Mrs. Saraswathi Thiagarajan (Sarasi Raj)

Mrs. Sarasi Raj (Sarasawathi Thiagarajan) circa 1924 - 2009

The first course of regular dance instruction was  a success.  The girls had learnt the basics and two items, and we had two half hour television shows to share with the community on the VPW channel, and also to use for reference..  Financially too, it had worked out well. We met almost all our expenses and I was glad to cover the extra bit.

Thanks to my initiative and Mrs. Thiagarajan's enthusiastic cooperation, it had been shown that regular dance instruction in Bharata Natyam was a viable route to follow if we wanted to bring India's dance tradition to our children and the larger community in a formal, systematized manner.

I will write about the follow-up courses we had with Mrs.T over the next two years, culminating in the  dance drama, Sita's Promise, that I wrote for the groups' public concert staged at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in April 1981. I have videos and photographs of the places the girls danced at, including a trip to Roseau, Minnesota.   I also hope to write about the founding of PALI and the weekly television show I produced on India and Indians in Canada.

But today, I shall just focus on our wonderful dance teacher who first brought Bharata Natyam to Winnipeg.

Soon after this first course, I started PALI (Performing Arts and Literatures of India). Her Winnipeg experience helped Mrs. Thiagarajan too, I believe, for she went on to found a dance-instruction organization of her own a couple of years later - PEALI Arpana Academy of Dance. She became well-known and well-loved in Montreal under the professional name she took on after the first course in Winnipeg - Sarasi Raj. In Montreal and in Vancouver(which she periodically visited to give courses similar to the courses we had in Winnipeg), over 70 students graduated to the arangetram level under her tutelage (and Kalpalatha's).

To give a brief overview of her life: In India she was a performer and a teacher of both music and dance. Her husband was an actor (he might have had another profession as well but I do not recall the details.)  She had immigrated to Canada with her family in 1971 and had lived in B.C. for a few years.  After her husband passed away, she lived next to her son's family in Montreal.  She then had an apartment of her own in Chateauguay (and later in Beaconsfield and other suburbs of Montreal), where I once visited her in the 1990s, and she prepared delicious masala dosas for me, and said, during our conversation, that only one other person from the Winnipeg days had ever contacted her.

Several of the girls who took those first dance-instruction courses went on to dance at a professional level.  But no one mentions the name of their first regular dance teacher any more.  That is a pity for the guru-disciple relationship is a special one, and one of the traditions of fine arts in India is always to recognize the importance of that relationship. 

So strongly was the idea of guru-disciple relationship inculcated in my daughter that she, and perhaps she is the only one of the 26 students who took Mrs. Raj's classes in Winnipeg, kept in touch with Mrs. Raj through her annual New Year greeting card.  In one of her last e-mails to me, Mrs. Raj wrote:  "I am very proud of Raji who thinks of her guru and of keeping in touch." 

She passed away on Monday, June 29, 2009 in Montreal. She was in her eighties.  I informed several people about her passing.  But it seemed to me that for them it was just another piece of small news, to be discarded with yesterday's newspaper.  That is one of my incentives in starting on this blogsite - as a community we need to keep alive memories of our past in this country. 

Thank you, Mrs. Raj, for being our first Bharata Natyam teacher.

July 1, 1978

July 1, 1978

The course with Mrs. Sarasi Thiagarajan was a resounding success.  She was an excellent teacher, motherly enough that the girls felt at ease with her and strict enough that they knew they had better do as told! Basics are so important in Bharata Natyam and she drilled the basics into them, how to sit araimadi, how to get the eyes to follow the raised hand, how to keep step with the sound of her cymbals... She knew her job and the girls progressed fast. By the end of the course, they had learnt a lot.

Very soon after she left, the group were told by the organizers of Canada Day events that they could dance at Assiniboine Park as part of the Canada Day celebrations!

We had taped a one-hour show on VPW Channel 13 and the first half hour was shown on June 6 at 8:30 p.m.

On June 1, I sent out a Newsletter to all participants.  I told them that Nimisha had agreed to lead the practice sessions on Saturdays at her house in Charleswood from 9:30 to 10:30, and that the first three sessions would be on June 10, June 17 and June 30 (or July 1) and that they would practise to present Vara Veena and Alarippu as a group for Canada Day.

Meanwhile, costumes had to be made, and we were very lucky. 

Tulsi Sarkar was a doctor (Family Practice) and she had a patient who was a seamstress.

We had Nimisha's costume (and also Ganga's) as model, and we bought yards of satin and trims, in various colours.  With these, she sewed exact copies of Ganga's old costume!  Ten costumes in record time! complete with front pleats and blouses and any number of buttons and snaps! 

It was fantastic!

I have photographs of the dances that sunny evening at Assiniboine Park. A close look would show many shortcomings in the coordination of hand gestures and symmetry of the formation, but heh, what were all those details when the fact was that these girls, half of whom were born in Winnipeg, were in costume and dancing away in front of a large audience, many of whom were seeing Bharata Natyam dance for the first time in their lives.

In the photographs, one can see the next group waiting to perform - the Gujarati group, most of whom were born in India, older, and danced their folk dance number beautifully.

First long term dance instruction course in Winnipeg

This was the very first full fledged dance instruction course in Bharata Natyam conducted in Winnipeg.  There had been one-day workshops where a professional dancer came from elsewhere and led a group of participants through some basic steps but this course went well beyond that.  Meeting a minimum of four hours per week over twenty five days (April 21 to May 15, 1978), it was an intensive course that led ten students through basic steps and adavus (hand gestures) to an Invocation dance (Vara Veena) and an Alarippu and a little of Jateeswaram.

There were eleven students from Winnipeg and three from out of town. The out-of-town students were Arun, Anil and Gita Sud, who came all the way from Ethelbert every weekend and had special classes.  The Winnipeg students were,  alphabetically by last name, Reeni Bose, Natasha Carvalho, Shyamala and Sowmya Dakshinamurti, Nimisha Mehta, Raji Parameswaran, Lalita and Hema Puri, Arlene Poliah, Anita and Leena Sarkar.  Raji, at age eight,  was the youngest and Lalita the oldest (or maybe it was Nimisha who was the oldest.)  Nimisha's family was from Kenya and she was already knowledgeable about Kathak.  She could not come for all the classes.

Six of the ten girls were small enough that they could stand in two rows without their outstretched arms bumping into each other in my 12 ft wide rec-room of tiled linoleum.

I remember the nine inch square tiles splashed with green and brown. (We changed the flooring to wood a few years ago and hence the nostalgia!)   When we came with our real estate agent to see the house in the Fall of 1971, we could hardly see the floor, strewn as it was with comics and newspapers all over the recreation room. (Later, the teenage boy who owned them became Winnipeg's leading, may be only, seller of old comic books.)   When we moved into the house in January, I saw the tiles were caked with a thick layer of dirt.  When I told my sister-in-law about the muck, with her Irish practicality she advised me to get on my knees and scrub.  Which I did, and umpteen dirty buckets later, lo, the floor was shining and smooth, fit for princesses!
Which is what the ten girls were - little princesses going through the dance steps four days a week after a long day at school.

But even more than that was the camaraderie of the seven mothers.  We sat upstairs and chatted while the girls danced downstairs, and every weekend, one of us had Mrs. T (and me of course!) for dinner.  Speaking of dinner, Mrs. T did not ask for much but was clear that she required salad and vegetables for lunch, and two chappattis and rasam for dinner, along with dal etc of course.  So, I made rasam for all of us every lesson-day and we sipped rasam and chatted.

Next: How we danced the floor off Winnipeg stages.

1978 cont

1978 cont.

I figured that if we could show the community that a dance instruction course was indeed viable, we could get more students for a course where Menaka's fees could be met.   I phoned Mrs. Thiagarajan to see if she was available.  

I had learnt from the previous experience to be up front with what we could afford, rather than ask the artiste as to what her fees were.  So I told Mrs. Thiagarajan that we could offer $550 as her teaching  and transportation fee (the return airfare was , and free boarding and lodging as my house guest,  if she could come on March 22 in time for the School Break. I was pleasantly surprised when she agreed to come for almost four weeks - four weekends plus a few weekdays!
When the contract was formalized, the final figures were that we would give $450 as fees and buy her plane tickets in addition to this.  The return airfare was about $160 at the time, and  I guess I was confident we would get at least four students in addition to the eight among the five of us!
I discussed it with the group of mothers, and we were all delighted.  After some back and forth exchanges with Mrs. T. we settled on the dates - April 21 to May 15 and  I sent out another mailing to all those who had at any time expressed an interest.  The classes would be held in the basement of my home, and the fee would be $50 for the first member of a family and $30 for the second from the same family.  There would be an opening session on Friday, 21st of April.  After brief introductions and discussion as to class timings, there would be a traditional pooja where after prayers, each student offers fruit and a dollar to the teacher as "guru dakshina."  This was to be followed by an hour-long first lesson.  At the end of it, any one wishing to continue would have to pay the full non-refundable fee.