This is a blog post from
11th Century | India :
Kamakshi disrobed and cleared the trickling sweat off her dusky neck with a damp towel. She had just returned to her chambers after offering prayers to her Lord, and what an audience had assembled that evening! Adept at Sadir, fluent in Bhajans and dutiful towards her beloved, Kamakshi’s life as a Devadasi was one any common girl would choose for herself and her daughter. She was patronised by one of the most affluent men in the kingdom and she spent her day dancing in praise of God. She was able to express her spiritual and sensual self through her movement, and she was lauded for it, for there was no greater practice than the display of devotion. She needed nothing outside the four walls of this temple that granted her the space to dance and shower in the divine glory of a Lord she knew mystically. Would this luxury beat the fetters of widowhood like her eternal marriage?
17th Century | Atlantic :
Jackson rested his hard body against the walls of the deck, noting the tightened muscles under the dark chocolatey skin of his arms. Home was half an ocean away and he was heading toward the unknown land of azure eyes and milky complexions. The group had had a lively session of dancing this morning, and Jackson was pleased to have some semblance of his culture in tact despite being so far away from everything that was familiar. Life was about to get better, the white man promised. It would be hard work, his cousin had heard. As long as he could tap his feet and shuffle to the rhythm of those beats he had grown up listening to, he could get through any degree of tumult. As long as he could breathe Africa through his dance…
Though Kamakshi and Jackson belong to different realms of history and society, their stories and what they stand for, have a common villain… or is it a hero?
Evolution is largely viewed as a positive thing. It suggests a “survival of the fittest”, which indicates growth, maturation or improvement. Something to think about, though, is that perhaps this positive thing is laced with a few drops of unpleasantness. Perhaps these drops of unpleasantness functioned as a fuel towards betterment. The human mind tends to repress certain memories which are painful. Why think of an unpleasant time in the past when one is happy with how the present turned out? It may be difficult to see a silver lining in unpleasantness, but maybe unpleasantness is exactly what was required to reach a pleasant present. It pays, therefore, to take a peek back once in a while, just to remember how we got here. Take dance, for example....
Much has been said about the reformist and abolitionist movements during India’s freedom struggle, and there is a whole lot of discussion about the dilution of culture, attributed to the colonisers, the British. In the case of the Devadasis, a community of female dancers dedicated to temples, the British are said to have had a degrading effect. These dancers lost their status in society when the British rulers behaved adversely towards kings who patronised temples and the practice of prayer through dance and music.
Fall from grace
The devadasi women were reduced to the identity of prostitutes and ripped not just of their social standing but also the sanctity of their art. Their dancing was written off as vulgar and their being offered to a temple ceased to be a thing of dignity. The British looked at Indian art forms, particularly the system of temple dancers, as crude and immoral. These women were not bound by legal marriage, and had partners among patrons or other male members of the elite. Many of their dances were conceptualised around erotic love for a God, which did not fit the ideologies of western culture, causing this performance art to get very close to being completely wiped out.
Contrary to the apparent decaying of Indian classical dance during colonialism, art practised by African slaves in America was not looked upon as taboo. Granted. While the slaves looked to their culture for comfort in the midst of hardship, their traditional music and dance was perceived as entertainment by plantation owners. The white man took to this genre of performance art so much that he used his abundant resources to take it to bigger platforms in the form of Minstrel shows.
But here's the kicker. The white man made a mockery of these African dance styles. Early Minstresly typically involved the white performers blackening their faces and performing the dances in the format of a comic show, belittling the native culture of their African slaves.
In both these chapters of oppression, it is fair to say the coloniser rather disregarded the importance and underlying prestige of indigenous art.
What Devadasis considered an integral part of their self was left to fester like an unwanted scab. What the Africans slaves revelled and took solace in was reduced to a sideshow. It was perhaps a fuel concocted with equal parts anger towards colonisation and a drive to keep generating those art-induced endorphins that led these victims to rocket out of a life fraught with constraints. Kamakshi and Jackson’s respective successors took it into their own hands to repossess their dance forms and immunise them from deprecation.
Sri Rukmani Devi, the famous Bharatanatyam dancer as she appeared on October 6, 1940.
The reconstruction of Sadir into Bharatanatyam took place under the wings of E. Krishna Iyer and theosophist Rukmini Devi Arundale. Both Iyer and Arundale recognised that Sadir had more dimensions to it than the perceivable sensuality or vulgarity in its movements and themes. They wanted to rid the art form of the attached stigma that came about as a result of the colonisers equating devadasis (the original practitioners of Sadir) to prostitutes, thereby causing reformists to look upon the art itself as taboo.
While Krishna Iyer established the platform (Madras Music Academy), Arundale broke the ancient methods down, fused them with the aesthetics of western ballet and gave birth to the modern-day Bharatanatyam. She moulded the new technique in a way that diminished the apparent vulgarity that caused the art form's degradation. Arundale excised some of the erotic facets of Sadir, such as certain neck, lip, hip and chest movements that made the dance appear to be sensuously provocative. She even altered the themes on which most compositions were based, making them more “chaste” and “pure”, particularly with regard to pieces revolving around the display of love. The aim was to put forth the spirituality of the dance without the taint of sensuous intentions.
Costumes, stage design and format of performances were adapted such that they could be presented on a public platform (unrestricted by temple doors), but at the same time, not invite criticism from reformists and abolitionists influenced by western culture. The revival and current practice of Bharatanatyam can thus be attributed largely to the reaction against the downfall of the Devadasi system. Once someone threatens something close to your heart, you fight to protect it, improve it and bolster it against potential harm, which is the building block of evolution.
The jig is up
The demeaning Minstrel shows also pushed Africans to retaliate. They reclaimed their dance traditions and presented them in their right spirit, but the movements had already been altered by the amalgamation of the Irish jig, the English clog and other steps picked up while observing plantation workers perform pure African dances.
Many dance forms sprouted as a result of the harmonisation of African and European dance styles in the 1900s, which catalysed the evolution of Jazz dance. While most of the original moves were traditionally set to the sound of native African beats, dancers slowly began adapting them to more popular music to appeal to all categories of audience. This originated during the Minstrel shows, where the musical scores were a blend of African with Irish and Scottish folk music. The jazz style, in itself, started to find a new identity after the decline of Minstrelsy and the subsequent Vaudeville shows, which were the staging of a variety of unrelated acts.
By then, Jazz had developed as an African-Amercian vernacular dance form, merged with ballet techniques, movements created out of caricaturisation of other cultures (like the Cakewalk, a dance in imitation of the way Americans walked) and the result of the interaction of many cultures within New Orleans, the birthplace of Jazz. The dance branched out into several styles such as modern dance, the Lindy Hop, Tap dance, the Charleston etc. Jazz dance is typically set to the sound of the prevailing popular music of the time, and yet it has retained some of the original native African steps and slides like shuffling.
In a way, both Indian classical and jazz dance found their feet in the modern world because of a certain pressure put on them during colonisation. Sure, there were other driving forces, but it may be safe to assume that in the context of these particular dance forms (and many others not considered here), the Imperialists and their influence played a defining role in the evolution of the styles as we know them today. They could have taken a different course and turned into completely different visuals under the influence of other aspects of the socio-cultural climate.
Butwould the Bharatanatyam experience be what it is today if the Devadasi system continued to churn out erotic choreographies? Would jazz fight gravity the way it does now if African native traditions literally stayed grounded and continued to pulsate to their own beats? It is difficult to visualise what these dances would look like now had they been through different political circumstances, but it is safe to assume that they are, today, a blend of cultural roots and colonial interference stirred by the threat of extinction.
....So, as you gaze mesmerised at Jack Cole's kaleidoscopic legs or marvel at the graceful movements of Priyadarshini Govind, remember: we went through slavery and woman-shaming to get here!
