{"id":2123,"date":"2002-06-28T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2002-06-28T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/06\/28\/2002-06-28-teacher-enjoys-role-as-missionary-for-kathak\/"},"modified":"2002-06-28T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2002-06-28T12:00:00","slug":"2002-06-28-teacher-enjoys-role-as-missionary-for-kathak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2002\/06\/28\/2002-06-28-teacher-enjoys-role-as-missionary-for-kathak\/","title":{"rendered":"Teacher Enjoys Role as Missionary for Kathak"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?file=\/chronicle\/archive\/2002\/06\/21\/WB207888.DTL\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, June 21, 2002: Chitresh Das is renowned all over India for his mastery of kathak. In 1971, at 26, he arrived in the US on a Whitney Fellowship to teach kathak &#8212; a northern India style of dance &#8212; at the University of Maryland. Now 57, he runs six kathak dance schools in the Bay Area, including San Francisco and Berkeley. He also offers a two-credit course at San Francisco State, where he is a faculty member. Das&#8217; performance career took off in India when he accepted an invitation by musician Ravi Shankar to perform at a festival in Benares. Later, after finishing his fellowship at the University of Maryland, Das found another mentor in Ali Akbar Khan, a famous musician in India who started his own music college in San Rafael. Khan invited Das to start a dance program at his college in 1971, and Das migrated west. Das has performed all over the world. Recently, he received high honors from West Bengal government&#8217;s State Academy for his teaching. &#8220;I&#8217;m like a missionary of kathak dance,&#8221; said Das, who teaches about 200 students in the Bay Area. Kathak is among India&#8217;s six major classical styles of dance. In its days of origin, kathak was used to narrate great Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Das adheres to kathak&#8217;s deep tradition but still strives to make it relevant to modern times.<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, June 21, 2002: Chitresh Das is renowned all over India for his mastery of,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}