, that she experienced the conflict between art and life. At that time, the region was suffering from a severe drought, but in her dance she depicted the joyful images of the people of Mathura bathing in the Yamuna River to greet Krishna. Since then, her work has been an attempt to resolve the conflict between art and life and to adapt to the realities of life and society.
At a time (1950s) when Bharatanatyam was undergoing a hegemonic shift, subjecting both the art and the artist to the will and morality of Brahminical and nationalist ideals of ‘reform’ and resurrection, Chandralekha and her art distinguished themselves, albeit disapprovingly, by failing to appeal to the approval of the general public. It established its primacy through non-conformity to what was sold as a palatable dance. Although she had no reference points, it was the life and work of the remarkable dancer T. Balasaraswati this has had a profound impact on Chandralekha. In 1960, while pursuing dancing full-time, she also wrote. She published the lesser-known prose collection entitled Roadside Rainbows: Montages of Madras. This collection followed her stream of consciousness and focused on her experience of Madras, its air, soil and water through her senses and her body.
Chandralekha’s explorations of the body
Chandralekha found no interest in imitating the gods, a popular theme in Bharatanatyam. She was more concerned with the human body, the human condition, and human bondage. She set out to free the body and explore what she called the geometry and limitlessness of the dancer. In this way, their dance imitated life itself. In the pursuit of this liberation, she renounced ornamentation in dance.
Chandralekha found no interest in imitating the gods, a popular theme in Bharatanatyam. She was more concerned with the human body, the human condition, and human bondage.
Despite their complex abstraction, Chanralekha’s choreographic works were characterized by their enormous minimalism. When Bharatanatyam dancers performed in full regalia, they wore heavy adornments and accentuated makeup to complement facial expressions and movements, creating a beautiful image for the audience. However, Chandralekha found this embellishment to be the extremely disruptive force that arises between the artist and his body and invariably between the artist and the audience. A Chandralekha dancer thus had freedom of body from ornamentation, similar to everyday practice or rehearsal. This was her conceptualization and she consistently integrated it into herself dance like in her life. Known for her silver hair, despite being an active artist at the time, she refused to dye it black, something her contemporaries would never dare to do.
Chandralekha Portrait – Chandralekha. Photo: Dashrath Patel. Courtesy: The Chandralekha Archive, SPACES, Chennai.
She did not try to reassure the unknown, but rather adapted it as part of the experience of her work, the human experience. At a time when the ability to serve as a medium between the everyday and the divine, or reverence for the sacred, remains the sine qua non of life in classical dance even today, Chandralekha rooted her art in the human experience and she understood that this human experience did not include religion as a definable realm. She freed the form from any ritualistic sense and filled it with intuition. She did not engage in dance to make a distinction between the sacred and the profane. Instead, her work, which she often referred to as “celebrations of the human body,” concerned movements that imitated the immaterial, demanding passion and strength from her dancers.
Chandralekha’s subversions faced backlash because they belonged to a “vulgar” area of art. Critics and the general public described her work as vulgar and often stated that she introduced Western and modern elements that had no place in Indian dance. However, Chandralekha had claimed that she actually owes nothing to the Western art world. She based her dance on the oldest methods.
Navagraha and other works
Their resistance to common dance ideas did not appear aggressive, but rather stood the test of time. NavagrahaHer groundbreaking work was an exploration of time and space rooted in conservative classical dance. She consciously engaged with traditions in dance in order to return to the basics. However, after Navagraha, she took an indefinite break from dance in the 70s and focused on women’s rights Environmental activism. In 1984, Chandralekha’s return to the stage surprised everyone at the East West Dance Encounter in Bombay, where she presented three of her productions.
In 1984, Chandralekha’s return to the stage surprised everyone at the East West Dance Encounter in Bombay, where she presented three of her productions.
Many tours and successes around the world followed. Her enigmatic productions have garnered worldwide attention and taken her to events, venues and showcases around the world, including the Tokyo Summer Festival, the Hamburg Festival of Women; the Asian Dance Festival, among many others. She was awarded the Gaia Prize for Cultural Ecology in Italy in 1990 and the Dance Umbrella Award in Great Britain in 1991. She also received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1991.
The meeting is right – I’m sorry – 1985. The lawyers: TSIPS, SPCES, PSFS,
Chandralekha is known for her productions like Angika, Sri, Lilavati, Mahakal and Sharira among others. “Sharira”, her last production, was the demonstration of the self in which we exist. She represented the idea that the meeting of sensuality, sexuality and spirituality was the original prerequisite for creation, an amalgam of which already exists in each self. And by creation she didn’t mean procreation, but the entire creation: thoughts, ideas, vegetation, everything and nothing. She thus centralized the feminine principle as the origin of creation. She created a form that allowed classical dance to break away from its origins, namely movements and understanding based on tradition rather than intuition. She juxtaposed traditional symbols with the realities of the female form.
The contours of her work reflect a confrontation with and undoing of the purity, conservatism and exclusivity that Indian dance symbolized. She was not interested in the idea of posterity or legacy. To date, very little remains of her archived or recorded works. She lived her life warding off the indignation that was coursing through her. Chandralekha would tell her charges to imagine themselves not as young girls, but as old women of this country. In all her age, her death is also a symbol of the passing of a dance language that endures, however, through parched earth, the sweeping tides of the Bay of Bengal, a mother’s flowing breast milk and, as such, through the nourishment of life.
Shreenithi Annadurai is an India-based lawyer. Her areas of interest include art as political expression and issues of representation and resistance, drawing on rights-based perspectives and feminist media practices.