A doha in every delicate move

Humra Quraishi

Years back as a schoolgirl, I had read Kabir’s dohas but last fortnight when I heard them once again, there seemed life in each of those words… in every doha. The reason was stark: four of our classical dancers — Anjana Rajan, Shreya Narayan, Anuradha Vellat, Swar Gujrania — were dancing to Kabir’s dohas at the capital’s Akshara Theatre. Kahat Kabir was coming to life; dohas in the togetherness of Bharatnatyam.

And when I asked Anjana Rajan — the well-known Kalashetra   trained dancer, artist and writer — why this focus on Kabir, she detailed her early encounters with Kabir.  “What you hear as a child becomes a part of your personality. I don’t know if that applies to my attraction to Kabir’s thought and poetry, but as children, my sisters and I heard our father singing and reciting Kabir. He was a playwright (Hindi and Garhwali) by vocation, although he worked in the public information division of the World Health Organisation and was posted in New York and then Geneva for close to 20 years.” 

Reading literature of different types, studying philosophy and world religions, getting to know various kinds of people and cultures, all these were a part of his life in a natural, unostentatious and enjoyable way. “So, early weekend mornings, while the rest of us still lazed in bed, he would be in the kitchen making tea and putting his favourite bhajans to tune in a voice that reached each corner of our apartment. He wasn’t a musician and joked that he was too original to carry anyone else’s tune, but the upshot was that I can still hear him sonorously belting out “Haman hai ishq mastaana, haman koho shiyarikya”.

That was her first encounter with Kabir. “Much later, after I trained at Kalakshetra, Madras, in Bharatanatyam and began performing solo, I would ask him for suggestions for Hindi pieces to set to Bharatanatyam, and I was drawn to verses of Kabir. In dancing to Kabir, I feel the challenge is to bring the abstract into the realm of form. This seems contradictory, but I want to keep trying. Because, I feel, essentially the purpose of any art is to discover the self, and if that is the case, we should be able to use the medium to express our innermost search. I want to continue my dance search through Kabir’s words.”

This combination couldn’t have been easy: a full-fledged and an ongoing process to put upstage such a well-coordinated performance… so powerful that that one hour, the audience sat unmoving.

One can well imagine the journey it has been. “The most immediate trigger for ‘Kahat Kabir’ was the Hindi play “Swapnaaur Satya” by my late father, Lalit Mohan Thapalyal, in which I directed our theatre group Sadhana Natya Kala Kendra (founded by him in the 1980s). The play centres on a man who declares he has stopped believing in God because the world could not be in such a terrible state if there was an all-powerful and compassionate God in charge. The way his dilemma is resolved in the play made me think of Kabir’s verses, and I found just the doha that I felt summed it up: ‘Kabira yeh sansaar hai jaisa semal phool. Din das kevyav harme in jhoothe rang na bhool.’ I choreographed it for two of my students as an introduction to the play. This was in 2013, and then in November and December 2015, I presented it again, adding more dohas, developing the choreography and blending it so that it flowed uninterruptedly into the play.” The combined performance of Kabir’s verse and LM Thapalyal’s  “Swapnaaur Satya” was called “Kabira Yeh Sansaar Hai”. 

For one month, starting November-end 2015, they performed it at Sahibabad, Hardwar, New Delhi and Dehradun.

While doing this work, she had to always keep in mind that the dance is a part of the larger whole and she could not allow her imaginative ideas or choreographic experiments to impinge on the storyline of the play. “At the same time, I wanted to harmoniously make the use of the two mediums at my disposal: Bharatanatyam and ‘realistic’ acting. These two are, I feel, complementary aspects of my performing expression. 

“But when I did this latest dance performance ‘Kahat Kabir’ at Akshara Theatre on January 9, I presented it as an expression of Bharatanatyam alone, without the play. I expanded the earlier choreography by adding more images to depict the words, as I understand them. I also added ‘Ud jaayega hans akela’.” 

Several dohas of Kabir found expression in this dance-doha performance, but the focus seemed on that one theme — ‘Jo ugyaa so antabai, phoolya so kumalaahin, Jo chiniyaa so dahiipade, jo aayaa so jaahin…Udjaayega hans akela’. Why? 

“I wanted to combine two ideas: that everything that comes to this world must end, and also there is joy in realising liberation is possible, when the ‘hans’ flies out of its cage and the ‘mela’ of this sensory world is left behind.”

And long after the show ended, those images, those words held sway. There was something offbeat to the dance-doha choreography, which Anjana Rajan describes as “Bharatanatyam-based choreography” (not a conventional Bharatanatyam performance). “I have used props (like dupatta) and sometimes, step beyond the strictly accepted limits of mudras, gaits and postures taught in a Bharatanatyam course.”

Kabir’s dohas need to be grasped by each one of us in these times… each of his doha carries an abundance of that starkness to everyday life.