When a city prides itself on the extravagance of its malls,  you know you are going to be in trouble if you are looking for culturally meaningful pastimes for your children. But tucked away in a green and leafy corner of suburbia, a quiet revolution is taking place.

Shagun Butani, our very own stalwart in the cultural badlands of Gurgaon, has opened her school for classical Indian dance with Madhyam Shagun, a classically trained dancer with a background in Odissi, Chau and modern dance, set up her dance school, Madhyam, which now includes 50 students, ranging in ages from 4 years to 18 years.

Odissi is one of the 6 classical dance forms of India and traces its origins to the  sacred ritual dances at the temples of Orissi in ancient northern India. During the British Raj, lack of feudal patronage meant that this dance form, along with many others, fell into disrepute. However, since Independence, it has slowly been gaining popularity again.

The technique of Odissi includes the juxtaposition of two opposing stances; the Chauka or the basic square stance, which is meant to represent the divine form of Lord Jagannath (Shiva to the north Indians), and the Tribhangi, or thrice-deflected posture in which the body is bent in 3 places. This use of the torso lends Odissi it’s peculiar swaying grace and its lyricism. The combination of softness and strength, fluid upper body and strong footwork, finds its divine  if schizophrenic resonance in Shiva’s Lhasya (creative) and Tandava(destructive) dances.

The reference to Lord Jagannath’s pose is not accidental: Odissi, like all classical Indian art forms, is deeply rooted in its spiritual traditions. Their extensive and rigorous training in hand gestures (hastas), vocal renditions (bol), facial expressions (abhinaya) and body movements(angikabhinaya) aims to perfect a student’s dance to a point where the observer can transcend time and space, no less, and can visualize the Divine Dancer himself.

Shagun clearly takes her role as Guru very seriously indeed. With her quiet grace and luminous eyes, she is the epitome of a classical dancer. She brings to her classes a rigour and intensity that she quite obviously follows in her life too.  From the small dimpled hands of the 5 year olds making the stance of the peacock (mayura) to the wonderful flowing torso control of the senior students, there are no short-cuts to the attaining of perfection

It is their Sadhana (spiritual practice), explains Shagun, when asked how children in our age of bollywood extravagance can be expected to embrace the austerity of classical dance.  Their reward, after all and according to the mystic poet Kabir, is Bliss:
 
“What need have I for this or for that?
Dancing at the feet of my Lord, all is bliss, all is bliss”