A truly electrifying dancer

Sreevalsan Thiyyadi

The gathering at Lahore was restive as the dance show began much behind schedule. This left young Yamini Krishnamurthy tasked with nursing the viewers’ grievance primarily. She took up the challenge along with a risk: opening to a long piece. “If they liked it, they would stay around,” the artiste would later recall the gamble. Not only did the residents of the heritage city cheer her, many among the enthralled even sang with her towards the end of the programme.

Yamini was already established when this episode unveiled in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Yet, practical tips during tricky junctures would invariably come from her father. “Suppose you start with a small item and many in the audience leave immediately. You are defeated easily,” suggested M Krishnamurthy, who often travelled with Yamini, knowing her calibre. He foresaw the victory in the Paris of the East.

In any case, Yamini had won over her family as a little girl. At five and just into school, she told her parents that academic studies bored her. “I want to dance, nothing else,” she kept announcing — louder as days passed by in the Cauvery delta where she grew up as a child. The elders were all art-inclined, but they sensed no career in anyone taking up Bharatanatyam full-time in the 1940s.

The Telugu kid living in Tamil land had her reason. A couple of minutes’ walk from her house in Chidambaram would take Yamini to the imposing Nataraja temple. Its exquisite architecture featured statues that enticed her much — especially Shiva in his cosmic dancing posture. Spending all day for months together in its precincts, Yamini decided that dance alone would define her life.

The determination led Prof Krishnamurthy to eventually take the child to Kalakshetra. In between, for seven years, Yamini lived in hilly Madanapalle in ancestral Andhra Pradesh. Kalakshetra was only a couple of furlongs away from their residence in Madras. It took one glance at the bright-eyed child for theosophist Rugminidevi Arundale to conclude that the aspirant was a promise. Indeed, the 12-year-old student went on to rise as an icon — and for not just Bharatanatyam. She redefined the status of Kuchipudi and made meaningful inroads into Odissi as well. As the late scholar SN Chandrashekhar used to note, Yamini infused freshness while presenting the three classical forms, seldom mixing up the movements.

By the time Yamini was in her twenties, India of the 1960s had begun to acknowledge the stature of its vintage arts that had undergone grand reinventions. An array of maestros played a role in this renaissance in dance and music. Yamini’s role in the subsequent take-off was central, notes fellow Delhiite and Bharatanatyam exponent Geeta Chandran. “For three decades till the early 1990s, she was an overarching figure,” she adds, also recalling the complementary intellectual contributions by the dancer’s father. “Yaminiji was effectively the country’s global ambassador for dance.”

At age 15, Yamini saw Tanjore Balasaraswati perform. Stunned, she strived to emulate the icon. Two years later, in 1957, Yamini’s Bharatanatyam debut at Madras marked the start of her fine assimilation of two major schools: Pandanallur and Kanchipuram. The lyrical movements of the first came through Kittappa Pillai, while Ellappa Pillai’s unhurriedness emboldened her rhythmic patterns. Dandayudhapani Pillai’s choreographies inspired her. Devadasi Mylapore Gowriammai honed Yamini’s abhinaya skills. She also learned Carnatic: vocals from the unconventional MD Ramanathan and the veena from the purist Kalpakam Swaminathan.

Past her teens, Yamini’s liking for Kuchipudi grew further. She decided to learn it, ignoring voices that dubbed the Andhra dance folksy. Vedantam Laxminarayana Sastry, Chinta Krishnamurthy and Venugopala Sarma guided her eminently. Around that time, she decided to learn Odissi, too, primarily under Puri-born Pankaj Charan Das, who had taught the celebrated Kelucharan Mohapatra — also Yamini’s guru later.

By 35, Yamini had herself become an established teacher, with 400 students. A decade and a half later, in 1990, she founded a dance institute in the national capital, which was already her home. “Till then, I was a busy performer within the country and abroad,” she’d wind back. “Setting up a school implied less time for composing. Yet, I could groom a whole lot of disciples.”

A Padma Vibhushan awardee, Yamini moulded her own style through eclecticism, but never insisted her pupils must follow her — even the self-invented leaps that made her distinct on the stage. “Deep knowledge about Hindu mythology, though, is essential for excellence.”

Yamini’s prime-time performances for rustic audiences across the Hindi belt earned her the name ‘bijli’. “She was truly electrifying,” notes art historian Ashish Mohan Khokar. To many, her dance was representative of the Nataraja image that stayed inside her from the toddler days.