It is not easy to encapsulate a life as fascinating as that of Padma Vibhushan Indian dancer, author and civil servant Sonal Mansingh in a few hundred pages. But in her biography Sonal Mansingh: A Life Like No Other, author Sujata Prasad has captured various shades, junctures and nuances of Sonal’s magnificent life story. Sujata met Sonal in 2012 and then began a journey that would materialise in a beautiful and inspiring biographical account. This project was a ‘three-year long gooey romance’ with the text, as she calls it.
There are parts of Sonal’s life that moved Sujata a lot. She shares, “Her life spoke to me at different levels as a woman. Her phoenix-like ability to rise from the ashes, her ability to embrace complexity, her absolutely iron-clad self-belief, her sour-sweet, somewhat overwrought relationships, and the cerebral element in her dance that leads her to engage and to provoke, and connect dances across genres, never letting the audience off the hook.”
But working with a personality like Sonal Mansingh wasn’t exactly a breeze, admits Sujata, “She has a disarming, infectious candour but there were several tetchy, difficult moments when hard-bitten and cynical, she ambushed me with her words. I felt I was on trial.”
One wonders what happens to the mindset of a biographer, when some other person’s life takes center-stage for some time while writing about them, “I mopped up the unfinished, incomplete fragments of my life to get into the interior of her life. Her life became an irreversible addiction. It left me pirouetting on the edge of madness,” she reveals.
Sonal’s life has also left Sujata much inspired. “Her hardwired sense of what is right and her incipient feminism, her effort to break glass ceilings that have remained relatively crack-free through seminal productions like Stree, Panch Kanya and Draupadi are very inspiring. But what inspires me most is her sense of living hundred percent in the moment.”
Sujata is now in the process of co-authoring a biography of Jayaprakash Narayan. She says, “This was written in large parts by my father, a historian. An intimate portrait of an extraordinary man, my father began writing this biography in the months bordering his death. Working on the unfinished text left behind by my father has been a sublime experience.”
