Traditions: Ohio Heritage Fellows; 103; Anupa Mirle interview, part 2 of 3

Q:

Anupa: I don’t know. I have been dancing ever since I remember. And, I remember I—I know that my, you know, older cousins and all, they... everybody remembers me dancing. So, and I have a feeling that perhaps, my mother used to say that I used to dance on the sofa and everything. And maybe it was just to get me out of the house, that she probably first would mean, you know, maybe the first class. But where I ended up was, I think one of the students that was going there, her older sister had just finished her debut and uh, so that’s how my mother met her and that’s how I ended up in the style I am right now.

Q:

Anupa: Yes... yes... um, hard to believe but my grandmother, my father’s mother, had learned ballroom dancing and piano, because my great grandfather was a physician and it was colonial India, so he was exposed to a lot of uh, western culture and he trained his daughter in piano because he loved music and he loved art. And so she knew piano and she knew ballroom dancing. So, I think probably it was her interest also, that she wanted all the daughters in the house to know art. And she was very particular that my mother also learn. But that was a period of time when they were trying to get women into education, so there wasn’t that much of a push for girls going into dance and art during my mother’s time, because they were more particular about education. But, all my cousin’s sisters on my mother’s side, we’re all into art. Each one of us studied but then we quit what we were doing and each one of us is either teaching dance or music, all four of us, so it’s amazing. And, so my mother was a huge part of it um, and I think her love for dance probably pushed me also into it, because she would ask me to come and choreograph whatever dances that she was doing. And I was probably ten/eleven years old at that time. So, I learned choreography very early, because she would be like, you should be able to do it. You’re learning classical dance, and so, that was how I learned.

Q:

Anupa: Yes, it is. Um, art is not separate from life for us in India. You see it in all aspects. Um, traditionally, specially in uh, households south—southern households, you see girls do artwork in front of the house every day in the morning with rice flour with a little caustic soda, because it’s a pr—tropical area and you don’t want bugs coming inside the house. So, a very creative way of putting stuff is you mix the caustic soda with the rice so the ants eat that and then they go away, because they don’t enter the house. So, it’s that much uh, inculcated as part of—and... all of us are expected to know music and dance... not so much dance because there were other connotations for dance during the—that period of time. But definitely, it is a lineage that is passed down.

Q:

Anupa: Yes, it is a traditional age, for children to enter into any art form be it music, dance, or painting or whatever. Because, by then you are expected to have all your motor skills pretty much, you know, where they’re supposed to be and art helps you learn to focus. So, they believe that it’s very important part of the training for every child to go into art at that age, because you are—you have to sit for an hour without fidgeting which is very difficult at that age.

Q:

Anupa: Yea, age six is where we traditionally start, because that is when the motor skills get set and you are expected to learn to focus. And art is a good way to learn focus and concentration.

Q:

Anupa: It has come a full circle. Dance is very important. There was a period of time when India went through a lot of invasions and it is very easy to uh, bring down a woman by forcing her to dance in not very pleasant surroundings. So then the art form also came down. But uh, since there was a revival in the 1930’s just prior to India got independence in 1945... 1947, so um... (PAUSED)