Chandralekha Prabhudas Patel, dancer and choreographer, born December 6 1928; died December 30 2006
The death of the Indian dancer Chandralekha, at the age of 78 from cervical cancer, ends an era of creative choreography and inventive endeavour in India. She was many things to many people; acknowledged as an icon by her admirers and acolytes, she was loathed by her detractors. Her work was charged with ideas and concepts that challenged traditional notions of what constituted the classical dance of India. She was a controversial but towering figure.
A Gujarati by birth, she was born Chandralekha Prabhudas Patel in the small town of Wada, in Maharashtra. Her father, a medical doctor, was a confirmed agnostic, though her mother was temple-going and devoted to ritual. Her early years were spent in Saurashtra, in Gujarat, and in Aden and Mumbai (formerly Bombay).
After quitting her law studies in Mumbai, she went to Chennai (formerly Madras) to learn dasi attam, the south Indian dance style practised by generations of temple dancers. Her guru was the well-known Ellappa Pillai, though she was also influenced by Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi Arundale. Balasaraswati was the last great devadasi, or "female servant of the gods", the euphemistic label for temple dancer or courtesan. Arundale, on the other hand, was the Brahmin danseuse, respectably married to the theosophist George Arundale.
It was Balasaraswati's influence that was the more lasting on Chandralekha. In production after production, she contravened and flouted the Brahminical Arundalian ethos and agenda. The opening prayer section which prefaced dance programmes was abandoned because she understood dance to be not a celebration of the gods but rather a celebration of man and woman - especially woman. She demanded power and passion from her dancers, and the choreography was often explicit and reminiscent of the erotic sculptures of the Khajuraho temples.
"Celebrations of the human body" is how Chandralekha described her dance productions. Because the primordial power of woman is what fired her imagination and creative instincts, she became the high priestess of shakti, the powerful female principle. High priestesses never marry nor are they shackled by the pruderies of social norms.
In 1950, at Tiruvannamalai, in Tamil Nadu, at the exact time that the mystic Sri Ramana Maharishi died, Chandralekha witnessed a meteor streak across the star-filled night in the company of two men. One was the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and the other the Bengali poet Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. Both treasured the memory of the occasion, which was recorded by the writer, critic and stage-lighting designer Sadanand Menon, later to become Chandralekha's live-in partner and soulmate.
What caused serious consternation in India was her assertion that, as a part of the independence movement, many spurious claims were propounded with regard to India's ethical and moral superiority. In this respect, it was not Indians alone who were guilty. They were actively supported by India lovers in the west who could see nothing wrong with India or Indians.
This false impression, Chandralekha believed, also impinged on the arts. Therefore, dance which represented religiosity was financed and officially encouraged, while that which dealt with secular and humanist issues was ignored or, worse still, discouraged. Bravely, Chandralekha became a crusader for equality, human rights, women's rights, secularism, pluralism and the environment. Her forthright statements to the media, and her accentuated make-up, did not make her popular with the orthodox middle classes, who viewed her as a woman not meriting respect.
However, the faithful flocked to learn from her at Mandala, her centre at Elliot's Beach, in Chennai. Technically, she fused Bharatanatyam with yoga and Kalarippayattu, a martial art from Kerala, which horrified the purists. Abroad, she was hugely popular, and such dancers as Pina Bausch and Susanne Linke worked with her enthusiastically. Many regarded her as an Indian Martha Graham, though she said she owed nothing to the American modern dancer and choreographer. On the contrary, she always claimed that she was more faithful to the ideals of Indian art and aesthetics than many who were riding on the wave of post-empire philistinism and euphoria.
Chandralekha's many productions, notably Angika, Lilavati, Prana, Sri, Yantra, Mahakal, Raga, Sloka and Sharira, have become the exemplars of modern Indian dance, based on her premise of the indivisibility of sexuality, sensuality and spirituality. Her many tours took her three times to the Tokyo summer festival; twice to Hamburg's Festival der Frauen; the Avignon festival; the Asian Dance festival, Hong Kong; the International Sommerscene, Copenhagen; the Jacob's Pillow dance festival; and various venues in London, New York, Chicago and Canada. In 1990 she received the Gaia award for "cultural ecology" in Italy, and the following year the Dance Umbrella award in Britain. These were followed by honours from India's Sangeet Natak Aakdemi, the national academy of music, dance and drama.
Chandralekha was a poet and graphic designer of distinction, and a lover of trees. "My sole achievement is in having planted 75 neem trees on my plot of land near the sea," is the sort of throwaway line she was prone to. She was cremated - according to her wishes without any religious ceremony - by Sadanand Menon and her longstanding friend, the painter Dashrath Patel.
