KAPILA
VATSYAYAN: A TRIBUTE
Jawhar Sircar
(26 September,2020, National Herald)
It may
not be an exaggeration to term Dr Kapila Vatsyayan as legendary, for she had
all the elements that qualify for this status, which incidentally, very few
cultural analysts and promoters could ever reach. In the performing and the
visual arts, there are larger numbers who achieved iconic positions but in the
domain of cultural popularisation, theorisation and management, we can recall
only very few. She is the last in the unforgettable trio, with Kamaladevi
Chattopadhyay and Pupul Jayakar as her predecessors Of course, none was a clone
and each of them embarked upon separate missions within the vast space of
culture.
Every
time one asked her about age, she would promptly reply “110 — are you happy?”
She died at 92, but despite quite a few age-related ailments, she was
unbelievably active and hands on till the end. She went about her task quite
enthusiastically and attended her Asia Project Office located in the India
International Centre quite regularly. It was, after all, her real home. She was
a Life Trustee of the Centre and pretty possessive about it and nothing could
hold her back. At the same time, she had no issues about sitting quite so
unobtrusively and unpretentiously in the back rows of the audience in several
events in the auditoriums. She made it up, however, with her emphatic interjections
in the seminar rooms.
She
had begun her involvement in the arts with classical dance and though she moved
on well beyond it, she could always tuck in her sari a bit and demonstrate mudras
to women who could well be her granddaughters. She supported the Kathak
Maharajs from Lucknow and treated Birju as her dear young sibling and the
maestro always blushed as she said so on stage.
Kapila
Vatsyayan had been inducted into the ministry of education that had subsumed
‘culture’ in the early decades after Independence. In fact, she was in this
ministry for a long period to contribute her domain knowledge and expertise,
before the bureaucracy took over totally. In this ministry, Kapila Vatsyayan
had seen it all — from Maulana Azad to Manmohan Singh, as the latter had also
held the culture portfolio from mid 2009 to early 2011. She had worked in
almost every position in the ministry and in many of its organisations. As she
put it, she was “Under Secretary to Special Secretary” and was thus an encyclopaedia
of knowledge that no dry files could ever substitute. She taught me more of
culture in the last fifteen years than I had learnt in the preceding part of my
life. As one fated to serve the longest tenure in the culture ministry, I often
fell back on her memory that was uncannily sharp despite advancing years,
whenever I needed to understand some past experience of the ministry.
She
was a totally involved institution-builder who had the rare skill of persuading
powers that be to make the investment, and once she received their approval and
funding, she went after the babus quite relentlessly until the project
materialised. Her crowning glory was the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the
Arts (IGNCA) but then she had her fingers in many other pies. Tibetan and other scholars are especially grateful to her for
assistance in establishing centres for Tibetan
scholarship in Sarnath, Ladakh and Dharamshala. Though she was not directly
connected with them when I had to be their man in Delhi, for absolutely no
fault of mine, she heaped me with a lot of advice. There was no escape from
this venerable lady who could be affectionate to some and quite exasperated
with others. She did not mind disagreements, but if she ever felt that someone
was out to harm her dream children, she could be quite severe. Those who have
been at the receiving end nurse their bruises even now. But, I guess that if
she was not so intense and emotionally involved, she would never be able to set
up or help establish the largest number of autonomous bodies supported by a
rule-driven ministry.
I have
personally witnessed how passionately she espoused causes that few could even
think of taking up. With her top-view of the cultural sector, she realised that
epigraphy had lost out badly at the university stage when competing disciplines
attracted students from this laborious task of deciphering inscriptions on
leaf, paper, stone and metal. She kept haranguing us until we obtained the
required data from teaching institutes that are anyway difficult to coordinate.
She pursued this subject, but we made little headway. As she had predicted,
India now faces an acute shortage of experts who can read the countless
inscriptions on different media that are languishing in our holdings. She was equally worried about dying languages
and tried her best to resuscitate at least some. Then, when Indian cultural
institutions acted rather lethargic about documenting the treasure trove of our
‘intangible cultural heritage’ she pressurised the prime minister’s office to
summon several inter-ministerial meetings. Thanks largely to such overwhelming
insistence, we have a reasonably large numbers of detailed dossiers
available.
Other
than classical dance, her expertise also covered
music, art, sculpture, cultural theory and comparative cultural studies. The
innumerable books and tracts that she has left authored or edited on different aspects of culture will keep
providing guidance to scholars and those interested for many years to
come. Among them are The Square and the Circle of Indian Arts (1997), Bharata:
The Natya Sastra (1996), and Matralaksanam (1988) and Classical
Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts (2007). Her Plural
Cultures and Monolithic Structures (2013) revealed her anguish quite
clearly and we often debated on her postulates quite passionately.
Dr
Vatsyayan was perhaps the only person who had received the top award or
fellowship from all the three national akademis— Sangeet Natak, Lalit Kala and
Sahitya. She was conferred the second highest civilian award, the Padma
Vibhushan and also served as Member of the Rajya Sabha. She was also given the
rare honour of being appointed as
a member of the executive board of UNESCO, Paris, the
highest body in the field of culture in the world.
With
her passing, an unfortunate void is bound to be visible in the scholarship and
promotion of the arts in India.
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