When Swarnamalya Ganesh puts together a talk under the aegis of TSP memorial lecture and it is Sadanand Menon who is delivering it, one can be assured of some brilliant thought provoking speeches that will question, dare and break many of the views that you had held close, unsuspectingly.
I was a little late and missed the young scholar talk delivered by Kaveri Murthy of TISS. But, from what i could gather from her interactions with the audience, and in particular during q&a it was amply evident that she is a promising talent and willing to challenge traditional outlook. For instance, when one of her relative in the audience, spoke in a matter of pride, how Indian Children living abroad were being sent to dance classes to pick up on their culture, Kaveri was sharp in pointing out why the onus was only on the girls to pick up tradition in this narrative and questioned the kind of upper middle class, south indian traditional girl that these girls were being groomed into by these dance classes.
Sadanand started off his lecture recounting how TSP reacted to Chandralekha's Angika performance at The Music academy. TSP had gone back stage to squirm at Chandra and ask, 'why were there so many beards and bare chests on the stage'. Of course, this was the time when Chandra had just started collaborating with Kalaripayatu artists. He reminisced how many chats and debates had followed this event and every time they met. However TSP was always at awe of the crowd Chandra's performances pulled soon changed his outlook.
Sadanand's lecture was titled ' the invention of tradition in Indian Classical dance - the contribution of archaeology'. Sadanand is known to hold very strong opinions and build very strong cases for them. This time, it was no different. Sadanand recounted the birth pangs of the dance form of Bharathanatyam at the hands of Advocate Krishnaiyer around the time of Congress session in Chennai in the year 1927. The incidents and the circumstances are well recounted in this article,
E. Krishna Iyer, one of the Secretaries of the Academy and its driving force in its eventful life of the first decade, was himself a trained musician and dancer. He was eager to introduce the Sadir dance in the Academy’s programme but had to bide his time. In the autumn of 1927, the Council of State in Delhi discussed the motion of a member from Madras for the prevention of dedication of girls as devadasis. The motion was opposed by the then Law Member who held that the existing provisions of the Indian Penal Code were sufficient to deal with the immoral practices that were allegedly a consequence of the devadasi system. In November 1927, the Madras Legislative Council unanimously passed a resolution urging the Madras Government to prepare preventive legislation to stop the devadasi practice. Subsequently, in 1929, the Council legislated an amendment to the H.R. & C.E. Act, empowering temple authorities to disenfranchise devadasis from their temple connections and revoke by civil proceedings the manyams (land settlement and privileges) granted to them. In 1930, S. Muthulakshmi Reddy, a doctor and social leader who belonged to a devadasi family, brought a bill in the Council seeking to prohibit the performance of the devadasi dedicatory ceremonies in any Hindu temple. This was the last straw for pro-art progressives.
These were very exciting times and the news about the devadasi sysyem was in the papers evrey day evoking popular debate on the subject and this subject of the dancing girl attached to the temple, somehow inspired our archaeologists to call the bronze girl figurine they had unearthed at Mohenjadaro as the ' dancing girl' , even though Sadanand was convinced that there was no signs of the figure in any remote dancing posture, he jocularly hinted she could be a girl waiting in the queue to an ATM.
By one stroke of an unsuspecting nomenclature, the Archaeologists, in turn, had pushed the history of Indian dances to thousands of years. This also inspired many proponents of classical dance traditions to claim the 'dancing girl' as their own, for after all, the archaeologists had left it to anyone's guess as to which dance school did the girl belong to.
Krishna iyer and others felt the need to push their case for the Bharathanatyam by sanitising the dance practice that was in vogue then. It is sad that in doing so they had buried the dance practice and the tradition of music that it inspired and that was in vogue for centuries till then. This was also a time when these so called 'shameful tradition' practice was finding followers in the west. It was the dance tradition in this land that inspired the troubadours, french singers of love and western performances such as Radha by Ruth.
Sadanand took us a little back ward in time and narrated the circumstances in which Martha graham quit Denishawn company in 1923 and started her own enquiry into dance, since she felt Denishawn school was increasing getting clogged with decorative styles. The orgin of these decorative styles can be traced to early 1900s, when Ruth Denis performed Radha in 1906 inspired by Hindu mythology.
Denishawn had made footages of dance forms across asia in their travels here. These are available in archives in California and should be of great use in looking at what was the dance form like before the advent of Bharathanatyam. He rued that not much was being done in researching this aspect because this was a part of history that was being happily erased.
Sadanand rued the fact that the present day dance has taken the form and abandoned the context. it was a highly decorative exercise with no soul. Dance classes increasingly resembled millitary parades and costumes made for half the dance.
Sadanand concluded ruing the fact that tradition was something that was doctored and tampered according to the political needs of the time.
I was a little late and missed the young scholar talk delivered by Kaveri Murthy of TISS. But, from what i could gather from her interactions with the audience, and in particular during q&a it was amply evident that she is a promising talent and willing to challenge traditional outlook. For instance, when one of her relative in the audience, spoke in a matter of pride, how Indian Children living abroad were being sent to dance classes to pick up on their culture, Kaveri was sharp in pointing out why the onus was only on the girls to pick up tradition in this narrative and questioned the kind of upper middle class, south indian traditional girl that these girls were being groomed into by these dance classes.
Sadanand started off his lecture recounting how TSP reacted to Chandralekha's Angika performance at The Music academy. TSP had gone back stage to squirm at Chandra and ask, 'why were there so many beards and bare chests on the stage'. Of course, this was the time when Chandra had just started collaborating with Kalaripayatu artists. He reminisced how many chats and debates had followed this event and every time they met. However TSP was always at awe of the crowd Chandra's performances pulled soon changed his outlook.
Sadanand's lecture was titled ' the invention of tradition in Indian Classical dance - the contribution of archaeology'. Sadanand is known to hold very strong opinions and build very strong cases for them. This time, it was no different. Sadanand recounted the birth pangs of the dance form of Bharathanatyam at the hands of Advocate Krishnaiyer around the time of Congress session in Chennai in the year 1927. The incidents and the circumstances are well recounted in this article,
E. Krishna Iyer, one of the Secretaries of the Academy and its driving force in its eventful life of the first decade, was himself a trained musician and dancer. He was eager to introduce the Sadir dance in the Academy’s programme but had to bide his time. In the autumn of 1927, the Council of State in Delhi discussed the motion of a member from Madras for the prevention of dedication of girls as devadasis. The motion was opposed by the then Law Member who held that the existing provisions of the Indian Penal Code were sufficient to deal with the immoral practices that were allegedly a consequence of the devadasi system. In November 1927, the Madras Legislative Council unanimously passed a resolution urging the Madras Government to prepare preventive legislation to stop the devadasi practice. Subsequently, in 1929, the Council legislated an amendment to the H.R. & C.E. Act, empowering temple authorities to disenfranchise devadasis from their temple connections and revoke by civil proceedings the manyams (land settlement and privileges) granted to them. In 1930, S. Muthulakshmi Reddy, a doctor and social leader who belonged to a devadasi family, brought a bill in the Council seeking to prohibit the performance of the devadasi dedicatory ceremonies in any Hindu temple. This was the last straw for pro-art progressives.
These were very exciting times and the news about the devadasi sysyem was in the papers evrey day evoking popular debate on the subject and this subject of the dancing girl attached to the temple, somehow inspired our archaeologists to call the bronze girl figurine they had unearthed at Mohenjadaro as the ' dancing girl' , even though Sadanand was convinced that there was no signs of the figure in any remote dancing posture, he jocularly hinted she could be a girl waiting in the queue to an ATM.
Krishna iyer and others felt the need to push their case for the Bharathanatyam by sanitising the dance practice that was in vogue then. It is sad that in doing so they had buried the dance practice and the tradition of music that it inspired and that was in vogue for centuries till then. This was also a time when these so called 'shameful tradition' practice was finding followers in the west. It was the dance tradition in this land that inspired the troubadours, french singers of love and western performances such as Radha by Ruth.
Sadanand took us a little back ward in time and narrated the circumstances in which Martha graham quit Denishawn company in 1923 and started her own enquiry into dance, since she felt Denishawn school was increasing getting clogged with decorative styles. The orgin of these decorative styles can be traced to early 1900s, when Ruth Denis performed Radha in 1906 inspired by Hindu mythology.
Denishawn had made footages of dance forms across asia in their travels here. These are available in archives in California and should be of great use in looking at what was the dance form like before the advent of Bharathanatyam. He rued that not much was being done in researching this aspect because this was a part of history that was being happily erased.
Sadanand rued the fact that the present day dance has taken the form and abandoned the context. it was a highly decorative exercise with no soul. Dance classes increasingly resembled millitary parades and costumes made for half the dance.
Sadanand concluded ruing the fact that tradition was something that was doctored and tampered according to the political needs of the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment