Yogini within

I first encountered the idea of a yogini at the Chausath Yogini temple in Orissa. It is a mysterious space, a shrine with 64 yoginis in sculpture, and no roof overhead this circular temple. It is a space which is powerful and not many are brave enough to come there in the dark. I loved the yoginis, their many forms, sometimes with animal heads and qualities, decorated and bejeweled, a symphony of energies of the universe. A strange connection and attraction existed between us.

A Yogini is said to be a ‘woman in union with the Self’. Someone once asked me if I think there is a yogini within me? It is like asking if I am the particulars that define me or the universal that cannot be defined? It is through spiritual practices that the yogini within soars outward. She cannot be engaged with through conscious effort, she flowers when she intends to. The soaring and blossoming of the spirit, a richness of the self, which signals the Yogini within as she travels light years. 

It is with Odissi that I first experienced time-travel, light years of travel and back in few moments of time. A need to go back every day to a deeper world, the flight of the yogini, her spiritual forest where jewels sparkle on every tree. Every time she travelled, she found another gem of life, sometimes earthly, sometimes alokik. Like all travels, after all such moments there is a  return home to the temple in the heart where the Yogini resides, rich, resplendent and all lit-up. In her garba griha, the inner sanctum, all spaces are fragrant, pious and blossoming with inner flowers.

When I was younger I needed a few hours of riyaaz  everyday and after riyaaz my mind disconnected to engage with domestic duties. It seemed an odd kind of disconnect, a switch on and off. Our Odissi Guru, late Surendra Nath Jena had said that the important thing was to do all our householder tasks, but keep the mind one with God. As a mother of two babies, I wondered if it was actually possible?

Part of the beautiful process of dancing Odissi rhythms has been its systematic work on my soul. Vedic Chanting connected my past, present and future with this journey. And learning music has unlocked many locks further. Opening up to the energies of the universe, I find the Yogini within. As I connected with my own divinity, many energies of the universe connected with me over time. Today, as my spiritual dialogue deepens, yet floats like a wispy cloud, or a child at play, I see so much beauty in utter simplicity and spontaneity in every thread woven into the quilt of nature. 

Sculpturesque

Whenever I visited any ancient temples with beautiful sculptures I felt a strange sense of excitement as well as a strange deja vu, as if I had some connection with these sculptures.

In my last visit to Orissa, it was as if the temple sculptures at the Chausath Yogini temple (in a remote field in a village) called out to me," Why was I coming to meet them after so long? Why don't you come more often? Have you forgotten us, our beautiful connection?" I remembered how these sculptures were what I wanted to experience in my body, and Odissi meant to me the exploration of the sculptures inside my body. Maybe I was a sculptor in one of these temples in the medieval times, carving out beautiful body-scapes of frozen moments in time. 

In this life, as sculptures, dance and frozen moments of time run parallel through my being, I write my ode to the sculpturesque-ness of Odissi:

The sculptures of my being,

danced in my body,

Odissi it was to be,

a dance of the waves of the sea.

A fullness of being,

joyous curves,

the langorous arms,
like creepers of love.

The honey-sweet shringaar,

of mischievious kamarbands,

heavy, pregnant anklets,

serpentine necklaces that never end.

The sculpturesque arrived,

and became my pulse,

became my riyaaz,

as the fabric of me came together.

I found the dance of life,

the shape of my soul,

my sculpturesque lines,

my singing curves.

Sculpturesque and sculpture,

face each other with the beats of time,

are we artistic inspiration,

or just poems that reside in each other's hearts?

A Sense of time 

A dancer is always seeking Shiva, and his sense of time. Dances feel like time-containers and sometimes like time-currencies. Encapsulating the universe and giving an 'alokik', divine moment.

Sometimes in an artiste's work one can feel like an altered sense of time, that transfers to us and we experience strong currents of the river of time.

The sixth sense that dawns after the 5 senses is the sense of time. Manifesting like lord Shiva's damru, it's naad resonates in one's being. For some the entire universe resonates with his damru, and every sound is this sense of time. It is a time altering moment to even play a damru: hear it's sound unite the fragments of our brain in a split second.

The world of Maya gives us an illusory sense of time. Once one can hear time clearly, one is open and aware of many currents of time: in a dance or music piece in which time moves slow, fast or in multiple layers at once. And that perfect creation of art where time stands still, in a deep state of timelessness.




All art is a deep inquiry into the self:

"I want to meet myself,
how long would it take?
At that turn,
in that moment of time,
lay Art,
a masterpiece.
Waves of Art and Life,
churned in the cosmic ocean,
and there came about Me,
the pot of immortal life..."

The saree chronicles

Back to summer with the most beautiful garment of our country. Sadly ignored by young Indian women rushing to Zara or losing themselves in the masculinity of jeans, Saree for me is THE marker of myself. My love of being Indian, wearing colourful fabric from our states, with lovely colour contrasts and patterns, cotton that breathes and sings on the body, that lets air caress the skin and rejoice in the feminity of the body: the saree is poetic about all these and more.

In Odissi I learnt to feel the joy of the Saree when it billows around my curves and expresses the feminity of my body. With the daily poems that my sarees and me create, sometimes we experience love, joy, myriad moods, sculptural corners of being and the care with which someone made this gift for me. To think that a craftsman-artiste in Orissa or Bengal sat and wove these patterns on his handloom, never knowing the joy he creates for me. New to the love-poems these weavers have sent to me is the kachcha-yellow dhoti meant for pandits in Varanasi. I fell in love with it as it sang songs to me with its yellowness and multiple colours on the border. As these borders travel across the length and breadth of me, I know that whether on a pandit, dancer or any woman, the Saree is sheer poetry, spiritual and sacred as the sculptures of an ancient temple.

Rumi Within 


Sometimes for an artiste, the elephant like artistic stirring within, with its stunning force of realization, gives way to a gentler stirring that feels like the Rumi within.  Rumi, the famous poet of the 13th c, found poetry within and a oneness with the universe, on a series of events in life. Each of us has a Rumi within, and a Rumi-ness that flowers with age, and enjoys a deep, moving, creative space within. Quite like the Bhakti poetry of India in the 12th.c, this inner space finds an experience of one's soul and an altered state of time.

When this manifests in the outer world it takes the form of a beautiful poem of Rumi, or a starry night painting of Van Gogh or a moving Odissi dance by a Guru like Guru Surendra Nath Jena. These jewel like works of art we enjoy, are simply the tip of the iceberg. The mountain of jewels lies within the heart of the artiste, whose inner state of being is resplendent and fiercely glowing.

This 'tejas', spark of being is beautiful, as oneness with the entire universe seeps in. Can one be fiercely illuminated yet flowing in the river of life with the entire cosmos? The answer is in the heart of every artiste, and the artiste in the heart of every person.

As I understand the Rumi within, and enjoy my Rumi-ness, I look back at moments in Turkey few years back. When in Capadoccia, I went to experience the dance of the whirling    dervishes, their mystical dance called the 'sama'. It is the sufi way of experiencing mystical union with the universe through sound and movement. The images seem to sing and dance of the Rumi within us all...

Floral Notes

Flowers are secret messengers of nature. Even the most busy bees halt for a moment to feel their beauty: the richness of their colours, the lingering fragrance and the moods they evoke. 

The malaya sameere (gentle breeze) of vasant ritu brings the fragrance of spring flowers.

For the sahridaya individual, the flowers seem to sing songs, that make us enjoy all of nature, the leaves, trees, grass and the wind in a fleeting moment and space. These beautiful quicksilver-like moments are precious, arrive from the middle of nowhere, and drench us in oneness with the universe. It only takes a beautiful flower to hold our wrists and gently make us play with nature.

Then there are lovely floral notes in Odissi that create a kaleidoscopic world of associations. Floral shapes in mudras, the dancer’s silver jewellery shaped like flowers, the shola flower buds in the Odissi dancer’s head dress – all present the floweriness of Odissi.

The Odissi bindi is also shaped like a beautiful, big, blossoming flower. It has a big red circular bindi in the middle with little white dots around it. On the forehead of any child or woman, this unique flower blossom makes her look radiant.

In many Odissi abhinaya, Radha is swayed by flowers : fragrant mango tree blossoms whose fragrance remind her of Krishna waiting in the mango orchard by the banks of Yamuna river.  The flowers of these dance moments seem to add fragrance to many such moments, and one’s Radha-ness is enriched forever.

The dancer offers many flowers of devotion (shraddha-suman) to her aaradhya : the lotus-eyed Vishnu or Shiva, the lord white as jasmine. Radha is also compared by her sakhi to a blooming lotus, beautiful both from outside and within. There seems to be a flower in the heart of every dance, for nature’s every colour, setting and mood.

The Mad elephant and Me - conversations

All art feels a deep connection with the self. It is not simply a skill or an art form, but the experience of one's being. The heights one travels within, the life of a movement, it's vital breath, the pulse of life.

Is this vitality of being Art? A recognition of the raging elephant with the lotus in his trunk.
The soul feels like a mad elephant within the body's cage, lusts to life outside, yet more aware of it's being. Sometimes an artiste loses touch with this being within. The elephant's sounds are drowned in the drone of daily life.



In a second of release, a life-altering moment, the elephant escapes and tramples all the vegetation around. "I look at its sheer size and force and wonder, how come I never saw it before? Yet now I remember, the faint sounds I heard and ignored, the vibrations within, that I turned into movements in dance. This mad elephant rages now and takes over the world, my being, within and without. I see it's skin, tusks, trunks and feet, it's beautiful grey and rough skin, how warm and real it feels. So beautiful, he reminds me of the elephant who was a devotee of Vishnu, possessed yet serene.

The elephant is me, the life of my life, the stirrings within. The discovery of myself. Why am I an artiste? Because I guess I am. I exist. I pulsate with the universe to dissolve like the waxing, waning moon.

The mad elephant has seen its reflection, it's insane with joy, it was waiting for that point of release. Within one moment, it found itself forever and ever."