Meduri - Bharata Natyam

Bharatha Natyam-What Are You?Author(s): Avanthi MeduriReviewed work(s):Source: Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 1-22Published by: University of Hawai'i PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1124019 .

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Bharatha Natyam What Are You? Avanthi Meduri

Let me tell you a story. I grew up in the cultural city of Madras, where I learned bharatha natyam, a form of South Indian classical dance, from a very young age. My dance teachers told me a story, a story they were never tired of repeating. They told me that bharatha natyam traces its

origins to the Natyashastra, a detailed, ancient text on dramaturgy authored

by the sage Bharatha (Bharatha-Muni), ca. 300 B.C. Sitting at their feet, I listened in wide-eyed awe. They told me that this dance was once called sadir and that it was performed in the sacred precincts of the temple. They said that the devadasi (temple dancers) who practiced this art form lived and danced happily in the temple environments. I nodded my head in

agreement. But then the devadasi turned "corrupt" and profaned the art form, they said suddenly, and rather angrily. Frightened by their anger, I asked rather hesitantly about how they had profaned the art. They looked around them to see if anybody was eavesdropping, and whispered into my ear: they said that dancing became associated with nautch girls because of the corrupt ways of the devadasi. Their personal life, reflected in the art form, expressed itself in the crude and literal language of the nautch girl. I did not understand anything they said. I was too young and frightened. A highly complex system rooted in religion had become "corrupted" till the "respectable" people of the south initiated a campaign in the late 1920s to abolish the ill-reputed devadasi system. What about the dance then, I interjected? They smiled benevolently at my anxiety and said that important cultural institutions, such as the Music Academy in

Avanthi Meduri is an exponent of bharatha natyam and kuchipudi classical dance. She earned an M.A. in English literature from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986 and is currently working towards a Ph.D. in performance studies at the Tisch School of Arts, New York University, supported by a grant from the Asian Cultural Council. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on Dance in a Changing Cultural Context at the University of California at Los Angeles in February 1987. The author is grateful to the Pan Orient Arts Foundation for making copies of the journal Sruti available to her.



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Madras, and eminent individuals, like E. Krishna Iyer, saved the dance from extinction. I asked them how it happened, instead of asking them

why it happened. I was too young to know the difference. When I repeated this story to my grandmother-for this had

now become my own story-she told me that my great-grandfather, T. Prakasam, had as chief minister of the composite Madras and And- hra Pradesh states of India publicly urged the people, especially the re-

spectable women, to take to dancing and thus lend something of the

purity of their own lives to the art form. I was perplexed. Is this why I was

taught dancing, for someone's idea of respectability? I remember feeling disappointed.

But to go on with the other story... My teachers reiterated proudly and with stern faces the three propitious happenings that revolutionized the history of bharatha natyam: 1) the name of the dance form was changed from sadir to bharatha natyam in 1932; 2) Rukmini Devi, an upper-class Brahmin, learned the dance form, thereby investing it with dignity, and established a dance school called Kalakshetra (Academy for Fine Arts) for the transmission of traditional knowledge; and 3) the great dancer Balasaraswati, whose artistry depended to a large extent on her ancestral connection to the devadasi tradition, spread the fame of bharatha natyam to the far corners of the globe. They said that sadir, by force of these three circumstances, was firmly launched on its transformational journey under the new name bharatha natyam. In time, this story became my own, until it was no longer a "story" to me.

Today I wish to look at this integral narrative of my life in subjective reflexiveness. My Indian teachers, I remember, exhorted me even as a child to quiet the restless agitation of my questioning mind. They extolled the virtues of transcendental knowledge (alaukika gnana), which is characterized by intellectual detachment. This view of reality terrified me then as it does today, for it undercuts plurality and forces one to consciously efface or transcend Self. So, I shall articulate my questions about Indian dance today self-consciously and without the desire to be neutral. These unasked questions were the dark shadows of my adolescent years, and they still possess the power to rock the adult foundation of my rationalized peace.

I shall begin by describing briefly some of the salient features of Indian dance, if only to create a context in which to frame my questions. Bharatha natyam in theory and practice refers to Bharatha's Jatyashastra (Rules of drama), probably compiled in the second to third centuries A.D.

(Bharatha-Muni 1961 and 1967). But the Natyashastra is not exclusively a text on dance technique. Rather, it is a comprehensive treatise on Indian dramaturgy that includes dance. Dance is conceived as being a part of drama in Bharatha's theatre, just as color is perceived as being intimately



BHARATHA NATYAM

connected to music, which in turn influences emotional representation. The rules that govern Indian dramaturgy are also the principles that define classical dance. Bharatha's vision, then, enunciates a total theatre that links all the minutest units of dramatic representation. Each unit, such as dance, can be analyzed and described separately, and yet assumes theatrical significance only in the context of the whole dramatic representation. If a minute aspect of the whole is disturbed or exaggerated, the theatre loses its characteristic, significant coherence. Bharatha's attention to theatrical unity and aesthetic wholeness evokes in the meditative mind a philosophic, cosmic vision of unity. This might explain the theatre's

abiding popularity in Indian aesthetics and its compelling centrality in

religious discourse.

Dance, a part of drama, is divided into three distinct categories: natya, nrithya, and nrtta. Jatya corresponds to drama, nrithya to mime

performed to song and music (PLATE 5), and nrtta to pure dance that

employs sculpturesque poses and body movements that do not refer back to narrative. The performer has four means of communication, or abhinaya (expression): vacika (speech), aharya (costume), angika (body), and sattvika

(psychological states). Bharatha, as Ghosh points out in his English translation of the Natyashastra (1961 and 1967) does not espouse the lokadharmi mode of explicit or realistic representation of emotion. He values the natyadharmi mode of communication, which evokes emotion in an artistic and subtle manner. The latter technique is valued because it helps maintain the illusion of art, the necessary difference between realism and

representation. The illusion of art is further reinforced by the religious themes of dance and drama, stories which are usually extracts from legend and Vedic scriptures. The ideal spectator (sahrydaya), absorbed in the religious stories evoked in the conventionalized mode of representation, experiences rasa, or aesthetic delight-a state of joy characterized by emotional plenitude. Endowed with superior artistic and intellectual capa- bilities, Bharatha's sympathetic spectator harmonizes differences into uni- ties by the power of his own mind. He, like the performer, perceives the sublime in the erotic, the divine in the human.

Indian dance thus encapsulates both in structure and in content the philosophic aspirations of the Indian mind. It appears as a sublime synthesis of philosophy, sculpture, music, and literature. It gathers all these strands and sets them in motion before the eye. Yet, because it weaves together so many artistic streams and evokes a compelling vision of aesthetic immensity and philosophic magnitude, it resists clear description as an artifact having its own unique temporality. When one begins to speak about Indian dance, one is entering a philosophical discourse on ethics, aesthetics, and social reality, all at once. This process resembles the sinuous dance of the elusive snake which dances always with its tail in its mouth.

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Mesmerizing no doubt, but very difficult to evaluate in terms of art

appreciation. Moved as I am by Bharatha's aesthetic theatre of complex unity, it

presents some immediate problems in translations to the contemporary world. First, this theatre is an expression of one religious world view, one very different from the plural reality of contemporary India. Rent asunder by colonialism, regionalism, and political strife, India today is psycho- logically restless and far removed from Bharatha's religious state of mind characterized by visrati (expansive quiet). Bharatha's theatre, in accordance with its world view, unfolds in a slow process of cumulative classical elaboration that is the opposite of the fractured, hurried reality of the twentieth century-it represents at its best the aesthetic and philosophic ideal of Indian art. Indian dance today, however, functions in a secular

reality-in the gap between philosophic vision and everyday reality. Today's bharatha natyam, with its danced stories of God evoked in a secular world, is analogous to a human being walking forward with his face turned backwards. I hasten to add that this peculiar analogy is true only of

contemporary Indian dance. Sadir, practiced by devadasi and housed in the physical context of the temple, its immediate theatre, fused ritual-form and religious fervor into one nondualistic whole. The temple was the natural home for Bharatha's ancient theatre, itself articulated in religious inspirations. So it fused physical context with ideology, form with content. And the devadasi symbolized this fusion till she and the dance were ousted from the temple in the first half of the twentieth century by civil laws that prohibited temple dancing. Let us now dwell briefly on the devadasi story.

The devadasi, literally "servant of God," danced and sang the stories of God before temple deities to propitiate and entertain them. She also performed the ritual oblations in the temple. For this reason, she was dedicated to the temple even before she attained puberty. Some time thereafter, she was formally married to the temple deity in a sacred thread-ceremony (tali kettu). The sacred thread tied around her neck solemnized her marriage to the deity and precluded her from marrying a mortal man, although she could have discreet sexual relations with priest or king. The devadasi, at the height of her glory under the rulership of the Chola kings in the ninth through twelfth centuries A.D., linked temple to court and balanced patronage with personal independence. Well-versed in the arts, she was considered a jewel of both court and temple alike. Both these institutions mutually cared for her rather lavish economic needs. Even in her marginalized social position, she was unique in that she epitomized the freedom of the plural woman outside of caste and not defined in the biological role of a madonna. The devadasi tradition continued into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but without the robust



BHARATHA NATYAM

FIGURE 1. The dancer in a raudra (angry) mood. The hand gestures (mudra)

represent the plow. Raudra is one of the eight major sentiments or emotions (rasa) in bharatha natyam. (Photo: Danna Byrom.)

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commitment of the preceding generations. Kapila Vatsyayan sums this up rather neatly:

the generation that went to colleges founded by the British in the early nineteenth century was isolated from the art traditions of the country. Apparently the art had died by the twentieth century and what could be seen of it was only a diluted, almost degenerated form of what was known as Sadir in the South. It was like a shadow of a bygone reality (1974, 4).

Muthulakshmi Reddi, speaking at the Madras legislature in 1901, sharply pointed to this degeneracy when she said: "Now the appellation of the devadasi as every one of us here knows, whatever the original meaning may have been, stands for prostitute" (Gaston 1982, 7). This anti-devadasi

feeling was reinforced again in the Madras Census Report of 1911, which on page 2601 described the devadasi system thus: "In South India, a girl may marry an arrow, a tree, perhaps to escape the reproach of attaining puberty unmarried. She may marry an idol which generally implies she has become a prostitute" (Gaston 1982, 8). Public disapproval, as we can see in the above statement, was directed at both the devadasi and the tradition she represented. The issue was complex because exploitation, child marriage, and child traffic had become incorporated into the system. It was, however, the devadasi's availability to all who visited the temple, patrons and commoners alike, that enraged the South Indian sense of decorum. It was inconceivable to them that she, who danced the stories of God by day, could actually indulge in the mortal delights of humans at night. They believed that "inner purity" (whatever that term means) had to synchronize with outer action. Thus, they promulgated the laws that abolished temple dancing once and for all. The "respectable" women of the south had entered the arena, wrested the dance from these traditional custodians, and mastered it. The devadasi were thus rudely dismissed, while the dance itself, like the mythical phoenix, rose from the ashes.

I believe the anti-devadasi sentiment failed to distinguish between cause and effect. If the devadasi had turned "corrupt," as the traditionalists argue (though I would prefer the word "indiscriminate"), it was not from moral depravity. Benevolent monarchy was being replaced by Muslim and foreign invasions, culminating finally in the twentieth-century independence movement. Caught in this changing, uneasy political atmosphere, with her former generous patronage vanishing, the devadasi had been forced to choose between economic necessity and man-made rules of decorum. She chose the former. Can I cast the proverbial stone at her who wished to live on her own moral terms? How does one begin to apportion blame, on whom, and based on what ethical values? But we did just that. We pronounced her alone guilty. Having polluted the sacred precincts of the



BHARATHA NATYAM

temple, almost as reparation she was forbidden to dance there. What about the psychological reality of her ceremonial marriage to the idol? Hundreds of devadasi were forced from the temple in ignominy and shame, not

knowing where to go or what to do next. The laws that had no heart had clever solutions. Almost as an afterthought they offered the devadasi a secular stage as a new home. Did the devadasi want this new home? Would the dance survive on this platform, cut off from the ritual roots of the

temple? I will attempt to answer this by posing other questions. The devadasi, expelled from the temple, arrived helplessly on the

secular stage. The bright cunning stage lights, that focused on her sharply and penetratingly, mercilessly exposed the dying flame of her life. But the

history of contemporary bharatha natyam actually begins earlier, in India's recent political history. India in the nineteenth century was beginning to cast off the foreign yoke. My grandfather, I believe, set fire to his Western clothes, as did millions in every hamlet of India, reverting to khadhi, the cotton cloth spun in the seed and toil of the Indian earth. India was

rediscovering its beaten-down authenticity. Ordinary men were transformed into little gods, and they strutted about the earth in proud dignity. Indian dance, imaged in the silence of the temple, fell into this noisy rhetoric. In 1931 the South Indian devadasi dancers were featured on the Music Academy platform in Madras, and the academy continued this tradition despite strong public opposition. Balasaraswati, who later became the legendary figure of bharatha natyam, herself belonging to the devadasi tradition, was featured on this platform in 1934, when barely in her teens. Krishna Iyer, V. Raghavan, and other liberal-minded scholars eulogized the transcendental glories of the two-thousand-year-old tradition in their lectures, even as the dancers danced out their social shame in public. In this political atmosphere the devadasi was transformed almost completely into an object, valued only as the repository of the ancient tradition she had mastered-as its symbol. In this we see the first signs of the split that society initiated and then seemed to sanction, the divi- sion between inner and outer, self and culture, which is also the special schizophrenia of the contemporary dancer. The questions that haunt me are these: why was the nineteenth-century devadasi in the temple con- demned for not fusing her inner life with the outer? And why, on the twentieth-century secular stage, because respectable people sanctioned it, was the disjunction deemed acceptable and even worthwhile? How could this be? Dance in the early twentieth century, both in the temple and outside it, was being defined, it seems to me, in the shabby clothes of "respectability," but not in its autonomy, and definitely not for its own sake.

How did Balasaraswati, alone among devadasi, achieve status and prestige under the new system? I wish for sanity's sake that I could answer

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this question unreflexively, by admitting simply to her extraordinary talent, a talent that could offer almost effortlessly a momentary experience of rasa. The issue, however, is far more complex and unassuring. "Some aver," says Gowri Ramnarayan, "that Rukmini Devi [the re-

spected upper-middle-class Brahmin dancer and scholar] was indirectly responsible for Bala's shining as an unchallenged star" (1984c, 25). What- ever Balasaraswati was or was not, it is clear that middle-class notions of

respectability had now become tied up with dance. Class had certainly become an issue, had raised its ugly head in a purportedly autonomous medium such as art. How we are going to untangle all these interwoven issues is a challenge for posterity.

Add to these complicating issues yet another theoretical issue. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aestheticians and scholars involved in formulating the history of Indian dance, in attempting to com- pensate for its progressive "degradation," elevated dance to a new high. They did two things: they extolled the technical virtues of Bharatha's JNatyashastra, and they incorporated Abhinavagupta's eleventh-century reinterpretation of the Natyashastra (Abhinavagupta 1926) into their new

propaganda, while continuing to speak of dance in terms of the Natyashastra itself. Abhinavagupta commented on the JVatyashastra in the sophisticated language of psychology and ontology, being and awareness. His language, springing from a certain specific world view, was given to abstraction and phenomenology, to art as a state of mind. And it was accessible to the nineteenth-century rational consciousness, separated from the dualisms and superstitions of uncivilized man (if civilization means growth .of rationality). So Bharatha's Natyashastra, probably written in the second to third century A.D., was reinterpreted in the eleventh-century language of Abhinavagupta, and the historical differences between the two were considered inconsequential by nineteenth- and early-twentieth century scholars. Theory, I believe, begins to operate in a vacuum unconnected with reality when it misses these differences. The devadasi practicing her art form in the temple might have been better able to harmonize these shifting world views than the scholars, as hers was an inherited oral tradition open to change and sensitive to difference. However unreflexive her tradition might have been, it was a living tradition that fused belief with practice. The aesthetic experience after Abhinavagupta, says Vatsyayan, "was considered second only to the supreme experience and was thus termed its twin brother (brahmanandasahodara)" (1968, 5). Bharatha himself, however, did not address the metaphysical nature of his aesthetic theatre. It was the later scholars who inquired into the psychology and ontology of the art experience, who elevated dance and drama to the status of a high religion (vedantal), perceiving it as an experience that embodied transcendental knowledge, cosmic oneness, and religious concentration.

Aestheticians and scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth

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centuries unwittingly opened up a new kind of void for the contem-

porary performing artist when they cogently verbalized and made ex-

plicit the implicit philosophic rules that underlie and govern Indian art. The twentieth-century performing artist, living in a secular reality, strug- gles to embrace, emotionally and intellectually, the theoretical ideal that has been set up. If she cannot personally achieve the ideal, she repeats the theory. So theoretician and artist trace the same circle, the figure eight, in which both are held mutually captive. This figure eight excludes the secular practice of bharatha natyam and the important contemporary reality of the performing artist. In the words of Kapila Vatsyayan, "Matter and style, the idea and the manifestation of it in form, go on merging into one another, and the one cannot be separated from the other" (1968, 167). This merging, I believe, chokes the vital breath of bharatha natyam by not

accounting for its secularization. As a first step, the dance now needs to be described on its own terms, as if it were a separate phenomenon existing outside of time. In this first step would be total freedom, the autonomy that all art aspires towards, but seldom achieves. If I could thus freeze bharatha natyam, I would then ask it a hypothetical question:

Bharatha natyam-Are you The vision urging me on, The memory holding me back, Or are you the dance at the heart That does not move?

Asking this reflexive question might imply the latent possibility of rediscovering the past in the constantly changing present, of articulating a

theory that can account for the practice of bharatha natyam. Aestheticians and scholars tried to reclaim sadir, which they re-

named bharatha natyam. But in the process they invested the new creation with their own notions of respectability. Rukmini Devi and others of her high social class saw the existing dance form as being too crude and literal. They felt it would not satisfy the aesthetic taste of sophisticated society in which it must of necessity now function. Rukmini Devi believed that the love (shringara) portrayed by devadasi was "very ordinary, low shringara" (Ramnarayan 1984b, 23). Love was not sensuality for her, but rather devotion (bhakti), and she therefore began to exalt devotion in her presen- tations. In contrast to this, Balasaraswati, a direct descendant of the devadasi community, felt that love was preeminent in the dance tradition because it emphasized both the self and the other, inner and outer-in short, life itself. She said:

The shringara we experience in bharatha natyam is never carnal-never, never. For those who have yielded themselves to this discipline with total

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FIGURE 2. A dancer in a shringara (seductive) mood. Shringara is one of the eight major sentiments or emotions (rasa) expressed in bharatha natyam. (Photo: Danna

Byrom.)

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dedication, dance like music is the practice of presence, it cannot merely be the body's rapture (Raman and Ramachandran 1984a, 28).

When Balasaraswati performed, one felt blessed and revitalized. Anna Kisselgoff said in the New York Times: "In one flash, the sacred origins of classical dance became clear. Perfectly modern sophisticates who know

nothing about Indian dance begin to use such words as epiphany, spiritual, sublime as they leave the theatre" (Raman and Ramachandran 1984a, 27). Balasaraswati herself never tired of saying: "There is nothing in Bharatha

Natyam which can be purified afresh; it is divine and is innately so"

(Raman and Ramachandran 1984a, 27). Yet Rukmini Devi and many educated Brahmins thought differently. Whose gaze was it then that differentiated the vulgar from the sublime? And on what criteria? Who is to say what love is or what it is not? It seems as if the Brahmins were

bringing their own philosophical and ideological biases to bear upon bharatha natyam. By doing this, they were radically altering an ancient art form of the temple and shaping its future destiny. By surrounding it with social ritual and philosophical dogma, they invested the new dance with awe and respect, the only means by which they could assure its continuance in a social environment. It is common knowledge that Balasaraswati lashed out at this cleaned-up, "Brahminized" dance, calling it in her turn "vulgar."

So we see the beginning of a dialectic in the styles propagated by these two women. If Balasaraswati focused on inner feeling, on surrender to the medium that led effortlessly to the concentration of the Yogic mind, Rukmini Devi approached the same goal through body control, mind and awareness. In a typical Brahminical manner, she focused on ritual, style, and form, and saw form as revealing content. And Rukmini Devi had a reason for focusing on form-she was anticipating the secularization that is the most singular feature of Indian dance today. By anticipating it, she was able to conceive of her academy (Kalakshetra) as an institution for the preservation and transmission of dance traditions that would become the boon and buffer for all of us who have learned dance after her. And by merely anticipating it, she actually began the secularization she so strongly abhorred. The academy's aim, to "educate public opinion and develop good taste through concerts, public lectures, demonstrations, exhibitions and publications"' (Ramnarayan 1984c, 22), actually launched dance into a new era of intellectual awareness. The notes and the extensive explanations that accompany a dance recital today are a direct offshoot of the academy's intellectual inheritance. Without the intellectual awareness, we might have lost forever a meaningful cultural experience. Yet because of it we have lost something of the spirit of Balasaraswati, that inner spiritual exuberance or fullness.

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It may be useful to point out that Rukmini Devi and the other scholars who helped mobilize support for bharatha natyam did not "redis- cover" India as many claimed; rather, they reinterpreted it in a respectable language for the modern masses. A number of factors-urbanization, diversity of languages, and a political history which has interrupted the continuity of Indian art-prevent any authentic rediscovery. Neither did the Madras Music Academy, an institution involved in the political re- formulation of bharatha natyam, actually help make the dance more respectable. The 1937 resolution of the academy said that "in order to make dancing respectable, it is necessary to encourage public performances thereof before respectable people" (Arudra 1986/1987, 20). The resolution proposed, in other words, to rectify the closed system of exploitation which had victimized the devadasi by opening up the dance to the public. But the question that bothered me even as an adolescent was: What makes dancing really "respectable"? Did dance performed on platforms before the educated and respected classes of society-and thus in an "open system"- acquire respectability by virtue of being presented before this public? That would mean that the dance itself was not any more respectable than before. To whom did the resolution's phrase "respectable people" refer? The politicians and the educated elite class, or the connoisseurs? What happened to Bharatha's ideal spectator, who is not clothed in society's garments of respectability but is tuned into the art experience for its own sake? Why was this person conspicuously left out? It seems to me that this "open system" was not so open after all. It excluded some segments of society, and by doing so did not, as purported, let art permeate the social infra- structure. On the contrary, dance became the exclusive entertainment of the "respectable"-the elite and middle class. Nor has the "open system" of public performances lent any new dignity or status to the contemporary performer. She is still dependent on a male system, even more so in fact than in the days of sadir. If the devadasi was protected at least marginally by the temple or the patron, the contemporary dancer is completely at the mercy of a new urban system represented not by one male but by many. This is a harsher reality than the devadasi ever faced. Ironically, the academy was reversing a process it intended to push forward, and today the dancer is forced to play fully the dual roles of traditional and modern woman: onstage she dances the stories of the gods, while offstage in a ruthlessly competitive secular world she must be both intelligent and ambitious. These two opposing world views are her historical inheritance, and only she knows what this inner tension does to her.

The contemporary traditional dancer knows that her social reality is different from the social context in which Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi danced. She admires and remembers them both in deep reverence, but she knows that she cannot emulate them. Yamini Krishnamurthi,

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an exponent of bharatha natyam in the city of New Delhi, says "Bala [Balasaraswati] was like a fabulous flower. Her talent depressed me because I realized it would be impossible to be like her" (Samson 1984, 28). In this poignant statement I perceive a robust honesty, an awareness that the dancer's life can never be the way it once was. Heraclitus said that you can never put your hand in the same water twice. Dancers today more than at any other point in time are aware of this agonizing yet joyful truth.

Intellectually tough, often educated, belonging to respectable upper- middle-class society, the young dancers of India are ambitious, independent, and articulate. If they have the economic means, they buy the best instruction available. If they do not, but have the talent, then they strug- gle. The path to fame is not easy. The students with economic power shop around for the best teachers and test them out. It used to be the other way around. Mothers more often than not enter the battlefield along with their

daughters, canvass for them, and undertake the promotional work. At all times money is needed.

I am not suggesting that there was a "blessed time" in history when material power was not connected with the arts. I am rather pointing out that when the arts and material power interweave and make a mutual pact to nurture each other, two things happen: a certain kind of political propaganda is generated (e.g., sadir is renamed bharatha natyam); and a hierarchical power structure is created in which a certain kind of transaction occurs, one which forces a parasitical relationship of mutual inter- dependence. Rukmini Devi perceived this dynamic and called it the secularization of the devadasi dance. In her idealistic manner, however, she saw secularization as synonymous with decay:

The deterioration set in when dances began to be organized in the houses of the rich as entertainment during weddings and other family festivities (Ramnarayan 1984b, 22).

It seems to me that Rukmini Devi was pointing not just to a power transaction but also to an unhealthy relationship between money and the arts-a relationship which exists today. Well-meaning, educated, in- fluential industrialists have risen to the occasion, as in the instance of S. Viswanathan, who set up the Kala Mandir (Temple for Fine Arts) Trust in Madras to offer financial assistance to the talented needy. I am amazed at the repetitive nature of this pattern. When the devadasi dance became "corrupted," as the story goes, powerful people invested it with respectability, thus ensuring its continuance. Today, dance does not need this intellectual reinforcement-it is now considered "respectable" to be a dancer. Dance now needs money, which trusts and various arts associations are providing to ensure its continuity.

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The question I am now leading up to is very simple: Who has the

money in the present system? In a traditional patriarchal society such as India, men have always been invested with power and they have always made the rules. The female dancer then, by returning to this system, is

actually returning to man. She has no other recourse. What is she making herself into? Not only does she look to him for nurture, she is also judged and evaluated by him. She has to court and pander to the often-egotistical wishes of male critics. I remember articulating this dilemma in Madras, in a press forum held at the Krishna Gana Sabha, a cultural association for the promotion of dance/music. I said, "I feel demeaned seeking the patronage of critics, which I must do if I want to survive in this system. Is there a way out of this for me?" The press and dancers chose to ignore my indignant plea. They thought I was simply foolish and young. The con-

temporary dancer must be intelligent, educated, strong, and articulate to succeed today, yet she is still in a servile position.

I venture to suggest that she might be in this position because she views herself as an object, a condition she has accepted since birth. I have had critics review me as a dancer with a "graceful figure" and "a lot of

glamour." By continuing to dress prettily, elaborately, and sensuously on

stage I invited this gaze upon myself. I disdained this reduced position intellectually but I actually reinforced it in my own action, attitude, and manner. Who was I dressing for, and why? These questions became insistent and could not be ignored. In fact, I was taught to dance, to gesticulate, and even to feel by male dance teachers. Although there are some female dance teachers today, most contemporary women dancers are taught by men. Thus the dancer, in the most impressionable period of her life, is taught to interpret herself and her art through the male filter. Asking these questions paralyzed me into inaction and forced me to annul a comfortable arranged marriage and to leave the security of my father's home in search of my identity. It was traumatic. I understand why most contemporary dancers do not wish to deal with issues of gender in performance. The matter is both complex and time-consuming, and it distracts one from the actual process of learning a skill.

Let us now look at the contemporary performance phenomenon, especially in relation to the combined dance styles of Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi. These two dancers were unanimous in their condemnation of the lokadharmi, or "realistic" mode of expression, which emphasizes exaggerated theatricality. They valued the natyadharmi, or "conventionalized" mode of communication, in which subtle and refined nuances of expression take precedence. The natyadharmi mode is expressive of the philosophical values of aucityam (proportion), restraint, and inner quiet. By latching tenaciously onto the natyadharmi style, Balasaraswati and Rukmini resisted, both in spirit and in the outer manifestation of the performance itself,



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the secularization that was as much a part of their times as it is of ours. They could do it. They were of another age, and of another time. But as Balasaraswati's disciple, Nandini Raghavan, has said, "I wonder sometimes if Bala's style is too restrained and subtle for contemporary taste that goes in for fast tempo and flashiness" (Ramnarayan 1984a, 39). Balasaraswati's tradition (parampara) is captured and held today only by a few individuals like her daughter Lakshmi. On the other hand, Rukmini Devi never had to deal with the realities of the contemporary dancer. She performed rarely and only because she loved to dance. Dancing was not her profession. Born with a silver spoon, she protected herself in the ivory tower of her institution.

Padma Subramaniyam, a senior contemporary dancer and scholar, says this about the lokadharmi/natyadharmi modes of expression: "I use both the lokadharmi and natyadharmi because I feel that using any one style will be monotonous. In art, styles are used for communication. Abhinaya means communication" (Ramnarayan 1983, 36). Yamini Krishnamurthi, a prominent bharatha natyam dancer in Northern India, believes that dance must "bring a certain excitement, a charisma" (Samson 1984, 28). "Communi- cation," "charisma," "monotonous," "personality," "individuality," and "originality" are terms that reveal the society we live in today, a society in the throes of a new birth-restless energy seeking variety, excitement, and contact with others; a society influenced by Western education, aesthetics, and individualism. Look around at the number of Indian dance institutions we have here in the West (New York, Los Angeles, and other centers) as well as at the triumphant Festival of India held in the United States over the past two years. Surely all this activity is affecting the mainstream of performance in New Delhi and Madras. When the world shrinks in size and mythologies and cultures collide, how can one speak confidently of separateness, and of being uninfluenced? The dancer, who is a product of her society, also experiences this restlessness. Heir to the philosophic goal of self-transcendence, doubly reinforced in dance as in life, the dancer today is in an enervating dialectic of spiritual tension between the secular and the religious. Why is she always reaching out? Reaching out to her audience, sometimes across the vast geographical distance between East and West, while wearing for a brief time the exotic mask of an entertainer; reaching out within her own culture for financial and psychological independence from the male-dominated press, patrons, and social institutions and their morality; reaching out to maintain her distant memory of a spirit of India, a spirit she knows is fast dying in the complex plurality of urban life. Yes, the dancer is reaching out to her audience today. Some say she is pandering to their aesthetic desires by emphasizing the lokadharmi mode of expression, which demands little or no imaginary response from the spectator. Subtle nuances get submerged in

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the broad outlines of dramatic expression. The more important question, however, is really about the function of dance in contemporary society. Is dance simply entertainment, or is it something more? Dancer and spectator are equally confused by this question, because the religious roots of Indian dance, the myths and legends, are still the bedrock content of the dance. But the manner in which this content is presented on the social stage places it in the realm of entertainment. The confusion lies in the dialectical tension between the secular and the religious.

Today the male spectator in India views the female dancer of bharatha natyam through his own preconceptions and needs. He sees and

responds to the dramatic, visual display of costume and jewelry, and is

intellectually stimulated by the sophistication evident in the performance. His imbibed notions of Western aesthetics are satisfied. He also responds emotionally to the stories, the myths and legends which he has heard or read in his own cultural specificity, and so the religious aspect of dance, though somewhat minimized in the new context, is still a part of his

experience. He observes the competent contemporary dancer's mastery of

technique, the confidence she possesses both in her medium and in her

knowledge of her past. He knows her power and recognizes that she is unlike her ancestor, who sublimated herself in philosophical energy to the medium. He is momentarily confused and even overawed, overawed by this unprecedented experience and confused by the new power and energy he perceives in the dancer, the woman who reveals herself as capable of

being so many things at once. He lashes out sometimes at this new dance, which he believes emphasizes Western notions of self and performance. Sometimes in silent resignation he calms his threatened manhood, attribut-

ing all this to the changing sociological patterns of life. And at other times he simply ignores the changes he sees on the stage, admitting no difference between the past and present, almost as if dance were a natural given.

Of all these male reactions, it is this tolerance bordering on apathy that most bothers me. I see in it the seeds of self-mystification, a confusion that views the new phenomena as continuous and synonymous with the past, which they are and yet are not. By harmonizing the new phenomena, he misses the ragged edges, the uniqueness, and smooths the dance into a manageable wholeness which does not do justice to the new phenomena in their vivid presentness. To sum up, the modern male spectator's response to a performance is mixed, and is fraught with tension. He, like the female dancer, has to muster up more energy than ever before simply to respond to the dance, let alone to understand it. Dancer and spectator are pitted against one another-almost as if this were a male-female confrontation- in a situation in which a new energy is being played out, a vitality that threatens to invert the traditional dynamics between man and woman.

This new dynamic forces an unbalanced interrelationship upon



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artist and spectator, an interaction that subverts Abhinavagupta's traditional interpretations of the rasa theory. Rasa, for Abhinavagupta, was a state of union with the universal spirit which both artist and spectator achieved by transcending the pain and pleasure of everyday life. According to him, it was experienced when

the duality of subject and object disappeared through intense introversion, and ultimately, a state was evoked unlike any empirical experience. This state was a transcendental one (alaukika) like the experience of pure bliss (ananda) (Vatsyayan 1968, 8).

This description of the art experience is profoundly true, in terms of both

psychology and ontology. Yet it poses some problems in its translation to a secular world. First, this theory presupposes a superior plenitude of mind, difficult to achieve in a secular reality. Second, what is the value of an aesthetic that is so completely subjective? Dance has entered a secular

reality, and for this reason it needs a robust, objectifiable criterion for evaluation, one that is not simply normative. The prominent practitioners of the dance are beginning to redefine the art, and the time is ripe, I believe, for theory to embrace practice and reevaluate itself. Yamini Krishnamurthi, rebelling against the subjective autonomy of spectators who consume everything into their own minds, says:

Dance has to vibrate. At the same time the dancer cannot presuppose that her inspiration will come from the audience. Her own inner strength must control the process. An audience cannot dictate terms to a dancer. She must lead them on her journey (Samson 1984, 27).

The dancer today wants the power of manipulation to rest with her, and she is willing to take this responsibility. Rasa thus is no longer an

intersubjective experience between spectator and artist. It rests more on the performer's own subjectivity and mental concentration. Traditional historians, on the contrary, believe that spectators are co-creators sup- plying through the power of their own minds a vital energy without which rasa cannot be created. Spectators today are mentally tired and too out of tune with their culture to energize the rasa experience in this manner. Yet performers and present-day scholars continue to eulogize the rasa experience as set out in the ancient past. Is Abhinavagupta's theory of rasa even applicable in today's context? By insisting on its applicability, one is assuming that values are universal, and that they remain constant. We have seen that both the dancer and the spectator have different values today, which have in turn altered their approaches to life and art. What are the long-term consequences of ignoring these circumstantial differences

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by simply juxtaposing the past and the present as if they were one continuous movement?

To illustrate this point, let me tell you another story. Four years ago I witnessed Padma Subramanyam's performance of the dance drama Kamba Ramanayam in the august premises of the Madras Music Academy. Kamba Ramanayam, written by the poet Kamba, tells the mythological story of the divine couple Rama and Sita. When I witnessed the performance for the first time, I was simply transfixed. The presentation was intensely evocative, blending music, color, and literature harmoniously, creating an almost perfect aesthetic illusion. I saw the performance four times. To be

quite honest, I wished to understand the nature of my aesthetic experience by making myself over into an object for analysis. I remember quite vividly one particular moment in the play, the moment encompassing the lyric "Avanum nookinan, avalum nookinal" (he sees, she sees). In fact, the melody was so captivating that it rises to fill in the spaces between these words even as I write them-perhaps primal sound is more powerful than

poetry, for this melody has haunted my imagination ever since. I recollect

watching Padma mime Rama's motionless gaze, then Sita's shy fluttering gaze in response. "Being" and "becoming" were thus personified in this "gaze." Oh, what a moment it was! Time froze into mythical timelessness, into the root of my childhood life, gathered and defined in the ambiance of India and her mesmerizing gods. An unconscious memory generated in the seed and silence of the womb suffused my entire physical body. I remember being distracted even in that moment, however, by the excellent musical performance of Shyamala Balakrishnan, a specialist in her own right. So I went back a second time, to listen selectively to her music. A child in the next seat, however, wailed constantly and frustrated my experience. I went back a third time and overheard two "upper-class" Brahmin ladies exchanging cooking recipes for the fast-approaching religious festival. I looked at them quizzically and wondered about their presence in the theatre and the meaning of art. Undaunted, I went back a fourth time. My favorite moment had arrived, "Avanum nookinan, Avalum nookinal." Even as the musical cadence fell to its basic tone, I heard two teenage girls sitting next to me whispering. One said, "What is it, yah? Do you understand-hey, look at the ring on her finger." The second girl said, "Shh... Shh... Look, that is how Amitabh looks at Rekha in the film Silsila." (Amitabh and Rekha are the romantic pair of the Indian silver screen.) I was quite literally shattered.

I looked around me and realized that I was the outcast, the marked person, the initiated spectator (sahrydaya) who had neither value nor connection with the changing world. What possible future can there be for an art form that a new generation cannot relate to except in the literal terms of the movies? Little wonder that the bharatha natyam dancer today



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is motivated by both a sense of power and an anxiety, two sides of the same coin. Swapna Sundari, a South Indian who is practicing bharatha natyam in the north, says "so much of our own culture has diminished so fast, that if nobody does anything about it, fifteen years later, the next younger lot will not even know the symbols of Rama and Krishna" (Raman 1984b, 29) (PLATE 4). The cosmopolitan nature of the audience that attends a dance performance, the discrepancy in the levels of awareness of the audience, and the general heterogeneity of these audiences put dance itself into question. It is not the dancer who is out of tune with her inherited culture, but the audience, which makes even more urgent the question of dance and its meaning in a changing cultural context.

So the sensitive dancer today, out of touch with her audiences, finds her existence quite isolating. Alone in her dressing room, in the silence of her soul, she peels off layer after layer of thick makeup, rich costumes, and

jewelry, and recognizes briefly but unforgettably, in the nakedness of her face, the pale imitation that she has become. She cannot forget her ideal, her history, and asks her reflection: Am I any different from my devadasi mother, forced to leave the precincts of the temple? Has history repeated itself? Has the pattern come full circle? Am I now like my devadasi mother, becoming essentially expendable, valueless? She pauses, but briefly. It is time for the next performance. She swings back into action from that center of nullity, of joyless negation, with vengeance. Her dance seems militant and aggressive, and her leaps and bounds across the stage often seem pointless. Balasaraswati lashed out, bemoaned this "vulgarity," this exaggerated display of empty rhythm and unproductive energy. Rukmini Devi quietly turned her face away: she went to her illusory tower, her Kalakshetra, and said in self-justification:

You can take a horse to the water but you can't make it drink. I have given the students of Kalakshetra all the opportunities. But supposing it doesn't work, don't you think that, if you have worked all your life, you have sown the seeds? (Ramnarayan 1984d, 38).

What seeds, I ask? Can those seeds even sprout in the earth today? What about the external circumstances, the weeds that stifle this energy? All that one can really do is to understand, if at all possible, the inner pain of this dancer. Isn't that all that tradition is anyway, a birth and a death? Why not pause on this death, this moment in time, in quiet contemplation, without hope for a future, without mourning.

But the wheel spins on and dancers spin on it. Some seek traditional answers to the present-day dilemma. Padma Subramanyam says, "I completely agree that my dancing is different from the prevalent style of bharatha natyam. I would like to clarify that this deviation from the norm is

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only a return to the roots of tradition" (Ramnarayan 1983, 37). Which tradition? Indian dancers wish to connect, at least theoretically, to a unity, a stability, which they like to call tradition. In practice, however, they see tradition as a dynamic process. This search for a single theoretical unity is the characteristic mythical search of the Indian mind, a search which reiterates circularity and sameness. This is understandable; a dancer is as much a product of her past as she is a reflection of her times. Some other dancers, like Sonal Mansingh, say quite simply, they wish to create "little pools of delight." Chandralekha, a radical idealist, gave up the life of a traditional performer. She urges dancers to stop this repetitive practice of spectacle performances, of nostalgic return to traditional narrative, and to focus on form. In form, she believes, is embedded the unity of Indian life. My own response was to flee the country at twenty-two. Having lived all my life under the protection of men in a patriarchal society, I wished to discover my separateness from them. Men had defined so much of my life and thought: Bharatha's historical presence loomed large in my earlier life; then it was my teacher, who came to occupy a position next to God; and finally there was my father, without whose protection I could not have honorably survived in India. I fled to America in an effort to free myself from the shackles of being an attractive talented woman, a performer, an object, who could be independent only on the basis of these criteria. I wished to assert the power of my mind over my sex. I knew even then that I was exchanging one prison for another, but I had no other choice. Yeats in his poem "Choice" sums up my own predicament: "The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life or of the work." Perfection of the work was not possible for me without the discovery of my self. So I left India. In exile, I wished to give birth to my tradition in body, thought, and action. Most traditional dancers don't experience this choice. They see life as separate from art, art being a representation of ideal time as opposed to temporal time.

Reflexive awareness for today's educated dancers has come at a great price. It has disillusioned some, forced others into a tighter illusory embrace with tradition, and propelled still others, like myself, out of the country. It is not a tranquil situation. Each is trying to discover a tradition, an authentic expression. But as long as Shiva's theoretical dancing snake continues to frame Indian dance,2 its mesmerizing power, which resides in the Indian heart, will, I believe, overpower and negate the contemporary performance phenomena. The practice of bharatha natyam has for a variety of secular reasons broken the bounds of ancient theory. I think we need a post-colonial aesthetic, a theory that can describe and evaluate the secular reality of dance in all its marvelous multiplicity.3 I articulate today, many thousands of miles away from home, some of the questions of my childhood, in the belief that serious questioning must have some meaning, however small, in human activity.



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NOTES

1. Vedanta is a complex branch of Indian philosophy that articulates the

theory of the atman (soul). 2. Shiva is the Preceptor God of Indian dance. The snake adorns his neck. 3. As a practitioner of the art, I have choreographed a dance drama that

includes Bharatha's four modes of expression: vacika (speech), aharya (costume), angika (movement), and sattvika (psychological states). But the resemblance ends there. In content, my dance drama does not seek to produce a sense of oneness, but rather consciously juxtaposes the platonic and the existential world views, a tension I have experienced both in life and in art.

REFERENCES

Abhinavagupta. 1926. Abhinava Bhdratz, edited by Ramakrishna Kavi. Baroda: Gaekward Orien- tal Press.

Arudra. 1986/1987. "The Transfiguration of a Traditional Dance." Sruti (December/January): 17-21.

Balasaraswati. 1984. "Bala on Bharata Natyam." Sruti (March): 11-15.

Bharata-Muni. 1961 and 1967. The Natyasastra, translated by Manomohan Ghosh. Calcutta: Granthalaya (vol. 1, 1967) and Asiatic Society (vol. 2, 1961).

Gaston, Anne-Marie. 1982. Siva in Dance, Myth and Iconography. Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras: Delhi

University Press.

Raman, Pattabhi, and Ramachandran Anandhi. 1984a. "The Whole World in Her Hands." Sruti (March): 16-31. 1984b.

"Interview: Swapna Sundari: A Thoughtful Terpsichorean." Sruti (November): 20-31.

Ramnarayan, Gowri. 1983. "Interview: Padma Subramanyam." Sruti (December): 36-37. 1984a.

"Bala, My Guru." Sruti (March): 35-39. 1984b.

"A Quest for Beauty." Sruti (June): 17-29. 1984c.

"Dancer and Reformer." Sruti (July): 17-26. 1984d.

"Rukmini Devi: Restoration and Creation." Sruti (August): 26-38. Samson, Leela. 1984.

"Yamini Krishnamurthi: A Capital Dancer in Twilight." Sruti (October): 26-32.

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Vatsyayan, Kapila. 1968. Indian Classical Dance in Literature and the Arts. New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

. 1974. Indian Classical Dance. New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broad-

casting.



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Meduri - Bharata Natyam