Fine Art Of Streetfighting

VOCALIST Pandit Jasraj's shrill dissenting note protesting the award of the Bharat Ratna to sitarist Pandit Ravi Shankar was only the latest instance of mudslinging within the artistic community that's always been a house jealously and pettily divided. The furore over his outburst— "There are far more deserving candidates," he had railed even as Ravi Shankar maintained a stoic silence—had barely subsided when diva Kishori Amonkar fired a salvo at a much-in-the-Star-news Lata Mangeshkar. "What has been her contribution to classical music?" she bristled to a journalist. She followed that up in private with some indignant knuckle-rapping of the NDTV anchor who in the course of interviewing Mangeshkar gushed onscreen how she was a musician at par with the legendary Tansen. "Kitna bewa-qoof hai," she reportedly huffed.

Amonkar was at least honest, up front. Other Delhi-based vocalists have been known to snipe at rivals through friendly, often gullible journalists; conduct proxy wars in which others get bloodied while they emerge smelling of roses. Organisers of the Shankerlal Music Festival still shudder at the memory of the clash of the titans they couldn't avert during a festival held in the '80s. Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Vilayat Khan engaged in a war of nerves over concert billings. Each wanted the other to play first so he could be tacitly accepted as being senior by virtue of having played later. Khan Sahib stormed out. The organisers got stomped upon. Panditji came out looking like the very picture of injured innocence.

Jasraj's carping focused the media spotlight on music but pettifogging rivalries, mini-skirmishes are endemic in the world of dance and painting as well. "Dance," reveals critic Ashish Khokhar, "is particularly prone to vicious infight-ing. Dancers are insecure. Like filmstars, models, they have short careers. Learn by 10, be onstage by 20, peak between 20 and 45. Who wants to see a hard Sonal, a crumbling Yamini unless like Bala they've something timeless to offer? When soul is missing there's only insecurity and spite. And constant spats."

Famous spats that have acquired folkloric status in the dance world include the one in which Odissi danseuse Sonal Mansingh hit critic Sunil Kothari with her chappals at Avignon after he wrote that her chowk (classic Odissi squat) posture reminded him of someone sitting on the pot. Other stories abound. About Bharatanatyam danseuse Komala Vardan dragging Statesman dance critic Subuddu to the Press Council after he infamously wrote: "Her deportment is weighty. She entered the stage from the middle in the manner of girls being shown off to clients in a Minto Road drawing room." Mansingh, Vardan may seem to have been more sinned against than sinning yet stories are rife about how dancers aren't averse to wining, dining, celebrating critics when they get glowing reviews and in other more suspect cases doing more of the same to ensure they get glowing ones.

The tradeoff is mutual. Dancers brandish reviews to wangle more funding, ICCR tours abroad, showcas-ing at prestigious local events/festivals. In turn, they recommend their critics, or shall we say publicists, for all-expenses paid, junket-laden sinecures on boards like those of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Bharat Bhavan...

And when dancers aren't fighting critics, they're fighting each other. Chennai-based Khokhar, a trained dancer and critic who's been trying to raise funds for the Mohan Khokhar Dance Foundation, castigates Delhi-based bureaucrats' wives like Vardan, Saroja Vaidyanathan and "that ancient 'modern' dancer Narendra Sharma for appropriating government land and grants to produce nothing of creative value". He delivers a blistering indictment of these dancers. "Vardan has a Kaka Nagar flat from the government yet cries foul each time the ICCR displays exemplary good taste by keeping her out of their foreign tours. Vaidyanathan, a completely mediocre dancer, has a three-sto-reyed institutional space in the Qutub area in addition to a government-allotted Siri Fort flat purely by dint of her late husband's 'contacts'. All people of this ilk do is make money by renting out the permissible 40 per cent of these prime properties to MNCs. Art be damned." Sharma too gets it in the neck. "He's the original 'cry wolf' man," rails Khokhar. "After 20 years of government-sponsored feeding, what's his output? So many people like him get grants to maintain troupes but pocket the money, including annual production grants." Khokhar is content to hyperventilate alone.

DETRACTORS of other dancers sometimes carry the battle to courts—like dancers/critics protesting the allotment of a Gulmohar Park plot to Kathak maestro Birju Maharaj did last year. They obtained a stay order on it. "On what basis," fumes an anonymous detractor, "can he grab one more plot? He already has a government-allotted Shahjahan Road house besides two other properties in Lucknow."

Sometimes that dance world infighting looks frighteningly like the dance of destruction. Recently, Delhi journalists were taken aback when they received malicious poison pen mail levelling wild allegations against Kuchi-pudi danseuse Swapna Sundari. Apart from accusing her of using her bureaucrat husband's connections to finagle government-sponsored performances and Door-darshan films, these letters railed on about her "obscene, obese, 106-kg body", and cast doubts on the authenticity of her research into Andhra Pradesh Vilasini Natyam techniques, claiming she had plagiarised other people's scholarship. Other ugly instances abound. A Thiruvananthapuram-based Kathak dancer wrote in to journalists with a startling accusation about an Ahmedabad-based prima donna who imitated her choreography and worse, tried to spirit away her dancers with promises of higher salaries!

Dance honours, too, trigger off negativity of the Jasraj variety. The much-feted Chennai-based Bharatanatyam dancer Padma Subram-aniam is caustically dismissed by Khokhar. "She'd have made an excellent circus act with her acrobatic karna contractions but to fete her as a dancer..." Other putdowners are as summary. "When people like Anitha Rathnam are given the Nritya Churamani award, when Shobha Deepak Singh gets a Padamshri for dance, both the awards and the selection process seem very suspect."

If music and dance be here, can painting be far behind? Painters are aghast over the National Gallery of Modern Art's move to buy paintings by a mediocre artist who led the assault on the Delhi gallery exhibiting Husain's Sita last year. The purchase is allegedly part of political quid pro quo between the artist and his government patrons.Satish Gujral's struggle to wrest from Husain the 'Eminence Grise' title of Indian painting, whether through orchestrated 'Hindu' indignation at his erotic treatment of Sitas and Saraswatis or through subtle debunking of his artistic worth has been the stuff of media headlines. Also well-documented are Anjolie Ela Menon's fulminations against jealous painters whose "worth was exposed on the foreign market" where her works sold for a higher price; against "so-called leftists" who protest her picture-pretty art even as they covetously vie for wall space in her clients' drawing rooms. As also the constant carping between the 'Baroda school-walas'—allegedly Vivan Sundaram, Ghulam Sheikh, Geeta Kapur, Mrinalini Mukherji—and the 'Delhiwalas' comprising among others, Satish Gujral, Manjit Bawa. Not to omit mentioning 'rigged' auctions where Menon and Husain buyers allegedly jacked up prices in lieu of three-for-the-price-of-one-painting deals with them.

Art's latest controversy? None. "Not surprising," explains art critic Suneet Chopra, "given art's increasing democratisation. Not the government, it's the private art galleries—129 in Delhi alone—that determine the artists' saleabil-ity quotient. The free market is the new patron. Bureaucrats heading government institutions are laughed off their posts if they squander taxpayers' money on bad art. Work speaks. Not connections." Ergo, fewer fights. At least lately. One hopes the happy trend spills over into the dance and music world too.