Columnist

Guru Mayadhar Raut

Dame Luck has always been an unpredictable mistress, stalking and wooing some all the time, while visiting others in fits and starts or not at all. That for a prosperous career in the dance field one needs good fortune and the right breaks as much as prowess is an accepted fact. While discussing the restructuring of Odissi in the early fifties, through what was known as the Jayantika effort, the names of Guru-s Pankaj Charan Das, Deba Prasad Das and Kelucharan Mohapatra are frequently taken by scholars and dance practitioners. Less often mentioned is the fourth dimension to this revivalist square, Guru Mayadhar Raut who, for years, has settled down in New Delhi to which place he shifted in the year 1967, at the behest of two young guru-s both of whom had their training under him, namely Harekrushna Behera and Surendranath Jena. On July 20th 2005, a threeday Odissi event at the India International Centre (IIC) heralded Guru Mayadhar Raut's 75th birthday. Intrigued about one who is registered as having been born in the village of Kantapanhara near Banki in Orissa on 6th July 1933 celebrating seventy five years in 2005, I asked the Guru's daughter Madhumita Raut, now the custodian of the Guru's more years of service before birth was recorded as 1933 in mantle, about this curious retirement, because he never the passport in an ad hoc arithmetic. "He is the only guru worked for the government. 

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