Here’s a little detour. This isn’t a chronicle of a life or the retelling of a journey. But this is an idea, a question, a life, a choice, a quest into the within… What are your notions of motherhood? Procreation or creation…
I wonder what Chandralekha would make of being called a founding mother. Giggle, probably. Her ideas about motherhood in her conversations and writings were combative, and her attitude to childrearing, positively militant. As a teenager she had decided that marriage was an institution of slavery for both men and women – a belief she upheld till her death. A long-standing dream was to stage a play, which involved a moratorium on children for seven years, and the effects this would have on society, industry and love.
Chandra did not dislike children. She got along perfectly with them. She just didn’t want any of her own, and preferred that her dancers didn’t either. So much of being a mother and giving birth has to do with the body – which, for Chandra, was the greatest repository of energies. So, to see the body reduced to an oven or a milk factory, to see women raising children and taking the large share of domestic duties – the sweeping and swabbing and cleaning, was something to fight against.
She was once asked in an interview in Germany: Didn’t you ever want to have children? And Chandra cupped her breasts, in a way that only a dancer can, and said that she was proud of her undrunk breasts – apina vakshoruham. That image of undrunk breasts was so strong it remained with me, and I used it as a weapon of power in a poem about the trials of being a woman.
I think Chandra’s greatest problem with motherhood, and the way it is enshrined in the public imagination along with martyrdom, was that it took the potency out of femininity. The female principle was integral to her ideas and work: it was the source of all creation. “When I say creation I don’t mean procreation,” she once said, “I mean all of creation: the trees, the forests, the vegetation of the world.” To hear her talk about the pure abstraction of triangle as yoni, or the immense power of Shri-Chakra, was an ecstasy in itself. That these ideas were ancient, that they were Indian – was a source of great pride and conflict for her. Because it meant we once had great ideas, but then fell far from them.
All her work – be it her many dance choreographies (Shri, Prana, Shloka, Sharira), her posters and poems or her exhibitions – had to do with the reclamation of the feminine principle. “You must see it in their bodies, you must see it in their eyes, you must see it in their spines,” she said of her dancers, about their ability to internalize what she was teaching them. For Chandra, the spine was the greatest metaphor for freedom. Just holding your spine erect was an act of resistance; it meant you did not bow to the oppression of patriarchy.
Over the many years I worked with Chandralekha, people who did not know her always asked me what it was like to spend time with her. They assumed that because she was political, because she was single and had never borne children, she must be brittle, cynical. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have never in my life met a human being so infused with the joy of living. She was supremely intense in the way she loved, thought, dreamed and worked. And yet, she was never weighed down with heaviness. There was a lightness to her, a quickness, combined with incredible depth, which made people fall in love with her all the more.
The two great pieces of advice she gave me were: to always walk alone; and always be in love. For Chandra this was not conflicting in the least. When she said love, she did not merely mean romantic love, although this was certainly not excluded. It meant wild, encompassing love for the world and all the magic in it: the mountains, rivers, trees and galaxies. Mad, unending, bottomless love – the kind of love a mother might have toward her child, but Chandra could have for a stranger.
After the Dance
i.m. Chandralekha (1928-2006)
After the dance I imagine you
resurrected into this uncertain world.
It is midnight, and the moon hovers
close to the trees, who are your daughters
and sons, planted in this desert
so many moons ago. After the dance
the audience drifts like dinner guests,
drowsy and replete. Those who knew you,
who are still filled with astonishment,
stand at the gate and say, She was everywhere.
Only later, when the theatre empties
and morning creeps into the dark,
when something of the day’s vituperous
heat makes its way down from the stars,
do I see you sitting in your favourite chair,
batting flies off your lips,
smoothening down your silver hair.
From Tishani Doshi’s new collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere (HarperCollins). The collection is available across bookstores.
