Spotlight
Contribution Of Male Artists To The Evolution Of Odissi

An important role in
the formation of what we define today as Odissi dance was played in the first
half of the 20th century by male artists belonging to the performing arts scene
of those days. At the time when the 'devadasi' tradition had come to an end and
the 'gotipua' tradition was looked upon as cheap and vulgar, a group of
talented and versatile stage artists infused new life into the dying dance
scene. The emergence of the present day Odissi cannot be totally understood
unless we place it in the context of the fertile atmosphere which the theatre
movement of the first half of the last century and the artists behind it
provided. Among the artists were Mohansunder Dev Goswami, Ramachandra Mania,
Laxminarayan Patra, Lingaraj Nanda, Kartik Kumar Ghose. Brindavan Das, Kashinath Sahoo, Durlav Chandra
Singh, Kalicharan Pattanayak, and Dayal Sharana. They were totally dedicated
and committed to the cause of reviving the performing arts of Orissa. Each one
of them was an exponent of more than one discipline, like music, drama
direction, dance or stage craft; and each one of them was a self made artist,
having acquired whatever expertise he had, more by observation than by
undergoing systematic training.
When Kelucharan Mohapatra's father Chintamani discovered, in the early thirties, that his six year old son was clandestinely taking dance lessons from Balabhadra Sahu, a gotipua master settled in Raghurajpur, his reaction was: "You would like, would you, to dance around moving your hips, pulling faces with your tongue stretched out, winking at the zamindar to receive garlands of flowers or to get banknotes pinned on your chest? This will not do!" Such was the attitude towards the gotipua dance in those days!
Eventually Chintamani sent his son to the only performing arts school he could trust, the Ras Leela party founded by Mohansunder Goswami, where his two elder sons had already learnt to act and play the dhol.
The legendary Radha Krishna Bihari Ras Dal, founded by Mohansunder Dev Goswami in Puri in 1918, served as a training ground for a number of youngsters, aged between eight and 18, who lived with the master and imbibed from him the art of abhinaya, percussion playing, singing and stagecraft. The training may not have included much of dance as such, but it was meant to mould the child into a performing artist by offering him not only a technique but also the right atmosphere of discipline and devotion towards the arts. The children were made to learn by heart the different songs from the Geeta Govinda and Vaishnava poems and were taught how to sing, act, move around and gesticulate according to the character assigned to them.
In a Ras Leela play, the musical score and the songs sung by the actors were given the most importance; a few lines of recitation were interspersed just to create links between the sequences.
During those days, a Ras Leela performance by Mohan
Goswami's troupe could easily draw 3000 to 4000 spectators who would assemble
not only from the village where the performance took place but also from miles
away. With a simple and rustic stage, a set of gestures taken mostly from daily
life and a minimum number of combinations of foot movements, the performance
was able to create a strong emotional impact on the audience.
In the Ras Leela style of recitation, the satvika aspect was given the most importance; guru Goswami himself would incite the children from the side of the stage so that they would not loose concentration. The variety of songs employed in Goswami's plays gave ample scope to the artists to familiarise themselves with the myriads of episodes and nuances of the imaginative and rich literature which took shape in Orissa during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries around the mythical story of Radha and Krishna.
This experience was of great importance for the future development of abhinaya in Odissi dance since, not only Kelucharan Mohapatra, but quite a few of the other Odissi guru-s as well, had at one point or the other gone through this apprenticeship.
It is noteworthy that, in Goswami's troupe, the most memorable female roles were portrayed by two of its male members, although two girls had also been accepted as part of it. The two girls were Radharani, daughter of a mahari's sister, who specialised in the character of Brindadevi; and Bidhyutlata Mohanty, a prostitute's daughter who used to portray the role of Chandrabali. The role of Radha was depicted by a boy named Basudeva and that of Lalita by Raghunath Nanda, who had been picked up by guru Goswami while he was singing along with his father on the 'bada danda' (main road) in Puri. Both the roles were quite demanding: while the first one was more intense and introverted, the second was supposed to be full of humour and wit and it seems Raghunath was so good in portraying this naughty character that he used to get medals for 'the best role' every time he performed. This goes to show that it is talent and not gender which is more important in the evaluation of an artist!
Another excellent interpreter of female roles was Ramachandra Mania from Gada Rengala in Puri district. A cowherd by caste, as a child and dressed as little Krishna, he used to take part in the Laudi khela, a kind of shepherds' dance enacted during the 'dola' poornima festivities in his village. He was spotted by one Somnath Mohapatra from Haripur and trained vigorously for six months in the gotipua style before he took part in the 'sangeeta dhala'. By the time the Radha Krishna Theatre, the first professional theatre of Orissa, was founded by Bonomali Pati in Bolonga in 1918, Ramachandra Mania was already known as 'Master Mania', an epithet which stuck to him throughout his life. During his association with the Radha Krishna Theatre, later on renamed as Bonomali Art Theatre, he had occasion not only to learn classical music and perfect his abhinaya under guru Brindavana Bihari Das from Balasore, but also to teach the gotipua dance and Odissi sangeet to a number of other male actors, among whom Kashinath Sahu from Pipli and Kartik Kumar Ghose, younger brother of the dramatist AswiniKumar Ghose, were also connected with the theatre.
Master Mania's portrayals of female roles were extremely accurate. He distinguished himself in the role of Bimali in the nataka titled 'Jayadeva'; of the nartaki Bandi in 'Ali Baba' and in the role of a maharani in the play 'Harischandra'. Among the dance items taught by him, there was a Siva-Parvati piece which Kartik Kumar Ghose and Kashinath Sahu danced together at Stewart School in Cuttack in 1931 and the Sree Krishna Nritya, a solo piece which won Kashinath Sahoo a gold medal when he performed it in a dance competition organised in 1936 by the Utkal Sahitya Samaj at Ramchandra Bhavan in Cuttack.
By the time the Bonomali Art Theatre closed down in 1936 due to financial difficulties, another professional group called Annapurna Natya Mandali had started functioning from the village of Klianduala Kota near Balugaon. Founded by Somnath Das, a landlord of the same village, assisted by Lingaraj Nanda from Lambhadarapur and Bauri Bandhu Mohanty of Jagatsinghpur, this Mandali's troupe began quite soon to tour and be known all over Orissa.
In the first 10 years of its existence, the group did not have a permanent stage to perform on and it used to set up camps in various districts of the State for the duration of one full season and would perform in make-shift pandals. During the rainy seasons, the entire troupe would stay in a rented hall in Cuttack to rehearse new plays. Only when, in 1945, a second group called the Annapurna B Group came to occupy this space, the original group, from then on called the A Group, settled down permanently in Puri in a three-storied building with an adjacent land, situated on the bada danda, in front of the police station.
The dance masters in the A Group, who were functioning also as directors and actors as enjoined, were Master Mania, Kashinath Sahoo and Kartik Kumar Ghose, who had all joined after the closing down of the Bonomali Art Theatre, and Laxminarayan Patra from Gudiali in Ganjam. The latter belonged to the folk theatre tradition of Prahlad Nataka, a performing art-form of the Ganjam area, which involved music, vigorous dance and acting. He had joined the theatre along with his three brothers— Brindavan, Adhinarayan and Satyanarayan— all involved in dance, acting and directing.
Kartik Kumar Ghose, besides learning gotipua dance from Master Mania in 1940, had also attended a summer course of six months' duration, in Almora, where Uday Shankar, the doyen of a new stream in the Indian dance tradition, had just opened a centre for imparting training in various styles. It is interesting to note how all these different influences went into the formation of the first group and solo dances which the young girls, who started to be associated with the A Group in the early forties, used to perform on stage, usually at the beginning of the enactment of a drama.
Among these was a group item, danced by Laxmipriya, Sara and Haramani, composed by Kashinath Sahoo in a style akin to the Manipuri one, to the accompanying Oriya song Manara kotha kohibi kahara sakhi rey (To whom shall I tell the secrets of my heart, O friend?); and the solo number, performed by Laxmipriya, Neela famuna kuley kalia (Krishna on the banks of the dark Jamuna) composed in folk style by Laxminarayan Patra.
With the introduction of female dancers on stage, the profits of the theatre increased considerably, and this naturally brought the various theatres, the two Annapurnas on one side and the Orissa Theatre, founded by Kalicharan Pattanayak in 1939, on the other, to compete with each other for having the most attractive dancers and dance numbers. It so happened that, in the year 1946, within a period of a few months, all the three theatres introduced in their respective plays a short dance number by a lady artist in Odissi style (even if the appellation of Odissi until then was used more to refer to the music than to the dance).
In July of the same year in fact, Kalicharan Pattanayak staged his own play 'Abhijan' (directed by Adhwita Charan Mohanty and Durlav Charan Singh) where a female dancer, Sara performed within the context of the drama, a mahari song at the court of king Purushottam Dev.
Almost at the same time, the A Group presented the play 'Kavisurja', based on the life and works of the Oriya poet Kavisurja Baladev Ratha, in which a female dancer, Haramani, performed a short sequence of Odissi bol-s at the court of the Raja of Athaghara. This play was written by Ramachandra Mishra and directed by Kartik Kumar Ghose, whereas the dance sequence was taught to Haramani Devi by master Harihara Panda.
In the same year, the B Group opened its new play 'Abhisek', written by Aswini Kumar Ghose, with star dancer Laxmipriya dancing to the Oriya song fanarey mo rana parama mita (My dear friend, this is my promise), one of the two songs taught to her by gotipua master Krishna Chandra Mahapatra, the other one being Nahi ke karidela (The one who denied). The lyrics of both were by Kishor Kavi Shyam Sundar Das and set to music respectively by Balakrishna Das and Singhari Shyam Sundar Kar. Laxmipriya had been brought to the B Group from the A Group by Lingaraj Nanda at the time when a female dancer was required for the part of Mohini in the drama 'Devi Bhasmasura'.
The B Group had the advantage of not only having in its ranks the two juture doyens of Odissi dance, Pankaj Charan Das and Kelucharan Mohapatra, but also of having access to the teachings of another male dancer, who, although from a completely different school, happened to play a determinant role in the emergence of the dance scene in Orissa. A Telugu by birth, Dayal Sharana had undertaken training in Kathak and Bharatanatyam before joining the India Cultural Centre in Almora, founded in the early forties by Uday Shankar. Here Dayal was exposed not only to Manipuri and Kathakali, but also to the eclectic and creative approach in dance-training which was characteristic of Uday Shankar's method of teaching. He had to leave the Centre even before its closing down in 1944, due to an attack of tuberculosis, and, after recovery he founded his own group of dancers with whom he used to give performances by hiring theatre halls in different towns and selling tickets for the shows.
He had come to Cuttack in 1947 along with six or seven of his dancers to show his dance numbers and had rented the Annapurna Theatre hall for three evenings. The ticket sale of the first two evenings had not been encouraging at all and he feared that he would be unable to meet even the cost of the hall. By this time the B Group had already staged the drama 'Sadhava Jhia' (The merchant's daughter) in which Laxmipriya and Kelucharan paired in the Dasavatar number composed by Pankaj Charan Das.
Kelucharan Mohapatra's aptitude to dance had been a revelation for the troupe. Fearing adverse comments he had in fact never disclosed to anybody that he had learnt gotipua dance in his childhood. And, up to the time of the 'Devi Bhasmasura' drama, he was only known as a good mridanga player. When the chance to stage a short dance sequence to be presented at the beginning of this drama arose, Pankaj Charan Das, who was at that time the dance master in the B Group, assigned the role of Mahadev to Kelucharan and kept for himself that of Bhasmasura, which at first was supposed to be danced in Chhau style by Radha Krishna Bhanja from Banpada.
After the success of his maiden appearance, Kelucharan was entrusted with the main role in the duet dance Dasavatar next to Laxmipriya whose assignment was mainly to stand with the 'anjali mudra' in the bhakta attitude.
Dayal Sharana had the chance to watch the dance rehearsals of Kelucharan and Laxmipriya and was so impressed by what he saw that he proposed to Lingaraj Nanda to have a mixed program on the third evening, by combining the dance items of the two troupes. The Annapurna troupe opened the performance with Dasavatar, followed by Nahi ke kahdela danced by Laxmipriya and the 'Devi Bhasmasura' dance-drama; after the interval, there were the numbers by the Dayal troupe including, among others, two solo items by him, the Hunter and the Soorya dances. The Oriya public, this time more numerous than in the first two evenings, expressed its appreciation of the indigenous items by clapping more vigorously during the first half than in the second. But, in spite of the good turnout of people, Dayal failed to raise enough money for paying the rent of the hall. He then proposed to Lingaraj Nanda to be allowed to pay back his debt by directing a dance production for the Annapurna Theatre. He had already set his eyes on Kelucharan and he was quietly looking forward to an opportunity to teach this promising lad everything he knew. Lingaraj Nanda as well as Durlav Chandra Singh and the other directors of the troupe welcomed the idea immediately; with the success of the first dance items staged and the opening up of the dance scenario, everybody had started feeling the limitations of a training which lacked a firm and systematic foundation. They admired the variety of styles known to Dayal and were particularly impressed by the neat presentation of the group choreographies which revealed a much more sophisticated approach in comparison with whatever had been presented up to now by the Annapurna group.
Dayal Sharana was entrusted with the composition of a new dance sequence to be performed at the beginning of the next drama 'Radhika' to be directed by Durlav Chandra Singh. For Kelucharan started one of the most intense and exciting experiences of his apprenticeship. The one that left him ready to take off, confident and aware that he possessed the power and the creativity to compose dance on any subject. Guru Kelucharan was born out of this encounter; and it is significant that it should be the Uday Shankar touch, although transmitted through one of his students, which lit one more spark of creativity in the world of dance. And not an ordinary one for that matter! In Kelucharan's words: "Dayal Sharana showed me the way; he made me conscious of what my body was doing and what more could be achieved through exercises. He made me aware of the use of the different mudra-s of the hands and of the possibilities of utilising the same hand gestures for expressing different actions. Not that I was not using mudra-s before, but I was not aware of it. He explained to me the derivation of the various hand gestures starting from the actions of everyday life; he would ask me to observe my hands while I was drinking water or eating food or holding an object and from there he would go to the " sastric' name of the mudra. He made me understand that although there are classified v mudra-s' in the written texts, many more could be created through observation of everyday life. He taught me how to compose small sequences of dance by putting together different steps; he opened in front of me the door of 'creativity' and once I went beyond its threshold I never had to look back ." After completing the group dance item on Radha and Krishna for the Annapurna group, for the next two years Dayal Sharana kept in touch with them by returning to Cuttack at regular intervals. During each visit he taught something to the actors and dancers of the troupe, among whom were Mayadhar Rout and Raghu Dutta. Kelucharan on his part continued practising the different body exercises even during Sharana's absence, improving and refining his dance movements more and more.
Soon after this, Pankaj Charan Das left the B Group and Lingaraj Nanda did not hesitate to entrust Kelucharan with the direction of the dance sequence to be included in the next play 'Aloka', produced by Priyanath Mishra. The piece, danced by Laxmipriya in three different styles— Manipuri, Odissi and Kathak— was the first dance item to be fully composed by Kelucharan; the style was derived from the mixed one taught by Dayal Sharana with Kelucharan accompanying the dance on the tabla and the pakhawaj. With the increasing number of girls coming forward to learn dance from 1950 onwards, the male dancers got more and more busy in giving private tuitions and they separated themselves from the theatre scene, although for the first few years they occasionally collaborated whenever any dance composition needed to be included in some play. If, on the one side, the popularity of Odissi dance grew due to the increasing number of female dancers who took to the stage, on the other it may have lost the opportunity to produce any more great male actors specialising in female roles. This is what has happened also in other styles of dance such as Kuchipudi and Chhau, where the introduction of female dancers has prevented the new generation of males from concentrating and refining the feminine aspects of the respective dance-forms. As far as modern Odissi is concerned, the male performer of today, perhaps intimidated by the large number of females around him, finds it hard to locate his proper space as performing artist and tends to confine himself to the role of teacher or at the most of a partner to a female dancer. The example of guru Kelucharan Mohapatra who has returned to the stage after a gap of almost 30 years and who, at the age of 75, performs with equal ease the vigorous character of Ravana and the delicate role of Radha, should once again prove that it is not age or gender which counts but dedication and commitment to the chosen art-form.
ILEANA CITARISTI