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.
