I watched Birju Maharaj as part of the Spic Macay programme in the Jhelum Lawns in JNU. Besides Dover Lane Music Conference, JNU was the other place where my education by exposure to excellence happened in Hindustani classical music and dance. In those days, I had just begun my work on the study of Amitabh Bachchan, as a popular star and was increasingly anxious in trying to find apt frameworks to set up an analysis of the star image. As a sociologist, I was to study the popularity of Amitabh, the superstar, the making of the image, but I possibly, despite an entire school of phenomenology developed out there, could not start with the premise of popularity because of the risk of tautology. I needed to start with the constitution of the phenomenon with attributes independent of the explanandum, which was popularity of the star. Hence, to study the aesthetics of stardom, a set of artistic techniques which made the star and made it possible for me to compare the image of Amitabh Bachchan with a slew of other stars in my range of watching.

Everyone I sought guidance from invariably pointed out of the Natyashastras, the most unhelpful of all tips I ever received. The text is useless on all counts as a guide to the principles of aesthetics. Having trashed it back to the NML Library, I walked towards aesthetic theories. Both Hegel and Adorno made huge sense where the Hindi film was concerned, but the aesthetics for them were in terms of what emanated from the work, and not what was in the work, especially put in with the intent to be a work of art. Heidegger was so-so, Aristotle worse than Bharatmuni. It was then that I watched Birju Maharaj dancing on the underground water storage tank of Uttarakhand, which raised its tip like a giant iceberg to create a stage ideally suited for performances. If I recall well, then strange as it seems it was this very performance that he presented that evening.

As I watched Birju Maharaj dance with rapt attention, I sensed that there were movements and there were pauses. For some movements, he was merely responding to the music, in some he was using music as a prop to create a movement. The former produced small movements and small pauses, the latter, large movements and large pauses. As I watched the dance, it started to appear to me that the intention of the performance was as much about the pause as it was about the movement, in fact the purpose of the movement was to arrive at the pause; and as the pauses became longer, the movements preceding those became more willful than mere responses. In a flash, I understood, the constitutive elements of a star; one needed to study the cinematic image like the dancing image, a series of movements and pause, of speech and silence, or recesses, of suspensions and absences. It was to this pause that all stars must move towards.

We may use the format of movement and pause, of sound and silence, presence and absence to create a template to study stars, compare one with the others, develop a scale of assessing performance and hence attain a theoretical foundation to eventually frame the study of stars.