Learning Differently With Traditional Art Practices

Our performing arts institution is located in a rapidly urbanizing area, south east of Bangalore.  The area has transformed from rural to semi-urban in less than ten years.  Semi-urban, because the civic infrastructure is poor and cultural and community commons are virtually non-existent.  I moved into this neighborhood five years ago and Antara began in an effort to bring artists to a community that had no access to any formal spaces for artistic practices.   For most urban middle-class children dance and music learning is accessed through out-of-school learning.  Majority of them do not pursue this learning beyond school age and these classes are generally the only formal arts-education they receive in their lifetime. 

We began with a commitment to traditional South Asian art practices (Odissi, Kathak, Bharatanatyam, Hindustani and Karnatic Music).   

What do these art practices bring us that conventional learning does not?

We believe that traditional artistic practices offer a range of benefits, helping one to form connections between:

·         concept and movement (or sound)

·         the physical and the ideal

·         reality and imagination

·         action and thought

·         most importantly, body and mind. 

Many young students who come to learn from us experience for the first time the connection between the living body and the lived body.  That is, they experience that the BODY not just the mind, is a SITE OF LEARNING.  Through their bodies they not only learn movement but also music, rhythm, history and myth.  Through reflective exercises of writing and other forms of expression that the students engage in as part of their dance training, we began to realize the depth of student’s experiences.

Traditional art practices taught at Antara serve as tools for embodied learning which are not normally offered in conventional education systems:

Conventional methods approach learning as:	Embodied practice at Antara, approach learning as:
teacher-centered, focused on external goals or student-centred and skill focused	developmental progression that happens with the beginning of inner awareness and moving towards an interaction with the outside world
mind focused and teach how to be outwardly organized	body-focused and teach how to be inwardly organized

An example of embodied learning practice at Antara:

Poornima Dahale, Odissi instructor at Antara is holding a 10-day intensive workshop for beginners.  Her classes include reflective exercises of the mind and deep relaxation practices.  In the open garden space at Antara, students are experiencing their bodies in a wholly different way.   The pictures say more than words can.

Poornima says

“I believe letting go of all stress, relaxing and enjoying works wonders vs. forcing, controlling and torturing your body.

I do not believe in mind over body theory. Body and mind work hand in hand. Both influence each other and guide each other. Body has its own wisdom and  it is constantly guiding us ,only if we could listen.

My journey is to find ways to share my love and passion for Odissi but with a more holistic and joyful approach. I try to learn from various forms of bodily practices and bring the most suitable lessons I learn into my own practice and sharing.”

Demystifying Devadasis, Demystifying Dance

Today almost three generations down from the nationalist movement, Devadasis are thought of as extinct and are recalled as people from the past. They are remembered either as auspicious women who were victimized by the society or as overly sexualized people who with their excessive sexual instincts were propagating a lifestyle which was regressive to the ideals and the growth of Indian society. Stigmatized as a community with regressive ideals, they were alienated from their own art.  These are not imaginings and ideas that are founded on material history of the Devadasi community but are certain tropes that were created as a result of the political agenda and interests of various people during the nationalist movement. Sadly, these tropes become the reference points of their history, to which they trace their present identities. These tropes are so dominant in the imagination of the people and the Devadasis themselves that, to uproot it, one has to delve historically into the complexities of their lives. One has to trace, not only linearly but dialectically to get some insight into the trajectory of events that unfolded in the history of Devadasis – the people and the practice. 

The Devadasis of the present day themselves have to invoke ‘artificial’ memories of their pasts that are constructed politically in order to make sense of their identity. Since Devadasis are portrayed in such opposing images of sexual exploitation on one hand and glorious artists on the other, they pose a problem of category. The Marxists interpret them as exploited labourers with no agency while some nationalists consider them as the keepers of the culture and the tradition of the country through their art and practice of dance. It is required, for us to articulate the past of the Devadasis differently to render their present identity, a historical reference and not vulgarly reductive and politically motivated stereotype. In order to open up multiple yet not skewed imagination of Devadasis, it is needed that we explore the social reality of the Devadasis in the previous centuries in India. To recount and account for historiographies exploring the subjectivities of the Devadasis who were common place is the need of the day and not just that of the few iconic and exceptional ones. A larger number of Devadasis are the ones whose voices were drowned in the loud commotion of the Nationalist movement with the grand agenda of reformation of the whole country.

Historically, the many roles played by devadasis are ambiguous in their definition and are amorphous in popular memory. The term “Devadasi” itself is a problematic term which is loaded with one, singular imagination. Various regional practices collapse under the weight of this one term and the meaning it entails. Leslie Orr in her book “Donors, Devotees and daughters of god” discusses how the term “Devadasi” is barely encountered in the regional inscriptions and the scripts of the 18th and 19th century. This implies that the word is a much modern creation that reduces and consolidates various practices into one category. Books like Davesh Soneji’s “Unfinished gestures” and autobiographies of devadasis such as “Rukmini Devi- A Life” by Leela Samson and “Balasaraswathi- Her Art and Life” by Douglas Knight demystify this term “Devadasi” for us. They reawaken the eclectic lives and practices in the 19th and the 20th century that are eclipsed by this singular dominant term. “Devadasi” as a terminology, is crudely understood to mean “slave of god” or “hand-maiden of god”. Stereotypically, we tend to associate the term with the temple women who were dedicated or symbolically married to the presiding deity of the temple.

Devadasis in temple have been the perpetual and persisting stereotypical image of the Devadasis in Indian cultural imagination. Apart from being in temples they were also courtesans and street dancers. Their roles were diverse and they were not restricted to dancing and singing. The modern idea of Devadasis is largely that of dancing women in temple. It is necessary to break this one image into the variety of experiences these women went through within and outside of temple. Leslie Orr in her work traces the beginnings of the Devadasi practice in the temples to the Chola period in the 6th to 9th century. She develops and constructs this history through inscriptional and iconographical evidences on the temple walls. She also claims that in the Chola dynasty, the temple women were the patrons of the temple as well which is clearly reversed by the medieval time. Though we frequently encounter the idea that the raison d’etre of the devadasis in the temple was singing and dancing, Leslie Orr says that their roles in the society were holistic and diverse, and their lives were relevant to the on-goings of the stately affairs.

Saskia Kerseboom, author of Nitya Sumangali, recently in a talk mentioned that dance was not just formal movement. It was a yagna which had a veda. A good dance performance was important for the well-being of the state, crops, king and his subjects. Dance in today’s society seems to have lost this relevance to our lives and is perceived as something apart from the everydayness of the world. This calls us to engage with the nature of the art practice and explore the lives of the artists, to see what made them so relevant and probably what should make artists relevant to our lives and world today.

References

• Soneji Davesh, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
• Orr, Leslie C., and Leslie Orrey. Donors, devotees, and daughters of God: temple women in medieval Tamilnadu. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
•  Samson, Leela. Rukmini Devi: A Life. Penguin Books India, 2010. 
• Knight, Douglas M. Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life. Wesleyan University Press, 2010. 
• Kerseboom, Saskia “An East-West Perspective on Abhinaya”, Conference “Abhinaya in Classical Dance”, Bangalore, November 15, 2014

Javalis- Abhinaya in the 21st Century

As part of Antara’s effort to situate South Asian dancing from an aesthetic, historical and social perspective, we carry reviews and analysis of some of these embodied practices.

This week’s blogpost is by Ajay Cadambi, a graduate student at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore who studies biophysics. His interests include the history of science, temple architecture and dance history. 

Javali, Raga Atana, Roopaka Tala

In 1920, the dedication of women to temple service was banned. This was directly in response to a nation-wide agitation that viewed women associated with temples as prostitutes. In Andhra, strangely enough, the art form of hereditary female performers survived well into the 1950s, in what are referred to as salon performances or mezuvani (from the urdu word mezban which means host). Contrary to popular belief, the devadasi did not perform excluslively within the precincts of the temple. Nationalists seem to want to skew over this fact, in their reconstruction of the history of art forms like Bharatanatyam which they describe as temple-centric.

Consequently, a large number of hereditary female perfomers or sanis were disenfranchised and their art form would have altogether disappeared into oblivion if not for the efforts of a wonderful woman named Vakkalanka Swapnasundari. With the support of her Kuchipudi guru, Pasumarthy Sitaramayya, she convinced various illustrious sanis from all the three major regions of Andhra, viz. Telangana, Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra to teach her their art. Important amongst them were Late Maddula Lakshminarayana, Late Chirutanipuram Pottigari Ranganayaki, Late Saride Anasuya and Late Golconda Bharathamma. Swapnasundari single handedly resurrected this art form and brought it to the proscenium stage.

A javali from this repertoire is presented by one of her students in the link I have pasted below.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEAp-Fmh6nQ

Unabashedly erotic, javalis are the quintessential marker of salon performances by courtesans. Soneji notes that “javalis are also signs of the volatile, sexually charged space of the salon, one that was diametrically opposed to the contained, private sexuality of the conjugal home." Like their predecessor, the padam, javalis are also tripartite and contain a pallavi (refrain), anupallavi (a sub-refrain) and charanams(stanzas). Like the padam, the narrative content of the javali is subject to multiple interpretations. The unravelling of this layered meaning through the medium of abhinaya (mime) via the use of hastas(hands) and facial movements that depict objects and ideas in multiple ways, in accordance with classical imagery associated with shringara (erotic love) is what would be expected from a good dancer.

A sani would also be expected to sing the javali in addition to performing abhinaya to it. The raga(melody) that the song is set to, the poetic devices used in the lyrics of the javali , and the tala(rhythm) enable narrative and aesthetic movement through the text. The narrator of the javali is almost always a woman and she is mostly in conversation with a patron, even if the lyrics themselves are directed towards a local representation of Krishna. The javali is always about the sexual subjectivity of the individual female performer and it is for this reason that sanis also talk of the proximities of their own lives to the narrative of the javali.

It is indeed, a rare opportunity to be able to witness elaborate abhinaya and to witness such a rare composition that is mostly unknown outside of the sani repertoire. Most of these javalis have not been documented in textual formats. There is an element of spontaneity in the performance as well which would be expected of a sani, because abhinaya was never “choregraphed” per se.  The distinctive feature of javali renditions in coastal Andhra is the gaptu-varusa, or improvised dance sequence, at the end, which apart from being exquisite in this particular rendition, undeniably marks the technical and aesthetic continuity of javali renditions in the courtesan community.

A brief description of the Javali is as follows:

The nayika is married and is trying to ward off the sexual advances of the hero. She might be doing so because she does not think highly him. He may not be a refined man for example. Or she may not want to engage with him because he has approached her at an inopportune moment and she does not wish to be caught by her husband. The dancer, Pujita Krishna Jyoti very skilfully portrays both these ideas.

“Expect nothing from me.

If my husband were to know, he will think me a cheat.

I am not like that lotus-eyed whore of yours, so these antics won't work.
I know you are only after my jewels, but I am not flattered by how handsome you are.

I can only tell smooth talkers like you to get lost.
Don't ask for things you can't have (like the moon).

I am appalled that you aren't even the least bit coy at approaching someone as exquisite as I.

Go away!”

 Reference:

- Soneji Davesh, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.