1th July 2018
Had T. Balasaraswati been alive, she would have turned 100 this year. The extraordinary 20th century dancer, who caught Satyajit Ray’s fancy and became the subject of his documentary Bala (1976), represented the seventh unbroken generation of a family of temple dancers and musicians. Her family tree dates back to the early 18th century, when her great-great-great-great grandmother was a musician and dancer at the Thanjavur court.
The restive Balasaraswati not only danced with joyous purity, but was also a consummate exponent of the music of Bharatanatyam, a legacy inherited from her famous musician grandmother Vina Dhanammal and her mother Jayammal. Trained by the legendary Kandappan Pillai, she stunned her audience during her ritual debut performance in Kanchipuram at the age of seven, when she managed to distil the essence of Sringara rasa to perfection. She confessed, laughingly, many years later, that her mother had taught her to emote with music, not words. By the time she was 18, she was already a rage in north India, encouraged to perform in Kashi (now Varanasi), Calcutta (now Kolkata) and other cities by the iconic dancer Uday Shankar…