Legendary gurus like Birju Maharaj are eternal. I don’t see their passing as a loss because what they leave behind is invaluable. He leaves a lasting legacy through his students across the globe not only from the realm of dance but from the Indian film industry.
Birju Maharaj hailed from an illustrious lineage of hereditary Kathak dancers – ‘Gharaanedaars’ – but he crafted a distinct path for himself.
Maharaj ji, as he was referred to, revolutionised the teaching of Kathak by going beyond the traditional guru-shishya parampara format by opening studio franchises and holding workshops all over the world.
Had Covid not struck, he would have been travelling internationally, teaching and collaborating. He had the maximum reach as a Kathak dancer and guru in the 20th and 21st centuries.
He enjoyed teaching immensely. His disciple Deepti Gupta, who also learnt choreography from my mother Dr Maya Rao, says ‘Maharaj ji was a generous guru’. He taught children and seniors with the same enthusiasm and humour. ‘Dance is ananda-dharma. It should evoke joy in you. Unless you experience joy, you can’t translate that joy into your dance or for the audience’, he would say.
He lived to dance. My mother, who was on the academic council of Kathak Kendra, Delhi, used to recount a funny incident from the annual dance exams: “Birju bhaiya came late to the assessment, wearing clothesline clips on his hands, and told the jury it was because he was diabetic. But the moment the dance began, he started drumming on the table and then dancing, forgetting that he was supposed to look ill.”
This itch was understandable. In his family, children would walk around wearing ankle bells as toddlers and start dancing or singing the moment they were prompted to do so by their elders. That was the life he knew since he started walking.
Birju Maharaj was just not a dancer. He was an accomplished tabla as well as naal player, a Hindustani vocalist, a poet and he could paint. He was from a generation of artists who did not compartmentalise the arts – that is how the treatise Natya Shastra describes a complete performer.
On stage, he was a showman to the core. No one could feel the pulse of the audience and deliver like him.
He had innate wizardry in how he imagined his choreography.
My mother was the first disciple of his famous uncle Shambhu Maharaj and was the one who brought Birju Maharaj to Karnataka for the first time in the 1950s. She wanted people to see the technical brilliance in a male Kathak dancer because what people understood of Kathak was through films and a diluted version.
I feel he was scholarly and quite entrepreneurial. He created recordings of many compositions and made them commercially available for people to learn and perform as he toured on teaching assignments. He wrote books on the pedagogy of Kathak.
His contribution to Kathak spans seven decades during which he danced, choreographed, taught, collaborated and inspired.
His art will transcend his lifetime.
(As told to Barkha Kumari)