In the 1940s, when boys weren’t really encouraged to pursue dance as a career, Sunil Kothari opted to train as a dancer. In 1956, he changed tracks to become a critic of the art form instead. It’s his career as a dance critic that Kothari will be talking about to city audiences on Friday evening as part of Junoon’s Mumbai Local initiative.
The youngest of ten siblings, Kothari’s love for dance began when he started learning Kathak as a ten-year-old in Deodhar’s Classes at Opera House. When Kothari’s parents enrolled him for his first class, little did they know that their son would go on to become a Padma Shri-winning dance scholar and critic. “My face became a playground for various emotions, and I expressed them rather well. My body fell into graceful poses. I loved all that. Parents and elders showed off my talents before guests,” Kothari recalls while speaking to The Hindu .
But walking on the path of passion was not easy. During his college days, Kothari was often ridiculed for dancing. He was studying chartered accountancy and would often perform at college festivals. By the early 1950s, he was not just a dancer, but also a trained chartered accountant. He had begun working as a CA, but was slowly drawn back to the swirls of Kathak, the adavus of Bharatnatyam, the samabhangas of Odissi and the kavutvams of Kuchipudi. With the support of his mother, Kothari gave up his career as a CA and began teaching accounts at Sydenham College. It was here that he met Mulk Raj Anand, the founding editor of Marg , a quarterly magazine on art that was started in 1946.
Thus began Kothari’s journey towards researching, and later critiquing, dance in a serious fashion. In 1966, Anand, whom Kothari considers his mentor, invited him to edit an issue on Chhau and masked dances. It was published in December 1968. Taking advice from Professor Mohan Khokar from the department of dance at M.S. University in Vadodara, Kothari started visiting villages in and around Tanjore, Imphal and Nagaland to study native dance forms in depth. “It [the research work] brought me the British Council Fellowship to visit London, study classical ballet and modern dance, and meet critics. I never looked back, and my discovery of India started.”
Kothari soon began attending dance conferences, and became The Times of India ’s dance critic, also contributing extensively on Odissi, Mohiniattam and Kuchipudi dance forms to The Illustrated Weekly of India. Curious to know what made artistes perform in their unique ways, Kothari interacted with dance legends like Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi Arundale to learn about the nuances of the various dance forms. “There was no one like me on the scene. Yes, dancers were there, but they were not critics, and we became friends,” he says of his early days as a writer.
Today, the 83-year-old dance historian occupies the unique position of having witnessed the change in classical dance forms over the last four decades.
He tells us how Chandralekha introduced a revolution in Bharatanatyam by focusing on themes like empowerment of women, sexuality and spirituality by combining Kalaripayattu and elements of yoga. Mrinalini Sarabhai highlighted the issues of dowry deaths and abstract concepts of the Rigveda. While Kathak artiste Kumudini Lakhia initiated a shift in the attitude towards dancers, issues of tradition and society, struggles of middle-class women through her presentations, her disciple Aditi Mangaldas has explored themes that deal with time. Mohiniattam dancer Kanak Rele has used stories of atrocities towards women in Indian mythology like Kunti, Gandhari and Ahalya.
Kothari’s bond with dance stalwarts makes him nostalgic. “Mrinalini and Mallika Sarabhai, Kumudini Lakhia , Aditi Mangaldas — after watching their rehearsals, if I would comment that the choreographic piece is too long, they would edit it,” he says with pride.
Kothari was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Dance Critic Association, New York, in 2011, the Padma Shri in 2001 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1995 for his contribution to the Indian classical dance field. The dance critic has over 15 books and innumerable articles to his credit.
His last book, released in 2013, was Sattriya dances of Assam, which took around 20 years to complete. The Sattriya dance form is performed by Vaishnava celibate monks, who can’t be touched and asked to pose or choreograph for the need of a photograph. “The monasteries are many and all cannot be represented. We had to wait for two years to get permission to visit Majuli island [on Brahmaputra river] and visit them. After the text was submitted by few [native] scholars and gurus, they had to be translated and edited,” he says.
Kothari is currently penning his autobiography, which will talk about the state of dance forms in the early ’50s and how other dance forms were discovered. Expect to read about Kothari’s encounters with Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev, French choreographer Maurice Béjart, German choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch, and his travels with Peter Brook, the director of Mahabharata, and Ratan Thiyam, the theatre director from Imphal. He will also talk about his close association with Mrinalini Sarabhai, Kumudini Lakhia and Chandralekha in the autobiography.
The writer is an intern with The Hindu
Sunil Kothari’s My Journey Through Dance: anecdotes and dance criticismwill take place today at Kitab Khana, Fort, at 5:30 p.m.
