Consider the following statements and choose the appropriate option :
(a) Padma Shri Awardee Milena Salvini was born in Italy.
(b) She was a famous Kathakali dancer and had established a dance school

Question

Consider the following statements and choose the appropriate option :
(a) Padma Shri Awardee Milena Salvini was born in Italy.
(b) She was a famous Kathakali dancer and had established a dance school named 'Centre Mandapa' in Paris.
(c) The Indian Government honoured her with Padma Shri Award in 2019.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), all three statements are correct. Note first that this question prints only three statements, labelled (a), (b) and (c); there is no statement (d), and a candidate who reads the list expecting four will waste time looking for one. Statement (a) is correct: Milena Salvini was born on 23 April 1933 at Milan in Italy. Her father died when she was four and her mother took her to France, where she grew up, trained in music and modern dance, and eventually took French nationality — so she is properly described as an Italian-born French exponent of Indian classical dance, and the statement's claim about her birth is exact. Statement (b) is correct: she is known above all for Kathakali. In 1962 she obtained a two-year scholarship to train in Kathakali at the Kerala Kalamandalam, and after returning to France she spent the rest of her life performing, teaching, filming and writing about the form, including a full-length study of the history and technique of Kathakali. With Roger Filipuzzi she opened the Mandapa Centre in Paris in 1975 as a place to teach and stage Indian classical dance, and it is that institution the statement refers to as 'Centre Mandapa'. Statement (c) is correct: the Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on her in 2019, the fourth highest civilian award of the Republic, in recognition of her work in art. Since all three statements are accurate, the option that accepts all three is the answer, and that is option (3). One further fact explains why the Commission set this question in a 2022 paper at all: Milena Salvini died in Paris on 25 January 2022, at the age of eighty-eight, a few months before this examination was written, and an obituary is one of the commonest sources of a current-affairs item. Her larger significance is easy to state and worth remembering: she was among the principal channels through which Kerala's classical performing arts reached European audiences, arranging Kathakali and Kutiyattam tours under the auspices of UNESCO, and the Kutiyattam tour she organised in 1999 fed directly into the application that saw Kutiyattam inscribed on UNESCO's list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2001.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option accepts the two statements about her birth and her work but rejects statement (c), the year of the Padma Shri. Statement (c) is in fact correct: the award was conferred in 2019, and the Padma awards are announced each year on the eve of Republic Day and presented at Rashtrapati Bhavan later in the year, so 2019 is both the announcement year and the year the award is dated to. A candidate is likely to arrive at this option after remembering her death in January 2022 and confusing the date of the obituary with the date of the honour, which is a specific and avoidable error — the Padma Shri came three years before her death, not with it. In a three-statement question the whole of the reasoning lies in deciding each statement independently, and here there is no ground on which the third can be rejected.  (b) This option requires both statement (a) and statement (b) to be false, and neither is. She was born at Milan in Italy in 1933, which settles statement (a); and she trained in Kathakali at the Kerala Kalamandalam on a scholarship obtained in 1962 and opened the Mandapa Centre in Paris in 1975 with Roger Filipuzzi, which settles statement (b). The option is presumably meant to catch a candidate who assumes that a French institution and a French career imply French birth, or who doubts that a European woman could be a Kathakali exponent — Kathakali being a form performed traditionally by men and trained through a long apprenticeship at institutions such as the Kalamandalam. Her career is precisely the exception that makes her notable, and rejecting statement (b) on the strength of an expectation about who practises Kathakali is exactly the sort of assumption the format punishes.  (d) This option accepts her Italian birth and the 2019 Padma Shri but rejects statement (b), the statement about Kathakali and the Mandapa Centre, and that rejection cannot be sustained. The centre she and Roger Filipuzzi opened in Paris in 1975 was created for teaching and presenting Indian classical dance, and her identification with Kathakali is the reason the Indian State honoured her: she trained at the Kerala Kalamandalam from 1962, brought the Kalamandalam's Kathakali troupe to France under the auspices of UNESCO, took its Kutiyattam troupe to Europe in 1980 and again in 1999, produced films on both forms and published a history of Kathakali. If anything, statement (b) is the best documented of the three. A candidate who reaches this option has probably discounted the name 'Centre Mandapa' as unfamiliar, which is a poor reason to reject a statement whose other half — the Kathakali connection — is the very thing the question is built on.

Concept: Milena Salvini (23 April 1933 – 25 January 2022) was an Italian-born French dancer, teacher, film-maker and writer who devoted her life to the classical performing arts of Kerala. Born at Milan and raised in France after her father's death, she trained in music and modern dance before obtaining a two-year scholarship in 1962 to study Kathakali at the Kerala Kalamandalam, the institution founded at Cheruthuruthy by the poet Vallathol Narayana Menon to rescue Kerala's classical forms from decline. On returning to France she organised a European tour by the Kalamandalam's Kathakali troupe under the auspices of UNESCO, and in 1975, with Roger Filipuzzi, she opened the Mandapa Centre in Paris as a permanent home for the teaching and performance of Indian classical dance. She worked equally for Kutiyattam, the Sanskrit theatre of Kerala regarded as among the oldest living theatre traditions in the world, arranging its tours to Europe in 1980 and 1999; the second of these led UNESCO to encourage an application under its then new programme for intangible heritage, and Kutiyattam was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2001. She wrote two books on the history and technique of Kathakali and produced films on both Kathakali and Kutiyattam. In 2019 the Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on her; she died in Paris in January 2022.

State PCS 2022 Q83 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q83 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer