Balasaraswati

Tanjore Balasaraswati was born on May 13, 1918, in Madras, the city now called Chennai, into one of South India's most distinguished hereditary families of musicians and dancers ^[1]. The family traced its lineage to Papammal, an eighteenth century musician and dancer attached to the court of Thanjavur, and each generation since had produced professional performers. Her great grandmother Sundarammal, her grandmother the celebrated vina player Vina Dhanammal, and her mother, the singer Jayammal, all practiced music at the highest level ^[2].

The household on Ramakrishna Chetty Street in the George Town district of Madras functioned as a kind of conservatory. Friday evening music sessions at Dhanammal's home drew the leading musicians and connoisseurs of the city, and the child absorbed Carnatic music before she could read ^[2]. Any Balasaraswati biography has to begin with this immersion, because her later art rested on a musician's ear as much as on a dancer's body.

Her formal dance training began around the age of four under Kandappan Pillai, a hereditary teacher, or nattuvanar, descended from the Thanjavur Quartet, the four brothers who codified the Bharatanatyam repertoire in the nineteenth century ^[1]. The apprenticeship was severe and traditional. Balasaraswati gave her arangetram, the debut performance that marks a dancer's entry into the profession, in 1925 at the Ammanakshi temple in Kanchipuram, when she was seven years old ^[3].

Balasaraswati came of age at a difficult moment for her art. The dance she inherited, then called sadir and performed by hereditary women known as devadasis, was under attack from social reformers who associated it with temple dedication practices they sought to abolish. Legislation in Madras Presidency moved through the 1930s and 1940s toward banning the dedication of women to temples, and many hereditary performers left the profession ^[4]. At the same time, revivalists such as Rukmini Devi Arundale were reshaping the dance for middle class practitioners under the name Bharatanatyam, altering its costume, music, and expressive content.

Balasaraswati took a different course. She continued to perform the repertoire of her family and her teacher's lineage largely as she had received it, including the padams and javalis, slow love songs whose interpretation demanded mature expressive skill ^[3]. Her position, argued in performances and later in lectures, was that the erotic and devotional strands of the tradition belonged together and that the inherited music could not be replaced without loss ^[4].

Recognition came early and from far beyond Madras. A 1934 performance in Calcutta brought her to the attention of audiences in northern India, and Rabindranath Tagore was among the admirers of her dancing ^[1]. Through the 1930s and 1940s she performed across India, often accompanied by her mother Jayammal's singing, and built a reputation as the preeminent exponent of the hereditary style ^[2].

Among the most frequently cited Balasaraswati achievements is her role in carrying Bharatanatyam to international audiences on her own terms. She danced at the East West Music Encounter in Tokyo in 1961, and in 1962 she made her American debut, performing and teaching at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts ^[5]. Further tours took her to the United States and Europe through the 1960s and 1970s, and she taught residencies at institutions including Wesleyan University, the California Institute of the Arts, Mills College, and the University of Washington ^[3].

American modern dance took notice. Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Ted Shawn all expressed admiration for her work, and critics in New York wrote about her concerts as major artistic events rather than ethnographic curiosities ^[5]. Her particular strength was abhinaya, the interpretive art in which a seated or slowly moving dancer elaborates the meaning of a sung poem through face, hands, and gesture, improvising variations the way a musician improvises on a raga ^[3].

India honored her repeatedly. She received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1955, the Padma Bhushan in 1957, and the Padma Vibhushan, the country's second highest civilian honor, in 1977 ^[6]. The Sangeet Natak Akademi made her a fellow in 1973, and in the same period the Music Academy of Madras conferred on her the title Sangita Kalanidhi, an award almost always reserved for musicians, in recognition of her command of Carnatic music ^[1]. In 1976 the filmmaker Satyajit Ray directed a documentary about her, simply titled Bala ^[6].

Balasaraswati's private life stayed close to the family compound and the family art. She had a long relationship with R. K. Shanmukham Chetty, a prominent public figure who later served as independent India's first finance minister, and their daughter Lakshmi was born in 1943 ^[3]. Lakshmi Knight, as she became known after her marriage to the American ethnomusicologist Douglas Knight, trained under her mother and became a respected performer of the family style in her own right ^[2].

Music remained the center of the household. Balasaraswati was herself an accomplished singer, and in later years she sometimes gave vocal concerts of padams and javalis. Her brothers, the flutist T. Viswanathan and the mridangam player T. Ranganathan, both became distinguished musicians and teachers, eventually holding faculty positions at Wesleyan University, which helped anchor the family's long association with that campus ^[2].

Those who studied with her describe a teacher who insisted on music first. Students learned to sing the compositions before dancing them, on the principle that gesture without musical understanding was empty ornament ^[3]. This teaching, carried on by her daughter and grandson Aniruddha Knight, kept the family tradition alive after her death.

From the mid 1970s Balasaraswati performed less frequently, though her stature continued to grow. Her 1975 address to the Tamil Isai Sangam, later translated and widely reprinted, set out her understanding of Bharatanatyam as an art of devotion in which the dancer's discipline itself becomes a form of worship, and it remains one of the most quoted statements by any Indian dancer ^[4].

She spent her final years in Madras, teaching a small circle of students and appearing occasionally at festivals and academic gatherings. Ray's documentary, shot when she was in her late fifties, preserved her abhinaya on film and introduced her to viewers who had never seen her on stage ^[6].

Balasaraswati died in Madras on February 9, 1984, at the age of 65 ^[1]. Obituaries in India and abroad described her as the last great representative of the hereditary devadasi tradition of dance, an assessment her admirers had been making for decades.

The clearest measure of Balasaraswati's legacy is that her style survives as a living school. Her daughter Lakshmi Knight taught and performed until her death in 2001, and her grandson Aniruddha Knight continues to perform and teach the family repertoire in India and the United States through the organization Bala Music and Dance ^[2]. Wesleyan University, where her brothers taught for decades, remains a center for the study of her family's music.

Scholars return to her career when they debate what happened to South Indian dance in the twentieth century. Where the revivalist account presents Bharatanatyam as an art rescued and purified, Balasaraswati's example complicates the story, showing an unbroken hereditary practice that needed no rescue ^[4]. Douglas Knight's 2010 biography, published by Wesleyan University Press, documents that practice in detail and is now the standard scholarly account of her life ^[3].

Basic Balasaraswati facts, her 1918 birth in Madras, her debut at seven, her honors from two governments and many academies, only sketch the outline. What contemporaries remembered was the experience of watching her elaborate a single line of poetry for many minutes without repetition. American critics ranked her among the great performers of the century in any tradition, and in India her name became shorthand for depth of interpretation in dance ^[5].