Kuchipudi

I was talking about intuition, and, uh, I was excited to have you on.

She interviewed survivors of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks for CNN in India, covered Slumdog Millionaire at the Oscars, is a trained Kuchipudi dancer and Hindustani vocalist who has graced the Alvin Ailey stage, and then she became a mom of three and found out that the most powerful voice in any room is the one inside of you.

On her award-winning podcast, That's Total Mom Sense, she helps parents learn to identify and trust that inner knowing, our superpower of intuition we so often talk ourselves out of.

Please welcome, on Desi Wisdom, Kanika Chadha Gupta.

So I studied Hindi-

Mm-hmm

... and, um, Kuchipudi dance-

Mm-hmm

Because women never performed and they were not allowed to.

In fact, you will also see in dance, particularly in Kuchipudi, there were Koodiyattam.

They were all female impersonators because they couldn't have women dancing.

It was with, uh, Rukmini Devi Arundale who brought out the devadasis into the classical structure that a lot of women started also from Brahmin family.

So when you look at Paramatma, generally Paramatma is considered to be a male god and the Atma is the feminine searching for the unity of the male and the female.

So these erotic padams which were danced a lot by Bharatanatyam dancers, sung by a lot of musicians and also performed a lot by the Kuchipudi dancers, they really evoke the Bhakti Rasa or the Sringar Rasa which is like the backbone of Advaita philosophy.

So tell us about the Sringar and Bhakti and how they kind of, you know, dissolve or, you know, kind of melt into each other.

Because that's something which not everybody would know about.

Like, for example, in Orissi, it is the chauka, the whole way that you stand, and the tribhanga, which become very important.

So, in our classical dance forms, when it is Kathak, it is a different, it's footwork, which is, they are the different gharanas, the Jaipur, the Lucknow, each gharana has their own characteristics.

And then in Kuchipudi, you have a different way of looking at dance.

So Manipuri is different.