My sister’s dance school had a show for all the students the other day, and it reminded me of a blog post I had drafted months ago, but set aside because I couldn’t get youtube to work for some reason. I had accompanied her to a dance recital that featured four different forms of classical Indian dance – Odissi, Manipuri, Mohiniyattam and Bharata Natyam. It was an exciting set of performances, part of a tribute to Sucheta Chapekar, a Pune-based Bharata Natyam (BN) dancer and researcher who has done much to popularize the study and patronage of classical dance in the city. Leading performers also spoke at a seminar about contemporary issues facing their particular dance forms, aesthetics, audiences, etc. As I sat there, rapt, it made me think about how, in always celebrating Pune’s love for classical music, its burgeoning dance community doesn’t really get the critical attention it deserves. Thanks to my sister who dances, choreographs and teaches BN here, I have been lucky to attend quite a few shows, big and small, and think a little bit (as a complete outsider to the art form) about the way in which different forms of haute dance impact ideas of national art and culture, language and tradition, and how contemporary moves shape and reshape these practices, in a madly expanding city whose social face is itself undergoing a rapid transformation.
Given that its aesthetics are so deeply enmeshed with Hindustani music, you would perhaps expect Kathak, the northern Indian courtly dance to dominate in Pune. Above is a superb Kathak piece by the legendary Saswati Sen, in the Satyajit Ray film Shatranj ke Khilari (Chessplayers). Kathak is indeed popular, but it is Bharata Natyam (BN), the southern form originating in Tamil Nadu that has captured the middle-class imagination in Pune. Classes have mushroomed in the city over the last decade or so, some ambitious academies, and others small neighbourhood courses for young school-going girls. Many of these complete the required six-year margam, after which they graduate with their first public performance, the arangetram. Hardly a week passes in December-January or May without an announcement in the newspaper about an arangetram in the city.
These arangetrams are expensive to organize, with the students’ parents footing the bill of the theatre, costumes, musicians, jewellery, etc. Although they can sometimes resemble a debutante ball for one individual dancer, rising costs have compelled several middling families of graduating students to mount a joint effort nowadays. This, in turn, has compelled novel approaches to choreography, in a form that has traditionally revolved around the solitary performer. Many leading BN dancers perform solo; aside from the intensely personal nature of the emotions expressed in the dance, performing solo on stage for several hours also relates to the technical virtuosity of the dancer. Here is a well known BN exponent, Malavika Sarukkai:
But in the new multiple-performer format, there is a lot of innovation in terms of stage configurations and the kinds of items performed. For instance, a lot more emphasis on geometric patterns, symmetric variations, contrapuntal actions in the more physical and technical nritta pieces, rather than on solo stamina. In the abhinaya or expressive, emotive pieces, there seem to be a lot more ensemble dance-drama compositions that build on conversations, narratives and social situations. Below is a fine example of this kind of group choreography:
Another interesting innovation is in language – BN is a dance form steeped in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit, but now popular in a city whose language is Marathi (and increasingly Hindi). Traditional 18th & 19th c pieces continue to form the mainstay of the performances – even though the Marathi dancers in Pune have little direct exposure to the words of these poems. The language of mudra (hand gestures), is of course a primary translator, as is the emotion of the music. But of late, many younger dancers are choreographing pieces from their own languages as well. BN flourished in the Gujarati city of Baroda over the 20th century, at the famous Maharaja Sayajirao University for the Arts, far away from the Tamil heartland, and there is now a sizeable repertoire of pieces in Gujarati. My sister draws on a large corpus of Marathi and Kannada devotional and erotic poetry to compose fresh items, and nearly every arangetram I have attended in Pune has included a couple of Marathi items, even as many of the traditional Tamil pieces have also become more familiar to audiences here.
Of course, the spectre of authenticity looms large over all these experiments. Although it is now often hailed as the pre-eminent form of Indian classical dance, BN is also viewed as part of a particular Tamil heritage and there is no doubt that Chennai and other Tamil sites remain the heart of the art form. Some view these linguistic and musical innovations (with Hindustani ragas, tunes and beats) as inappropriate, doing violence to the core of BN’s aesthetics. And yet, this popularity outside its heartland has certainly contributed to its elevation into classical, national heritage. I admit I am torn. I have never been a big fan of the Ravi Shankar style fusion music that throws strange twangs and twings together (I cannot stand the phrase “world music” and most of what is peddled in its name), and yet (perhaps because I speak Marathi?) I really like and appreciate the experiments that combine Marathi compositions with BN mudra and abhinaya. Part of it is a question of time; all experiments, over time, become tradition, and in the next few decades, perhaps this linguistic variety may well become part of BN’s core aesthetics?
Although steeped in Hindu devotionalism of various (often contradictory) kinds, if my sister’s students are any indication, students in Pune are from all religious backgrounds, and I wonder how this shift from a particular regional and social set of performers and audiences to a much more diverse pan-Indian middle-class is going to shape its repertoire. An important question raised at the symposium was about the ability of these art/dance forms to address changing needs and ideas of family, feminism and individualism – can the love of Radha and Krishna continue to speak, however flexibly and timelessly, to changing notions of sexuality, gender, devotion or romance? Or, like language, music and choreography, how will BN’s core aesthetics (or Kathak’s or Odissi’s, for that matter) engage afresh with the ever-changing social? In this regard, whither their classicism?
Of course, classicism and tradition are themselves modern ideas about the past and seek to fix what is actually a continuously changing process. Scholars have analyzed this “classicization” of BN during the nationalist movement, and even before the nation, the great Serfoji composed some beautiful Marathi pieces for BN as a ruler of a princely state in Tamil country. But it remains to be seen how the resurgent categories of nation and national culture on the one hand, and the pressures of globalized entertainment, fusion dance, reality dance competitions that prize innovation and agility above all else on the other, will influence what young dancers in neighbourhood schools of classical dance like my sister’s aspire to as their career, as their aesthetic outlet, and as their passion.
Part of the Chapekar anniversary celebrations was an evening’s performance by the leading dancers from these different classical schools. One doesn’t usually see these juxtaposed so closely together; while the more geometrical movements of BN slide gracefully into the sensuous and fluid shapes of Odissi or Mohini Attam (the video right above this paragraph) from the neighbouring region of Orissa and Kerala, Manipuri from further northeast is dramatically different. But they had an interesting common thread – nearly all of them performed pieces from the legendary Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, a medieval literary, musical and erotic masterpiece on Krishna’s life. It was a revealing exercise in the sheer potential of choreography and imagination to see the familiar ashtapadis from Gita Govinda figure one after the other in such diverse visual, physical and musical avatars. (That link also has a lot of examples from different dance forms of various Gita Govinda poems)
The piece right above is an Odissi rendition of a popular piece from this text, hariiriha mugdha vadhuu. My sister regularly performs the BN variant of this poem as a slow, langourous and erotic invocation of Radha’s longing for her lover Krishna. That day, the Manipuri dancers presented it in such an upbeat, innocent and decidedly playful interpretation in the Manipuri dance that it took me a while to recognize it through the words! Here is another Manipuri piece, also from Gita Govinda:
Unity in diversity is an extremely tired and cliched, not to say exploitative and delusional, mantra of the modern Indian national imagination, but I am tempted to argue that it is in these unexpected moments, in grasping the beauty of these creative expressions, their commonalities as well as their distinct possibilities, that the phrase gains any meaning at all. I left the concert wishing they had included a Kathak performance in it as well – but here is another famous Gita Govinda poem, yaahii maadhava, where the dancer is upset with Krishna’s infidelity – also performed by Saswati Sen. Set to raga Bhairavi, this is so much more plaintive and weepy than the rather more furious and sarcastic BN interpretation I have seen.
In the end, I gotta say –
1) Some of these videos are short and not of great quality, but I love youtube.
2) Madhavi mami is a bit surprised, but thrilled to bits that her wire baskets have got such a positive response. Let me see if I can get some detailed instructions and post them here. Thanks so much for the feedback!
Yes, those two words do conjure up my near neurotic devotion to the HBO series, but this is not about my turning into a basket-case over the Wire. It’s about a craft that involves making shopping baskets out of plastic wires, something my aunt Madhavi mami has been doing for decades.
Madhavi mami has made hundreds of these, and gifted one to nearly everyone in our extended family on my mum’s side on some occasion or other; my parents have brought the veggies home from the market in the one she gave us, for twenty-three years. It was getting rather frayed at the handles of late, so she gave them another one. While I was visiting her some time back, she was making yet another, so I decided to capture the process in a photo-essay.
Kits for these baskets are available, in solid or multi-coloured packs, in that great mecca of crafts in Pune, Tulshibaug. I haven’t been able to trace how the wires themselves are made, or from what kind of plastic. The wires are flat, slightly curved, and are in long spools of 20-odd metres per colour. You start off by cutting off strips of equal length (there is some odd maths involved here about the ratio of the primary to secondary colour, one being slightly shorter than the other to ensure the rectangular shape of the basket).
Then you make the first knot of two tightly interlocked Zs, folding one wire into a Z, and then threading the other sideways into it. Once they are locked in the vice like grip, you have the basic unit of the basket.
This is not as easy as it seems, and the main problem is sorting out which wire goes where, and keeping the knots tight. It takes not so much physical strength as deft wristwork to get the knots to sit snugly, and takes a bit of practice. I tried a few after a very long time – my aunt taught me this basket making when I was a kid, and the bits I helped her make were very easy to spot in the finished basket: loose, half-hearted patches in the middle of the tight, determined weave. They weren’t much tighter this time round either, but I was certainly determined!
You then add knots in all four directions of this initial knot, making the central spine of the flat bottom of the basket. Once you have the length and breadth you want, you “turn” the knots upwards into a rectangular tube, and keep weaving till you have a basket deep enough. When done, you weave the wire ends inwards into the basket, leaving it with a sturdy edge.
Then you braid a nifty handle for it.
These bags were probably the height of fashion a long long time ago, and when I was in college it was simply not cool for a certain set, especially the urban elite in Pune and Bombay, to be seen grocery shopping in them. They are, I guess, the shopping basket equivalent of crocheted granny squares, and over the last couple of decades, it’s breathtaking how almost everyone has taken to the flimsier, disposable “carry-bags” as not only more convenient, but a consumer’s free right. In this utterly warped sensibility that views plastic bags as modernity and progress over cloth and straw, clogging our drains and brains alike, these baskets are quaintly unfashionable, stubbornly utilitarian, and odd: they too are plastic, but reusable and heavily durable. Does anybody who has seen these in Pune or elsewhere know whether they are, or can be made of some kind of recyclable plastic?
bas ishq mohabbat pyaar…. So goes the song from the film, Delhi-6, that I mentioned in my last post. This is Delhi, my friend, nothing but love, it croons…..
I miss Delhi. Over the last two months, I had many a moment to mull over my sentiments about this mad city. It is a cliche to say that people have a love-hate relationship with Delhi, but alas, this is true and I am no different. It’s not just the fact that most of my friends in India live there, or that it’s the nerve-centre of the history academy, or that I have bittersweet memories of past lives. It’s also its many quirks and vices that are difficult to categorize. So here are some random likes and dislikes.
L) I love the months of Feb-March in the city when the dry winter gives way to a hesitant short spring. You can go from woollen vests to thin cotton tops in a span of ten days around Holi. Gardens all over are in riotous bloom, especially the roses at the President’s residence, but I especially love the bougainvillea that pours out on to footpaths like pink paint from a can knocked over, and the silk-cotton flowers strewn all over the ground.
D) For all its greenery, I detest the wasteland that is the central, planned city of “Lutyens” New Delhi. Everyone seems to ooh and aah about its lush elegance, its colonial bungalows, landscaped rotaries and tree-lined avenues, but the area is an effing nightmare for pedestrians. The lack of proper traffic lights turns the mildest of drivers into raving lunatics, while it takes pedestrians an eternity to cross a road or rotary. To say nothing about the fact that this suburban, made-for-cars layout in the middle of the city, with no shops or people to keep it alive after sundown, makes it very unsafe for women to walk around by themselves right in the heart of town.
L) But I gotta say, in the late winter afternoon sun, walking a kilometre or two down these avenues for lunch from the archives to one of the State houses for various regional cuisines, gossiping and laughing with friends, or alone, spotting birds in the trees is wonderful. This is also the time when Delhi comes alive with concerts – classical dance, play competitions in different languages, free music concerts in the parks, food and film and handicraft festivals… it’s hard to decide what to go to and what to miss. In general, I favoured food over film, but I managed a good dose of the rest as well!
D)But the whole place also has a kind of sarkari stench hanging over it. Compared to the crass malls of Gurgaon and the shining lights of privatization all over the country, this Nehruvian-elite govt-servant scene in the capital seems positively benign to many, but it sets my teeth on edge. It’s not just the “lal-batti” culture of politicians with commando security and blinking cars holding traffic ransom at will. Everything from the clipped accents to the ethnic-chic elegance and the hush and rustle of well-heeled power that self-deprecatingly and disingenuously masks itself as middle-class is at once very familiar and quite repellent.
L) Delhi-ites reading this will snort in disbelief when they read this, but I actually enjoyed public transportation this time round. I’m not just talking about the Metro, which is fucking amazing. I travelled by DTC and chartered buses every day to work and back, and experienced some of the camaraderie of daily commuters that I hadn’t before. In the green government buses, the conductor sits at the back, making everyone go to him to get their ticket. In the rush hour pickle, this is not really possible. So people sitting on his side of the bus pass money back and forth to passengers throughout the bus. “1 seven,” “2 three,” “1 five,” they chant, telling him how many tickets of what denomination. They also pass back the tickets and change along the same chain, with a dispute occasionally breaking out and some accountant gamely rising to the occasion to solve it. The conductor robotically just dispenses tickets and passes them on. I had to do that once and very quickly lost my patience, but am amazed at how long others’ good humour (given that this is Delhi, after all) lasted.
D)The private Blueline bus-walas are barbarians for the most part, and regularly mow down people on the streets. Their conductors can dramatically improve your swear-word vocabulary in two days. Their status as a haven for molesters is also legendary, and this is easily one of the most hateful things about Delhi, bus commuting having scarred generations of women’s relationships with public space in the city. But I was surprised that I felt safer in them than I remember, with so many more women in all kinds of clothes in the buses, toting phones, backpacks, briefcases… I wonder whether mine was really a rose-tinted one-off experience, or if I’m just older (as a friend suggested, try asking younger women!), or whether Delhi’s male bus passengers are – gasp! – a tad improved on their humanity index?
L) But if the Blueline buses are a tribute to the Wild west, the Metro is positively brimming with civilization. It’s a shining symbol of the new India, but it retains a good dose of old Nehruvian societal improvement through homilies and maxims. Advice on dos and don’ts from watching out for unclaimed baggage, to moving to the centre of the carriage, to not spitting, to minding the gap, is fitted in neatly between station announcements. These regularly made me laugh, because they are so typical of the many faces of Delhi. A male baritone in a sardonic voice straight from a poetry session across in the old walled city, dressed in a sherwani and the grease of many a kabab, does the Hindi ones. “Aglaa station…” it says thoughtfully, taking a pause, as if to repeat the first phrase of the couplet, “Chandni chowk hai. Yahaan“.. (another thoughtful pause)… “Bharatiya Rail ke Dilli station ke liye badleiN.” (pause before the poem’s punchline..) “Saavdhaaniise utreiN.” Just as you are pondering the meaning of the poem, a school-marmy English female voice follows, in a clipped convent-educated-elite voice: “The next station is Chandni Chowk,” it spits out, with all the native elite’s contempt for native words. “Change here for the Delhi station of the Indian Railways Network. Mind the Gap.” You can almost feel the cane stinging your palm as you leave the train, your ears smarting with the punishment she has just doled out, and the sound of r’s correctly rolled.
So many random observations, so little space! All in all, it’s difficult to arrive at a balance sheet with the city. There is so much that I love and despise there, I wish I could keep going back on a regular basis just to keep the debate going in my head. Those reading this who have a similar love-hate relationship with Delhi, what are your pet raves and rants?
(A bunch of people asked why the blog has been so silent, and after digging deep for angsty reasons, I realised a practical one was a mental block against posts with pictures. Well, so here I am, trying to break it, with a post without pictures, totally covering up for not taking interesting pictures of the city while I was there.)
