Back to Roshan Kumari! Words on an interview published just over a month ago and some newly found videos

With this post, I think Roshan Kumari is now pretty close to the top of the list of the dancers whom I have written about most in this blog. Among those who have not appeared in all that many films, she is definitely at the top. (For those who don’t know about the several other posts that I have written which were about her or included her, please go here, here, and here. But for reasons I will get back to another time, the most recent one, showing seven dances, will have to be revised.)  One of the reasons she appears here so often is, of course, because she is so great, but another is that I keep finding new incentives to post about her.

I would guess that most people who know about Roshan Kumari at all know only that she was the dancer in Satyajit Ray’s film Jalsaghar (and many people who saw that film don’t even know the dancer’s name – even though it was a phenomenal dance scene). But when you get a little curious about her and look around every so often, it seems that new information keeps emerging. What’s even better is that it sometimes is actually information that was just published. Thankfully she is still very much with us (now age 84), and a couple of weeks ago, I even found an interview with her that had appeared in The Indian Express just one month earlier – that is, as recently as August 21, 2022!

The article is entitled The Story of a Reclusive Dancer: Roshan Kumari, who once lit up the world of Kathak, and the subtitle tells us, “In a rare interview, Roshan Kumari, part of the feted Kathak trinity with Sitara Devi and Damayanti Joshi, speaks of her devotion to dance, the iconic performance in Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar, and what her journey steeped in Kathak has given her.” Unfortunately, when you follow the link to the article, you will find only a beginning piece of it, because you cannot get access to the whole article without registering with The Indian Express. But I would say that it’s certainly worth taking that small step of registering. (You are not obligated to pay anything or subscribe – although you should, of course, if you find that the publication, in general, interests you enough.) Given the agreement that one makes when registering, I would not feel comfortable sharing the whole article, as some people encouraged me to do on Facebook. But trusting that it is perfectly OK to quote from it and refer to it in some detail, there are a few things that I wanted to point out here.

The article is very nicely written by Suanshu Khurana, and some of the best parts of it actually come from her descriptions, narrative, and quotes from other people, rather than from Roshan Kumari, herself. Roshan Kumari does not give all that extensive an interview because, as she puts it, she doesn’t like being asked questions. So, Ms. Khurana managed to get information out of Dr. Kumari (as she is referred to by many) by skillfully making an interview seem as little as possible like an interview. And given the limits involved, I am impressed at how successful she was!

One thing that this article told me that I had not known before is how thoroughly Roshan Kumari’s whole dancing career was linked to the mentorship and encouragement of her father. Here on this blog, there has been some discussion about the fact that Dr. Kumari’s mother was the great film singer Zohrabai Ambalewali, and the fact that her mother put a lot of energy into encouraging her in her dance endeavors. In other places, too, Zohrabai is mentioned for her devotion to her daughter’s dance career, and one source that I saw even said that Zohrabai gave up singing in great part to devote more time to helping and encouraging her daughter. But we learn from the article here that Roshan Kumari’s work as a dancer is much more closely linked to the tutelage and devotion of her father, Fakir Mohammed. This makes sense, since Fakir Mohammed was a renowned percussionist. He played tabla very often as a session musician in the film industry, and apparently, he was also very versed at playing the pakhawaj, the original traditional instrument for accompanying kathak.

In the interview, Roshan Kumari says, “My relationship with my father was very different. Baoji and I had some kind of soul connection. I was also his gandabandh shagird (disciple for life). I have loved dance because of his passion for rhythm. Whatever I could do was because of my father, his riyaaz. I could play in the complex world of rhythms because of him.”

 A little later, she goes on to say, “I was very sharp and could very quickly pick up what my gurus taught me. During the long riyaaz sessions with my father, it was as if I would drink up that piece. He worked as hard as me. His life was completely devoted to my dance.”

Unfortunately, the connection between her dance and her father was so strong that when he died, she could not bring herself to perform anymore. This is what we are told near the end of the article:

In 1994, Fakir Mohammed passed away. “I have not touched my ghungroos since then,” says Kumari, welling up looking at her father’s portrait. “It’s difficult to speak about my dance because it’s tied to him. I plunge into a dark space, which is why I do not do interviews,” says Kumari, who never married, “It is quiet and lonely but my students are wonderful and keep visiting.”

However, it was also made clear that she’d had a very good run as a performer up until that fateful moment in the mid ‘90s. In the past, I have found that detailed information about her performing career was very hard to come by, and that is one reason I really appreciated this article.

Not long ago, it was very difficult even to find out her true age, about which there has also been a good amount of speculation in this blog. (If you check Wikipedia, it won’t help much – it tells you, “year of birth uncertain.”) But now we know definitely from this article that she was 84 at the time of this interview, and given that it was published in August 2022 and she was born on December 24, this would mean her year of birth was 1938. (Actually, I believe we had concluded as much at this blog before, but it took some convoluted research and calculations.) And as the article confirms, this means that – like a few other dance stars in old Indian films – she met some of her greatest successes at a very early age. She was still only 15 when she made her film debut in Parineeta (1953) – alongside Gopi Krishna who was, himself, only 17 or 18. And she was only 19 when she starred in the kathak scene in Jalsaghar, which many of us consider to be the greatest dance scene in the history of Indian cinema.

By the way, there is an excellent description of this dance in the article, too, along with a good number of words telling why her performance of the dance was so amazing. But I am not going to quote from that here, because I am finding it difficult to pick out one choice sentence vs. another, and if I quote everything, that will come very close to reproducing the article. Anyway, my intention here is to give you more information about Roshan Kumari, not to write a whole new post about that dance scene, magnificent though it may be. But I do think that everyone should read all the things that this article in The Indian Express says about it, which is one more reason to recommend that people register so that they can see the article in its entirety.

[Note: the following paragraph was revised on October 24.] Incidentally, in this post, I had originally linked to a YouTube post by Tom Daniel of the entire film Jalsaghar, but apparently, it has been taken down. But the song and dance scenes on his songs channel still remain – including the famous dance. Or, to see other copies of that dance, you can simply search for “Jalsaghar” on this blog, because I have posted it a few times before. In fact, I am not going to embed that dance in this post exactly because I have already posted it so often! But I would like to share a couple of other videos, of other Roshan Kumari dances, that I discovered right around the same time that I saw the article.

These videos come from a channel called Classic Dance, which has some very interesting videos of famous dancers – mostly kathak dancers – who have also appeared in at least some films here and there. This YouTube user obviously does not go out of his way to make sure that the videos look clean and sparkling – and it may very well be that the sources, themselves, are in such bad shape that it would be impossible to try to improve them anyway. Nonetheless, I certainly appreciate the fact that he has included apparently rare clips of Roshan Kumari dances that I have never scene before.

The first one I wanted to point out is a scene of Roshan Kumari dancing in a documentary, “The Classic Dance of India,” from Prakash Jha Productions, in the part unsurprisingly labeled “Part I – Kathak.” This film was obviously made quite a few years later than the Films Division documentary that has been referred to so often in different places (and mentioned in this blog before). Roshan Kumari is considerably older here than in any of the other dances that I have seen her perform on film. Another interesting thing about this clip is that it shows Fakir Mohammed doing the padhant (reciting the bols). Judging by the obviously mature age of Roshan Kumari in this one and the fact that her father looks quite old, I am guessing this to be from some time in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. But Dr. Kumari’s performance is still great!

And the other video that I wanted to include in this post is labeled as being from a Doordashan (Indian government television) documentary on Samta Prasad. As some people might know, Samta Prasad – also known as Gudai Maharaj – was a famous tabla player who, like Fakir Mohammed, worked as a musician for a lot of Indian films. Curiously, I have learned also – at least going by a YouTube comment – that he played the tablas in a classical piece in Jalsaghar, Raag Miyan Ki Malhar. (I presume that he was not just playing for someone else but was also the tabla player on screen. He looks markedly different there from in the other performance clips that I’ve seen, but maybe that was just the result of very good costuming.) I am guessing that this scene below was filmed a bit earlier than the one in the video above, maybe from the 1980s – probably the earlier part of that decade – but I can’t say that I am certain of that. (If anyone has a date that is accurate, please do let me know!)

I should mention that there is also another clip that I found on this cannel (and had not seen before) entitled PadmaShri Dr Roshan Kumari & Desciple [sic], Kathak, but it is over an hour long and the visual quality is so poor that for much of the video, I can’t even recognize the faces. (I think some of it shows Roshan Kumari but maybe more of it shows the disciple – or multiple disciples.) So, I am not going to embed it or even try to discuss it.  But for those who are curious, this is the link.

In any event, I hope that there are other people reading this post who were as delighted as I was to see newly posted Roshan Kumari dance videos and a newly written article about her. Obviously, she is one of my favorites among the talents that I have found out about during so many years of exploring old Indian films. These new discoveries – the article and the two videos – were more than sufficient to inspire me to do a new blog post after a long-ish dormant phase. (I know that an increasing number of people out there were wondering if my 15th anniversary post at the end of July was my last.) If and whenever I find new videos or articles related to Roshan Kumari, that will certainly be enough to wake me into doing another post!