Dec 14, 1998
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THE ARTS: DARPANA Amma of Culture Corp After 50 years of pioneering existence Mrinalini Sarabhai's dance school reinvents itself. By S. Kalidas
Below her book-lined study, daughter Mallika is getting the Darpana troupe to rehearse with a teacher of Naga folk dances. "I could not practise today since I have a cold," says the matriarch by way of an apology for having missed her morning routine. Today, memories both personal and public, crowd her mind. Memories which constitute chapters in the saga of our independence struggle, the renaissance of Bharatanatyam and the first self-conscious steps of modernism in Indian dance. But despite being the embodiment of a sizeable chunk of cultural history, Mrinalini is not inhibited by it. "Change does not bother me," she asserts, "I was always one for freedom in art. I did my first experimental piece, Manushya, way back in 1949. But anything new needs a strong foundation and tradition provides for that." Actually when Mrinalini (nee Swaminadhan) started learning Bharatanatyam, what we consider tradition now was being rediscovered and remoulded by the likes of Rukmini Devi, Vallathol Narayana Menon and Rabindranath Tagore. After Rukmini Devi, Mrinalini was perhaps the second girl from a "respectable Brahmin family" to take to professional dancing -- a revolutionary step at the time. "When I got married to Vikram," she recalls, "many people commiserated with my father-in-law Ambalal Sarabhai for his son's indiscretion in marrying a dancing girl." It must give her some satisfaction that now virtually every middle-class parent wants his or her daughter to learn some music or dance as a passport to matrimony. For, the first thing Mrinalini did on reaching Ahmedabad as a young bride was to open her own dance school, Darpana. In the course of its 50 years it has trained 16,200 students, staged 450 original productions, given 23,000 performances in over 91 countries and expanded its scope from pure classical dances to include contemporary work in dance, theatre and puppetry; folk and tribal forms; a publication unit; a television and video cell, and an activist programme to use the arts to bring about attitudinal change and environmental awareness in rural areas. All this was perhaps possible due to her privileged position. "She is, after all, Ammu Swaminadhan's daughter and Vikram Sarabhai's wife," the sceptics would say. But her journey was neither easy nor painless. With sheer hard work, passion and sincerity she silenced the cynics. Besides, as Tolstoy once said, "Each family is unhappy in its own way." And Mrinalini too has had to bear the loss of loved ones -- her father Swaminadhan and her husband Vikram -- when she needed them most. A lesser woman might have succumbed to her sorrow but Mrinalini had the rare capacity to sublimate it in her art. Of course, having a supportive daughter in Mallika helped.
The refashioned Darpana is a culture corporation. The undergraduate-level classical dance classes have been discontinued -- "So many of our own students have started teaching, so we no longer need to fill that slot," -- and what used to be loosely organised departments are now six separate strategic business units (SBUs) which will be responsible for raising their share of resources and finance. "For too long I carried the load of making a non-profit organisation grow and thrive. Now I feel it is time for those who reaped the benefits of a well-run institution to share the burden," says Mallika. What is creditable is that of the annual budget of Rs 1.40 crore only about 13 per cent comes from the Government. Also, Darpana's establishment and salary costs constitute only 22 per cent of the total budget, leaving the rest for creative objectives. On the artistic front as well, Darpana has changed its goals. The performance and propagation of "pure" classical dance forms is no longer the aim. "I do not deny the worth of pure Bharatanatyam but my dream is to use the arts to make a difference to society," says Mallika. She is thus steering Darpana into the field of development, environmental awareness, non-violence through multi- cultural experiments, multi-media shows, television and such. Starting December 28 Darpana celebrates its half century with the Vikram Sarabhai International Arts Festival with three new works in collaboration with English, Scottish and American performing artistes. Through the next year elaborate plans have been chalked out including an international folk arts festival, a children's festival, a women's festival, an event focusing on environmental issues through art, contemporary experiments with world folk music, plays exploring themes of peace and non-violence, mixed media happenings by contemporary artists and a festival aptly titled Art and Technology. So where does that leave Amma? Very happy and directing her new dance theatre The Conference of Birds with the noted British director John Martin. And watch out, she is not cuckoo. |
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One has to pull back the bow-string before
letting an arrow fly. "I plumbed the depths of tradition before embarking on any
creative change," says Mrinalini Sarabhai as she gazes across the sands of Sabarmati.
While the surprisingly sprightly 80-year-old dancer may symbolise the sashwat (eternal) in
our tradition, Darpana, her famous dance school, is now in the throes of a radical change
of structure and purpose to face up to the next millennium. 
Within five years of Vikram Sarabhai's
death in 1971, Mallika -- with all her talents as a dancer-actress and management expert
-- decided to commit herself seriously to her mother's institution. Without her timely
intervention Darpana might have sunk into inertia like Rukmini Devi's Kalakshetra, but
with Mallika at the helm it has not only found an energetic administrator but also a new
raison d'etre, as it were. "During all these years Amma (as Mrinalini is called by
everyone in Darpana) ran a feudal matriarchal set-up," says Mallika. "When I
took over I found that both our aims and the way we went about achieving them needed to
change." Every organisation needs to sit back after a while and take stock of the
past and plan for the future. Says Mallika, "The social factors change and so do
ambitions and objectives." Last year Mallika recruited a think tank of people
associated with Darpana, including international theatre company directors and management
psychology mandarins to create a new mission statement for Darpana. Next she asked IIM's
Organisational Transformation (OT) expert, Indira Parikh, to chart out a new management
structure for it. 
