Rare Madame Menaka Find: The Menaka Archive

A few days ago, an article on Madame Menaka by the great Indian dance historian Sunil Kothari was published in The Asian Age, and I was heartened to see that the title of his article is about his viewing a clip from "The Tiger of Hastinapur," which by his description of the brief tiger and king visuals and reference to my blog, is clearly the video clip I posted online years ago from the 1938 German feature film Der Tiger Von Eschnapur (see here and here) which, due to the editing program I used, included brief glimpses of the scenes before and after the dance sequence.  I love knowing that rare video clips I have posted or sourced are being seen by such knowledgeable people as Kothari who lived through so much of India's dance history!  There is some confusion and perhaps typos in Kothari's article, given that the photo and descriptions he references from Damayanti Joshi's book on Madame Menaka, which I own, actually refer to the film and the photo still as "Die Tiger von Eschnapur," not "The Tiger of Hastinapur," and he also amusingly refers to me as "Milai Milan." :)

Anyway, Kothari's article prompted me to see if any new Madame Menaka finds had surfaced online in recent years, and through a quick search I discovered something EXTRAORDINARY: some Indian dance and music history enthusiasts/scholars in Germany have created an online archive, "The Menaka Archive," dedicated entirely to Madame Menaka (aka Leila Roy-Sokhey, 1899-1947) and her Indian ballet group's European performance tour from 1936-1938 at http://menaka-archive.org!  Note that the archive is in the German language, and while it does have an English option, the English translations seem to be automatically generated so are not fully accurate;  I have linked to those pages or linked to/used automatic Google Translate translations throughout this post where possible (but for those that appear in German, you'll need to use the translation features of a browser like Google Chrome).

The archive looks to be the brainchild of two Germans, Markus Schlaffke, a documentary filmmaker and doctoral student at the Bauhaus University Weimar researching the Menaka Ballet in Europe, and Isabella Schwaderer, a research associate at the University of Erfurt who is also working on a project about the European reception of the 1936-1938 Menaka ballet tour.  The efforts looks to have sprung from the artistic research project/collective of which Schlaffke and Schwaderer seem to be a part, Zinda Naach, that has aimed to hold Indian dance performances in recent years along the original route of the Menaka tour.  In such coincidental timing related to Kothari's November 11 article this month, the Zinda Naach Facebook page (which writes in English) shared that The Menaka Archive went live a few days earlier on November 6, proclaiming:

... We are now able to trace Madame Menakas performances in Europe from an overall perspective for the first time. Over the last years we have researched documents of Menakas performances in Europe in hundreds of Archives and private collections. We have ordered these finds and assigned them to a digital database that is now available to the public as 'The Menaka Archive' (www.menaka-archive.org). We understand The Menaka Archive as a collaborative platform for further research and reconstruction of a specific history of artistic modernity, written jointly by dancers and musicians in India as well as in Germany ... The Zinda Naach performances will from now on continue as a series of events under the umbrella of The Menaka Archive in order to activate and decipher its archival findings. We kindly invite you to explore The Menaka Archive holdings and to contribute to its research program.

The first thing visitors to the Menaka Archive see is—guess what!—the other Menaka troupe dance from the 1938 film Der Tiger Von Eschnapur!  I think the archive's version, given the sharper appearance and some scratch lines, may come from a copy of the film in Germany, rather than the lesser-quality but longer one I had found and posted.  Here's a screencap of the archive's homepage:

Screencap from www.menaka-archive.org

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1 comment Madame Menaka, Rare Find

Guru Gopinath Dancing in Mahatma Udhangar (1947, Tamil) and BFI Footage, Plus Thoughts on His Legacy

How excited I am to recently find two more visual records of Guru Gopinath dancing in the mid-1940s, one in the commercial Tamil film Mahatma Udhangar and one archival find at the British Film Institute (BFI)!  Back in the dance revival decades of pre and post-independence India, Guru Gopinath was among the trained native Kathakali dancers who brought that dance form and its movement vocabulary to other parts of India and the world.  Gopinath did this first through a touring partnership with the American-born dancer known as "Ragini Devi," and later by creating a Kathakali-derived accessible dance form that seems to be known today as "Kerala Natanam."  Gopinath has been featured on the blog twice before in dance footage from the 1950s.  First was his portly and entertaining dance with Guru Gopalakrishnan/the mohini in the mythological "Mohini Bhasmasur" sequence in the 1957 Telugu/Tamil film Mayabazar, and second was the rare archival find of brief clips from his stage performance in the U.S.S.R. in 1954 as part of the Indian Cultural Delegation.  But these new finds are special because they are from a decade earlier, and feature Gopinath looking noticeably younger and thinner!

Gopinath's Dance in Mahatma Udhangar (1947, Tamil)

Mahatma Udhangar (also transliterated Mahathma, Udangar, Udankar) was an unsuccessful release directed by G. Pattu Iyer that "sank without a trace and is barely remembered today" [6], which must explain why there's so little information readily available on the film.  I shared more information about Mahatma Udhangar in my last post rejoicing about finding Kumari Kamala's dance in the film.

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2 comments Guru Gopinath, Male Dance, Rare Find, Rare Real-Life Footage

New Kamala Dance Finds in the Tamil Films Mahatma Udhangar (1947) and Illarame Nallaram (1958), and Better Versions of Two Kamala Classics!

I'm back to immersing myself in searching and research, and what do I find this month but two film dances of Kamala that I've never seen before in the 1947 Tamil film Mahatma Udhangar and the 1958 Tamil film Illarame Nallaram!  Then I also discovered that the Films Division Bharata Natyam documentary she was in is now viewable in a higher resolution, and her Bharatanatyam dance in the 1956 Hindi film Chori Chori has been colorised!  Let's take a look at all these finds, one by one.

The path to discovering the two new film dances started with a new-to-me photo of Kamala that popped up in a Google Images search, which led me to her updated Wikipedia entry that I noticed now has a longer "Partial Filmography" section, which reminded me of the film dances of hers I'm still looking for, which then led to some searching that revealed these new finds!  There's also a great dance of Guru Gopinath in Mahatma Udhangar, but I'll save that for a separate upcoming post.

Mahatma Udhangar (1947, Tamil)

According to the ever reliable font of Indian film history and dance Randor Guy, Mahatma Udhangar (also transliterated Mahathma, Udangar, Udankar) was an unsuccessful release directed by G. Pattu Iyer that "sank without a trace and is barely remembered today" ("Remembering D.K. Pattammal,"  Galatta Cinema, September 2009), which must explain why there's so little information readily available on the film.

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5 comments Kamala, Rare Find, Rare Real-Life Footage

Birju Maharaj Dancing Kathak in Khayal Gatha (1988, Hindi)...Yes, I'm Back, Hiatus Ended!

I'm back, my excitement has spontaneously returned, and the blog has had a facelift that's still under some construction.  More on all that soon, but for now, on to the content!

Every once in a while I search the interwebs to see if any cinematic/archival dances from my wishlist have surfaced. On a recent search jaunt, I was delighted to find that footage has been posted online of the great Kathak doyen, Pandit Birju Maharaj, dancing in the 1988 Hindi film Khayal Gatha ("The Khayal Saga," sometimes listed as being released in 1989).  I knew Birju Maharaj had choreographed for some Kathak dances in films, but Khayal Gatha was the only instance I'd read of where he was in front of the camera, rather than behind it.  Kathak hasn't made that many appearances on this blog in the past, but like those few times, this is a real treat.

Pandit Birju Maharaj, for those who aren't aware of his stature, is probably the name most synonymous with Kathak dance in the last half-century, a 1930s-born acclaimed carrier of his family's now-predominant Lucknow gharana of Kathak, a critical part of the standardization and institutionalization of Kathak in the Indian post-independence dance revival and reckoning that took place in his most formative years, a beloved and very charismatic and likable performer, and an innovator within traditional boundaries.  He was instrumental in popularizing the dance form in India and the world, and is still doing so today, traveling around the globe in his 80s.

It quickly became apparent in watching Khayal Gatha that Birju chose an "art film" far from the world of commercial cinema for his cinematic dance debut.  (Note, I will leave out honorifics and refer to him simply as "Birju" for brevity and clarity.)  Kumar Shahani, a significant name in Indian parallel/new wave cinema, was by all accounts a radical, experimental, and avant-garde filmmaker.  Khayal Gatha is no exception—when I first browsed through the film I could not make any sense of it, so I found what some wiser people than I had written about the film and Shahani which helped quite a bit, but much interpretation is left for the educated viewer to decide.

Writings on the film [1,2,3,4] describe Khayal Gatha as an experimental and sensory exploration of real and invented Indian legends, traditions, and performing arts from the past five centuries to the contemporary period, many related to the vocal tradition of Khayal, a genre of North Indian/Hindustani classical/semi-classical music that is heard throughout the film and as a style features improvisation, microtones and gliding between notes, and a varied range of classical, folk, and popular sources that the film is greatly inspired by.  The lead character, portrayed by actor Rajat Kapoor in his debut (whom I can never unsee as anything but the creepy pedophile in Monsoon Wedding!), is a wanderer and seeker who is at times an observer and other times takes on the personas of the various legendary figures being depicted.  Plenty of allegory, abstraction, metaphor, repeated scenes, and a lack of chronological storytelling tick the experimental boxes, and the dialogues are often philosophical and meant to inspire thought.  Ultimately, the film can be interpreted in very complex ways in relation to the wounds of historical loss, the human sensory experience, cyclical movements and the nature of time, and much more that's beyond the scope of this post...and beyond my comprehension.

Director Kumar Shahani used dance and music in many of his films.  His work has been featured on the blog before when I posted about excitedly finding dances from Shahani’s later films Bhavantarana (1991), featuring the late Odissi Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra and other famous Odissi dancers, and Bamboo Flute (2000), featuring dances by Mohapatra as well as Alarmel Valli.

I was heartened to read that Khayal Gatha features key musical contributions (and I assume on-screen appearances) "by some of the foremost musicians from the Gwalior gharana" of Indian classical music [5].  But of course, of most interest to this blog is that the great Birju Maharaj dances in a feature film!  We get to see him three times totaling about seven minutes of footage spread out over two primarily pure dance pieces and one expressive piece.  There's also a Kathak dance practice scene by two women, and you know how I love a good practice dance!

Watching other performance and demonstration footage of Birju dancing online, he is among the great performers who have so imbibed and internalized a dance form and all its associated complexities that his performances look effortless and a part of his very being.  For those who don't know who he is, Birju at first glance isn't the most handsome male dancer, doesn't have that "ideal" body shape, and wears simple clothing, but on watching him perform, these things quickly become irrelevant.

Dances in Khayal Gatha

Introductory Dance - Birju Maharaj's first dance in the film, and the film itself, are said to be visually inspired by Mughal miniature paintings, which often feature the "framing of a figure against a window" or vacant space [2].  From behind an empty door frame, rhythmic sounds precede Birju's movements into view. He depicts a horse and horse riding, a common sight and method of transport throughout the film as the wanderer makes his journey, and soon "gallops" off screen to a cut of his truncated dancing body framed by a window, the lighting inverted.

Birju's assuredness and style of movement is commanding!  Regrettably, his dance lasts less than a minute, soon interrupted by the wandering protagonist (Rajat Kapoor) slowly walking by and gazing at the dancer in the window. The wanderer knocks on the door, and a woman answers—she (actress Alaknanda Samarth) is an oracle-type seen throughout the film in different avatars, provoking philosophical/critical thought and learning in the wanderer.  The oracle leads the wanderer to her guru, and unties cloth that had been wrapped around his feet.  What does that mean, I wonder?  When the wanderer responds to the oracle's question "to what are you bound," her reply is, intriguingly, interpreted by cinema studies scholar Laleen Jayamanne [2] to refer to the notion of "the mere exact repetition of the form without an internalization of its spirit [being] rejected as unworthy of the tradition," a sentiment applicable to the dance tradition shown the film as well as the film's philosophical yearnings.

Video starts 56:08

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1 comment Birju Maharaj, Kathak, Male Dance, Rare Find, Suchitra Harmalkar, Vijaya Sharma

Muthukumara Pillai On Screen in Kannika (1947), and Other Nattuvanars in Indian Cinema

Thanks to two YouTubers who have uploaded songs from the 1947 Tamil film Kannika in the past few months, Bharatanatyam dance history aficionados can now witness on screen the nattuvanar Kattumannar Koil Muthukumara Pillai (1874-1960, also known as Muthukumaran or Muthukumarappa, of the village Kattumannarkoil aka Mannargudi or Kattumannargudi) at the age of 73 playing the role of a nattuvanar in the song "Natanam Adinar":

Muthukumara Pillai can be seen at 1:14, 1:58, closeup at 2:55, and 3:51 onward
(the lower quality version includes 2 more seconds where he begins to speak, but it's cut off!!)

How do I know it's him? I had read a while back in the September 1993 Sruti magazine feature on Muthukumara Pillai (for brevity, MKP) that when he was in Coimbatore from 1944-1947 teaching exercises and dances to young boys at a drama company, he "came in contact with Pakshiraja Studios and trained the proprietor Sriramulu Naidu's wife Saroja for her lead role in the film 'Kannika' [and] Muthukumara Pillai himself too made a brief appearance in the film." When I watched the recently-uploaded songs and compared the nattuvanar's appearance with known photos of Muthukumara Pillai, it was clearly him! Compare these stills from Kannika with a photo of MKP that I featured in my post on Muthuswami Pillai and that must have been taken in the late 1930s which were the years the young man on the right, Muthuswami Pillai, trained with MKP.

Left: Kannika  Right: Muthukumara Pillai [credit: Mohan Khokar]

This Kannika footage is incredible because Muthukumara Pillai belonged to the oldest generation of nattuvanars whose hereditary artistic practice was discovered in the twentieth century transformation of what we today call Bharatanatyam. What's more, he along with his contemporary Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai (also known as Pandanallur Meenakshisundaram Pillai, from Pandanallur village, for brevity MSP) are often remembered today as the two top-ranking gurus and nattuvanars of their generation who trained most of the first non-hereditary Bharatanatyam dancers who spread and popularized the art form far and wide. The two of them each trained such legends as Ram Gopal, Rukmini Devi Arundale, Mrinalini Sarabhai, and Kamala Lakshman.

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1 comment Bharatanatyam, Hemamalini Arni, Kamala, KN Dandayudhapani Pillai, M.S. Sarojini, Muthukumara Pillai, Radha Burnier, Rare Find, Shobana, US Krishna Rao, Vazhuvoor Ramaiah Pillai, VP Dhananjayan

Mystery Indian Dancers in Seven Wonders of the World (1956, US)

When fellow Indian dance sleuth Ragothaman translated sections of Shankar Venkatraman's Tamil book Thiraiulagil Isai Kalaignargal (Musicians in Cinema), I was surprised to read a number of little-known references to film and film dance appearances of Indian dancers and musicians. I previously blogged about one—Kuchipudi dancer Sobha Naidu dancing in Abhimanavanthulu (1973, Telugu)—but the few others mentions seemed to have no available footage today, like Bangalore Nagarathnammal acting in Krishna Leela (1947, Kannada) and K. Bhanumathi acting (and possibly more?) in Jalaja/Natya Magimai (1938, Tamil).

Venkatraman's book also described multiple films that the now-veteran dancer Padma Subrahmanyam had danced in: the Kannada movie Sri Rathna (likely the 1955 Kannada/Tamil film), the Tamil Nadu documentary Alaiyangalum Thiruvizhakkalum (Temples and their Festivals) in which "she danced for the song 'Kalaiyadha Kalai Engal Kalaiye' in front of the temple deities," and the American movie Seven Wonders of the World in which she "danced a 'snake dance'."

I felt excited by the last discovery! Surely Seven Wonders of the World, a 1956 American film, would be relatively easy to find, and it sounded like Padma might have done a solo dance! But a bit of research led to the discovery that the film was made using Cinerama technology, a widescreen format somewhat like today's IMAX that died out in the 1970s. Cinerama films were "impossible to see at all, in any form, for nearly half a century" because they were never broadcast on TV or released for home viewing (DVDTalk).

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5 comments Bharatanatyam, Padma Subrahmanyam, Rare Find, Rare Real-Life Footage, Western Films

Meeting and Interviewing Kamala! And a Rare Video Find at the NYPL!

Get out of the way people, dance nerds coming through!

Last week I had the pleasure of taking a dream trip to New York City and visiting the hallowed walls of the place that has for years beckoned me with its unparalleled collection of Indian dance treasures...the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts! For so long I have been fantasizing about the trip but it always seemed a bit out of reach until fate coalesced and I found an opportunity to get away. I met up there with fellow Indian dance research/archive nerd extraordinaire Ragothaman and we proceeded to voraciously power through the NYPL's Dance Division holdings with anxious excitement! Can you believe it—I held in my hands the personal notes and photos of Simkie, Indrani Rehman, and more.

But the most stunning find happened right after arrival on the first item Ragothaman and I viewed. It was an item in the catalog that had intrigued me—a 3-minute film reel titled "two Indian dancers" with location and date unknown and the coy description "Performance of East Indian dance, possibly Bharata natyam. A dance by two women (the second dancer, at stage right, is only intermittently visible on film) is followed by solo dances." My mind went wild with possibilities! It could be anyone in the video!

The NYPL staffer set up the silent film reel for us in the private viewing room and as the first few frames of the darkly-lit, grainy recording flashed on the screen we couldn't believe our eyes! It was footage of Kamala and her sister Rhadha dancing Bharatanatyam on stage, in color, in the late 1950s or early 1960s! Kamala could be seen relatively close-up at times, her abhinaya on display as she mouthed the words of the song. The short film reel opened with Kamala and Rhadha performing an alarippu, followed by Rhadha doing a jathiswaram, then Kamala dancing a kirtanam/varnam. The segments were short clips that were hastily edited together and when both sisters were dancing together Rhadha was often unseen outside of the frame. The costumes were in blue and pinkish-orange for Kamala and dark green and orange for Rhadha. The clip seems to be the only extant footage of Kamala's early stage Bharatanatyam outside of cinema, and seeing Rhadha joining her is a rarity! The guess of the date is based on how similar Kamala and Rhadha look to their performance in the film Bhakta Kuchela which was supposedly released in 1961. Oh how I wished I could take just one single screencap of the film reel for my readers, but recording and photography of any kind in the film viewing room was strictly prohibited.

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2 comments Kamala, Rare Find

Uday Shankar, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn in Utah!

While browsing through the Utah Digital Newspapers website (mostly public-domain material, woo!), I was surprised to learn that Uday Shankar, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn all performed multiple times in Utah, my current U.S. state of residence, between 1911 and 1962!

That Uday Shankar performed here was most surprising of all. In all my past reading and research about Uday Shankar, I had never read a reference to him or his company performing anywhere in the Intermountain West region of the United States. Very little details about Shankar's touring schedules are available, and for a long time I assumed his company only performed in big cities like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles because those were the only ones briefly mentioned.

General details of Uday Shankar's tours are outlined in the writings of Mohan Khokar and Ruth Abrahams. Nearly all of the performances in the U.S. by Shankar's company were sponsored by the renowned impresario Sol Hurok who first saw the group perform in Paris. Uday Shankar's first company (comprised of family, friends, and Simkie) first toured the U.S. in 1932-33 and 1933-34. Uday Shankar's second company (with new choreography and dancer additions Zohra Segal and Madhavan) performed in the U.S. in 1936-37 and 1937-38. After a return to India, the opening and closing of the Almora Center, and the release of the film Kalpana with little commercial success, Shankar and his third company (entirely revised with dancer addition Amala Shankar) returned to the U.S. in 1949 for a 10 week tour and again in 1951-52. The company's last performances in the United States took place in 1968.

Ruth Abrahams' dissertation on Uday Shankar is the only source I've found that gives specific details about Shankar's tours. A 1933 touring schedule on page 147 reveals that beyond the expected big cities, the tour included stops in places like Cleveland, Ohio; Madison, Wisconsin; Springfield, Missouri; Birmingham, Alabama; Waco, Texas; Tuscon, Arizona; and cities along the coastal pacific northwest and California. Abrahams notes, "The magnitude of the tour effort is remarkable to consider when one reflects on the circumstances of the times, the lack of convenient transportation, and the sheer bulk of personnel and baggage. Amenities, both professional and personal, were schizophrenic in effect—sometimes luxurious, but more often minimal, and the company was hard put upon to locate decent, affordable restaurants and housing. Usually, they just ate and slept on trains between concert dates." I wonder if the company encountered difficulties in their Deep South performance in Birmingham. When Indrani Rehman and her troupe performed in Louisiana almost three decades later in 1961, the troupe was refused admission to two restaurants due to racial segregation [14].

Source: Utah Daily Chronicle [12]

It wasn't until I took a stroll through the Utah Digital Newspapers website that I discovered Uday Shankar and his company performed in Utah at least three times in the 1950s and 60s. The company performed first in 1952 at the Capitol Theater in Salt Lake City and then in 1962 gave two performances—one at the College of Southern Utah in Cedar City and another at Kingsbury Hall at the University of Utah. The picture on the right is from an article announcing the Kingsbury Hall performance, and I don't believe I have seen it anywhere else! A 1962 tour is not explicitly mentioned in Abrahams' or Khokar's descriptions (Khokar just says Hurok sponsored Shankar's tours several times from 1949-1968), so this discovery adds to the knowledge base about Shankar's touring schedules.

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3 comments Rare Find, Research, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Uday Shankar

Odissi Dance in Odia Films - Including a Rare Dance in Lalita (1949)!

I must start this post immediately with a startling find—a 25-second clip of "Odissi" dance from Lalita (1949), the second Odia-language film ever made. Odissi dance as we know it today was not even formed yet in 1949! It would be years before the dance form became known outside of its regional borders, into the late 1950s before it started to become codified into its modern design and format through the Jayantika project, and into the 1960s before it flowered and was fully recognized as one of India's classical dance forms. Take a look at this gem (Update: Embedded different video source September 2019):

Video should start at 1:35

While the clip is short and hastily edited, the full scene appears to be set inside an Odishan temple where rituals and dances for Lord Jagannath are being performed. The dancer, presumably meant to be a mahari (Odishan devadasi), appears and after prostrating herself before the Lord she settles into one of the elemental postures of Odissi dance, the Chauk. A jump cup reveals the dancer rotating one of her hands in the characteristic Odissi hand gesture “hamsasya.” Fascinating evidence of these dance elements from 1949.

As elaborated upon further on in this post, in 1940s Odisha brief and simple dance presentations of varying inspirations were increasing in popularity in the new professional theaters, and young girls from privileged backgrounds began learning and performing dance amidst the awakening cultural scene in Cuttack. The dance above was filmed in the latter part of the decade when the beginnings of what we know as Odissi movement vocabulary today was gaining ground in the collaborative atmosphere of professional theater.

Mahari Suhasini, 1958 - Source:
Central Sangeet Natak Akademi

While it's important to recognize that the dance above is a "film dance" and its intentions in presentation authenticity are unknown, it's intriguing to analyze the brief portrayal and try to make inferences from it. The dancer's appearance seems to have more affinity with other film dances of the period which took on their own style from various sources of the day. Compare the costume and jewelry of the film dancer with the picture of the Jagannath temple Mahari on the right (taken in 1958). The film dancer's blouse is not velvet (as was customary for Maharis) but rather sateen, and her jewelry-lined ears and decorated side bun seem unusual. The velveteen belt with the long frontispiece reminds me of Manipuri costume (especially Sadhona Bose's costume in her so-called Manipuri dances in Raj Nartaki), and the artistic design is similar to that worn by Kelucharan Mohapatra and Laxmipriya in a photo of their 1947 Dashavatara performance (see in history section below). The film dancer's appearance also seems to differ significantly from the pictures of Priyambada Mohanty in her dance costumes in the 1940s and 50s some of which are shown below.

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7 comments Archita Sahu, Minati Mishra, Odia, Odissi, Rare Find

Adventures in Date-ing the BritishPathe Devadasi Dance and Video

Since I last posted about the amazing video find of two South Indian devadasis dancing in Baroda around the 1930s, I have been obsessed with finding proof of two things: the identities of the devadasis, and the true date the video footage was filmed.

BritishPathe has no documentation for the video (only noting it "appears to be some kind of celebration") and through personal communication with me confirmed that the "1930-35" date estimate was based only on other films found in the same canister.  I'm excited to reveal my research on this incredible footage of not only pre-revival "Bharatanatyam" but also royal activities in a princely state before Indian independence!  While the identity question is still being investigated, I feel like I can make an educated guess about the date: mid to late 1920s, most likely 1926!  This is based on the youthful appearance of Pratapsingrao in the video and the fact that a BritishPathe film crew was present and would likely have only done so for especially large events, most likely the 1926 Golden Jubilee.

Why is the Date Important?

Beyond being able to give a date estimate for a rare video with no documentation, I find the date determination important because if it was really filmed around 1926, the dance segment is an example of "Bharatanatyam" dance before most of the significant legal events and reconstruction activities towards the devadasi lifestyle and dance occurred in India and before the "dance revival" of the 1930s.  In the Madras Presidency, Muthulakshmi Reddy didn't make her recommendation to the Legislative Assembly to criminalize temple dedication until 1927, the Music Academy of Madras was not even founded until 1928-29, E. Krishna Iyer presented the first dancers from the traditional community at the annual conference starting in 1931, and it was years later before Rukmini Devi Arundale presented her arangetram in the dance form and created the institution Kalakshetra.  Closer home to Baroda, the neighboring Bombay Presidency did not enact its anti-devadasi legislation until 1934 [7].  While anti-devadasi sentiment and actions had been in place across the subcontinent since the mid 1800s, the fact that the video appears to have been filmed in a princely state before the most fervent formalization of the sentiment makes it especially important to the historical record.

But what has also been fascinating is that getting to my 1926 estimate resulted in a rich yield of research and rare photos about the princely state of Baroda (presently Vadodara) which I'm excited to share here.  I've been able to identify a few people in the video as well as nearly all the filming locations!

Identifying the Royal Family

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8 comments Devadasis, Rare Find, Research

Film Dances of Madame Menaka and the Menaka Indian Ballet

Joshi's Biography

Over a year ago, I featured three rare film dance sequences of members of Madame Menaka's "Menaka Indian Ballet"; two were from the 1938 German film Der Tiger Von Eschnapur and the other was from the 1938 British documentary Temples of India.  Medame Menaka (real name Leila Sokhey) is generally recognized as an instrumental figure in the transformation of the maligned North Indian "nautch" dance to respectable "Kathak" in the 1930s.  Not only was she among the first (some would say the first) Brahmin women to perform Kathak on the public stage at a time when public female performance was stigmatized due to its association with prostitution, but also she was a pioneer in refashioning the form with a modern, dance-drama format and introduced Kathak technique to the international community for the first time through her troupe's tours of Europe and Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, Menaka's name and contribution remain generally forgotten today outside of serious dance circles due to her early death in 1947, the demise of her dance school soon after, and the establishment of Kathak as a patriarchal tradition that rarely acknowledges women practitioners of the past "as gurus, teachers, co-creators, or pioneers" (Chakravorty). 

Given Menaka's importance to Kathak dance and her billing as a dancer using Kathak technique, I was perplexed when I first watched her troupe's performances in Der Tiger Von Eschnapur.  The first dance segment had absolutely nothing to do with Kathak and the second only marginally so; both seemed to be presenting a generic, "exotic" Uday Shankar-style aesthetic that did not follow any particular form of Indian classical dance and instead looked inspired by Javanese dance.  At the time I figured Menaka must have bowed to the demands of the film which wanted to feature an "oriental" spectacle.

But this interpretation was turned on its head this week when I got a hold of the late Kathak dancer Damayanti Joshi's biography of Madame Menaka.  Joshi explicitly notes the dances in Der Tiger Von Eschnapur were excerpts from two of Menaka's earliest dance-drama creations, Krishna Leela and Deva Vijaya Nritya!  What's more, the costumes are clearly authentic pieces straight from the real-life productions, and it's highly likely the music is authentic as well.  What conclusions can be drawn from this striking information?  I'll get to my thoughts later on in the post, but first I want to review the songs again and reveal who the dancers were.

Identification

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6 comments Madame Menaka, Male Dance, Menaka Indian Ballet, Rare Find, Research

Film Dances/Appearances of Ram Gopal and Extant Dance Footage

While browsing the website of the National Portrait Gallery in London, I discovered they have a page on the late famous dancer Ram Gopal who is generally recognized as the first Indian dancer to bring classical/traditional Indian dances (as opposed to Uday Shankar's style) to the West starting in the late 1930s.  As I read the NPG's description of Gopal, I couldn't believe my eyes:

 "After the War he starred in a number of Hollywood epics made on location, such as The Purple Plain (1954), and William Dieterle's Elephant Walk (1954), for which he had also choreographed the dance sequences.” 

What?! Ram Gopal starred in Hollywood films and choreographed a dance? In all my reading about Ram Gopal I had never come across mention of his stint in films! Of course, I had to go on a little research journey and find out as much about this as I could.  It appears that he had supporting character rather than starring roles in a few films.

Ram Gopal's Hollywood/British Film Work

Elephant Walk (1954) - This American film contains the only feature film dance associated with Ram Gopal I was able to find.  The dance appears to be a traditional Kandyan dance and according to the credits is performed by dancers from the Madhyama Lanka Nritya Mandala, the landmark first traditional Kandyan dance school in Sri Lanka established in the 1940s by traditional Kandyan dancer Suramba Gurunnanse/Rajapakse and still functioning today [website no longer up but archived here].  Kandyan (or “up-country”) dance is one of the three main dance forms identified with the majority Sinhala ethnic community in Sri Lanka and is considered Sri Lanka’s national dance.

The film dance was supposedly filmed at the sacred elephant octagonal at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy.  Gopal is credited as the dance's choreographer which I found interesting since I've not read of his learning Kandyan dance in his autobiography or elsewhere.  But he did tour Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in the 1940s and tried to start a "School of Pakistani, Ceylonese, and Indian dances" in the 1960s, so he certainly must have picked up Kandyan dance somewhere along the way.  An article in Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times newspaper claimed that the male lead was Ram Gopal himself, but I’m convinced it’s not after taking some screencaps of the lead dancer who definitely does not look like Ram at all.  The only person that remotely looks like Ram Gopal is the man with the spear dancing around the masked elephant at the end.

Definitely not Ram Gopal

The film dance begins with a procession of dancers walking to the performance space and then cuts to a group of male dancers wearing what looks like authentic Ves costumes.  The lead performer, pictured above, gives an incredibly energetic performance!  The sequence is frequently interrupted by the irritating dialogue of the luminous Elizabeth Taylor and her companions.  At 2:34, the female dancers appear and another solo dancer gives yet another energized but brief performance.  It's interesting that the women are not wearing the female Kandyan dance costume seen today.  The number quickly goes downhill when white chick Mylee Haulani saunters in to titillate the male onlookers but is revived when the masked elephant dancer appears at 5:15.  The feel of the whole sequence is one of the "sophisticated" westerners watching a "quaint" but strange "oriental" dance performance of the country they are in.  I wonder if any of the dancers in the scene were well-known Kandyan dancers in the 1950s? Definitely an excellent archival piece of Kandyan dance history. Here tis:

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9 comments Male Dance, Ram Gopal, Rare Find, Rare Real-Life Footage, Research

Rare 1930s Tamil Film and 1950s Padmini Dance Footage from Ellis Dungan’s Collection

Hiding in the most unlikely of places, the West Virginia State Archives in the US, are documentary films and video footage shot/directed by the late Ellis Dungan, an American who made a number of Tamil films in South India from 1935-1950. In the collection are two incredibly-rare videos with footage I assume has not been available publicly until now.  The first video is “Inside India,” a documentary on South Indian village life that has an extended stage dance sequence by "Travancore Sisters" Padmini and Lalitha. The second video is a compilation containing footage Ellis took while directing the Tamil films Sati Leelavati (1936), Seemanthani (1936), Iru Sahodarargal (Two Brothers, 1936), and Ambikapathi (1937), and it reveals rare images of film stars and technicians and gives a visual glimpse into how Tamil films were made in the 1930s.  The thanks for unearthing these videos goes to a wonderfully-knowledgeable online contact, Sreenivas Paruchuri, who sent these links to me.  Thank you! 

Inside India - Featuring a Padmini/Lalitha Dance (at 7:39)!

This documentary at first appears to be just a montage of scenes from village life in South India with a staid, explanatory voiceover. But at 7:39, an audience and stage appear as the voiceover explains, “There are numerous dramatic troupes that travel from village to village in Southern India and evening performances are given in the streets.  Here the people in the village witness one of the most popular musical dramas, Mathura Veeran, the story of Princess Bommi being wooed by Veeran, a commoner.” As the curtain withdraws, the performers are revealed to be Lalitha and then her sister Padmini! The duo doesn't perform much abstract dance and instead focuses on enacting the lyrics of the story for their first act. In their second act, the sisters appear in horse costumes in what looks like a Poikkal Kudirai Aattam “dummy horse” folk dance! Isn't Padmini absolutely luminous here?  The legend the voiceover refers to is that of the folk deity Madurai Veeran, which was the subject of the 1956 Tamil film of the same name which Padmini acted and danced in (and it has a Lalitha/Ragini dance too).  RajVideoVision just recently uploaded a legal copy of the whole film on YouTube!

What remains unknown is when this documentary was filmed. My guess for the dance portion, based on Padmini’s facial shape and appearance, is around 1950-1952 or so given the similarity to her early film appearances from this time. While Dungan is said to have returned to the US soon after his hit film Manthiri Kumari released in 1950, he made frequent trips back to India and made his last film there in 1962, so Inside India conceivably could have been filmed right before he left or when he returned later. I wonder why he didn’t identify the famous sisters by name in the documentary. Surely Dungan would have known who Padmini and Lalitha were given that they danced in Manthiri Kumari and he was familiar with the Tamil cinema world. I also wonder if this is really an “authentic” drama stage performance or if it’s been manufactured for the documentary. Were Padmini and Lalitha in performing drama troupes at this time?

Footage from 1930s Tamil Cinema Sets/Filmings

While the West Virginia Archives calls this video “15 minutes of Dungan’s home movie film of movie-making in India,” it is no simple home movie! It is incredibly rare, silent footage of the movie making process in South India in the 30s and features many shots of actors, technicians, musicians, and producers of the time period as well as the filming and set technology. It also shows Dungan himself and in action! It is very likely that this is the first extant video footage available for some of the lesser-known people in the shots. And to my absolute delight, there are two short dances!

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13 comments Documentary, Lalitha, Padmini, Rare Find

Indian Dances in Western Films about India: Part 2 (The Rare)

Continuing on from Part 1 of the series, here in Part 2 I've listed those dances that don't quite fit in the upcoming Part 3 (orientalist dances) because although they don't appear particularly authentic there is something truly historically special and rare about them and they deserve a space all of their own. 

The first two sets of dances are not from British or US films but, instead, Germany! I didn't realize that Germany's interest in India dates back to the Romantic Period and the many German romanticists who found inspiration in Indian writings. Not surprisingly, when films became mainstream a century or so later, quite a few German films concerned the subject of India.  The history of "German Indology" is quite fascinating and complex particularly regarding German orientalism (and how it compared to British and French orientalism) and the rise of Nazi ideology in Germany; the book The Indo-German Identification looks like an interesting review of these topics and is previewable on Google Books.  OK, on to the dances!

Der Tiger von Eschnapur (1938, Germany) 

The 1918 German book The Indian Tomb written by Thea von Harbou has had many German film incarnations and keeping track of them gets really confusing!  Let's just say this 1938 version (split in two parts, one Der Tiger von Eschnapur (The Tiger of Eschnapur) and two Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb)) directed by Richard Eichberg is the second film incarnation; the third version from 1959 will be lovingly covered in all its bizarre glory in Part 3.  :) Anything and everything you would want to know about the various Indian Tomb films is covered in this great article from some obscure online magazine called Rouge.

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9 comments Madame Menaka, Menaka Indian Ballet, Rare Find, Research, Western Films