Mohan Khokhar and MK Saroja: Two lives steeped in dance

Dance scholar and horian Mohan Khokhar and Bharatanatyam exponent MK Saroja found each other at Kalakshetra – Bharatanatyam royalty Rukmini Devi Arundale’s endeavour to impart artic education to young adults.
Born in a Brahmin family, Arundale attempted to adopt a puritanical approach to dance – expunging a large chunk of eroticism and sensuality represented shringaar ras, which had been a part of it for centuries, and focussing more on pieces about bhakti, making it more conventional and palatable for the audience of the time. But ironically, the focus on bhakti did not mean austerity in the presentation. She brought in intricate costumes, elaborate sets, and a grandness – which remains emblematic of current forms of Bharatanatyam.
It was 1940. India was yet to find Independence and freedom of expression and Bharatanatyam was just about getting acceptance among Brahmin households, as people agreed to allow their daughters, ones from ‘good homes’ to take up dance.
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Mohan was then living in Lahore in undivided Punjab, where classical dance was never a form of interest or respect and where Bharatanatyam was unheard of most people. Saroja was learning the art form from Vidwan Muthukumaran Pillai in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, besides being from a culturally inclined family.
Alarmel Valli an Indian dancer pay tribute to dance pioneers Mohan Khokar and M.K. Saroja Khokar
Mohan, meanwhile, had seen performances of dancer and choreographer Ram Gopal and could never forget the magic of his movements. While on a tour, Gopal had lived in Mohan’s home in Punjab, where his father was an Army Commissioner. The young boy had asked him about learning the dance form. “Ram told him that people perform this dance in the South. No one can teach you in North India When you go to Chennai, you will find one woman sitting under the tree, you can ask her to teach you,” says Mohan’s son and dance horian Ashish Khokhar.

After travelling for eight days from Lahore, in a train pulled a steam engine, his face black with coal snoot, Mohan reached Chennai and asked Arundale to teach him. “She found it exotic that this boy from Pakani Punjab is so crazy that he has come all the way to learn dance,” says Ashish.
Mohan became Arundale’s first male student. “After a week she realised that this boy will die because he is not used to rice and rice dishes – a staple in south India – three times a day. She asked the hostel people to make chapati once a day. He was like an adopted son to her,” he adds.
Navtej Singh Johar is an Indian Sangeet Natak Akademi award-winning Bharatnatyam dancer
Saroja’s guru was the first official dance guru at Kalakshetra, a small, unassuming conservatory at the time.
Far apart in their worlds and cultures, it was their love for Bharatanatyam that brought the two together. They married in 1949 and moved to Baroda, where Saroja learnt Kathak from noted gurus Sundarlal Gangani and Kundanlal Gangani of the Jaipur gharana, and Khokhar became the head of the dance department at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. At the time it was the only university offering dance at the college level. When the two moved to Delhi in 1965, Mohan joined the Sangeet Natak Akademi while Saroja taught her students. Around the same time she was travelling with her own performances besides doing regular classes for a handful of students in Paris and some film and advertising projects. Her friends and contemporaries Indrani Rehman and Yamini Krishnamurthy would often drop at her Delhi home and ask her to teach some unique compositions.
Kavita Dwibedi pays tribute to dance pioneers Mohan Khokar and M.K. Saroja Khokar
“While my father looked at the theory of dance, my mother worked for the practical aspect of it,” says Ashish, who in 2013 had organised a well-received exhibition titled “A Century of Indian Dance:1901-2000” that featured extensive material such as photographs, costumes, letters, books, brochures, concert invitations, and even matchboxes and firecracker boxes carrying dance pictures, among others. The exhibition was billed as India’s single largest dance collection the Lincoln Centre, New York, The Dance Museum, Stockholm and UNESCO’s dance council in Paris.

While Mohan passed away in 1999 due to cancer, Saroja, who spent the last four decades of her life in Chennai, died earlier this year in June at 91. Last weekend, on Mohan’s birth anniversary, a tribute to the two titled “Sarojamohanam” was held and had senior dance exponents — Alarmal Valli, Leela Samson, Madhavi Mudgal, Navtej Singh Johar and Aditi Mangaldas — pay their respects to the two lives steeped in dance. Ashish also showcased a documentary featuring their life and times, highlighting how it’s important to remember people who contributed to dance in a significant manner. “In India, there aren’t even five books on dance in a year. Where is our patronage from corporate India?” says Ashish, who, along with his wife Elizabeth, is continuing the work of his father adding to his his extensive collection of memorabilia.
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