Kathak
कथक कथक
Also Kathaka, Natwari nritya.
Dance North India
What it is
Kathak is the dance of north India and the only classical form that is as much Muslim as Hindu in its making. Its name is from katha, a story, and the kathakas were storytellers who danced; from the sixteenth century the form moved into the Mughal and then the Lucknow courts, where it took on Persian dress, the abstract rhythmic play of the mehfil and the intimacy of a chamber performance. It is danced upright, on flat feet, with the body held straight and the drama in the spin, the footwork and the face.
How it is built
The two halves are nritta, pure rhythm, and abhinaya, expression, and a performance usually moves from one to the other. The dancer wears ghungroos, up to a hundred bells on each ankle, and the footwork, the tatkar, is played against the tabla like a duel: the dancer sets a phrase, the tabla answers, each raising the complexity. The chakkars, spins, are taken in multiples and a dancer may turn dozens in a sequence and stop exactly on the beat. Thumri and ghazal are used for abhinaya, which brings in a repertoire shared with Hindustani vocal music.
How it is learnt
The question a family actually has
Begun at six or seven with tatkar, the basic footwork, practised for months before anything else. The bells are added early and a beginner wears fewer. Spins are drilled separately with a spotting technique. Five to eight years brings a first solo. A Kathak dancer must understand tala arithmetic well enough to improvise against a tabla player, so the training includes reciting bols aloud and composing phrases that land on sam, which is closer to a musician’s training than to most dancers’.
Whose lineage is whose
Where a claim is contested, by whom
Three gharanas are named. Lucknow, from Thakur Prasad and the court of Wajid Ali Shah, is known for grace and abhinaya. Jaipur is known for forceful footwork and complex rhythm. Benares, from Janakiprasad, sits between and claims the older temple line. A fourth, Raigarh, is sometimes added. The twentieth century reconstruction tried to recover a Hindu temple origin for a form whose documented development is largely in Muslim courts, and that emphasis is contested by historians including Margaret Walker, who argues the temple genealogy was built later than it claims.
Worth knowing
The duel with the tabla
In the sawal jawab, question and answer, the dancer plays a rhythmic phrase with the feet and the tabla player repeats or answers it, and the two trade, each setting harder problems, until one cannot answer or both land together on the sam to applause. It is improvised, competitive and good humoured, and audiences who follow the tala count along. No other Indian classical dance puts the dancer and the percussionist in direct contest like this, and it is the inheritance of the court mehfil rather than the temple.
What the courtesans kept
Much of the abhinaya repertoire, the thumri and the subtle gestural vocabulary, was carried through the nineteenth century by tawaifs, courtesan performers of the Lucknow and Benares establishments, who were trained musicians and dancers with considerable independence. Colonial anti nautch campaigns and the collapse of court patronage destroyed that world, and respectable reconstruction in the twentieth century distanced the form from them. The repertoire it kept is theirs, and scholars and some practitioners say so increasingly plainly.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- North India
- Lucknow, Jaipur and Benares are the three gharanas, and the form is the classical dance of the Hindi speaking north.
- Bengal
- Taught widely in Kolkata and absorbed into the Bengali dance scene alongside Rabindra Nritya.
- Punjab
- Taught in the cities and shares a repertoire of thumri and ghazal with Hindustani vocal music.
Connected to
Deities
Festivals
Related arts