A Passage from India: The Dancing Daughters.

Mothers pass on a centuries-old tradition of dance to their children in the New World

THE MIRACLE occurred on a warm July night in India, at the temple dedicated to Siva Nataraja, the dancing god of Hindu belief.

Ramaa Bharadvaj was there with her husband Bala and 18-month-old daughter, Swetha, to ask Siva for help. Ramaa had been an accomplished classical dancer in the bharata natyam tradition. Now, a debilitating spinal infection had left her unable to dance; her legs were unreliable, given to collapse.

As the family stood in the temple at Chidambaram, awaiting the day's final ritual, the crowd suddenly started pointing at baby Swetha. "Look what she's doing!" they said excitedly. Sitting on her father's shoulders, Swetha had ably adopted three of the most common positions of Indian dance, all the while staring at the image of the deity. It was a sign from God, Ramaa believes. Within a few months she was cured, dancing again at full strength. Ramaa committed herself to passing along her knowledge to her daughter, because she believed Siva had selected her daughter to become a dancer.

That was eighteen years ago. Swetha, who turns 19 next month, has performed with her mother since she was 4. "Even today, I think that her first lesson came from him (Siva)," Ramaa said, sitting in the family room of her two-story home in Yorba Linda, California, a few miles from the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, where the family has lived since December 1987.

In a neighboring suburb, Diamond Bar, Anjani Ambegaokar sits in a traditional silk salwar kameez (pants and caftan), with her dupatta (sash) draped elegantly across her body. She talks about her own education in kathak, another of the seven classical forms of Indian dance, and she tells how she taught her daughter, Amrapali. Strikingly beautiful, Amrapali, 22, has thick curls cascading to her waist.

There was a similar moment of epiphany when Anjani knew that Amrapali had a gift: "She did something with the rhythm that would only come to someone who was born with a certain sense about the rhythm in kathak, because the kathak rhythms are very complicated. And I just looked at her and said, `Oh, my God. Where is this coming from?' From that time on, I started taking her on as a serious student of dance."

In these upper-middle-class suburbs thirty miles east of Los Angeles, literally and spiritually so far from India, the centuries-old classical dance traditions have taken root. More than that, the dance forms are starting to blossom, thanks to a growing number of first-generation Americans trained by their artist-mothers.

These artist-mothers, far from the cultural or social pressures in India, have watched their counterparts in the western dance community and pursued dance careers while raising their families. They learned to self-produce their programs of original choreography and they run small but serious schools.

They are asked to sit on arts panels. They are sought out by choreographers of flamenco and even ballet to collaborate on programs that explore the forms' similarities and differences. Their concerts have begun to attract crowds beyond the usual suspects, the Indian emigre community, which numbers about 250,000 in Southern California and 1.2 million nationwide.

Interest in Indian dance, among presenters, dancers and audiences, has increased dramatically here in the past twenty years. Both Ramaa and Anjani said they are more in demand than ever. Even Ramaa's lighting designer marveled to her about the spreading influence of Indian dance. More mainstream choreographers are looking to work with Indian master artists. Whereas Indian dance used to be considered a form of "exotic" interest only, now Ramaa is approached by presenters who would like to co-present concerts with her.

"In fact, when we were at a meeting about Dance Kaleidoscope"--Southern California's largest dance festival--"one of the things that I was told is that the presenters were kind of disappointed that more Indian dancers hadn't auditioned."

This month, Ramaa and Anjani and their daughters will appear in a production of the epic poem The Ramayana at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The show also features classical Cambodian and Indonesian dance. Anjani and her company, Anjani's Kathak Dance of India, will dance at the Hollywood Bowl on June 25, in a program that combines kathak and flamenco, while Ramaa and her company, Angahara Ensemble, present a new program at the Japan America Theatre in Los Angeles on June 23.

These artists are not alone, either in their ambitions or in the way they are passing along their art form. Los Angeles-based bharata natyam dancer Viji Prakash started working with her daughter Mythili, 17, when the girl was 4. Nandita Behera, considered by many the exemplary odissi dancer in Southern California, gives lessons to her 9-year-old daughter, Nupur. So far, however, her son, like the son of Irvine-based bharata natyam dancer Ramya Harishankar, refuses lessons because "only girls do dance." Some prejudices cross cultural and international divides.

Judy Mitoma, director of the Department of World Arts and Culture at UCLA (the university's unusual name for its dance department), said it is "astonishing" to see two master artists, such as Ramaa and Anjani, with gifted daughters.

"I think that certainly these children are going to be very important players," Mitoma said. "They have not only great personal talent; they have the tremendous grounding that their mothers have achieved through sacrifice and hard, hard, hard work. That's something we do not see very often in the West. I have to confess that my daughter is a dancer, too, but we can't count on that in America."

Dance has been an integral part of Indian art, religion and culture for centuries. It is a highly codified and stylized art form with a rich literature of analysis. During the centuries of British rule, however, it fell into disrepute. A renaissance began in the middle of the twentieth century that continues today.

The seven forms of Indian classical dance (see box opposite) share similar characteristics: complicated rhythmic patterns; elaborate, specific hand gestures; and animated facial expressions of highly developed subtlety and tone. Training often begins when children are toddlers, and they start performing soon after.

Amrapali Ambegaokar graduated from UCLA last year and is pursuing a career both in the commercial sphere and the concert dance world. She was recently selected to do a hip-hop routine on the television show Sabrina, The Teenage Witch. The other first-generation daughters are younger and have a few years before they have to choose their paths. Whatever they decide, they will have multiple influences, and choices, to consider: the rigors of their intensive training, the fact of being first-generation Americans and, like Amrapali, a determination to succeed on their own terms. Just like their mothers.

Ramaa, born and raised in the southern city of Madras, was spotted by one of India's leading bharata natyam teachers when she was only 3. She and her twin sister, Uma, gave their debut concert at age 6, and then won state scholarships to tour India in 1967, when they were 8, the youngest recipients of the award.

Their father, a government accountant, acted as their booking agent, sometimes enduring humiliations from rude presenters. That changed when they began training with Kamala, a renowned dancer who was the first daughter from an upper-caste Brahman family to have a performing career. The training became more serious and Ramaa became a part of Kamala's company. A solo dance career would have cost the family money they did not have. Besides, there was never any question about her future.

"You were taught to believe when you were 18 or 19 you'd get married," she said.

And she did, in a traditional, arranged marriage. In fact, her husband, Bala, an aerospace engineer with a Ph.D., had specifically wanted his wife to be either a trained singer or dancer. He has not only encouraged his wife's artistic ambitions, but helped realize them.

Ramaa began teaching Swetha immediately after that fateful trip to Chidambaram. The teaching was relaxed, rather than rigid, transferring the mother-daughter relationship into dances that often cast Ramaa as the mother of the Hindu God-child Krishna, played by little Swetha.

This allowed Swetha to incorporate play into the dance. Her first memories onstage are of her mother picking her up and whirling her around. "It brought out a lot of spontaneity in our movements onstage," Swetha said. "I think it was really, really real, when I was doing things onstage when I was very little."

As a school-age child, Swetha considered her special skills no different from any other extracurricular activity. Her friends went to soccer practice or studied ballet; she was a bharata natyam dancer. The family made trips to Madras, India, where Swetha performed solo and with her mother; the shows received positive reviews in local newspapers.

Her teenage years were more difficult, as schoolwork and other interests vied for her attention. "I can honestly say that it almost started to become a pain in the neck," said Swetha, who is studying biology at the University of California, San Diego, about ninety miles from home. "My dancing quality had to improve because I couldn't be this clumsy little kid anymore. The prime age for a dancer really starts when they're like 16. My mom was trying to prepare me for that. It was more of a hassle to practice all the time."

Ramaa, meanwhile, was branching out into new areas with her choreography. She collaborated with the director of a local ballet school on a performance and translated The Panchatantra, an ancient text of animal fables, into a bharata natyam concert. She's at a crossroads now, trying to figure out what her proper legacy should be. Being a teacher and performer is not enough, she feels. She would like to go to India to do research on lesser-known dance traditions still practiced in the country's villages, but which are dying with the older generations.

"The United States has given me a lot of things. I don't think I would be the dancer that I am, or the artist that I am, if I had stayed back in India," Ramaa said. "It took this marriage, this security and this financial independence to go back to India and say, `Look, I'm back.'"

Last year, Ramaa received a California Arts CounCil Traditional Folk Arts grant, and she and Swetha began intensive training in another classical style, kuchipudi. That training and Swetha's move to San Diego have subtly altered their relationship. The kuchipudi training has put them on more equal footing: They are both students, instead of mother-master and daughter-student. And Swetha, who believes, too, that her talent is God-given, is finding more joy in the work, even though she leaves the university every weekend to go home and rehearse. Swetha was selected to do a kuchipudi solo at Los Angeles's Dance Kaleidoscope in July.

"All these items (kuchipudi dances) that we learned together, we correct each other, which is really, really weird," Swetha said. "Yes, she's my mom--and she's my teacher. I still have respect for her as my teacher. (But) I feel like I'm growing as a dancer to be able to have input."

Anjani Ambegaokar, the daughter of a doctor and an English teacher, started studying bharata natyam as a toddler in her hometown of Vadodara (formerly called Baroda), about two hundred miles north of Bombay. But she never loved it--it was too stylized, too constrained. Her family arranged for lessons in kathak with one of the leading exponents of the form, Sundarlaljee Gangani. When she was 12, she also began a certificate course offered at the university, which meant she was studying intensively six days a week.

Anjani had wanted to follow her father into medicine but he discouraged it. She had become such an accomplished dancer--why throw all that away? So, at her father's urging, she enrolled in the university as a double major, in dance and economics.

"My mother used to tell my father, `Why are you pushing her like this?' And he used to say, `Someday, she is going to remember me and thank me for this because she will be somebody and she will do something with all this.'" Anjani added, "I never thought of not doing this."

In 1963, when she was 18, Anjani was named best kathak dancer in a national competition for university students. At that point, she seriously thought about making dance a career.

Fate intervened, at least temporarily. She had fallen in love and, despite her parents' initial misgivings over a marriage that they had not arranged, they allowed her to marry Jagadish Ambegaokar, a mechanical engineer. The couple settled in Chicago. Anjani, who already had a master's degree in kathak from her university in India, got another master's degree in business and went to work in a bank. At the same time--in 1975--she started giving concerts as a solo performer on the touring roster of the National Endowment for the Arts. Amrapali was born in 1978 and the family moved to California soon after.

Amrapali grew up watching her mother dance in the extra bedroom converted into a studio. She wanted to emulate the girls in her mother's school. As an elementary school student in predominantly Anglo Diamond Bar, she was teased because of her dark skin and black hair. Yet, she was proud of her heritage, and performed at the school talent show every year.

Like Swetha, Amrapali found the teen years difficult, balancing the extracurricular activities she loved with expectations that she would continue dancing. Mother, daughter, and the small company toured regionally and went to India about every two years. Amrapali played the clarinet and joined the Diamond Bar High School marching band. Her senior year she was picked to be drum major, the first student of Indian descent to receive that honor. Band practice was a source of bickering between her and her mother. She would have to leave dance rehearsals early, and, still wearing her salwar kameez, would rush back to school to lead the band.

"I knew dance would always be there and marching band wouldn't," Amrapali said. "And I wanted to fit in."

A turning point came in her senior year, when she won second place in the Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Awards, in the jazz/modern dance category. Though an official had told the family that Amrapali, as an Indian dancer, wouldn't stand a chance against 130 of the best jazz and modern dancers in Southern California, she got a $2,500 scholarship. She graduated from UCLA in 1999--having studied with David Rousseve, Sharon Kinney and Ron Brown. She is now living at home, going to auditions and working with her mother. She is determined to make inroads in mainstream entertainment, and wants to take advantage of the current fad for things Indian.

She and Anjani want to continue pushing the boundaries of kathak dance. In April, they premiered an innovative project, "Soul to Sole," at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in California. The concert united their kathak company with Laila Del Monte's Flamenco Company and Lynn Dally's Jazz Tap Ensemble.

Anjani recently won a $5,000 California Arts Council Artist Fellowship. But even with her success, she admits that today it's sometimes difficult--as well as pleasurable--to share the spotlight with Amrapali. She worries that she's not going to look as good onstage as her daughter, who is in her prime.

"She's a grown woman now," Anjani said, wistfully. "We have more differences than we used to. Basically at that time, whatever mom said, she would do. She's at an age where she's looking for new things, not just the old tradition. In a way, I don't think she is wrong. But I consider it important that she maintains, that she stays grounded in her tradition, because that's what's going to take her where she wants to go."

It's an ironic turnaround from when Amrapali was a girl and her mother used to "kick her butt" onstage, as Amrapali puts it. But for all the hard work and difficulties, Amrapali considers the gift she's been given precious indeed.

"It took me a long time to understand that, `You know what? You're lucky.'" Most people, she said, "don't get stuff like this. People don't get art at their doors."

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THE CLASSICAL DANCE forms of India date back centuries, many of them beginning as ritual forms of worship. The classical dances, separate from folk dances, require years of training and discipline; certain forms were practiced at temples by specific families only. Dances used to be passed down from master teachers, or gurus, to students. Though the guru form is still intact, now there are codified curricula and the dances are also taught at university level.

Though there are dances of pure rhythm, the main purpose of the dance is to tell a story. The dance is integrally tied to poetry and music and should always communicate something to the viewer.

Bharata natyam: Originally a solo dance form of female temple dancers from the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. In bharata natyam, a dancer's basic stance is a deep demi-plie, heels close together. The dancer strongly and precisely stamps out the dance's polyrhythms. Complicated hand gestures communicate specific ideas, moods and feelings, as do the facial gestures, which take years to perfect and require highly developed isolation techniques. It is the Indian dance form seen most often in the United States.

Kathak: Began as the dance form of roving storytellers. Kathak, from the northern portion of India, uses a more upright position than bharata natyam, and is known for its fast footwork. Kathak is believed by some to be the forerunner of flamenco, and kathak dancers develop fast and complicated patterns for stamping the floor. The dancers wear ankle bells weighing as much as four pounds, which create a unique musical sound.

Kathakali: A dance-drama performed by men. Created in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, the form requires a high degree of stylization in acting, movement, costume and makeup. The makeup, especially, is notable for the dancer's oversized, colorful mask-like appearance, which is achieved by layering rice flour and paper with color on top.

Kuchipudi: Was originally performed by men of the Brahman upper caste, and was believed to have been created by the sixteenth-century Siddhendra Yogi after he was saved by the Hindu god Krishna. The technique is fast, but precise and rigorous. Now also danced by women, kuchipudi features virtuoso dances, including the plate dance in which the dancers balance their feet on the edges of a brass plate, and another in which the dancers draw figures of animals in the sand with their feet.

Manipuri: From the country's most northeastern state, Manipur, where the predominant ethnic group is the Meitei, different from the rest of the country. The women's dances give the impression of ease and spontaneity, as opposed to the precision of the south Indian dances. Dances for men, on the other hand, can be extremely acrobatic, and the men sing and tell stories.

Mohini attam: Dance of the enchantress, and performed only by women. Mohini is a character that the god Vishnu assumes in several legends to defeat evil. Like kathakali, it is also from the state of Kerala. The women's basic bent-kneed position is similar to bharata natyam, but the heels are farther apart. It is an elegant, slow-moving form, with the dancers clad all in white and gold.

Odissi: One of the most ancient dance forms, originally performed by dancing girls--and boys dressed as girls--at the temples in the state of Orissa. The form is noted for its sculptural quality, which looks perhaps the closest to the reliefs on India's temples. The body is isolated into distinct units, forming an S shape, and the movements are soft and elegant. The dancer sometimes performs balancing steps on her heels, which is also done in kuchipudi.

Laura Bleiberg is the Orange County Register's dance critic.