Once again, BritishPathé's digitized archive holds another rare gem of Indian dance: brief footage of the legendary devadasi T. Balasaraswati giving a dance performance at the 1963 Edinburgh Festival in Scotland! The Indian portion of the video actually begins at 3:04 with veena player Narayana Menon showing his instrument and then playing a Bach sonata. Balasaraswati's piece begins at 3:43, shows brief shots of her nattuvanar (who is he I wonder?) and musicians on the left, and closes with a nice, crisp closeup of Bala's face ending at 4:06. Last, harmonica artist Larry Adler performs a musical trio piece with Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar's tabla player Allah Rakha. Take a look:
What an excellent video find! This means the number of extant recordings of Bala's dance can be increased by one. Somehow I missed this video before when I searched through BritishPathé's archive after learning of the incredible Baroda devadasi footage and found clips of Uday Shankar, Simkie, Ram Gopal, and others. The video's keywords don't help much since Bala's name is spelled "Balasvarasvati." While the clip is extremely short and not what I would consider Bala's best dancing (and the sound doesn't seem to match the visuals), it is very rare and can be added to the archival record of Bala's work.
Douglas Knight devotes a few pages of his biography on Bala to her performance at the Edinburgh Festival. Some of the musicians who came along with her were family, and others included Sarojini Kumaraswami, a student of Jayammal. Knight writes some delightful passages about Bala's festival experiences:
What a coincidence! I just discovered that not even a month after I had posted Bala (1976) on YouTube a much better-quality version was posted by the imagineindia channel which appears to be linked with the "Imagine India International Film Festival Madrid" that took place in May. The quality of their version is excellent with no pixelation or compression, sound perfectly synched, and a rose-tinted sepia appearance. If only I would have waited a few weeks it would have already been up online, amazing! Oh 2012, my love for you has no bounds!
Update: Video removed/channel no longer available
Imagineindia's channel also has what I understand is another rare film of Satyajit Ray, Pikoo's Diary. Other non-related channels have uploaded Sukumar Ray and The Inner Eye, both also quite rare apparently.
While that is quite awesome, I am even more excited to see that Sanchari, Bamboo Flute, and Kuchipudi Revisited are now all posted full length! I was so excited about the discovery of the full-length Bhavantarana on Monday that I didn't check to see if any other Indian Diplomacy hosted documentaries I blogged about had been posted in full!
Only two documentaries are said to have been made on the legendary devadasi/Bharatanatyam dancer T. Balasaraswati (Sruti magazine). The first was a 1962 recording titled Balasaraswati produced by Wesleyan University in the US, and the second was a 1976 documentary titled Bala directed by Satyajit Ray.
The Wesleyan recording appears to be available for purchase [Update: no longer locatable now] and short clips from it are on YouTube, but the Satyajit Ray documentary is as elusive as can be! I don't think it's ever been commercially released, and only a few film studies programs and government archives seem to have copies which are unfortunately rarely screened. As luck would have it, this week I found a copy of the rare documentary online. Blocky artifacts due to apparent heavy compression made for a less-than-ideal viewing experience, so I cleaned up the video to make it as presentable as possible given the source. I rarely post entire films, but I'm presenting this one for not only the educational value of discussing it here but also because it is an important archival recording of a critical figure in the history of India's classical dance traditions. Ray himself apparently saw the film's "main value as archival" and he "put on film a rare performer for future generations to marvel at" (Robinson).
Here is the wonderful documentary; time markers of interest (if you watch the video on YouTube you can click on the times in the description and go straight to that point of the video): 2:07 - Bala demonstrating hand gestures 3:57 - Bala singing and performing abhinaya 7:00 - Bala speaking in English 8:29 - An elderly Uday Shankar speaking about Bala 9:58 - Bala's Krishna Ne Begane Baro dance by the ocean 18:58 - Bala's varnam dance with her musical ensemble. (Note - A better version of Bala is now available on YouTube; please see my June 8 post. I have not yet removed my version below in case others have linked to/embedded it).
While chatting with an online friend about the history of devadasis and other topics related to this blog, my friend pointed out that the website of the Asia Society had a video containing a rare clip of devadasi Mylapore Gowri Ammal dancing. The video was Douglas Knight's presentation at the June 2010 Asia Society-hosted launch of his book, Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life. As I watched, I was completely astonished to discover that not only did it have an almost 3-minute video of Gauri Ammal's abhinaya (!) but also it contained two separate clips (with nearly 13-minutes of collective dance footage) of the legendary devadasi T. Balasaraswati.
Here is the stunning video with the dance segments notated above. The first two dances have no sound and Mr. Knight reads excerpts from his book in the background. (Here's the original video link if needed.)
12:02-16:00 - Balasaraswathi dancing on stage 18:13-20:54 - Mylapore Gowri Ammal 22:34-34:09 - Balasaraswathi performing an alapana starting at 23:25 and then dancing to Krishna Nee Begane Baro starting at 25:17 (according to Sangeetha's blog).
While browsing the website of the National Film Archive of India, I was excited to find that films in the catalog (which can be found through the search) have an extensive cast and crew list that in many cases identifies the choreographer! [Update: This information no longer appears to be part of the search results that I could see.] The archives have quite a few South Indian titles back to the early 1930s and the majority of them have a choreographer identified, amazingly. Armed with this information, I did some web searching and found that quite a few dances from 1940s South Indian films immediately struck me as looking like Devadasi dances.
(2021 Update: I am no longer updating this blog but hope you enjoy my older posts!) Bringing light to classical and traditional Indian dances in the cinema of India; unearthing rare archival clips and academic research on South Asian dance!
