Performing arts in North India have long been preserved and disseminated through hereditary families of musicians and dancers, and by extension, through clan or caste groups often defined by their performance specialty. Although arguably less central players today than in the past, hereditary masters still form the core families of the stylistic schools known as gharānās and remain many of the most sought-out teachers. Purity of style, however, is largely considered a characteristic of the past, and many of today’s foremost musicians identify themselves through their teacher rather than claiming to present an unadulterated style from an earlier period. Yet kathak dance still remains predominantly defined through three gharānās and the star dancers and teachers who are their central disseminators. Although the vast majority of kathak dancers today are women from non-hereditary backgrounds, the families of hereditary dancers from the Kathak caste still by and large have control over matters of style and repertoire, and in some cases have the power to make or break careers. In spite of a definite move in the musical world away from stylistic domination by the leaders of the gharānās (see Neuman 1990 among others), questions of authenticity in kathak are largely still answered in terms of this older model of hereditary authority.
As pointed out above, this hegemonic control on the part of the Kathak leaders rests to some extent on the fact that the name of the caste and the name of the dance are one and the same. Although the oft-repeated saying Kathā kahe so Kathak is translated as ‘One who tells a story is a Kathak’ (Kothari 1989: 1), there is another trope stating that the Kathaks (the people) are by definition kathak (the dance). This connection between caste and choreography forms an important part of the conception that authenticity and authority in the transmission, preservation and origins of the dance are inextricably connected to the hereditary Kathak community, and this belief is preserved and reinforced by many practitioners whenever possible. One very public illustration of this occurred at the Kathak at the Crossroads International Symposium and Festival in San Francisco in 2006 when a panel entitled ‘What is Kathak?’ ended suddenly when one participant, to the delight of both the audience and other panellists, announced ‘There is Kathak!’ indicating the seated Birju Maharaj (hereditary leader of the Lucknow Kathak gharānā; Figure 3.1) with a theatrical flourish. The resultant burst of applause made it clear that there was nothing more to be said.
Figure 3.1 Birju Maharaj, leader of the Lucknow gharānā of kathak dance. © Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, India
Yet, such displays, and more importantly the ways in which they discourage and even prevent discussion, indicate that there is very probably much more to be said and still more to be looked into. The origins and place of the Kathak hereditary group itself in the history of North Indian performing arts is a bit of a mystery, and the various explanations that have arisen in both written and oral histories are seldom satisfying. Whether the claims of ‘ancient Kathakas’ are factual or fanciful, the Kathaks, both as the current ‘owners’ of kathak dance and as one of a number of castes or clans of hereditary performers, are extremely active and visible in the performing arts of the past 150 years and deserve both deeper and broader scholarly attention than they are usually given.
As so dramatically demonstrated in San Francisco, ‘what is kathak’ is publicly credited to the performing artists and gurūs who are the hereditary dancers called Kathaks. There are a number of families of Kathaks active in the publicly funded concert and educational arena and scores more performing in less visible circumstances. Since in the hereditary Kathak families only men perform, historically gurū and śi
ya (disciple) are said to have been father and son or uncle and nephew and this has created lineages of dancers that only very recently have begun to include female family members. These family trees then form the core of the Kathak gharānās, which are recognized not only by the hereditary dancers and their students, but also the government institutions who patronize them. At the government-supported Kathak Kendra dance school in New Delhi in the winter of 2002, for example, five of the seven kathak gurūs were gharānedār or hereditary Kathaks.
There are officially three Kathak gharānās, which are named after cities although they more accurately represent the artistic inheritance of larger regions. The most publicized and perhaps most internationally known is the Lucknow gharānā, which traces its beginnings to the mid-nineteenth-century court of the Nawab Wajid ‘Ali Shah. The Lucknow gharānā is represented by a single core Kathak family, headed today by Birju Maharaj (Figure 3.1). His sons and nephews are also dancers, and one of his daughters is also now increasingly recognized as a teacher. The gharānā is further visible through the hundreds of non-hereditary disciples trained by Birju Maharaj and, prior to the 1970s, by his uncle Shambhu Maharaj. Equally recognized in the literature is the Jaipur gharānā, which is made up of a number of Kathak families and is centred in Rajasthan. Of the gharānedār teachers at the Delhi Kathak Kendra in 2002, only one, Rajendra Gangani, was a hereditary member of the Jaipur gharānā. Gangani is certainly a popular teacher and star dancer, but Jaipur Kathaks seem comparatively under-represented in the dance schools and on the contemporary concert stage (cf. Natavar 1997). Many of the older non-hereditary dancers, however, trained in both gharānās and claim both Shambhu Maharaj and the Jaipur Kathak Sundar Prasad as gurūs. If the Jaipur gharānā is under-represented, the third gharānā, the Benares gharānā, is even rarer. Benares dancers are not included in the large dance schools, although they are somewhat visible on the international performance circuit.
There seems to have been a lot of cross-fertilization between the gharānās throughout the twentieth century. Repertoire identified as characteristic of one gharānā is often danced by the other. Furthermore, it is said that as the disciples of non-hereditary dancers have taught new generations of dancers, the subtle body language that has characterized the separate traditions has become gradually lost or modified. Although some non-hereditary dancers take pride in being ‘pure’ Jaipur or Lucknow gharānā and connect themselves closely to their hereditary gurūs, many others now say that the differences between gharānās have for all practical purposes disappeared, and some go so far as to insist that only gharānedār Kathaks should claim to represent a certain gharānā. Nevertheless, the division into Jaipur and Lucknow styles is still very much part of dance training and many dancers’ identities. The Kathak Kendra in Delhi carefully keeps gurūs trained in the Jaipur and Lucknow gharānās on staff, and incoming students are channelled into foundation classes in one style or the other.
Gharānās, however, are much more than simply styles; they have been important socio-musical organizations for most of the twentieth century. The origins of the gharānās are vague, but do not reach back before the middle of the nineteenth century (Neuman 1978: 187). The earliest gharānās were both vocal and Muslim and arose in response to changing patronage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the regional courts lost finances and influence and musicians moved into a larger, anonymous and competitive urban space. As unique and marketable identities, gharānās caught on and instrumental lineages, first soloist and then accompanist, followed suit. Today, the gharānās are still for the most part Muslim, as Islam permits the marriage of close cousins thus allowing musical knowledge to be kept within the family, but as discussed above, their importance has been markedly lessened by technology and globalization. Nevertheless, musicians in North India still recognize these musical lineages, each of which claims to disseminate a discrete performance style and body of repertoire and usually traces its origins back to a charismatic founder. Although non-hereditary musicians may become disciples of gharānā members and thus identify themselves as belonging to a certain gharānā, authority and ownership rest with the gharānā’s core family, the khāndān, and male leader, the khalīfa. Membership in a gharānā has given performing artists not only a distinctive and marketable socio-musical identity but also an authoritative musical pedigree to which they can refer (Neuman 1990: 145–67; also see Neuman 1976 and 1978, Meer 1980: 128–37, Kippen 1988).
Placing the Lucknow, Jaipur and Benares gharānās of kathak dance into this framework is a somewhat uneasy fit. Only the Lucknow gharānā has a single central family and acknowledged authoritative leader, but no one calls the family a khāndān or Birju Maharaj the khalīfa, as these are Muslim terms. The Jaipur gharānā, on the other hand, comprises a number of lineages and has no equivalent of a khalīfa. Both these various Rajasthani families and the extended family of the Lucknow gharānā include drummers and other musicians as well as dancers (see Kothari 1989: 56–7 and Natavar 1997). Furthermore, there are at least two separate traditions identified as the Benares or Varanasi gharānā of kathak. The first, called the Janaki Prasad gharānā after its founder, is described as an off-shoot of the Jaipur gharānā with a uniquely expressive and devotional repertoire (Kothari 1989: 59–65). The second Benares gharānā comprises hereditary Kathaks who still live in the city of Varanasi and includes legendary dancer Sitara Devi, her father Sukhdev Maharaj, her siblings and their students. This Benares gharānā is included in some literature and probably has a consanguine connection to the Lucknow gharānā (Narayan 1998: 176 and below).
The Lucknow and Jaipur gharānās are more solidly established because both are formally maintained through the dance schools and historically validated through documentation in the dance literature. Of the two, the Jaipur gharānā is sometimes identified as older (Devi 1972), and said to have developed in the Hindu courts of Rajasthan. The Lucknow gharānā is said to have appeared rather suddenly (Khokar 1963) and was patronized by the Muslim rulers of Awadh. Their style characteristics are usually presented as dichotomous. Jaipur style, although possessing ‘a strong religious flavour’ (Singha and Massey 1967: 132), shows a ‘partiality for pure dance’ (Singha and Massey 1967: 133). According to Banerji, ‘footwork stands most supreme’ in the Jaipur gharānā, forming 95 per cent of the dance (Banerji 1984: 128) and Saxena (1963), Khokar (1984), Samson (1987) and Kothari (1989) all focus on the style’s virile pure dance and ‘rhythmic wizardry’. In contrast, the Lucknow gharānā is described as graceful, delicate and expressive, complementing ‘technical virtuosity and flamboyance … [with] subtlety in the depiction of moods and emotions’ (Samson 1987: 79). Lucknow is also identified as the birthplace of 
humrī, the most expressive of the dance-songs, alternately said to have been invented by Wajid ‘Ali Shah or by Bindadin, an ancestor of the current family who is often identified as the founder of the style (see also Manuel 1989 and du Perron 2007).
The dance gharānās and their central families, however, are only a part of the community or communities called Kathak. There has never been anything approaching a definitive ethnography of the Kathaks, and such a study may well be impossible due to the wide distribution of hereditary performers either calling themselves Kathaks or claiming to be related to Kathaks. Furthermore, as discussed at length in Chapter 6, shifting identities and name changes seem characteristic of many parts of this social layer; who is or is not a ‘Kathak’ can sometimes be quite difficult to define. Finally, although the Lucknow and Benares Kathaks are arguably part of the same community and perhaps might more accurately be called the Uttar Pradesh Kathaks, what relation if any they have to the Rajasthani Kathaks is both unclear and contentious. References to people called Kathaks who are performing artists appear in historical documentation of what is now Uttar Pradesh almost 100 years before similar references appear in material from Rajasthan, yet there are a number of suggestions in the literature that the Kathaks of Varanasi were originally migrants from Rajasthan (Khokar 1963: 10, Bhavani 1965: 37, Devi 1972: 167, Banerji 1982: 63, and Natavar 1997: 72). As Natavar has pointed out, there is a dearth of information about the Rajasthani Kathaks both ethnographically and historically (1997) whereas the Uttar Pradesh community has been the subject of a great deal of documentation. References to consanguine relationships (for example in Qureshi 2007) or to particular lineages (for example in Shepherd 1976) within this community can be combined with the ancestral charts and limited ethnographies found in some of the literature on kathak to put a reasonably useful picture together.
Frances Shepherd’s study of the Benares tablā gharānā in the 1970s identifies the Kathak community very broadly as ‘a group of professional classical musicians and dancers who … call themselves Kathak’ (Shepherd 1976: 13). Shepherd pointed out that three gharānās have been founded by hereditary Kathaks – the Benares tablā gharānā, a vocal gharānā and the Lucknow gharānā of kathak dance – and emphasized that male members of the Kathak community most often sing, dance or play tablā or sāra
gī, while female members are never taught formally. She located Kathaks in a number of areas in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as well as in the city of Benares, identifying a vast community of related musicians throughout this area comprising what she categorized as ‘classical’ vocalists, accompanists and dancers (Shepherd 1976: 13–18). Kathak dancer Shovana Narayan provided a little further information about Kathaks in Bihar in her book Dance Legacy of Patliputra (1999). Although her ethnography does not clearly connect these performers consanguineously to the central family of the Lucknow gharānā and much of the book is given to the search for ancient origins, her work describes a Kathak community that is geographically and professionally more diverse than usual (Narayan 1999: 6–8). In 2003 and 2005, I had my own opportunity to add to the data provided by Shepherd and Narayan. The hereditary performers I was fortunate to meet were rural folk musicians who identified themselves as Kathavacaks.
I was initially introduced to Kathavacaks and their performance genre kathāvacan through a presentation in Toronto by Dr Sally Jones. Jones spoke and showed video documentation of the performing art of Shitala Prasad, a hereditary musician from the district of Rae Bareli southeast of Lucknow, and relative of Munna Shukla (a nephew of Birju Maharaj) and thus a member of the Lucknow gharānedār family (Jones 1999). During the winter of 2002, Munna Shukla spoke to me in some detail about the Kathavacaks of Uttar Pradesh including Shitala Prasad: he described their performances, and emphasized that these performers and the Lucknow gharānā members were all part of one family. Two other senior teachers at the Kathak Kendra, Urmila Nagar and Rajendra Gangani, both spoke of rural Kathaks in the Churu district of Rajasthan although Gangani did not call them Kathavacaks. Nagar also drew my attention to a quartet of boys from an Uttar Pradesh Kathavacak family who had recently come to Delhi to study kathak dance with the sons of Shambhu Maharaj: Krishan Mohan Misra and Ram Mohan Misra. In 2003 and 2005, I was able to make two visits to the villages of Raghav Pandit and Ram Nagar, both in the Sultanpur District of Uttar Pradesh, southeast of Lucknow (see Map 3.1). There I met the boys’ relatives, recorded kathāvacan performances, and interviewed some of the artists.
My hosts for both visits were the fathers of the boys studying at the New Delhi Kathak Kendra, two brothers named Ashok Tripathi (Figure 3.4) and Tripurari Maharaj (Figure 3.3). Ashok and Tripurari belong to an extended family of hereditary performing artists centred in the Sultanpur District, but with relatives also in Lucknow and Varanasi. Although farming is by and large the family’s primary means of subsistence, many of the male family members perform kathāvacan, act, sing, play instruments and dance. In addition to their own performances, the brothers run two music schools: the Kalika-Bindadin Paramparik Kathak Natvari Lok Nritya Kala Kendra in their home village of Raghav Pandit, and the Ashok and Tripurari Maharaj Shiksha Paramparik Kathak Natya Sanskritik Kendra in the village of Ram Nagar some miles away. They are related both to Birju Maharaj and to Shitala Prasad by complex cousin relationships; Birju Maharaj’s mother, Mahadevi, was originally from Raghav Pandit and her brother, Ram Sevak, still lived there when I visited. According to Ashok and Tripurari, Birju Maharaj himself also lived there for a time when he was a boy. The brothers gradually expanded their folk-music schools through the late 1990s and early 2000s, and have benefited from government patronage and interest from the urban Kathaks. The Raghav Pandit school, a large one-story structure with a sizeable performance hall, was built in 1998 with support from the Government of India, and the school in Ram Nagar was built more recently. As only male family members perform kathāvacan and other genres, the brothers had hired other musicians to teach separate folk traditions at the school – women, in particular, who teach appropriate folk songs and dances to girls. Furthermore, in view of changing times, they also decided to send their elder sons, Shivdutt, Krishan, Kaushal and Abhay, to study stage kathak at the Kathak Kendra in New Delhi so that they would have the option of performing both kathak and kathāvacan in their future careers.
Map 3.1 Map of Uttar Pradesh showing Sultanpur District
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The first performances I viewed in March 2003 had been arranged especially for my visit and took place in a large room in the Kalika-Bindadin school.2 Although the musicians presented a wide variety of items including kathāvacan, folk dances and a short theatre piece, I was keen to see a show in an ‘authentic’ setting, performed for a rural Indian audience rather than a Canadian ethnomusicologist. I asked if I could be informed of any programmes Ashok and Tripurari might be presenting in February or March of 2005, my next visit to India, and was invited to attend shows in Ram Nagar and again at the school of Raghav Pandit. The evening show in Ram Nagar was on a makeshift stage in the town bazaar, and the afternoon programme at Raghav Pandit had a local politician as the guest of honour. I discovered, however, somewhat into the proceedings, that both shows had again been arranged because of my presence.
All the performances I viewed consisted of a variety of performers and genres, including folk songs, devotional songs, expressive gestures and classical kathak, which was performed by the young men studying in New Delhi. Thirteen-year-old Abhay also knew kathāvacan, and also sang devotional songs such as bhajan and illustrated them with gestures. I had initially heard him in 2002 at an informal programme arranged by Urmila Nagar in her studio at the New Delhi Kathak Kendra, and he sang again at both shows in 2005. Abhay’s father Tripurari, uncle Ashok, two other adult male family members, Nanda Lal Misra and Harinand Misra, and two more distantly-related men, Kuldeep Misra and Daya Shankar Pande, also performed kathāvacan, described below. Another unrelated hereditary group, the Ahirs, performed at the school in 2003 and again on stage at the Ram Nagar bazaar in 2005. The Ahirs are a community of cattlemen from Uttar Pradesh who claim to be descended from Krishna. In their dance, which they call nāvarī, they play wooden flutes and dance in energetic steps that make the bells they wear on their thighs jingle.3 At the programme in the school in 2003, the Ahirs were the grand finale of a long sequence that included a comic theatrical interlude about Krishna stealing butter (see below). To provide a finale for the 2005 show in the Ram Nagar bazaar, and also to help attract an audience, the brothers had hired a magician.
Although each of the programmes I viewed could be classified as a type of variety show, the central art form was the solo genre called kathāvacan. A presentation of kathāvacan by Tripurari was the first item in the 2003 performance at the school. Kathāvacan also figured prominently in the other two programmes and, of all the vernacular or ‘folk’ forms presented, is the one supposedly linked to kathak dance. Tripurari’s presentation began with a short sung prayer to Krishna and moved into an approximately 15-minute performance that combined story-telling in heightened speech (kathā) with sung poetry (kavitā, in this case about Radha and Krishna), expressive gestures, mime and instrumental interludes on the harmonium and the tablā. The instrumental sections used a variety of the eight-beat folk tāl kaharvā, and the harmonium repeated one or another of the kavitā’s phrases as a lahrā or cyclical melody. These sections formed a type of punctuation in the performance, and during them Tripurari walked around the performance space, often executing a type of dance step by tapping the toes of each foot before he stepped. He interacted with the ‘audience’, who were other family members and performers seated around the classroom’s periphery, by gesturing and frequently bidding them ‘Look!’ (Dekhā!). The audience responded to certain statements with enthusiastic shouts of ‘Jai!’ There was little in Tripurari’s performance, however, that corresponded with stage kathak. He occasionally took a posture with his elbows bent, hands held in front of his chest and body tilted, but more often gestured in a very natural way directly to the audience. He used an orange gauze dupaā as a prop, draping it around his neck when singing or speaking, pulling it over his head to denote a woman, and tying it around his waist during the instrumental sections. He performed no actual ‘dance’ items, but during one instrumental interlude presented a detailed mime segment as a woman washing the front of her hair, applying powder, eye makeup and lipstick. Finally, the performance moved into a fast instrumental section, during which Ashok sang and Tripurari performed his sedate toe-tapping walk. The musicians then repeated the final phrase of the kavitā three times as a tihā’ī or rhythmic cadence.
Tripurari’s performance of kathāvacan was similar to the other presentations I saw in 2003 and 2005, and also to other performances of this type of kathāvacan documented on video by other researchers. A much earlier performance by Tripurari, Ashok and their father, Bhagvati Prasad at the New Delhi Kathak Kendra on 18 September 1986 was preserved on video by Laurie Eisler. There is also Sally Jones’s footage of performances by Shitala Prasad at the Kathak Kendra and in rural Uttar Pradesh in 1997 or 1998. More recently, Mekhala Natavar also filmed Shitala Prasad performing kathāvacan at a temple festival in Ayodhya in 2004. Her documentation also, interestingly, includes Ashok, Tripurari and their troupe at the same festival performing the folk dance-drama Rām Līlā in nautankī style, where men dress as women.4 In addition to Tripurari and Ashok, therefore, I saw five other family members and two more distantly related men performing kathāvacan. These 13 performances by nine different Kathavacaks all alternated heightened speech, which itself was a combination of storytelling, poetry and preaching to the audience, with short excerpts of devotional songs, and enhanced both speech and song with illustrative gestures. Rhythmic interludes on tablā and harmonium punctuated the free exchange between speech and song, and during these interludes the Kathavacak would perform some type of footwork. All the Kathavacaks wore a long scarf or dupaā, which they hung around their necks, knotted around their waists, or used as a prop to show a baby, a woman’s veil, a man’s turban and so on.
The form is flexible enough that the performers shifted modes seamlessly according to the context, and one could not divide the performance into sung, spoken and dramatic sections. Sung and spoken phrases were performed in such quick succession that they in effect became one, and dramatic gestures were used throughout. The performances did have divisions between sections involving singing and speech, which were usually non-metric and accompanied only by the harmonium, and the rhythmic interludes, which added tablā and ended in a tihā’ī. Each Kathavacak seemed to have the freedom to execute a performance that showed his strengths and experience. Ashok Tripathi, Tripurari Maharaj, Shitala Prasad and Nanda Lal Misra spoke, recited and preached as a significant part of their performances. Shitala Prasad and Nanda Lal Misra were particularly verbal, addressing the audience directly by referring to current events and other issues. The younger performers, Kuldeep, Satish and Abhay, on the other hand, spoke only to introduce their material and then focused on their songs and gestures.
The dance or ‘kathak’ elements also varied between performers and seemed to depend largely upon individual knowledge and training. Tripurari’s performance showed that the inclusion of rhythmic repertoire is unnecessary for kathāvacan, as he knew none, attempted none, and was not wearing ghugrū. Nanda Lal Misra and Kuldeep Misra wore ghugrū, but only presented short bursts of unrefined footwork during the instrumental sections of their performances. At the other end of the spectrum were Satish and Abhay who had studied kathak in Delhi. They not only excelled at tatkār and la
ī (rhythmic footwork with variations) and knew any number of ukās and gats, but also both integrated some of the more refined abhinaya or expressive gestures learned for stage work into their renditions of the kathāvacan songs. Occupying a middle position were Shitala Prasad and Bhagvati Prasad, both of whom knew and could execute a few simple ukās.
Kathāvacan, however, was not the only performing art practised by the rural musicians. In 2003, after Tripurari, Satish and Kuldeep had performed, I was treated to a long presentation identified as folk dance and nāvarī. Between a Radha-Krishna dance by two pre-adolescent girls and the aforementioned dance of the Ahirs, was a dramatic episode complete with animated dialogue and slapstick comedy presented by two men, one quite elderly. The elderly man was Ram Sevak, the maternal uncle of Birju Maharaj, but his performance had little in common with the refined dance of his nephew. He and the younger man shouted and cavorted around to the great amusement of the small audience. Ram Sevak also had a clay pot of butter or yoghurt, which he, between eating the contents and smearing them on his chin, swung at the younger man. There are many stories about Krishna and his friends stealing butter; this was clearly one of them. The participants eventually began to dance, not in set patterns, but freely moving to a rhythmic folk song accompanied by naqqāra (kettle drums) rather than tablā which had accompanied the kathāvacan performances. This section was pure theatre, relying completely on spoken dialogue, dramatic action and a certain amount of unsophisticated buffoonery. Although there was nothing in the episode that seemed even remotely related to kathak dance, one of the central players was Ram Sevak (Figure 3.3), who, as Birju Maharaj’s maternal uncle and the brothers’ first cousin once removed (son of their paternal great-aunt), is the clearest direct link between the rural and urban families (Figure 3.2). In our conversation in 2003, Tripurari emphasized the importance of linking kathāvacan with what he called ‘Krishna expression’ explaining:
We even show the scenes with butter stealing, shepherd boys and qaba
ī [wrestling]. We show yoghurt and butter stealing and what not, and associate it with Lord Krishna. We combine these scenes, whatever they are, and present them. This is known as our traditional kathak-nāvarī. … Since my aunt [father’s sister/cousin – that is Birju Maharaj’s mother] was there, we have called it kathak-nāvarī folk dance (personal communication).
Furthermore, in Natavar’s video of the festival in Ayodhya in 2004, the brothers and their company were performing the folk dance-drama Rām Līlā, rather than kathāvacan. Natavar’s subsequent interview with Ashok and Tripurari contained a discussion about how nautankī theatre was different from kathak and kathāvacan.
It seems clear from these activities and conversations that the art of these rural performers is as closely connected to drama as it is to dance. Of course one can argue that in Indian performing arts, particularly the so-called folk arts, the division is inappropriate and meaningless. Yet, with the importance given both to the familial and the etymological connections with kathak (today, inarguably a dance), the comparison is important. Although the kathāvacan was much more dignified than the boisterous kathak-nāvarī or the androgynous nautankī, all are dramatic forms which emphasize speech and mimetic actions over the rhythmic movements called dance. Many stage kathak performers talk to the audience in between items – Birju Maharaj in particular can be an extremely entertaining storyteller – but the emphasis is clearly on the dance. It is possible for a kathak performance to contain only rhythmic items, without speech or even abhinaya, and still be considered ‘kathak’, whereas the opposite, a performance with only speech and gestures, would be seen as a different sort of art form entirely. On the other hand, speech, singing and gestures are central to kathāvacan, whereas dance is entertaining but unnecessary.
The choreographic and musical connections between kathāvacan and kathak are very tenuous. The kathak-nāvarī drama had even less in common with kathak, yet one of the actors was the main consanguine link between the city and country performers. Both sides of the family make much of the relationship. In our conversations, the Kathavacaks frequently referred to Birju Maharaj’s childhood in the village and his subsequent great success in the dance world. The name of the first school in Raghav Pandit can be translated as the ‘Kalka-Bindadin Traditional Kathak-Natvari Folk Dance Art Centre’. Kalka and Bindadin were Birju Maharaj’s grandfather and great-uncle respectively, and it is they who are often given credit for the creation of today’s kathak in the court of Wajid ‘Ali Shah. Yet, nothing taught at this school resembles present-day kathak in any way. Similarly, nothing in kathak really resembles kathāvacan, and kathak students do not include the folk form in their study. Nevertheless, many urban Kathaks and kathak dancers point to the villagers as the source of their dance.
Figure 3.2 Family tree showing relationships between Birju Maharaj and Kathavacak performers (constructed from oral testimony). Kathavacaks are shown in italics and the performers I saw in 2003 and 2005 are shown in bold
It has not been possible to amend this figure for suitable viewing on this device. For larger version please see: http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/ebooks/9781472403933Fig3_2.pdf
Figure 3.3 Performers at Raghav Pandit village, 2002 with Tripurari Maharaj front row right and Ram Sevak front row left. Photographed by Ilyas Husain Khan
Figure 3.4 Ashok Tripathi playing harmonium at Raghav Pandit village, 2002. Photographed by Ilyas Husain Khan
The mutual rewards of publicizing the family connections are clear for both sides. The rural performers have received government money for their school, have performed in tours associated with Birju Maharaj, and are hoping their children will benefit from their training in Delhi and bring more financial stability to the family. The urban Kathaks, on the other hand, often allude to these roots as proof that their dance is ancient and Hindu. ‘They remind one of the ancestors – the way we were’, Birju Maharaj asserted at the Delhi performance (Eisler 1986), and in an interview with Sandhya Swarnamanjri he described the art form of the Kathaks of Handiya (his paternal ancestors) in terms that can be easily connected to the activities of his mother’s relatives (cited in Swarnamanjri 2002: 85). The kathāvacan of the rural extended family is thus a devotional art form to which the urban family members can point with pride and identify as the root of their own dance, kathak.
One assumes that the Kathavacaks of Uttar Pradesh, as relatives of the Lucknow gharānā Kathak family, are also ‘Kathaks’, although they do not identify themselves that way. This extensive network of hereditary performers is currently spread across Uttar Pradesh and into Bihar with a concentration in Varanasi that dates back at least to the 1830s (see Chapter 6). Members of the group commonly use the surname Misra, although it is sometimes upgraded to the honorific Maharaj to recognize family leaders, such as Birju Maharaj, whose birth name is Brij Mohan Misra. The community is thus often referred to as the Kathak-Misras (as in Kalidas 1998). The Kathak-Misras are endogamous and the group as a whole fulfils most of the characteristics Neuman identified as typical of a birādarī or brotherhood of hereditary specialists. The birādarī is a community, larger than a khāndān or extended family, but still comprising ‘individuals who share a common ancestral place of origin and between whom there are potential or existing marriage links’ (Neuman 1990: 127). Neuman did not include caste in his discussion, as his research centred on Mirasi hereditary specialists who are Muslim, but he did identify the ‘Katthaks’ as the second major community of accompanists in North India. Like the Mirasis, the Kathaks play tablā and sāragī, but unlike Mirasis, they also dance (and as dancers are soloists rather than accompanists) and are Hindu (for further clarification see Neuman 1990: 95 and 126–9).
The relationships that characterize the Kathak birādarī are visible through the consanguine marriage links between the Lucknow gharānā central family (arguably a khāndān, to use the Muslim term) and various musicians in Varanasi and rural Uttar Pradesh. Indeed, the tidy family tree of the Lucknow gharānā of Kathak dancers (see Figure 8.1) contrasts sharply with other documented legacies within the birādarī, such as the Benares gharānā of tablā players, which displays a complex web of leaders, lineages and discipleships.5 Regula Qureshi’s work with hereditary sāragī players also reveals some of the intricacies in the relationships between musicians within the birādarī. Sāragī player Bhagvan Das, who is related to Sharda Sahai of the Benares tablā gharānā for example, arranged for his son Kishore Das to become Sahai’s disciple, and Hanuman Prasad Misra, another well-known sāragī maestro, has a daughter married to a son of Sharda Sahai and a son married to one of Birju Maharaj’s daughters (see Qureshi 2007: 221, 229 and 255). While the family ties between Birju Maharaj and the brothers from Raghav Pandit village are somewhat more distant, the fact that Birju Maharaj’s mother came from the same village where her brother is clearly involved in these folk arts is significant. Furthermore, the Kathavacak Shitala Prasad is related to kathak gurū Munna Shukla through his father, Sunder Lal Shukla who married one of Birju Maharaj’s sisters. Kathak-Misra musicians also number among the New Delhi accompanists: veteran Kathak Kendra tablā player Viswanath Misra, also a sāragī player and vocalist, originally hails from Varanasi (see Rajan 2005) and most of the gharānedār Kathak gurūs prefer immediate or extended family members as tablā players in their classes.
The activities of the rural performers show that the Kathak-Misras are not as easily categorized as the communities of hereditary Muslim musicians documented by scholars like Neuman and Qureshi. Kathaks sing, dance, play tablā and sāragī, but their rural relatives also perform Rām Līlā, kathāvacan, comic theatre and perhaps nautankī. Some members of the birādarī identify themselves as Kathaks, others do not. Some have organized themselves in gharānās, and others have not. There are clearly great opportunities for further ethnographic research on the Kathak-Misras of Uttar Pradesh, and even more prospects available with the ostensibly unrelated Kathaks in Rajasthan. The variety of artistic activities – vocal and instrumental music, dance and drama – combined with the range of contexts – urban, rural, devotional, secular, folk and classical – support the conjecture that the members of the birādarī who most often identify themselves as Kathaks have a long tradition of shifting genres and identities in relation to changes in politics and patronage.
It is worth mentioning as yet another curious aspect of kathak scholarship that although most practising musicians and dancers, especially those who are the disciples of hereditary Kathak-Misra gurūs, are very aware of the consanguine affinity between these dancers and other performers, the birādarī is not generally acknowledged in the literature. Scholarly interest in this type of kathāvacan also seems very recent, and to my knowledge there is very little published about it. It is in some ways curious that many of the dancers and musicians I spoke to in Delhi between 2002 and 2006 seemed to know about Kathavacaks and their art, yet in the main kathak literature only Sunil Kothari and Susheela Misra give them any mention at all, and even their data is very sparse (see Kothari 1989: 2, 9 and 11 and Misra 1991: 2). Current oral testimony, however, often identifies kathāvacan as the ‘root’ of kathak, a belief supported by the family connections, but also exhibiting the timelessness that often characterizes oral history by making the contemporary rural genre simultaneously the ancestor of the stage dance (Khanam 2001). In a conversation in 2002, Munna Shukla told me that there was only one Kathak family. This initially confused me, but it seems clear now he was referring to the Uttar Pradesh birādarī. Certainly, the importance of the Kathak-Misras in the history of North Indian performing arts cannot be overstated. As actors, dancers, singers and drummers in formal and informal settings, they have been and remain active performers and not uncommonly leaders and innovators.
During the last few decades, a time when gharānās have become less and less important to musicians and recording technology has made it almost impossible to control dissemination, the kathak gharānās have largely remained very active and intentional socio-political constructions. It still seems crucially important even in the twenty-first century, that dance gharānā family members maintain their gharānā’s identity as distinct, not only from other gharānās, but also from the inevitable spread of the style through the disciples of disciples. For example, rather than market themselves as authorities of the Lucknow gharānā as countless close disciples can and do, members of the Lucknow central family are now using the names of their forbears. On his personal website, Birju Maharaj is identified as the ‘torch-bearer’ of the Kalka-Bindadin Gharana of Lucknow, and his son, Jai Kishan Maharaj, calls the school he runs with his wife Ruby Misra, the Birju Maharaj Parampara. This is surely in part publicity and marketing, but it is also a method of controlling the style and maintaining ownership. If what is kathak, or more specifically, what is Lucknow kathak, or Birju Maharaj kathak is defined by activities of the hereditary gurūs, then one can learn properly only by studying with a member of the family. Yet, the stylistic divisions between the gharānās seem to have been vague even as the first articles explaining those divisions were written (Khokar 1963: 11). Each attempt to define the characteristic repertoire or movement vocabulary of the gharānās ends with a caveat that these descriptions are of traditional, ‘pure’ dancing and do not really apply today. This is largely because the gharānās themselves are twentieth-century constructions and their ‘traditional’ characteristics are ongoing decisions that in turn support ownership and authority.
The size and dispersal of the Uttar Pradesh Kathak birādarī and the continuity of its endogamy, on the other hand, indicate that it is a much older form of social organization. Tracing the movements and activities of the performers before the name ‘Kathak’ emerges in the written record in the early 1800s must remain conjectural, but to suggest that there has long been an extensive endogamous group of hereditary performing artists in North-Central India who sing, dance, play drums and perform entertaining dramatic episodes about Krishna is not far-fetched. To what extent these performing artists can be connected to a Vedic past, what parts of their performance practice before the twentieth century can be connected with the classical dance called kathak, and what other choreographic or communal roots the dance might have are now the subjects of the rest of this inquiry.
1 Material in this section has also appeared in my article ‘Ancient Tradition as Ongoing Creation: The Kathavacaks of Uttar Pradesh’ published in the Canadian Journal for Traditional Music (Walker 2006).
2 An extended description of the performances I viewed on 27 and 28 March 2003 is included in my dissertation (Walker 2004: 100–103 and 108–9).
3 The Ahirs did not perform in the second show of 2005 (at Raghav Pandit), but one of the dancers approached me there with the request that I draw special attention to their dance in my film. Further documentation of this dance can be found in Lokrang: Uttar Pradesh (Sinha 1990) and on the CD World Library of Folk and Primitive Music: India (2002).
4 The video footage taken by Eisler, Natavar and me has been deposited in the Archive for Research in Ethnomusicology, part of the American Institute for India Studies in Gurgaon, India.
5 For more information see Mativetsky, www.shawnmativetsky.com/benares.html.
