How Pandit Birju Maharaj always stayed alive to sights, sounds, and sentiments of the present

The last time I spoke to Pandit Birju Maharaj was in 2017, a few days before he was scheduled to perform at NCPA’s Bandish Festival in Mumbai. I was writing a preview of performances at the festival, and had been asking artists what they expected audiences to see. In response to my question, Maharaj chuckled a bit, and confessed he had no idea what he was going to perform. This was too early to decide. He would sneak a peek at the audience from the green room, after the doors had opened, sometime between the first bell and the third bell. And that moment, he said, was when he would know what to dance that evening. Birju Maharaj’s artistic oeuvre was defined by this spontaneity. Kathak is richer for the ideas he brought to it. Tributes to Maharaj’s life and work poured in when the news of his death, aged 84, broke on Monday. Maharaj, born Brijmohan Nath Mishra on 4 February, 1937, began his life in a very different India. Born into a family of court dancers, he spent his childhood touring the courts of various northern and central Indian principalities. Learning dance and music, then, was equally a matter of structured lessons with his father and uncles, and of absorbing and imbibing what Maharaj saw around him. Visibly gleeful as he reminisced about the past, in multiple interviews across decades, he would talk about being roused from his sleep in the middle of the night, his bed clothes swapped out for a costume even as he was half-asleep, because a capricious nawab wanted to watch a performance. Maharaj was performing these midnight dances in a fast-changing India, with Independence around the corner. Independence would bring with it new systems of governance, and thus, of patronage. The systems of belonging and livelihood that his predecessors had known and built were also set to change.   And Maharaj was growing as a performer with these changes unfolding around him. As a teenager, in the early 1950s, he travelled to Delhi in order to teach Kathak at a series of institutions, eventually finding a home in Kathak Kendra. The 1950s were when many of the forms, we now recognise as classical dance, were being consolidated and reconstructed, from mythology, literature, sculpture, and the repertoires of hereditary performers. Many of these forms would be presented at the First Dance Seminar organised by the newly constituted Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1958. The state was now the biggest patron of the arts. And as a young postcolonial nation, the arts were crucial to India’s new national identity.  

Maharaj found himself in the thick of these developments, having to reinterpret what lineage and tradition meant within new institutional structures.

The familial gharana system he had descended from was now expanding to include new students, often from middle-class urban backgrounds. For Maharaj, dance was life. “Malik hi rhythm hain (God is rhythm, life is rhythm),” he once said in a television interview. How would these ways of being and living translate into the structure of the institution?   Maharaj’s students remember a curious teacher with a childlike appreciation of new gadgets and a tremendously improvisatory style. While the movement aesthetic of Kathak was set, within its framework, Maharaj was telling new stories every time he approached a composition or a rhythmic phrase. When he danced, he also listened, and audiences were endeared by that attention. Maharaj fed off the energy of an audience. If someone coughed, the sonic landscape of the cough would morph into a tihai, a charged and percussive phrase, repeated thrice to end with explosive effect at the sam, the first beat of a rhythmic cycle performance. When asked to explain his sense of rhythm and movement, he was often at a loss for words. He spoke of himself as an instrument; he was not the doer, but was guided to do by unseen forces. He had the uncanny ability to read an audience, and summon up mythical and rhythmic universes of Kathak that would speak to them that evening.   The first time I saw Maharaj dance in 2006, in the courtyard of an engineering school in Mumbai, I remember him holding court backstage, in a makeshift green room. A line of admirers spilled out of the room, and into the corridors of the engineering school. They wanted to touch his feet, recount shared time and performances, and cement connections. When Kathak dancers speak of their gurus or name older artists and practitioners, sometimes, you might find them quickly tugging at their ears. This is in equal parts a tribute to one’s lineage and an apology for voicing the names of great personages, for the act of calling them into being in singular form. It is a gesture Maharaj would often use during his interviews, tugging at his ears when he mentioned his grandfathers, fathers or uncles. In the world of dance, Birju Maharaj the artist was a monolithic figure, composed not only of his life and work, but also by the stories, myths, and anecdotes that had accrued to him over time. Together, they would constitute a mythic imagination of Birju Maharaj as a figure, and simultaneously, of Kathak.   [caption id=“attachment_10292581” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Pandit Birju Maharaj[/caption] Maharaj and his family were also pervasive figures in Hindi cinema. His uncle Lacchu Maharaj was known for his work on films like Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Pakeezah (1972). One of Birju Maharaj’s most iconic film choreographies was ‘Kahe Chhed’  from Devdas (2002), featuring Madhuri Dixit. The song features lavish sequences that establish the cinematic resonance of Kathak, whether it is the top shots of swirling skirts as a roomful of dancers turn in chakkars, or the close-ups of bejewelled ghunghroos tinkling on Madhuri Dixit’s feet. But there are plenty of subtle moments, like the ones where Dixit, sitting with her back to the camera, drops a shoulder and slides her fingers down her arm, sending a frisson of excitement through her attentive audience, both onscreen and offscreen. Birju’s ability to listen, to almost work backwards, mapping the path from rasa to bhava and then executing it the other way round, was on full display in these subtle, nuanced, and fleeting moments.   Kathak has been changing. The 21st century has brought new but important conversations around the guru-shishya parampara, and the content and repertoire of classical dance forms, including Kathak, to the fore. What role does consent play in the flirtatious and vaguely non-consensual exchanges between heroes and heroines in mythological narratives, young dancers have asked? How do we apply 21st century understandings to these narratives? Through eight decades of work, Birju Maharaj was always alive to the present — to its sounds, sights, and sentiments. And that is his legacy — this spirit of curiosity and spontaneity — even as dancers work through the challenging but essential questions they must ask of themselves, and of the forms they inhabit.   Ranjana Dave is a dancer and writer based in New Delhi. She tweets at  @chaltipatang.