Birju Maharaj a force to be reckoned with

Birju Maharaj a force to be reckoned with

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): When Birju Maharaj dances in Jakarta he will not
only entertain, but his performance will provide a glimpse into a
civilization of a bygone era.

For India's Birju Maharaj is not just a leading exponent of
the Kathak dance. He is an entire cultural legacy of a time when
riches rained upon Lucknow, his hometown, bringing about much
licentiousness and imbalance in both thoughts and action. Then
pleasure seeking had proliferated but the arts were also forced
to flower if for no other reason than to please the nobility.

Dance at that time was made a vehicle for coquetry and poetry
was invented for the extreme glorification of feminine beauty.

At the performance of the Kathak style in Jakarta, his first,
he will dance to excerpts taken from the epic story Ramayana. In
a colorful piece composed specially for audiences here he will
celebrate the Indian spring festival of Holi on stage along with
Saswati Sen, his muse and spiritual consort for nearly three
decades and Deepak Maharaj his son and disciple.

Birju Maharaj is the quintessential Lucknawi which, if used in
a pejorative sense, suggests foppishness and indulgence in
elaborate etiquette, the idle preoccupation of powerless
aristocracies everywhere.

But to know Lucknow is also to know all about the spirit of
mutual tolerance and understanding that existed in the
cosmopolitan capital of architecture, dance, music and creative
writing between different cultures not only from the Indian
subcontinent but from around the world.

The city that gave birth to Birju Maharaj was once the
unwalled capital of Shia Muslims who became its rulers in the
18th century. They were descendants of a family from Nishapur in
Iran who within a decade of their arrival converted the ancient
Hindu city into a dream world of gilded domes and minarets.

The Europeans who followed further conceived it as an Indian
version of a luxurious spa back home. With fortunes flowing in
from the fertile countryside and secure under the protection of
the British armed forces, the rulers retreated for almost 200
years into a world of make-believe as if there was no tomorrow.
Lost within their baroque homes the locals thought they had
arrived either at London's Windsor Castle or the Versailles near
Paris, while Lucknow's rich European population imagined itself
reborn into an Islamic pleasure garden.

In a predominantly Hindu state with a Sunni Muslim majority,
the Iranians and the English soon created a city with pastoral
suburbs where they lived in huge bungalows surrounded by gardens
and paved roads with a small Gothic church, a post office,
banquet hall and tennis courts. These dwellings were considered a
gigantic folly by some, while others were unable to decide
whether the structures resembled a castle, a wedding cake in
brick or a baroque fantasy.

It is in the womb of this very disparate but imaginative Hindu
heartland also home to Persians and Europeans alike that Birju
Maharaj was conceived more than six decades ago in a Brahmin
family that believed Shiva, Parvati and Krishna to be founders of
their art. The only son and disciple of his father, Birju Maharaj
gave his first dance performance when he was seven years old.

Guidance

Although he lost his father when he was just 10 years old, he
continued to dance under the guidance of three uncles who
delighted in imparting to the youngster all those little family
secrets that have kept dancers from this family famous for over
300 years. Today Birju Maharaj is not just a master of dance and
drama but a fine vocalist and drummer too. He is able to play
many a musical instrument with as much ease as he composes poetry
and it is quite obvious that age has only added to his phenomenal
knowledge of bol (musical phrases), laya (speed of movement),
taal (beat) and bhava (expression), all important components of
the Kathak dance.

The ancestors of Birju Maharaj were professional kathaks
(storytellers) in neighboring Brijbhumi, the land of Krishna who
sang and danced in praise of the gods at temples. Mesmerized by
the energetic dancing and music, Muslim rulers invited some of
the devotees of lord Krishna to court. Since the rulers
themselves concentrated on much poetry and music, having little
to do on the battle field, they exchanged tunes on musical
instruments brought with them from Iran and absorbed the
religious fervor of the kathaks into different aspects of
sensuousness and romance as well.

The city's musical activity reached its zenith under Wajid Ali
Shah, Lucknow's last ruler who would himself compose, dance and
sing along with the ancestors of Birju Maharaj, enthralling one
and all with his excessive gaiety. It is here that Persian
mingled with the local dialect and added another dimension to
Urdu, a language initially born out of the unavoidable
interaction between the invading speakers of Persian and Turkish
and those who spoke various Indian vernacular languages.

But the variety of Urdu that bloomed on the soils of Lucknow
is so special for its extreme graciousness that it is known to
bring tears of joy to all those who hear it. The same language is
used to compose the most heart-wrenching of love songs that are
called ghazal and which will be rendered here by Soma Chakravarty
Ghosh in the first half of the musical extravaganza.

The ghazal is loved to this day for its unique combination of
spirituality, melancholy, loftiness of thought, profound
lamentation and tone of longing. The Urdu language continues to
play a great role in keeping alive the syncretic Indo-Muslim
culture that is also dubbed by its critics as flamboyant,
effeminate and decadent.

British colonialism managed to put an end to the kingdom in
1856 but the city's rich tradition of dance, music and poetry
continues. The pomp and glory of the prince may well have been
trampled over by the gigantic strides of time but as long as
Birju Maharaj continues to swirl ecstatically, the musical life
of Lucknow will remain alive and kicking.

Birju Maharaj and Soma Chakravarty Ghosh will perform at
Gedung Kesenian Jakarta at 7 p.m. on Saturday. For further
information call 330407, 7657025 or 08161820836.