‘Just the sound of traffic was sufficient to make me dance’
Acclaimed yesteryear actress Asha Parekh has penned down her autobiography, The Hit Girl, in collaboration with the critic Khalid Mohamed. Presented below is an extract from the book.
Om Books International By Asha Parekh & Khalid Mohamed Pages:264 Price: 895
Idanced, therefore I was. Without dance I would not have become an actress. Something — dare I say spiritual? — would set me dancing ever since I was a toddler. Just the sound of traffic on the streets was sufficient. Even the sound of silence has a rhythm, a beat. Trained in several disciplines of the dance form, a voice within me would constantly say that I was born to be a classical dancer, an exponent of Kathak. That was not to be my métier as such once the acting bug had bitten me. Concurrently with a film career the aim was to perform classical dance forms at stage shows. Inevitably once a movie actress attempts to double-task, she is not taken seriously enough. Audiences come to the stage performances to see a movie star perform, and not a classical dancer. Or so the purists insist, a cynical point of view surely.
Yet I would like to believe that the audience would have hooted me off the stage N TIO FIC if I had not done justice to the hundreds of classical dance performance shows organised across the world for a d decade and some more.
The words of the rulebreaking American dancer, Isadora Duncan have been a source of inspiration. Duncan had maintained: “The dancer will not belong to a nation but to all humanity. She will dance not in the form of a nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette but in the form of a woman in its greatest and purest expression. She will realise the mission of woman’s body and the holiness of all its parts. “She will dance the changing life of nature, showing how each part is transformed into one another. From all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall dance the freedom of women.”
The late Mohanlal Pandey, who hailed from Uttar Pradesh, trained me in Kathak when I was an impish nine year old. Not the sort to obey commands from anyone, when it came to dance quite contradictorily I was a model student. Dancing was my calling, studies at school were secondary. And there was this fascination for articulating the kathas of Ram-Sita, Krishna-Radha and Shiv-Parvati.
Pandeyji must have been in his late 40s, lean and of medium height. His kathak classes were conducted at a dance-hall-cum-residence in Dadar. He instilled in me the principle of lasya, of tenderness through delicate feet and hand movements in accordance with tabla beats and hand claps.
Learning kathak can be physically demanding. Surprisingly I never felt exhausted, perhaps because After a long period of unemployment, Master Sahib is appointed to a school for tribal girls in rural Jharkhand. He has heard of the Asur tribe who live there, that they are primitive, crude giants or perhaps even the demons of myth. Master Sahib settles into an uneasy routine, prejudiced against his neighbours and surroundings. But when the village chief’s son, appears in his room, battered, Sahib must perforce get involved with the community around him. the dance form was a release, a migration to another space and time altogether.
Pandeyji did not let his students know he was suffering from throat cancer. I did not understand what he was saying when he sat me down one day, and with moist eyes confided, “Child, I do not have much more time to live. If I am strict with you, it is only because I want to pass on to you whatever little I know.” The tragedy of that statement now rings in my ears. Without Pandeyji’s coaching, I would have been nowhere. When he passed away after a year, Mum and I were at the funeral, my first exposure to death. For days there was a feeling of numbness. I felt alone, deserted till Mum took hold of me and told me to cry my heart out. I had been holding back my tears.
Next my parents enrolled me for Bharatanatyam classes conducted by Arjun Desai closer to home in Santa Cruz. Said to be the oldest classical dance tradition of India, Bharatanatyam calls for a fixed upper torso, legs bent or knees flexed out allied with footwork and sign language communicated by gestures of hands, eyes and face muscles. A Bharatanatyam performance, as experts have noted, comprises nrita, nritya and natya (pure dance, solo expressive dance and group dramatic dance).
At times the physique of classical dancers bulks out. Mine did. This led to the “Asha Parekh” pun-intended joke. It goes that I went to a temple and pleaded before the lord, “Main tumhare paas badi aas leke aayee hoon [ I have come to you with high hopes]”. Hope or aas in my case connoted you-knowwhat. I have a sense of humour, can laugh at myself. The joke is on me. Fine.
Pandeyji did not let his students know he was suffering from throat cancer. I did not understand what he was saying when he sat me down one day, and with moist eyes confided, “Child, I do not have much more time to live. If I am strict with you, it is only because I want to pass on to you whatever little I know.”
Extracted with permission from Asha Parekh: The Hit Girl, published by Om Books International