Birju Maharaj blended aestheticism into Kathak

Sreevalsan Thiyyadi

Birju Maharaj sang well all his life, as if proving how innate musicality must embody a dancer’s spirit. Just as his vocals were refreshingly soothing, the effervescent maestro’s hands swayed and the body twirled in perpetual celebration of what he visualised as cosmic movement. Kathak was a form Birju began practising as a toddler when British India gave no ‘classical’ status to anything indigenous. He was seven at his maiden public show, and the country two years short of Independence.

Into the next decade, Sangeet Natak Akademi began supporting the nascent nation’s age-old performing arts. Timely, as Kathak was crisis-riddled amid shrinking royal patronage in contrast to the plentiful Mughal-era.

Birju’s family had been into dancing for seven generations across the Indo-Gangetic plains. Courtly Lucknow defined his formative years, even as the household had its relatives living in the region’s other heritage cities: Benares and Rampur, for instance. Existential woes plagued their dance, some of whom began opting for allied careers to thrive financially.

One of them was Lachhu Maharaj, an uncle of Birju (formally Brij Mohan Nath Mishra). Trained in traditional Kathak, Lachhu had moved to Bombay to choreograph songs for Hindi movies. Teenaged Birju travelled down to the metropolis. Lachhu’s style had turned mellow, which was a far cry from Birju’s first guru and elder uncle, Shambhu Maharaj. A synthesis of the two streams would go on to describe Birju’s unique style.

As Birju’s prime disciple Saswati Sen used to reiterate, ‘Guruji blended the softness of one uncle and the sturdiness of the other.’ His ancestral land was Handia, 40 km east of Allahabad. Much like the mythical Sarasvati at the confluence, Birju’s dancer-father Acchan Maharaj (Jagannath Mishra) remained a subtle presence along the undercurrents of the Padma Vibhushan awardee’s colourful career.

Garrulous Birju’s rise implied an unprecedented individual-driven enrichment of Kathak, fetching it global fame on par with Bharatanatyam. Endowed with amazing adaptability, he also collaborated with other classical forms — a 2013 jugalbandi with Tamil Nadu’s illustrious Padma Subramanyam being a shining example. Such flexibilities are perhaps a taken: Kathak dancers are fundamentally storytellers. Ideally, they ought to be good at reciting lyrics, emoting them facially and supplementing words with gestures sparkled by eye movements, besides displaying percussive skills. Birju played the tabla and pakhawaj; even wrote rhyming poetry. He ran fingers expertly over the harmonium while crooning thumris and ghazals in languages spanning from Bangla to Marathi. The dancer spoke of sitarist Ravi Shankar and piper Bismillah Khan as fondly as about Naushad Ali or Talat Mahmood. No wonder, Birju worked for cinema, stringing dance sequences for films, ranging from Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj ke Khilari to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas.

A raconteur sharing wisdom from Hindu mythology as easily as playing video games over ice-cream, Birju saw life in its entirety. The finesse with which he enacted the course of a character’s infancy to senility in a 12-second bol proved his free-spirited approach to Natya Shastra.

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