Against all odds

MALAYSIA'S legendary choreographer of Indian classical dance Datuk Ramli Ibrahim was recently awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s top civilian honours.
The award was given in recognition of Ramli’s 40-year career as a classical Odissi dancer and trainer, and his efforts to set up Sutra Dance Theatre in Malaysia.
When asked about the experience, Ramli said: “I am very calm about getting any awards.”
He knows that there are some critics who disapprove of his achievements, and to a certain degree, a recognition like this seems to validate him and the work he has done.
His dance journey has not been easy.
Over the years, some sections of the Indian community had accused him of bastardising the Indian classical dance form, while some sections of the Malay community went as far as to call him a murtad (apostate) for embracing a culture that is not his.
And then there are those who feel he should retire gracefully from the limelight at his age, and stay behind-the-scenes as a choreographer.
However, Ramli has never been one to dance to the tune of his critics.
“You cannot listen to everybody,” he says. “I did not persevere because someone was criticising me. I did it because I had an inner compulsion to do it.
“If you just have an [easy] life, then your life is less meaningful.”
Despite the obstacles he has faced, he feels that he has so much to be grateful for.
“I am blessed,” he says. “I have been kind to animals and that compassion has blessed me and given me good luck, and a good life.”
He has four dogs and 10 cats, all former strays. “Sometimes I forget to lock my doors, but they have become my guardian spirits who protect me and my house.”
As a child, he was always artistically inclined, in no small part due to the encouragement of his father, the late Haji Ibrahim Mohd Amin, a Malay literature lecturer.
“My father always encouraged me to read, and I was familiar with all the Malay Hikayat (stories),” he says.
When he was nine, he was a regular guest on a 20-minute radio show where he was reciting poems and singing.
He travelled to Australia to study engineering, but by that time, his heart stayed with the arts, especially dance.
After completing his engineering degree, he began to study ballet in Australia, and later learnt Bharatanatyam in India.
He later became interested in Odissi, and was responsible for establishing it as a recognisable dance form in Malaysia.
At one point, Ramli was teaching students in his home, at the same time his mother Hajjah Kamariah Md Zin, a housewife, was teaching the Quran.
“I will be teaching Indian classical dance in one room, while my mother was teaching Quran in the next room,” he says.
“When my mother was getting old, I remember telling her: ‘Why don’t you just retire from teaching the Quran, and I will give you the money you need.’
“She looked at me and said [sarcastically]: ‘When you stop teaching Indian dance, I will stop teaching the Quran’!”
Sadly, after four decades of teaching and performing, Ramli finds that today, Malaysians in general have less appreciation of culture.
“Culture brings out the humanity in us,” he says. “Our appreciation for culture will lead us to having more appreciation for nature, for the environment ... for everything you cannot measure with money.”
He believes appreciation for culture should begin in schools, and that the Education Ministry should work together with the Tourism and Culture Ministry to promote it among students.
What asked the greatest misconception people have of him, he says: “They believe I [lead] a glamorous life. Some of them who have come to see me at my house, they will say ‘this is not the life of a struggling artiste’.
“A lot of people have this notion that I have it easy and life has always been good to me.”
For Ramli, this is far from the truth. Everything he has now he has earned through blood, sweat and tears.