Celebrating 10 Years (with a little extra look at this blog’s early days)

So here we are, ten years… As I mentioned in my ninth anniversary post, the blog wasn’t fully formed into the blog that it is now until about April of 2008, so you could say that it took a full nine months for this baby to be born. On the other hand, after a human baby is born, it will usually take nine months or more to reach the stage where it can start walking, and that analogy might be a better fit. It is a full decade since I made the announcement and opened up this space, and I am personally amazed that this amount of time has passed. So, although I have nothing else to post today (but will have something soon!), I just couldn’t let the day go unmentioned. Happy birthday, dear blog!
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P.S. Did I say I had nothing else to post? I changed my mind. I started to go through the early posts of this blog, and then I decided to describe that evolution a little more, through highlights that I noticed. But I have no great desire to link to most of those highlights, especially since there are too many clips missing and there are a few more posts that I want to take down. (Plus, I don’t really have the time to put in links during the late night/early morning that I am writing this. But I may add some later – when this anniversary will already have passed.) Of course, a reader could also search through the archives, but I think that in most cases, I would prefer that they/you didn’t.

My first visible post on this blog that has content beyond an announcement is dated August 4, 2007, and it is about a song by M.I.A. (She was a musical artist whom I was very interested in when I started this blog, though I don’t care much for anything she does now. But I still give her credit for doing great things with samples from Indian film soundtracks, specifically on her second album, Kala, which came out shortly after this blog started. It was by tracing one such sample that I discovered Ilaiyaraaja.)

I think there were other posts near this blog’s beginning that I deleted, and there was some stuff that I took into “private” because it turned out not to fit at all. (Is that cheating? Actually, I think this is the kind of work that I should have done much more of over the years!)

For the next couple of months in 2007, this blog continued to be focused on eastern/western fusion artists, mostly either M.I.A. or Cheb i Sabbah.

In October of 2007, I wrote an extensive post about mujras. I wrote mainly about the contemporary mujras that I saw in Pakistani videos, but this led to a conversation in the comments section with Sitaji (Suzy) of Bollywood Food Club, and that is the point when I started venturing into the “Bolly blogging” community that I later got to know so well.

On November 25, 2007, I posted the song by Ilaiyaraaja that I had traced through M.I.A. (“Kattakkulle Mansukulle,” as I spelled it there.) [Note: Clip needs to be replaced. Will do that soon!] That appears to be my first post here of a clip from an Indian film.

On December 3, 2007, I posted about Parties, Sarees and Melodies, a blog from which I had been able to download quite a few soundtracks from 1950s Hindi films. (I sure do miss that one!)

On December 10, 2007, I posted this blog’s first Hindi film clip, a dance by Jayshree T. Then, a couple of days later, I posted another dance by Jayshree T.

During most of the rest of that December, I spent more time on contemporary fusion artists and also some time on Middle Eastern artists and belly dancers.

On December 24, 2007, I posted my first Golden Age Hindi film clip (which now has to be replaced), a song by Mohammed Rafi from Kohinoor. (I guess I should add that it wasn’t the one that most of you probably think of. I posted the Holi song, “Tan Ranglo Ji Aaj Man Rang Lo.”)

On January 5, 2008, I posted the great Padmini dance to the song “Mannavan Vanthanadi.”

On January 19, 2008, I wrote my post, “Fascination with Kerala.” At the bottom, I posted my second Padmini dance, “Aadal Kaniro.” (Yes, that’s Tamil, but I wasn’t finding Malayalam Padmini dances at this time. Besides, this is one of her greatest!)

On February 8, 2008, I reviewed the CD Rough Guide to Bollywood. (It was an OK reivew, but I have come a long way since then!)

March 2008 has an interesting mix of stuff… Cheb i Sabbah (again), Ilaiyaraaja, and Shobana (with references to Padmini).

In April 2008, along with posting about some contemporary stuff, I started to post more about a few of our favorite classic cinema dancers, Vyjayanthimala, Padmini, and Ragini.

On April 30, 2008, I posted about Shree 420. When I watched that film in April of 2008, I fell in love with it. This was the point of no return; this was probably the film that turned me into a complete, devoted fan of classic Hindi movies. (To clarify here, I had already been watching tons of Hindi and Tamil music and dance clips, but this was the point at which I would start heavily consuming entire films, becoming a bona fide Golden Age Bollywood blogger.)

I had been a fan of different forms of Indian music and dance for quite a while before, and I had gone through a significant phase in that respect a decade earlier. Some of that fondness, as I have mentioned, had been influenced by experiences and relationships (well, at least one anyway). But nobody whom I knew in person had recommended any classic Indian films to me (not even Hindi ones). I started looking at the film scenes online, then looked at some blogs and browsed a lot in the DVD stores in Jackson Heights (most of which stores no longer exist, alas). I picked Shree 420 off the shelf while browsing, took it home, and was surprised at how good it was. Then I went back to the stores and bought more and more DVDs (without spending a lot of money, because so many could be found for $3-$5, $7 at most). It’s that simple. For people who continue to ask me, there’s no great mystery behind my supposed expertise on old Indian movies. I liked some things, so I looked for more, and I got to like more. Though I did search out information and read a little as time went on, too (for the next nine-plus years)…

Favorite Scenes Showing Kathak Footwork (danced by Gopi Krishna, Sitara Devi, and Roshan Kumari)

While I love all the classical Indian dances, I think it’s fair to say that my favorite is Kathak. (Or this, at least, has become my favorite in the past few years or so.) And while watching Kathak, I have often gotten the most enjoyment just from watching the footwork and the parts that focus on it.  In technical terms, this aspect of the dance that I love is called “tatkar.” But I hesitate to use that word too much in my own descriptions, because real Kathak tatkar can get very complex, involving strings of “rhythmic syllables” and a very involved interaction between the dancer and (other) percussionists. If I try to figure out what makes genuinely great tatkar, I might end up going out of my element. So, let’s just say that I love the footwork – how it looks, how it sounds, and how it fits in with the music and the dance.

When I think of this Kathak footwork as it has appeared in movies, the kind of scene that I have most in mind is the one where the dancer is relatively stationary – not leaping around like a ballerina, etc. (which doesn’t happen in real classical Kathak) – and all the fancy moves of the dance are concentrated in the feet. The feet create a rhythm as they hit the floor, and the rhythm is enhanced by jangling of the ghungroos, those straps with numerous bells in them that are affixed around the ankles. The dance, itself, creates music and is therefore part of the scene’s soundtrack. We see this phenomenon in dances from other cultures, such as Flamenco and tap dance (which I also love), but I think it’s most apparent in Kathak. The music that comes out of a Kathak performance would not exist in its entirety without the dance, just as the dance could not happen in the absence of music. And I find that very interesting.

I have to say, I also really enjoy looking at the feet as they’re working. I have joked before that I may have developed a Bollywood-related foot fetish. I won’t speculate as to how true that might be – not seriously, anyway. But part of the fun here also comes from seeing the brilliant work of an instrument being played. In a Kathak film scene, a close-up on the feet is a close-up on the most prominent musical instrument.

So, with all this in mind, I decided that I would try to put together a list of scenes that emphasize or peak with this Kathak footwork, with at least some close-up on the feet and an emphasis on the music that they’re making. But when I started to think about the best footwork scenes that I’ve seen, I kept coming up with the same three dancers: Roshan Kumari, Gopi Krishna, and Sitara Devi. I might have dug up a couple of other examples (Vyjayanthimala could sort of break in with one scene or another), but the list would still be overwhelmingly weighed in the direction of these three people, whom we might consider the Kathak/tatkar royalty. So, finally, that is how I came up with this very narrowed down list and title.

And now, if you have managed to read through all of the overly long introduction above…

For the first scene, here is a delightful number from Parineeta (1953). Here, the close-ups on the footwork are fairly short, but they are prominent, and the scene, itself, is historically prominent because it shows one of the earliest film appearances for both Gopi Krishna and Roshan Kumari. (Actually, it was Roshan Kumari’s film debut, according the info that I have glimpsed.) Both dancers were definitely not yet out of their teens when they danced to this song – in fact, I don’t think they were beyond their mid-teens – but they still were fantastic.

A couple of years after Parineeta, Gopi Krishna made his famous debut as a star, in Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje. Here, he was maybe 17 or 18 years old. His co-star, Sandhya, was a bit older, somewhere in her 20s. But it was Gopi who taught her Kathak – just for this film (at the request of Sandhya’s husband, V. Shantaram) – and I have to admit that Sandhya (much as I love her) did not excel to being a Kathak dancer on par with Gopi or the other stars on this list.  But the scenes of she and Gopi doing Kathak together still are famously wonderful! And among the many dance scenes in this film, I knew right away that I had to include the one for “Rat Basant Aayi Ban Upavan” (aka the “Raag Malika”) because the bulk of this scene consists of the stars’ dancing feet, superimposed over scenes of nature. After a short introduction, it’s all Kathak footwork!

Then, as I thought more about Gopi Krishna’s tatkar in Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje, I realized that I could not leave out the following dance scene, which occurs near the beginning of the film. It includes some magnificent footwork by Gopi and magnificent other stuff, too (and, obviously, Sandhya thought so also).

Now it is time to pay attention to Gopi’s aunty, Sitara. Her most incredible footwork scene, in my opinion, was in a dance that was very far from the traditional Kathak or mujra setting. It was the dance for the great snake (?) that she did for Anjali (1957). There is not much in the way of foot closeups here, but the whole dance is centered on the Kathak-style footwork, as you can see in the rapid vibrations of her body and as you can hear in the incredibly rapid jangling of her ghungroos.

There are a couple of somewhat Kathak-based dances by Sitara in Aabroo (1943). The one below contains some brief moments of very nice Kathak-based footwork. Understanding that this is in no way a real Kathak dance (it’s a bit more of a cabaret dance), nonetheless, I think there is enough classical influence here to qualify it. And besides, it’s just so nice!

Now, let’s move a bit ahead in time to include a scene from a classic documentary. Maybe it is cheating to include a piece of a film that isn’t fictional, but I couldn’t resist adding this scene because it is so great, and it does have some wonderful tatkar in it (done with the cutest red-colored toes, I might add). And it is still classic, coming as it does from a Films Division movie made in 1970.

…Which leads me to the greatest footwork scene, within the greatest Kathak scene, in the history of Indian cinema. Of course, a lot of people reading this would know what I mean without even taking a peek at the video below – that is, that I am referring to the dance in Satyajit Ray’s film, Jalsaghar… Within this greatest Kathak scene, I  think the  close-up on her feet doing the tatkar is truly spectacular. And as you can see, the hero (or perhaps anti-hero) agrees too, as he is totally mesmerized.  Maybe the nawabs of yore also understood that there were few experiences as great as watching superb Kathak footwork.

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P.S. There is now a pretty perfect-looking description of Roshan Kumari at Wikipedia. It would be nice to learn who put this together, because it includes a lot of facts and speculated notions that have been thrown around here in this blog in the past, but that could never be located together in one place. I think, therefore, that this Wiki entry must be relatively new or newly expanded.