Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

MUSIC & DANCE : December 05, 1999

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Creative explorations

Arundhati Subramaniam

"The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks," wrote Randall Jarrell.

It is one of those immortal wisecracks that come to mind when one thinks of the current predicament of Indian classical dance.

Mohandas V. Badagara/Wilderfile

After all, we have all heard classical dancers speak with a wistful sigh of the vast dichotomy between a hoary unsullied heritage and the tainted mercantilism of the dismal present. There are, of course, reasons for such a wilfully jaundiced view and they are not merely to do with the blinding glitter of a reconstructed history.

For the post-Independence middle-class dancer has had to work out a complex equation between the then and the now, between the prescribed certitudes of an artistic inheritance and the raging anarchy of contemporary reality.

Is she able to reconcile these polarities? Is Indian classical dance an honest representation of today's ethos? Or a hollow posturing ritual that seeks to evoke some nostalgic notion of a bygone glory? Is today's dancer a decorative cultural ambassador, a mobile exhibit of a mummified shastraic tradition? Or an autonomous creative practitioner actively seeking to relate a system of artistic norms to a historically particular situation?

In her biography, Chandralekha, ardent apologist of a redefined Bharata Natyam, recalls a significant moment during her arangetram while performing "Yamuna nagarilo," a piece that evoked a bevy of gopis frolicking in the fecundity of water. It suddenly struck her that the concert happened to be in aid of the Drought Relief Fund. The schism between art and hard fact, between performance and self, came home to her at that moment with a jolt of revelation.

Mohandas V. Badagara/Wilderfile
Astad Deboo

And thus began her journey of creative exploration - a process of questioning hegemonic ideas of culture and tradition, of peeling away outdated liturgies of feudal narrative and ersatz religiosity and trying to explore the teeming potential of the Bharata Natyam form itself. "I believe that new directions in dance cannot come from mere technique; that would only make one a boring virtuoso," she asserts. "The concepts of space and gender cannot be inherited; they have to be redefined."

She happens to be one among a growing tribe of dancers who feel that need to interrogate the divide between tradition and context, art and life. given the multiple contexts that collide and coexist in our time, thankfully the results of such quests are vastly diverse.

Astad Deboo, India's modern dancer of long standing, trained in vocabularies as varied as Martha Graham, Kathakali, jazz and Pina Bausch, has for decades addressed himself to the possibilities of abstraction in movement. Weary of the pervasive Radha-Krishna troupe in Kathak, Aditi Mangaldas seeks inspiration in contemporary poetry particularly that which affirms that women can own psychological calendars that are autonomous of the men in their lives. Daksha Sheth attempts to evolve a supple movement syntax conditioned by her education in Kathak, Chhau and Kalaripayattu. Maya Krishna Rao is engaged in exploring the areas of slippage between dance and theatre. And there are others, Uttara Asha Coorlawala, Ranjabati Sircar, Navtej Singh Johar, Mallika Sarabhai, to name a random few.

How successful have these experiments been? Uneven, perhaps inevitably, but it may be premature to say more, since today's epoch is also proverbially the most obscure. The key question is whether they are born of a strenuous and honest process of self-enquiry. There are times when one can virtually sniff out the integrity of an effort even when one cannot applaud the result. At other times, the reverse is true. For given the increasing number of dancers who have begun peppering their programme notes with words like "innovation" and "contemporaneity", one cannot help but wonder at times at the veracity of the claim.

Mohandas V. Badagara/Wilderfile
Vinay Kumar from Auroville.

The peril is usually that of jingoism. There is surely nothing more irksome than a trite socialism masquerading as trailblazing experiment - merely bringing the hypothetical equivalents of Kargil or Narmada or a platitudinous women's empowerment slogan on stage to prove one's relevance. Chandralekha speaks of how she came up with the image of a devi (representing womanpower) vanquishing an asura (representing patriarchy) when choreographing her work, "Sri". However, she soon rejected this as allegorically facile and chose the more rigorous path of looking for metaphors offered by her own body.

Artistic jingoism is often accompanied by artistic fundamentalism. Leading Bharata Natyam exponent Alarmel Valli cautions against the "whats new" syndrome - a politically fashionable endorsement of experiment for its own sake. The hazard in the uncritical acceptance of innovation, she points out, is that it could well harden into the dogma of the future. "Tradition", she believes, "has an infinite capacity for renewing itself, but at its own pace - naturally, gracefully and inevitably."

There is also the subtle pressure of the prevalent cultural climate that demands that artists prove their Indianness in some way. Astad Deboo speaks of the paradox wherein his work is regarded as exotic and oriental overseas, and western back home in India. This attempt to standardise and trivialise cultural identity can, of course, be deeply damaging to a dancer seeking to come up with a genuinely honest response to a complex environment. The cop-out is tempting - a splattering of decorative ethnic chic to prove ones cultural credentials. "It's something I've always resisted," says Deboo who realises that such tokenisms invariably make for dishonest art and dishonest politics.

Mohandas V. Badagara/Wilderfile
Padma Subramaniam.

The fact is that the Indian ethos is by no means monolithic. Our dancers have perhaps still to fully make space for its unruly heterogeneity in their work. In his production, "Burning Skin," that visited India some years ago, Canada-based Indo-Armenian dancer Roger Sinha came up with a vibrant anarchy of body grammars: Bharata Natyam adavus and close-fisted martial art stances to speak of the South Asian quest for identity in a white society. As it quotes from sources as diverse as classical and kitsch, the production throws up an image of pure pastiche that lingers on in the mind at the close a brown sahib sipping English tea to the lyrical effusion of a Strauss Waltz. It is a work that seems to sum up perfectly the contradictory, anomalous, multi-layered reality we inhabit today.

And yet, it is important to remember that Sinha represents one approach among many. On the other side of the contemporaneity debate are dancers like Malavika Sarukkai and Alarmel Valli, or Birju Maharaj and Kelucharan Mohapatra. These are dancers who have internalised their formal grammar to the extent that few could dispute that they are contemporary dancers in every sense of the term. They have proved time and again that a rich allusive traditional form can be a flexible and honest language of self-expression. When Malavika Sarukkai talks of the richness of the classical idiom, she does not merely mouth fashionable rhetoric. Her form is no longer a syntax that she employs, but a language that she lives.

Clearly therefore, there are no definitive solutions, only multiple directions. The dancer who self-consciously attempts to represent a contemporary reality may end up producing art that is as dishonest as the dancer who wilfully denies her historicity. One's cultural ethos is not a matter of external cargo to be declared at the slightest pretext; and yet, to entirely obliterate its existence in an effort to be universal is equally fatuous for it is an ineradicable presence, a part of every artist's creative sensibility.

Through history there have been a few artists who have made more searching and rigorous demands on that creative sensibility than others. The scene today, in the final analysis, is perhaps not so very different.