Soft power

Mallika Sarabhai has a vulnerable side, and she is unapologetic about it in a new book

- NANDINI OZA

There are so many labels to describe Mallika Sarabhai—actor, dancer, activist, writer—that one is tempted to ask the question that Eminem once rapped about: Will the real Mallika please stand up? Mallika herself avoids such banal categorisation. She is at her elusive and playful best as she describes herself on Instagram as: Mongrel. Diverse. Green. Equitable. Humane. Hopeful. Confused? To solve the riddle of Mallika, one must go to her first love: Dance.

All her energies flowed from dance. And her dance flowed from grief.

In her new book, In Free Fall: My Experiments With Living, she describes her depression after the death of her father and a painful heartbreak. She remembers sitting on a large chair with armrests in her bedroom, which faced the lawn and the river. “I spent four months of nothingness sitting in this chair, with my legs propped up on the windowsill, looking at the river and asking, why? Why did Papa die? Why did this man let me down? And then, in a Eureka moment, I woke up one morning with a single thought: ‘All I want is to dance’.” Dance became her refuge where she could vent all her feelings. “And I don’t necessarily mean Bharatnatyam and Kuchipudi. Often I play music loudly in my room and just dance as though I was at a party or a discotheque,” she writes.

Her book works because it gives an insight into what makes Mallika work. Not just the parts of her that we are familiar with— the woman who gives back-to-back dance performances, takes on the ruling BJP in Gujarat or stands up for the victims of the post-Godhra riots. But the hidden and less savoury parts, too: