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Book Name:Dancing In The Family Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs. 295 ISBN: 8172234384 Pages: 158 PP Year of Publication: 2001

THREE GENERATIONS BORN TO DANCE

A mudra of hands above the head, a deer becomes a flower. An exotic dancer posturing in front of a temple. For most non- Indian readers, Indian dance is as fascinating and exotic a subject as the country. Mata Hari, in fact, passed herself off as a temple dancer and infected a whole generation and Hollywood along with her.

Which is probably why Esther Luella Sherman, who was born in suburban Michigan in 1896, reinvented herself as Ragini Devi. She told the world that she was a reincarnated Hindu whose sole mission in life was to spread the gospel of Indian dance in the world. In an interview she gave in America in 1926, she claimed to be a high-caste Kashmiri who had learnt "invisible dances and inaudible music" in the secret sanctuaries of India and Tibet. Ragini Devi, after an early start in silent movies and exotic oriental dancing, took up her romantic new role with verve.

She eloped to New York with Ramlal Bajpai, an Indian nationalist, and then impulsively abandoned him for a coup de foudre, the Marxist poet and man about town Harendranath Chattopadhyay, brother of the poetess Sarojini Naidu. However, it took her four more years to set foot on Indian soil, after the romance with Chattopadyay in Paris faded, arriving penniless and pregnant with her daughter Indrani in Pondicherry. For years afterwards, Indrani wondered who her father really was-Bajpai or Chattopadhyay - until she finally met Bajpai face to face.

The romantic rebirth of Ragini Devi is where Sukanya Rahman's story of three generations of dancers - which began in America, moves to India and turns full cycle to return to America again - begins.

Despite Ragini Devi's Hollywood story, she went on to prise the Kathakali form out of its shell in Kerala and present it to the outside world. She also wrote the first two books on Indian classical dance in English, including the landmark Dance Dialects of India.

Rahman's book, though mundane in its title, is fascinating because it namedrops and gossips unashamedly along the way. Everyone who was anyone at that particular time is in the book: from Kennedy to Nehru, to Haile Selassie. As a result its appeal goes wider than dance fans.

Ragini Devi's subsequent adventures in India and her flight back to America, casting her spell on Rabindranath Tagore, toiling after dance gurus, bewitching Bombay's seths, and battling her way through war-torn Europe, are the stuff that Mata Haris are made of - at any rate, Greta Garbo as Mata Hari. Sukanya has gone deep into her family history and into her own reservoir of childhood memory - she bares it all and tells the story with uncommon insight and vivid humour.

In time, her mother, the 16-year-old Indrani, also eloped, in her case with an MIT-trained architect, Habib Rahman, a Bengali Muslim. Rahman went on to become chief architect of Delhi and designer of some of the city's best-known monuments, including the classically pure Gandhi samadhi at Raj Ghat. The couple first lived in Calcutta and then later in Delhi where Indrani made her own influential contribution to dance.

Indrani Rahman, despite being half-Indian and half-American, was crowned the first Miss India in 1952. However, her title, finds no mention in recent Miss India histories. Indrani's real contribution was not her beauty, though that was great, but to put classical Indian dance on the world map from the early 1950s.

She was part of a nucleus that included Charles Fabri, Mayadhar Mansingh and Deva Prasad Das, who "reconstructed" classical Odissi as we know it today. More importantly, she was representative of a political age. As the prima donna at Nehru's court, she was presented with unfailing regularity to charm the likes of Chou en Lai, John F. Kennedy and Haile Selassie, since her spoken English was as exquisite as her person attired in dance regalia. The Lion of Ethiopia was so dazzled by her at a performance in his honour at Rashtrapati Bhavan that, after showering her with gold coins, he commanded his daughter to take off her heavy silver belt and hand it to the dancer.

Behind the ambition, glamour, love tangles and disillusionment, however, the commitment to dance never wavered. The search for dance gurus in remote villages, and the rigorous, often painful, discipline comes across powerfully. Sukanya watched in Madras as the venerable Guru Chokkalingam Pillai's "stick cracked on mother's shin...if she lost her concentration". She went on walks where when her bidi-smoking, ornately-dressed grandmother burst into an impromptu dance lesson on Bangalore's Brigade Road, embarrassing her. Sukanya trained to be a painter at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris but the genes made their presence felt.

In an unexpected twist, all three women returned to live in America-Ragini Devi and Indrani Rahman died there-and Sukanya married her mother's American tour manager, thus brining the story full circle.

As a child Sukanya Rahman secretly prayed that her family would become 'normal'. But this never happened. Dance was, and remained, the family obsession. So she struggled to stay afloat in this family of unique, indomitable women. Written with insight and humour, straight from the heart, this is an insightful and fascinating look into the Indian dance scene from the 1920's onwards.

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