Birju Maharaj: Glorifying chiselled form of Kathak

Birju Maharaj – Brijmohan Nath Mishra – whose name remains synonymous with Kathak, was born into a family of illustrious Kathak exponents in Lucknow in the mid-1930s.

His Gharana (school) came to be known after his ancestors – the Kalka-Bindadin Lucknow Gharana. Following the death of his father, the legendary Acchan Maharaj, when he was about nine years, he came under the wing of his uncle Shambhu Maharaj.

Thereafter, Birju’s mother Mahadai wrote to Kapila Vatsyayan (who had been a student of Acchan Maharaj) requesting her help in securing her son’s future. The youngster arrived in Delhi in the late 1940s and soon started teaching at Sangeet Bharati, an organisation set up by Nirmala Joshi, the first secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA). “He was about 12 and most of his students, like the Late Rani Karna, were older than him,” says Nand Kishore Kapote, Birju Maharaj’s former student and author of Nrityasamrat Pandit Birju Maharaj.

Early Days of tough training

Young Birju’s early days in Delhi consisted of a rigorous early morning practice followed by a bicycle ride to the Indian Coffee House in Connaught Place and then to Sangeet Bharti in central Delhi. The bicycle, given by Vatsyayan, still stands in Birju Maharaj’s house on Shahjahan Road in Delhi.

Vatsyayan encouraged the youngster to study and tutored him as well (she preserved two of his exercise books as a memory of those days). He was fascinated by action movies and mechanical devices. (Years later he expressed, “I see the human body as a machine, I am curious about the muscles, bone structure and the capacity of the body to create movement in the canvas of space.”) His child-like qualities endeared him to all.

The youngster also possessed sharp observation skills, photographic memory and an ability to absorb the minutest quality of movement, emotions, sounds and rhythm. He was fortunate that in his journey he found individuals who supported and nurtured his talent.

Married at a very young age, family responsibilities made him accept the offer of arts patron Sumitra Charat Ram who was instrumental in establishing and running Delhi’s premier dance and music institute, namely the Bhartiya Kala Kendra.

Birju Maharaj assisted his uncle Shambhu Maharaj in creating several dance ballets such as Kumar Sambhav and Sham-e-Awadh (on Wajid Ali Shah).

In 1959, under the guidance of his uncle, Lachhu Maharaj (who directed dances in major films like Mughal-e-Azam and Pakeezah) presented his first major production Malti Madhav. This dance-drama had a well-known duet of Birju Maharaj and Guru Kumudini Lakhia.

National Institute established

It was from this strong core of Kathak activities that the Kathak Kendra, or the National Institute of Kathak Dance, came into existence in 1964 under the aegis of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. The institute, located in Bahawalpur House in central Delhi, proved to be a landmark in providing Kathak and allied arts, space for growth and critique.

In the early years, apart from Birju Maharaj, the Kathak Kendra had dance gurus like Kundan Lal, Munna Lal Shukla, Durga Lal, and Reba Vidyarthi for the foundation course of Kathak; Pakhawaj guru Puroshasttam Das of Nathdwara, tabla gurus Manika Prasad Mishra, Vishwanath Mishra (younger brother of Chhannulal Mishra) and Govind Chakravarti. A range of accompanists from traditional sarangi and tabla families were guided by committed cultural administrators ranging from Gopal Das, Govind Vidyarthi, Keshav Kothari and Jiwan Pani to steer Kathak to new heights.

The guru who took the dance form and the institution to new heights was undoubtedly Birju Maharaj. It was here that he trained hundreds of students, created memorable dance productions that were rooted in the local but carried an element of universality that earned him international acclaim. His biggest achievement was that he not only brought Kathak to the modern proscenium; he saw that virtual platforms were one aspect of the future they had to prepare for, so he laid the foundation for online classes as well.

Two Chinese women

As a student at the Kathak Kendra in the 1980s, one never came to know the actual names of Shanu and Manu. The two Chinese women had come to learn from Birju Maharaj in the late 1970s. It was a delight to watch how Birju Maharaj inventively taught them the intrinsic ideas of rhythmic patterns. He would muse, Ama, into Kaise Kathak kee cheezen batau (how do I explain nuances of Kathak to them)?

He would start by playing the tabla percussion. But, instead of the usual Indian performance syllables (bols), he would use different sounds, like ‘pum-pum or ‘chin-chin’ while executing the footwork he had created, which even today is known as the Chinese ladee (a number of things strung together).

In this case, ladee would mean rhythmic syllables strung together, says Raghav Rajbhatt, a student who accompanied and assisted Birju Maharaj for over a decade and, with his guru’s encouragement, popularised Kathak in Telangana.

Amplifying Kathak

The Kathak Kendra was from the mid-1960s to mid-1990s the anchoring institution where Birju Maharaj nurtured his art of Kathak and brought its aesthetics from the performance spaces of private courtyards and courts to the modern stage. He was largely responsible for the amplification of Kathak in the international arena.

Although he was not formally educated by modern or Western standards, as one of India’s most travelled performers, Maharaj Ji, as he was known, had the comprehensive experience to compare and distinguish the variations in Indian dance aesthetics from those in Western dance formats such as ballet and modern dance.

My routine in the 1980s was to go to the Kathak Kendra for my morning practice before hopping onto a bus to reach Delhi University in time for my classes. I would frequently find Maharaj Ji practising with the utmost concentration in the next room. To me, it was astonishing that an artist of his calibre, who was at the peak of his career, found it essential to practice daily!

Birju Maharaj had a unique routine in that he would usually practise facing his shadow, formed by a ray of sunlight filtering into the room from a corner, with the greater part of the room still dark.

Once I asked him the purpose of practising with shadows and darkness.

He remarked, “Shadows allow me to engage with the purity of the line of my body movements. At the same time, executing footwork in the dark and silence makes the sound much louder. It enables a process of immersion, moving in that shoonyata. In this shoonyata, the body is tuned with nature to understand the laya and pulse of life.”

Dancer and the Dance

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Birju Maharaj’s interactions with international students and foreign spaces stand out for the effort he put into them. While teaching young women students from Europe or America he thought a lot about how to communicate the idea of the concept of ghungat (veil) or nakhra (coyness) that was outside their cultural experience in a modern-day setting. His global popularity was anchored in the rooted Indianness that he succeeded in communicating to the West.

Raghav Rajbhatt remembers the occasions when Birju Maharaj would show his foreign students exactly what he meant. He would enact the role of Radha or a gopi – lowering his eyes out of shyness and reverence, his body shrinking in coyness – and ask the students to be Krishna!

As he once said, “I never have to negotiate my Indianness to present contemporary themes. One only needs to have command over the intrinsic element of one’s dance grammar. If you are confident in your body and in the vocabulary you possess, you will create and express traditional and contemporary themes with ease. Also, you do not need to have the padding of designer costumes, fancy lighting and sound to convey your story through Kathak.”

During his international travels, Birju Maharaj and Vidushi Sawswati Sen (who was one of his earliest students) would often perform exclusively for the Indian diplomatic community. Former diplomat B R Muthu Kumar recalls that during his posting in Germany, his senior asked him to ensure that Birju Maharaj and Saswati Sen performed on August 15 at the new opera house in Frankfurt. After the concert, Kumar hosted a dinner and Birju Maharaj found out that it was the birthday of their host.

“The most memorable gift that day for me was Maharaj singing on my birthday at home and Saswati doing tukdas (abstract pure dance compositions) to Maharaj’s bol. It was 40 minutes of sheer bliss,” recounts Kumar.

Some anecdotes

Raghav Rajbhatt has his stock of anecdotes as well. “On a government tour to the Netherlands, we had three shows of Maharaj Ji’s dance ballet Roopmati Baaz Bahadur and had fashioned cardboard swords for the war scenes. The dancers performed so enthusiastically that the swords broke during the first show itself!  There were some Dutch workers hanging around in the auditorium after the show.

“Between Maharaj Ji and me, we mimed our way to a store where packaging material was lying around. I created two swords out of it, and then Maharaj Ji and I tried them out by using them in a fight.  The workers in the auditorium thought we were fighting with real swords and tried to make us stop. Maharaj Ji tried to tell them that the swords were harmless but failed to do so. Finally, he asked me to hit him with the sword. I exclaimed, how can I hit my guru? But Maharaj Ji scolded me, so I raised the sword and hit him. The workers realised what was happening and we all had a good laugh!”

In the past couple of years, the Covid-19 pandemic made people across the world familiar with terms like lockdown, isolation and social distancing, bringing travel almost to a standstill, but Birju Maharaj was unfazed. He worked till the very end, teaching students online even from the hospital. During the period of lockdown, he published a compilation of his musical and poetic compositions titled, Brij Shyam Kahe (Brij Shyam was his pen name).

Truly, the guru who brought a chiselled form of Kathak transcending all gharanas to the modern proscenium, negotiated the dynamics of the virtual stage, created a critical viewership for the dance form across India and abroad, and laid so much emphasis on communicating Kathak’s essence to students across the globe, was a “universal, living Madhurya Krishna” (Krishna who is the very essence of sweetness), as described by Srivats Goswami from the Chaitanya Premsansthan in Vrindavan.

As for Birju Maharaj’s ability to inhabit traditional and contemporary themes with effortless ease, be rooted and universal at the same time, the challenge will be to take forward that legacy.

Navina Jafa is Vice-President of Centre for New Perspectives, a think tank that works on intangible heritage, traditional knowledge through research and pilot programmes for sustainable development. The above article, which appeared on the Website of Wire India, has been published under a Special Agreement.