One might be tempted to treat Dances of the Golden Hall as yet another coffee-table ‘glossy’ on the glories of Indian art, glance through the photographs and put it aside. This would be a mistake for this joint tribute by Ashoke Chatterjee and Sunil Janah to an illustrious dancer and her art is a work of ori¬ginality and brings something entirely new, surprising and refreshing into the world of art books.There is certainly a great deal to be learnt from it about the classical dance forms of South India, both from the meticulous and painstaking studies in the text and from the several hundred photo¬graphs of a straightforward and uncompromising nature. The chief distinction of Ashoke Chatterjee’s text and Sunil Janah’s photo- graphy lies in their achievement of making the art of Indian dance appear no dead museum piece, to be labelled and locked into a glass case for the curious to study, but a living tradition that might have begun in the mythical ages of gods, assuras and apsaras but has continued to live through the centuries because of the dedication and passion of a long line of gurus and their disciples, through a variety of vicissitudes, to survive in our own day and age and show itself capable of further development and a not yet foretold future.
Nov-Dec 1981, volume 6, No 3