Dances on the Footpath

Unfortunately, I have had plenty of reasons recently to write new film-related blog posts, simply on the basis of the number of classic stars who have died. After Sandhya died early last month, we lost the actress-dancer Madhumati on October15, but November turned out to be even worse. On November 14, we lost Kamini Kaushal, and then on November 23 to 24, Dharmendra and Kumari Kamala died, within a day or less of each other. (Dharmendra died on November 24. Most articles say Kumari Kamala died on November 23, possibly because that was the day where she was staying, at her son’s place in California. Some Indian sites give the date as November 24.)

In the past few days, Dharmendra has gotten mention and tributes in many places, but I did not see Kamala’s death mentioned as much by broader news sources or sources devoted to films; she was commemorated mainly in sites and journals strictly devoted to dance. Now you might say that this little blog has been both film-related and dance-related (in addition to going in various other directions). But sometimes, I do end up noticing the dancers more than anyone else in the classic films, and that is why I have given Kamala more attention over the years – and why she is the artist whom I have chosen to pay tribute to this time.

I would say that Kamala was the best South Indian dancer whom I have ever seen in Indian films. Great dancers such as Vyjayanthimala and Padmini have gotten due recognition, because they have acted in so many films and became established “Bollywood” icons – in addition to being great dancers. But I think Kamala – who was even better than the other two as a dancer – ultimately became a little less noticed because she stuck more exclusively to dance (though still acting in a few films here and there). In fact, even in dance, as Kamala has said a few times herself, she has gone relatively underappreciated, even forgotten in many circles. Certainly, she did get a lot of recognition in the beginning – starting as a child prodigy in the 1940s – especially for being the young film dancer most responsible for the revival of bharatanatyam (at least on the cinema side). But as the trends in films changed, and as South Indian films continued to trail behind Hindi films (that is, the ones that would be referred back to decades later as “Bollywood”), she seemed to become increasingly underappreciated. In fact, Kamala has said so, herself, and this was a big reason why she eventually moved to the U.S., settling in as a dance teacher in the suburbs of New York City. (Padmini also moved to the U.S. and, like Kamala, ended up living and teaching in the New York City area. But she did not express the same kind of discontent that Kamala did, especially not as a reason for her move.)

Kamala continued teaching in the New York City area, even in very recent years (long after Padmini’s death). Like Padmini, she did some teaching in New Jersey, but she did more in Long Island and Westchester. In fact, I almost met her right after she gave one her dance lessons in Westchester, a little more than 11 years ago. I bailed out for a few different reasons, leaving the interview and subsequent write-ups to my blogging friends Cassidy/Minai and Ragothaman. I guess it would have been nice to meet Kamala, but I am not someone who actually craves that much to meet my favorite actors, dancers, etc. Their work is what matters to me, and I am just grateful to have been exposed to so many of Kamala’s great dances in films.

Kamala danced in tons of South Indian films and I have mentioned some of her dances in those films in past posts in this blog. In fact, unlike her aforementioned dancing peers, she actually is someone whose Hindi film dances were less well-known than many of her Tamil ones. That’s one reason I have decided to show and talk about five clips of dances that she did in Hindi/“Bollywood” films. Also, even though I have not completely shied away from posting about South Indian films in the past, I feel that Hindi films have been more central to this blog – or at least were for a long period – and are also better known to most of my old friends in the blogging community (some of whom also know the Hindi language – but probably aren’t so versed in Tamil). One more reason that I am going to focus on a few dances from her Hindi films is that some of the clips are long gone from posts that I did about these dances in the past. And unlike with, say, Sandhya, my posts about Kamala were usually about her dances specifically, not contained within a larger film review.

I have decided to go through this list chronologically (not ranked), so I’m starting here with a breakthrough dance by the 8-year-old Baby Kamala in Kismet (1943). Kismet has often been referred to as “India’s first blockbuster,” so Baby Kamala had a guaranteed huge audience for this. But people were also obviously charmed and dazzled by the skills of this little girl. By the way, although the character in the scene here collapses from the pace of the dance, it’s pretty obvious that the real Kamala would not have. She already was at a stage where she could easily master this.

Now, after going on for so long above about why I am only including Hindi film scenes on this list, I might be cheating a little here by including the 1947 Hindi remake of the 1945 Tamil film Meera (a movie about the mystic/poet/saint also known as Mirabai). However, I believe the 1947 film became more famous and, per Wikipedia, it’s the one that made M.S. Subbulakshmi a national film star (for the first and last time, since she would quit films to concentrate exclusively on her singing after that). Also, I found the Hindi version of Meera because of a delightful post from December 2009 at The Cinema Corridor, by Nivedita Ramakrishnan, as well as the clips that she posted on YouTube under the nameAlaknanda2007. (Actually, I got to see the videos on YouTube and write about Kamala’s dance from there before Nivedita even put up the blog post.)

Anyway, while M.S. Subbulakshmi played the adult Meera, Meera as a child was portrayed by Radha Viswanathan, and there is one scene depicting a dream that child Meera has in which she dances with Krishna, who is played by none other than Baby Kamala. Almost needless to say, the scene is delightful (if a little fuzzy in the clip). Kamala does great in the role – as one would expect – and the whole dance is adorable.

The next three Kamala dances from Hindi films that always spring to my mind come from the years 1956 through 1958, when Baby Kamala had become Kamala Lakshman and was in her early-mid 20s. (By the way, she acquired the name “Lakshman” (also commonly spelled as “Laxman”) from her first marriage, which turned out to be ill-fated. A couple of decades later, her last name would officially be Lakshminarayanan – which actually was her second husband’s name, although it was a bit confusing in its similarity to “Lakshman.”)

I think the decade between the mid ‘40s and the mid ‘50s was the time when Kamala really built her reputation as the proponent of bharatanatyam in the cinema, which she did mainly in South Indian films, especially Tamil ones. With her famous bharatanatyam skills, she also became an important representative of newly independent India or, in her very famous dances in Nam Iruvar (1947), the patriotic aspirations of an India about to become independent. The pure bharatanatyam was not as essential to her dance in Hindi films (I suppose for obvious reasons), but in Chori Chori (1956), she does a great traditional thillana. (I think this dance is purely traditional, though if any real classical dance purists out there see any variations, I’d be curious to know.)

In the context of the film, her dance functions mainly as an item number, since she does not play a character who has any role in the plot. Her performance is presented just as a dance taking place at an ultimately unwanted wedding, with the main characters being played by Nargis, Raj Kapoor, and Pran. (You can see a cut to Pran in the audience here.) But for me, Kamala became the star of the film when she performed that perfect bharatanatyam – even though I did like all the main actors and the film in general.

Kamala’s dance in Kathputli (1957) is an incredibly lively and more modern number, though with a few nods to bharatanatyam in her expressions and various dance movements. It reminds me of many dances by Vyjayanthimala. Actually, Vyjayanthimala plays the main character and is the main dancer in this film.  Kamala plays a dancer who is brought in as a substitute for Vyjayanthimala’s character, Pushpa, when Pushpa has to drop out of the theater because of a problem with her new (and very quickly alienated) husband. Balraj Sahni plays the owner/manager of the theater, Loknath, who is distraught about losing Pushpa as a dancer, because of her talents and because he is obviously in love with her. (There are actually a few more complications than that, as I have just seen while checking a post that I wrote about this film sometime back. This is quite full of melodrama! But I don’t remember much now beyond the dances.) In any event, Loknath seems to be consoled somewhat, finally, when he is presented with a substitute dancer – whose name happens to be Kamala, just like the dancer playing her. Curiously, though, this substitute dancer is actually even better than Pushpa. That is to say, Kamala is a better dancer in this film than Vyjayanthimala – a point that I have seen brought up by a couple of people other than me, too. And by the way, it’s not because Vyjayanthimala isn’t good in this film – her dances also happen to be great! Anyway, as I recall, the character Kamala becomes difficult to deal with especially because of some stage mother of hers who is making unreasonable demands. Eventually, Pushpa is brought back and we see at least one more great dance by Vyjayanthimala, too (with a dramatic speech on top of that, as I recall). But it’s a shame that we couldn’t see any more dances here by Kamala.

Kamla’s dance in Yahudi (1958) is probably the most modern dance on this list, although it supposedly takes place in an ancient Roman theater. The dance and outfits also have an Arabian flavor, as does the other main dance in the movie, in which Helen and Cuckoo materialize out of smoke coming from genie bottles. I love Helen and Cuckoo, but Kamala’s dance was more of a high point in this film for me. Kamala is not only extremely dynamic here but also ever-so-graceful – look at those flowing arm movements. As in Chori Chori, there is a cut to a couple of the real stars of the film. (You can see Dilip Kumar and Nigar Sultana here. Meena Kumari plays a big role in this film, too, though she is not in this scene.) However, the big stars kind of become irrelevant for the length of Kamala’s fantastic dance. (At least that was how I felt.)

Kamala could obviously contribute wonderful skills to any kind of dance that she did. (By the way, I think I neglected to mention that she was also trained as a kathak dancer when she was a child, concurrent with her early lessons in bharatanatyam.) And for this, as I was saying, she gets due recognition in the dance journals and sites – especially at the great Narthaki and their channel at YouTube. Maybe if she had not died on basically the same day as the famous Dharmendra, other types of journals would have found more space to talk about her. (I didn’t even find out about her death, myself, until about two days later.) But at least as I see it, with the death of Kumari Kamala, we have seen the passing of another truly great performer – an absolute legend, really. RIP, Kamala.

I wish that I didn’t end up returning to this blog after several months for such a sad reason. But Sandhya has died. By most reports, she was 94 years old (though some sources still give other ages and dates of birth – for some reason, there have always been different ages listed for her on different sites, and they all used to be wrong). In any event, as the saying goes, she lived a long life and, hopefully, a relatively happy one. From what I could tell, she was basically a recluse for many years, so it was difficult to get new information about her. But it certainly was not difficult to find numerous examples of the great work that she did in the past.

I started to buy DVDs of V. Shantaram films starring Sandhya very early in my dive into the Golden Age because they were so easy to find in the stores in Jackson Heights, Queens, NY when I lived there between 2007 and 2010. (At that time, there were at least half a dozen stores there selling lots of “Bollywood DVDs”; now there are none.) They were often in the discount bins, too. I am not sure why they were so cheap (they should all have gotten top price!), but that was just one more reason for me to grab one after another without hesitating for a moment.

I know that not everyone loved her dancing, and classical dance purists, especially, found something to criticize, even after she took her crash course in kathak with Gopi Krishna. But I always found her dancing to be truly unique, amazingly lively, and chock full of stunning innovation. She was a good actress, too. People criticized her looks, and I even had big arguments with some blog readers after I said that I considered her to be beautiful. Admittedly, maybe I should have said that she was just very charming, because she did not fit any traditional standards of beauty (something that has also been mentioned in many places over the years, whether relatively kindly or not). But she did have beautiful eyes and such captivating expressions, and since I so often positively loved to watch her dance, I still have to say – if you will pardon the cliche – that she was beautiful to me. Also, I have read several accounts that she was a fine person, genuinely good to other people and always sincere.

Anyway, here I am going to list/link to four full reviews that I did of films starring Sandhya. I will add links to some of my other Sandhya posts a little later (because there are quite a few). (Note, I wanted to get this post up quickly to honor Sandhya right away. Fortunately, I was able to replace the dropped clips in my reviews faster than I had thought – and therefore able to finish this part completely while it was still October 4, at least in my time zone.)

So here we go, starting with my review of the great Navrang – one of the first full film reviews that I wrote in this blog, way back in July of 2008:

Navrang

Teen Batti Char Rasta (1953)

Pinjra (1972)

Beautiful Songs from Parchhaiyan (1952)

And you can expect me to add at least a few links to other posts later, so please come back. (In other words, to be continued!)

P.S. The song from which I took the screen cap that you see at the top isn’t from one of the films I listed/reviewed; it’s from Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje. The song is Kaisi Yeh Mohobbat Ki Saja. I just happened to watch this song again recently and then I thought that I could get a great picture out of it to put in this post – and I believe I did.

Part II (added Oct. 6)

As promised, here are links to several more Sandhya-centered posts from this blog over the years – these being things other than full film reviews.

Another Great “Radio Performance” (Lata on Sandhya) (The first of a couple of times in this blog when I posted a certain wonderful song from Teen Batti Char Rasta. Just posted the clip here, no text – something I don’t do anymore – and now have replaced it because the old one wouldn’t embed.)

Sandhya, You May Have Won a Very Tough Competition (The competition in my mind for the all-time best peacock dance.)

Sandhya in Amar Bhupali (1951) (Two great clips from Sandhya’s first film. They’d been dropped, so I replaced them with recent fixed-up and colorized versions.)

A Fish Out of Water (Clip of the wonderful title song/dance from the 1971 film Jal Bin Machhli – won’t embed, but certainly worth the extra trip to YouTube.)

Do you think this video for Jakatta’s remix of a Sheila Chandra song was influenced by Sandhya’s character in Do Ankhen Barah Haath? (Inviting a visual comparison.)

A Look at the Lovely Dance Called Lavani (A few clips were dropped from this post, but I was able, at least, to replace the last one, which is from the Sandhya film Chandanachi Choli Anga Anga Jali, a Marathi movie made in 1975. I watched a few dances from this film, and I think she was just as great here as she was in many of her classics from the ’50s-’60s.)

Yesterday, July 30, marked 18 years since I opened up this blog with my first small announcement about it. At that time, the blog did not have the real focus and subject matter that it would have for the bulk of its time starting about half a year later (although it has in recent years moved somewhat back toward its original form, at least in terms of drifting away from (obsessively) discussing classic films and back toward discussion more generally about music, dance, and a few other things). For a while after its start, the blog also contained many of what I would call short throwaway posts, the kind of stuff that I have felt freer in the past decade to toss out on Facebook instead. But if you include everything in this blog, then it has just passed its 18th birthday.

As I have said before, it is questionable whether the blog is still alive. I tried to revive it a little this year, but the time, energy and inclination have not combined in the right way to keep me posting regularly. I am also quite fed up with the technical changes at WordPress, which actually not only complicated the process of writing new posts but somewhat screwed up the format of old posts (not to mention the irreversible changes they made to the front page – for example, see my sidebar for a description of problems related to the blogroll).

I do have a post in mind for sometime soon, but I’m making no announcements about reviving this as a regular blog again. :)

I might add, though, that I have just last week been relieved of a job that robbed me of much of the time and energy that I might have put into keeping the blog going. I will have to find another job eventually, but I might also have more time on my hands in the near future that I can put into this blog. If I do not do a lot of new posts, maybe I will spend a little time fixing up some of the problems in the old posts and replacing dropped video clips, too.

I have thought of creating indexes of sorts. I also thought of writing a sort of “best of” post so that people might be able to refer immediately to at least some good posts from back in the day that they haven’t seen before. But I admit, when I tentatively started rummaging through my old posts to find the best from 18 years, I realized that this could prove to be an unbearably laborious and tedious task.

I also have thought of providing updates to some old posts, which I have been somewhat inspired to do after receiving very interesting comments on posts that I wrote years or even decades ago, some of which comments actually contained new information. But for now, I hope people will read these comments via the “Recent Comments” list on the sidebar.

I might try starting a new blog, too, either in WordPress or on some other forum (back to Blogger?). I am partly motivated to do this by the fact that I have written some substantial posts for Facebook over the years, too – many of which are completely unrelated to the particular range of subjects covered by this blog – and I’d like to copy them into a place where people can easily find them at any time.

At least some of the things that I have mentioned here will happen (even if I can’t promise all), so, to use an old, overused phrase, please stay tuned!

I’m going to do a simpler post this time, focusing on one fantastic song in a great video, performed in a very moving way by the Pakistani singer (once pop, now much more Sufi) named Hadiqa Kiani. While it’s only the beginning of March, I would bet that this is going to prove to be my favorite music video of 2025. The production is great and the visuals convey the meaning clearly and precisely to the point that you can be someone who speaks only English, without knowing the meaning of any of the words, and still understand the message perfectly. Meanwhile, Hadiqa Kiani is, herself, a great singing artist as well as, apparently, a skilled actress, who makes this song very much, as the saying goes, her own – even though it is a classic going back a few decades. I have seen and heard a couple of different versions of this song (which I will get back to in a little while), and I like Hadiqa’s version the best.

The phrase “Paisa Bolta Hay” (or “…Hai,” as it is more commonly transliterated) is a pretty basic one, something that even someone with my rudimentary skills in Hindi and Urdu can get immediately. It basically means, “Money Talks,” and that is the perfect title for this song and video. The message is that money can determine, interfere with, or control anything in our society, and that this is not a good thing, either. In other contexts, it could be conveyed in a sort of shrugging, resigned, and/or less dramatic way, but this video conveys the song pretty strongly as an anti-capitalist protest – which is how I like it most. I also was very moved by the sadness of some of the scenes as Hadiqa moves through the video surveying examples of capitalist exploitation. Obviously, this also conveys a strong message about the exploitation of women, something that the versions before this probably didn’t zero in on as much. When we witness – along with Hadiqa – the sale by some sort of pimp of a young (and likely trafficked) young woman to a creepy old man, it is as distressing as can be and would put a tear in anyone’s eye. Later, we see a courtesan dancing scene with money flying over the dancer (which may or may not be an example of exploitation – understanding the tradition behind this – but certainly shows the significance of money to such performances). And more intriguingly, this occurs behind the scene of a monkey being forced to dance for money, too. Actually, I would bet that if you understand the lyrics, as well as if you see a translation of this poem (which I will get to shortly), you will notice right away that the visuals explicitly illustrate different lines. There is a lot in these visuals to take in, while we are also taking in a fine singing performance done to a very good and classic qawwali beat.

It should be no surprise that the song is driven by a good beat, considering that the tabla player for this song is Ustad Dildar Hussain. Dildar Hussain is probably known best as being the tabla player for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (decades ago), but in more recent times, he has also toured a great deal with Fanna-Fi-Allah Sufi Qawwali, and he is the one who taught tabla to Fanna-Fi-Allah’s longtime former tabla player (and co-founder) Aminah Chishti. (By the way, Aminah Chishti deserves special mention as a pioneering female tabla player, being the first woman allowed to play tabla in the shrines of Pakistan. I wrote about that in this blog – and about Fanna-Fi-Allah in general – about a decade ago.)

The writer of the lyrics is the poet Sail Azad (1938-2018), also known by his birth name, Ghulam Hussain. A quick search reveals that he has written lyrics in both Urdu and Sindhi that were performed by quite a few performers in both India and Pakistan, but that nothing he wrote is nearly as well known as “Paisa Bolta Hai,” which essentially was the song that made him famous.

Searching for an English translation, I did find one that looks pretty good, posted to the blog The Absinthe Room. This post also is duplicated by the post’s author (identified as AquariuZB) on a blog devoted to the Sabri Brothers singer Maqbool Sabri. But AquariuZB doesn’t show a simple word-for-word translation; rather, he intersperses the Urdu lyrics and English translation with quite a few notes explaining references and context, giving a fuller-than-usual account of how the lyrics should be understood. For this reason, I am not going to pick out the translated lines to post here but, instead, just highly recommend that you take a look at this blog post and enjoy the depth of his perspective.

It would take an awful lot of work for me to try to confirm that the lyrics that Hadiqa sings match the ones translated here from the version by the Sabri Brothers – we all know how these things can vary – but I am pretty convinced that if the versions have any differences between them, they still must be pretty close. (I can say that it seems the Sabri Brothers’ version might be the more complete one, since it is a few minutes longer. I would certainly welcome comments by anyone reading this who might be fluent enough in Hindi/Urdu to compare the versions much more easily than I can and would be inspired to report back. :) )

Given that the post containing that translation is based on the version by the Sabri Brothers and that they are the group who made the song famous, of course I am going to provide their version here. And although this post was inspired specifically by Hadiqa Kiani’s version, I do also enjoy the Sabri Brothers’ version, since that qawwali group was pretty great.

Looking around, I have also found a Hindi film version of this song, from the 1989 film Kala Bazaar. (Not to be confused, by the way, with the 1960 Dev Anand classic, which is commonly spelled as Kala Bazar. And as far as I know, the later one is not in any way a remake of the earlier, though there could be some similar themes – with a title that translates to English as “Black Market.” ) This is obviously a simpler version of the song, and the songwriting credits below the video mention a different lyricist – Payam Sayeedi – and name the music composer as Rajesh Roshan (son of Roshan, the great composer from the Golden Age). I will never quite understand how songs acquire such different credits when they go from a recorded/audio version to a film version and/or from Pakistan to India (or vice versa), but given the identical melody, there is no question that we are hearing the same song. (By the way, you can find an English translation of this version of the song – which is done in a straightforward way – at Filmy Notes.)

The picturization in the Kala Bazaar version certainly is lighter than Hadiqa Kiani’s; in fact, this was the version that I had in mind when I mentioned above that the song could be conveyed in a sort of “shrugging, resigned” way (fitting better into a film that is probably a sort of comedy). The general message of the song still comes across, but Hadiqa’s version is far more moving, to say the least.

While looking at people’s comments to different versions of the song, I saw someone write that this is a song that could be relevant in any time period. Unfortunately, the way the world is going, it feels more relevant in the present than during any other era I can remember (going years and decades back). That is part of the reason I was so drawn to the song when I found it in the past couple of weeks, during the first few months of 2025. And maybe because Hadiqa Kiani’s version was the one that drew me in, this is the version that will always remain engraved in my mind when I think of this song – though with due acknowledgement of the great Sabri Bothers, of course. I have already watched Hadiqa’s video a good number of times, and I still want to see it and listen to it many times more.

[A couple of things that I thought I should note in advance: First of all, there is no ranking in this list. The order in which these performances are listed is the result of the way (or different ways) that my thoughts flowed. And for some time before I even got into listing the events and artists, I simply had to say a lot in a broader sense about a certain festival…]

For a while now, I have wanted to name some my favorite performances of kathak dance among those that I have seen since the early part of 2019. I am putting the marker there, because the third weekend of April 2019 was the time when a new forum emerged in my own town, New York City, for people to see numerous performances by some of the best kathak dancers. April 19, 2019 marked the beginning of the New York Kathak Festival, something that I think is different from anything that has existed before in New York. Before the NYKF, I could find a dance show now and then that might feature a few varieties of Indian dance or might be a showcase for “world dance,” in which kathak played a small part, and there was also no telling whether we were getting the best or most exciting dancers in the form. Although, since it’s only been in the past several years that I have become completely “crazy for kathak” – as I like to put it – there is a possibility that there could have been something like this before but that I wouldn’t have been as aware of it because I wasn’t looking out for the dance so much. But… I don’t think so. I am pretty confident that here in New York City, this festival is unprecedented.

And I have to add that I have experienced only a fraction of the New York Kathak Festival, which is packed full of talks and classes and workshops during the several days that it officially takes place, as well as containing three nights each time filled with multiple kathak performances. And on top of that, they have “pop-up” concerts outside of the weekends of the festival and have had online festivals, too (especially during the peak of the COVID crisis). I have not made it to the pop-up festivals because, rather than taking place in a central location in Manhattan, they usually take place in a corner of Queens (where I haven’t lived in 15 years; I’m stuck in the Bronx right now). Also, the timing of those events has never been very convenient for me, and probably, the same is true for the online events, which I have missed, too (though I have seen a few clips from them). I have gone to all three of the official live dance festivals since 2019 – the others being in 2023 and 2024 – but instead of going to all three nights of performance in each event, I have gone to only one. I guess the main reason for that has a lot to do with the availability of these things called time and money. But another reason is that just one evening of these performances is so satisfying – it always contains so much to take in!

So, I would have to say that I am far from a full participant, even simply as a spectator. Nonetheless, I really find that as aesthetic experiences go, these kathak festivals can reach me pretty deeply. Seeing a good kathak dance has become, for me, one of the greatest aesthetic experiences.

And in case this hasn’t become clear, these kathak festivals have been my main source for that great aesthetic experience for the past several years here in New York City, In fact, every dance event that I am going to show clips from in this post stars a dancer or troupe who appeared at least once in the New York Kathak Festival, and every dance mentioned here except for one (which I will get to in a little while) is one that I saw there.

Some people who have been reading this blog for a few years might recognize that this is not the first time that I have mentioned the New York Kathak Festival or showed a clip from there. The first time was a couple of days after I went to the first event in the Festival. That post was Some Nice Film and Dance References to the last Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, and the dance troupe that I showed there was the Courtyard Dancers (founded and led by Pallabi Chakravorty), for their dance “Find Metiabruz” – which I am going to show again here, by the way. I also wrote a number of words about the historical context and message of this dance, so I hope that people who have not read the post before will be able to take a good look at it for reference now (and that is why I am not going to repeat that material here – there is just too much else that I want to get to!).

Actually, when I first went to the Festival, I specifically chose the first night as the one I would go to because I wanted to see the Courtyard Dancers, since I had already been aware of their work and Pallabi Chakravorty for quite a few years. I think I first saw a clip of Pallabi in 2012, when I stumbled upon a dance she did to singing by Abida Parveen of poetry by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (because I was searching for things related to Faiz, as I recall). A year later, I hoped to see the Courtyard Dancers when I moved to their home city, Philadelphia, to work at a publishing job for five months, but that chance never occurred. Anyway, I am glad that I went to the first night of the 2019 festival, because it’s hard for me to imagine that any night there could have been better. (Some other nights gave people bigger glimpses of certain legendary stars – which I talked more about in my post from April 2019, too – but I doubt I would have gotten to see as much other great current talent as I did on that April 19.)

And when I finally saw the Courtyard Dancers live, that seemed well worth the wait also. It’s not just that the Courtyard Dancers are very interesting aesthetically; they also have actually inspired me to look further into the subjects that they explored. For instance, as I said in my post in 2019, their dance was the main reason I started thinking, at the time, about writing a post devoted to the subject of Wajid Ali Shah. (And by the way, I also have gained a lot of information from Pallabi’s books, which I discussed a little in the 2019 post as well.)

I am going to discuss more dances from the NYKF soon, but first I wanted to take a detour to talk about next the dance event that I went to, which did not happen for another two and a half years.  Actually, after the Kathak Festival of 2019, I was greatly looking forward to seeing the next one in 2020, but something kind of got in the way. Fortunately, though, when I finally did emerge from the COVID crisis to see a dance performance at Dixon Place in October of 2021, I got to be dazzled by the woman who would become the new kathak queen of New York. And by the way, that dancer, Rachna Nivas, had not been able to perform live, herself, for close to two years, either. But in spite of all the time that had passed, she was obviously far from rusty – in fact, I think she must have stored up a whole lot of greatness during that wait. So, this turned out to be a truly magical night.

I have posted Rachna Nivas in this blog before, when I wrote about performances combining kathak and tap dance, because one significant such collaboration featured her – a project called Speak, which toured several times. She actually lived in her native California at the time, where she been a student of the famous Chitresh Das. And by the way, I also show Chitresh Das in that post on kathak and tap dance, because he was part of a very famous such collaboration, and some people even credit him for starting that trend. (I have also heard other names credited for starting the trend, but it could be that Chitresh Das was the one who really sort of popularized it.) He was an innovator who actually helped to create a whole new mini-tradition of kathak in the U.S. I discussed that a little in the older post, too, but if anyone is really curious about his life and work, I would like to recommend a book written by another former student of his, Sarah Morelli, entitled A Guru’s Journey: Pandit Chitresh Das and Indian Classical Dance in Diaspora.

But getting back to Rachna now… I think she is just dazzling in her abilities at some of the features of kathak that I so love… Her footwork and her chakkars (aka spins or pirouettes) are just amazing, and she is also great with emotional pantomime (I believe the technical term for that would be “abhinaya.”) She is able to do some great improvisation in response to the tabla player (which, as she pointed out, is very much a feature of traditional kathak dances), and she is able to concentrate remarkably at doing different things at once (such as sometimes singing a little while she dances, which I don’t think we usually see these days except in Bollywood films). She has honed her ability to do all these different things via a special meditative kind of practice that she refers to as “kathak yoga,” which is a fascinating exercise also practiced by the other members of her old dance school, also most likely initiated by Chitresh Das. But that is something I would have to go more into in another post, because I could not possibly even start to describe it sufficiently right now.

Rachna Nivas has also gotten some very eloquent praise from well-published dance critics, who can describe her abilities much better than I can. Fortunately, at the beginning of the clip that I am sharing here, we get to see a passage written for the New York Times by one such critic, Brian Seibert.

I have seen Rachna in two dances since “Unedited.” One was a very ambitious program that she put together, “Reclaiming the Divine Feminine.” She began this program with a sample of the pure kathak that she had performed in “Unedited,” but then she took her dance into a more experimental and overtly theatrical realm. I thought this was very good, but I had liked “Unedited” even more. She also did a part in the New York Kathak Festival of 2024. She was very good there, too, but once again, I realized that I had liked “Unedited” more. I missed another dance that she did a little more recently, but whenever I have a chance, I plan to go see her again. I might like some of her dance shows more than others, but I can’t imagine ever being disappointed by her.

Since I just wrote a bunch about the kathak queen of NY, maybe this is a good time to write about the kathak king of the world – or one of them, or one of the princes, at least. I didn’t realize before I went to see him in the New York Kathak Festival of 2023 that Rajendra Gangani was such a world-renowned star. I began to get a sense of that when he was introduced by one of the New York Kathak Festival presenters as being a glimpse of divinity and when the reaction by the crowd almost made me feel as though I was seeing the Beatles in 1964.

Rajendra Gangani is greatly known for a number of reasons… First of all, he is the son of an even more legendary kathak dancer, Kundan Lal Gangani. (That’s often the way it works with the greats of Indian music and dance that we know of… I guess that, due to the often hereditary nature of the way music and dance has been passed down through the ages, no one is really bothered by nepotism over there.)  Kundan Lal Gangani was known, as Wikipedia puts it, for being the “torch bearer” of the Jaipur gharana (which I also happen to love almost any time I see it labeled as being on display). Of course, Rajendra became a very accomplished dancer in his own right, but in addition, he is a very successful teacher/guru. I have noticed tons of people who’ve been taught by him, including Rachna Ramya, a kathak dancer and scholar who wrote a large encyclopedic book on kathak that I have been reading lately (Kathak: The Dance of Storytellers). In fact, he is actually pictured on the cover. (There is also a female dancer who is facing him in the photo, but her back is to the camera. I have not been able to find a description of this picture, but I suspect that that woman is the author, herself.)

Watching Pt. Gangani (which I suppose is the most accepted way to refer to him, since he earned a major award and became a Pandit), I could see that there was something quite unique about his dance, and also that he exercised an amazing amount of control, as well as a kind of agility that seemed to come out in minute or subtle ways as well as in the grander gestures. Now, I say this simply based on my own instinctive impressions; I do not claim to back these observations with any great technical knowledge of the art. But I am thinking that, if I want to try to point out some aspects that might make his artistry so special in the eyes of so many, those might be among them.

For some reason, for their clips from the 2023 performances, the New York Kathak Festival put together only very short snippets, which is not at all how they had shown the dances from 2019. (By the way, from what I can see, they also displayed only short snippets from 2024. But I am not concerned about showing dances from the 2024 show that I saw, because there isn’t really anything from that evening that is standing out in my mind as much – outside of the dance by Rachna Nivas, that is.) So, by following through on my plan to show one video clip from each of the performances that I’m mentioning here, I am actually including much less time from two of the performers than from the rest. I thought of solving this problem by showing multiple clips from those two performers, but this makes the presentation a bit awkward in terms of the space that the extra videos will take up. I am therefore going to stick to just one clip for each after all, but I would highly recommend that readers follow the links back to the NYKF channel if you want to see more.

For Pt. Rajendra Gangani, I want to show this particular 49-second clip because I was really intrigued by the sideways walk across the stage that he does here. I don’t think I have seen anything like this before. I am guessing that this walk-dance must involve an incredible level of skill and control, even though it is not a large/grand kind of movement (so it is exactly the sort of thing I was referring to above). This also provides a great example of the way that a kathak dancer can contribute to the music of a piece via the movements of the feet and ghungroos – something that he is no doubt a fine expert at, too. But he does end this little sequence with some grand arm gestures that I am tempted to describe as positively regal. Well, after all, he is one of the kathak kings or princes of the world…

The other dancer whom I remember well from the 2023 NYKF show is Svetlana Tulasi. Svetlana is also well known around the world, and she stands out a little from most famous kathak dancers because she was born in Moscow (though her heritage is half-Indian). Although she has had good formal training, she has also taken some paths that are kind of different from those followed by most classical dancers, and from what I can tell – actually unlike most dancers featured in the New York Kathak Festival – she likes to do fusion directly involving Bollywood film soundtracks. In fact, she has apparently had more involvements with the film world than just covering some cinema dances. I don’t think she ever actually entered the Indian film industry, herself, but she is currently is starring in a new, independent American science fiction film, playing the captain of a starship. The film is called The Xenophobes… And I am just going to have to see it sometime!

But getting back to the dance, itself, Svetlana is certainly a very good and highly experienced dancer, and she seems to have boundless energy. She also can be quite expressive (maybe one reason why she’s able to take up this new career in film acting now).

Once again, because of the way clips were prepared from this 2023 show, I can only show one that’s essentially a snippet, but I encourage people to look at more parts of her dance posted by the NYKF. And if you want to see her dances elsewhere, that is very easy, because out of all the dancers I’m mentioning here, she has probably established the biggest presence on the Internet.

For the fifth selection, I am returning to my experience with the New York Kathak Festival of April 2019 to write a little about Farah Yasmeen Shaikh. There actually were two kathak performers whom I knew about before attending the Festival on that night, and this fascinating dancer was the second one. Farah Yasmeen Shaikh has participated in multiple kinds of projects over the years, ranging from educational projects to various special speaking projects to (most recently) a podcast. Also, although U.S.-based, she has been doing quite a lot of dance in Pakistan (where her parents came from) over the past several years (at least) and has participated there in some major arts/dance/literature festivals. Like Rachna Nivas, she is also a former student of Chitresh Das.

For close to a decade, Farah has led her own California-based dance group, Noorani Dance, whom she brought to the New York Kathak Festival. She did one dance with them (as I recall) and one dance solo. I like the Noorani dancers, but I found Farah’s solo dance at the Kathak Festival to be pretty mind-blowing, so that’s the one I’m going to post and talk about here. One thing that really impressed me was her sheer intensity. As you can see in the video, the expressions on her face convey an incredible and unique kind of drama, and I think some of her dance movements, such as the footwork (matching those really strong tabla beats), add to this feeling of intensity (though I didn’t realize that at first while I was sitting and watching her performance, because my eyes were so fixed on the expressions on her face). I don’t even know if the video below conveys the emotion of her performance sufficiently. I had a pretty good seat – pretty close up – and I was spellbound.

I should add that the subject of the dance also perfectly suits the intensity of emotion in Farah’s expressions and causes me to like this dance even more. As described under the YouTube video: “Based on excerpts of the poem by the great Pakistani Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, questioning the outcome of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, and the ‘dawn’ that came from the anticipated ‘freedom,’ this piece asks: ‘Is this the dawn that we all ached for? No, this is not that one.’”

As some people out there know, I am also very fond of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems. I have already mentioned earlier in this post that he was the main reason I first discovered a dance by Pallabi Chakravorty, and I have devoted quite a few posts in this blog to him over the years. (Those probably started during my intense Noor Jehan phase, but I have also brought up Faiz’s poems when delving into thoughts about political protest and fighting for a better world. And, by the way, I have also gotten the impression that Farah Yasmeen Shaikh has strong inclinations in that direction, too.)

I am going to end my main selections for this post here. I thought of stretching this list to six or seven, but, actually, the next two selections would also have been from that fantastic night at the New York Kathak Festival in 2019, and then I probably would have felt the need to rename this post something like, “My Favorite Night of Kathak Dancing in the Past Six years, plus Just a Few Other Dances That I liked.”

However, there’s no reason why I can’t add some honorable mentions here:

Shivangi Dake (sometimes billed with her husband’s name “Robert,” too): This dancer probably traveled the farthest to come to the New York Kathak Festival in April of 2019, considering that she was based in Singapore (and may still be). She did a couple of delightful fusion pieces at that show, too (one involving Brazilian music!). I have also enjoyed a number of her video clips on YouTube, sharing them on Facebook a few times. I will probably feature her in another post sometime that is devoted to kathak fusion. Or maybe she will be on another favorites list.

Barkha Patel: She performed at that April 19, 2019 show, too. She’s actually a New Yorker, and she runs her own dance company here. At the New York Kathak Festival, she did some excellent Jaipur gharana. But she is also someone whom I could put on a favorite kathak fusion list in the future. (She has a wonderful video on YouTube dancing to a version the Sia pop song, “Cheap Thrills.”) I also might put her on a future list devoted strictly to kathak dancers based in New York City.

Urvashie Kissoon at the Lotus Music & Dance World Dance Festival on December 1, 2024: Out of every dance that I left off the list, I most likely would have put this one in, if only Lotus Music and Dance had provided a YouTube clip! (There is a video posted within their website of the whole event together, but that would not have fit in well here.) For obvious reasons, it would have been great to be able to include just one other festival and venue… Urvashie Kissoon has also appeared at a New York Kathak Festival pop-up show, and she has some dances from a Queens, NY festival that were posted to YouTube a while back. But I saw her specifically at this event – which also was the last dance event that I went to in 2024. I found her dance to be quite charming – although it is split up in a way, with a more pantomime-oriented performance done solo and then some decent footwork done in a combination dance with several other kinds of dancers at the end. (I am not sure how well that approach worked in general, but that’s OK.) This festival included a variety of dances, such as Persian classical dance, flamenco, bharatanatyam, and even a tap-kathak duet (involving a different kathak dancer, fairly early in the show). I would not put this quite at the level of the NYKF, but it was a good presentation, and Urvashie shone through.

Urvashie Kissoon might be someone else to include in a post specifically about kathak dancers based in New York. And that is increasingly feeling to me like a good subject for a future post!

Is this blog still alive? That’s a good question. My momentum at keeping up here has obviously flagged quite a bit in recent memory. One reason certainly is a lack of time vs. so many commitments; another is my uncertainty about how I want to proceed, because my focus has just become so different from what it was a few years ago; and another is my increasing frustration with the always unnecessary changes being made by the managers, admins, or whatever you want to call them at WordPress.

A sort of last straw for me was when they eliminated the function by which the links that I listed would automatically be displayed in a blogroll. This wiped out a list of so many sites! (And let me extend my apologies for that to quite a few people out there.) I tried to recreate the blogroll in a shortened form (as you see), but it seemed like an unnecessary amount of work. I also could not recreate my list of sources for music and dance clips (from YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo). I don’t know why it didn’t work, but when I tried doing this, the results were always quite weird and I had to delete my efforts immediately.

I am so fed up with WordPress, I am thinking of moving back to Blogger, where I did blogs close to 18 years ago. I also admit that I have just found it a lot easier to post things on Facebook. I keep my Facebook posts exclusively on a “friends” setting, but if anybody who reads this blog would like to be a Facebook friend of mine (that is, if you aren’t already), please do let me know! But be forewarned that my Facebook timeline also includes a lot of other things, from pop/rock reviews to a whole a lot of posts related to my politics (which are far to the left but only in certain ways (enough to alienate at least some people), while other things I post don’t really fit in the usual party lines and so will just piss off some other people who are on the left).  

But, anyway, I still get drawn to this blog now and then. And there are certain things that will always contribute to my getting drawn back: Very nice and/or interesting feedback in the comments (once in a while); a mention or two in a really nice academic book devoted to the subject of film studies (though I haven’t delved into films much in ages); a sudden increase in visits… Well, I’ve got an ego (much as I would like to wipe it out as the Sufi literature that I read keeps telling me to do), and I suppose it is also easily fed. This past week, I was startled when I saw close to 2,000 views on the day following Zakir Hussain’s death (which was sad and shocking, by the way – RIP). Obviously, it was due to a lot of people conducting searches and finding my post A Little About Tabla Master Zakir Hussain and His Kathak-Dancing Wife, Antonia Minnecola (who studied with Sitara Devi for three decades). But just that little reminder that is actually possible to get that many readers for a post (some of whom, hopefully, will want to look at a few of my other posts, too)…was enough to inspire me to drag this whole thing on for at least a little longer. :)

And I am working on something new… Not a very big post, but something that I have wanted to do for a while. (Hint: It has to do with some of my favorite Kathak performances… Not in films, but live; not in a golden past, but in the past few years; and not in India, but right here in my town, New York City.) Hopefully, it will be finished up soon, and so this blog will feature another post before the year is done. [Noting a few days later: Or at least not long after the New Year has started.] Stay tuned! And if I decide for some reason that I don’t want to finish the post after all, expect this paragraph to be deleted.

[Hello, dear readers – anyone who may still be out there… Seventeen years and three days after I first posted any words here and just over four months and a week after I last wrote a blog post, I have actually come back! I have been inspired to write a review of a great book that I have just read, Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia. This review is an extension of a shorter Facebook post that I wrote a couple of days ago, just a little while after I turned the last page. I am including the beginning of the review as I wrote it on Facebook – an informal chronicle of immediate thoughts. I was planning simply to copy that post into this blog, but when I got started, I could not help but expand it into a somewhat fuller review. I could actually spend a lot more time writing even more about this book (and maybe honing the review a little more?), but I have been eager to get my thoughts up here quickly – and to (finally) put up a new post! I think its a truly great book, so I hope I have done it some justice here.]

I just finished Empires of the Indus by Alice Albinia, on my midnight commute home, and you might say I am blown away. What a journey, what a book! (By the way, by “what a journey,” I mean her travels along the Indus River – which happened a little over 15 years ago – and not my ride home tonight on the D train from Manhattan to the Bronx – though this book did make that trip more enjoyable a few times, too.)

Ms. Albinia certainly constructed this book in a fascinating way, by devoting each chapter not only to a further point north on the Indus River but also a further point back in time, labeled/subtitled specifically with a different year (or range of years). So, the first chapter, around Karachi, is labeled “1947.” (By the way, she has a cousin named William Dalrymple, and it is during the parts taking place in Sindh that you can see the most resemblance, but the book eventually becomes something very different, too.) Three chapters later, while we are still being shown Sindh, the chronological label is “1718-1752,” as she writes about the “River Saints” (also a subject that I have been fond of for some time). Six chapters later, the title is “Alluvial Cities” – in reference to the Indus Valley Civilization – and the subtitle is “2600 BCE.”

This fascinating structure that she has come up with helps to give the book a great added dimension – possibly in more than one sense of the word. It almost seems as though she was not only riding in boats and jeeps (as well as walking very, very extensively), but, also, simultaneously (so to speak), taking a continuous ride in a time machine.

I imagine that this structure had the potential to become frustratingly limiting, but fortunately, to get around some of the obstacles that it could have created, she employs an interesting device – or let’s say, the interesting device was presented to her. It’s a device that was made most evident in the “Alluvial Cities” part: Because of all the strife, terrorism, and international rivalry surrounding the Indus River (a matter that she also comments on compellingly), she is blocked sometimes from progressing north along the Indus in anything resembling a linear path. At these times when she is halted by the military forces from Pakistan, India, and even (near the end) China, she has to take long detours south and loop around at another angle in order to get to the desired next stop. So, even though her report on the Indus Valley Civilization is centered on her visit to Kashmir, she is able, due to the required detour, to write about this ancient civilization from several other locations without undermining the travelogue’s structure in any major way. It is because of this detour – as she actually points out overtly at one point – that she is able to give a much better picture of how geographically huge the Indus Valley Civilization was, especially for its time – far exceeding the areas covered by the then-concurrent civilizations of early ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia .

Now, given all the time that I have been spending describing the impressive technical aspects of this narrative, I feel that I really should mention that this is also, many times, a very emotionally moving book, and that Alice Albinia does not hesitate to convey her own deepest emotional reactions to the trip. She is very empathetic in her discussions of some of the hardships and tragedies that human beings had to encounter in these different places and during these different historical times. I have read quite a few accounts of the violence and hardship brought about by Partition, and in the Chapter “1947,” Ms. Albinia’s writing is as moving as almost any that I have seen. She is constantly repulsed by the violence that mankind is capable of, a theme that, unfortunately, she can revisit many times with ease during a long history of this river. She can be sardonic in her thoughts in this area, too, something that I realized as she repeatedly brought up the massacres and overall brutality committed by Alexander, while also repeatedly describing how many different populations have been eager to claim him as their own hero during a stretch of thousands of years. (By the way, she writes most of her remarks about Alexander the Great in the chapter “Alexander at the Outer Ocean,” subtitled “327 BCE,” which is centered mainly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa aka the North-West Frontier of Pakistan, and she also makes more than a few references – in a few chapters – to the contemporary violence there.)

Given all the drama that Ms. Albinia relates in her descriptions of thousands of years of recorded history, I did not expect that the most moving chapter would be the last one, “The Disappearing River,” which is subtitled “50 million years ago.” But it is the most moving chapter because she, herself, is most moved by the thoughts that her experiences near the source of the river conjure up, related to a tragedy that will affect something that she now loves and which has a history much older than the entire existence of humanity multiplied many times. She relates how she becomes extremely depressed when she arrives at a point near the northern end of the river (after another one of her forced long detours) only to find that there is no river in sight, because the water has been stolen for a new Chinese dam. There is some river to be found a little further on, even closer to the source, but at that that point, she has been shown all too starkly what fate might face the entire Indus River as more dams get built and more ecological destruction of various kinds take place. Toward the end of this journey, she has something of a breakdown, and she describes weeping every day. She mentions that her condition might have been caused in part by the harsh, cold conditions in these Tibetan mountains, but she also makes it clear that her depression is mostly caused by the thoughts that are going through her mind. Although she has thought about – and related – so much socially/politically created tragedy (afflicting so many different kinds of people) with every new stop in her journey, at the end, she is most moved when forced to contemplate the ecological tragedy happening to the Earth, itself, as manifested by the bleak fate ahead for this nearly 50-million-year-old river – due entirely to “mankind’s folly.”

You might say that this turns out to be a very sad chronicle, but there is much joy to be found in this book, too – especially the joy that comes from seeing so many beautiful things and thinking about so much history that is also rich and fascinating at many points. And all of that joy – as well as the sorrow – is related superbly in this stunning travelogue ingeniously combined with a very long-reaching history book.

About three weeks ago – between February 29 and March 3 – the annual celebrations of the Urs of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar were held in Sehwan, Sindh, Pakistan. I did  not find out about this until about two weeks later (the date on our calendar varies so much that it’s hard to keep track), but as has often happened in previous years (during the past 15 years or so that I have been aware of these matters), I wanted to do a new blog post related to this subject. This time, though, I also wanted to come up with something that was entirely different from the posts that I had done before.* Fortunately, within a day or two, quite by coincidence (I think), the perfect answer popped up on YouTube.  On March 16, much to my delight, a brand new video was posted from Filip Holm’s show, Let’s Talk Religion, entitled “The Counter-Culture, Lawless Muslim Mystics Who Drank Wine? / The Qalandariyya.”

So, now that I have watched that video – and greatly enjoyed it – I am going to tell you a little about the Qalandariyya – the group that included all the qalandars – based mostly on what I learned from Filip’s video. But first, I would like to say a few words about Filip, himself.

As I mentioned several months ago in my post about Farid Attar’s Sufi classic The Conference of the Birds, Filip Holm has an excellent show on YouTube that is centered on explanation and discussion of a variety of religions, sects, and theological-philosophical tendencies, but which particularly excels when he delves into his own academic specialty, Sufism.

By the way, Filip was not raised as a Sufi or Muslim, himself. He does have family roots in the Middle East (in Iraq), though he, himself, is Swedish. But he comes from a Christian family. It may be partly because he was not raised a Muslim or a Sufi that he never seems to assume that his viewers are coming to his show with any kind of religious knowledge in this area. (With all due respect, some people who were raised in the faith do seem to make that mistake.) Similarly, although he is an academic, he will never lapse into academic language that might confuse his YouTube viewers. He explains everything in a marvelously simple way, considering that he sometimes imparts some very complex ideas.

As I have mentioned before, I, myself, was raised without any religion and spent most of my life as an atheist, then an agnostic, and have only started to gravitate toward spiritual/religious (mainly pantheistic) beliefs sometime in my late 50s (I am now 62). So, as an outsider to both religion and academia, I really do appreciate that I find it so easy to learn from Filip about all these matters. (By the way, if you want to know more about my own spiritual orientation and nonexistent “religious” heritage, you can also find that at the end of the Conference of the Birds post. But I don’t want to get too much onto that tangent here.)

And now, since I have explained what a beginner I am, I hope readers will forgive me if any of my own explanation of the ideas and history conveyed by Filip in his video might at any time seem a little too simple or inaccurate. Probably, people will get a more accurate picture by watching Filip’s video directly. But I wanted to do a writeup here because I feel that it really has a place in this blog. I have touched upon the legends of the qalandars so much in a superficial way via words and clips related to films and music, that I find it very satisfying now to be able to write a few things here about their history and ideas.

Filip’s video centers on the Qalandariyya as their movement developed in Syria (first) but, more centrally, in Iran. It is among the Persians that the Qalandariyya really seemed to take root. But these were not people who were always firmly geographically rooted, since they were very inclined to travel throughout their lives. (In the subtitles to some qawwalis that I have watched, I have seen them referred to as “wanderers.”) This is why qalandars also ended up gaining a strong presence in South Asia. And Filip does touch upon the presence of qalandars in North Indian music and culture, mentioning Amir Khusrau and the famous, relatively contemporary (though now deceased) Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. (He does not at all make this Indian/Pakistani cultural history the center of his program, but I was happy to see him finally mention it at one point, since that is my own main place of reference – and source of great aesthetic inspiration, too.)

Maybe the real, key word in the title of this video is “Counterculture.” (Incidentally, although that word is hyphenated in the video subtitle, I never feel that it should be – maybe because I’m American? Anyway, I will be typing it without a hyphen from this point on.) It probably is clear to most people who have encountered qalandars in art, literature, or song lyrics/poetry that they were a counterculture, going against accepted norms of their contemporary society and Islam, itself. A lot of their seemingly contrary behavior, as Filip points out, was a deliberate effort on their part to draw a kind of disdain to themselves. This was their way of destroying the ego (referred to in the original Arabic literature as the “nafs”). The destruction of the ego is referred to/translated as annihilation (from the original Arabic word “fana”) and was considered an important part of the Sufis’ spiritual journey toward fully understanding God. But the qalandars believed that by being outwardly virtuous in their appearances and drawing praise for superficially pious conduct, they would likely only inflate the ego that they sought to destroy. So they defied concepts of what normal people would consider to be a good citizen or Mulsim in their appearances (by dressing in rags or odd-looking animal skins or sometimes wearing almost nothing and sometimes – though we don’t see this as much in, say, film depictions – by shaving their heads and beards). In addition to that, they sometimes smoked hashish and drank wine. (“Wine” is referred to in a lot of Sufi poetry, but this is as a metaphor for spiritual intoxication. Muslims were never actually encouraged to go to the taverns and drink wine.) They also did not form/raise families as many a good Mulsim was expected to do. Actually, many remained celibate, which was in line with the greater level of asceticism that they normally pursued. At a deeper level, hidden from their superficial appearances to others, they were more pious and more ascetic than anyone, but they could not let themselves be seen for it – and likely praised.

Taking a good look at all of this from a contemporary perspective, it actually – and maybe somewhat surprisingly – makes a lot of sense. (And here, I am adding my own observations and interpretations – it is not something that Filip relates.) Understanding that the ego as observed in the Sufi/spiritual context might be a little different from the ego in the context of what we understand in contemporary society (with our contemporary knowledge coming from a different kind of religion known as psychology), the potential problems that the ego present are still basically the same. In the present society, especially in public discourse revolving around politics (but in other areas too), there seems to be a strong tendency among many people toward what is known as “virtue signaling.” This is a tactic that normally feeds the ego, and often the most egotistical do-gooders make a point of letting everyone know how good they are – whether it is by showing what good deeds they are doing or just (maybe more often) by showing how much they hold the “best” – that is, most socially sanctioned – opinions and beliefs. This is the kind of tendency that might feed the most extreme kind of egotism, the psychological condition that we call “narcissism.” But the Qalandariyya – who went so far as to bring disdain upon themselves in order to avoid drawing attention to their virtues – seem to have been the complete antithesis of virtue signalers.

The Qalandariyya are also pertinent in the contemporary context just from being – as mentioned before – a counterculture. As Filip mentioned, in addition to the reasons related to their spiritual quest to destroy the ego, they probably developed (at a more basic level) as a plain reaction to the established social prescriptions in Islam. At a deeper level, they were not at all interested in the real hedonism pursued in more contemporary time by, say, hippies, but because of the appearances that they cultivated in opposition to accepted society, they apparently kind of looked like hippies, at least sometimes. (Plus, of course, there was that smoking of the hashish…) The similarity probably did not escape people working within the popular culture of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, as evidenced by the way qalandars are depicted in South Asian films from the era. Especially in certain Pakistani movies (some of which are sources of clips that I have shared here), the qalandars really do look like hippies of the (then-)present day.

There is something else that the qalandars have in common with hippies and other people in modern counterculture(s): As Filip pointed out, they have often been depicted with musical instruments in their hands. Music was important to Sufis in general, but the qalandars’ emphasis on walking around with musical instruments might also have been an outgrowth of their rebellion against orthodox Muslim prescriptions about accepted behavior, since there was a prevailing form of Islam that discouraged and looked down upon music. For that reason, it was another way that the Qalandariyya made sure that they would attract disdain. (As we know, these opposing attitudes toward music, corresponding to different forms of Islam, still exist in the current day, sometimes resulting in unfortunate repression and violence, with Sufis often being the victims.)

But it is probably because of the qalandars’ involvement in music that so much poetry that is sung along to great music refers to them. It seems that in spite of themselves, the Qalandariyya inspired a lot of praise in qawwalis and Sufi kalams. Of course, it is also only through music that so many of us first heard about the qalandars, and it is because of music and film references that they have become a favorite subject in this blog.

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* The most extensive posts related to this subject that I have written previously are:

Some Favorite Noor Jehan Film Songs Related to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar (and some other Qalandars too),

Celebrating the Urs of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Part I: The Song, and

Celebrating the Urs of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Part II: The Festival

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P.S. I am aware that in my last post, I suggested that within a month or so, I would write a post about Kathak vs. Flamenco. I am sorry that I broke another promise, but I felt that the Qalandariyya took precedence right now. But I will do that soon!

To start off this post, I would like to quote myself from a couple of years ago, when I wrote the following about Kathak and tap dance:

As I’ve mentioned before, there is a certain special reason why I like both Kathak and tap dances so much: the sound of the feet hitting the floor is actually part of the music. In both dances, the music would simply not exist were it not for the footwork, and the footwork or dances in general would not be as enjoyable even just to watch if for some reason you had to do so without hearing any of the sounds specifically made by the feet (even if all the other parts of the music were audible). Additionally, the complexity of the music naturally increases (or decreases) with the complexity of the dance and vice-versa. Of course, there are a number of dances that fit this special category: flamenco (which is most often historically linked to Kathak), Irish clog dancing (which has been linked historically to tap dance), etc. But Kathak and tap are the two dances fitting this description that I know best, have seen in films most often, and love the most.

This month, due to some nice newer videos that I have seen, I am feeling inspired to write some new installments on this subject, this time focusing on some of those other dances that I’ve mentioned above, and more. In the post after this one, I will get into the wonderful combination of Kathak and its direct descendant, flamenco. But for now, I wanted to start by getting right into a dance that I wouldn’t have even thought about before.

The dance that I want to focus on in this post is buck dancing, especially as done by the dancer and musician Hillary Klug. Buck dancing is a kind of folk dance that is most commonly done in the Appalachian region of the U.S. (For a decent brief history of the form, I recommend referring to the Encyclopedia of North Carolina.) If you have never heard of buck dancing, that is probably because it is not that well known outside of its region of origin. So, one might not think it likely that anyone would come up with a sort of East-West fusion including this dance, such as, say, something that combines the buck dance with an Indian percussion instrument. But that’s precisely what musicians and show organizers Igudesman and Joo did when they put together a concert that spotlighted the combination of Hillary Klug playing violin and doing her buck dance with Ananda Murti Das playing an Indian instrument billed here as the “mrdanga” – more commonly spelled (per Wikipedia, etc.) as mridanga, also known as the khol. (There is a dispute in comments below the video that is obviously the result of a confusion between this mridanga – which is an instrument from North and East India – and the mridangam – from South India – which some people seemed to think this instrument was being labeled as. But the confusion can be cleared up with just a little searching/research.)

The video that shows Hillary and Ananda performing simply as a duet is labeled “American violin and India mrdganga [sic] combination,” but the aspect of this duet that really struck me was the percussion section formed by this Indian instrument and Hillary’s Appalachian dancing feet. And it is because the sound of Hillary’s dance is such an important ingredient that she was given a special wooden platform to dance on, to make sure her steps were heard. (In fact, a question came up in YouTube comments as to why she was given that platform, and a couple of us answered that it was because her dancing feet were actually being used as an instrument in the music. If you go to that section of the comments, you will see that I (posting as LifeIsaTrain) concurred with a comment made to that effect, adding, “It’s kind of like Kathak.” By the way, looking at the video again, I also think a mike was slipped inside the platform. I actually don’t think that the sound of her dance was mixed quite high enough in the YouTube audio, but I like to think that the sound of her good footwork came through more clearly at the live event.)

The other video from this concert that can be found on YouTube involves a wider range of musicians performing a Charlie Daniels song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” This one actually might be a little too crowded; I think I would have preferred more videos simply featuring Hillary and Ananda by themselves. But I found it enjoyable nonetheless, especially because of Hillary and Ananda.

If only there were more videos of the Hillary/Ananda combination, I would include them and give you a fuller post about that. But I don’t want to end the post just yet, because I wanted to include at least one video of Hillary Klug in her more traditional element. So I have decided to include this marvelous clip of “Little Rabbit.”

I suppose I have gone a bit far afield with this post, but I see a connection between the percussive footwork that I like so much here and the percussion created by the footwork that I appreciate so much in Kathak. (I also do appreciate Hillary’s fiddle playing; she is quite good at that, too.) Incidentally, she does some other kinds of percussive dance, too, including Irish clog dances. (I am not going to include her Irish dances here, but they can easily be searched on YouTube.) I doubt that Hillary Klug is ever going to try to learn Kathak, but I honestly could see her doing a duet with a Kathak dancer one of these days.

Meanwhile, I hope readers will keep an eye on this blog for the next installment, where I will show some delightful combos involving Kathak and flamenco. I promise that I will do that one fairly soon -not in two or three months, but maybe in just one – or even possibly sooner! Due to a slight change in my own schedule – as well a burst of energy that I got from watching all this fast dancing – I think that I can safely say that I am going to be on a roll now. (Not that I can predict 100 percent how anything will turn out these days, but…hopefully…we’ll see.)

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P.S. A brief copy editing note: I know that I have not been consistent among all my posts when it comes to figuring out whether to capitalize “kathak” or not, but I don’t think I have ever gotten a definite answer to that question, either. For now, I’m going to say that I think it should be capitalized. One day, I will make a solid decision and comb through the blog to adjust everything accordingly.

I am pretty sure that none of the other kinds of dances I mentioned are capitalized – though I am not really sure why that is.

It may seem that I am changing course again for the time being. :) I intend to pursue the Sufi poet thread in future posts, but maybe not so quickly. As we approach the end of the year, I thought I would do a simpler post about a double dance cover (that is, a cover that is “double” in a few different ways, with two dancers dancing together in two different versions to match two original versions) which happened to lift my own spirits at the right time. Although this “remote collaboration” is not brand new; it was done in 2021.

I think that 2021 might end up being remembered as the Golden Age of Remote Collaborations on YouTube, no doubt due to the restlessness of so many people having to “isolate” or “shelter in place” (or whatever other terms were used – I am already forgetting). Of course, that’s why it’s no coincidence that I also posted people’s homemade and/or home-based videos more often than usual during that time. But this is the first time that I found this particular collaboration, while I was viewing some other things. (Now, I should add that I am not sure that these two dancers did this collaboration exactly because they were stuck “sheltering in place” or anything like that, but it is certainly not a far-fetched conclusion to reach.) So, while I did not think that I would be able to do another post before the end of the year, now I am feeling a little inspired… Although I am not going to try to turn this one into a great piece of analytical writing. As I did more often in the old days at this blog, I am mostly just going to provide the clips.

And by the way, on a personal note, I am happy to report that I have been able to negotiate a change in my work schedule so that I will have more spare time (that is, a couple of days less of work per week), so that I am going to be able to do a lot more things again – at least until I am broke again. At least at the moment, that means that I plan to resume more regular posts on this blog (unless/until something else gets in the way). Please note that I will never undervalue the significance of “spare time.” In our era, especially, that is the time when the most creative work gets done by the greatest number of people – possibly as proven during COVID crisis.

Anyway, let’s get to this fine collaboration, which covers a certain very famous dance-off done in both Hindi and Tamil, originally between Padmini and Vyjayanthimala.

I will start off with the rendition of “Aaja Tu Aaja,” from the film Raj Tilak. This clip is on the channel of Sukanya Kumar, who plays the Vyjayanthimala role, while the Padmini role is played by Krithika Rajkumar.

Incidentally, I posted a clip of the original version of “Aaja Tu Aaja” on my YouTube channel, but even though that was a clip prepared by Tommydan, it was 13 years ago, and much clearer versions have popped up since then. The following clip is not perfect, because it has that big company logo in the upper left corner (which I never like) and, like so many more recent YouTube videos, near the end, it displays boxes showing other videos that are available, blocking out the final scene somewhat. Still, it is pretty clear – and a great pleasure to watch, of course.

And here is Krithika and Sukanya’s cover of the Tamil version, “Kannum Kannum Kalandhu,” from the film Vanjikottai Valiban. This one appears on Krithika’s channel, and this time, the roles are reversed, with Krithika playing the Vyjayanthimala role and Sukanya playing the Padmini role. (There are differences in the choreography worth noticing, too. In fact, looking for the differences between these two covers kind of matches the fun and intrigue of picking out the differences between the originals – a matter that I will get back to soon.)

And here is the original version of “Kannum Kannum Kalandhu.” (Once again, the clip is not perfect - it’s a bit dark and we see more annoying logos as well as preview boxes at the end, etc., but it’s the clearest one that I have found and is also certainly a pleasure to watch.)

In closing, I would like to dedicate this post to Cassidy aka Minai of Cinema Nritya, who posted a very comprehensive comparison between the original Tamil and Hindi versions a dozen years ago. Actually, I don’t think that I have seen anyone else examine those two versions so thoroughly in a blog post or any other piece of writing (and I am pretty sure that I have seen at least a few). I truly hope that Cassidy’s blog will come back one day! And, hopefully, I will come back with a new post here very soon (really!).