IN the 1980s, while studying bharata natyam with renowned abhinaya teacher Kalanidhi Narayan, I experienced a curious kind of congruence: I was a young married woman having an affair, learning a dance about a young married woman having an affair. Yet, in enacting Radha as abhisarika – she who goes to meet her lover – I was performing a situation that in real life I was striving to keep secret. While none of Radha’s specific actions in going to meet Krishna in a forest bower were mine, the emotion I was embodying in the ashtapadi, that ‘unbearable lightness of being’, was very like the one I was actually experiencing.

This reminded me of a very different kind of congruence that had been demanded of me a decade earlier. In my only personal interaction with Rukmini Devi during my time as a student at Kalakshetra, I had once come to the evening’s performance in the theatre with my long hair streaming down my back. Rukmini Devi had noticed and sent me back to the hostel to braid it neatly, saying, ‘You are not just a dancer in dance class, you are always a dancer.’

At seventeen, I had no idea what my unbound hair signified to Rukmini Devi, nor did I believe her that being a dancer meant the strict rules of the dance class should govern the way I lived in the world outside it. Ten years later, by the time I was learning the Gita Govinda ashtapadi with Kalanidhi, I was much more aware that, as Kenneth Burke said, ‘There are no forms of art which are not forms of experience outside of art.’ I was beginning to confront the moral questions that bharata natyam raises and that dancers have been grappling with throughout its modern history.

So what is the relationship between real life and art? Aristotle said that art imitates life; Oscar Wilde said it was the other way round. In the Natya Sastra, the frame is constantly shifting with one melting seamlessly into the other: the gods enter the cardinal points of the stage to protect the very first theatrical performance, a play about a fight between gods and demons, from demons, resulting in the compendium Bharata wrote, which is a book we can read in real life, telling us those gods are still there within the stage we’re dancing on, so we pay obeisance to them before every performance even today. Abhinavagupta, in his commentary on Bharata’s terms natyadharmi (practices of the theatre) and lokadharmi (practices of the world) compared the first to a mural and the second to the wall on which it’s painted; while looking at the painted image we can’t help but see the wall.

According to the Natya Shastra rules and categories that were invoked by those who taught the dance, the point of performance was to refine and distill real emotion to yield a universal, abstract aesthetic mood – rasa. Srngara rasa, the erotic mood, distilled from the bhava of desire, was certainly one problem that bharata natyam posed.

 

The place of srngara in dance that had been taken for granted till then became a source of debate in the 1930s when bharata natyam was no longer purely the purview of devadasis performing in salons and courts, but was being performed by women from ‘respectable’ families on public stages.

The transition from being an art form tied to caste and sexual practices within a closed community to being an art form open to all required major and minor adjustments. Some, such as the nattuvanar and musicians being seated on the stage rather than walking up and down behind the dancer and the elimination of acrobatic and gimmicky dances involving cutting vegetables or balancing on knives, were accepted without demur, while others, such as limiting the role of srngara and the padams that expressed it, were fiercely debated.

 

The argument, in those early years when it was first posed, was often expressed as an opposition between two women: Rukmini Devi, belonging to the new class of women who performed on stage, and Balasaraswati, hereditary dancer with a lineage going back seven generations. But when one reads what they had to say about srngara, it’s hard to point to where their divergence lay.

One of them said, ‘The aesthetics and the artistry of Bharatanatyam alike make us realize that srngara has pride of place here… The srngara we experience in Bharatanatyam is never carnal; never, never. It cannot be merely the body’s rapture… Srngara thus is an instrument for uniting the dancer with Divinity.’¹ The other one said, ‘It is wrong to say we shouldn’t have srngara. Srngara is love, and beauty, without which there wouldn’t be any dance at all. Srngara and bhakti must be one. You cannot separate the two… I have no problem with sex or love, nor with portraying srngara, but the dance should not be sexy. Sexiness has no place in our arts.’² While the endnotes will clarify who said what, I think we can agree that the sentiments they express are hardly at odds.

No matter what Rukmini Devi and Balasaraswati said, it wasn’t the case that bharata natyam is unsexy. True, the dancer is covered from neck to calf, and the style itself is marked by a precision and control that make this denial plausible. It isn’t sexy in the way it once was, when courtesan/dancers might rummage in the laps of men in the audience ‘looking for a lost earring’,³ or in the way striptease is, through the sexiness of the revealed body of the dancer, or in the way modern dance or ballet can be sexy, through beautifully trained bodies moving in ways that overtly convey passion.

Bharata natyam plays down the sexiness that depends on dancers swivelling their hips in order to emphasize a different order of sexiness. The srngara padams speak of erotic love in precise and explicit terms mentioning not only specific acts and positions – 69, two lovers standing, the woman on top – using specific, suggestive gestures called rati hastas. The sexiness resides in the way the dancer interprets the lines of the poem and the audience members, those who know the codes, conventions and tropes, respond. As philosopher Ronald de Sousa put it, ‘a metaphorical strip tease is still a tease.’

 

Rukmini Devi chose certain of the srngara padams while eschewing others. At Kalakshetra, dancers were taught ‘manchi dinamu’ by Kshetrayya for example, with lyrics that speak quite directly of erotic love in the courtesan mode. Of course, the words leave a lot of room for interpretation, and ‘Now is the right time. Let him come…’ can be elaborated according to the inclination of the dancer as ‘the auspicious moment according to the planets’ or ‘now that my husband is gone.’

Balasaraswati stressed again and again that all padams were suitable, while holding the opinion that Brahmin dancers were simply not capable of properly elaborating the erotic sentiments they expressed.⁴ She herself had danced srngara padams since her first performance at the age of seven. Audience members couldn’t ‘understand such a little girl expressing the intricacies of srngara rasa so beautifully, without really comprehending the meaning as an adult might.’⁵ We have no record of which padams she performed as a child. On the other hand, her signature piece as an adult was the devotional kriti ‘Krishna ni begane baro’, which expressed a mother’s love for her child, and evoked no srngara at all.

 

Which padams and javalis were or were not appropriate in the new setting for dance was being debated by others as well. Many of those who knew what the art form required in imaginative effort wondered if girls from ‘respectable’ families should interpret the sexually explicit lyrics of poems formerly performed by courtesans. E. Krishna Iyer, a stalwart supporter of the dance and a dancer himself, nevertheless asked, ‘Is it proper or safe to encourage present-day family girls to go in for Ksetrayya padas and are they likely to handle them with understanding of their true devotional spirit? At any rate can a pada like Oka Sarike [if you are so tired after making love just once] ever be touched by our girls?’⁶

Sometimes, the lyrics were changed. For example, the original anupallavi of Ghanam Krishna Iyer’s Atana padam to Tiruvottriyur Tyagaraja was considered so explicit as to be unsingable. Ironically, it is the Dhanammal family, to which Balasaraswati belonged, which changed the text to what is presently sung.⁷

Kalanidhi was one of the respectable ‘family girls’ who’d started learning dance in the 1930s. She studied with Gowriammal, a devadasi of the Mylapore Kapaleeswara temple who’d taught Rukmini Devi and others at Kalakshetra, and been one of the teachers of Balasaraswati. While Rukmini Devi had started her dance school and choreographed her dance dramas and Balasaraswati had continued her dance career both in India and abroad, Kalanidhi left dance completely at sixteen, when the stigma attached to dancing made it difficult for her family to find her a husband. She’d never performed in the interim, and had only recently started teaching after a thirty year hiatus, when I became her student.

 

She could do so⁸ because the stigma had, to a large extent, disappeared. Rukmini Devi’s choreographic and pedagogical influence on the dance form, through Kalakshetra with its strict curriculum and control over the students, and the dance dramas she created with mythological themes, shifting emphasis from the solo dancer and srngara, had been a factor in erasing the stigma. This allowed the pendulum to swing the other way in our understanding of the devadasi’s societal and artistic role. Abuses inherent in the system that had lead to its abolition were being underplayed, while those aspects that showed her as autonomous, sexually liberated woman of the world were being emphasized by western educated academics.

Writing in the language of authenticity, the subaltern, gender studies, and appropriation, these scholars traced straight lines through the shifting, tangled and complicated history of the dance form’s journey through temple and court and salon to the stage. They took the refusal to do explicitly erotic poems to be Bowdlerization and blamed the Brits, or the Brahmins, or the bourgeois sentimentality of bharata natyam dancers. This created a climate where the erotic padams, those that E. Krishna Iyer had considered ‘unsafe’ and that had not so far been much performed on stage, became hallmarks of authenticity and could be recreated by this Brahmin wife and mother for a new generation of young dancers.

Kalanidhi interacted with the formal elements of bharata natyam with an unparalleled creativity. What Kalakshetra had taught me as static forms, she turned into intimate personal journeys. Her way of teaching, which was not, as far as she could remember, the way she herself had been taught, required that I fully insert myself into the dances I was learning.

 

Abhinaya in bharata natyam succeeds when, through the dancer’s embodied presence, a stylized representation of emotion is identified and experienced as real. It is not the telling of a story; rather, the dancer sustains a felt emotion through a series of fleeting gestures and facial expressions that interweave with the meaning of the poem, building in intensity until a single pivotal moment unfurls into an experience of emotional truth.

Kalanidhi revealed a repertoire made for this process, outside my experience of abhinaya to that point. These padams, javalis and ashtapadis explored other ways to connect intimately with a man than the socially sanctioned one of marriage. In these poems love, erotic love, was never safe, always complicated, full of difficulties and pain. The poet is male, yes, but Kalanidhi showed how the female dancer could, through an entirely conventional gestural language of forest bowers, night-blooming jasmine, cuckoos, moonlight fully inhabit the words.

The first line of a very popular 17th century padam that Kalanidhi taught me, asks, ‘Why have you come here? Her house is not on this street. Go away…’ The tone is sarcastic: ‘you must have mistaken my house for hers in the bright moonlight’, and goes on to suggest that the lover, who’s supposedly turned up at the wrong door, has been driven a little crazy by the other woman, with her ‘teeth like jasmine buds’ and ‘eyes shaped like fish.’

 

Each line gives plenty of scope for the dancer to elaborate and explore text and subtext: what is she doing when she hears his knock on the door? Is she enjoying the moonlight on the terrace, and so watching him as he wanders the street, or is she sitting alone and pining, waiting in hope that he might turn up, or is she going about her business, having forgotten about him, until she opens the door and sees him there? The dancer can choose from a myriad of possibilities. She can make fun of the man for getting mixed up when her own house is so small while the other woman’s is so much larger; this house is plain while the other is beautifully decorated; she’s inside with the door closed, while the other woman is standing there in the doorway. The intent is to show that his turning up at her door late at night couldn’t possibly have been an innocent mistake. It must be because he is so bedazzled by that other woman with the beautiful eyes which have pierced him like arrows, with her wiles which awaken desire, with her ability to get whatever she wants from him – jewelry, money and his devotion, subtly denigrating while pretending to praise her. She remains determined to misunderstand the intentions of this lover ‘who carries the Mandara mountain.’

Kalanidhi taught me to mime the ‘go away’ in subtly different ways: ‘don’t touch me’, ‘let go of my hand’, ‘I’m not listening’, ‘don’t pull at my sari’, ‘take your hand off my shoulder.’ The dance always ended, though, with pushing the imaginary insistent lover out and latching the door behind him.

But that’s not where the poem ends. Between the end of the repeated pallavi line, ‘go away’, and the beginning of the last verse that Kshetrayya wrote, an abrupt change of heart has taken place. All of a sudden, the lover who’s been repeatedly told to leave is making love to the woman ‘with twice the fury.’

 

What are we to make of this sudden reversal? Should we let the light, charming world of this dance be muddied by the intrusion of the real? Delhi High Court Judge Ashutosh Kumar would have no problem understanding the change of heart expressed by the woman in Kshetrayya’s poem. In his ruling on a case of rape that hinged on the issue of whether the woman had consented to the intercourse that had taken place, he stated: ‘Instances of woman (sic) behaviour are not unknown that a feeble "no" may mean a "yes". If the parties are strangers, the same theory may not be applied... But same would not be the situation when parties are known to each other, are persons of letters and are intellectually/academically proficient, and if, in the past, there have been physical contacts. In such cases, it would be really difficult to decipher whether little or no resistance and a feeble "no", was actually a denial of consent.’

We must be careful to take into account both divergence and intersection whenever art or sex are held up for scrutiny. Both of them have very different meanings in different contexts.

When the poem was written, for and about a courtesan and enacted by her, the dancer’s life and her art occupied the same territory. Performing in a salon-like setting for an all male audience of connoisseurs, a devadasi, despite feeling anger at a lover’s unfaithfulness, might well have found it to her advantage to succumb to his opportuning and give in. It makes sense that she even suggest this to her audience, among whom may be her patron. Rather, she could well be using the dance to tell him that a little anger and petulance on her part could enhance the force of their subsequent love making.

In Veena Oldenburg’s descriptions of the lives of the courtesans or tawaifs of Lucknow, she refers to an art of pretense or nakhra that lies somewhere between life and the training and rigour of the dance arts, between lokadharmi and natyadharmi, which ‘courtesans have to master in order to spare no opportunity of coaxing money out of their patron and his friends.’ These devious ‘routines’ have been rehearsed and perfected until they appear spontaneous: ‘...the feigned headache that interrupts a dance or a song, feigned anger for having been neglected, a sprained ankle, tears, a jealous rage have beguiled generations of men to lose thousands of extra rupees or gold coins to these women. The tawa’ifs refusal, at a critical juncture, to complete a sexual interlude with a favourite patron is a particularly profitable device…’

 

On the other hand, the dancers of today, for whom sexual availability is no longer a prerequisite for performing bharata natyam, see no need for that final aquiesence. What the poet has left out, that transition from anger to arousal, can’t be imaginatively filled in. Once the dancer has said ‘Go away’ her natural response, the one that intersects with her real emotion, is to show the unfaithful lover the door. This is in line with our contemporary ideas of the nature of love, the relationships between men and women and our notions of consent. Leaving out the last verse is a legitimate artistic choice.

What if the emotional journey is one you don’t want to take? The Kshtreyya padam that begins, ‘Why do you want me to go to him? Why don’t you go yourself?’ is more troubling. The poem describes an incident that could be hashtagged MeToo:

He pinched my unripe breasts,

just sprouted

until it hurt, while I protested

pressing into them with his sharp nails

I screamed aloud

and he slunk away like a thief.

I am frightened.

He pulled me towards him

making all kinds of promises,

and gagged my mouth, overpowering me

and did everything he liked.

I am frightened.

When this padam was performed in Los Angeles in October 2006 by visiting dancers from India, Ramaa Bharadvaj tried to initiate a conversation in the pages of an online Indian dance and music forum Narthaki. To Bharadvaj, the meaning of the padam raised ethical questions. She expressed the opinion that, having grown up in a culture in which the described actions are criminal and morally abhorrent, ‘…all that this particular song did was to conjure up in my mind images of monstrous men preying on children.’⁹

 

We can tell that this happened long before the #MeToo movement took off, because the response was incensed. One camp, in all caps, suggested that Bharadvaj was just jealous, because she herself was not such a good dancer; the other criticized her for not understanding the underlying devotional aspect of the poem, since the older man molesting the girl is the god Krishna. Bharadvaj wasn’t asking for any songs to be banned; she was questioning whether they could be performed and appreciated by an audience without context.

Other padams deal with the same theme. In Idu sahasamulu, Swathi Thirunal has the young girl saying, ‘I am still a child. I haven’t even seen a man properly. Should you do this to me? Please listen to me, oh lord, and stop. When I’m older I’ll make love to you.’

 

The young Balasaraswati as a child of seven could have performed one of these padams as part of that much admired first performance in 1925. At that time, the reformers who saw the Devadasi system as exploitative and abusive were fighting to raise the age of dedication to sixteen. So there was no legislation in effect to prevent a child like her from being dedicated to the temple. Had that happened, the actions that the padam described could have actually taken place, the young dancer’s body being the site of both theatrical representation and real molestation.

On the other hand a dancer today, who is not a child, who is not constrained to have sex with men to whom she isn’t attracted, can enact this padam in a fully empowered way should she so choose. After all, even feminists can have fantasies of being raped.

One padam describes Krishna disguising himself as a woman in order to trick a young girl into having sex. She says, ‘and now my heart is troubled/by what he did.’¹⁰ Another padam expresses the heroine’s complaint when, in the night, she turns to embrace her lover only to find she’s kissing the woman he’s secretly brought into their bed.

Both situations sound like those letters printed in the top shelf magazines: ‘Dear Penthouse, you’ll never believe what happened. My friends introduced her to me as our relative’s daughter. After a while, she said, "I’m bored. Let’s play a kissing game. Too bad we’re both women…"’ No, there isn’t consent, but the words and the phrasing suggest a titillating fantasy. I imagine that these are the kinds of padams that Rukmini Devi found too sexy, and that Balasaraswati was anxious to keep from being purely about the body’s rapture.

The heroine of the padams is willing to take great risks for sexual pleasure, evading mothers-in-law, husbands, snakes, travelling thorny paths at night, braving the gossip of neighbours and the jealous wiles of other women. She makes herself vulnerable, not sure of what she wants until Krishna shows her. After initial reluctance, she discovers her desire and its fulfilment in moments such as this one in the ashtapadi, when Radha says, ‘He unloosed my hair, strewing jasmine buds/I cooed like a kokila bird.’

 

In most padams, though, desire is unresolved. If the woman is not yearning for an absent lover, she’s angry with him for having stayed away so long, or for having been unfaithful in the interim, or for showing up with the signs of his recent lovemaking with another right there on his face.

Or consider the various exploits of a younger Krishna, where he takes the gopi’s clothes as she bathes in the river, and forces her to come out of the water naked, arms raised in obeisance above her head in order to get them back. He steals butter from the gopis and breaks their pots so that the curds soak them. What is undeniably true is that if a real boy were to do the things that I was supposed to enact Krishna doing, my response would be to call the police.

 

Canadian dancer Nithya Garg talks about her experience of learning such a piece, Chikkavane ivanu, a Purandaradasa kriti from the 14th century that describes Krishna as harassing women in different ways: catching her alone and demanding sex; while her hands are occupied in churning the butter, pinching her breasts; sneaking into the bed and pretending to be her husband. I quote her at length because her experience and thought process is so pertinent to my point:

‘I think what’s odd about this piece is not that it is highly sexual. It just doesn’t make sense, the childishness with which Krishna’s portrayed. I couldn’t bear the fact that we were dancing with no deeper introspection into how weirdly sinister it was. But then, you can’t say it’s sinister right? Because it’s Krishna! Hence lies the problem. There was no way to insert my own feelings or interpretation, mainly because I was too young to have any idea of speaking up to my guru.

‘What is interesting is, now, having learnt and seen more sexually implicit or explicit classical pieces, I’m realizing it has nothing to do with brahminical prudishness around sex that made that piece off-putting. It was the thoughtlessness with which we were portraying obviously problematic acts.

‘I still grapple with whether or not the piece could be portrayed in a playful manner, as though the gopis are pretending to be upset, while secretly having a wildly sexy time in Vrindavan. Then maybe I would feel differently. But that hasn’t been the way I’ve danced it, or seen it danced. People either interpret the lyrics literally, with no deeper reflection and end up showing terrified gopis trying to run away from Krishna to no avail (painful to watch or dance), or they sanitize it and gloss over the more disturbing parts, which is odd because the lyrics are there as evidence of the deviation.

‘There is such a dissonance between bhakti oriented interpretations, and the clearly problematic nature of the acts ascribed to Krishna.’

We can’t apply present-day notions of consent, bodily autonomy and desire, since that would betray the context when the poems were written and first performed. But neither can we simply turn away from or ignore our own emotional responses to the situations they depict. Even when the poems describe interactions that are humiliating, or disgusting, or frightening, they become compelling to the extent that they allow the dancer to explore the landscape of her own desire. In the final analysis, the dancer is not expressing the poet’s emotion, but her own. Nothing remains that is not the dancer once the dance is over.

 

It is the transgressive nature of those acts ascribed to Krishna that give these situations their transformative power within the construct of bhakti. Once upon a time bhakti itself was radical, set against mainstream societal pre-occupations. Precisely because ‘Krishna’ is not reducible to M.J. Akbar, he reveals the possibilities within spaces of danger, intrigue, deception, disgust, vulnerability and surrender for actualization of the sexual self, such that it becomes the paradigm for transcendence. Bharata natyam abhinaya provides a structure for the dancer to examine and delineate the terms of that equation. Her own introspective engagement with the conventions of the form has the power to upturn ordinary notions of right and wrong.

If the padams engage us today it is through the freedom with which the poets of the genre explore a range of erotic possibilities in male/female relations, often not the sort of sex that society deems permissible. The emphasis they place on illicit love, where the woman speaking is parakiya (belonging to another) or samanya (belonging to anyone) rather than svakiya (one’s own) expresses the poet’s understanding of the nature of erotic love and the nature of marriage – that the two can’t properly coexist.

The poets express an understanding of the essential dynamics of seduction: desire, that restless, incessant seeking towards completion, is destroyed by the very union it is striving to achieve, so quarrels, infidelities, misunderstandings, trampling of boundaries, ignoring of ‘no’s, are the necessary ground for its enactment. The affirmative consent that the #MeToo movement wants to implement would entirely short circuit this process. Both her reluctance and his determination, or his reluctance and her determination, are requirements for seduction to proceed. For lovers, seduction is the ultimate means to resolve their disagreements.

 

Seduction is the artist’s way as well. In examining these dynamics, it’s hard to say who exactly is being seduced: the poet Kshetrayya, seduced by the devadasi in the temple, seduces her by writing poems in which a woman is seducing or being seduced by Muvva Gopala, the god she loves; devadasis dance his songs of seduction to seduce their clients, using gestures and movements that seduce women who don’t want or need to be seductive to learn the art, who use it to seduce new audiences into experiencing srngara rasa, the distilled essence of seduction.

In the audience-centred understanding of art that comes from the Natya Sastra, the one who wants to experience rasa must be open to the experience, be sahrdaya in fact – must share the same heart. Rasa is a participatory endeavour. The dancer has to be seductive, and we must be willing to be seduced.

 

Footnotes:

1. Balasaraswati.

2. Rukmini Devi.

3. My father told me of attending such performances by devadasis in his youth.

4. As told to Seema Agarwal by Meera Seshadri in private conversations.

5. John Higgins, Programme of the 11th Dance Festival, The Music Academy Madras.

6. A.K. Ramanujan, V.N. Rao and D. Shulman, When God is a Customer. Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 28.

7. Ramiah Pillai interview.

8. With the permission of her husband who nevertheless wouldn’t allow her to take male students.

9. http://www.narthaki.com/info/articles/art171.html

10. A.K. Ramanujan, V.N. Rao and D. Shulman, op. cit., p. 71.