Sadanand Menon: From Mohenjodaro to Madhuri Dixit

CRITICALLY INCLINED

The past few years, I have responded to several requests for keynote lectures reviewing 'a century of Indian dance' "" a sort of a narrative of dance in India through the 20th century. It has made me reflect seriously on the time cycle applicable to Indian dances.

Considering there is the fictitious Mohenjodaro 'Dancing Girl' at one end and Madhuri Dixit at the other, the very concept of a 'hundred years' of dance is artificial within the Indian context. The time frame of a mere 'century' does not sit well with a civilisation that is comfortable speaking only in millennial terms.

Most readers will remember the news item, a month ago, of the Archaeological Survey of India's discovery "" at Bhirrana, a Harappan site in Haryana's Fatehabad district "" of a red potsherd with an engraving resembling the 'Dancing Girl,' the iconic bronze figurine of Mohenjodaro. While the bronze was found in the 1920s, the potsherd came up during ASI's excavations in 2004-05. A few hundred miles separate the two sites. ASI Archaeologist L S Rao claims, in Man and Environment (Volume XXXII, No.1, 2007), that the find belongs to the Mature Harappan period as, until now, "no parallel to the 'Dancing Girl' "" in bronze or any other medium "" was known". He writes, "The delineation [of the lines in the potsherd] is so true to the stance of the bronze that it appears the craftsmen of Bhirrana had first-hand knowledge of the former."

This has revived the old bogey of imagining the Mohenjodaro figurine of a girl in a tribhangi posture as being that of an early Bharatanatyam dancer. Dancer/choreographer Chandralekha used to pooh-pooh this claim saying, "Look at any Indian woman standing in the market or at a bus stop; they have exactly the same posture. We don't call them dancers. It is just an attempt to invent an ancient origin for classical dance." Eminent archaeologist H D Sankalia had, in a conversation with her in 1980, accepted her doubt as genuine.

It is this naïve, inventive interpretation of the past, combined with more conscious mystification of origins in Shiva's dance on Kailasa, which has relegated the discourse around dance to some sort of a speculative theology, simultaneously masking and obfuscating the politics and aesthetics of the 'body' that we inherited and the crisis of that 'body' in our times.

No hundred-year-audit of dance will be comprehensible without looking at its material sources in the subcontinent during the 2,000 years before it. Suffice it to say, a large variety of dances and body practices flourished in pre-Natya Shastra (200 BC to 200 AD) societies. The interlinks and overlaps in these were obviously observed and codified within a rigorous, structured, semiotic grid by Bharata in Natya Shastra, with a grammar and a cognitive system which has survived to this day (as pointed out in Chandralekha's seminal paper, Militant Origins of Indian Dance, Social Scientist, 1980).

Kapila Vatsysayan's Traditions of Indian Folk Dance (Indian Book Company, 1976) documents the impressive range, variety and diversity of the practice of dance at the micro- and macro-levels of the Indian subcontinent, most of which are connected to hunting and work practices, agricultural cycles, seasonal variations and fertility rituals.

As a common, connected gestural language evolved at the upper and lower ends of the social spectrum, the practice of dance was not seen as separate from daily life, breathing techniques, attack/defence systems, therapeutic practices or the broader disciplines of architecture, poetry and music.

While the dances of the 'folk' "" adivasis, agricultural labourers, subalterns "" stayed raw, robust, collective and energising, dance in temples and courts became increasingly individuated, decorative, esoteric and decadent. Towards mid-19th century, it was this form, practised in the rapidly decaying princely courts of India, which was reviled and proscribed within the logic of Protestant puritanism of the colonial masters. The charged, post-1920s' rhetoric around the 'Devadasi Abolition Act', initiated by newly Calvinised Indian elites, reflects all the confusions, ignorance, guilt and rage over the subject.

The early decades of the 20th century saw a new need to connect nostalgically with the past. Considering the ruptures, gaps and erotic material within it that the new moralism found hard to accept, the only option was to invoke a past, as if there was a cohesive, linear and continuous flow of 5,000 years from the 'Dancing Girl' of Mohenjodaro to our times.

This was false, for much of what we call 'traditional', was newly 'invented' between 1925 and 1970. As during the national liberation movement, it was inevitable that classical dances too would get co-opted in the post-independence nation-building project, to be successively projected as heritage and as art products both ambassadorial and market-friendly.

Yet, it is ridiculous how our elite and our academics continue their chicanery, periodically reinventing a 'timeless' frame for our dances, forgetting the Einsteinian dictum that anything 'timeless' is in a 'time-warp'.