Lighting up the unsung life of a Kathak maestro

Sreevalsan Thiyyadi

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As a teenager in undivided India’s Bombay, Mohanrao Kallianpurkar dabbled in an amazing range of activities. The Saraswat Brahmin household’s age-old bond with Hindustani music led the boy to learn sitar and harmonium. This, after a passionate brush with painting. The student, who had migrated to the metropolis from the hilly Khopoli along the Sahyadri at the age of nine, was intelligent, though not outstanding in school. He became a good swimmer, played tennis, billiards and carrom. For college, Hubli became the choice.

How come, then, the emergence as a classical dancer? Sheer serendipity. Mohanrao, on a 1935 visit to Bombay, 550 km north of his north Karnataka city, stumbled upon Sundar Prasad performing Jaipur-style Kathak. “Mesmerised,” as this first book on Kallianpurkar says, the 22-year-old “found his calling”. His craving to learn Kathak shocked the ménage for whom dance was for the fallen such as devadasis and tawaifs.

If determination and talent ensured Kallianpurkar’s rise, his cosmopolitanism pitched two milestones down the Kathak timeline. One, a curriculum for the dance. Two, a format to its presentation. Both were the result of an urban academic mind founded on rustic familial heritage. The 192-page work on the unsung icon doesn’t state this directly; instead, it gives ample clues to sense the interesting link.

His open-mindedness made Kallianpurkar eager to imbibe the essence of schools other than of his first guru. Thus, even as he pioneered India’s Kathak institute (Bindadeen School of Dance, Bombay) in 1937 and ran it well for a couple of years, Mohanrao bid goodbye to a “teary-eyed” Sundar Prasad for broader studies upcountry. Lucknow’s Achhan Maharaj took the youngster under his wings. A decade later, after Maharaj’s death, his brothers Lachhu and then Shambhu trained Kallianpurkar, who had by then begun teaching at Marris College of Music (soon to be named after musicologist VN Bhatkhande). Barring a six-month Delhi stint (as director of Kathak Kendra in 1964), the City of Nawabs continued to be Mohanrao’s home for 33 years. The eclecticism made Kallianpurkar Kathak’s first non-gharanedaar dancer, point out the three authors: Shama Bhate, Arshya Sethi and Shilpa Bhide.

The master, back in Mumbai in 1972, was invited to join a nascent NCPA, grooming dancers along the western belt as well. Into the evening of his life, Kallianpurkar, who knew astrology, got increasingly spiritual, reciting ‘Lalita Sahasranamam’ and ‘Soundarya Lahari’ regularly. The death occurred in 1985 in Hubli, once his place as a college-goer where he stayed with his uncle. Hepatitis B was the villain, though a wrong diagnosis cited cancer. Actually, the malignant disease killed his prime tutor Sundar Prasad (in 1970), Kallianpurkar recalls in the book that features four of his own essays — one being an analytical study, another on nritta technique and two monographs on his gurus Sundar Prasad and Shambhu Maharaj.

Incidentally, Shambhu’s domineering conduct bordering on arrogance contrasted with that of a suave and unruffled Kallianpurkar, note the co-authors without juxtaposing the traits. The trio, who worked amid the two Covid-19 years of aloofness and restrictions, hasn’t over-romanticised the subject. With a research bend, they throw optimal light on Kathak’s history and gharana pride, though the chapter on how classical dances of the south and northeast weathered their crises meanders like a detour. QR codes lend extra material, while footnotes and 42 images (four in colour) from Bhate’s archives at Pune-based Nadroop academy add value to ‘The Paviour of Kathak’. Laudatory recollections come from the legendary Birju Maharaj besides Kumudini Lakhia.

As Kallianpurkar’s life straddled pre- and post-Independent India, the book traces a track of the subcontinent’s 20th-century cultural history, focusing on an untiring struggle for self-worth over a heap of national heritage.