Navtej Johar's dance tribute to Bhagat Singh

Sarika Sharma

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Eulogies to Bhagat Singh are many. In Punjab, the most popular imagination paints him as the groom on his way to marry his beloved. The gallows are romanticised, the ceremonies of marriage are evoked as metaphors, and ‘death’ is imagined as the bride. But Navtej Johar’s ‘Tanashah’ pays a tribute none has offered: it recreates the last few days of the 23-year-old martyr-intellectual’s life in dance — Bharatanatyam.

Johar first opened this act at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa in 2019, Covid halting its stride soon after. Three years on, he has brought ‘Tanashah’ to the stage once again.

The artiste draws on Bhagat Singh’s prison diaries, particularly his essay ‘Why I Am An Atheist’. Johar says he has been drawn to the spirit of Punjab and Bhagat Singh personifies that spirit for him — “bold, clear, fierce, passionate and somewhere unstoppable”.

“On the other hand, the appropriation of Bhagat Singh as a Hindu nationalist icon was most disturbing for me. He was anything but that. Bhagat Singh was a committed communist and fiercely against religion and God,” he says.

Johar is amazed how Bhagat Singh arrived at such searing clarity at such a young age; the clarity with which he willingly accepts death, faces it with an enquiring mind, draws inspiration and courage from it and remains unshaken in his secular views. And this clarity gives him courage and passion. “Apart from being fearless, I also see him as a very sensitive man and a deeply reflexive thinker; he critiques society like a poet,” Johar says.

Youthful death and separation of a lover are the leitmotif of the play. The impending moment of his youthful death almost seems to embolden Bhagat Singh, propelling him unto that final moment with a fierce veracity. Juxtaposed against this fierceness of a man tempting death is a ‘padam’, an amorous song that talks of a lover’s unbearable longing and unacceptable separation from his beloved. The two extremes bring together Johar’s long-time associate Madan Gopal Singh with his haunting singing of ‘Heer’ and Carnatic vocalist K Venkateshwaran.

Johar identifies with the passion of the young visionaries — both of lovers like Heer and Ranjha whose selves merge into each other, notwithstanding death, and Bhagat Singh’s single-minded identification with his objective. “Both are indicative of a yogic condition that is both that of concentration and sensorial aliveness.”

The solo also fulfils Johar’s desire to work with text. “As a classical dancer, we don’t use text, only gestures and expressions. And I wanted to combine them all into a somatic practice with body, voice and words.”

From ‘Fana’a: Ranjha Revisited’ to ‘Tanashah’, Tamil Nadu and Punjab have often coexisted in Johar’s works. Trained in Bharatanatyam at the Kalakshetra Foundation in Chennai, the Jalandhar-born artiste calls Punjab and Tamil Nadu his “two realities”. Their distinct ethos, poetry and landscapes inform his imagination. “This piece, like any other piece I make, is essentially about me, about my insideness that is equally stirred by the fearlessness of Bhagat Singh as well as the beyond-self-love of Waris Shah. Also, I am deeply drawn to both Punjab and Tamil Nadu and find that very vital edginess in the Punjabi and the Dravidian.”

Love, courage and tenderness define the overall tone of ‘Tanashah’. To him, these are the fundamentals of being human. But why ‘Tanashah’, which translates into dictator, we ask. The answer surprises: “Bhagat Singh’s friends started calling him a tanashah because of his very radical views that he openly advocated, but he was no tanashah at all.”