Latest news with #Darshan
Hans India
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Hans India
Fan murder case: SC adjourns hearing on plea challenging bail to Darshan to July 24
Bengaluru: The Supreme Court on Tuesday adjourned the hearing of the plea challenging the grant of bail to Kannada actor Darshan to Thursday (July 24). The hearing has gained significance after the Apex Court raised objections over the Karnataka High Court's decision to grant bail to the actor. A bench comprising Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan adjourned the hearing after Darshan's counsel, senior advocate Siddharth Dave, informed the court that senior counsel Kapil Sibal -- who was supposed to argue the matter -- was engaged in another trial where his presence was essential. Dave requested a day, stating that he received the case only on Monday night and would not be able to prepare and present arguments on such short notice. Dave also clarified that he would not argue about the reasons behind Darshan's arrest but would focus on the merits of the case. Earlier, the bench had expressed strong reservations about the manner in which the Karnataka High Court exercised its discretion in granting bail to the actor in connection with the fan murder case. The court had told senior counsel Kapil Sibal, "To be very honest, we are not convinced with the manner in which the High Court exercised its discretion. We will very honestly say this." The Karnataka government has filed a plea seeking cancellation of bail granted to Darshan and other accused in the case. Senior counsels Siddharth Luthra and Anil C. Nishani are representing the state government and presenting their arguments. Darshan, Pavithra, and 15 others were arrested on June 11, 2024, on charges of kidnapping and brutally murdering Renukaswamy, a fan from Chitradurga. Renukaswamy had allegedly sent derogatory and obscene messages to Pavithra, angry over Darshan's continued relationship with her despite being married. Sources close to Darshan revealed that Pavithra competed with Darshan's wife, Vijayalakshmi, over jewellery and luxury cars. She allegedly pressured Darshan to make public appearances with her after he had been seen with his wife. Pavithra and Vijayalakshmi also had public spats through social media, leading Darshan's fanbase to split into factions. Renukaswamy, who supported Vijayalakshmi, had criticised Pavithra -- a move that ultimately led to his brutal murder, according to police findings. Darshan is busy shooting for his upcoming film 'Devil'. Sources confirmed that he is in Thailand currently. Since his release from prison on October 30, 2024, after spending 131 days in custody, he has been participating in shoots. In a major relief to Darshan earlier, the Karnataka High Court on February 28 allowed him to travel across the country. Previously, he had been restricted to Bengaluru and the jurisdiction of the sessions court.
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
How Malavika Sarrukai has spent over 50 years carrying the classical while rethinking what Bharatanatyam can be
After dancing for over 50 years, when 66-year-old Malavika Sarrukai — one of the most influential names in the world of Bharatanatyam — metamorphoses into Yashoda now, beckoning Krishna in the long-revered bhakti piece, Krishna nee Begane Baro (O Krishna! Come soon), commanding, imploring, coaxing, she carves its contours with a clarity so certain that it is no longer just a mother-child tale from a fabled past. Under Sarrukai's supervision, this composition by the 15th-century poet Vyasatirtha — with years of introspection in tow — has evolved into something more contemplative; with different hues on different days — of longing, vulnerability and connection with the spiritual. Going beyond the usual adoration, this piece manifests. Perhaps, because, as Sarrukai says, she 'sees more' now. 'After revisiting and refining it over the years… I feel it's a much deeper felt moment now. I see so much more than I have in the past,' she says. It's interesting how Sarrukai's approach to presenting this age-old piece, which she saw as a young girl being performed by T Balasaraswati — the last of the great dancers from the Devadasi lineage and one of the most revered dancers in the history of modern classical dance — is far away from emulation. Of Balasaraswati or other masters or her gurus and so many artistes who have performed this before her. At the Capital's Kamani Auditorium, in a concert titled 'Darshan' presented by Bharatanatyam exponent Rama Vaidyanathan's Madhavi Foundation, one saw Sarrukai's approach through evolution, where four compositions were delineated depending upon how much and what Sarrukai saw when peeking inside a story or feeling that evening. 'The manodharma (imagination) happens on the spot, when there is mastery over the piece, technique, a sense of poetry, along with musicians who have the wherewithal to follow, to improvise, to change, to shift and to read dance. So what I did yesterday was not what I did earlier. It is changing. But to change, you need to invest… Be it any performance, it is all about the artiste putting in that sense of prana (life) into the dance,' says Sarrukai in a conversation on a humid afternoon at Delhi's India International Centre. This sense of life is critical to most of the works that Sarrukai has touched or invented under the aegis of Bharatanatyam in the past decades. She has performed at sacred as well as secular spaces — temples and the proscenium — and danced numbers from mythology as well as other traditional pieces from the repertoire. But she's also looked vividly at contemporary themes, including climate change, created a production inspired by the Chipko Movement, looked at the significance of the warp and weft of the handloom, presented the transcendence of Amir Khusrau's poetry, portrayed Hanuman in a solo piece and looked at some older compositions with a feminist lens, among others. Sarrukai's work has always been about experiences that affect her. Her latest work Beeja – Earth Seed, which will premiere in Delhi in September, will talk about the instability of the planet and 'allow the subaltern voices to speak.' The deer, the swan, the birds, the trees — they all will have a voice in the production. As for the humans, they aren't in the main role. She got the idea while visiting friends in Uttarakhand's Landour, where she found a tree with a placard that read 'I was once a tree that held its ground.' 'Look at the floods in Texas, the forest fires in Spain and LA. We are the ones who have created havoc. The production celebrates the planet but it also asks questions about where we are going — important in these times,' says Sarrukai. Vaidyanathan, who invited Sarrukai to lead the festival this year, has been fascinated by the level of expertise and excellence the Chennai-based dancer brings to the dance form. So much so that she calls herself a 'fan', a rare moment in a world where dancers rarely admit to admiring other dancers. 'Her artistry is so nuanced… her ability to evolve her vocabulary but at the same time maintain strict levels of aesthetics, excellence and loyalty to the dance vocabulary is something which has astounded me. She is able to widen the canvas of the form and make the dance an extension of herself,' says Vaidyanathan, who is drawn in by Sarrukai's ability to bring in a 'modern sensibility to normal mythological stories within the parameters of the dance form.' ***** Before Sarrukai moved to her home, Dharini, on Chennai's Seaward Road with a dance studio and the trees that have seen her grow into the dancer she's become, she lived in an apartment at Mumbai's Nepean Sea Road and went to Cathedral School in Fort. No one danced in the family but Sarrukai's mother, Saroja Kamakshi, absolutely wanted her seven-year-old daughter to dance and would drive her to Matunga every day to the home of guru K Kalayanasundaram. There, a reluctant Sarrukai had to be coerced to climb to the third floor through the cramped wooden staircase and learn the Tanjore style of Bharatanatyam. Sarrukai's mother, instrumental in making sure that her younger danced, towers above all else in her dance life. She wasn't a dancer, worked for a magazine and was not involved with choreography. But she could think of deeper ideas, goad her daughter to think harder, to look at the contexts and content with a newer outlook. Then there were costumes, finances, and managing a career. 'She was my sounding board. Everything was run past her,' says Sarrukai about her mother, who passed away in 2013. She was also the only one allowed in her green room in those last moments before Sarrukai stepped on the stage. Among all of this, she was also raising two daughters — Malavika and her older sister Priyadarshini — as a single mother. In Sumantra Ghosal's documentary on Sarrukai, The Unseen Sequence (2013), Kamakshi talks candidly about the unravelling of her marriage. 'It was good that I got through my marriage and finished with it. Otherwise, I would have never been able to do all the things that I did,' she says. At this time, dance became a sanctuary for Sarrukai. After her arangetram at 12 and after she decided to be a professional dancer at 16, Kamakshi moved to Chennai to her family's home. 'How does one practise (in an apartment in Mumbai), because you are constantly disturbing others,' says Sarrukai. In Chennai, they lived in a joint family and Sarrukai shared a room with her mother, albeit on the ground floor. 'It was my living room, my study, my bedroom, my dance room where I practised,' said Sarrukai at a seminar organised by Raza Foundation while describing the concept of 'space' in dance. They lived frugally and struggled but Sarrukai kept dancing. She also trained under TN Rajaratnam Pillai and received her training in abhinaya from Kalanidhi Narayanan. For the first 20 years of her dance life, Sarrukai danced and performed what her gurus taught her, which was the margam or the traditional repertoire. She took the dance world by storm with her geometric lines and intricate footwork and travelled all over the world. But about 30 years ago, when Sarrukai began to choreograph herself, by which time Bharatanatyam had become a language for her and moved beyond the 'items', she began to 'respectfully question' the repertoire. There were times, for instance, when she wasn't happy with representing a tree with the plain tripataka mudra, a hand gesture used to denote a tree among other ideas. Sarrukai was concerned about how the tree felt when the birds stood on it or when its leaves rustled. She wanted to use the human body's physicality to represent these ideas and energies. 'I decided to remove the decorations. Now I could say more with less,' she says. On occasion, she'd become a courtesan and instead of traditionally complaining about how the man promised her jewellery and gifts, she turned her nayika into a sarcastic woman. Sarrukai starts this piece by adorning her jewellery and showing it off. She then asks the man, 'What happened to all your promises?' A feminist nayika, who was not a victim or dependent on the man to provide, felt radical. Or when she didn't want to do a piece about a woman chastising her companion for not touching her with the hands that touched another woman. 'Is this relevant today? Do I want to say this?'she asks. What strikes Ghosal, who remains a creative collaborator with Sarrukai, is her refusal to give up on her work. 'And that is not easy. Dance is not particularly funded and is a lonely journey especially for a solo dancer… and one compromises for various reasons, including economics, time constraints, an artiste's growing years. Malavika just refuses to give in to any of these pressures and holds on to the core concept of her work,' he says. ***** Not following tradition, blindfolded and questioning it, put Sarrukai on a difficult path, especially when everyone was celebrating the traditional repertoire. 'But I wanted to do what was more honest,' says Sarrukai, who felt that for any gesture or a footwork design to be a part of her dance, there had to be a need for it to be there. 'I followed the style exactly the way that my gurus taught. I was a very good student. I danced the way they wanted. It was real for me then. But what is real for me now? Context is also important. One doesn't have to discard tradition but extend oneself. When I extend, I do so with responsibility. When you respect a discipline so deeply, there will be caution when you stretch,' says Sarrukai. The criticism arrived almost instantly. There was discomfort with an artiste pushing tradition. In 2006, dance critic and musicologist BM Sundaram wrote in The Hindu, '…Luckily, this program was billed only as 'dance' and not as 'Bharatanatyam'. Sarrukai sent a rebuttal speaking of her right over tradition as well as finding newer meanings. In an article that dancer Anita Ratnam wrote in her dance newsletter Narthaki, she mentioned the rejection of the Khusrau piece in Delhi. 'Not swayed by her brilliance, fans of Malavika Sarukkai almost unanimously rejected her experiments with costume and movements in her New Delhi performance… Even her most diehard fans had harsh words about her adventures. Why cannot an artiste try out a new silhouette?' she asked. 'It still continues. People still talk,' says Sarrukai. None of it has stopped her from choosing her themes, stories and the way she wants to use the grammar of Bharatanatyam to represent them. In recent times, when the Carnatic world has been debating inequities in the music and dance traditions, including vocalist TM Krishna raising issues of caste and gender among others, Sarrukai, who is a firm believer of everyone's right to learn and dance, feels that in the discourse, a topic like pay disparity between a vocalist and dancer of the same stature or dancers being grossly underpaid, is not even acknowledged. 'Bharatanatyam is not a prerogative of Brahmins. Dance is meant for everybody. A lot of people are learning. When I was learning from my Bharatanatyam guru (who was not Brahmin), did we ever speak about this? We all co-existed beautifully. But the gatekeepers all over the world are the same… Patriarchy has always been part of the scene. If you really need to be inclusive, you need graciousness, you need empathy…. Between music and dance, music is considered high art and dance is somehow not so high. A senior musician will get much more money than a senior dancer. It is unequal, it is exploitative. But nobody wants to talk about this… One has to present the full picture. Then let people decide. If you show the half picture, it brings in the divisiveness,' says Sarrukai. The situation for the younger dancers, she says, is worse — they get a 'ridiculous amount that will barely cover the cost of coming to the Sabha,' she adds. 'And yet they dance. My heart goes out to them. They are up against the odds. I have been up against the odds. Why does Krishna not speak about this? No one is talking about changing the scene for dancers,' asks Sarrukai. This is perhaps why, to make a living, many dancers teach 'when they should be training themselves,' says Sarrukai. To address some of these issues, Sarrukai, a winner of the Sangeet Natak Akademi award as well as a Padma Shri, set up a trust named Kalavaahini, which helps with fellowships for dancers who want to choreograph new works, besides dance residencies where she helps dancers hone their technique and discuss deeper ideas of dance. She also runs a dance festival in December during the Margazhi season and presents many dancers. But funds are always short. How does she manage to do it all? 'It's exhausting,' she says. But amid all that exhaustion, Sarrukai continues. To try and make an age-old art form speak to the complex world of today. Like she always has, she is willing to take on the rigour.
New Indian Express
4 days ago
- New Indian Express
Not convinced: Supreme Court questions Karnataka HC bail to Darshan
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday expressed displeasure over the Karnataka High Court's order granting bail to Kannada actor Darshan Thoogudeepa, an accused in the Renukaswamy murder case. 'This court is not at all convinced by the manner in which the high court (Karnataka), in its discretion, granted bail (to Darshan),' said a two-judge bench of Justice J B Pardiwala and Justice R Mahadevan. Challenging the order of the Karnataka HC, the state filed an appeal in the top court seeking cancellation of the actor's bail. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the actor, faced a tough time in the court, as the SC asked him to give 'good reasons' why it should not interfere with the HC's bail order. 'To be very honest with you, we are not convinced with the manner in which the HC has exercised discretion. We will hear you because your clients are on bail; they (state) have come for cancellation of bail and you must have seen the manner in which the high court had dictated the order,' Justice Pardiwala asked Sibal. Sibal responded that keeping aside the high court's decision, the court can look into the Section 161 and 164 statements and two to three key witnesses, including the police. The veteran lawyer wanted to know from the judges as to which part of the HC's order the bench found problematic. Justice Pardiwala replied, 'That part of the order where the high court was really saying how to release them on bail.' The court asked Sibal to come prepared next Tuesday. According to the prosecution, Darshan, a 47-year-old Kannada actor, was arrested on June 11, 2024, in connection with the murder of 33-year-old Renukaswamy, a native of Chitradurga. The victim's body was discovered near a stormwater drain in Bengaluru on June 9, 2024. After the investigation, the Bengaluru police filed a charge sheet and arrayed Pavithra as accused number 1 and Darshan as the accused number 2. Police claimed that Renukaswamy's act of sending offensive messages to Pavithra was the motive of the offence committed by Darshan and others. Initially, a Sessions Court had rejected the bail of Darshan forcing him to knock the doors of the top court.
India Today
5 days ago
- India Today
Supreme Court frowns upon bail for actor Darshan in Renukaswamy murder case
The Supreme Court is reviewing the bail granted to Kannada actor Darshan in connection with the murder of his fan, Renukaswamy. The Karnataka Police appealed to the apex court after the Karnataka High Court granted bail. A Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Pardivala noted its dissatisfaction with the High Court's order. The court observed, "We are not convinced that the High Court's order was correct." Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, representing Darshan, argued that the case should be evaluated purely on the issue of evidence. The Supreme Court did not pass any orders on the matter and has scheduled the next hearing for the following week.
News18
5 days ago
- News18
‘Not Convinced…': Supreme Court Frowns Upon Karnataka HC Granting Bail To Actor Darshan
Last Updated: The Supreme Court questioned Karnataka High Court's decision to grant bail to actor Darshan in the Renukaswamy murder case, asking his lawyers to justify it. The Supreme Court on Thursday expressed serious reservations about the manner in which the Karnataka High Court granted bail to Kannada actor Darshan Thoogudeepa in the Renukaswamy murder case. A bench of Justice J B Pardiwala and Justice R Mahadevan said it was 'not at all convinced" by the manner in which the high court exercised its discretion and asked Darshan's lawyers to present compelling reasons for why the apex court should not intervene. 'To be very honest with you, we are not convinced with the manner in which the High Court has exercised discretion. Very honestly, we will say this. We will hear you because your clients are on bail. But you must have seen the manner in which the High Court dictated the order," the bench told Kapil Sibal, appearing for Darshan. Responding to the bench, Sibal argued that irrespective of the High Court's order, the Supreme Court could examine the statements recorded under Sections 161 and 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, along with testimonies from two or three key witnesses, including those from the police, reported Livelaw. Keeping the matter for next Tuesday, Justice Pardiwala said, 'You need to convince us that there is no good reason for this court to interfere." When Sibal asked which part of the High Court's order the bench finds problematic, Justice Pardiwala replied: 'That part of the order, Mr Sibal, where the High Court was really panting how to release them on bail." What's The Case? The bench was hearing a plea filed by the state government challenging the high court's order dated December 13, 2024, which had granted bail to Darshan, who is accused of being involved in the torture and killing of 33-year-old Renukaswamy. The 33-year-old was allegedly abducted by Darshan and his aides from Chitradurga and then tortured in a shed in Bengaluru in June last year over obscene messages sent to Darshan's alleged partner, actor Pavithra Gowda. After Renukaswamy died, his body was thrown into a drain. The police has alleged the victim was held in a shed in Bengaluru for three days in June 2024 and subjected to brutal torture and his body was recovered from a drain. (With inputs from agencies) view comments Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
