It seems like I’ve met Raka Maitra at a very particular time in her life. For nearly two decades, she had kept up the same 10am-9pm daily schedule of practising and teaching odissi, the dance form she’s spent her life with, at the studio. Now, at 54, she’s just embarked on a new season of half-days. With a new colleague teaching in the evenings, she’s freed up time for herself. “Now I can read. I can think…think of networking, setting up meetings and trying to raise funds,” she said excitedly at the Yakun Kaya Toast near Aliwal Arts Centre, where Chowk, the dance company she founded, is based, and where she comes for breakfast every morning. It’s hardly a sabbatical, but for someone who has lived along the lines of a strict regimen, having a flexible schedule is new. 

Yet flexibility and liminality are key to the very ethos of Chowk. The dance company defies categorisation: though rooted in classical Indian traditions like odissi, it intersects with a variety of contemporary forms. Its name itself is a Hindi word for square or plaza, a cross-section of different cultures, as well as one of the two basic stances in odissi. Over the years, Chowk has collaborated with the mediums of clowning, Nanyin, and even bubble performers: hardly the expected route for a company whose artistic director trained under the classical guru Madhavi Mudgal. 

Then again, ever since she embarked on a career as an independent dancer, Raka has taken risks that have clearly questioned the confines of tradition. Early on in her practice, while still living in India, she and her classical dance peer, Shagun Butani, founded The Dancing People, a sort of prelude to Chowk. By then, Raka’s career was already a lauded success. In her 20s, she received a national level young artist award, the Shringarmani, for classical odissi dance. The path seemed clear. Yet her hunger for experimentation drove her to shed safety in the search for one’s craft.

The Dancing People put on a performance entitled The Masks of God that utilised a mix of chhau, a dance form with roots in martial arts and folk traditions, odissi, and modern dance, influenced by Butani’s time in New York, where the modern dance movement emerged. Other practitioners ridiculed her departure from tradition. Like many classical traditions, Indian classical dance is made up of a tight network of elite performers, critics, and producers. To veer away from decorum that has been built up over centuries is to position oneself as different, suspiciously so. After that, the two friends diverged in their paths, with Butani reverting to tradition and Raka hurtling towards where she stands today.