Who speaks for Mohamana?

DEVESH SONEJI reviews 'Mohamana Explorations', an event organised by the Prakriti Foundation in Chennai.

THE Prakriti Foundation, Chennai, organised a two-day event centred around the representation of text and context in Bharatanatyam through performances of the bhairavi varnam "mohamana enmidil" composed by Ponnaiya (1804-1863). It sought to bring together various interpretations of the text by artists trained by hereditary masters, inspired by Saskia Kersenboom's brilliant study of the varnam in her book Word, Sound, Image: The Life of the Tamil Text. The focus was on the Thanjavur style of dance, represented by artists trained by T. Balasaraswati and K. Ganesan (Nandini Ramani and Saskia Kersenboom), and by K. P. Kittappa Pillai (Hari Krishnan, Srividya Natarajan, Indu Varma and Vyjayanthimala). Conceptually, the event seemed a god-send for those interested in a hereditary interpretation of texts for dance.

However, the reality of the event was quite different. Instead of drawing the focus back to content and context, the event became a mere set of "performances" which were weighed against one another. Indeed there was very little discussion about context, and, as I observed the event, I was reminded of a question I have asked myself many times - "who speaks for Bharatanatyam?"

The "Mohamana Explorations" event was, of course, replete with "speaking" - questions and naive queries about many little details like: "Why did some musicians sing following a niraval- like format for the sancharis?" "Why did one dancer walk back in a particular way?" etc. The members of the hereditary communities present either as observers or as nattuvanars, such as Ulaganatha Pillai, T. Mukta, Latchappa Pillai, Gopalakrishnan Pillai and K. Chandrasekharan to mention a few, strangely did not "speak". The moments of their silence were telling. As I sat there, I realised that the question perplexing me was not "Who speaks for Mohamana?" but rather, "Who Listens for Mohamana?" Why all of this messy "speaking" about various tattumettu structures and sangatis, when all we should be doing is listening? As Saskia Kersenboom so poignantly pointed out in her introductory remarks, the acquisition of knowledge or meaning in the Tamil context is inseparable from orality - it comes from seeing, listening, processing, speaking and performing. The boundaries of manodharma are given by the hereditary practitioners, not as "golden rules" but rather as clusters of applied principles. The transgression of these principles by many practitioners may certainly have been the impetus for the "Mohamana Explorations" event, but in effect, it served simply to validate the kind of "open-ended" interpretive strategies which are so alarmingly prevalent in Bharatanatyam today, but so alien to the traditional communities.

"Oh, the old masters are dead or dying ..." a popular Bharatanatyam artiste once said on film. That being the case, the issue of contextually-sensitive (uchita) interpretive strategies of hereditary compositions becomes a crucial one. Their voices are no longer heard, the hereditary embodiment has vanished, but certainly "mohamana" varnam continues to be danced. This is precisely the point of disjuncture. Contemporary Bharatanatyam practitioners enjoy, or rather crave a sense of antiquity - and so thousands of dancers perform compositions like "mohamana" - but to what end? With the disenfranchisement of the traditional community, practitioners and critics have come to subtly appropriate notions of auchitya through their own (usually imagined) sense of history, propriety, text and technique. The hereditary practitioners out of the picture, these texts become free-for-all arenas, where the local becomes universalised. At the "Mohamana Explorations" event, one senior participant event said, "Siva is Paramasivan, so can be shown in any way (in 'mohamana')."

The disenfranchisement of the hereditary community of performers and its effects on form/content/representation is clearly evident in the contemporary discourse surrounding dance in Chennai today. That December, for example, at one of the Music Academy's morning sessions, when E. Krishna Iyer's support of hereditary artists was questioned by an erudite historian, upper-class audience members walked out of the hall, clearly indicating the upper- class hegemony over not only the form, but also how its imagined history is to be represented. "Bharatanatyam" dance is represented as "authentic" in the circles, as is its history, which is neither critically developed, nor aware of the need to account for the representation of the subaltern devadasi. As cultural historian Avanthi Meduri has eloquently put it, the devadasi's "ghost" continues to haunt the sutured history of her murai, and its by-product, modern Bharatanatyam.

From the rule of Sarabhoji II till about 1980, male members of the hereditary community seem to have had an increased visibility, even as the women in the community generally faded out of public culture. However, now even the male members of the community have been pushed to the margins, and the death of K. P. Kittappa in 1999 marked the end of the generation of artists which was a part of the ritual performances of the Brihadishvara temple in Thanjavur. Even Kamalamma and Doraikannu, who managed to escape the extreme forms of socio-cultural marginalisation we see elsewhere, are unable to provide us with the full spectrum of the repertoire of the Thanjavur tradition (comprising koyil, kacheri, kuravanji and samskara compositions). So where then, is the contemporary practitioner to turn to for the boundaries of what is proper (ucita)? Where are the sources one should be listening to?

Nearly every composition of the pre-modern period, for music or dance, is inextricably linked to place. Every place is a site for innumerable dialogues, between god and devotee, lover and beloved and artist and artistic creation. The sources we should be listening to, must come from voices which echo ideas about place - compositions from Maratha-period Thanjavur inevitably focus on localised personalities, rooted in sthala-culture. Let us take the example of the Tiruvarur imagery, central to so many currently popular padavarnams for dance such as "mohamana" (bhairavi by Ponnaiya), "rupamu juchi" (todi by Ayyasami Nattuvanar, not Dikshitar as popularly believed), "yela nannesevu" (purnachandrika by Ramasvami Dikshitar) and "entanine telupudura" (khamas by Subbarama Dikshitar). There are many "indigenous" voices which can inform our understanding of this sthala, and by extension, our representation of texts for dance associated with it.

The compositions of Muttusvami Dikshitar, who had an intimate association with the temple and its music and dance traditions, are one resource which can prove to be an effective "marker" of the boundaries of manodharmabhinaya or sanchari about Tiruvarur. In Dikshitar's thyagaraja vibhakti kriti "thyagarajam bhajare" in yadukulakambodi raga, for example, Thyagaraja is referred to as Nilakantha ("nilakantham aneka phaladam"). Therefore, when describing the Lord in the line "bhogatyagesa anubhogam ceyya va kitte", the flexibility of the hereditary murai (system, tradition) allows for the representation of the Nilakantha aspect of Siva in the abhinaya. This type of imagery, which makes itself known to us through the lyrics of Dikshitar, is merely the visible peak of a larger, layered history of representation. However, this layered history is invisible precisely because of the loss of the human embodiment of the imagery, namely the hereditary community of performers.

As one walks through the Devasraya Mandapa, once the site of the performance of the Tyagesar Kuravanci, the memory of the temple- women of Tiruvarur's hallowed kondi tradition is rekindled. Their images, fanning, worshipping, singing and dancing for Thyagaraja, are preserved on the Nayaka-period ceiling paintings. These images, represented by Nandini Ramani (who showed the women dancing as Thyagaraja is brought out of his sanctum on the ter during the chariot festival) and Hari Krishnan (who depicted the narrative of Manikkanachiyar, who gave up her mortal coil to be by Thyagaraja's side) were not discussed in the response- sessions, nor mentioned in the reviews of the event which followed. So yet another source for the boundaries of sanchari for "mohamana", namely the performance texts and narratives of the kondi women, which still survive through their descendant P. R. Thilagam, seems to have gone unnoticed other than by a handful of artists such as Saskia Kersenboom, Nandini Ramani, Lakshmi Viswanathan, Indu Varma and Hari Krishnan. I am also reminded of Lakshmi Knight's performances of "mohamana" which recall the myth of Manunidhi Cholan, a narrative crystallised at Tiruvarur. Texts and oral traditions of sthala-mahatmya, are one more source for locating the boundaries of sanchari. The oft-repeated idea that hereditary communities did not have access to such knowledge (or such texts) clearly is a mistaken one, and one that has perhaps supported the "open-ended" interpretation of dance compositions from the Thanjavur tradition. In fact, it is through the (usually non-brahmin) temple-atiyars (servants) such as the temple-women, the periyamelakkarans, vilupparaiyans, otuvars, uvacans, and others that these localised narratives are preserved and promulgated, as is certainly the case at Tiruvarur.

It is unfortunate that the "Mohamana Explorations" event became just another "Madras Season Event". Instead of discussing and demonstrating context, it became a "showcase". A potentially educational experience lost its orientation and became a "who can dance the best?" event. Many members of the audience, comprising both young dancers and mature "teachers", apparently did not even realise why these artists had been chosen to interpret this text. Texts for dance need to be understood at a variety of levels. Interpretation of texts from the Thanjavur dance traditions by a dancer today, must necessarily involve familiarity with the conceptual world in which those texts were created. Sure, that world is obviously different from the world we live in today, but Ponnaiya's own world when he composed "mohamana" was also infected by a colonial presence - his was a world of English education, foreign music and goods from the West - not unlike our own. Indeed, the Thanjavur brothers themselves were agents for tremendous change. Yet, within that new world of cracks and fissures, Ponnaiya was able to reify his past - the world of the classical love poetry, nayanars, sacred sthalas and grandiose Agamic ritual. In our post-colonial world, we should, like Ponnaiya, have a sense of historical consciousness. It is still possible, I am confident, in our world of commercial Bharatanatyam, to be conscious of the issues of representation by identifying many of our ideas about "tradition" as constructs, and then moving on to listen non-selectively to what sources really say. Once we have listened to history and context, instead of assumed, will, contemporary Bharatanatyam dancers then really be able to "speak for Mohamana".

The writer is an Indologist and a noted Sanskrit and dance scholar.

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