Sitara Devi
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The authors of this article are…
Quaid Najmi, Tuesday, 25 November 2014 | IANS/ Nerve.in (Quaid Najmi can be contacted at q.najmi@ians.in)
Malini Nair, With inputs from Purnima Sharma The Times of India
The artiste
In an era when men wore women's costumes in theatre, dramas, songs and even the fledgling film industry, one young Indian dancer shattered stereotypes. She was Sitara Devi.
Born in Kolkata as Dhanalakshmi, and called Dhanno, as she was born on Diwali in 1920, Sitara Devi later became a living legend -- a renowned exponent of the classical Kathak style of Indian dance. She died in 2014, at age 94.
A school dropout, Sitara Devi struggled against all odds to excel in her chosen field and brought Kathak from the domain of nautch girls to the global arena.
Family
Sitara Devi came from an ordinary but talented Brahmin family of Varanasi which lived in Kolkata and later in Mumbai.
Sitara Devi came from a family of kathakars (story tellers) of Varanasi who sang and danced as they narrated stories from the epics. Her father and guru, Sukhdev Maharaj, also trained her nephew Gopi Krishna, the other big name from the Benares gharana of kathak in Hindi cinema. They represented a school of kathak that was vigorous and flamboyant. It was a style that demanded extreme physical fitness, and Sitara Devi followed, and insisted her students to follow, an exercise regimen outside the dance practice.
Her father Sukhadev Maharaj was a Sanskrit scholar, researched in Bharat Natyashastra and was a Kathak dancer-teacher, a member of the Royal Court of Nepal, and mother Matsya Kumari was related to Nepal royal family.
In the 1920s, Sukhadev Maharaj met Tagore who encouraged him to revive the lost Indian dance form Kathak and elevate it to a dignified status.
Sukhadev Maharaj introduced reforms to revive Kathak by including religious elements -- unlike what the nautch girls did -- and it slowly became popular.
He also taught Kathak to his daughters Alakananda, Tara, Dhanno (later Sitara Devi) and sons Chaube and Pande.
They returned to Varanasi and set up a dancing school where the daughters of local prostitutes were also admitted, and Sukhadev Maharaj battled social ostracism to popularise Kathak.
Childhood
When her marriage was fixed up at the age of eight, Dhanno fought against it, demanding school education. The family finally relented and admitted her to Kamachhagarh High School.
There, Dhanno blossomed as a dancer, and her impressed teachers asked her to teach other children for a performance.
Family discovers her talents
Finally, Dhanno's immense talent dawned on Sukhadev Maharaj. He re-named her as 'Sitara Devi' and put her under the tutelage of his elder daughter Tara. Tara is the mother of Gopi Krishna, the famous Kathak exponent, and nephew of Sitara Devi.
At the age of 10, Sitara Devi started short solo performances during movie intervals in a local theatre in Varanasi for a year and in 1931, the family shifted to Mumbai.
Recognising her huge energy reserves, her father designed a stringent regimen for physical fitness, enabling her to somersault, swirl, wrestle and swing around a tall horizontal pole 100 times with agility till she was 75!
Debut: before Tagore
Soon after reaching Mumbai, she made a public debut at Sir C.J. Hall.
Later, Sitara Devi gave a Kathak recital before a select audience comprising Tagore, Sarojini Naidu and Sir Cowasji Jehangir in a private royal palace, when she was just 11.
At one such performance, Tagore publicly felicitated her with a shawl and Rs.50 gift, which she considered as her life's greatest honour.
At that time my father whispered - 'Don't take only the gifts, he is a great man, seek his blessings' - I sought Gurudev Tagore's blessings to become a great dancer some day, Sitara Devi had said.
Five years later, by when she was 16, Tagore described her as 'Nritya Samragini' (Empress of Dance)., an honour which remained dear to her till death.
Her style
Her dancing was full of vibrant energy. She developed her own niche style drawing from a treasury of themes, poems and choreography collected by her father, creatively analysing and combining the environment to suit each and every step she gracefully performed.
Her high-energy, heavy rhythmic movements based on music could continue effortlessly for hours and occasionally included renditions of 'thumris' and 'bhajans' during the performances.
She blended the elements of two schools of Kathak -- one which was developed in Banares (east Uttar Pradesh) and one from Lucknow, (Oudh, or north Uttar Pradesh), and represented a forgotten era when Kathak used to be performed the whole night.
Cinema
Around 1932, Dhanno was hired by a filmmaker and choreographer Niranjan Sharma and she performed dance sequences in Usha Haran (1940), Nagina (1951), Roti [1942, of which she was the heroine] and Vatan (1954), Anjali (1957) and the epic Mother India (1957), her final role in which she danced to a Holi song dressed as a boy. Other films that featured her dances or choreography include, Abroo, Phool.
Sitara Devi's film dance sequences show the kind of creative struggle classical dancers underwent to survive in Hindi cinema. In a song in the Dilip Kumar-Nargis starrer Hulchul, she pulls off a ballet-type sequence with many chakkars thrown in en pointe (on her toes).
"She actually danced on a piano in K Asif's Phool (1945). Once we travelled for a kathak performance to New York and she picked this star-spangled, transparent costume for herself. We were worried about audience reaction to this but she typically waved away our fears with a 'ja, ja'. And amazingly enough, the audience loved it." He recalls her dancing a 9-hour kathak marathon in Mumbai, alternating her tatkars with cries for glucose and water.
Personal life
She went through two high-profile and turbulent marriages, one with filmmaker K Asif and another with Pratap Barot, the father of her percussionist son Ranjit.
’Candid’ and uninhibited
Veteran critic and associate Sunil Kothari says the dancer had no inhibitions in life and called a spade a spade—in very colourful language.
In his Bollywood chronicles, Saadat Hasan Manto describes Sitara Devi as "not a woman, but a typhoon which did not blow in and out as typhoons do, but which retained its force and fury without showing any signs of weakening". In life as well on the stage, Sitara Devi was the irrepressible force Manto mentions. She continued to dance up a storm till she was well into her 80s. Politespeak was not one of her virtues and no one, not even the holy cows of the classical world, were spared a tongue-lashing if they irritated her.
"Her passion was amazing and her immersion in the style was remarkable, it was like every pore of her body danced," says dancer Aditi Mangaldas. "I once went to meet her in the green room before her show and she asked me to help choose a costume. There was me with my minimalist style and her wardrobe full of the colours that reflected her zest for life. And when I would point to something she would say, 'Arre, yeh kya. Pick a real colour.'"
Sitara played a fairly underclad tribal in Roti, wearing fewer clothes than almost any heroine of that era.
On the stage
Over the years, Sitara Devi performed all over India and abroad, including prestigious venues like Royal Albert Hall, London (1967) and the Carnegie Hall, New York (1976).
After her holi dance sequence in Mother India (1957), Sitara Devi decided to bid goodbye to films to return to pure kathak. Birju Maharaj, whose father, Acchan Maharaj, was her guru too, says she was a fine dancer who assiduously followed the guru-shishya parampara. "She shone like a true sitara on stage and films. I remember once chacha (Shambhu Maharaj) complimented her on her diamond necklace and she promptly gifted it to him saying, 'Maharaj yeh aap se achcha thode hi hai,'" says Birju Maharaj.
Students
Some of her famous students were Madhubala, Rekha, Mala Sinha and even Kajol among many more. She desired to set up a Kathak dance academy in Mumbai, but got no land from the government.
Honours
Honours came from all over, including Padma Shri. But Sitara Devi declined the Padma Bhushan, contending that she deserved a Bharat Ratna given her immense contribution to Kathak.
