Mohan Khokar
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
A profile
Prerna Sodhi TNN The Times of India, July 16, 2011
Dancer and collector Mohan Khokar (1924-99) dedicated all he had to documenting and archiving almost a century of India’s dance history. For the first time, this extensive and treasured collection of photographs, costumes, recordings, films, paintings, sketches and other dance-related material will be showcased in an exhibition to be inaugurated.
“A Century of Indian Dance:1901-2000”
Organized by Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) and conceptualized by Khokar’s son Ashish, a dance critic, the exposition, ‘A Century of Indian Dance:1901-2000’, will feature India’s dance forms and its evolution over the 20th century. “The entire collection showcases the milestones in Indian dance forms and how they have evolved with time. The idea behind chronicling was to keep them as old reference points,” said Ashish.
The exhibition, which is also being called the national launch of the Mohan Khokhar Dance Collection, will be open in five parts at the Visual Arts Gallery at India Habitat Centre. From the use of dance in old Air India advertisements to postage stamps retrieved from Singapore showing Indian dances, the collection promises to bring forth some unique objects, such as a 75-year-old Nataraja made of broken bangles and beads. “The collection records anyone and anything associated with dance. It also includes dance forms represented on calendars, fire cracker boxes, sketches, and Kathakali dance representation on textile and paintings,” said Ashish.
Another interesting exhibit is a photograph of the Maharaja of Baroda with his newly wedded wife, a Tanjore princess, in 1883. The otherwise unremarkable picture offers a clue about the spread of Bharatanatyam to India’s west and north, as the maharaja’s dowry also comprised a troupe of Bharatanatyam dancers.
Ashish said his father used to spend hours at a time in a Chennai library, researching and taking down notes from the available literature on various dance forms, all with a pencil. “We are talking about the 1940s when my father documented the available literature of dance from books. The same library was destroyed in a fire later,” he said.
Ashish has been managing and adding to the already comprehensive collection for the last 25 years. He says the archive is not just a study of dance. “We are not looking at dance in isolation. In fact, the entire collection is representative of what India was like in the 1950s or the 1970s. The collection is neither specific to region nor religion.”Ashish’s big worry now is the future of the collection as it does not have a home for itself, but is still housed at the Khokar residence in Chennai. “The collection has not been institutionalized or digitized till now. It has been with my family for the last 40 years and is kept in our home in Chennai.” ICCR director general Suresh K Goel said the collection had been waiting to be showcased to the world for a while now. Even though ICCR may not be able to institutionalize it permanently, it does plan to take the collection across the globe. “The collection is slated to be exhibited in New York, Paris etc. The idea is to showcase to the world through this collection on Indian dance forms, how India itself has evolved in the last century,” he added.
