Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
“Tumhara gaana sunke mera naachne ko man karta hai. Tum jahan bhi gaane jao, mujhe saath le jaana (I feel life dancing on hearing your voice, take me along wherever you go to sing),” overwhelmed with emotion, classical vocalist Soma Ghosh’s voice quivers as she recounts Kathak queen Sitara Devi, 94, who breathed her last in the early hours on Tuesday. “I think I was lucky she took to the stage the last time with me.”
In 2009 at the Bhavan’s cultural centre, Ghosh had barely begun her rendition of the Banarasi kajri, Arrey Rama Rim Jhim Se Barsela Paniya…, when the nonagenarian SitaraJi walked with a walker. “She just forgot her walker, came up on stage and began moving to the words gracefully. Though the audience was in raptures, I was getting anxious for her but couldn’t stop mid-performance. Luckily, Jayanti Mala, her daughter, ran up and helped her.”
Two years later, she would do this again at a Soma Ghosh concert in memory of the late Kathak legend Kishan Maharaj, who was Sitara Devi’s fellow disciple since early childhood. “She couldn’t move her feet but the expressions on her face when she emoted to Begum Akhtar’s Woh Jo Hum Mein Tum Mein Karaar Tha left us all moved. Her tears were in free fall as she performed remembering her childhood friend,” remembers Ghosh, who laments, “Unfortunately that was her last time on the stage.”
Her percussionist-composer son from her second marriage, Ranjit Barot, who is away on concert tour of the US with guitar legend John McLaughlin, has cancelled his concerts to rush back for the funeral on Thursday. Sitara Devi was earlier married to K Asif, the filmmaker who made the epic Mughal-E-Azam.
Born in 1920 in Kolkata to Vaishnav scholar Sukhdev Mharaj and Matsya Kumari from the Nepalese royal family on Dhanteras, Sitara Devi was first named Dhanlaxmi. But when a childhood performance in the play Savitri Satyavan left not only the school but also the local media enthralled her father began calling her Sitara (the star).
By 1931, the family moved to Mumbai, where she impressed Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore with a three-hour solo recital. Tagore offered her a shawl and Rs50 which she refused and sought his blessings instead to become a great dancer. He blessed her, calling her the (Nritya Samragini) Empress of Dance.
Over the next six decades, Tagore’s words came true and how. She came into her own as a Kathak legend and was a pioneering force in bringing the genre to Bollywood.
Kathak legend Birji Maharaj remembered the times when she was learning the dance form from his father Achhan Maharaj and uncles Lachhu and Shambu Maharaj. “We grew up thinking of her as family as she was always with us,” remembers the legend. “But despite the laad-ladawan, she would never forget the ‘guru-shishya parampara’ and always accorded my father and his brothers a lot of respect.”
This is a view echoed by other Kathak legends, Pt Chitresh Das among them. The San Francisco-based maestro, who was in Pune for a meeting with fictionalised history legend Babasaheb Purandare, said he was shattered at the thought of her passing away. “I must have been barely eight years old when I first saw her in Kolkata. There was a fiery electric energy in her dance. So much so that it’s almost like I can imagine those pirouettes and expressive eyes so many years later.”
Acharya Ganesh Hassil lamented the loss of unison of three schools of Kathak dancing. “She had the best of Lucknow, Benares and Jaipur in her. She tirelessly pursued dance and was a true vidushi.”
He recounted how she was known for her temper. “But that would be momentary. She would soon cool down and shower the person with lot of fondness and love.”
In fact, the danseuse had refused to accept the Padma Bhushan saying she found it insulting that the government found her worthy of anything less than the Bharat Ratna.
Among the many who condoled her death were PM Narendra Modi and superstar Amitabh Bachchan.
