Swati Bhise, the Executive Producer of The Man who Knew Infinity, talks about promoting culture and traditional sensibilities
BHISE: ESSENCE OF CULTURE
An exponent of Bharatnatyam, a dancer who has used her skills and her art to enthrall audiences across the country and across the oceans
Executive Producer on The Man Who Knew Infinity, the Ramanujan biopic that is the opening film at the IFFI
Teaches at the Lincoln Centre in New York and at different universities across America
Propagates in India the arts and has even brought stage products to Goa
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There’s this grace that Swati Bhise embodies, a grace that can only come from living a life full of creative expression. When she talks, her gestures give her away. It’s then that you know that this is a lady who has graced a stage somewhere in her life. Swati Bhise, however, has graced much more than just ‘a’ stage. She is an exponent of Bharatnatyam, a dancer who has used her skills and her art to enthrall audiences across the country and across the oceans. Today, there are people in the Bronx, in New York, who don’t just know her, but can tell you a thing or two about Indian classical dance. All thanks to her.
But, this is not the reason why Swati Bhise sits in her dance studio at her fabulous home in Dona Paula, overlooking the ocean. This time she’s not here to put her feet up (although, by her own admission she’s pretty much a workaholic). Swati Bhise is an Executive Producer on The Man Who Knew Infinity, the Ramanujan biopic that is the opening film at the International Film Festival of India. At first she was reluctant to be a part of it, because her daughter Devika was cast in a leading role. “Her producer, I guess, looked me up online and asked Devika to request me to read the script. At first I was reluctant. But she convinced me to atleast read it. I liked it, but I found a few things missing,” she says.
She goes on to elaborate on the intricacies of life when Ramanujan was growing up in India, in a Tamil Brahmin family. “He was an Iyengar boy,” she says, by way of differentiation to how someone else from the neighbourhood or a neighbouring state would have acted and behaved at the time. “I took the script and suggested changes. He didn’t grow up in a slum, it was a simplistic lifestyle,” says Bhise. She helped the producers and directors understand not just the mindset at the time but also the cultural and traditional sensibilities that would have prevailed then.
That’s how a traditionalist would normally act. Swati Bhise is not your run of the mill traditionalist though. She may still extoll the virtues of hard work, a good upbringing and learning dance the way it has been taught for centuries, but she has crossed the oceans to teach dance in America, host a television show where she interviewed proponents of different cultural traditions, perform 65 shows a year back then in the eighties and nineties, but still harks back to a beauty of the sounds of the temple, where dance traditions were at their most pure. “I grew up in a traditional Maharashtrian home. My father’s side were Maharashtrian but Gujarat based. My mother’s side was all about art, poetry and music. The atmosphere there was ‘speak your mind’. I saw equality around me,” she says, talking about how her roots helped her stay grounded but open minded, able to retain her staunch traditionalism even in a Western country.
Swati Bhise still teaches at the Lincoln Centre in New York and at different universities across America. Here in India, she propagates the arts and has even brought stage products to Goa in the form of a theatre festival a few years ago. Clearly, she’s more than just an executive producer. She’s the essence of culture herself.
