Living and breathing dance

“It was love at the very first ta-tai. The moment I took my first step in dance, I knew it... I had found my life,” says the queen of Kathak, Shovana Narayan.
Today, after close to four-and-a-half decades as a professional dancer, Shovana, who was trained before that for a decade and more, has not changed.

“Dance is my life, and there is no other way I can go about living,” she says. The Padma Shri awardee was in the city for a show — Wisdom and Compassion — The Way of Buddha — on Sunday and despite all the fame and love that has come her way, she remains as humble as ever.

For someone who changed the dance scene in the 70s’, Shovana says it was quite a difficult time. “Back then, dance wasn’t something people would talk about favourably. My parents were very liberal and loved art forms, so they let me dance. In fact, it was my mum who took me to my first dance class,” she says.

At the age of three, Shovana accompanied her mum to her first dance guru Sadhana. “She laughed and told my mother that I was a baby and that I should come back later. But I knew from the beginning that I wanted to dance.” Shovana’s first performance came when she was four.

“I had gone to my grandparents’ home, where everyone was talking about a dance competition and I insisted that I be enrolled as well. At first, everyone ignored it, but I was stubborn and they gave in. But during the auditions, I froze.

When I reached home, I got the thrashing of my life but it was only when my mother told me that I would never be allowed to dance again that I burst into tears,” she says. The next day, Shovana went and danced so much that she won the first prize. Since then, there has been no stopping her.

But dance wasn’t the only thing that kept her busy. Shovana had to juggle between two professions and family, yet she managed to do it brilliantly. “I was in the civil services too. I would have to take time out to do both the things I loved and I think if you love something enough, you will find a way to do that” she says.

Having trained under the guru of Kathak Pandit Birju Maharaj, Shovana learnt a lot. “Panditji would come home and teach me dance, he was a hard task-master. He simply wouldn’t let you go until you got the angle of the hand, the mudras and the posture right.

During holidays, he would come home at 10 am and make me practise till 5 pm. My back would break but he wouldn’t give up,” she says. Despite learning dance from a young age, Shovana’s first professional performance happened when she was in her early 20s.

“It was at the Shanmukhananda Auditorium, Mumbai. It was my first solo performance without my gurus. It was an acid test, but that experience taught me how to connect better with my audience,” she says.

While dance is what keeps her busy, Shovana has always been a part of and supported Al Gore’s The Climate Reality Project India. She says, “I’ve always felt that dance and the environment are one. We get connected to the environment through dance and I’ve always been a supporter.”

Shovana also discovered the Kathak Villages in Gaya, Bihar. She says, “I never knew they existed until a decade ago. It was only when I was performing there that I found out about it. Much later, I discovered eight such villages and we found so many documents from the colonial times.

But the sad part is that no Kathak dancer stays there, they  moved out due to lack of opportunity,” she rues. On her performance in Hyderabad, she says, “It feels lovely to perform in a city where art is appreciated.”

And when you ask her if she plans to retire from dancing anytime soon, she says, “How can I? Dance is my breath. I will stop the day I get called to the other world.”