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Voyages of Body and Soul

Voyages of Body and Soul: Selected Female Icons of India and Beyond

Edited by

Ketu H. Katrak and Anita R. Ratnam

Voyages of Body and Soul: Selected Female Icons of India and Beyond Edited by Ketu H. Katrak and Anita R. Ratnam

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Ketu H. Katrak, Anita Ratnam and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5644-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5644-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... ix

Preface ........................................................................................................ x

Acknowledgments ................................................................................... xvi

Part I: Mad and Divine Female Saint-Poets of India and Beyond

Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 Institutionalizing Identity Through Divinity: Female Saint Poets of Maharashtra Madhavi Narsalay

Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 10 of a Thousand Names: Vi u’s Beloved Mediator

Archana Venkatesan

Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 19 Translating the Autobiography of a Goddess Priya Sarukkai Chabria

Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 27 From Melody Queen to Muslim Madonna: Pakistani Female Singers Transcending the Secular/ Sacred Divide Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 35 Meerabai and St. Teresa of Avila: Lives in Parallel Worlds Nirupama Vaidyanathan

Part II: Performing Artists’ Process/Choreographic Notes: Mad and Divine Mystic Saint-Poets of India

Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 44 Darshan: Seeing Malavika Sarukkai

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Chapter Seven ........................................................................................... 50 Aditi Mangaldas Interviewed by Nirupama Vaidyanathan

Chapter Eight ............................................................................................ 53 Like Camphor on Fire Madhu Nataraj

Chapter Nine ............................................................................................. 59 Aikya: In the Voice of Akka Mahadevi Mythili Prakash

Chapter Ten .............................................................................................. 64 Soulful Abhangs and Thoughtful Vaakhs Rama Vaidyanathan

Part III: Epic Women of India and Beyond A. Female Icons of India’s Ancient Epics Re-Visited

Chapter Eleven ......................................................................................... 73 The Living Heroines of Indian Myths and Legends Prema Nandakumar

Chapter Twelve ........................................................................................ 81 Womanity: A Psychic Continuum of Selfhood and Tenacity, Keynotes of Sañgam Women Swarnamalya Ganesh

Chapter Thirteen ....................................................................................... 90 The Places and Spaces Inhabited by Sita: Freedom and Captivity Veenapani Chawla

Chapter Fourteen ...................................................................................... 98 On Sita Parityagam: The Abandonment of Sita Kapila Venu

B. Epic Women of Indian Dance: T. Balasaraswati, Rukmini Devi, Chandralekha, Indrani Rahman and Mrinalini Sarabhai

Chapter Fifteen ....................................................................................... 101 Remembering My Teacher: T. Balasaraswati Nandini Ramani

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Chapter Sixteen ...................................................................................... 109 Remembering Rukmini Devi Katherine Siebel Kunhiraman

Chapter Seventeen .................................................................................. 114 The Honest Body: Remembering Chandralekha Padmini Chettur

Chapter Eighteen .................................................................................... 119 My Mother Indrani Rahman Sukanya Rahman

Chapter Nineteen .................................................................................... 123 Mrinalini Sarabhai: Cosmopolitan Patriot and Epic Woman Andree Grau

C. Dark Women of Epics and Dramatic Literature

Chapter Twenty ...................................................................................... 135 Magical Connections Among Women with Passions of Epic Proportions: Medea, Lady Macbeth, Surpanakha Ketu H. Katrak

D. Epic Women in Politics

Chapter Twenty-One .............................................................................. 143 Epic Women in Politics Ammu Joseph

E. Feminist Evaluations of Epic Women

Chapter Twenty-Two .............................................................................. 152 The Power of Performance and Human Agency: Re-Assessing Feminist Evaluations of Epic Women Kalpana Ram

Part IV: Performing Artists’ Process/Choreographic Notes: Epic Women of India and Beyond

Chapter Twenty-Three ............................................................................ 162 Eleni of Sparta: An Indo-Greek Re-Telling Rajika Puri

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Chapter Twenty-Four ............................................................................. 167 The Good Wife: Arnaea & Arundhati from Sthreedom: Notices on an Immaculate Conception Chitra Sundaram

Chapter Twenty-Five .............................................................................. 175 Golden Peacock: On Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi Anusha Subramanyam

Chapter Twenty-Six ................................................................................ 179 On Kaanhopatra & Mata Hidimba Rajashree Shirke

Chapter Twenty-Seven ........................................................................... 184 Pulambal: Anguished Voice Lakshmi Vishwanthan

Chapter Twenty-Eight ............................................................................ 187 In the Spirit of Frida Kalpana Raghuraman

Contributors ............................................................................................ 191

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 6-1: Malavika Sarukkai, In Dream. Ray Clark, London ............... 44 Figure 6-2: Malavika Sarukkai, Dance. Ray Clark, London .................... 46 Figure 7-3: Aditi Mangaldas. Dinesh Khanna .......................................... 50 Figure 8-4: Madhu Nataraj. Shamanth Patil J ........................................... 53 Figure 9-5: Mythili Prakash, “Abhang Ecstasy”. Jorge Vismara .............. 59 Figure 10-6: Rama Vaidyanathan as Lal Ded. Avinash Pasricha ............. 64 Figure 10-7: Rama Vaidyanathan. Joris-Jan Bos ...................................... 69 Figure 12-8: Swarnamalya Ganesh in Nammai Marandarai Naam

Marakkamattom. Sundar Ramu .......................................................... 82 Figure 14-9: Kapila Venu. Vipul Sangoi .................................................. 98 Figure 15-10: Balasaraswati with Nandini Ramani and Priyamvada.

Archives of Dr.V. Raghavan Center For Performing Arts (Regd.), Chennai ............................................................................................. 101

Figure 15-11: Balasaraswati. Dhiraj ....................................................... 106 Figure 16-12: Rukmini Devi. Kalakshetra Foundation ........................... 109 Figure 17-13: Chandralekha performing Sakambhari, the opening portion

from her 1991 production, Sri. Bernd Merzenich ............................. 114 Figure 17-14: Chandralekha watching her dancers do “Namaskar”

on the beach, 1992. Sadanand Menon ............................................... 117 Figure 18-15: Indrani Rahman (Kuchipudi, Mandodari Shabdam) 1968.

©Sukanya Rahman/Ram Rahman Family Archives ......................... 119 Figure 18-16: Indrani Rahman (Orissi), Habib Rahman photo 1957.

©Sukanya Rahman/Ram Rahman Family Archives ......................... 121 Figure 19-17: Mrinalini Sarabhai. Darpana Academy

of Performing Arts ............................................................................ 123 Figure 23-18: Rajika Puri showing egg from which Eleni of Sparta

was born Epic Women. Vipul Sangoi ............................................... 162 Figure 24-19: Chitra Sundaram. Vipul Sangoi ....................................... 167 Figure 24-20: Chitra Sundaram. Vipul Sangoi ....................................... 170 Figure 25-21: Anusha Subramanyam. Vipul Sangoi .............................. 175 Figure 25-22: Anusha Subramanyam. Vipul Sangoi .............................. 176 Figure 26-23: Rajashree Shirke and group. Vipul Sangoi ...................... 179 Figure 27-24: Lakshmi Viswanathan. Foto Cylla ................................... 184 Figure 28-25: Kalpana Raghuraman. Simone Richardson ..................... 187

PREFACE

Our journey to this volume of essays and performance/choreographic notes has transpired over nearly three years, inspired by the Natya Darshan conferences and performances in December 2011 and 2012 (curated and convened by Anita R. Ratnam with Ketu H. Katrak as Academic Advisor) in Chennai, India under the auspices of Kartik Fine Arts, Arangham Trust, and the online dance portal www.narthaki.com. Our exploration of female icons of India and beyond brought together academics, artists, cultural commentators, historians, poets and writers, many of who are featured in this volume. In 2011, the theme of “Mad and Divine Women: Mystic Saint-poets of India and Beyond” took us into the minds and hearts of women such as Andaal, Akka Mahadevi, Janabai, Lalleswari and others who yearned for the divine via creative expression. In 2012, we delved into the theme of “Epic Women” from India and beyond. Participants, scholars and artists brought new illuminations to well-known figures such as Sita and Draupadi from India’s epics, others created performances on Greek female figures such as Penelope, and Eleni. We also included inspirational artistes like Frida Kahlo and contemporary women of epic courage living in our midst such as Ang San Suu Kyi (of Myanmar), as well as “dark” women with passions of epic proportions.

We developed the parameters of the notion of the “mad and divine” to imagine the lives and works of India’s unique female mystic saint-poets whose lives were dedicated to seeking the divine. Hence, they were ostracized from patriarchal society, even considered “mad.” We probed this unique kind of “madness” that passionately craves the divine. Is such “madness” necessary to reach the divine? Why is it that when men express such feelings that they are called “realized” and women are branded as “mad”? In a patriarchal society, are women quicker to endorse these archetypes? Are such phenomena still visible in our midst? Our feminist approach is attentive to historical and geographical realities that were the contexts for these women’s lives in male-dominated societies.

This volume of essays and choreographic notes on performances aims to humanize both the female mystic saint-poets misunderstood during their lifetimes, and women of Indian epics such as Sita and Draupadi whose common elevation to goddess status denies their many human dimensions. Our participants question the fixed, monolithic icons of ideal womanhood

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that have problematically become part of India’s collective unconscious. Hence, Sita as an ideal, self-sacrificing wife is upheld uncritically and used as a moral imperative to discipline young women even today. The contributors probe the troubling ways in which women, often to their own detriment, internalize patriarchal notions of manhood and womanhood. The layers of ideological constructions of gender are embedded in accretions of myth, history and legend, bringing together fact and fiction.

We recognize a curious reality, namely that mystic women poets yearned for male deities, perhaps subconsciously asserting a normative heterosexuality. One wonders why the most prominent of such figures do not desire female deities hence upholding a lesbian reality? Was such desire simply invisible? Would it indeed render these mystic saint poets, already marginalized in their patriarchal societies even further exiled from their human communities? A similar reality prevails with the women of the epics who are in visible heterosexual relationships such as Sita and Rama, or Draupadi with her five husbands. Again, in those patriarchal societies and even in contemporary times as we include women of epic courage, is the reality of same sex desire still invisible, or when visible, open to social discrimination, and even hostile legislation? The latter is evident in a recent, shocking ruling by India’s Supreme Court recriminalizing homosexual relations by upholding the archaic Indian Penal Code 377. This ruling, ironically an 1860 relic of British colonialism, reasserted in December 2013 shocked and outraged Indians and indeed the world as a step backwards in a democaratic society.

Female mystics from regions across the Indian sub-continent include figures such as Lalleshwari from Kashmir (in North India), and women saints from Maharashtra (in Western India), such as Janabai, some belonging to the lowest caste (dalits) who joined the sacred path to escape caste oppressions. Andaal, female mystic poet of the 8th century, from Tamil Nadu in Southern India, wrote poems where the body is central; she openly expressed erotic desire for Lord Vishnu. A different figure of the 16th century, Meerabai, wrote ecstatic poems in adoration of Lord Krishna. Meera left a royal husband, and was judged insane, as she was totally immersed in thoughts of her beloved Lord Krishna. With her fierce faith, she drank the poison that her husband’s family prepared and stayed alive. Such miraculous happenings on a physical level are entrancing in Indian lore. Another example comes from The Mahabharata when Lord Krishna rescues Draupadi from public humiliation since her five husbands are powerless to defend her. They lose Draupadi in a game of dice, and the evil Dushasana wishes to disrobe her as if executing a metaphoric rape on the woman’s body as her five husbands look on. Draupadi, with no human

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being to help her, prays to Lord Krishna who miraculously provides endless fabric to her saree until Dushasana collapses in exhaustion and Draupadi’s honor is untouched.

This volume includes prominent scholarly voices such as Madhavi Narsalay’s exposition of three female saint-poets from Maharashtra and their quest for the divine. Archana Venkatesan, an authority on the 8th century Tamil mystic saint-poet, Andaal presents a learned study of Andaal’s passionate verses in adoration of her beloved Lord Vishnu. Legend has it that everyday, Andaal made a garland of fragrant flowers for the Lord’s image, but she secretly wore it herself before it was taken to adorn the Lord. The garland was, for Andaal, a physical symbol of the passionate touch that she yearned from the One she believed to be wedded to. We have an essay by poet Priya Sarukkai Chabria, also on Andaal that presents Chabria’s own “transcreations” as she terms her translations of Andaal’s erotic poetry. In contrast, Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s essay takes us into the melodious sounds and personal courage of three highly accomplished contemporary Pakistani female singers who challenge the sacred and secular divides.

A favorite and popular female saint-poet, India’s Meerabai is discussed with a unique comparison to the Spanish saint Theresa of Avila, by Bharatanatyam dancer, Nirupama Vaidyanathan who draws upon St. Theresa’s autobiography that provides much insight into her life and struggles. Both figures lived around the same time-period in the 16thcentury and faced similar obstacles from patriarchal systems.

The scholarly engagement with female saint poets is balanced by choreographic and performance notes by prominent artists, many of whom created new works for the Mad and Divine and Epic Women gatherings. These artists include Bharatanatyam dancer, Malavika Sarukkai whose new work entitled “Darshan – Seeing” explores Andaal’s passion for the Lord. Kathak and Contemporary Indian dancer, Aditi Mangaldas presented her original choreography in “Seeking the Beloved”, based on the poetry of Meerabai. Bharatanatyam dancer, Mythili Prakash, who grew up in California and now lives in Chennai (a return migration), created her own choreographic exploration entitled, “Aikya – in the Voice of Akka Mahadevi” that recreates the female saint-poet Akka Mahadevi’s extraordinary passion and courage in attaining the Lord via her verses called vachanas. Mythili also performed for the “Epic Women” gathering in a multi-genre production based on Dr. Gowri Ramrayan’s play, Yashodhara, the wife of Gautama Buddha, a single mother, deserted by her husband and her evolution from grief, loss, sorrow to transcendence. The performance uses Hindi, Pali, and English narration.

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In “Soulful Abhangs and Thoughtful Vaakhs (sayings)”, bharatanatyam dancer Rama Vaidyanathan probes the life and teachings of 13th century saint Janabai, of Maharashtra, and 14th century saint Lalleswari, of Kashmir who fought social norms while fearlessly expressing their love for the supreme.

On the heels of the resounding success of the 2011 gathering attended by local and international audience members, the 2012 Natya Darshan focused on the theme of “Epic women” from India and beyond. We examine and expand the usual parameters of the “epic” and the types and qualities of “epic” women to include prominent women of India and the world who demonstrate courage and creativity of epic proportions. Women featured in India’s two epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata from 2000 years ago are re-interpreted for contemporary times. Scholarly presentations bring new illuminations to iconic figures like Sita with her many versions in folklore and myth. Veenapani Chawla analyzed the various locales that Sita traverses in the epic, such as the forest, the palace, and in captivity. Kapila Venu, master artist of the Kuttiyatam style of dance (from Kerala in Southern India), spoke on “The Abandonment of Sita” that she also performed in “Sitaparityagam.” The latter is based on Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsa portraying Sita abandoned in the forest by Rama, raising their two sons alone, and refusing Rama’s demand to prove her chastity yet again through a fire ordeal. Instead, Sita chooses to return to her mother, the Earth.

Our contributors include scholar and historian Prema Nandakumar who discusses what makes women “epic”. Swarnamalya Ganesh’s essay presents what she terms as “Womanity” exploring “selfhood and tenacity as keynotes of Sangam women” in South India. Ganesh analyzes the dynamic personalities of prominent female figures of this era such as Madhavi of the Tamil epic, The Cilapaddikaram.

Among epic women, we include legendary teachers of the classical dance style of bharatanatyam, rooted in Chennai. In this volume, students of these remarkable artist-teachers, indeed, “epic teachers” share personal memories. Nandini Ramani writes about her teacher T. Balasaraswati, whose abhinaya (gesture language) and expression of bhakti (devotion) are legendary. Katherine Kunhiraman describes Rukmini Devi’s life and work in the context in the 1920s and 1930s, Devi’s exposure to the Theosophical Society and her establishment of the prominent Bharatanatyam Dance Academy, Kalakshetra that continues today to train dancers and teachers, many of whom live across India and in the Indian diaspora world wide. Padmini Chettur writes about her teacher Chandralekha, the pioneering foremother of Contemporary Indian dance.

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Sukhanya Rahman (US based), daughter of Indrani Rahman lovingly recalls her mother. Andre Grau (London based) presents an intellectual biography of Mrinalini Sarabhai, an early innovator of bharatanatyam and a courageous woman of mid-20th century.

Ammu Joseph analyzes the paradox of epic women in politics in South Asia that boasts of female leaders presiding over nations whereas ordinary women’s status remains low and oppressed. Kalpana Ram (Australia based) undertakes feminist evaluation of epic women by investigating the interactions between performance and human agency. Another essay (by co-editor Katrak) on the literary representations of “dark” women with passions of epic proportions explores what drives such women to act on dark passions, and what limits were placed on them as females in their patriarchal societies. Why are they judged negatively without understanding their contexts?

The performances on Epic Women creatively spanned geographical locations and historical time periods. New York based Rajika Puri, in her “danced story-telling” using bharatanatyam and odissi techniques presented “Eleni of Sparta: An Indo-Greek Re-telling” where she dances, sings and narrates the story of Eleni, Queen of Sparta, commonly known as Helen of Troy, heroine of Homer’s epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, 7th century BCE, later deified. Rajika uses English and ancient Greek.

Several performances were inspired by women of incredible courage in the face of political oppression such as Myanmar’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, performed by bharatnatyam and contemporary Indian Dancer, Anusha Subramaniam (London based). In “Golden Peacock”, Subramaniam’s creative choreography is inspired by Suu Kyi’s writings in Freedom from Fear. Suu Kyi in captivity is like the peacock, a beautiful bird that cannot fly.

Chitra Sundaram (London based) performed “Stree-Dom: An Immaculate Conception” as a performative paper exploring two women – Arundhati, wife of the Vedic sage, Vashishtha, and Penelope, the wife of the Greek warrior Odysseus – celebrated for their chastity and fidelity. Chitra speaks and moves in this work that aims to challenge limiting cultural constructions of femininity via selected historical and mythical female figures in epic and romance.

Kalpana Raghuraman (Netherlands based), whose personal dance style is based on bharatanatyam, choreographically recreated Mexico’s Frida Kahlo. “In the Spirit of Frida” portrays Frida, a woman of epic courage and creativity who painted from her bed while living in constant pain. Kahlo defied rules and became an icon of freedom and female

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emancipation in the Mexican context and remains an inspiration to women artists worldwide.

Over the course of these two gatherings in 2011 and 2012 and in this volume of essays and choreographic notes we recognize outspoken mystic and epic women, poets and ordinary women with epic courage who fearlessly followed their chosen paths with devotion and energy that are models for women in the 21st century. We may be proficient today with social media phenomenon, media convergences and the bewildering speed of information exchange, but the distance between diverse cultures, languages, and artistic styles remains challenging to bridge. Through this volume, we honor exceptional women and others who remain nameless in history, and all those who speak truth to power, finding creative ways to survive with dignity in a world that needs art to oppose the forces of domination, and to inspire working towards a just and equitable human society.

Anita R. Ratnam, Chennai, India Ketu H. Katrak, Irvine, California

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to sincerely thank Mr. L Sabaretnam and Mr. Sekar of Kartik Fine Arts for their support of the 2011 and 2012 conclaves at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan auditorium in Chennai. We thank Rex for his unique visual design inputs. Our gratitude extends to Lalitha Venkat, Victor Paulraj and L. Sumathi for managing the key aspects of the two events. A special mention goes out to the team of workers and volunteers led by Y. Mohan and Kannan who worked tirelessly to make both woman-centric events such a resounding success.

This volume of essays would not have been possible without the careful and efficient editorial and administrative assistance of Raksha Patel. We truly appreciate her dedicated work on several aspects of this project as it has journeyed from presentations and performances on stage to print.

We sincerely thank Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for her initial interest in this project, and for guiding us through the process towards publication. We also thank Keith Thaxton and the production staff at Cambridge for their professional assistance.

Anita R. Ratnam Ketu H. Katrak

PART I

MAD AND DIVINE FEMALE SAINT-POETS OF INDIA AND BEYOND

CHAPTER ONE

INSTITUTIONALIZING IDENTITY THROUGH DIVINITY:

FEMALE SAINT POETS OF MAHARASHTRA

MADHAVI NARSALAY

The Medieval period in India (11th century CE to 17th century CE) witnessed a rise in devotional or bhakti literature in local language. Songs, philosophical contemplations, mythological stories woven in and around the bhakti movement indicate an evolution in the vision of God and the world. Maharashtra (in Western India) is no exception to this phenomenon. Bhakti movement has shown signs of change in the orthodox Brahmanical tradition of caste and gender sensitivity. Poet saints, both male and female from the deprived as well as privileged sections of the society have found place and positions in the movement. Such an egalitarian approach is an important feature of the bhakti movement in medieval India in general and Maharashtra in particular. This essay focuses on

How do the saint poets’ femaleness and femininity play a role in their divine aspiration? How are the bodies of female saint-poets subject to patriarchal and familial forms of control and how do the saint-poets resist such social strictures? How do the arts of the literary (words, poems) and the expressive (music, dance) facilitate access to the divine?

Female saints representing three sects, namely and are discussed in a chronological order. I begin

with of the sect that flourished in 13th century CE i.e. in the regime of the Yadavas of Devagiri (Ajgaonkar 1939, 1). The

Institutionalizing Identity Through Divinity 3

founder of the sect, Sarvajña Cakradhara preached non-violence, celibacy, asceticism and bhakti.

God i.e. K a and his different incarnations are to be worshipped in name, form, activity, deeds, place, sayings ( ), memories (sm ti) and the blessing of god incarnate. Cakradhara believed that any person irrespective of his caste and gender could attain God. Gender can never be an obstacle between the devotee and God, even to the extent that menstruation was not regarded as impurity, but rather, as a natural fluid equivalent to mucus.

Macadamias, also known as Macadamia was one of the leading but

Cakradhara renamed her as capac a poet has referred to her as

(Kundup 2001, 1-2). As child widows, both her sister and she were subjected to atrocities. It is to

who was Krsna incarnate for her. She bathed him, fed him, massaged his body and worshipped him. All these references in the , Cakradhara’s biography, do indicate a physical, sensual attraction of the female disciple towards her Guru. Much akin to the tradition of bhakti, especially referred to by as, this is

(servitude) kind of bhakti. As serving the most respected person i.e. Cakradhara. Here, her femaleness was only restricted to the chores and responsibilities of woman, in other words the ‘cult of domesticity.’ The of the Mahanubhava tradition mentions Cakradhara and his sect. Within the patriarchal social structure, her role as a woman follower was domestic and at times denounced by followers of

who criticized her for forgetting her womanhood. However, in the , curious disciple keen to know more on the life cycle of K a. Interestingly, acaritra by Cakradhara is actually driven by

’s questions. After Ca sect was in

doldrums. Cakradhara had declared that Govindaprabhu would lead the sect and this was not acceptable to Cakradhara’s followers. The Sm tisthala followers to follow Cakradhara’s orders and continued the tradition of the

va sect (Kundup, 7) that an independent identity in this sect, an identity that went beyond the restrictive norms of

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‘being a woman’ and transcended into being a “dharma rak aka”, one who keeps the tradition alive.

Be that as it may, she did not allow her femininity to be subdued on the altar of leadership. This is evident from her compositions such as Dhava e – a composition of K arukmi (Irlekar 1999, 80-105). Dhava e, as the name suggests means white, which is synonymous to flawlessness or untaintedness. Dhava es reveal the delicate, but intense love of Rukmi She is the virahi longing for union with K a whose physical charms attract Rukmini’s friends who even forget their own existence. The element of feminine sensuous consciousness is implicit in this composition where Rukmini’s friends narrate the incident:

We have not seen your lover completely, which ever limb we saw, our eyes kept gazing.

sets aside the feminine sensuality immediately. She describes Rukmi

Steady became my wandering mind Enters the dark K a in the heart-lotus Darling Rukmi - [She] forgets the sensual, in her mind penetrates Go- (lord of the senses)

same time her spirit overcomes the desire of sensual pleasures and proceeds towards the super sensuous. The narratives mention her as a groom’s maid, but the Dhava es give a feeling that she is Rukmi1999, 33-35). Her union is not on the level of the feminine body, but rather, on the spiritual level with her God. On the corporeal plane, she vehemently manages the domestic cult of womanhood, but on the spiritual level the female body sheds off the feminine consciousness to be in communion with the divine.

born in the family of was a maid in the house of saint -14th centuries CE). She became part and parcel as well as

witness to the spiritual pursuits of sect (Inamdar 2001, 40-43) that

This sect believes in Vi hala, i.e. God as the Ultimate Reality, and bhakti as the mode of worship to attain him.

It is to be noted that there is hardly any historical data regarding and her relationship with and Vi hala. The abha gas

(poetry in praise of Vi hala) composed by her and legends are recorded in


Bhaktivijay(Bhingarkar 1989, 19). Janabai felt that she owed her spiritual advancement v; therefore most of her abha gas end with “thus says Jani of .” at times and would invoke Vi hala:

Mother died and father is no more, O Vi hala you are the sole [one] I am your tiny baby, please do not neglect me, I am alone.

She imagines a family of Vi hala:

My Vi hala is a family man along with the cowherd folks, Niv tti

behind, with him,

Ba Says Jani, O Vi hala, I see the festival of devotees

(Irlekar 2006, 81)

This imagery of Vi as an onlooker and not a family member.

Such poignant invocations achieved the desired effect and Vi hala became easily accessible to her. This is very much akin to the philosophy propounded in the as well as that both recognize the Lord as the servant of those who nurture and nourish him with bhakti.

’s compositions is the natural expression of the woman’s mind.

The difficult domestic chores in ’s house became simple and easy in the company of Vi hala. Janabai felt his presence in each and every task she did. On one plane, we may call it an intense obsession for the desired object. On the other hand, if we regard the experiences of

become one and the same for her. It is also known as bahir- i.e. the external manifestation (Marfatia 1986, 42).

It is significant that or oneness with God. The existence of Vi hala was nitya but outside her.

, a Dualist, was a believer in dualism. Bhakta and God can never become one; secondly, notions of impurity of the body for

hala in the body of one such as herself of low-caste. Her emotional imagination pervaded over her experiential world. The uniqueness in the (devotee) type of bhakti of God and in return God serves her.

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does not leave its caste and gender centric flavor. It records her menial tasks like collecting cow dung, sweeping and scavenging. The bhangs have a corporeal framework that also has a mystic flavor. Within this framework, Vitthala (also called Vital) is a witness and a participant in her life. The corporeal and mystic are expressed in the following lines:

Jainabai was troubled because of her hair, Vital hurried to help. He let loose her hair and hastily killed the lice. Combed her hair and freed her, says Jana I became cleansed

(Irlekar 2006, 240)

Here the word ‘cleanse’ i.e. nirmala is open-ended – it may imply overcoming physical as well as spiritual impurity.

also mentions her indebtedness to , though nowhere does mention her unflinching devotion. Most of her compositions are replete with references to household work. Though her feminine attributes like beauty and sensuality have not been manifested in

dominant. ial forces belonging

to the privileged sections can subject someone from the weaker section to ’s

proximity to Vi hala, she was accused of stealing jewellery adorning the Lord Vi hala and was sentenced to death. Witnessing death in front of her eyes, she composed abha gas urging Vi hala to save her. The miracle that is narrated is that hearing her repeated pleas Vi hala’s affection for her melted the iron pole erected for her execution. This established her innocence and she was released.

hala. She followed the strict code of conduct pertaining to gender and caste. In spite of facing odds, she traversed the path taken by her spiritual Guru and fulfilled her divine aspirations.

Ve was the disciple of S temporary of Sivaji (17th CE). Her life history is recorded in Samarthapratapa that indicates

position of Ma as Ve

only Marathi female to have composed an entire narrative named She was a Brahmin child-widow, hence, she had to lead a

life of strict austerities and celibacy. For Veturning point in her life. She was introduced to reading and therefore had


access to many works of saints. Her inner voice indicated that following the path laid down by Sdivine aspirations. Her increasing inclination towards Sraised many eyebrows in her society but Ve

dissuade her, but her answer indicates the spiritual control over her female body:

My mind and my body are taken away by my Guru, Following his path with the knowledge symbol in his hand Name of God in the ears, on the face, With ears split we have become yogis and have come for the darshan of saints This is the divine vision of Ve

(Ajgaonkar 1939, 191)

Ve sets aside her femaleness and her mind is eager to seek higher spiritual pursuits. The relation between Ve

was his daughter ( ). This incident had a deep impact on Ve

The composed by Ve

focus. So, the frame of reference remains patriarchal. As far as poetic quality is considered, Vethan subtle mental feelings of Rama and Sita. Ve ’s descriptive details of Rama do not indicate her feminine gaze towards her ‘masculine’ divine aspiration. Her descriptions are glorifications of his regal splendor,

weds him. The work taken in the contextual framework of the author indicates that Ve ’s feminine grace had become inert and she looks at the entire episode with neutrality. She remarks that poetic creativity was a divine intention:

O God, please take away the afflictions and give me rest, As long as the mortal frame exists so long be my devotion O God, give your divine signal, to Ve

ma a ‘write this one’ (Ajgaonkar 1939, 188)

Early widowhood, strict control of passions by reading spiritual texts, e

Chapter One

8

the reasons which can be accounted for a plain narrative of .

In conclusion, after analyzing the female saint poets’ biographies and contributions, I note certain points in common:

a) The medieval bhakti movement in Maharashtra was essentially patriarchal. The female saints were the disciples of male saints. They were not independent proponents of sects, but took male guidance for achieving spiritual advancement. To earn a place in the male-centric world of devotion, they had to strive hard to have independent identities with the sectarian framework.

b) Social norms were instrumental in shaping the personalities of the saints. While leading a life of celibacy, they focused their time and energy on divine pursuits while staying in the company of their Gurus. But they did not hesitate to break the norms of societal control over their femininity.

question remains: did she choose to stay as a servant only to get access to the imagination of the presence of Vi hala came to her assistance in her loneliness, physical pain and also during trying times. I would also like to

were Brahmin widows and naturally belonged to the privileged sections of the society. This was not the case for

were widows, but they wrote on svayamvara (Rukmi hidden and curbed passions of these women. The difference between

a, but with an eye on Rukmi which was not so in the case of Ve

was reduced to a tool. attracted to Cakradhara’s physical charms. The sect believed in the charismatic and enchanting capacity of Cakradhara’s looks that increased the number of followers. Unlike thischarms as an obstacle to the path of God. These sectarian restrictions have played a key role in influencing the literary quality of Ve ’s work.

d) Female saint poets of Maharashtra have not resorted to frenzied behaviour or holy madness as their Gurus strictly guided their divine pursuits. They were over-shadowed by the towering personalities of their Gurus. Unconventional and unexpected expressions are not evident in their literary forms; neither have they tried to explore some different mode of literary or artistic expression. Originality, innovation or mere deviation


from the prescribed norms of society or even thinking and behavior were not permitted in medieval times.

Sociologically, disruption in the social structure and stricture is essential for initiating a new way of thinking. The founders of the sects themselves undertook such disruptions. The personalities of female saint poets were stuck within male-driven sectarian frameworks. It became more challenging for the women to establish their individual identity in such a scenario; however, facts reveal that they succeeded. ’s role of ’s unflinching love for Vi hala and Ve ’s as the head of a Ma ha clearly stand testimony to the facts that they did not restrict themselves within female and feminine parameters. In their journey of life, they carved out their identity crossing the boundaries of gender in their pursuit of the Divine.

A Selected Bibliography

(The author has used original Marathi sources and translated relevant quotes into English.)

Ajgaonkar, Jagannath. 1939. Maharashtra Santa Kavay . Mumbai: Bharata Gaurava Granthamala.

Bhingarkar D. B. 1989. Santa . Mumbai: Majestic Prakashan.

Irlekar, Iravati. 1999. Mahadambece Dhava e. 3rd edition. Pune: Snehavardhan Publishing House.

—. 2006. Santa i . Pune: Snehavardhan Publication.

Inamdar, H. V. 2001. “ ” in editors Kadam N. R. and Pote, D., . Mumbai: Bharatiya Sahitya Sevak Sangh, 39-62.

Kuber, S. V. Editor. 2010. Dhule: Lokavrata Publication.

Kundup, Kanhaiya. 2001. “ dy ”, in Editors, Kadam N. R. and Pote, D. . Mumbai: Bharatiya Sahitya Sevak Sangh, 1-19.

Marfatia, Mridula. 1986. The Philosophy of Vallabhacharya. Delhi: MLBD http:www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/truewoman.html>viewed on October 17, 2013.

CHAPTER TWO

OF A THOUSAND NAMES: VI U’S BELOVED MEDIATOR

ARCHANA VENKATESAN

through her fantastical legend, savoring its drama of unrequited love, and stubborn, unwavering willfulness to win Vi u as her husband. In the narrative’s denouement she is either absorbed into his body through a variety of creative resolutions or (re) emerges as a potent divine force unto herself.1 Over the course of five centuries, a period that spans the foundation avism’s emergence as

and , twin roles that enable her to act as both the exemplary devotee

and exemplary wife. In her latter identity she is variously characterized as manifestations (awith the Tamil goddess, Nappicompositions, the and i, are exalted as distilling the essence of the Upani ads. In this brief essay, I discuss

’s function as the ideal mediator or puru , proposing that this ava theological construct skillfully

accommodates her many identities as poet, saint, and goddess.

Mediating Effort: ava Concept of the Puru

in the poetry of the . Although these early Tamil poets did not employ the Sanskrit term or its Tamil equivalent, they

intermediary.2

quest.3 In the twth

of a Thousand Names: Vi u’s Beloved Mediator 11

-12th the writings

th

in his commentaries on the .4 These scholars articulated a range of positions vis-à-

express(1268- -1323), resulting in an irreversible

specifically with regard to . Is she merely the

intercessor or can she also act as the (the means) and the goal (upeya

his accessibility (saulabhya) and transcendence (paratva. Their

indivisibility thus affirms her ability to grant mercy and accept the devotees’ petitions and surrender.5 the only (means) and upeya

with him and draws souls ( ) to him when in separation.6

as the exemplary because of three defining qualities: her (compassion), her

(state of being undeserved by anyone but her lord).7 Several episodes from the

dependence on him, while she saves the crow that tortured her from

independence that enable her to influence his actions is explored in depth thcentury) who see her as the

soul ( ) and the divine mediator.8 for the intermediary to be successful she must neither be fully god, nor fully mortal, but somewhere in between, straddling two worlds and two personalities.9

Chapter Two

12

as the Puru

O goddess Mukunda is quick to compassion to people like us, despite our many transgressions though we are long ordained in vows. This is certain for he is bound by the garland that touched your hair, by the abundance of your words which are as sweet as the music from the a’s strings

510

in 29 verses, she is cast in the role of the puru .11

/ -like puru is appropriate to her new status as Vi u’s beloved wife.

author of two poems, the Tiruppavai and Nacciayar Tirunamali, ceaselessly appealed to various messengers and mediators, pleading to be united with Vi u.12 Paradoxically, she also claimed for her own words a special efficacy in ensuring the success of the devotee’s quest. For instance in i 3.10, she extolled her words as capable of securing entry into Vaiku 13 The taniyans (praise poems) that accompany both the Tirumo i as the author of powerful words that can mediate on the devotee’s behalf. Uyyakocentury Tamil ta iya lauds her glorious verses and ends with the plea that they may never be forgotten. Two centuries later, reflecting evolving ideas about the puru ’s divinity,

ar’s famous Sanskrit -ta iya evokes the inseparability of Vi u and his conso /Nappi ai), while casting

as the one who must remind him of duties revealed in a hundred . By the thirteenth century, commentators on the like

as the ideal guide who leads both the and other devotees on their quest for K a.14

It is largely on account of the unique value of her poems and her is included as one

and i comprise a part of the (Divine Collection of Four Thousand). As the Divya Prabandham is seen as constituting the

ava system of or dual


r the development of theological doctrine.15 ’s inclusion as an emphasizes the

avas’ self descriptions of their

’s and N i (and especially the ) are termed Upani ad- as since they distill the substance of the Upani hadspioneering taboo-breaking saint ( and is gradually transformed into a goddess. In the former role, her beautiful and moving poems are the primary mediators, but as a goddess she herself is the intermediary, able to coax and cajole Vi u towards mercy. Let us recall that in his ta iya ,

as the one to remind Vi u of his duties revealed in the Vedas, deftly invoking the power of the divinely inspired, divine poet-wife’s eloquence that empowers her to mediate on behalf of those who neither have the words nor the ability to approach Vi u themselves.

For the lord

I offered a hundred pots of butter and yet another hundred brimming with sweet rice. Will the beautiful lord who rides on Garu a Not come to claim my offering?

i 9.616

(1017-1137 CESrivilliputtur. But before arriving at his final destination, he stopped at the Tirumaliruncolai temple to offer a hundred pots of sweet rice on behalf, finally fulfilling a long ago pledge. When the venerable

immediately manifested from the and ran towards him,

forward, in addition to carrying the epithet on account of his great love for that

17 eeting, the

wide foyer of the , and stand as a reflection of the tall main temple’s sanctum.

Chapter Two

14

-temple priests, and is often narrated to first time visitors as a way of explicating the special significance of the utsava images in the garbha

s foyer. On th

with predominantly male Brahmanical sectarian authority, embodied in the a familial

brings herself into a kinship relationship not only with him but also with the entire tradition that he represents. And today, she is served by her

-

the and delinearole and identity.18 goddess, is the mediator par-excellence, the . She is accessibility itself (saulabhyarunni

compassion is so potent that the devotee needs to exert only the slightest effort – offer some pots of butter, perhaps – to engage her

regarded as the ideal, most efficacious mediator.19 assumes the mediator’s role and actively seeks to provide grace.20As

younger sister she is an intimate part of the entire tradition. The creative garbha

s foyer, and the even more creative story elucidating it, remind the - onjoins narrative and

architectural space to embody the abstract concept of the .

Concluding Thoughts: A Mother to All

a genealogy that marks her gradual apotheosis from th

commentary – both theological and historical. It articulates the

over the importance of the goddess wi -, a poem of almost


also mend reconcile them into the concept of the . The poem activates the beginning of grace (as her and claim) while as the goddess she fulfills the promise of that grace in her guise as the mediator.

the phenomenon of bhakti (devotion) itself is a radically transformative agent. Bhakti does not simply end when the so-called bhakti movements end. Rather, we must read the entire complex of later traditions – of exegesis, liturgical practice, hagiography, commentaries, story-telling – as an organic continuation of bhakti, albeit one that is arguably regulated with rigor. Concepts such as the which emerge in the crucible

forge themselves into distinctive communities, are flexible enough to

once: poet, saint lover, wife, goddess, sister, mother. It allows the community to retain within the fold a woman who flouts the rules of ritual behavior and threatens physical violence to herself, and to revere the impassioned erotic words in which she speaks of her burning desire for

– mortal lover, immortal wife – that she is able successfully to act as the exemplary

, an ever-vigilant wife, and an ever-merciful mother to the world.

You pity me. You protect even me, a sinner. This is your nature Though her suckling child bites her breasts doesn’t a mother because of her abundant maternal love continue to nourish it with her breast milk

27

Notes 1 Like the other (those who are immersed in worship is seen as an exemplar of one who forged the path of bhakti making it available to all. Yet

, the one who rules, is immersed in Vi u in a manner different from the other . While on the one hand, her immersion signifies her total absorption with Vi u, it also resonates with the hagiographic narratives of the untouchable

vai ava communities’ latent

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discomfort with the presence of women and untouchables among their revered twelve. 2 For example, commentators consider i 6.10 as dedicated to the notion of puru . 3 Verses 18-20 of the are addressed to K a’s consort, Nappi ai. The group of appeals to Nappi i quest.

19 is of particular significance, as it begins with an address to K a and concludes with a plea to Nappi ai to intercede. The verse is interpreted as stressing the significance of the goddess in any effort to reach Vi u. For a summary of the commentaries to the three verses cited above, see Archana Venkatesan, The Secret Garland:

i. New York: Oxford University Press, 116-121. 4 puru akalais and Te kalais, stress the role of the as a puru . For more detailed discussion on the as puru , see Patricia Mumme, ava Theological Dispute: Ma . Madras: New Era Publications, 1988. 5 Pratap K. Kumar, The Goddess LakVai ava Tradition, 121-127. 6 Kumar, 102-109. I have provided a very brief survey of the major ideas about the puruin a number of sources. See the works of Patricia Mumme and Pratap Kumar cited above. See also, Vasudha Narayanan, The Way and the Goal: Devotion in the e ava Tradition, and K.K.A.Venkatachari, The Ma av . 7 Venkatachari, 134. 8 This idea is discussed extensively in Vasudha Narayanan, a in the

ava Community. Journal of Vaishnava Studies 2:4 (Fall 1994), 55-90. 9 Mumme, 228-229. 10 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 11 The is the third in a set of stuti praise of each of Vi u’s three consorts. They are the , and Stuti ss and is identified implicitly

association. 12 appeals to both sentient and insentient beings in the i. The poem opens with a vow to Kama, and she invokes birds and clouds as her messengers, while pleading with flora and fauna to ease her suffering.

Pi ai reads these appeals as caused by momentary ’s love-sickness.

13 Venkatesan, 156. 14 For a discussion of the iya ssee, see Venkatesan, 223-225. 15 Two of the most important doctrinal ideas rigorously argued for in the commentaries on the Divya Prabandham are prapatti (surrender) and kai karya (loving service). For an overview of the concepts see, Vasudha Narayanan’s The


Way and the Goal. For an examination of the particularities of the disputes and their historical developments see Patricia Mumme. For a discussion of the historical development of the concept of prapatti and its relationship to the Te kalai/Va akalai schism, see Srilata Raman, Self-Surrender to God (prapatti) in

: Tamil Cats or Sanskrit Monkeys?. 16 Venkatesan, 172. 17 temple icons. For an analysis of some of these episodes, refer to Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images, and Vasudha Narayanan, “On Earth as He is in Heaven.” in . Edited by Joanna Punzo Waghorne, Norman Cutler and Vasudha Narayanan, 53-68. 18 Ma aiya i Utsavam celebrated in both Srirangam and Alvar Tirunagari. At both sites, the goddess closes the temple doors to Vi u who returns after a protracted trip that involves dalliances with royal

intervenes, effects the reconciliation, skillfully acting as an intermediary between Vi u and his consort. For a discussion of the festival in Srirangam see Paul Younger, “Ten Days of Wandering and Romance: The Pa ku i Festival in

kam Temple, South India.” Modern Asian Studies16:4 (1982), 623-656. 19 uably the most important of the twelve , is also believed

ava temples, the sa briefly set on the sa has a pair of

feet etched on its crown. with Vi u’s feet on his u can somehow transmit itself to the devotee through the . 20 is regarded as a manifestation usually the case.


Primary Sources

Uraiyu a . 3rd ed. Edited by, Ramadesika Acaryar Swami. Trichy: The Little Flower Company, 1993, 761-792.

i . Edited by, Krishnaswami Iyengar. . Edited by,

Secondary Sources

Davis, Richard H. 1997. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Chapter Two

18

Kumar, Pratap K. 1997. The Goddess LakSouth Indian Vai ava Tradition. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.

McDermott, Rachel Fell. 2001. al. New York:

Oxford University Press. Mumme, Patricia. 1988. ava Theological Dispute:

Ma . Madras: New Era Publications.

Narayanan, Vasudha. 1996. India. Edited by Jack Stratton, Hawley and Donna

Wulff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 87-108. a in the Theology and Experience of

ava Community. Journal of Vaishnava Studies 2:4 (Fall 1994), 55-90.

—. 1987. Vai ava Tradition. Washington D.C. and Cambridge, M.A: Institute for Vaishnava Studies and The Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard.

__. 1985. in Heaven.” Divinity in India. Edited by Joanna

Punzo Waghorne, Norman Cutler and Vasudha Narayanan. New York: Columbia University Press, 53-68.

Raman, Srilata. 2007. Self-Surrender (Prapatti) to God in avism: Tamil Cats or Sanskrit Monkeys? New York: Routledge.

Venkatachari, K.K.A. 1978. The Ma a Literature of the -s. Bombay: Ananthacharya Institute. Venkatesan,

Archana. 2010. Tirumo i. New York: Oxford University Press.

Younger, Paul. “Ten Days of Wandering and Romance with Lord Ra ku kam Temple, South India.” Modern Asian Studies 16:4 (1982), 623-656.

CHAPTER THREE

TRANSLATING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A GODDESS

PRIYA SARUKKAI CHABRIA

Translating 9th century Tamil mystic Aandaal’s songs has transformed me in many ways. Almost all one’s signposts of ‘reality’ dissolve as one journeys, seeking her. The resonant allusiveness of the girl-mystic’s sonic sacraments, her summons to the divine to possess her as she is, achingly alive, and not as spirit, and the surpassing beauty of her poetry demand no less.

All translation is an act of faith in the possibilities of poetry (in this case) of another time, tongue, texture of language and vision to be worded in the now. The hoary battle of whether the translator should be faithful to the word or the spirit was, I think, resolved in the resounding words of the translators of the Saint James Bible who, in 1611 declared that one should not attempt to ‘restore’ the text to an illusionary pristine state but do one’s best to free it from the constraints of time, place and dogma not through simplification but by plumbing its depth. “For has the kingdom of God become words and syllables?” the translators ask before proceeding. “Why should we be in bondage to them if we may be free?”Aandaal’s luminous songs are primarily seen as holy texts, and, most often in translating sacred verse, philosophical overtones tend to override the poetry. I see Aandaal as a poet divine.

Further, mystic poets sought to cross all boundaries and seek themselves in consonance with the cosmos. Therefore, translating sacred verse is an act of faith in one’s self to presume to touch the mystical experience in some furtive way. This craves the twining of humility and courage as well as a shining central beam of love. Moreover, by the 11th century, Aandaal was venerated as a goddess by Vaishanavites so her translators attempt to re-inscribe ‘divine utterance’. To paraphrase the Rg Veda and Susan Sontag, one has to ‘search with an intelligent heart’ and

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do this, I add, in awe. Aandaal’s songs begin on the horizon of the liminal and spill into a vast unknown.

Literary history is studded with cases of compositions by “mad and divine” [conference theme] women usurped by men, as, for instance, with J or The Yahwist who possibly lived in the court of Solomon the Wise and wrote crucial portions of what is now known as the Genesis and the

. So too is Aandaal’s existence contested by some even today who suggest that she is a fabulation of her saint father Periyalwar’s imagination, no more. True, Periyalwar adopts a female persona – as Krishna’s mother who delights in the Child God’s antics – in his numerous pillaitamil compositions. By extension, he is accorded authorship of Aandaal’s songs on the grounds that a mere girl cannot exhibit the erudition, philosophical depth, formal rigor and last but far from least, erotic content bedded in these hallowed verses. Contrarians should re-examine the evidence: Periyalwar’s pillaitamil songs are delightful, almost folksy compositions imbued with bhakti (devotion). Aandaal’s compositions are of an altogether different order of poetic merit, sharpness of tone, emotional intensity, ranging between hope and despair and she dazzles. The blaze of the sacred embedded in every material that constitutes ephemeral life pervades her songs as she simultaneously urges timeless grace to illumine her. This vision is also layered into her eroticized demands on the divine.

Below is my translation of a stanza of Periyalwar’s pillaitamil

A golden leaf ornament flashes on His hips as He plays, on His Head a peacock feather winks as He plays; enchanted are we By Krishna who expanded as Trivikrama to embrace the universe Yet when He embraces me He shrinks like Vamana, this Child of mine

And this is Aandaal in Nacciyar Tirumoli: The Song of Lament – Dark Flowers

Stanza 2: O blood red hill flowers Open as two palms that beg for light you climb towards the heavens Carry me as you ascend to him who is the light and meaning of the Vedas whose discus blazes in his hand

Lift me to his radiance Place me beside those dear to him

Translating the Autobiography of a Goddess 21

Further, Aandaal’s voice changes between her oeuvres, and even within each one. This possibly adds to the bewilderment in understanding her. Time and again she burns boundaries and dissolves fixed notions of identity. Her first work, composed when she was about thirteen, the thirty verses of the Tiruppaavai (The Path to Krishna) is a lyrical devotion-doused description of vows undertaken by maidens to obtain a good husband; it is a song of congregational worship. Imagining herself and her playmates as the gopi-girls (milk-maids) of Krishna’s village, this is a cadenced call of awakening her friends, and ultimately the gods themselves to accept the girls’ worshipful devotion. The address is always from the group, in the plural as in

Stanza 3: With two strides the Supreme One covered the three worlds. Us He will sustain. The rains shall never fail; thick red paddy will tousle the wind, in flooded fields amidst the sprouts bright carp will leap, lotuses will rock spotted bees to sleep and our big gentle cows shall bear udders so ample our small hands can’t enclose its seep: pots will brim. All wealth will be ours. Come, fulfill our vow and gain His parai-drum.

By stanza 21 she is directly addressing her beloved:

Lord whose compassion brims like pails overflowing with milk, Who lights all darkness, whom we cannot fathom, surrender sleep. At the door, your quailing enemies surrender; we surrender to You. Supreme God we refugees from the world seek refuge at your feet.

In her second and last work, Nacciyar Tirumoli (The Sacred Songs of The Lady), we encounter another Aandaal who sings of her individual need for spiritual and sexual congress with her chosen god and of an abundant female desire explicitly sited in the body. (This is why I title my forthcoming book, The Autobiography of a Goddess). Here she uses a familiar tenor to address the God of the Universe, Narayana, for he is now her absent lover; I follow suit and refrain from capitalizing her direct address.

Aandaal composed in cen (Old Tamil), faithful to 2nd century BCE to 2nd century CE Sangam era poetic conventions that drew from the ancient compendium of grammar the Tolkapppiam, but not its tinnai conventions that morph moods of love and evocative landscape into symbolic spaces of passion. Sangam means a gathering. The practitioners of old knew the rules and modes of interpreting such poetry; coded allusiveness was the key. Besides the literal meaning, simultaneous parallel (ullari) and inset

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(eraichi) meanings need to be pried out of each poem. Such a structure offers a riddling generosity of interpretative possibilities as each verse reveals layered, multiple configurations of meanings. Especially in the Nacciyar Tirumoli, each of Aandaal’s verses becomes a literary hologram. View it ‘frontally’ and one level of meanings appears, tilt it to catch another glow, angle it further and different illuminations emerge. And this from a fifteen year old whose glossy hair was drenched with dew, who wore not blouses but a smear of saffron paste on her breasts, who, on hearing of the dark dreaming God Narayana, of his great chest strewn with strings of pearls intuited these jewels were spinning galaxies whirling in the cosmic blue of Deep Space and Deep Time, who was, moreover, her beauteous and tormenting lover she summons to take her as his bride. Aandaal is a flame of vulnerable love that fires consciousness.

In a voice passionate, accusing, intimate and agonized she conflates extreme violence with swooning surrender; splices needs birthed deep within the body with visions of Deep Time; layers details of life around her with apt and erudite mythological references. She calls and calls for bliss to consume her. This is why I refrain from applying the word “transgressive” to Aandaal as it suggests a deliberate breaking of rules. I think she didn’t bother with any social conventions or rules – except those of poetry.

In this work-in-progress, I have deployed various strategies to be true to her spirit and excavate the form best suited to each song. Thus I prefer to term my versions, “transcreations”, not translations. Sometimes I use italics to suggest her hidden thoughts and allusions; sometimes an inset block of prose-poetry to elaborate dense philosophy, sometimes I’ve adapted A. K. Ramanujan’s stepped techniques (as with The Song of Lament: Dark Flowers), and at other times I have unpeeled layers of meaning drawing from Sangam poetics.

The transcreations below are from Nacciyar Tirumoli, the opening Song to Kamadeva who is the God of Love/Lust, an archer akin to an adult Cupid wherein the underlying symbolism of the archer is one’s own body, his bow is one’s will, and his arrows one’s consciousness aimed at eternity. My transcreations are a step-by-step paring of what Aandaal may have meant.

The first version is descriptive and closest to her decorous literal utterance. The second, the parallel, the ullari, often emphasizes her erudite mythological allusions and the links she finds in natural phenomenon which highlight inner vistas of longing. The third, the inset, the eraichi, is the freest: in the hidden, she is explicit. Here I investigate the mosaic of meanings thus far revealed, then delve beneath these to seek further


possible connections. Making this third leap has been the most demanding: it has often “arrived” as an inversion of the literal meaning. At all times, I kept in mind that Aandaal demands that divinity inhabit her pulsating corporeality; for her, the body is the site of the sacred.

In stanza 4 of Song to Kamadeva, Aandaal is intent on striking a deal with the deity of desire:

As offering, I write your name on the wall, Ancient One with fingers dipped in lamp black I draw your crocodile banner, stallions for your chariot, beautiful attendants to fan you and your bow of sugarcane. From my earliest childhood I longed for him alone; to him I offer my breasts, now full though young. May the Lord of Dwaraka cup my breasts. This is my prayer

Perhaps she also says:

I offer all You desire and all You need to perform your duty. Your hands are full. From girlhood I have desired only him, In surrender I wish to offer him my flower breasts now full and full of longing. Make Dwaraka’s Lord enfold my gift. Be quick –

And maybe this too:

with fingers dark as time I write Your hoary name and bribe You with all You want now deliver my want: my tender breasts ache for touch I wish to smear on my god of love my all can’t wait a second more rouse Yourself collapse time

In the second version’s parallel movement I explore the resonance of hands and plentitude: Kamadeva’s hands are made full by her offerings, her full breasts are her offering to Dwaraka’s Lord whose empty hands must fill cupping her gift. This, to me, is the pivot of the deal she is striking. The third version’s inset meaning arrived when I realized why Aandaal chose to invoke Kamadeva as Ancient One, rather than by his

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other appellations such as Mind–Born One, Intoxicator, Mind–Churner, Bodiless One etc. Aandaal is a genius poet, never one to leave a name or image hanging and she constantly plays with contrast. She will subtly link each word, thought, image and allusion – in multiple ways – to others throughout the body of every single verse. Therefore, couldn’t she be contrasting Kamadeva’s hoariness with her youthful self? Probing deeper, my mind leapt to a further connection: she’s also contrasting concepts of Time – her suffering in everyday time with the bliss of Deep Time where her love resides and demands that Kamadeva collapse this arc.

In Song 8 of Aandaal uses the conventional trope of asking clouds to bear her missives of love but shocks us with her visualization of carnage of various orders and, equally, with her utter love. Aandaal’s enveloping vision fuses internal and external worlds; the presence of grace in all things animate and inanimate seeps through her utterance. Stanza 5 notes:

Monsoon clouds you spread above the earth, slash the sky with torrents, you shake the honey-heavy blossoms of Vengadam and scatter scented petals. Go tell the dark lord who killed the demon Hiranya ripping him with paws of fury that he has robbed me of my bangles.

Perhaps she is also saying:

Dark clouds you enlarge in anger, growl and roll across the skies rending it open with rain, lightning; you tear flowers, spill honey, petals clot like blood on earth. Go to the fierce Lord who roaring plunged his claws in Hiranya his mane tossing as his bloody paws ripped insides out tell him: I’ve grown thin with longing, bangles slip

And maybe this too:

engorged with anger nails extending he kills plunging wrists in these very hands I seek to gather my swollen ripeness in as spilling nectar


my body’s blood flower bursts

Aandaal’s adoration of Narayana/Vishnu is so intense that she welcomes him not only in his avatars as valorous Rama, sky-crossing Trivikarama and beauteous Krishna but even his fiercest: as Narasimha (Man-Lion). I thought in the parallel movement, her metonym of God/rainclouds extends to the earth that becomes her body ravaged by the rain of desire. In the third inset movement, Andaal’s longing for her love-swollen body to be caressed and consumed, ripped and entered by the splendor of Narasimha must be among the most erotic verse ever written, even as it is fiercely mystical.

The girl-mystic’s passion and helplessness mounts till the penultimate Song of Desire. Here, in anguish Aandaal rages that she will violate her body if her lord does not violate her untouched womanhood. Either he, useless ‘bandit of love’, embrace her or she will pull out her useless breasts by the roots and fling these in his beautiful face. Song of Desire reveals both her extreme vulnerability and her intimacy with the dark dreaming resplendence that reclines on the serpent Ananta (endlessness/Eternity) whose cloudy body is believed to be made of the remnants of past universes. Aandaal’s shimmering surrender flickers against the flaming cosmos withering in longing.

Suddenly in her last song, In the Woods of Brindavan, her mood changes. Her voice is calm, accepting; each verse seems simple though in fact dense with philosophy. What caused this volte-face? Which arc of magnificence is her body-comet blazing towards that she changes her poetics so? For years, neither the treatises nor my discussions with scholars satisfied me. Like a buzz of bees clouding her is her change of heart – reflected in tranquil voice – the result of Aandaal disavowing the erotic path as an unworthy channel of divine pursuit. She is said to have returned to the Krishna of her childhood years, to the god as child, addressing him in an almost maternal tone, devoid of desire, but laden with devotion and surrender. True, the tone of this song is prayerful. But had Aandaal disavowed her autobiography? Or could something else have occurred?

Dr. Archana Venkatesan in her excellent book, The Secret Garland: Antal’s Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli offers an invigorating alternative explanation. But I mourned the loss of the mad and divine girl in whose thrall I’d lived. She, in absolute surrender, challenges the cosmos to accept her as she is. Where had my Aandaal disappeared? And who was this saint who peaceably sang the last hymn of the Nacciyar Tirumoli?

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Stanza 9: In The Woods of Brindavana (translated by Sri Ramabharati from Four Thousand Hymns of the Twelve Alwars)

The Lord creates Brahma, and through him the worlds. Did you see that pure one, for whom all this is a sport? The Lord who killed the bird, the calf and the elephant Came out of the forest after hunting; we saw him there in Brindavana

My interest is not in locating Aandaal’s Brindavana for commentaries mention that she is pacified when she realizes the grove of bliss, Brindavana, is not without, but within, antaryami, dwelling in the small beating chambers of her heart. I cede to this theological argument for Aandaal sang through a young body maddened by a beauteous god. When she had almost burnt her body away with longing, when she’s incandescent, lit camphor flaming into fragrance, she transits to fuse with the endless spaces of grace that dwell within her. Such rapture is the way of mystics.

Yet poetry, like sacredness, is visceral: born in the body and moving outwards while affecting the body when receiving it like a storm of grace. My connection to Aandaal is primarily through her luminous poetry and only through this art can I be sure of her transit and transcreate her songs. Finally I found evidence in her formal rigor. In this last song Aandaal indicates her nearness to god by adopting a shorter six-foot line instead of the eight-foot line she used earlier. And she changes form. In stanza after stanza she asks: have you seen him in Brindavana and the answer is yes, we have seen him in Brindavana. But who questions? And who answers? Isn’t Aandaal again showing a familiar hand by playing with contrasts and Time? Only this time her younger self, struggling to leap out of the everyday asks the questions; her older self, blissful, outside Time, answers. Thus she pacifies.

Thus sings Aandaal of glossy hair; those who read her verses will forever be illumined.

CHAPTER FOUR

FROM MELODY QUEEN TO MUSLIM MADONNA:

PAKISTANI FEMALE SINGERS TRANSCENDING THE SECULAR/

SACRED DIVIDE

FAWZIA AFZAL-KHAN

When tortures and darkness Seem to extinguish the free air … History teaches with her light That [wo] man can change that which exists … Everything falls in the dust of the dead When the people set their violins And looking forward interrupt and sing, Interrupt the hatred of shadows and watchdogs Sing and wake the stars with their song….

From “Cuba Appears” (Pablo Neruda, trans. Miguel Algarin,

from Song of Protest, 1958-68)

In this essay, I fashion an argument about the place and importance of three women singers in Pakistan by evaluating their mediation of secular and sacred spaces that enables an understanding of the evolution of Pakistani culture and women’s impact on it. Such a project also helps to dislodge pervasive stereotypes in the West about the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, its culture, and its women.

My project is impelled partly by such news-items as the following:

1. (Pakistan), Ghazala Javed, 24, in June 2012, was visiting a beauty parlor for pre-show preparations. When she left the saloon with her father, two unknown armed men

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riding a motorbike fired on her. Ghazala received six bullet wounds and her father four. The singer was pronounced dead at arrival at the Lady Reading Hospital (LRH).

Ghazala Javed was a Pakhtun singer belonging to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province. She was considered to be a leader in reviving and promoting female singing within the KPK province following the Taliban insurgency. She was nominated for a Filmfare Award in 2010 and received a Khyber Award in 2011.

2. A singer-dancer named Shabana was killed in brutal fashion and her body left out to rot in the Market Square known as “Khooni Chowk” (Bloody Square) by the Taliban in the city of Mingora in Swat in April of 2009.

3. Aiman Udas was a singer and songwriter in Peshawar, Pakistan. Udas had frequently performed on PTV television and AVT Khyber, a private Pashto channel in Pakistan. In 2009 her brothers allegedly shot her dead in her apartment in Peshawar. Her final song was titled, “I died but still live among the living, because I live on in the dreams of my lover.

These women mediate between the world of beauty, of song, and “happiness” on the one hand – and of suffering, alienation and death on the other, or to borrow from feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, they might be thought of as “affect aliens.” Ahmed notes, “If injustice does have unhappy effects, then the story does not end there … unhappiness is not our endpoint. If anything, the experience of being alienated from the affective promise of happy objects gets us somewhere” (Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects”). This “somewhere” that we get to is what I describe as the “queering of Islam” in the musical oeuvre of the Pakistani women singers whom I discuss here. Their voices and songs help us to arrive at a “queer” understanding of our own affective responses to the questions raised by encountering the “other” in our midst.

Whereas scholar Sara Ahmed focuses on the situation/figure of the migrant postcolonial in the metropolis, I discuss the stories of three women singers, two of whom live(d) and work(ed) squarely within the patriarchal national imaginary of post-Partition Pakistan (Noor Jehan and Abida Parveen). The third singer, Deeyah, is the diasporic figure of the “killjoy feminist” most akin to Ahmed’s example of the football-loving heroine of the film, Bend it Like Beckham. Like that heroine, Deeyah’s musical interventions in Norwegian space open up uncomfortable questions for both the Muslim community’s “happy objects” landscape, as well as that of the western racist and neo-imperialist discourse of “happy

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multiculturalism” embraced uncritically by white western neoliberal citizens in Norway and elsewhere.

Deeyah

Deeyah has released only two albums to date: the first, “Deepika” released in 1995, and the second, “Ataraxis” in 2007, and a few hit singles. The songs she has performed straddle and combine the sacred-profane, mind/body divide in interesting ways, with the young woman baring more of her body in music videos accompanying the release of her songs and albums than her female Pakistani predecessors under discussion. However, one can argue that the baring of her back in her hit single “History” (1996), or baring it again and finally taking off an Afghan-style burqa to slip into a pool in a bikini-clad body in her hit single, “What Will It Be” (featuring guest performance artist, LA rapper and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas voice talent Young Maylay, released in 2006) are political choices. Such choices are necessitated by the charged Islamist climate of not just her birth country, but also the racist European culture in which she has grown up. Thus, for instance, in the music video of her song “History,” we see Deeyah as the only young dark-skinned woman on a bus filled with white folk ranging in age from the young to the very old, many of them looking like skinheads with tattoos on their arms and shaved heads, eyeing her as an outsider, with a scene in which a man who looks like a cop is following her with a sniffing dog. Following this shot, we see Deeyah with the camera behind her, her back now bared, singing the lyrics, “I won’t fight, but I’ll defend my right,” and “History is proving us all wrong … no reason to be proud of our own.” She then goes on to assert, “I won’t step back into the shade … I will let my roots grow deep.” Here, her naked back serves as a slate on which a new history can be written, one in which she “belongs” to the white society in which she has grown up, a world where all individuals should have the same rights without having to resort to violence to defend them. I ask whether she is an “affect-alien” here because she refuses to let the history of racism in Europe disappear? Or is her stated desire to let her roots grow deep in Norway, the “good feeling” of a “happy multiculturalist” aiming to embrace the future of her life in Europe cleansed of its colonialist past, and thus meant to evoke a similar affective state in the listener?

Continuing with this train of questioning, where/how does the “alienation from the affective promise of happy objects” play out in the musical oeuvre and lives of Madame Noor Jehan and Abida Parveen, and in so doing, shed light on the secular and sacred poles of Pakistani society

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as enacted by its women singers? For Madame, as Noor Jehan came to be known, the sexualized female body, with all of its allure for men, became the avatar of alienation from the affective promise of happy objects by allowing her to use it through her melodious voice and talent to live entirely on her own terms. After two marriages, two divorces, countless affairs including one allegedly with General Yayha Khan who was President of Pakistan at the time of its split with Bangladesh, she said in an interview:

I am Noor Jehan because I have worked hard to become Noor Jehan. I do not owe it to anyone, least of all men. If a woman works, what does she get at the end of the day? The only peace she knows is within the four walls of her home. Who can work harder than I have? And what peace, I ask you, have I known? Once the husband realizes that his wife can earn more than him, he begins to hate her. He wants her to be dependent on him. Only if a woman is entirely dependent on her husband can she hope to make a home.

Noor Jehan never did “depend” on any man; but she did create a home for her six children from different marriages.

What is fascinating is how the phenomenon known as Malika Tarranum (Melody Queen) Madame Noor Jehan, rose from the ranks of a literal Kanjar (a nautch girl, a prostitute) to becoming a Queen, transforming the image of the Kanjar not into one of purity or piety, but rather, infusing it with the pleasures of the sensual voice and body and rendering that sensual, sexual energy not just acceptable, but adored and desirable across class, ethnicity, gender and religious affiliation. While it is tempting to see her as an iconic figure that was anomalous in the larger culture to which she belonged, I would like to suggest that Pakistani Muslim culture and society has, within its syncretic tradition of pan-Indian Sufism, an appeal to the spiritual which is deeply wedded to the sensual. It is to this heritage of Sufi Islam which singers like Madame Noor Jehan appealed even as she did not embrace its more ritual aspects. This heritage is so ingrained that Jehan even referred to herself as a Sufi devotee with a murshid (spiritual leader). While it may be true that the more recent “Sufi music vogue is a shallow urban bourgeois fad whose performers lack any serious or long-standing engagement with or understanding of genuine Sufi tradition,” it seems to me that singers like Noor Jehan got away with much that was bawdy and irreverent in their song choices and personal style of performance and living because at some level, audiences understood instinctively the marriage of secular and sacred in her work. This synergy of the sacred and secular also underlies much of the creative spirit of the county and its peoples.


Thus, for example, a 1970 film made in Lollywood (the lesser-known Pakistani equivalent of Bollywood) features a song by playback singer Noor Jehan showing the popular actress of that era, the voluptuous Firdaus, lip-syncing and dancing to Noor Jehan’s famous song, Sun Wanjhali Di Meethri Taan (Listen to my beautiful flute), as her earthly lover/beloved Ranjha plays in the foreground on his flute, his long hair and get-up the mark of a Sufi dervish (saint). Viewing these opening shots, audiences are pulled in through the contrasting (but equally beautiful) style and substance of the song, the lyrics and the figure of Ranjha representing the sacred along with the female appeal to her earthly beloved Ranjha, the secular, profane aspects of love. Yet, the song in totality integrates these two impulses of human nature, raising questions regarding the place of music and female performance in Pakistani society, not just in Madame Noor Jehan’s more progressive era of the 1940s-through 2000, but in today’s Pakistan when Islamist clergy and extremists issue fatwas banning music in general and target female singers and performers for particular approbation and even for public executions. Audiences must ask how Islamist clergy and extremists can ban music, when even secular renditions like those of the film are steeped in the power and attraction of the devotional impulse? If human love is a reflection of the divine, how can love songs be the mark of the devil? How can women, as both objects of desire and desiring subjects, be sinful creatures? Clearly, singers like Noor Jehan inspire us to learn more about the role of music and of female singers in Pakistani culture in particular, and Islam in general. Further, as a result of the affect – that is, the combination of mind/body/emotional responses that we experience when seeing/hearing her sing – we are moved to challenge such obscurantist views.

Abida Parveen and the Queering of Musical Space

I argue that singers like Noor Jehan, Deeyah and Abida Parveen challenge fundamentalist understandings of Islam via a Sufi-inspired “queering” of a heteronormative worldview that wishes to separate nature and culture, body and mind, as well as the divine from the human. These singers bring the divine or the sacred back into conversation with the supposedly secular through their love songs – a conversation with long historical roots in Islamic history but which is ignored conveniently by present day orthodox clerics. Ayesha Jalal’s recent book, Partisans of Allah analyzes these roots even as she critiques the tendency of mullahs (ignorant, linear and literal-minded orthodox Islamic clerics). The latter preach “waging war against infidels” rather than embracing the greater

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jihad (jihad-al-akbar) which is the struggle to overcome one’s own “lower self”, a concept beloved of the followers of Ibn-al-Arabi, a 14th century mystic. Jalal comments:

Not only does blanket condemnation of Ibn al-Arabi’s followers as pantheistic denigrate their liberal stance on social and cultural accommodations, but also it is symptomatic of the failure to come to grips with the mystical orientation.

It is this “mystical orientation” that Pakistani female singers embrace even within the patriarchal orthodoxy of Muslim Pakistani musical culture. Female Sufi singers’ responses to issues of gendered identity within a tradition of male-dominated qawwali music, for example, is embodied powerfully in Abida Parveen, the leading contemporary female voice of Pakistan representing Sufi music today. Perveen says in an interview:

Male and female does not even come into it – what you call Allah is one – God is the mehver [center] of everything – you make a roundabout and whatever way it goes – it is in that direction – it is as if you have put up a clock tower, and every passage will go through it – it will go to it – it really does not matter whether it is male or female – in fact we can really say in the Sufi’s terminology – if someone is not a male – he is called [a] female.

Indeed it can be argued that Abida Parveen represents the self as both corporeal and transendent, a self that is part of a world in which we are all participants at once of the secular life and the sacred realm. Thus, to experience Abida Parveen singing sufiana kalam (similar in intent but performatively different from the qawwali style) with her large body that does not bespeak traditional gender markers of femininity since she usually wears shapeless tunics, no make up, and her hair in an unruly mop of curls adorning her plain face which could be male or female – is indeed to enter a space of blurred gender identification. Her appearance on stage, with her wild curly hair framing her face as she sways to the music she sings, the audience clapping and swaying along with her, introduces audiences right away to the beauty and power of devotional music from Pakistan which celebrates the quest for divine love, but through earthly metaphors of desire in which male singers perform in a female voice while female singers like Abida Parveen take on traditional male forms and feminize them. As Naseer Mirza and Sikander Baloch of Radio Pakistan observe in an interview conducted by Dr. Abbas in 1999:

Since [Abida Parveen] was trained within the male traditions her style is exceptional. She uses the dohra or bait, short two-line verses, within the


main body of her narrative, a style she imbibed from her male mentors, including her late husband, Shaikh Ghulam Hussain … No other woman in Sind has this style, which is essentially a unique male style.

One of Abida Parveen’s popular concert compositions is a mystic text about a female mendicant performed at concerts and at the annual Urs (religious festival) celebrations commemorating the Sufi poet Abdul Shah Latif’s death anniversary at his shrine in Sindh. Abida Parveen is one of the rare females invited to perform in this space, and I suppose it helps that she is a Sindhi herself. The composition is filled with allusions to the Leila-Majnun myth in which Majnun, the male lover, has become a madman for love of his beloved Leila. In the lyrics she sings (written by Hakeem Nasser in the 18th or 19th centuries), Parveen sings as the embodiment of both the madman and the female mendicant who is fearful that the one she loves is perhaps the one – the madman – who has set himself on fire. But here, in this verse, the female mendicant and the madman are interchangeable as both the desiring subject and object of desire.

Jis karan mai jogi bane (for whom I became the female mendicant) Kahin vohi na jalta ho-e (has he ignited himself) … jab se tune mujhe (since thou made me) Divana bana rakha hai (a mad one) Sang har sakhs ne (a stone every person) Hatho me utha rakha hai (carries in their hand)

Thus, in both her personal appearance and her style of singing, as well as in choice of material, Parveen blurs gender and class hierarchies – as the poetry of Bulleh Shah and other mystics reveals – and equally circumvents the walls separating earthly love from divine love, the secular from the sacred, female from male, and the lover from his/her beloved.

In terms of combining the secular and sacred poles of Muslim life, in which female sexuality becomes yet another manifestation of the Divine spirit, Deeyah’s trajectory, although unique in its contemporary diasporic manifestation, is not all that different from that of Madame and Parveen as I have discussed above. Deeyah’s songs connect love for man, woman and Allah. In baring her body, she also bares her soul and shows body and soul as inextricably linked. The images of Deeyah in her music videos effect a “queering” of traditional female space within the Muslim imaginary. Deeyah’s images of her bare back inscribed with names of female victims of honor-killings, or her culturally-erased back in her video “History” blur the folds between “burqa” and “bikini,” tracing the contours of her-stories on the body of the Muslim woman rewriting his-tory.

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In the musical oeuvre of the three Pakistani female singers discussed here, I have “queered” Islam as understood by the orthodox elite and their followers. Such queering that occurs when the affective realm impinges on the listeners’ bodies and souls via these women’s singing allows us to experience the kind of love that the Sufi poets of Islam extol, a love which breaks down the division between body and soul, male and female, and between (human) nature and culture. By blurring the borders separating the secular from the sacred, man from woman, righteousness from impiety embedded in orthodox and normative Islam’s divisive vision of (feminine) Nature versus (masculine) Culture, the work of these female singers encourages the world, East and West, to reinvent itself.


Abbas, Shamed Burney. 2002. The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual: Devotional Practices of India and Pakistan (Austin: University of Texas Press.

Ahmed, Sara, 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.

Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. 2009. “The Long Dark Night in Pakistan.” Counterpunch.

Bal, Mieke. 2006. A Mieke Bal Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 333.

Jalal, Ayesha. 2008. Partisans of Allah. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Manuel, Peter, “North Indian Sufi Popular Music in the Age of Hindu and Muslim Fundamentalism,” 52:3 (Fall 2003), 380.

CHAPTER FIVE

MEERABAI AND ST. TERESA OF AVILA: LIVES IN PARALLEL WORLDS

NIRUPAMA VAIDYANATHAN

Through the centuries, the spiritual quest has fascinated human beings belonging to different faiths. This quest took on special meaning in the lives of women who lived in societies dominated by patriarchal norms. Here, the woman’s individual spiritual quest confronted institutionalized patriarchal norms, and led to a spirited cry for freedom to make choices.

In this essay, I examine the lives of two women – Meerabai (1498-1547) and St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) – one a Hindu saint, and the other a Catholic nun, who lived in overlapping time periods on different continents. I reflect on the ways in which their individual choices reflected their desire for a life filled with spirituality which confronted patriarchal ideas of how women should lead their lives.

To read about a human being’s spiritual quest is a profound experience for a reader belonging to a succeeding generation. Meerabai and St. Teresa revealed their spiritual desire through words that have inspired us for 500 years. Meerabai’s writing is in the form of poetic verse that is sung all over India, while St. Teresa of Avila has written prose that has survived the passage of time.

I examine both saints’ lives, using their work (in English translation) as the basis for this comparison. There is a difference between the written documentation available about the two saints. Teresa has many well-known books such as, Interior Castle, and The Way of Perfection. She has also written an autobiography called, The Book of My Life that gives many precise facts about her life. Spanish king Philip II who ruled Spain from 1566 onwards acquired original copies of all the books written by her, and preserved them in pristine condition in his palace at Escorial, about 50 miles from present-day Madrid. The books were written by hand, with some parts in Teresa’s own handwriting, while nuns in her convent wrote down other parts.

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Meerabai’s writing on the other hand, has primarily reached us through an oral tradition, and we do not have precise details regarding dates, places, and events. Nonetheless, I was surprised to find a number of scholarly articles endeavoring to firmly conclude the time of her birth, as well as the timing of other events in her life.

The two women were born into families that possessed considerable wealth and social status. Meerabai was born in Merta, Rajasthan in 1498, while Teresa was born in Spain in 1515 their births being separated by 17 years. Teresa’s grandfather was a converso, a Jew who converted to Catholicism the Spanish Inquisition. In 1492, during the Inquisition, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain ordered Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism or leave Spain. For 700 years prior to this decree, Muslims had ruled Spain, and Muslims, Catholics, and Jews had lived in considerable harmony throughout Spain. Many Jews unwilling to give up lives built over several generations converted to Catholicism as Teresa’s grandfather did (The Book of My Life).

Teresa’s parents were devout Catholics. Her mother used her rosary beads every day, and her father’s compassion was influenced by his ideas on morality within Catholicism. Teresa writes of her very first spiritual leanings in tender detail. With a large brood of eleven siblings, she spent a lot of time with her brother who was closest to her in age. “In the small orchard behind our house, we would pile up stones to build our hermitages. But, they immediately came tumbling down thwarting our project over and over again” (The Book of My Life, 6).

Yet another revelation from Teresa’s childhood brings her even closer to the modern-day reader. As a child, she was an avid reader, addicted to romance novels, a habit which greatly displeased her father. In this idyllic childhood filled with material comfort and a caring family, a pivotal event created profound implications for her future decisions. When she was twelve years old, her mother died in childbirth ( 7). This event traumatized the young girl and she developed a deep fear about marriage and ensuing childbirth. After getting married, her older sister Maria moved to another town. At the time, it was not acceptable for a young girl to stay without an older female relative’s supervision. So, at the age of twenty, Teresa joined the convent. She lived there for over a year and a half, and she started contemplating a life of monastic existence prompted in no small measure by her aversion towards the other choice for a woman of her age, which was to marry and raise children (The Book of

13). To her surprise, when she asks her father permission to take her vows, her father objects, as he does not want to lose his daughter completely to a monastic life.

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At this moment, she decides independently to leave her father’s home, and with her brother’s help to join the Incarnation, a convent. She says of this moment, “I remember that when I left my father’s house that day, my distress was so intense that I believed it couldn’t be greater if I were actually dying” (The Book of My Life, 17). And, from this point when she asserts herself, we see her doing so at many other moments in her life, making decisions that most women of her time would not have dared to take.

Compared with this level of detail we have about Teresa’s life, what we know about Meerabai’s life is sketchy. What I present here is based on a consensus view of her life based on various historical sources. Mirabai ka Jivancharitra by Munshi Devi Prasad, published in 1905, is the first book that examines her life in detail. Before this book, the life of Meerabai is detailed in short references within Rajput history. From piecing together various sources, we find that Meerabai was probably born in the year 1498 in Merta (a fortress-town about 50 miles from modern-day Ajmer) to Ratan Singh. Her mother died when Meerabai was very young – similar to Teresa’s life. Meerabai then went to live with her paternal grandfather Rao Dudaji. Here, keeping with the traditional upbringing of a Rajput princess, she was educated in the Vedas, and Upanishads by a priest, while receiving instruction in music and dancing as well. (Alston, 2) Her childhood love for Krishna is referenced in the following poem:

O Krishna did You even rightly value My childhood love? Without your sight I feel no ease My mind swings this way and that Mira says, I am Yours. I will proclaim this, with Your permission To the beat of a drum. (Alston, 75)

In 1516, Meerabai married Bhojraj, son of Rana Sangha of Mewar. This arranged marriage was an alliance based on gaining political advantage for her father-in-law Rana Sangha of Mewar. At the time, he was the Rajputs’ best hope to fight against advancing Mughal forces, hence he married princesses from Jodhpur, and another princess Karmavati Bai from Bundi to the northwest of Mewar. Immediately to the north lay Merta, and he secured an agreement with Meerabai for his heir-apparent Bhojraj, thus creating a wall of support north of his borders in all directions. Unfortunately, Bhojraj died a few years after their marriage. Historians accuse the genealogists at the Mewar court for not recording the cause and date of death of a prince who was an heir-apparent.

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After Bhojraj’s death, Meerabai faced a lot of hardship, for her spiritual leanings caused a great deal of friction within the royal palace. Widowed and childless, Meerabai starts receiving sants and sadhus (holy men) in her royal chambers, a custom that was frowned upon.

Compared to this struggle that Meerabai faced in leading the basic tenets of a religious life – the freedom to pray, and the ability to meet others of a similar bent of mind, Teresa, by adopting the church, had access to such activities with remarkable ease within the church walls of the Incarnation for twenty years where she dedicated unlimited time to pray.

Given this space and time to pray freely, Teresa still admits that like Meerabai she is unable to do so. “The conflict is between yearning for God and attraction to the world” (The Book of My Life, 52). This quality of self-deprecation and utter frankness make her one of the most sought after saints in Catholic theological writing today. People identify with her struggles so deeply because they mirror their own. They also derive the strength to continue with this unrelenting battle between the spiritual and material worlds hoping that they too can achieve what she did after twenty years of prayer and meditation.

After this long period of leading an unremarkable life as a spiritual seeker from the age of twenty to forty, Teresa experienced a deep spiritual conversion that catapults her into the hallowed space reserved for saints. From this moment of transformation, Teresa never forsook her faith. She experienced spiritual raptures where she felt deep physical torment. Because of these raptures that seemed like strange experiences, many questioned her ‘true’ faith. Many of Teresa’s writings were initiated as a result of doubters who questioned the veracity of her claims. In explaining her experiential feelings time and again, she immortalized her own experiences for succeeding generations of believers.

Compared to this moment of epiphany in the life of Teresa, we see Meerabai alternatively sure of Krishna’s place in her heart, followed by an intense search for Him. The following verses reflect the joy of oneness and the pain of separation.

O my companion, I have beheld Shyam, the son of Nand. I have lost all consciousness of my surroundings And worldly shame has fled. (Alston, 37)

From this moment of union that she describes, we then see her as the one who is separated over and over again:


Today I heard to my great delight That Hari had come Seeing that He has in fact not come I gaze down the road with yearning My eyes will not obey my commands And emit a constant flow of tears What can I do? I am at a perfect loss I have not wings to fly. Says Mira: O My Master the courtly Giridhara I await your coming in great expectation (Alston, 85)

If Teresa was constantly questioned because of her raptures that were not understood by those around her, Meerabai faced persecution for her continued spiritual pursuit within her father-in-law’s palace. No one understood or supported her practices. In 1528, about 12 years after her marriage and widowhood, her father-in-law Rana Sangha died in a futile battle against the Mughal invader Babur. Vikramajita becomes the heir. He sends her poison, which she drinks gladly insisting that it had changed into nectar because of her Giridhara.

Rana, I know you gave me poison But I came through as gold left in a fire Emerges bright as a dozen suns. Opinion and family name I throw away like water You should hide, Rana. I am a powerless mad woman Krishna’s arrow in my heart Destroys my reason I hug the lotus feet of holy men, Give them body and soul Mira’s lord knows she is his servant. (Alston, 114)

Battling a threat to her life, Meerabai not only does not shy away from confronting her tormentors, she sets her feelings down in passionate verse, displaying her bhakti (devotion). After this episode, she reportedly returns to her paternal uncle Viram Dev’s house, and continues her worship at the Chaturbhuj temple at Merta, whose ruins can be seen today. In this period of her life, she feels marginalized and isolated from family members.

Strange are the decrees of fate Behold the large eyes of the deer Yet he is forced to roam the forests The harsh crane has brilliant plumage

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While the sweet-voiced cuckoo is black The rivers flow in pure streams But the sea makes them salt Fools sit on thrones as kings While the wise beg their bread Mira’s Lord is the courtly Giridhara The King persecutes the bhakthas [holy men]

From this alienation, she leaves for Brindavan, a center for Krishna’s devotees. Here we see another pivotal well-documented event in Meerabai’s life when she was confronted by the respected theologian Jiv Goswami who tells her that a woman in their midst would distract him and his fellow devotees from the pursuit of attaining Krishna. Meera responds by saying, “as far as she could see there was only one male in all of Vrindavan and it was not Jiv. Before Krishna [she implied], the rest of the world is female” (John Hawley and Mark Jueregensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India).

Through this event in Meerabai’s life, I have drawn several conclusions. Women from princely royal families did not choose to live among saints in Brindavan. Never able to satisfy the expectations of her royal family, Meera fought for acceptance amongst a group of saints with whom she felt a sense of kinship. Meerabai is believed to have died in Dwaraka among other seekers of Krishna.

Teresa leads a deeply religious life till the very end, but, starts to question the openness of the Incarnation, and desires a stricter adherence to Christ’s precepts. She wishes to build a convent for nuns, a place where they would observe a strict code of poverty, and receive alms from Catholics. During this time of the Spanish Inquisition when insubordination to the Church’s principles could be construed as heresy, and punished with severity, Teresa’s goal was an unusual one, namely, to start a monastic house within the Catholic Church. For this, first, one had to convince church authorities that the very institution that had supported Teresa had fallen short in some way. This, of course, was a most delicate subject. To win approval from inside her own convent, she prudently decided to speak only of the rational reasons for doing this, while keeping divine visions and voices that she experienced under wraps. There were many who doubted her simply because she was female.

With great difficulty, she started a cloistered convent, laying down the rule that no more than thirteen nuns live there at a time, relying entirely on alms, wearing no footwear and serving the Lord in a small chapel that was erected with the help of other devotees. Even after she had the convent, the mayor and city council members threatened to bring it down. Here too, in


intense prayer and by using prudent internal negotiations, she waited patiently. All this uproar brought her to the attention of judges under the Spanish Inquisition, where one false statement against the Church could take a person’s life in an instant. She faced them not once but twice, convincing them that her chapel was not against the Church, but in fact, went further to spread the gospel of Christ. The example of nuns living in isolation, subsisting on food and clothes donated to them could only inspire, she said, more piety not less among others. Finally, she was exonerated of all crimes against the Church.

Teresa traveled personally throughout Spain, founding one convent after another, handpicking those who wanted to lead their lives according to a very strict monastic code. She realized that the success of her project relied on the nuns that she chose to live by her decree. Today, there stand seventeen convents named after her – only one was founded after her death in 1562.

Teresa was canonized in 1622 forty years after her death, and is one among 33 Doctors of the Church; in the history of the Catholic Church, only three are women. She was the first woman to win this title. The title of Doctor of the Church is reserved for those whose writings have made a significant impact on propagating the ideals of Jesus Christ. And, as is often the case, men won this title fairly easily. But a concerted effort by Catholic women all over the world was launched to give her this recognition in 1970.

We see through their lives that Meerabai felt marginalized – there was no order of Hindu women monks for company. Frequently she refers to herself as being “mad.” This must refer to how others thought of her. Teresa, on the other hand, by stepping into the Catholic Church had the overall support of an established order. But, here too, when she decides to take an independent decision, the order turns on her. Both of them do not give up their spiritual pursuits. They are remembered today for their courage in challenging the social and religious paradigms that threatened to define and engulf them in their grip.

PART II

PERFORMING ARTISTS’ PROCESS/CHOREOGRAPHIC NOTES:

MAD AND DIVINE MYSTIC SAINT-POETS OF INDIA

CHAPTER SIX

DARSHAN: SEEING

MALAVIKA SARUKKAI

Figure 6-1: Malavika Sarukkai, In Dream. Ray Clark, London

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One of the most profound lessons I learnt about classical art performance theory was reinforced not by scholarly writing or academic pursuit but with an occurrence quite by accident. It happened unannounced and quietly in the ample courtyard of my friends’ estate outside Zurich.

A huge gong stood silent in the corner of the sunlit courtyard waiting to be struck. Bending low, I put the wooden striker to the surface. Keeping up the pressure of the striker on the surface, I traced its circularity to ‘prepare’ it. After a pause, with expectation, I ‘struck’ the vast surface. The entire courtyard ‘reverberated’ with the deep sonorous ripples of sound travelling outward. Then silence descended. Or so it seemed, until one listened attentively to the deep inner sound of the vibration in the still

In that moment the aesthetic theory of rasa (emotions)

Words fell together as correspondences, preparation of the gong’s surface and dance practice were striking as performance on stage, their reverberations and resonance echoed within artist and audience. Looking at my mother, I felt exalted as we shared this private moment of discovery. Both of us were delighted to find the scholarly theory of aesthetics reflected with disarming simplicity in the world. We stood astounded by this simple truth. It brought home to me yet again that rasa – aesthetic bliss or spiritual resonance – was the essential experience that I wanted my art to reflect.

Bharata Natyam can be seen as a style or as a language of dance. If equated solely with a style and repertoire that evolved at a particular point of time it could become restrictive and habit oriented. Over decades, internalizing Bharata Natyam, it has become my personal language. My dance is rooted in the sacred, works with the classical alphabet and allows interpretations to have contemporary energies. This empowers it with an immediacy and contemporaneity transforming it into a living, breathing art form.

Choreographing Maname Brindavaname: The Magical Grove Within for the Mad and Divine Festival in Chennai was fortuitous. It took me into the world of Vaishnavite thinking and adoration and the mystical bhakti (devotion) drenched love poetry of 9th century saint poet Aandaal. She was the only woman alwar (Vaishnavite saint) who sang of her unbridled love for Vishnu. Driven by intensity of love and devotion by age fifteen, she had written two works: Tiruppavai (The Song of Krishna), and Nachiyar Tirumozhi (The Sacred Song of the Lady). Myths and stories abound linking the magical merging of Aandaal and Vishnu in the temple at Srirangam. These stories continued to weave in and out of my mind as I oriented myself to the interpretation of her Pasurams or verses.

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Figure 6-2: Malavika Sarukkai, Dance. Ray Clark, London

Maname Brindavaname: The Magical Grove Within is a drysa kavya (visual poetry) bringing to light some verses of the lesser-known work from Aandal’s The Sacred Song of the Lady. These poems abound with Aandaal’s mystic love for Vishnu, her blinding innocence of pure desire. Even though I had ample interpretative knowledge of love poems in the traditional repertoire of Bharata Natyam, entering these love poems was different.

I knew I had to prepare myself for this entry – to think, feel, and sense the overpowering love and viraha (separation) of complete devotion. It required from me a suppleness of approach, a repossessing of technique, spiritual alignment and more. This orientation required discarding habit and convention and instead staying with the aching vulnerability of pure desire. My mind and being had to be prepared, like a field ready and waiting for Aandaal’s bhakti. With this new awareness, my language of dance opened up, granting space, freedom and moments of bliss, and moments of celebrating the notion, namely, “it is not the dancer but the

” There were many inflows that created the choreography, such as a visit

to the great temple at Tirupathi referred to as Thiruvengadam by Aandaal. Here, Vishnu is omnipresent as Varadaraja, the Giver of Boons. Standing

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near the inner sanctum sanctorum in the glow of flickering oil lamps, I saw the nirmalaya sevai, the unbedecked form of Vishnu. He is envisioned here as a young and handsome being. As I stood and gazed fixated in the cool darkness of the shrine I came closer to Aandaal and her bhakti or devotional love. Darshan, it seemed, was the moment of seeing a truth, a moment of revelation within oneself.

Other inputs included several long sessions with scholar Dr. Raghuraman where he explained the significance of word, meaning, subtext, and context. Hours during which the notes written were internalized and transformed into dance concepts. Next came the music composing sessions with Dr. Vanathi where mood, rhythm, and melody were discussed while paying acute attention to nuances in concept and musical design. Together with these inflows were the transcreations of Aandaal’s poems in English by poet-novelist Priya Sarukkai Chabria. All these inputs infused meaning, dimension and creative energy.

The Magical Grove Within travels from the precincts of the temple at Srirangam to the untrammeled spaces of the heart in Brindavan i.e. the work moves from the worship of Vishnu in his archa (iconographic form), to him as the antaryami (omniscient or all knowing), the indweller within the heart. To quote A.K. Ramanujan from Hymns for the Drowning, “God out there in the universe is also in the temple as he is in the devotees’ heart. He is at once the other, the indweller and the icon.” The dance choreography in the production highlights the searing and unbridled yearning of Aandaal. She calls to Vishnu drenched in divine infatuation. We discover passion, longing and her uncontainable desire for Vishnu of Thiruvengadam through Aandaal’s deeply felt emotions. Her mystical love knows no limits and with surprising honesty she lays bare her vulnerability.

Andaal’s sacred pilgrimage imprints us as she sings The Nachiyar Thirumozhi (The Sacred Song of the Lady). Together with Aandaal, we journey through spaces both real and imagined – Srirangam and Brindavan, outer and inner, past and present, touching many realities.

In one of the choreographies entitled, Thoodhu (The Cloud Messenger), nritta (rhythmic dance) and abhinaya (expressional dance) coalesce to create a sharp body language of emotion and an eloquent dance-speak. While attuning myself to Aandaal’s poetry, I found strong images of iconography becoming embedded in it. This intuition contoured the choreography and moved it towards a juxtaposition of the margi, the ‘great’ pan-Indian elite tradition, and the desi, the ‘little’ vernacular traditions. In my dance and sound design the pattern played out – chanting of Sanskrit verses in sharp contrast to the poetic singing of Tamil verses,

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dance energies rooting the immovable iconographic images of the Gods against the restless movement of Aandaal.

In Thoodhu (The Cloud Messenger), the composition is envisioned in three parts: as Aandaal sees Vishnu in his archa (iconographic form) as Perumal, as Narasimha, and as Ranganatha. The divine protector of all the world manifests in myriad forms: standing in equipoise as Perumal, seated as he disembowels the demon Hiranyakashipu, and reclining on Ananta the Serpent of Infinity. Aandaal beseeches the clouds to take her message to her Lord. She is tossed between longing, despair and rejection. Even the clouds desert her as they move away across the skies making their way to her Lord Vishnu.

Three passages of nritta (rhythmic dance) entitled, “Cloud Dance” enhanced the mood woven into the composition based on Hymn 8, a transcreation (as Priya Sarukkai Chabria expreses it) of the poem, “The Cloud Messenger”:

Verse 1 Dark cloud roof unfurling beneath The roof of the covering sky Do you herald the coming of my Lord Thirumal from high Venkata hill where bright waterfalls plunge? My tears, luminous, stream between the full Hills of my breasts I am not to weep; yet he makes me break my vow: How does this honor him?

Verse 5 Monsoon clouds you spread across The sky, slash It raining torrents, you shake the honey-heavy blossoms Of Vengadam and scatter scented petals Go tell the dark lord who killed the demon Hiranya Ripping him with paws of fury That he has robbed me of my bangles.

Verse 9 Great thunderheads that rear as intoxicated elephants Over Vengadam’s forested emerald summit Ask him who makes his bed on the colossal coils of the sacred Serpent what words he said to me. He, protector of All is false With me, a maiden slender and trusting In what light will the world judge him if he betrays Me, tortures me instead? Shouldn’t he protect his name?

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As I internalized and aligned my being during several hours of rehearsals in preparation to become a patra or vessel to contain this artistic experience, many other levels emerged. As the wise ones say, “One has to search in the heart with the intellect.” This is the journey, the darshan, the seeing. The words of photographer Raghu Rai come to mind: “The emergence of the unseen and the revelation of the unknown carries the current of the divine – the experience becomes a darshan.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

ADITI MANGALDAS

INTERVIEWED BY NIRUPAMA VAIDYANATHAN

Figure 7-3: Aditi Mangaldas. Dinesh Khanna

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Nirupama: Aditiji, you presented a performative piece on Meerabai at the Mad and Divine festival in Chennai. How did you start work on this piece by Meerabai?

Aditi: What I presented at the Mad and Divine conference was excerpted from a production entitled, Uncharted Seas that I had originally staged in 2006. The research for this production started when I read a profound quote from philosopher J. Krishnamurti who said, “We look for fixed points, but there are none, either in ourselves or outside in the universe. To live without these fixed points is our challenge.” From this initial inspiration, the production was built on the concept of search. Poets and philosophers amongst us have written eloquently about the following questions that human beings have always grappled with – “Standing alone, looking out at the distant stars, have we not wondered what creation is all about? What lies beyond what our mind can perceive? Is this search external, on paths that have been laid down through centuries? Is the search internal, through paths that are known, tried and tested?” I have posed these questions to the audience in the production, ‘Uncharted Seas’, incorporating poetry from Meerabai, Bhartendu Harishchandra, Jalalludin Rumi and many others who have written about the human longing for answers to this search.

Nirupama: How did you choose to interpret Meerabai’s poetry? Aditi: I did not try to interpret Meerabai’s poetry. Instead, my

challenge was to transform the piece, while evoking a sense of quest in the audience. When I was younger, Meerabai’s poetry was part of our dance curriculum. We learnt to interpret the poetry using traditional mudras (hand gestures) indicating Krishna with recognizable motifs and images. This time, I tried to go beyond mere interpretation, and instead tried to transform the piece into movement, abhinaya (expressional dance) and into visual images that reflect the broader spirit of the piece. When this is the desired goal, any poem or text becomes doubly challenging. I chose the song, “Ramaiya mein toh thare rang rati” (Oh Rama, I am your beloved) from Meerabai’s poetry and tried to find the essence of the composition in my dancing. All the poet-saints were searching for the intangible. So, to constrain Meerabai’s search by merely indicating Krishna through recognizable mudras (hand-gestures) and motifs would not do full justice to her life’s quest. To me, she was a free spirit who was looking way beyond the tangible experience of the murti (idol); perhaps, the time when she lived compelled her to affix labels to her quest. In fact, in many of her poems she refers to her unending quest in the face of opposition: “I don’t care what people think, for I want to find my identity.

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I am just asking a question, and people are saying that I’ve lost my way,” she notes in several poems.

Nirupama: How do you perceive the life of Meerabai and her poetry? What do you feel when you read her poetry?

Aditi: When I read her poetry, I feel that she was a free-spirited woman. In the time that she lived, free-spirited women like Meerabai could not have expressed their freedom, without putting religious overtones to their quest to reach something larger than what they had been taught to expect. Internally, she was definitely someone who chose to live life with complete abandon. Her poetry reveals this abandon in so many places. In fact, I am not able to visualize her as an icon draped in white, with an ektara (single string lute) on her lap. Of course, we do not have any images of Meerabai. To me, when I read her poems, I feel that she was a woman who had fire inside her. I can only visualize her as wearing flaming red, not white. That sanitized mage of her draped in white has been created by a patriarchal society that desired to see her fit within certain prescribed norms. Her desire for freedom and the abandon with which she lived were the essence of her personality and that is what I tried to take and explore, rather than this image that has been handed down to us. If I had done a literal interpretation of Meerabai’s poetry, then, I would not have hit upon the essence of who she was, and her quest. If I find the seed of that poem, then that seed can grow into a tree in others’ minds.

CHAPTER EIGHT

LIKE CAMPHOR ON FIRE

MADHU NATARAJ

Figure 8-4: Madhu Nataraj. Shamanth Patil J

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I have lived in Bangalore for the last two decades where the ubiquitous Vachanas (spoken words in prose or via lyrics of Lingayat philosophy) make their imposing presence felt at various literary conferences, dance and music concerts, but somehow they held no lure for me.

Given my training in Kathak, Contemporary dance and Hindustani music, I was more drawn to the poetry of the Sufis, esoteric Goddess texts, modern philosophers and the occasional avant-garde literary work.

Any talk of me performing Vachana related literature had me furtively look for the exit door.

How then did I find myself consumed and possessed by the Vachanas of the 12th century women mystics?

This is how it happened: In 2011, dancer, writer, curator and a woman of several other strengths,

Anita Ratnam, called me on a balmy July morning. She informed me in her clear, authoritative voice that I should create a new choreography based on the works of women saint poets for the Mad and Divine conference that she was curating in Chennai

I loved the idea but the challenge lay in finding that elusive poet. I knew that the North Indian, Kashmiri and Tamil poetesses were already ‘taken’ by other dancers for the conference.

I approached my uncle Basrur Subba Rao, a respected scholar who has authored highly acclaimed books on the saint poets Kanakadasa and Allama Prabhu. He was compiling material for his latest work featuring the philosophy of the monotheist Shaivite sect – the Lingayats – featuring over 40 Sharanas (male mystics) and Sharanes (female mystics) of the 12th century.

Subbu Bappa (as I call him) said, “Madhu, why don’t you consider the women mystics from Karnataka? About 35 in number, they have composed over one thousand three-hundred and fifty Vachanas within a span of 50 years.”

My heart sank. Vachanas again? Shattering my apprehension regarding Vachanas were words I heard

Subbu Bappa recite. It was like a revelation:

Like the pearl in the teardrop of a bumble bee Like fire hidden in the glow-worm Like sixteen digits hidden in the moon Like sound hidden in the blowing wind Like flash hidden in the thunder clap

“Muktayakka”, translated by Basrur Subba Rao

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The sheer beauty of these profound thoughts, and the potent hidden meaning garbed in simplicity had me riveted.

The Sharanes had my curiosity and now they held my attention. Apart from the radical saint poet, Akka Mahadevi, the rest of the Sharanes are virtually unknown to most of us today.

I realized that Subba Rao had transcreated the poetry of the Sharanes, infusing into it a new life and meaning. I was moved by his firm resolve in making these rare works available to the 21st century reader in English.

I discovered that the Sharanes were Monists, i.e. Advaitins who did not believe in Dvaita (dualism). They had links to the monistic Upanishads and the Kashmiri monistic Shaivism.

This is an important point to note as the Sharanas are linked to Virashaivism (the philosophy of a distinct Lingayat sect) that is a later phenomenon from the 14th century. The latter is a dvaita branch with roots in the sacred scriptures, namely, Shaiva Agamas.

Nirvaya Aikya (Salvation by Disappearance)

A unique feature of the Sharanes is their focus on death and salvation. “The Kannada term for the Sharane Aikya namely salvation, is Nirvaya which means becoming nothing. It is Sajiva Mukti, namely, salvation while still living. In effect, vanish …like camphor on fire,” said Subbu Bappa.

… step by step all distinctions disappear, Knowledge & ignorance disappear, Standing on the tip of the mountain in Shunya, I see a wondrous, shimmering light, I disappear into it’

“Lingamma”, translated by Basrur Subba Rao

“The word Linga (phallus, a major symbol of Shiva) denotes the Shivalinga but has a mystic meaning. The ‘Li’ means loss and ‘ga’ means going. That is disappearance by dissolution,” Subbu Bappa explained.

The poetry has several references to standing on the threshold (boundary between life and death) or a peak. These are metaphors for the transcendent Aikya state where mental and bodily functions are about to dissolve, where duality no longer exists and all becomes known.

One reads of Sharanas going into caves and disappearing without a

Leaving no trace could refer to having no residual no obligation to be reborn.

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Transfixed, I delved deeper into the enigmatic Sharane world and realized the potency of as vivid imagery started to take shape in my mind.

Soham Asmi (I am that) – Divine body, Divine Woman The Sharanes believed in the Anga linga advaita (body and linga)

philosophy where body and linga are considered the same. A woman is divine because her body is divine. I connected to this

thought completely as a woman who cannot separate her body from her Dance.

The Sharanes never really got their due in history. Some were married to prominent Sharanas of that era, but were independent philosophers and thinkers in their own right, not secondary to their husbands.

Bold women I thought, who stood out through their poetry and ventured into a largely male bastion in a gentle but dynamic manner.

Dissolving in Divinity

Dance for me cannot exist in oblivion and hence some wonderful artistes joined me as collaborators for “Nirvaya-Dissolving in Divinity.” The first was my dear friend and photo artiste, Ramya Reddy, with whom I brainstormed extensively and the imagery became apparent. But how on earth would we show disappearance on stage?

As women, we have an affinity to water. Water had to be the

Ramya meticulously took visual shots of me dancing that would run parallel to my dance. Our filmmaker friend, Bhushan Bagadia added dimensions of movement and animation to Ramya’s images.

The prologue opened with me seated in the Aikya stance (body within a triangle), as present day images of skyscrapers, crowded streets and traffic along with a cacophony of electronic noises assault my being. Slowly, I moved isolated parts of my body to Lingamma’s Vachana as water started to swallow me and I dissolved…disappeared.

This imagery transported me from the mundane to the sublime as also from today’s world to the realm of Sharane philosophy.

An expansive space was created through the choreography where connected imagery was birthed in movement. Sometimes my dance was mirrored in the projections, metaphoric of the Sharane’s philosophic reflections. For instance I created the quintessential threshold on stage using interactive multimedia.

I chose to take the poetry of three Sharane women – Lingamma, Muktayakka and Molige Mahadevi – and initially decided against the

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works of the radical poet, Akka Mahadevi, whose persona and poetry have inspired many artistes already.

These Sharanes completely immersed me into their concept of stillness and enlightenment. The choreography began to take on a more intellectual turn as I tried to manifest the cerebral quality of their work into movement.

Something was amiss, I felt. It struck me that I missed the lover-beloved aspect of bhakti

(devotion). Akka! Akka Mahadevi often crossed over from mystic thinking to

bhakti and back. Shiva as chenna mallikarjuna was her ultimate lover. She made a powerful entry, pouring her impassioned poetry into my choreography, my heart and my being.

My Mother and Guru, Dr. Maya Rao, became my choreographic

consultant and dramaturge. Given my dual identity as a Kathak and Contemporary dancer, I drew

from the rich fount of Kathak, bringing in the Kathavaachak (story-telling aspect) and shringaar (amorous sentiment) elements with contemporary motifs juxtaposed in parts.

My dear friend and music composer Praveen D. Rao created a soundscape that was at once sublime and quirky.

I recall that for the Akka segment that had a haunting Thumri-like (romanic genre of North Indian clssical music and dance) quality, I urged Praveen to recite rather than play the tabla (drum) bols (syllables). The

the work. Basrur Subba Rao was my principal source for both the original

Kannada verses and the English translations that were rendered by Ramli Ibrahim, Praveen and me.

Shreedevi Deshpande Puri and I created a costume that became a canvas for the projections and also reflected the ‘Vairagya’ state of Akka when she discards all her material possessions for love.

We chose a nude shade, a mangalgiri sari that was converted into a Kathak-type costume including contemporary overtones. Janardhan Raj Urs created the lighting plan.

My mind, my heart, my soul and my body merged and became one with the Sharanes as Nirvaya evolved into a 40-minute capsule. I have performed it in four countries, and each time my connection with the Sharanes grows stronger.

Strangely, Nirvaya was created exactly a year prior to the Nirbhaya (meaning fearless) movement, arising from the gang rape of a 23-year old

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woman in Delhi in December 2012. This devastating incident shook India and the world. Both Nirvaya and Nirbhaya stand for sensitivity towards women, their causes and their bodies.

I recently watched a film about how the thinking and lives of astronauts change drastically after they view the earth from space. It is akin to a spiritual revelation. The fact that at a molecular level, each of us is the same and that the individual and the absolute are one, hits them like a bolt of lightning.

Advaita philosophy? Star struck with stardust? Who knows? I only know that having travelled on a journey to discover the

my universe transformed … forever.

Not realizing you are the symbol of union with the Linga within you toil in search of another Linga seeking the One without a second.

You are united with it just as you stand, You yourself are the formless.

“Molige Mahadevi”, translated by Basrur Subba Rao

Note: Women saints from other regions of India are typically Vishnu

bhaktas. Andal and Mira are celebrated examples, but neither was a mystic or a Shaiva. In contrast, the Sharanes were Shaiva mystics, a rarity among women. The only record of women Shaiva mystics outside Karnataka is Lal Ded and ‘Rauf’ Bhavani of Kashmir.

Thanks to Basrur Subba Rao for translations.

CHAPTER NINE

AIKYA: IN THE VOICE OF AKKA MAHADEVI

MYTHILI PRAKASH

Figure 9-5: Mythili Prakash, “Abhang Ecstasy”. Jorge Vismara

My first encounter with Akka (elder sister, addressed with respect) Mahadevi was through her vachana (verse) Aralukondakerege. “Look, this barren and parched land has been flooded with a torrent of Grace. While enjoying the pleasures of the world, the prospective of the higher path has appeared … having glimpsed my Guru’s feet, I am truly blessed …” This vachana immediately resonated with me deeply, and thus began my interest in Akka Mahadevi’s life and poems. The fire of Akka Mahadevi’s personality as reflected by her life story and echoed in her words, stirred me immensely.

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I happened to have returned from an incredible trip to the birthplace of Akka Mahadevi and other Lingayat Spiritual Masters, when I received the invitation to be a part of the Mad and Divine Festival. There was no question about my chosen female mystic; the answer was clear. And so I began work on my production, “Aikya (Union): In the Voice of Akka Mahadevi.”

For me, the vachanas were a starting point. There is a lot of variation in the historical accounts of Akka Mahadevi’s life, so I took the creative liberty of envisioning her character based on her verses. They were a fascinating combination of imaginative philosophical metaphor, biting disdain for empty ritual, fervent love and surrender, and aching desire for Divine Union. What I sought to bring into my dance was the intensity of her spiritual transformation as reflected in these vachanas. Her life, her decisions, and her actions are what make her the social revolutionary that she has come to be regarded as in the field of female emancipation and empowerment. But to me, her poetry reflects the core of every action and decision: the burning desire that fueled her extraordinary passion and courage – the singular desire of Oneness (Aikya) with her beloved Chennamallikarjuna (Lord as white as Jasmine).

The process of creation of the script flowed quite intuitively and rather quickly, hand in hand with the music composition by my brother Aditya Prakash. Though Akka’s vachanas do not have dates, there seemed to me a clear progression in the intensity of her words that allowed me a glimpse into her inner journey. Her awe and curiosity to know and love Chennamallikarjuna develop and deepen from childlike wonderment, to fervent sringara (passionate love), to fierce determination, and ultimately complete surrender. While this transformation was clearly elucidated in my mind, finding the technique to communicate it was incredibly challenging. With my teacher and mentor, Malavika Sarukkai, constantly reminding me of the importance of staying anchored to sthayi (core emotion), the first step was etching the character. How would I permeate Akka into every movement, gesture, or look? I remember, for example, one particular gesture that I worked on. The gesture was Akka taking the duppatta (veil) off her head before she began speaking to the King who had come to seek her hand in marriage. This gesture prefaced the song Giriallade in which she asks sarcastically, “Would the peacock rather dance on a grassy hill or on a pile of dirt? Would the swan rather swim in a lake or a puddle?” A single gesture like this immediately set the tone of Akka’s disdain for materialism that colors the steadfast sringara of this vachana.

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The more daunting challenges were in physically portraying advaita (a school of thought that believes the true self to be one with the Supreme Reality, and to be pure consciousness) that formed the essence of her verses, life, and journey. How does one depict her love for “Him [the Lord] who has no form, nor end, nor origin”? How does one capture “merging” or “becoming”? The last scene of Aikya portrays her experiences at Anubhava Mantap (academy of mystics, saints, and philosophers of the Lingayat faith in the 12th century in Karnataka) in the company of other Spiritual Masters, and her onwards journey to Kadalivana where she realizes her Quest. For me, such experiences and transformation could not be expressed through gestural abhinaya, but rather through movement that embodied her experience. In the composition of this scene, both Aditya and I held close to us the ideas of: divesting, immersion, yearning, flight, gratitude, surrender, filling, becoming, and finally “Being.”

Embodying Akka became a practice in itself. Dancing the work, whether in practice, performance, or rehearsal is

always a deeply intense and transformative experience. Performing Aikya twice, with the gap of a year in between the performances, there was a significant deepening and internalization felt in the second performance.

Of particular interest to me was the comparative process of working on Aikya simultaneous to another work also about an “epic woman”: Yashodhara, the wife of Gautama Buddha. Yashodhara, based on verses by Maithili Sharan Gupta, conceived, scripted, music composed, and directed by Gowri Ramnarayan portrays the inner journey of Yashodhara, abandoned by her husband Siddartha in his pursuit of Enlightenment.

Finding the technique to crystallize the character of Yashodhara was also an interesting challenge. Investing energy and character into symbols and metaphors that ran throughout the production was an important part of this process. For example, Gowri akka (elder sister) had chosen a song entitled, Ali Kartharila! in which an angst-filled Yashodhara demands scissors from her sakhi (friend) to cut her tresses that strangle her like dark snakes. In the opening scene of the production, Siddhartha admires and caresses her beautiful locks, and in the closing scene, she washes the Buddha’s feet with her tears and hair. I remember a class with Malavika akka in which her question to me was: “How are you portraying ‘Yashodhara’ differently from, say, a ‘Sita’?” The last scene of the four-part choreographic work was entitled Manini (proud one). Pride was a characteristic of Yashodhara that both the poet Maithili Sharan Gupta, and the director Gowri akka sought to bring forth. Hair, therefore, became for me a distinguishing characteristic of Yashodhara. A gesture such as

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caressing her own hair could be done so as to communicate the pride, vanity, and self-indulgence of the excited young teenage Yashodhara eagerly awaiting her Swayamvara, or the pained and longing older Yashodhara who wistfully remembered the loving touch of her husband Siddhartha.

As a choreographer and performer, embodying the two women – Yashodhara and Akka Mahadevi – required me to engage with myself in very different ways. Of course the process of choreography itself is very different when working on my own versus working with a director, but it was in my own internal process for each work that I felt a polarity. Dancing Yashodhara pushed me to draw from my own human emotions to embody the grief-stricken, angst-filled, questioning, prideful, contemplative, wistful Yashodhara as depicted in the work. Dancing Aikya about Akka Mahadevi pushed me to draw from what I can only describe as a deeply intimate realm of experience, leaving me intensely charged, filled, and meditative.

From an artistic perspective, both were fulfilling. Both spoke of yearning for completion, like the lotus, rooted in the sludge struggling through the water and rising to bloom in the warm rays of the sun. While Yashodhara moved almost resistantly, with her focus at the roots that weighed her down, Akka Mahadevi had a one-pointed focus, soaring toward the sun. Dancing Yashodhara felt cathartic; dancing Mahadevi felt euphoric.

I was interested to note audience response to the works. Yashodhara has been performed considerably more than Aikya, so it is difficult to do a fair comparative study in audience response. While both were received well, I did notice that Yashodhara almost consistently moved the viewer to tears.

This really made me think … In today’s world, is a story of struggle more accessible? Is it more

common to feel empathetic towards Yashodhara, than to feel inspired by Akka?

Is Yashodhara as a heroine more relatable than Akka? Do people feel more sympathy for a heroine who is helpless, hurt, and

struggling with answers, than one who is fervently focused on realizing her Goal?

Is the uncertainty of Yashodhara’s spiritual quest more accessible than the unflinching spiritual quest of Akka Mahadevi?

For this reason, is a “Saint” such as Akka considered more of a far off ideal, than an immediate role model?

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In Indian dance, spirituality is the essence of the form, most will agree. But how much does it have to be layered to make an impact on audiences?

I am reminded of an observation made by Malavika akka that film holds its appeal in depicting the tangible “everyday”, while art is elevating because it depicts the intangible “otherness”.

How tangible does one have to make the intangible so as to make it accessible to the viewer?

This is the question that I will continue to grapple with most as I create work and grow in my journey as dancer, choreographer, artist, and individual.

CHAPTER TEN

SOULFUL ABHANGS AND THOUGHTFUL VAAKHS

RAMA VAIDYANATHAN

Figure 10-6: Rama Vaidyanathan as Lal Ded. Avinash Pasricha

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This work explores the voices of two female mystic poets – Janabai from Maharashtra (in Western India) and Lalleswari from Kashmir (in North India).

I draped the sari through my legs (as worn in Maharashtra), adorned the fish shaped nose ring, the crescent bindi (dot on forehead) and walked on to stage … Janabai became me.

With a vina [the South Indian stringed instrument] in my hand, I will sing the Lord’s praise; who can stop me?

Janabai the 13th century mystic from the State of Maharashtra in India was an extraordinary woman who took devotion to new heights by singing and dancing her way to enlightenment. Born into a low caste family, she was a servant maid in the household of Namdev, a saint who was greatly respected by the followers of the Warkari Tradition – an order that staunchly believed in Vitthala as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu.

Tuza kae Devoon Sawalaya? What can I offer you Oh dark Lord? For I am just a maidservant in the household of Namdev.

Janabai’s state of spiritual consciousness found expression in abhangs or Marathi hymns through which she communicated with Panduranga, the Lord enshrined in Pandarpur. She lived in this Temple town and would make daily visits at the crack of dawn to offer her worship along with her master Saint Namdev.

Uttha Panduranga prabhata samayo pathala! Wake up oh Panduranga, the sun has risen

In her abhangs Janabai would unabashedly call out to Panduranga Vitthala. Her pleas were so convincing, so emotional, that many a time it seemed that the Lord Himself appeared before her. The uniqueness of Janabai’s relationship with the Lord was that She saw Him in different forms and sang to him with different sentiments, as in these lines:

You are the mother deer who leaves her baby behind and disappears into the forest, and I am that baby searching for my mother in the dense forest of life

She would often be seen talking to a friend who no one else could see, and it is believed that Vitthala himself came as a fellow maidservant to help her with her daily chores as she remarked:

I am angry today, why are you late? Am I not in your mind anymore?

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She would cajole, plead, rave, rant and sometimes even show attitude as in the line:

Don’t you dare play games with me and don’t even try to escape from me,

Her surrender to the Lord was uninhibited and unconditional. She saw Him everywhere, in every one and finally in herself. My eyes and mind on you, your name on my lips

Wearing flowing white clothes with hair let loose I went and stood erect on stage … Lalded became me.

Does it matter whether you are a Hindu or a Muslim when Siva the supreme truth abides all?

The Muslims called her Lalla Arifa, the Hindus called her Lalleswari, but they both called her Lalded. Born in the 14th century to a Kashmiri Pandit family, Lalded at a very early age was saddled with a wicked mother-in-law and an indifferent husband causing her to detach herself from family life and spend her time in self-introspection. Her vaakhs (sacred words) or Haiku-like sayings in the Kashmiri language were thoughtful yet spontaneous outpourings of her deep connection with the Divine. Her words of wisdom carrying the message of love, tolerance and equality of man were like a breath of fresh air in a society struggling with fanaticism and rigidity that existed within the Muslim and Hindu Brahmin communities:

I taught my mind to see the One in all my fellow men; how could I then discriminate between man and man?

Lalded was an animal lover and protested against animal sacrifice that was highly prevalent in India at that time. She rebelled against meaningless customs and professed renunciation as the only path towards spiritual realization.

Oh fool, right action does not lie in observing fasts and ceremonial rites; contemplation of the self alone is right action.

Lalded was a maverick; she shed her clothes, danced in gay abandon, led a life of a mendicant and crossed all barriers of social norms.

When can I break the bonds of shame? When desires cease to nag my mind

Lalded’s quest for salvation chose the path of trika (the three Goddesses – Para, Parapara and Apara) of Kashmiri Saivism philosophy


that saw Siva as the formless metaphysical head of supreme consciousness.

One has to cross the six kundalini chakras to reach the seventh state of the union of Siva and Shakti that symbolizes a balance of the static and the dynamic, of creation and dissolution.

After I reach that blissful state, does it matter whether I live or die?

Many of Lalded’s vakhs were a result of real life incidents, some of which have become legendary stories amongst the Kashmiris. With her long loose tresses she would walk around naked, and would be ridiculed by many who were not yet drawn into the world of her pious teachings. Lalded remained undisturbed and to send this message across to her critics, she went to a cloth merchant one day and bought two pieces of cloth of equal length, weighed them and swung them both on each of her shoulders. Whenever anyone abused her she tied a knot on the right cloth and whenever anyone worshipped her she tied a knot on the left one. Several knots later she went back to the cloth merchant and weighed the two pieces again. The weight had not changed.

I am a Jeevan Mukta; I have liberated my soul while still living

As a dancer, after the show, I removed my makeup, tied my hair, packed my costumes – the Maharashtrian sari, and the flowing white robes, went home and started thinking …

They inspired me, they enlightened me, and they humbled me. They mesmerized me with their clarity of thought and strength of conviction. In my portrayal of these two incredible women, I can never have the courage to say that I became them, because that would mean, I rose to their level. In fact they came down to me, embraced me, blessed me and revealed themselves through me. Instead of me capturing them they captured me; instead of me defining them they defined me. They became me.

They enraptured me with the way they used their lives to liberate themselves from their very own lives. They disregarded social customs and conventions completely and yet they are appeared to be untroubled, joyful and yet cried through their poems. They were innocent like babies but spoke like the wisest of men. Knowing a little about these two mystics got me a trifle closer to truth, to the reason of life, to the way of life. They enriched me by throwing open huge windows

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that had my adrenalin flowing uncontrollably. They bestowed upon me a rare sense of happiness, an excitement that is unexplainable. They renewed my belief in dance because in my attempt at understanding them, I understood the dancer in me a little more.

Janabai and Lalded danced through me and as they did they taught me something more – a lot more about my own dance. I was amazed at myself when movements that were just not in my language started emerging without a sense of awkwardness. I am sure if I had used these movements in any other context they would have looked incongruous. Janabai’s passionate and insane love for Vitthala manifested itself in carefree lavani movements, and Lalded’s nonconformist attitude was best shown through Sufi like swirls. Her tantric philosophy using pranayam (breathing patterns) and yogic powers to control the mind allowed me to explore the geometric dynamics of my dance form. Several of her vaakhs which dwelled on finding one’s spine and embarking on a journey up the spine, encouraged me to come up with centered and abstract movements which spoke more than they showed. For Lalded, I danced with my hair let loose

of her courage wore off on me. Janabai was nineteen years old when she sang those soulful abhangs, and she made me feel that young all over again. The spring in her walk, the lilt in her expression and that alluring personality brought out several shades of a yearning heroine, some of which I hadn’t discovered before.

Lalded and Janabai were so varied, but they taught me the same lessons. In their own ways they were complete in their pursuit of uniting with the infinite. Even though Lalded tread the path of knowledge, she shows glimpses of pure adoration and love for Siva in some of her vaakhs. While Janabai chose the simple way of devotion, some of the highest doctrines of Hindu philosophy are reflected in her abhangs.

Lalded was a she believed in the formless, as she remarks:

I walk towards that effulgence

While the Vaishnavaite Janabai worshipped the form in her words:

I yearn to see your wondrous form

Jana was soulful and Lalla was thoughtful, but there is no denying that they were both Mad and Divine.


Figure 10-7: Rama Vaidyanathan. Joris-Jan Bos

PART III

EPIC WOMEN OF INDIA AND BEYOND

A. FEMALE ICONS OF INDIA’S ANCIENT EPICS RE-VISITED

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE LIVING HEROINES OF INDIAN MYTHS AND LEGENDS

PREMA NANDAKUMAR

Keynote Address delivered at the Conference/Performance Conclave on ‘Epic Women’ held by Kartik Fine Arts in association with Arangham Trust on December 20 – 23, 2012 at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chennai.

I am delighted to be part of this Conference that is set to explore some of the women characters in epics from the world over. It is a matter of pride for the Indian that in this global spread, the epic women of India are in the majority, and also that they are the ones who challenge the wits of contemporary humanity. It would be so wherever such a Conference is held, whether in India or abroad. For India alone has epic heroines who continue to live amongst us, directing our lives in a million ways.

During the 1950s and 1960s, there were a series of brilliant evocations of epic heroines on the silver screen in Telugu. These portrayals had drawn us closer to the classics in Sanskrit and Telugu. Somehow, somewhere, those black and white film images were able to catch the imagination of many.

Another reason for our feeling close to the heroines is because in India the myths and legends of the past are not dead sea-scrolls. Sita, Savitri, Renuka, Draupadi and Kannaki are living heroines, role models in preparing, planning and executing our lives. Swami Vivekananda who worked tirelessly to empower Indian women placed these role models before them: “O India od is Sita, Savitri, and Damayanti. Sita is the name in India for everything that is good, pure, and holy, everything that in women we call woman.”

Indian women even today observe the Savitri vrata (religious fast). Renuka is found in thousands of temples re-named as Mariamman or Ellamma or Pydamma. The Draupadi Amman festivals make The Mahabharata heroine a living presence while an iconized Kannaki is worshipped in South India and Sri Lanka.

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I am aware of the criticism that we tend to feel touched by the sorrows of these women from the epics without realizing that men perpetrated many of them. But this is not a one-way problem. There are epic men who have sacrificed their lives for women as in the legend of Ruru and Pramadvara in The Mahabharata. The question that confronts us is not that woman is victimized by man, but rather why she allows herself to be dominated. One reason could be that Nature – again called by the feminine name, prakriti – is against her. I would like to refer to the very significant novel of Rabindranath Tagore, Yoga-Yog wherein, unable to endure the brutal ways of her husband Madhusudan, the gentle Kumudini returns to her natal home. One hundred years ago this was not tolerated. Kumudini’s sister-in-law Nistarini says a woman’s place is beside her husband even if he was evil. Kumudini’s brother Vipradas is saddened that women themselves should undervalue womanhood in this manner; however, even Vipradas has to keep his idealism aside once he is told that Kumudini is in the family way. She goes back to her husband. Valmiki’s Sita herself must have contained continents of self-confidence to guard her pregnancy even after her husband plots to abandon her in the forest. Ah, motherhood is holy.

The epic heroines like prominent women in history faced such challenges with great determination. Mahatma Gandhi held such a view, as I see from his correspondence with my mother-in-law, Srimati Ranganayaki Thatham. Obviously she had problems in the family and had been advised patience by Gandhi. When she retorted angrily to his advice, asking whether she should bind her eyes like Gandhari in The Mahabharata, he replied suavely and to the point that Ranganayaki should not accept literally all that is written in the epic. Gandhari could have served her husband better if she had kept her eyes open. The self-binding of her eyes must be taken as a symbol and no more. “Do not bind your eyes literally or metaphorically. Use them and serve your husband well. Serving one’s husband is not blind adoration. When her husbands were helpless, did not Draupadi speak angrily to them?”

When Western influence and English education allowed new breezes to blow across our land, a transformation in creative writing began in a prominent way. People went back to epic heroes and heroines as well as to historical personalities. One great creator of the new Sita is Kumaran Asan who wrote Chintavishtayaya Sita in 1919. According to Sukumar Azhikode, Sita is seen here as “a critical, sharp-tongued, passionate woman speaking out for the legitimate rights of the women of all times”; and yet she calms down remembering her father’s ways described by

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Valmiki. She tells herself that she should not have hatred even towards someone who has treated her unfairly.

The conclusion in Kumaran Asan’s reading of Sita is so natural, and also has a terrible beauty about it. After the entire narrative as a reverie in the hermitage comes to a conclusion, we enter the Ayodhya Court for those few, last lines:

She spoke no word. She gave one look at her husband’s anguished face. A glance at the assembled court. The next moment she had released herself and stepped across the great divide.

This is how myths are transformed to gain entry into contemporary hearts. Chintavishtayaya Sita was a great favorite of my father’s, Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar. He was inspired by this poem to insert an extended, powerful soliloquy of Sita in his English epic, Sitayana. He even made her contemplate issues like the nuclear horror.

Ah set up the witches’ cauldron and brew the critical concoction that will fission the atom and invoke the Shatterer of the Worlds?

Looking back on our classical myths and legends, it is wonderful to note how writers have been re-interpreting these works to help women fight back. Draupadi is brought to the Pandava court and held out as the property of the Kauravas. Is woman no more than a chattel that can be bought and sold, one who can be won or lost in a game of dice? There are so many poems and plays on this

Another noteworthy text is S.K. Ramarajan’s Tamil epyllion Meghanadam (1956) that has Indrajit’s Sulochanai as the heroine. How

answers for Sulochanai’s questions. Like Bharati’s Draupadi who wonders whether the entire kingdom has no man to come forward to stand up for Dharma when an innocent woman is dragged and disrobed in a royal court, like Kannaki who cries out whether Madurai city has not a single man to speak out against the wrong done to her by the execution of her innocent husband, like Sita herself who exclaims whether Lanka has no man to give wholesome advice to Ravana, Sulochanai tells Indrajit:

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Imprisoned the beautiful Sita, Were there no wise men here To warn him: The eyes of chaste women? They are balls of fire, their cloud-like Tresses? They are Yama’s noose. Terrible. Their body is a tender creeper? N

Are there other ways of reading the epic heroines apart from such somber retellings? Can we inject humor to trace the truths in the lives of the past? This way of re-reading the epic characters could be in the style of my mother-in-law, the renowned Tamil writer Kumudini. Her long life was one of deep involvement with the plight of women. The Gandhian institution, Tiruchi Seva Sangam that she founded in 1948 gave a new life to thousands of orphaned and abandoned girl children and women. Kumudini felt that woman brought on many of her problems by not protesting at the right time. In her brilliant drama, Viswamitrar she imagines a situation when Chandramati refuses to go into exile with Harischandra. A pointed introduction includes Kumudini’s thoughts on women’s independence:

It is usual to say that one cannot triumph over destiny. Yet, some with their ability and cleverness, are able to control even destiny. In the original story when Harishchandra left the country, Chandramati went along with him without any qualms and endured privation along with him. Savitri, on the other hand, learnt in advance about the departure of Satyavan from this earth and as soon as that time came, made appropriate arrangements and followed Yama who is not visible to human eyes, defeated him and got her husband back, and in the process, earned two boons as well. If, in Chandramati’s place, there had been a woman like Savitri, what would have been the fate of Viswamitra?1

One has to read the play to understand the various nuances of female power. If only woman would use it with due circumspection, while anchoring herself firmly in the family, what can even a fiery ascetic (like Viswamitra) do? Caught in the mazes of the nation’s politics, bedeviled by the foreign minister’s statesmanship and the return of Menaka demanding a place by his side on the throne, Viswamitra can do nothing but run away.

Kumudini’s other play entitled, Varied Advice is also a reinterpretation

of epic heroines in the light of contemporary culture. This play was actually produced as a musical. Despite qualities of heroism and virtue, would a girl choose any of the ancient heroes as her life’s partner? But


then, did the contemporary girl have anything better? A girl-child was not quite welcome, so she preferred to accept what came her way even when over-fond parents search for “a suitable boy”. The young Gita in the play has no idea how to choose from the list presented by her enlightened family: IAS (Indian Administrative Services), CA (Chartered Accountant), an engineer in Dubai or Doha minting gold or the son of a cabinet minister? After a whole scene of rib-ticklers, all suitors leave and Gita falls asleep.

Gita dreams of several epic heroines – first is Sita who provides a speedy answer to Gita’s question. Gita can choose anyone but not someone who professes lofty ideals. Next, Draupadi has no hesitation in responding: “never marry a man who is Damayanti appears and assures Gita that one who runs away from the responsibilities of the house should be studiously avoided. Chandramati is all thunder and lightning. No, Gita should never opt for someone who insists upon telling the truth. It is now the turn of Sakuntala to sail into the vision and warn the sleeping girl against marrying one whose memory is weak.

So I did not give you housekeeping money? Where did I leave my box? Who is my wife?

Then there is Radha who says that a husband with varied moods was no good. The last to appear in Gita’s dream is Savitri who advises Gita not to worry but just look after the husband, whoever he be, as her eleventh child. According to her, the whole problem arises because we think of men as heroic, as helpmates, guardians, providers and so on. Naturally, there is disappointment. Why have high expectations about men? They are just

When Gita wakes up, she is delighted that her problem of choosing a husband has been solved. Gita, her mother, aunt and grandmother now sing in unison, dancing on the stage:

Husbands are just children, The last baby for the wife. In the outside world they are heroes, Within homes, just prattling babes … Minister, sinister, all are kids.

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Although rarely staged, Varied Advice has never failed to amuse the audience to a wise view of life.

There have also been other ways of looking at our epic heroines. Remember, their lives have not been in vain. We would do well to conclude with Savitri whose story of paaativratya (vowed to her husband) I am afraid has not been rightly understood in a male-dominated society that has sought to trap female chastity with iron chains. If we get back to the original legend in The Mahabharata, we would see her as brave, free, loving and duty-conscious; the ideal woman who can uplift a whole race.

In Vyasa’s narrative, Savitri emerges as a strong lady who first empowered herself before facing the crisis. Three days prior to the fatal moment, Savitri undertook a rigorous “three-nights vow” when she fasted, meditated day and night and stood still appearing like a block of wood (kaashtabhuteva). On the third day she performed a fire-sacrifice.

The Vedas (Hindu religious scriptures) have two major aspects: purva mimamsa (rituals), and uttara mimamsa (philosopy). According to the path of purva mimamsa, it is not merely faith in one receiving the fruits of the rituals. We are told that a power descends into the person performing the ritual, and remains with him/her until the fruits are realized. The learned Mahamahopadhyaya Pramathanath Tarkabhushan remarks:

A sacrifice is the nature of an action that is very soon lost. Hence the instrumentality of the sacrifice to the fruit that is to take place at a distant time is hardly possible. To establish this instrumentality that is propounded by the Sruti, between sacrifice and heaven, an invisible potency is admitted which issues from the sacrifice and which endures till the fruit is generated and which resides in the soul of the sacrificer. This is called apurva. It ceases on producing the result … It is a power in the sacrifice.

No doubt Savitri’s aim was non-widowhood. She needed a divine power to help her achieve it and the Vedic ritualism gave her such a power. Niyamavrata samsiddhaa mahabhaagaa pativrataa. This power helped her to confront Yama (the god of death from taking away her husband).

Savitri’s self-empowerment (niyamavrata samsiddhaa) has now been conveniently forgotten. Actually, paativratya itself is a force as is brahmacharya. It is tapas (fire). But what have we made of this notion? No more than getting consumed in a husband’s funeral pyre (the act of sati where a wife dies on her husband’s funeral pyre)

Fanatics (women included) are not ready to listen to the point that the Tamil word, karpu (chastity) is associated with karpiththal, namely, to educate and to be empowered. That takes us easily to the golden message


in the phrase: Niyamavrata samsiddhaa. What is this but rigorous self-discipline, self-empowerment and an ability to face any crisis with the spirit’s strength? Sri Aurobindo has written an epic on the subject, and his Savitri, after her yoga preceding her husband Satyavan’s death, is fully equipped to face any challenge from man, nature and fate. Here is his description of Savitri who is Niyamavrata samsiddhaa mahabhaagaa pativrataa:

Near to earth’s wideness, intimate with heaven, Exalted and swift her young large-visioned spirit Voyaging through worlds of splendor and of calm Overflew the ways of Thought to unborn things. Ardent was her self-poised unstumbling will; Her mind, a sea of white sincerity, Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave … A deep compassion, a hushed sanctuary, Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven; Love in her was wider than the universe, The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.1

This is the reason why Sister Subbulakshmi Ammal, herself a child widow, taught Savitri’s story to the inmates of her Avvai Home which was a refuge for young widows. It was the lesson of strengthening women’s psyche that lay behind Sister Subbulakshmi’s faith in Savitri’s story.

Epic women live forever as they draw from our lives the needed energy. As the centuries pass by, they help us find fulfillment. An I.C.S. (Indian Civil Service) officer referred to Draupadi once as a screaming fury. I beg to differ from him. Women are capable of granting infinite mercy. Draupadi would have done that if only the Kuru Court had listened to Krishna’s passionate speech in favor of peace. The 95th canto of the Udyoga Parva is witness to this. But Duryodhana and his cohorts would not listen and the battle at Kurukshetra became inevitable. So why blame Draupadi? Our epic heroines have always risen to the challenge, and granting forgiveness runs in their veins. Please remember this when you deal with them. Whatever mode you choose to present our heroines – epic, legendary, historical, folklore – do present them as women who strengthened themselves, women who were always noble in deed and thought, and who did not care for self-flagellation. Epic heroines dare to question, as Sita does when she challenges Rama’s assumption that as a woman she would find it difficult to live in the forest. She asks why Rama thinks her weak, and why he fears to take her to the forest. Of course Sita does this in privacy and with a sense of loving possession. She asks

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satirically if her father, the Videha king got a woman in the dress of a man as his son-in-law?

After living with her all these years, hasn’t he realized her strength of

mind? Isn’t she like Savitri, the wife of Dyumathsena’s son, Satyavan? In the end, Rama gives in for he really loves her deeply. Accompany me,

he says something as if he were testing the woman in Sita: Rama tells her that prior to going, she will have to give away quickly all her possessions. Apparently Rama does not know the true psyche of women. Sita smiled immediately, says Valmiki. Was it due to happiness at her having won the day or was it due to derision at the way a man’s mind moves? All that we know is that Sita is ready to sacrifice the material goods of everyday living at a moment’s notice, and that she receives Rama’s favorable words with a quick smile, kshipram pramuditaa devi:

Sita, of that consent So hardly won sprang joyous, as on fire, Disburdened of her wealth, lightly to wing Into dim wood and wildness unknown.1

Saluting this smiling manasvini, Sita, I wish the Conference a happy, purposeful, interactive, creative, enlightening and beautiful time of discussions and reliving the experiences presented on the stage by your team of brilliant artistes who have come here from all over the world.

Notes All translations from Kumudini are by Ahana Lakshmi. 1 Book I, canto ii, translated by Sri Aurobindo.

CHAPTER TWELVE

WOMANITY: A PSYCHIC CONTINUUM OF SELFHOOD

AND TENACITY, KEYNOTES OF SAÑGAM WOMEN

SWARNAMALYA GANESH

An investigation of the women of the Sañgam age (300 BCE-500 CE) brings several provocative images of sophistication, elegance, participation, fear and faith. It also explores the links between cultural beliefs, social institutions, sexual roles, religions, personal identities and racial archetypes. The primordial concepts of motherhood, consort, the protector and the murderous get subsumed into the personalities of the women of this era. The dynamic truth in the continuum of tribal practices and certain accepted systems along with religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism (Jain 2004) can be seen in the nature and psyche of

im galai and others. A subterranean view of the life, art and aesthetics of these women

shows that several traits of theirs have links to chthonic female characters who lived in trees, crossroads, caves and funeral grounds, who sang and danced in gay abandon, were fearsome in battle and had magical powers (Jain 2004). The Sañgam recognizes women as both beautiful and terrible. She is the converse of the same form. When she enters the pantheons of civilized society much of her is transformed from the ugly to the beautiful, crudity to culture, the teacher to the learner, a murderer to a creator and protector. When she enters a systematized society her primordial status is elevated at times, but also threatened at others. We can identify the agency of this psychic continuum through eras till contemporary times. In this essay, I explore how we have orchestrated her persona through centuries and histories. In the stories of these Sañgam women we can see our own. Albeit altered, but real. It is one story, and many lives.

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Figure 12-8: Swarnamalya Ganesh in Nammai Marandarai Naam

Marakkamattom. Sundar Ramu

She was a sophisticated, educated and beautiful young girl. Born into a family of well-bred artistes; accomplishment and gorgeousness were her hallmarks.

Sirappilkun uporundiya Pirappilkun andai … Her deeds befit her greatness no less, with immaculate birth …

After rigorous training for seven arduous years, she debuted at the age zan. Delighted at her mastery, the

king titled her Talaik all the festivals of the kingdom. One day, after watching her dance to perfection at the flag festival), her patron KHe was jealous for she was untouched by signs of age and every man who watched her perform yearned for her.

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i

My guru’s gran i. She was a beauty and a talent to reckon with during her time. A disciple of Pandanall r

away with a rich man of the neighboring village to become his consort. He was proud to own her. But he also heard some family and friends fret that she was after all a “d ” (servant of God), perhaps having a licentious relationship with her na (dance master). With this poisonous seed sown, he grew a suspicious man. Unable to convince himself, he sent her away to Pandanall r again. Upon her return, her mother quite unassumingly, asked her to pay a visit to her guru’s house, as a mark of respect. That was it; all hell broke loose. The patron came to know o i of adultery. She was told to never return. She remained at Pandanall r.

ri, the sands on the beach, but he left. She rfind it difficult to fathom a response to dissertation by a man who has “purchased” them. One urban response, I can imagine is, perhaps some

– first a beautiful love letter expressing her grief over their separation. When K

again. This time, it was a letter of complete surrender:

Why have you fled the city in the darkness of the night? Don’t your parents at least, deserve a good bye? Does this befit your stature, my Lord? Please accept my apology.

This letter disturbed me very much. Her submission is frustrating, I thought. Why could she not have rebelled at his tantrum about her

understood as a symbol of resistance and rebellion from within the system. Invoking the power of literacy that was given to her by the same traditions and societal values that condemn her or relegate her to the position of a

independent, she didn’t need Ksaid, for you have tainted your reputation with lack of conviction and forthrightness by leaving me in a huff.

i stayed back at Pandanall r. She remained a strong woman, who bred her two daughters into fine dancers. She was an erudite composer who used her knowledge, gift of the agency of religion and

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custom to hereditary dancing women, to transform her life into a purposeful one for herself, her daughters and for the community at large.

In many ways, negotiated her place in the world, within circumstances that were created by the men around her. She broke the shackles of oppression by deciding to break the life that was designed for her by the society. By refusing to leave behind her memories of Kman, she refused the bonds of norms and traditions. Instead, she used her literacy as an instrument for change. She became a Buddhist monk. She converted her daughter Ma im galai too. She shaved off her flowing tresses, trading jewelry, silks and brocades for simple saffron robes,

avi and Ma im galai challenged the deeply held notions of norms and practices, even while staying within the limits of expected societal behavior. However, by using the gift of literacy that came with these norms, they created a radical shift in their relationship within a man’s world. If love was what she had to give, if her beauty was to be bought by men, so be it. She gave love of a kind that was universal. She didn’t allow her beauty to be bought but instead showed the world one that was priceless.

Kaly i authored some poetic works and Tamil translations of Telugu padams. Her beauty was the otherworldly kind. She was a deeply spiritual person and lived an earnest life.

Ma im galai

Showing motherly love and beauty of otherworldly class is the story of

ix “ka” (mother), the -

power. “ i” also belongs to this genre. She is the primordial representation of tribal Mother worship in the early Hindu dharmic practices. In the Periya am, she is the goddess of agriculture. (S. Ramachadran, 2011-2012). She protects her sons and provides them food. As a village deity she used to love liquor and human sacrifice but when she was transferred into the tribal belief systems, her Lalita or grace was projected. She entered the classical pantheons thus and later the feudal society. Ma im galai’s “

am while it is believed that it is in fact Sarasvati who is Kalaimagal – Goddess of the arts? In the drama, ,


given his poetic prowess and transformed from a simpleton to a prolific

letters with her spear. In his akam he hails her as “ ukhapriya”, a lover of parrots. The parrot symbolizes speech and words.

her and Goddess of language and arts. Further, there is no depiction or description of Sarasvati’s connection to a skull bowl anywhere. Also, the worship of Sarasvati as the Goddess of

n

temple. It was she who gave her to him and said there will be perennial food flow in it so that he can satisfy the hunger of mankind (Iyer 1989).

rful nether world ghosts, Ma im galai used to feed her children. Annap ra i, the Goddess of food. She doesn’t feed equally but feeds according to one’s needs, just like the Goddess who apportions food and wealth that her sons bring after hunting, according to each of their needs. The hungriest son or who has worked hardest gets a little more; the one who did less gets little. She does “ ” or apportioning of wealth – Lak mi. In tribal cultures of Tamil culture she was

Ramachadran, 2011-2012). The image of Ma imlove and discretion is a strong one. A deed of love where the mother feeds you, no matter what, is one that bears long term reformative effects on society and humanity. It signifies the fundamental principle of human existence and survival not through faith or religion but through primal sustenance, food. “To a hungry man, a piece of roti is the face of God,” said Mahatma Gandhi. Concepts of “ ”, “Dharma Samvardhini” as deities promoting righteousness continue.

Josette Sheeran

Josette Sheeran, a contemporary woman, the former Executive Director of UN’s World Food Program, as part of “food for humanity” has created the “wawa mum”, small sachets of dry food made out of chick peas, dry milk and vitamins that are essential for brain development in a child. This costs less than 17 cents. Consuming one packet of this will take care of a child’s entire day’s nutritional needs. The other initiative is the “access to food” program where the farmers are given incentives to produce seasonal and fresh agricultural products. With that, one cup of the

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local produce is given as a meal to every child. This has caused a transformative chain effect on the entire society. In her words, “There is enough food in the world to feed everybody, we just need to give access to it, especially to the needy”.

Jy a

As all powers, there is a violent side to the female deity too. The other color, pot-

bellied and has matted locks. She is the sinister energy that, if prayed to, will bestow health and wealth. The primordial mother, who rises first from the ocean, Jy a is our perception of the terrible, the ugly, fearful, dancing the Tungañgayank tu. Various Tamil lexicons describe her.

In C i Nigan u (12th CE), Arumuga these words: s ai indiraikkum tt da gav i ne uñgagadu vasaimu ral m aditavai muga im d viya. (Woman who owns the K ai star, elder sibling of Lak mi, destroyer of good, single plaited dame, riding her chariot with a crow banner, dark hued, one who creates misunderstandings, the primordial Goddess.) She is addressed as M d vi, the ill omened. But is she?

Ka agi

As the wife, the first woman who entered his life, Ka agi had the right to claim K d patiently for 13 years. No questions asked she accepted him back. She quietly packed their bags to leave for Madurai with him. What strength does it take for a woman to allow breach of trust and abuse to pass by and compromise to live with the same man? What goes on in her head? What was Ka agi thinking, feeling? What was on Hilary Clinton’s mind while exempting her husband’s indiscretion? Why did Rihanne, the singing sensation reunite with her boyfriend, even after he physically assaulted her? If acceptance of oppression and abuse is regression, then why are we celebrating women, who in the name of endurance take this oppression?

oppression into an opportunity for transformation, Ka agi used it as a tool to transfer repressed emotions into power. Power, that was to instill fear in the minds of men.

Jy a had been denied her rightful place in the tribal concept, whose ini. Fond of liquor and flesh,

in the post-Vedic times she incarnates as Durga, the blood thirsty one. She


is the power of sickness and death. Vais ri, small pox and other epidemics, excessive rains or drought are all her cause. In ,

Ka agi after prolonged drought, epidemics and poverty, for rain and prosperity, which she bestows upon them. The frustration and anger that she had gridlocked for years, unleashed at that moment of final injustice.

vi of tribal origins, the goddess of snakes, who takes her deceased husband’s corpse on a raft to the Gods seeking justice and when denied, played dangerous tricks on them (Jain 2004). Ka agi’s suffering found an outlet, when she avenged the death of her man, the one who had let her down time and again by burning down everyman in the vicinity. She has sent terror waves across the globe about the effects of inviting the unleashing of repressed anger. When personal, righteous anger boils over it becomes politics. The worship of Goddess Bhagavati or the fierce aspect of Lak mi, the worship of Jy a the first-born is closely linked to the deification of Ka agi.

In fact, identifies Ka agi as Jy a. She is addressed al (milky ocean) was churned, it

was Jy a who arose from it along with the moon and therefore understood as her sibling. There are several Jy a sculptures found in Tamil Nadu. She was a popular cult Goddess. Places like Bahur in

i temple, Brahmapur wara temples have Jy a sculptures that are in worship (R. Ezhilraman, September 2012). She is invoked for happiness and prosperity. But ignoring her will anger her, and she will play pranks (s ai) on the villagers. Her banner is the crow, she rides an ass and her weapon is a broomstick. In the Ka agi temple at Surili and other places in Tamil Nadu, people believe that the Goddess needs to be kept happy, otherwise she will cause havoc to the wrong doer.

Phoolan Devi

Phoolan Devi, the infamous bandit queen of contemporary India, killed every man of the upper caste, the Thakurs who was or was not involved in gang raping her and killing her husband, Vickram. To her, splattering the blood of these men was about avenging a lifetime of slavery, assault and rape. She wanted to sow the seed of fear and terror in the clan of the wrong doers, and she did. She was an ardent Durga worshipper. She agreed to surrender her arms and ammunitions before the pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and Goddess Durga. Women in Uttar Pradesh saw her as an incarnation of Durga and young girls prayed to her for strength to

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protect themselves from the abuse and tyranny of upper caste men. Idols of Phoolan Devi were sold outside Durga temples and people kept them in their p ja rooms for security and strength. She symbolized the power of righteous anger.

How does a woman who was living within the taboos of societal design break the shackles even while staying within the system? How does Madhavi turn oppression into opportunity? How does a story of personal sacrifice and motherhood turn into a transformation of society? How does Ma im galai create a hunger free world, finding the strength to lead a radical, peaceful, loving cosmos? How does a woman who is viciously oppressed and scarred by emotional abuse turn her endurance into potent and manifested anger, sending a warning signal to all mankind?

i, Annap ra vi or Ma im galai to Josette Sheeran, Jy a, D vi, Ka agi to Phoolan Devi – several stories but one woman. If these concepts of “woman-isms” were only epic but not a continuous psyche of women through eras, they would have lost their relevance. The fact that their qualities, the malefic and benevolent are traceable in women of all times, including in contemporary narratives, confirms my argument that the feminine power is perceived and absorbed into various societies as both favorable and unfortunate, gloomy and pleasant depending on each social construct. Women who hang on trees, live in water, crawl underground, fly in the air, ride crows, bulls, wear snakes, eat meat, drink blood, give wealth, dance, sing, study, marry, be a wife, a mother, educators, bandits, politicians, rock stars, in India, Hindus, Buddhists, in Christianity, in the US or elsewhere, then, now, are all either given a primordial status or are under threat of losing it. The way “she” negotiates her role and status in a patriarchal society is a very crucial dialogue in women studies. She may seem oppressed and benign sometimes, but let us not forget that she is also dreadful, malefic and very proactive at others. From Sañgam women to now, she may be in a man’s world, but she is womanity.


Adigal, Ilango. 2001. Silappadigaram. Chennai: U.Ve.SwaminathaIyer, 10th edition.

Iyer, Alain Daniélou and Manimekhalai. 1989. The Dancer with the Magic Bowl by Shattan.New York.

Jain, Sandhya. 2004. Adi Deo Arya Devata: A Panaromic View of Tribal Hindu Cultural Interface. New Delhi: Rupa Co.

Munivar, Divakara. 1996. Senthannigandu.Tirunelveli: The South India


Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society. R. Ezhilraman. “Worship of jyesta: A shunned cult in Tamilnadu.”

Journal of Indian History and Culture, September 2012, 100-116. Ramachadran, S. interview by Dr.Swarnamalya Ganesh. “Sangam women

and their response to patriachy (2011-2012).” Silappadikaram Art gallery at Poompuhar.

Rao, T.A. Gopinatha. 1997. Benaras: Motilal Benarasi Das.

Takkar, Sara. 1841. South Indian Sketches. Unknown. Sampurna Kovilan Kadai. Sreemagalputtaganilayam. V. Tirunangai. 2009. “Jyestadevi cult in Pandya Country.” South Indian

History conference, 464-466.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE PLACES AND SPACES INHABITED BY SITA: FREEDOM AND CAPTIVITY

VEENAPANI CHAWLA

As a director in theatre, much of my work has involved the unpacking of myth – whether South Asian or European. I see myth as an allegorical expression of reality. It is akin to a secret portal through which knowledge pours out poetically and metaphorically. This view presupposes that knowledge has an a priori existence and that often it manifests itself in easily digestible symbols. As human consciousness evolves, these symbols unravel their meaning progressively. And so myth includes within it, not only things of the past when it was created, but also of future times. And there is wisdom in myth which allows for contemporary intervention.

I am not talking about using myth as a peg on which to hang current ideological preoccupations. I am talking about myth itself, containing the content that can be unpacked in the light of contemporary time, or for any possible future time. And that is what is exciting. You take what exists and that which already has many layers of interpretation, the result of other interventions in history, and you carry this history with you, and add to it your own insights, so that you have a thick, rich feast for audiences. This for me is the heart of Theatre.

My production of Brhannala serves as an example. Arjuna as the female impersonator apparently sits astride both genders. The production extended this union of polarities to different ways of seeing and knowing. And the interpretation of Brhannala therefore combined both the temporal, rational way of seeing and knowing one-at-a-time along with the spatial, metaphorical way of seeing and knowing all-at-once. But this was not an arbitrary interpretation. For inherent in the concept of Brhannala and its related figures of Ardhanariswara, Savysachin (the one who can shoot with both his right and left hand or who can shoot with his right hand and play the vina with his left hand), is the idea of the union of right and left brain activity, of the temporal and the spatial, of the rational and the

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metaphorical. Indeed Brhannala begins and ends with two different, though related moments of crisis in the life of Arjuna, two liminal moments of transition and critical choice about how to be in the world. The choice is between a binary view of the world or of “seeing with the eye of complete union.”

Recently, my colleagues and I at Adishakti: Laboratory for Theater Arts Research (in Pondicherry, India) have been engaged in investigating The Ramayana as a source for our contemporary theatre activity. The essential idea was to open the epic up to allow the many voices in and around the text to find release in new performance expressions and multiple interpretations. Additionally the hope was that traditional performers, for whom the epic provides content for their repertoire, would have access to new interpretations of this content and thereby evolve new performance vocabularies in response to new things to say. We assumed that such vocabularies would reflect contemporary inner rhythms, as natya dharmi or performance behavior and language that emerge mainly from the daily behavior of the times. Be that as it may, one of the interpretations that emerged from this work was an interpretation of Sita of The Ramayana. This paper muses on that interpretation. It is still a work in progress.

Through the course of The Ramayana, Sita enters many spaces. Her journey through these spaces – Mithila, Ayodhya, Panchavati, Lanka and Valmiki’s Ashram in the forest – seem like a voyage of self-discovery. Each space either brings out a potential within Sita or helps her to define what she is not. And this depends on whether her essential self resonates with it or not. Each space also has a distinct character, which signifies the nature of Sita’s inner space at that moment.

In a process similar to that of the yogi who seeks to emerge from an amorphous being – indistinguishable from the collective consciousness and environment – so as to grow ‘distinct in order to know herself’, before abandoning this defined individuality to become something larger – Sita too progressively achieves a crystallization of individuality before willfully losing it at the end of the epic.

The first space that Sita occupies is Mithila. She was born there and became the daughter of Janak. The first time I learnt of this Janak (the 21st in a long line of other Janaks) outside The Ramayana was when I was told that Krishna of the Gita refers to him as the perfect example of a great Karma Yogi. And it is this Janak whose dialogues with Sulabha the Sanyasini on ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ are recorded in the Shanti Parva of The Mahabharata. It is the same Janak who was the disciple of the great seer Yajnavalka, who is said to have composed the Brihadarnayaka

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Upanishad. The philosophers of the Upanishads were engaged largely in investigating the nature of reality. They were concerned with enquiry. Imagine then the atmosphere in which Sita is brought up – intellectually curious, questioning everything and concerned with investigations into truth rather than the establishment of truth. Indeed in the first millennium, Mithila was recognized as the greatest intellectual center of the times. Great literary and spiritual work emerged from it. The foremost heterodox thinkers, Buddha and Mahavir are said to have lived there. Besides, the enquiry initiated by the seers of the Upanishads focused on the inner life of the individual and thereby ultimately strengthened individuality. Hence after the last of the ruling dynasty was dethroned, Mithila became the first democracy in the world and remained one till the beginning of the Magadha Empire.

After Mithila, Sita goes to Ayodhya as a young bride. Manu the lawgiver is said to have founded this city. The idea of Manu is a symbol. In the Isha Upanishad, Verse 8, translated by Sri Aurobindo, Manu is described as “the mind embodied in matter, the Thinker imprisoned and emerging from the objective Fact. This imprisoned Thinker is Man the Manu.” And it is interesting that in the evolutionary chronology of the ten avatars, Rama of Ayodhya is seen as the first representative of the Mind of Man. His precursors have been the animal, or half man half animal, etc.

Manu’s laws were customary; they evolved originally from a mass of binding habits formed by groups living together. They grew further as a response to changing ideas and increasingly complex necessities. At some point they acquired a formal status and authority. They governed the social, political and economic activities of the society and controlled the outward acts of the individual with rigor.

Manu and his laws leak into the history of the city. It was always known for its Kings, the celebrated Ikshvaku dynasty, and their kingly functions of providing a strong framework of rules and laws and dharmas (duties) of security and prosperity to the people. Ayodhya after all was a great trade center and the concern was to always have systems in place that would ensure the prosperity and security of the State and its people. And not surprisingly, The Ramayana is about Kingship and the duties and functions of the ruler and the establishment of his authority. Unlike the preoccupation of thinkers in Mithila looking for the meaning of existence and how to be in the world meaningfully, the lawmakers at Ayodhya were concerned with laying down external rules of behavior which would govern the king, his family, the family in society, the citizens and their interpersonal behavior.


To mark the difference in the two cities and their character and what they symbolized it must be repeated here that while the Upanishads ultimately created the ground for individuality, the laws of Manu reinforced the collective. Additionally, while the source of the inspiration for the enquiry that the Upanishads undertook was refined, being rational and supra rational, the source of the laws of Manu was less luminous. These laws were based in the habits of social living.

It is for these reasons that Sita must have found the atmosphere in Ayodhya stifling. It must have seemed like a regression into a world where the processes of being meaningfully in the world had degenerated into conventions, and life dominated by lifeless rules and laws.

Indeed Ayodhya was a place of claustrophobic, dark, domestic politics. And while for the others leaving Ayodhya was a tragedy, for Sita it was a happy thing, a relief to leave the stifling atmosphere of the place. But again only a child of Mithila, full of curiosity and enquiry, would have thrilled to the prospect of a forest sojourn as an opportunity for freedom, for experiencing newness and adventure. The forest, the next home for Sita, is essentially Life, changeable, variable and ungoverned by any other laws than those of Nature.

The forest, according to mythologist, Devdutt Patnaik symbolizes Kali, the naked, fearsome, and unbound one. The forest is a place where the rules of the city and civilization give way to wildness and anarchic freedom. Indeed Patnaik extends this image to give us two oppositional faces of Sita as the earth – Kali and Gauri. And he notes that earth is both wild and domesticated (I prefer the word cultivated to ‘domesticated’. It is closer to the notion of the cultivation of self and broader than the notion of domestication). In its wild form, earth is the forest figured by Kali. In its cultivated form, earth is the field figured by Gauri, the cultivated, civilized one, clothed by ‘the rules, which turn nature into civilization’.

Does Sita reflect Kali during her sojourn in the forest? Does she resonate with its displacement of the rules of the city? I would say that without the extravagance of the Unbound One but with her characteristic impatience and variability of mood, she does. For on the one hand Sita demands that Rama live according to the rules of the forest and give up his weapons, which he uses to extend the functions of the State into the forest, by providing security to those who live in it. And then contrarily she demands that he take on the role of the hunter – even against his own will and her own stated desire to live peacefully – when she urges him to get her the golden deer. Casting off the metaphorical bindings of her cultivated self, she vehemently demands to have it dead or alive, to play with or to eat.

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I am tempted to see her wrestling with the deer, flaying it perhaps and then lamenting her act thereafter. It is an embarrassing moment. But it is in keeping with the variable mood of Kali, her impatience with established rules of behavior, her free spirit, which would never permit rules and conventions to disallow her natural impulses or prevent her from experiencing the unknown.

Indeed I see both moments as expressions of Sita’s desire to be free from the laws of the city and of civilization. She sees the forest in opposition to the city – a motif that occurs in other epics as well. Remember the burning of the Khandavaprastha forest in The Mahabharata? It was so that Indraprastha could take birth in its clearing.

If the forest sojourn is an adventure into what is yet Unknown, the trip to Lanka is an attempt to push back even further the boundaries of the Unknown. Indeed, the Lakshman rekha is the boundary beyond which lies this further Unknown. The yogi’s process parallels Sita’s, who tries always to enhance the peripheries of her consciousness, leaving no area of self, unknown and unexplored and therefore inaccessible to consciousness. Lanka in my view represents the subconscious.

Much like in the Persephone story, here too the kidnapper is a dark and terrible figure and it is not easy to locate his kingdom. Likewise we cannot enter the subconscious with our waking mind. We can access it only in dream. Nor do we have control over it and we watch helplessly as it colors our day-to-day thoughts and actions through the surfacing of discarded thoughts, inclinations, habits, and desires. It is a place where all our universal and personal experiences are stored, and a place of lost memories, suppressed experiences and desires. Lanka and Ravana represent what Sita has suppressed and is now being confronted with.

But not only does Sita slip into her subjective subconscious when she vanishes into Lanka but into a universal one as well. For the subconscious is universal. She is trapped, stored, suppressed in it – like all things in the subconscious. She lives as a memory in the minds of others, in the mind of Rama. No one knows where she has gone. Nor do they know how to find a route to her. Ultimately it is only the fabulous creatures, the monkeys, who find out where she is and one of them, the son of the god of the wind, finds the route to her.

Who are these fabulous creatures, the monkeys? Wendy Doniger in The Hindus: An Alternative History suggests that the monkeys in The Ramayana “function in some ways as the human unconscious.” She goes on to suggest, that animals often replace people in dreams. Might it not be that the monkeys in general and Hanuman in particular are expressions of Rama’s dream mind, which connects with Sita in the subconscious?


Later, when Sita disappears into the earth, Rama says, “Once upon a time, she vanished into Lanka, on the far shore of the great ocean, but I brought her back even from there; so surely I will bring her back from the earth.” (Quoted from Wendy Doniger’s translation of the Valmiki Ramayana in The Hindus: An Alternative History.) The passage seems to suggest the near impossibility of locating Sita and Lanka, hinting at its non-physical dimensions.

If there is fabulousness about the monkeys, Lanka has a similar quality of fabulousness. It is almost unreal and unearthly in its wealth and opulence, its beauty and strangeness. It is surreal. The subconscious is similarly fabulous and surreal. If it has dark and terrible things in it, it also has a great wealth and creative potential. Buried in it are memories of all personal and universal experiences which have escaped consciousness but that can provide solutions to the questions of existence.

There is a resonance of this view in the Vedic story of Sarama, the hound of heaven (the intuition) who is sent by Indra (the higher mind) to look for the lost cows (wealth, light, knowledge) stolen by the robbers of the deep, the Panis (or tamas, i.e. the darkness, the ignorance). She streaks through the inner landscape to arrive at the cave of the Panis (the subconscious) to discover the lost wealth. She then reports back the path to the secret hold to Indra, who arrives with his armies to recapture this wealth and is followed by Saraswati (goddess of knowledge).

In his Savitri Sri Aurobindo gives us a poetic description of this:

In the deep subconscient glowed her jewel lamp; Lifted, it showed the riches of the Cave … In a splendid extravagance of the waste of God Dropped carelessly in creation’s spendthrift work … And stolen by the robbers of the Deep, The golden shekels of the Eternal lie, Hoarded from touch and view and thoughts desire … Lest men should find them and be even as Gods.

(Book 1 Canto 3)

I would like to see both these texts as parallel narratives, filling in the gaps, as it were, in Sita’s narrative in Lanka. When Sita emerges from Lanka, it is only to be rejected by Ayodhya. She doesn’t fit in. Nor does Ayodhya suit her. She has moved on too far beyond the collective suggestion. So she re-enters the forest and this time she does not see it in opposition to the city, but as an alternative to it. And indeed in our cultural memory the forest is the refuge for the alternative individuals – those who opt out of the social order. What is the point of this heightened degree of

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individualization if it compels one to step outside the collective, one might well ask. And a response could be that it offers relief to the individual from the deadening sameness of the collective, its datedness. But that is surely not enough.

The alternative space has always been the nurturing ground for the advanced guard of the collective, the forerunners of the future. For in the forest, apart from the exiles, lived the rishis, the poets and the mystics – those engaged in musings, which resulted in new thoughts and ideas, in creative insights into the meaning of existence and solutions to its problems. Valmiki lived in this space and he stumbled on the sloka (religious verse) with which he wrote The Ramayana. And we still discuss it to this day.

Sita re-enters the forest to live in Valmiki’s ashram, which is a liminal space. It is not the city, but offers the opportunity for self-cultivation under the mentorship of the mystic/poet. It is not the wild forest but provides the freedom of the forest. Here Gauri and Kali can function and co-exist in harmony. For cultivation of self and life occurs beyond the formulaic rules of behavior – through a fresh, free, creative response to each problem as it arises. And this character of the space signifies what Sita has now become.

But like all the other spaces Sita has occupied, the ashram too is a space of transition. Sita will have to move on. But where will she go? Back to Ayodhya as wife, mother, and queen? To a lesser definition of self than she has now achieved? That will surely be a retrogressive step. Now that she has fully individualized herself, there can be no other solution than that of the mystic – to dissolve into a larger whole, in an act of surrender. And so the descent into the Earth.

In conclusion, words by the Mother (named by Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry, India) are relevant and inspiring:

one should have emerged from the immense sea of the subconscient, one should have begun to crystalize, to grow distinct so as to know oneself and then give oneself as that alone which is its own master can do. And what effort and struggle it takes to attain this crystallization, to emerge from the amorphous state of the environment; and how much more effort and struggle yet to give oneself, to surrender once the individuality has been formed. Few beings consent willingly to make this effort; so life with its brutal unforeseen events obliges men to make it unintentionally, for they cannot do otherwise.

“Prayers and Meditations,” in Collected Works of the Mother, March 20, 1914



Doniger Wendy. 2009. The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York: The Penguin Press. Kindle edition.

Malashri Lal, Namita Gohkale, Eds. 2009. In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology. Penguin Books and Yatra Books.

Sri Aurobindo, trans. 1970. The Upanishads. Birth Centenary Library. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.

Sri Aurobindo. 1970. Savitri. Birth Centenary Library. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.

—. 1970. The Secret of The Veda. Birth Centenary Library, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.

The Mother. 1979, 2003. “Prayers and Meditations”, in Collected Works of The Mother. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ON SITA PARITYAGAM: THE ABANDONMENT OF SITA

KAPILA VENU

Figure 14-9: Kapila Venu. Vipul Sangoi

Several plays in the repertoire of Kutiyattam are based on the Indian epic, The Ramayana. Kutiyattam is an ancient Sanskrit theatre tradition performed today primarily in the Southern Indian state of Kerala. Interestingly, of all the characters in The Ramayana the most explored and adored character in Kutiyattam is the ten-headed demon, Ravana and among the very few female characters who appear on stage it is the demoness Surpanakha, Ravana’s sister, who is most sought after.

In Kutiyattam, Sita as a character was hardly brought on stage especially in earlier times. An oil lamp either represented her presence, and when necessary, her verses were recited by a nangiar (female accompanist playing the cymbals) wearing a red uttariya.

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When asked to create a performance based on The Ramayana, I was reluctant, initially to choose Sita. I found more scope in characters like Surpanakha and Kaikeyi. However, after I saw a beautiful Pahadi miniature that belongs to the personal collection of Dr. Eberhard Fischer depicting the episode of agnipravesha (the fire ordeal that Sita endured) I felt that Sita deserved to be studied more deeply.

Personally, I have felt that we can do most justice to the exquisite beauty of Sita’s personality by looking at her through the eyes of Ravana. The repertoire of Kutiyattam dedicates an entire sixteen nights to enact the long play entitled, Ashokavanikankam, the 5th Act of Shaktibhandra’s Ascharyachoodamani up to the celebration of Ravana’s passionate love for Sita. The play explores in great detail Ravana’s love-lorn plight sinking deeper each day immersed in his love for her and forgetting his surroundings, his stature and every other concern until one day he finds himself prostrating at her feet ready to give up anything for her sake. She remains nonchalant.

After reading several versions of Sita parityagam (the abandonment of Sita) and gathering details from the Sanskrit dramatists, it was from Kalidasa’s Raghumvamsa that I finally chose the text and imagery. However, that remained as a skeleton for the performance and as the piece developed, my accompanists and I took the freedom to interpret freely both Sita’s and Rama’s love, conflicts, trauma and realization. This way the performance started to grow in a more spontaneous and personal manner each time it was performed.

The other very fascinating side of Sita’s character is her untiring love for nature and wildlife. Being the daughter of the earth, it seems to me, that she genuinely loved to be in the forest. Even after returning to Ayodhya after a long exile, Sita expresses her longing to go back to visit the forest again. She never tires of telling and retelling the wonders of the wild to her companions in the palace. Finally, after being abandoned by Rama in the forest, when Sita breaks down and cries, the whole forest unable to bear her sadness, weeps with her. Trees shed leaves, deer stare vacantly as half chewed grass falls from their open mouths, and peacocks stop their dance and hang their heads in shame. The forest stands by her and it is there that she raises and educates her two sons.

At the very end of the performance, we make space for Rama’s emotions to come spurting out after being contained in him for a lifetime. The moment when Rama realizes that Sita is leaving him and going away for good is so profound that he can no longer contain his inner world and it explodes leading him to experience a half mad state of mind and he faints only to recover to a sense of absolute loneliness.

B. EPIC WOMEN OF INDIAN DANCE: T. BALASARASWATI, RUKMINI DEVI, CHANDRALEKHA, INDRANI RAHMAN

AND MRINALINI SARABHAI

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

REMEMBERING MY TEACHER: T. BALASARASWATI

NANDINI RAMANI

Figure 15-10: Balasaraswati with Nandini Ramani and Priyamvada.

Archives of Dr.V. Raghavan Center For Performing Arts (Regd.), Chennai

She always danced for the gods and that is why her dance bore such a divine quality. Her art transcended to great heights. Such was the art of T. Balasaraswati (Bala), the legend of the South Indian dance, Bharatanatyam. Her unique involvement in her chosen tradition was the sole pursuit of her life. A great follower of the Thanjavur tradition as

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handed over to her by her Guru Kandappa Pillai (also of the Thanjavur group) Bala adhered to her dance tradition, in a strict manner until her last performance. Following a full order of repertoire even at her ripe age, with a perfect basic posture, well-executed foot work, chiseled hand and feet delineations, marked the heights of purity and standard in her recitals. Her excellence in pure dance (nritta, i.e. footwork without expressive meaning) was a special feature that deserves mention since many know her only as the “Queen of Abhinaya” (gesture language that expresses emotion and conveys narratives). Bala thrilled the audience with her limitless offerings of exquisite interpretations which were unique in their own way, with an innate beauty; her dance, in fact could be described as “visualised form of music” for there was the strong undercurrent of classical music which was soulfully interwoven with her mimetic explanations. With a grand musical expertise that Bala inherited from her legendary grandmother, the vina exponent Dhanammal, and her mother T. Jayammal, the musicality of Bala’s dance assumed exquisite dimensions through a beautiful blend of the inter-relation of music and dance.

For Bala, her art was her life. Her devotion to her Guru Kandappa was supreme. Her goal in life was to maintain her Guru’s tradition in all its purity and dignity. She openly said that she dared not change anything of her teacher’s training. Such was her total reverence for her teacher. Similarly, she had deep affection for her teacher’s son, K. Ganesan who came under Bala’s care as a young boy and as per her mother T. Jayammal’s instructions, started accompanying Bala in her performances at a crucial moment in 1958.

At 62, I look back through the decades of my association with this Legend of Bharatanatyam. My admiration for her grows every day. Her life and art reveal several facets of her struggles that she encountered in the wide network of humanity, from which she arose to create history and be respected as a woman of great achievements. Bala is an icon of the dance history of South India, an Epic woman of immortal fame. For me personally Bala was the lead kindly light that has shown me the path to divine glory through the realms of her art.

Bala was unique in many ways, as a person and as an artist. She was a woman of strength who stood firm against varied social obstacles that crossed her path; her artistic career was never smooth. Nonetheless, she combined her creative genius with an innate spirituality. She did this with utmost propriety and subtlety to give a unique touch to her art.

For Bala, life and art were not separate entities. She breathed music and dance and meditated on them all through her life. She was a true artist

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who was uncompromising with regard to the twin areas of dance and dance music, both in their content and quality.

My training with Balasaraswati began in 1955 at her school established by the Music Academy, Madras, at its campus, with my father, Dr. V. Raghavan, its long-time Secretary, playing a vital role in this endeavour. My elder sister Priyamvada, Bala’s first student, started with her privately from 1951, and later at this school which was formally registered in 1953. My training with Bala lasted till 1982; around that time she became ill.

Balasaraswati’s art was of pristine quality endowed with a serene, spiritual touch. Her handling of the sentiment of love (sringara) was subtle and coated with dignity. Her strong belief in the traditional aspects of the art gave her an unparalleled status in the world of dance. Her mingling into one with any composition that she performed or taught was something special, as her imagination for the interpretative portions would flow on and on, and her extraordinary skill would immerse the student or viewer in a state of ecstasy. Her prowess was as deep and immeasurable as that of an ocean and could immerse the viewer into waves of joy.

In the Kandappa-Bala technique, all the technical sections from the basic steps to the items of repertoire were always taught by my revered dance-master K. Ganesan, while Bala was present most of the time during those rigorous sessions of technique, keeping a watchful eye on the student.

My direct sessions with Bala started when I was in my early teens when I used to feel tense to face her directly because of her legendary stature. But having lived under the shadow of another legend, my own father and renowned Sanskrit scholar-teacher, Dr. V. Raghavan, I was somewhat familiar as to what to expect from such teachers of great eminence. However, every situation was different with Bala because her emotions and personality were colorful and complex. At every stage of my earlier years, I learnt a further dimension of my teacher for whom art and life were inseparable.

Bala’s style of teaching happened through a smooth methodology where the student had to understand the details in a gradual process and progress accordingly. There would not be any questioning by the student during the session and the student has to absorb and repeat the lessons as given by the teacher. Generally, Bala never liked any parent or student asking about the debut performance (arangetram). She used to get irritated and would say, “don’t come here only for that purpose. I know about the concept of arangetram, but there’s so much more to learn in this art.” Bala was never after money. She experienced both extremes in her life – struggle for money and the pinnacle of a rich life; but she remained the

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same at all times. She never demanded any fees from any student and accepted whatever was given to her by way of honoring her.

Once the student had perfected the technical aspects of Bharatanatyam and its repertoire, Bala would first begin with sabdam, the first interpretative composition of the traditional format and proceed in a leisurely manner to the other items – the lyrical part of the varnam, the padams and javali. The tempo of the composition had to be followed firmly, initially, by just walking with the song while Bala kept the talam (rhythm). Later, the hand gestures would be set for each padam. Initially I was shaped under her protective wings; as I grew up, my mind expanded and started to absorb the deeper nuances of Bala’s approach.

Bala used to tackle the classes with ease and in a simple approach without any big expectations from the student. But many times I had to withstand her mood swings and emotional upsurges. Generally, she never used to get upset for any mistakes that I made in my learning process during my early days. One has to be very patient and surrender totally to Bala. Once, she acknowledged the complete submission that my sister and I demonstrated when she gave her final affectionate verdict on us praising our loyalty and sincerity. She never openly appreciated any of the performances of the student. She would never tolerate ignorance. She wanted me to be well equipped in the different aspects of performing. She liked the way our father had groomed us, with proper training in vocal Carnatic music, Sanskrit, and a sumptuous knowledge of our ancient texts, the Puranas, dance treatises etc.

The technical side of Bala’s style was very rigorous in the real sense – the training of basic steps with only the footwork took at least two years. After that, hand gestures were added gradually. By the time the student was ready for the first invocatory number (alarippu), at least 3 to 4 years of basic training would have been completed. The traditional format (margam) is of prime importance in this tradition. A very important aspect of Bala’s technique is its equal emphasis on both pure dance (nritta) and the interpretative dance (abhinaya).

Many people admired Bala as the Queen of Abhinaya. This emerged as told by herself out of a crucial situation in her life – when Kandappa left Bala for a while to go to Almora to work with Uday Shankar, Bala felt almost deserted in the art-field. She had to continue her art, earn her livelihood and with family commitments, Bala said she geared up to give more song composition (padam-javali) sessions, accompanied by her illustrious mother-vocalist T. Jayammal.

Bala had a definite mode of teaching the young student, starting with very simple straight hand positions that brought out the direct meaning of


the lyric. Then, more hand gestures were taught to elaborate the poem. These would have to be practiced as per her direction without any input from the student at that point. Bala allowed the student to mature all by herself. Hence for me, the process started with an inward journey. As I grew older, I could envisage the free-flowing technique (manodharma) of her abhinaya technique to a certain extent.

Bala expected us, the sisters, since we were trained in vocal music, to apply our minds towards a deeper approach and widen our variety in abhinaya, while our technique master Ganesan was keen on the points of perfection of the rigorous, rhythmical nuances and the limb movements. Since I was fortunate to have both the aspects under one roof, I feel that as Kandappa insisted, it made a perfect synthesis of the physical and mental communication of the lofty ideals of the dance-par excellence, each one forming an unbroken chain of action, a crucial molding factor of training in a single tradition.

Well-maintained sthayi-bhava (the prevalent mood in a dance item), hand-gestures moving in an unhurried manner with the music blending in gentle, seamless extension, and hand delineations having an innate beauty are some of the striking features of Bala’s depiction. Further, in Bala’s tradition, subtlety, and suggestion (dhvani), smooth portrayal of role-reversal, absence of dramatization, elevating thoughts in interpretation, and spontaneity in linking the different parts to offer a wholesome visual picture. No hand interpretation (sanchari) is fixed and is never pre-rehearsed. Only the rhythmical ( patterns of the choreography were rehearsed just a day before the recital, mainly for the sake of the percussive (mridangam) accompanist.

Similarly the basic steps (adavus) set for any musical syllable (swara) segment exhibited a clinging quality and maintained a perfect alignment with the musicality of the rhythmical portion, be it a jatiswaram or a technical part of the varnam or a tillana. Bala never compromised the format at any point of her performing career, whether in India or abroad.

Loyalty to one’s own tradition, utmost patience, hard work, and above all intense devotion to the teacher were the core values that Bala propagated in her life. For me it was always a life’s learning process under her guidance and what I had for Bala was a fear-oriented-devotion (bhaya bhakti).

This bhaya bhakti of mine got transformed into pleasant, beautiful experiences with Bala towards the last stage of her life. I was very fortunate to have lived continuously with two legends, my father and Bala especially during their ripe years which saw the best of their works, and of course Ganesan who breathed his last on my lap. Even in day to day

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activities, it was a great opportunity for me to see them, observe, understand and assimilate their approach in judging and accepting art and life, their subtle, yet firm outlook on life and people and their ripened thought processes – all these shaped my own views on these aspects.

Figure 15-11: Balasaraswati. Dhiraj


For Bala, the last period of her life was somewhat saddened by various happenings. From 1982 on, she did not travel. At the Music Academy’s campus, from Monday to Saturday, she looked forward to my arrival just for chatting and sharing. Various episodes, old and new, different people, a softened attitude, care and concern for the Bharatanatyam scene, were all part of those conversations. She looked up to me like a long time friend, and sometimes she opened up her heart about her life experiences. I sat in wonder at times and at other times I felt like crying for her. She said once: “now you are a mother; you will understand me well now”, while explaining a crucial situation in her early life. At another time she appreciated my father’s decision to marry us off at the appropriate time and remarked: “it is a must to have a partner and a married status; nobody should stand like me”. Listening to all those personal outpourings, I felt a deep pain and sympathized with my teacher even more. I could sense that she felt very lonely at those times.

As a person, Bala was often misunderstood as being arrogant, while the fact was that she could not tolerate ignorance. As a genius she was always looking for people who could really understand things at her mental level. However, to understand Bala’s colorful moods and emotions and cope with her, one has to stay close to her for decades with perseverance and patience.

Bala’s mind always dwelt on her art that was highly aesthetic, rising above all mundane considerations. A strict disciplinarian, Bala seemed a tough personality for many who did not understand her well. Personally, Bala was a light-hearted, colorful, simple woman; the hardships that life and artistic career offered her, made her an unapproachable personality. She had to be so for the firm upkeep of her tradition. Until she reached the pinnacle of her life, Bala’s artistic path was not one strewn with roses. Nothing worked out easily for her; her perseverance, dedication and hard work alone brought her all the name, fame and glory. The 1963 Edinburgh Festival and 1962 American Dance Festival where she was given standing ovations for her performances and applauded by none less than Ted Shawn himself were all the initial glories that came her way and there was no looking back.

If Bharatanatyam is so well known in the West, it is mainly due to the fact that it was Bala who introduced Western audiences to the intricacies and nuances of this form, mainly a solo performance (ekahaarya). Even in the 30’s and 40’s it was Bala’s responsible attitude that many others during the same period tried to emulate in spreading this art form. It required a Bala to keep up this artistic activity in order to acquaint wider

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awareness of the beauty and aesthetics of Bhartanatyam right from the time of its renaissance.

Whatever happened around her, Bala was there all the time, dancing on to reach the Supreme without aiming for name, fame, money or awards. Padma Bhushan, Padma Vibhushan, Fellow of Central Sangeet Natak Akademi, the only dancer so far to get the prestigious Sangeeta Kalanidhi, Isai Perarignar, Desikottama were some of the honors bestowed on Bala.

Bala, being a stern “old time” teacher never openly appreciated or encouraged her students, but gave them “the best of her art”. She inculcated a “sprit of sincerity and devotion”, and was indeed a Silent Teacher (mauna guru), who suggested the various “do’s” and “don’ts” of the art quietly through her own artistic life.

It is said that Bala never created many students. But the fact remains that Bala never cared for quantity. A few of those who cherish and follow her tradition have been given the best of her technique and artistic values. When Bala taught at the Music Academy, illustrious musician-friends, Harikatha exponents, prominent dancers, well-known critics, connoisseurs, and renowned personalities from various walks of life, including visiting dignitaries frequented her classes. For all of them, Bala remained the same simple, unassuming, majestic woman, who readily responded to their request and danced a padam or slokam, creating an atmosphere of absolute tranquility. Although the whole world of art was watching her with great admiration and wonder, Bala was always her own self, easily reachable at times and tough at most other times.

As an artist, she stood high and magnificent, away from all the petty cries of jealousy and controversies. The word smarabuorsampradaya (tradition) indicates a perennial reality. The followers of a tradition vanish in due course of time; but the path that was set down, and the nuances created and curated by artists like Bala remain forever. The fact that Bala’s timeless art is discussed time and again at various venues is itself a proof of the immortal status it has maintained in the dance scenario even after 29 years of Bala’s departure. Never before was there one to be and never to happen in future too – such was the artistic genius of the “One and Only Bala”.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

REMEMBERING RUKMINI DEVI

KATHERINE SIEBEL KUNHIRAMAN

Figure 16-12: Rukmini Devi. Kalakshetra Foundation

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I am honored to write about Rukmini Devi Arundale whom we called “Athai” (aunty). I am heavily indebted to friends and teachers who have shared stories over many years, chiefly Sarada Hoffman who was as close to Athai as a daughter, N.S Jayalakshmi who spent her entire life in Kalakshetra, Shanta Dhananjayan who was a part of Kalakshetra at home and on tour for many years and often found herself the chosen roommate, my own husband Kunhiraman, whose father Ambu Panikkar was Athai’s Kathakali guru from 1940 to 1947. Kunhiraman, my husband’s own personal experience in Kalakshetra spanned nearly thirty continuous years, and a decade more after moving to California, during which time he returned seasonally to perform his old roles in the dance dramas. All of these people are great storytellers with excellent memories.

In order to understand Athai’s artistic sensibility, it is important to know the artistic mood in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries (I will discuss this later) that contributed to the creation of Kalakshetra and some of Athai’s other creative interests that may not be obvious to the present generation.

When I first came to India I was at the end of adolescence. I am from a family of artists, and had been impressed from childhood by the artistic movement I have earlier described. In India I found that there were areas in which taste had simply failed. Coming to Kalakshetra was like a homecoming of sorts. Maybe my family is too much the “taste police”, and I was stepping into the Indian equivalent of this, but I found Athai’s aesthetic judgment to be flawless. I devoured Kalakshetra. I kept my eyes and ears open, absorbing the morning-prayer songs, the bhajans (religious songs) in the ancient temple at Thiruvanmiyur, the simple folk dances. I tried to absorb every bit of the process as Athai turned her attention to the smallest detail of every aspect of her work.

Athai had started her study of Bharatanatyam as an adult, with an established intellect and interest in Indian tradition and thought. She was fortunate to have the very best of the artists of the day to teach her. Some were very old, the remnants of a withering and condemned art. Later when she started Kalakshetra, she brought some of the 20th century’s most famous musicians as well, pulling them from retirement to share their gifts with us. I felt I had been given a glimpse of the original Thyagaraja as my music teacher Budalair Krishnamurthi Shastrigal sat a few seats away on the 19M bus, singing to himself, as he added the talam (rhythmic structure), to his song.

The legendary, once celebrated devadasi (temple dancer) from Kaapaliswara Temple in Mylapore, Gauri Amma, came to teach classes. Confused and vague in her very old age, she limped up to the campus to

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sink weakly onto the mat, but when she began to sing and her eyes flashed with passion, it was a window onto a long-gone age, and a gift to those who were fortunate to receive that gift. Athai had learned much from her, when both were younger, and much of the Kalakshetra repertoire comes from that tradition.

Artists of various traditions came to guide the creation of new productions in their own styles: the dance drama known as Bhagavatha Mela from Mellatur (in Tamil Nadu), was one of these, and while shaping it with the traditional experts, Athai’s hand was always there, refining it for the contemporary stage while retaining its character. Another dance drama form known as Kuravanjis were also meticulously assembled, making some of the most charming stage productions ever seen on the Indian stage.

In the mid 19th century, the Aesthetic Movement emerged. Its philosophy in a nutshell was that art should not have a moral or political motive, but that art should be decorative and beautiful, uplifting and reflective of the perfect beauty of nature. Art of many kinds found inspiration from those of China, Japan and India. Following closely was the Arts and Crafts Movement extending from the late 19th century till the 1930s. Many prominent artists, painters, architects, sculptors, writers, dancers were a part of this movement, and many of them extended their rejection of the cloying confines of the Victorian age to their religion, and became Theosophists. There was an artistic and philosophic reaction to the industrial revolution and the Victorian age of excess.

It is hard to imagine today in our age of freedom of thought, that in its time, Theosophy was a rare refuge for those who sought an escape from conventional religious sentiment. Athai, born to a family of Theosophists was fortunate to be nurtured in an atmosphere of open-mindedness. Many of the cultural treasures we accept as a normal part of our lives today owe their presence to her imagination and forceful personality.

This artistic movement had its political side. In England the concept of socialism arose from it, and in India the independence movement was encouraged and supported by Annie Besant and many fellow Theosophists. Artistically and culturally they promoted a love of Indian tradition to replace the pressure to abandon everything that was not British. Annie Besant learned Sanskrit in order to translate the Bhagavad Gita. This translation with Besant’s insightful commentary was our textbook in our religion class at Kalakshetra. I still have my copy of this translation from that class.

Viewing art as a civilizing influence, Athai dreamed of a return to simple aesthetics for all, embodied in the saying “simple living and high

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thinking.” At one of the annual Theosophical conventions, she set up an exhibit of two homes, one very low budget, and the other slightly more elaborate, using indigenous materials and designs in a manner totally pleasing and practical, devoid of western elements. It was believed that objects of utility should be beautiful, well crafted, and should carry a sense of integrity so that for instance, things made of wood should look like wood.

Athai was intrigued by the textile traditions of all parts of India, and established the Kalakshetra weaving center where the old patterns of silk saris were revived and reproduced in silk as well as cotton, bringing them within reach of everyone. Nowadays we see these traditional designs everywhere, but fifty years ago they were called “Kalakshetra Saris” – found only in the most exclusive shops in India’s major cities. Shanta Dhananjayan recalls having a weaving class at Kalakshetra. What better way to encourage respect for craftsmanship?

First, emerging in the beautiful grounds of the Theosophical Society in the city of Madras (now Chennai), Kalakshetra students absorbed the lessons of their well-designed environment – set in a garden of Asia’s most stunning plants and trees. When the campus moved to Thiruvanmiyur, close to the Theosophical Society, Athai seized the opportunity to guide the creation of a campus that reflected the best of simple Indian tradition in the buildings and gardens. Students helped to decorate the campus with kolams and rangolis (patterns drawn on the ground considered auspicious). Kunhiraman recalls terrifying nights sleeping alone in the brand new studios, while supervising the digging of the famous lotus pond. Staff, students and visitors were honored with the task of planting new trees, now flourishing and spreading.

During arts festival preparation, we would rush to the costume workshop, where Athai would come personally to explore the choices for costuming new productions. Twisting fabric into turbans, winding them this way and that, pulling out remnants of her own frayed costumes to examine the clever construction now forgotten, painting makeup on a willing face to see how a man could become a monkey without becoming ridiculous – she was a hands-on person who never missed a single detail. In the early years she gave her best saris to be made into costumes for her dance-dramas. The musicians’ platform on one side, the altar on the other, both were always perfectly balanced with traditional textiles, bronze objects, fresh flowers, hanging ornaments made from palm leaves, all created a total atmosphere – a perfect setting for the perfect productions on the stage.

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The early costumes were of fantastic quality that cannot be replicated today, many woven at Kalakshetra’s weaving center. For one of the Kuravanjis, Athai had the weavers make plain cotton saris with magnificent pallus (the loose end of the sari, usually elaborately designed) then sent them to Madurai to be tie-dyed, creating authentic “chungudi” saris that when worn by the dancers made a clear statement about the elegance of simplicity. Few nowadays understand why the costumes were patched and repaired over so many years to make them last till the old fabric would no longer hold the stitches.

Some critics have said that Athai mixed ballet with the Bharatanatyam. She did study ballet briefly, but what she brought from it to her dance was the discipline and precision that soon became the hallmark of Kalakshetra style. Today, almost all the respected performers have polished technique, whatever their style, but it was not always so. Even when young and ignorant, I was shocked by the crudeness of dance, and its costuming and presentation. Her percussionists set the adavus (foot-patterns of bharatanatyam) to talam (rhythmic patterns), scholars studied the text of songs to ensure accuracy, the various traditional teachers taught her their individual styles and from all these she selected what looked best to her. A discerning eye did not fail in this task, and the geometric patterns prove themselves in every pose.

Another criticism has been that Athai stripped the dance of all its sensuality. Cloying sentiment and corny, sometimes vulgar romance were some of the elements of Victorian arts that the Aesthetic Movement purposely avoided. But for Athai subtle sensuality and uplifting imagery were the goals.

We did not know, when celebrating the Golden Jubilee in the 1985-86 season, that she was just weeks away from death. After the final performance she came to the stage and sat on a chair, and without the aid of even a little note, named almost every single person who had shared the journey with her.

Rukmini Devi was a giant, with the strengths and weaknesses of giants. I count her as one of the greatest inspirations in my life, and a gift to the world of Indian culture. I pray that her productions will continue to be passed down through generations of dancers with as little change as possible, and those on the brink of obscurity will be revived while the original participants remain with us.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE HONEST BODY: REMEMBERING CHANDRALEKHA

PADMINI CHETTUR

Figure 17-13: Chandralekha performing Sakambhari, the opening portion

from her 1991 production, Sri. Bernd Merzenich

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In 1990, during my final year of chemistry studies at BITS Pilani, fellow dancer Krishna Devanandan invited me to visit a rehearsal at no.1 Elliot’s Beach, home and workplace of Chandralekha. On stage, three dancers – Krishna, Meera Krishnamurti and Jasmine Simhalan – were rehearsing what we later referred to as ‘the triangle’ – midsection of Chadralekha’s choreography of Sri (1991).

The feminine and masculine were depicted as a triangle with pulsating centre. Interpreted by these three dancers whose spine held the kind of strength and dignity I’d never seen before and a single male dancer in the centre who simply explored the vertical line. There was no smiling, no trying to be expressive. In this image, very far from the narrative, coquettishness and pretense of the Bharatanatyam I’d learnt through my childhood, deeply embedded in a profound understanding of space and time, the lateral and the horizontal, and most importantly, a deep research into the origin of energy and movement within the body, we can start to read the discourse of Chandra’s dance.

Immediately convinced, I asked and Chandra allowed me to start training from the next day on. Yoga with Nandakumar and Nagin (B.K.S. Iyengar practice), kalaripayattu (martial arts from the state of Kerala in India) with students of Vasu Gurukul (EPV Kalari, Kottayam) and adavu (bharatanatyam technique) class with Meera and Geetha Ramesh. Chandra was working at the time mostly with students from Kalakshetra (bharatanatyam school that followed its founder Rukmini Devi’s style), therefore for those of us who came from other bharatanatyam schools, there was a period of re-learning the grammar with a new focus on line and geometry.

Why these three forms – yoga, kalaripayattu, and bharatanatyam technique? To Chandra, the conceptual knowledge of these forms (even beyond their references in mythology) represented a united physicality that would go beyond any of these in isolation. For her, it was not merely a strategy to expand her movement vocabulary by learning multiple forms the way contemporary dancers today tend to do. Instead Chandra looked beyond movement into the underlying principles and connected.

From yoga, Chandra understood the human spine, its ability to remain fluid in stillness, and the way bodies open with breath. She would constantly urge us to apply this knowledge to our adavus, and to look for the initiation of all movement in the base of the spine. She knew that the particular grounded-ness and flexibility we would gain from kalaripayattu would help us to understand the simplest of body states-how to stand, how to walk, how to sit, how to change the levels of physical movement.

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With Chandra, there was no end result. No completion to the learning. She constantly challenged and pushed our knowledge and relationships with our own bodies. Stripping away our mannerisms. Refusing to allow prettiness. What we slowly understood was that Chandra was starting to see far beyond the physical body that we knew. She was seeing the body as the charger of space, the body as extension of the ground, the body as the site of energy, and the body as lines, triangles and circles. At times looking for the body’s vulnerability. The incredible tension between bodies – in proximity, or far apart. If we look hard at the incredible journey that is Chandra’s, we see much more than dance. We see a philosophy of life, a shrewdly political mind located in post-independent India, and most importantly, I think, someone who dared to ask the question and find answers to: – “what does it mean to be a woman”.

So, equally important as the exploration of form and performance itself was what Chandra referred to as her work on our consciousness. However resentful we were as young girls in our early twenties to be lectured on everything, starting from what we wore and ate, how we looked at people, the twitches of our mouths, our gaze, how we socialized, what we read. What became very clear was that Chandra was not interested in “faking” performance. Her women dancers had to come as close to being “women” in the way she envisioned them – stripped bare of frills, make-up and artifice, with strong bodies and powerful focus. She was never interested in youth and beauty in the way patriarchy portrayed it. She urged us to be “ancient”. Not to waste our time on the frivolity of consumerism. Not to be swayed by populist fashion. And though critics have often said that the power that Chandra could bring to the stage, through the strength of her own consciousness, was always stronger than that of her dancers, I do think that the beauty of this journey for me is, that if we choose to, we can keep traveling on it. And we can do this even now, in her absence. And only now can I understand many of her words and the reasons for them.

So, time. Time is of course central to Chandra’s discourse. In her hands, time becomes political. As intrinsic to form as body itself, in the way that her use of time affected movement. We can look at the ‘slowing-down’ of movement in Chandra’s work from several perspectives. My first experience of the task itself, especially when applied to Bharatanatyam material, was that it actually exposed to me what I didn’t know. That so much of what we do with our body is purely mechanical. So, first, at a purely physical level, slowing down asks us to clarify all the details of movement and to energize what we would otherwise rush through. ‘Slowing’ down however was also intrinsic to Chandra’s focus on charging space. When the body takes time to occupy image, to shift line,

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then the transition becomes that much more important. On Chandra’s stage, moving slowly was about flow, and extending the body’s lines into space. It was a very deliberate move away from the virtuosity and titillation of Bharatanatyam dancers in third speed. It was intrinsically connected to her thinking that dance is not entertainment.

The dancer’s function is not to seduce the audience, or even to make it “easy”. With the same rigor that she applied to her own life, Chandra refused to enter a cozy and lazy engagement with her audience. She wanted them to meet her halfway.

Figure 17-14: Chandralekha watching her dancers do “Namaskar” on the beach,

1992. Sadanand Menon

Through her performances, she wanted to share a very qualitative experience with people. She wanted to remind us of what we were losing by living these speedy mechanized lives. She wanted us to look once again for the poetic potential of dance. Not a dance that was frozen in time, telling irrelevant stories in redundant ways, but a dance where the body itself plays central character, a dance where the body recovers its spine and its dignity, and a dance where the brutality of life finds a counter. In Chandra’s notion of dance, violence is answered by sensuality, the aridity of our insides is made fluid by sexuality, and the body can escape its own materiality to discover spirituality.

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And finally, in her last work Sharira (2000), Chandra finds a form where the three meet within the body. Spirituality, sensuality and sexuality are bound together in this work, which is neither yoga nor dance. It is instead a masterful choreography of time and space. In powerful response to one woman, Chandralekha’s question: “where does the body begin and where does it end?”

Please note: Having worked with Chandra for 10 years, this essay for me, even as I write it, is incomplete. It has not allowed me the space to mention aesthetics, content or even her humanity. Instead I have tried to focus on the body alone and I hope there is at least clarity to this.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MY MOTHER INDRANI RAHMAN

SUKANYA RAHMAN

Figure 18-15: Indrani Rahman (Kuchipudi, Mandodari Shabdam) 1968.

©Sukanya Rahman/Ram Rahman Family Archives

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I feel that my mother has finally come home. Indrani was born 82 years ago on a French liner docked in Madras harbor. Her adventurous American born mother Ragini Devi was one of the pioneers in reviving Indian classical dance in the 1930s.

As a baby, Indrani was either crawling about the dance floor while her mother studied Bharatanatyam with Mylapore Gauri Amma, or she was stashed in the green room while Ragini performed on stage.

The happiest times of her childhood, she said, were spent in Kerala Kalamandalam where Ragini was the guest of poet Vallathol. Vallathol’s wife Amma and dancer Gopinath took Indrani under their wings and cared for her while Ragini created a sensation and broke barriers by being not only the first woman but the first white woman to study and perform Kathakali. Indrani often sat in on her mother’s classes, but for her the highlight was being taken by Ragini to the all night Kathakali dance-dramas. These performances that she absorbed with intensity and passion cemented her aesthetic values. She drilled into both my brother Ram and myself that one had to tremble, have goose flesh, and weep if one was witnessing the art of a truly great artist. There was no room for mediocrity.

Indrani had her stage debut at the age of five in her mother’s troupe in Bombay. At age nine, she was smuggled in a laundry bag by her mother across the Canadian border into the US – an experience that terrified her and filled her with a sense of insecurity. At age 15, she married Bengali architect Habib Rahman in New York and returned with him to India and soon after gave birth to me.

A performance in Calcutta by Shanta Rao, her muse, inspired her to pursue Bharatanatyam, which brought her back to South India, first to study the basics with U.S. Krishna Rao in Bangalore and then in Madras with Pandanallur Chokkalingam Pillai at the Indian Institute of Fine Arts in Egmore. A great event in her life was her official arangetram (debut performance) in 1950 at the Museum Theatre. Seated in the audience that evening were Balasaraswati and her family, Tara Chowdhry, Yamini, Vyjayantimala, Venkathachalam, and Harin Chattopadhyaya among others.

Indrani had already established a name as solo Bharatanatyam dancer when she was crowned Miss India in 1952, a moniker she would spend her entire life trying to shake off. She felt that a beauty queen would not be taken seriously as a classical dancer. Other accolades, medals and awards that she received during her life she stuffed away in a cabinet in the kitchen pantry where they are still gathering dust.

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Figure 18-16: Indrani Rahman (Orissi), Habib Rahman photo 1957.

©Sukanya Rahman/Ram Rahman Family Archives

Mostly at the urging of Ragini, she began pursuing lesser-known forms of dance like Mohini Attam, Kuchipudi, Odissi and Satriya dance. With the exception of Satriya dance that she never performed, she added these to her repertoire and placed these forms on the world stage.

She had an uncanny eye for talent and promoted and encouraged emerging dancers and presented them in her own performances. Many of these dancers like Durga Lal, Ramli Ibrahim, along with Radha & Raja Reddy rose to great prominence. Indrani was a great supporter of non-Indians pursuing Indian dance and music and believed that art was universal and should have no boundaries.

My mother felt that once a dancer had experienced the yoga of training under a master and experienced the sublime magic of moving an audience by her performance, she could never be a normal human being

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Along with her great beauty, Indrani had a mellifluous voice that could charm a cobra and she had a fiery temper and could also cuss like a sailor. To her longtime flutist Srinivasa Murthy she was “Bhagavati’, to her brilliant mridangist Krishna Pillai, she was ‘Kali’; she was seldom anything in between. To me, she was my epic mother and I know she is here with us today.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

MRINALINI SARABHAI: COSMOPOLITAN PATRIOT AND EPIC WOMAN

ANDREE GRAU

Figure 19-17: Mrinalini Sarabhai. Darpana Academy of Performing Arts

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Can dancers ever be epic women? Or is it only the heroic women they portray that warrant the label? In this presentation I will argue that in India during the revival period,1 simply wanting to dance and perform publicly was a political act that only the most dedicated of individuals engaged in, and that many of these dancers were indeed epic.

Mrinalini Sarabhai had undoubtedly an epic character. Her decision to become a dancer may not have been as dangerous as that taken by her sister, the late Captain Lakshmi Sehgal, who joined the Indian National Army to combat British occupation (cf. Hills & Silverman 1993). Neither was it as flamboyant as that taken by her sister-in-law, Mridula Sarabhai, who helped women of both sides of the border during the tragedy of Partition (cf. Basu 1996). Mrinalini may not have put her life on the line, yet her dedication to dance, her decision to fight injustice and to use classical dance as an act of social activism distinguishes her. To establish an institution in a city not known for its love of dance, and to create dance works about dowry death and pollution when few, if any dancers thought these to be suitable topics at the time was indeed extraordinary in its vision. Further, to sustain this vision over the decades, despite personal tragedies, has been indeed an endeavour of epic proportion.

Talking with Mrinalini over the years, I am always astonished by the richness of her life. She was born Mrinalini Swaminadham in 1918, making her truly a doyenne of Indian classical dance. She came from a family of academics and freedom fighters and was brought up in an intellectually rich environment. Her father, the barrister Subbarama Swaminadhan (1873-1930), was educated in elite institutions in both England and the US. By the time he married in 1908, his practice was thriving and he was able to afford a comfortable home called Gilchrist Gardens, named after the first – of the many – scholarships he had been awarded for his studies. Ammu, his wife, was only 14 when he married her and as Mrinalini put it to me “he brought her up”: finding a tutor, having her learn English and promoting her independence. She was quickly at the heart of Madras society, taking part in dramatic productions, playing tennis, driving a car, all activities quite daring at the time for a woman in Europe and North America, and even more so in colonial India. She engaged with people who were politically and spiritually minded. Her friends, the theosophists Annie Besant (1847-1933) and Margaret Cousins (1878-1954), had been suffragettes back home in England and Ireland. In 1917, she joined them in the foundation of one of the oldest Indian feminist organisations, the Indian Women’s Association (IWA).2 Her home quickly became a centre for both her social and political circles,

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especially after the death of her husband in 1930, when she was left as a young widow with four children.

From this brief sketch, it is quite clear that Mrinalini’s early years were both immensely rich in terms of the people she was surrounded by, but also somewhat lonely with what today we would describe as workaholic parents. This is not to say that she was a sad child. In her autobiography (Sarabhai 2004), she writes vividly about the pranks and mischief she went into with various visiting cousins and friends and about the daily excursions to the beach with Lakshmi. Throughout her school life she seems to have been at the heart of many social activities too. Yet she was undoubtedly a serious and precocious child, largely surrounded by adults. In 1933, her mother decided to take the family abroad and they arrived in Munich just three months after Hitler had become Chancellor. Mrinalini wrote to a family friend: “Here, everyone seems bewitched by a man called Hitler and his voice blares out everywhere. I feel he is evil from the sound of his voice but he has some uncanny hypnotic quality’ (Sarabhai2004: 44) – quite perceptive from a fifteen-year old girl who lived a sheltered life.

Mrinalini was surrounded from a very young age by women who were actively engaged with the world – doctors, publishers, politicians and so on, and who were largely supported in their endeavours by their male partners. Indeed as she put it to me, “I came from a family where women were never downtrodden” adding emphatically “I have never felt unequal

similar beliefs. Indeed, her husband Vikram talking about their marriage once said, “a wife who would be totally dependent on me would be intolerable” (Sarabhai, V. 1992 [1970]: 42). So whilst her desire to become a dancer was maybe incongruous in the highly intellectual and politicised environment of her family, it was not outrageous. Rukmini Devi was a family friend after all and she encouraged her.

Ammu considered that Mrinalini should be educated in Europe and in 1932 she arrived at the St Georges School in Clarens, the first British public school to be set up in Switzerland. The founders wanted the school to reflect “sound learning, an appreciation of beauty, and the promotion of peace through international good will” (see http://www.stgeorges.ch). It encouraged sport activities such as netball and lacrosse in summer, skating and skiing in winter.3 It also offered Dalcrozian ‘Greek’ dance lessons as was common for young ladies at the time. After two years, Mrinalini returned home, and there was discussion about her going to Oxford, which she was not keen on. As she put it: “for me, all education had only one title and that was dance” (Sarabai, 2004: 49). She was sent to Louise Lighfoot

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(1902-1978),4 the Australian dancer who had established the First Australian Ballet Company in 1929 and was at the time teaching dance in Madras. What Lightfoot offered, however, was not what Mrinalini was looking for, and she enrolled at the bharatanatyam academy, Kalakshetra, established by Rukmini Devi in Madras (now, Chennai). There, she trained with Muthukumaran Pillai (1874-1960) whom she credits “with initiating her into the real Bharata Natyam tradition” (Lynton 1995: 38). She enjoyed the strict discipline of his work and she felt that “he delighted in [her] capacity for hard work” (Sarabhai 2004: 50). She would work again with him later in her life, when, returning from America she moved to Bangalore to work with Ram Gopal, and still later when in 1948 she would invite him to come and teach at Darpana, Mrinalini’s Dance Academy in Ahmedabad where he stayed for three years. At Kalakshetra, Mrinalini also worked with Rukmini Devi, whom she admired greatly.

In the summer of 1939 she met Vikram Sarabhai. She had gone to Ooty (a hill-station in India) for the holidays, staying with the family friend Margaret Cousins mentioned earlier. Vikram came to the tennis courts when she was playing. She comments on this first encounter that in contrast to her wearing shorts: “It was the first time I had seen someone wearing a kurta in the elegant chikkan work of Lucknow. To me he looked like a Rajput painting come to life” (Sarabhai 2004: 51). Cousins decided to hold a charity concert and asked Mrinalini to dance one of the “Greek” dances she had learned at school:

Much to my dismay, the entire Sarabhai clan …was seated in the front

I danced for what seemed an interminable time … Even now I shudder every time I hear Chopin’s Waltz in A Flat Minor, and can still see the solemn faces of Vikram and his family in front of me (Sarabhai 2004: 51).

Returning to Madras, Mrinalini became dissatisfied with her life as apart from her bharatanatyam classes that she loved, she felt very unhappy at home. Her mother suggested that she go to Rabindranath Tagore’s institution at Shantiniketan whose ideals and objectives included the promotion of an “intercultural … understanding of the world”, and the unification of humankind through ‘the study of culture and philosophy of different nations’ (Sahu 2004: 203). There she studied kathakali and manipuri.5 She also took part in Tagore’s dance dramas. In 1939, touring with the Shantiniketan dance group, she performed Chandalika (1933) for Mahatma Gandhi in Calcutta. There she met the poet Vallathol, and the dancer Uday Shankar.


Mrinalini talks about the experience of belonging to Tagore’s circle as one of the most important periods in her life. A picture of Tagore has a prominent place in her study at Darpana (Mrinalini’s Dacne Academy in Ahmedabad, India). Reflecting on her experience she commented:

Now so many years later, looking back, I wonder about the ‘Abode of Peace’. Was it the Maharshi who, through his meditation, blessed that piece of land? Or was it Gurudev … who wove a spell with his spiritual poems and his humanistic ideology? Or the men and women who gathered there to teach the highest ideal of truth? There was a synthesis of dedication that contributed to the harmony of the place and we students were swept up into its glorious landscape. It was a joy to participate in the dance dramas. For me the enchantment came alive each time Gurudev said “Here is the music. This is the story. Dance it as you wish”. I felt so elated, so free to express myself. Finding new forms from traditional techniques was my need and it was Gurudev who first understood and encouraged this creative urge (Sarabhai 2004: 56).

Mrinalini left Shantiniketan after two years to accompany her mother to the US on a lecture tour. On the way to America, there were many stops in Asia and whenever possible Mrinalini attended performances, met teachers and took classes, establishing contacts which would come useful in the future when touring with her own company.

During the journey, Mrinalini also engaged with social dance, as every night on the ship traveling from South East Asia to New York, there was ballroom dancing. One of her partners was Dale Carnegie6 who suggested that she attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA) in New York, where he had studied himself. The American experience not only enriched her artistic skills, but it opened up a new world. As she put it: “As a student I was allowed to earn and worked hard doing anything that came my way to make a living: serving at canteens, giving lectures on India, posing for portraits. I even run the lift for a week and of course gave a few recitals of classical Indian dance at International House and once on television” (Sarabhai 2004: 71-72).

Returning to India in 1940, she joined Ram Gopal’s school in Bangalore where her teacher from Kalakshetra, Muthukumaran Pillai had moved to, so she was able to pick up her training. Unknown to her Vikram Sarabhai too had moved to Bangalore as, unable to return to Cambridge to pursue his postgraduate studies because of the war, he had decided to study at the Indian Institute of Science. They began meeting regularly. Although she enjoyed working with Gopal, an artist who by that time had an international reputation (see David 2001), she felt that he did not share her spiritual-artistic vision and following the advice of her guru, she left

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and returned to Chennai as she wanted to further her training, at first with Chokkalingam Pillai (1893-1968) and then with his father-in-law the legendary Meenakshisundaram Pillai (1869-1954), the guru who had taught Rukmini Devi. Vikram’s family, however, was putting pressure on him to return to Ahmedabad. The Quit India movement had started in earnest and the British were determined to crush the freedom fighters. They wanted their son to return home. Vikram pursued Mrinalini more intensively and, despite a lack of interest in marriage, she felt that:

Vikram was so different. He understood my commitment to dance. … We had so many things in common: our love for beauty, for honesty, for tradition, and for the country, and at the same time, our excitement about new developments in civilization.

Science is so similar to Art, both disciplines are a search for unknown galaxies of the universe, both spiritually aware of the indivisible wholeness of the cosmos. A scientist looks for new horizons in knowledge, a dancer for inner horizons of understanding. A scientist speaks about the spaces beyond our planet and its mysteries. A dancer searches spaces within for meaning. Vikram as a scientist, and I as a dancer, shared a togetherness that was hard to define’ (Sarabhai 2004: 79-80).

They were married in September 1942, in a small wedding ceremony and they moved to Ahmedabad.7

This overview of Mrinalini’s life up to her marriage gives a sense of her background both in social, political and artistic terms. She was undoubtedly part of a cosmopolitan elite, spoke a number of languages, was well traveled and well connected. Her family circle included the leading politicians and intellectuals of the time. She had many female role models in her mother and her friends who were independent and politically engaged. Her schooling was done in institutions where a sense of beauty and awe towards nature was promoted and where intercultural engagements were encouraged. In dance terms Mrinalini had an eclectic training. She had been in contact with many of the great dancers and teachers of the time, was able to explore in some depth a number of Indian techniques,8 and to have some brief encounters with a number of genres from South East Asia, as well as Euro-American acting techniques. She had also engaged in choreographic work from an early age, which she told me was “what she always wanted to do”.


She was deeply attracted to the Sarabhai family. As she put it:

I was drawn to what seemed a cultural background that was both very Indian and very sophisticated. It was this very ‘Indian-ness’ that I had been seeking in my own life, which was lacking in my family. Here were young people, educated abroad, but completely Indian in their thoughts, belonging to a world, which I sought, a mingling of the finest of both cultures (Sarabhai 2004: 80).

In 1946, Vikram and Mrinalini moved to Cambridge so that Vikram could work on his PhD. Arnold Haskell (1903-1980) the well-known critic, ballet scholar, and friend of Uday Shankar and Ram Gopal, arranged for her to give some lecture-demonstrations. “Practically every member of the dancing profession not performing that night attended,”, Haskell wrote; continuing that “every dancer in that audience felt a real kinship with India after watching something in a language they could understand” (RAD 1947: 23). Whilst there was not much opportunity for dance performances, Mrinalini paved the way for her return visit in 1949. Returning to India after Vikram’s PhD was completed, and by now mother of their first child, Mrinalini resumed her training to the surprise of many who had thought that, even though she had not stopped dancing after her marriage as would have been expected, she would give it up after her first child. As she said to me: “it never crossed my mind”. In London too the “dancing mother” was noted, when she performed at St. Martin Theatre in 1949. The Daily Mail (Wednesday 30th March 1949) published a photo of Kartikeya with the caption “Pu-pu watches mother dance”, alongside a picture of her dancing.

Not only was Mrinalini a feminist dancing mother but early in her career a reviewer wrote that she was: “an intellectual and social rebel – a trait inherited from her family” and that she “may be expected some day to live up to the ideal of democracy in Art” (Shah 1945).9 There were dancers who engaged in such works at the time, using the Uday Shankar “technique”, but no classical dancers did.10 Mrinalini’s work then was humanist in nature. For example, for her first major European tour she presented Manushya, which dealt with human beings “natural emotional reactions to love, anger, greed, fear, pity, and despair”. Ideas, however, were coming to her so that in 1963 she choreographed a work directly linked to social issues such as “Memory is a Ragged Fragment of Eternity” (1963). This piece was inspired by the frequent suicides of young housewives, killing themselves to escape the hostility of their in-laws. This was a tough subject to tackle and from that time onward such works would be regular parts of her repertoire.

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In this brief discussion of Mrinalini’s life one can see how a devotion to India, an engagement with the world as a global citizen, and a love for social justice imbued her artistic career, making her indeed a cosmopolitan patriot and epic woman.

Notes 1 The years leading to and following India’s independence from the British Empire (1947) saw a cultural revival in the arts, especially music and dance. Since many scholars have documented this (cf. Allen 1997, 2008; Chakravorthy 2008; Lopez y Royo 2007; Meduri 2005, 2008; O’Shea 2006, 2007; Walker 2009/2010, 2010a, 2010b), I will therefore refer to it only briefly. 2 Annie Besant was its first president, with “Margaret Cousins, Mrs. Malati Patwardhan, Mrs. Ammu Swaminathan, Mrs. Dadhabhoy, and Mrs. Ambujammal as honorary secretaries” (Forbes 1999: 73). 3 We were both amused by the coincidence when in one of our conversations we discovered that the ski resort her school was taking its students to was none other

so shared our love of the wild narcissus flowers and their heavenly fragrance. They grow in vast quantities in the mountains above St Georges School. 4 Louise Lightfoot was the first woman to graduate as an architect from Melbourne University in 1923. She went on to work at the Sydney office of architect Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937), who had won the competition to design the new capital of Australia, Canberra in 1912. Griffin and his wife Marion Mahoni were interested in theosophy (and later in anthroposophy). It was Mahoni who encouraged Lightfoot to pursue her interest in dance. She had suggested that Louise learn eurythmy, the movement system devised by the anthroposophists Rudolf and Marie Steiner, which Lightfoot found “a little dull” (Australian Dictionary of Biography 2005). When she saw Anna Pavlova’s company in Sydney during the Australian tour of 1926, however,” the fusion of classical technique and romantic emotion was a revelation” (Australian Dictionary of Biography 2005). She took classes in ballet and character dance with Misha Burlakov, who, whilst not a member of the Anna Pavlova company, nevertheless danced with it during its Australian visits. Later, Lightfoot also took “classes in the technique of Mary Wigman … (and) added dances in that starkly modern style” in her repertoire (Australian Dictionary of Biography 2005). Burlakov had taught Rukmini Devi ballet in Sydney in the late 1920s during her stay in the city (Brissenden and Glennon 2010: 82). She had also performed the Nautch dance from Hindu Wedding (1923) the work Uday Shankar (1900-1977) had choreographed for and danced with Anna Pavlova (cf. Erdman 1987, Hall 1984-1985). This was part of a community concert put together by Lightfoot and Burlakov for an event organised by the architect Walter Burley Griffin (1876-1937) at Castlecrag, a new suburb he had designed (Brissenden and Glennon 2010: 82-83) as “an ideal community in anthroposophic harmony with nature and culture” (Australian Dictionary of Biography 2005).


5 Kathakali with Kelu Nair, and Manipuri with Amobi Singh. 6 Dale Carnegie was the author of Public Speaking: a Practical Course for Business Men (1926), later entitled Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (1932), and How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), which was to be translated into numerous languages, sold millions of copies, and can be seen as the first of a whole movement of self help books which would be written by him and many other writers. Mrinalini comments that: “Many years later, his books helped me through many a mental crisis” (Sarabhai 2004: 68) 7 Mrinalini mentions that at the time she was studying with Kunju Kurup, the kathakali dancer and they danced together a scene from the Ramayana for Vikram (Mrinalini Sarabhai 2004: 91). 8 When she was with Gopal she also had the chance to learn some kathak. 9 In the same article, devoted to the All India Dance Festival. D.S. Shah also comments: “I only wish Rukmini Devi, will, in course of time, give a socially progressive orientation to her art and use it as a medium to express the manifold aspects of our modern life. That would be in full accord with the educational mission of her life” (Shah 1945). 10 For example, Sadhana Bose created Bhook (hunger) in 1941, a work based on the Bengal famine (Banerji 1983:138; Chaitanya 1987: 205) and Zohra Sehgal created Reptile in 1944, a work based on the divide and rule policy of the British (Banerji 1983:138) and of course Shanti Bardhan under the auspices of the IPTA choreographed works such as Bhookha Hai Bengal (Hungry Bengal) in 1944 (Purkayastha 2010).


Allen, Matthew Harp. 1997. “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance.” The Drama Review 41:3, 63-100.

—. 2008. “Standardize, Classicize and Nationalize: The Scientific Work of the Music Academy of Madras, 1930-52.” In Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, editors Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji, 90-129. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Basu, Aparna. 1996. Mridula Sarabhai: Rebel with a Cause. Oxford: Oxf ord University Press.

Brissenden, Alan and Keith Glennon. 2010. Australia Dances: Creating Australian Dance 1945-1965. Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press.

Chakravorty, Pallabi. 2008. Modernity in India. Calcutta: Seagull Books.

David, Ann. 2001. “Ram Gopal: A Challenge to Orientalism” (pt.1); “Ram Gopal: the Post-War Years.” he Dance Annual of India, 36-45, 46-53.

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Forbes, Geraldine. 1999. Women In Modern India Volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hills, Carol and Daniel C. Silverman (1993) “Nationalism and feminism in late colonial India: The Rani of Jhansi Regiment, 1943-1945.” Modern Asian Studies 27:4, 741-760.

Lynton, Harriet Ronken. 1995. Born to Dance London: Sangam Books. Lopez y Royo, Alessandra. 2007. “The Reinvention of Odissi Classical

Dance as a Temple Ritual.” In The Archaeology of Ritual, Editor, Evangelos Kyriakidis, 155-181. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California.

Meduri, Avanti. Ed. 2005. Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited.

Meduri, Avanti. 2008. “Temple Stage as Historical Allegory in Bharatanatyam: Rukmini Devi as Dancer Historian.” In Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, edited by. Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji, 133-164. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

O’Shea, Janet. 2006. “Dancing Through History and Ethnography: Indian Classical Dance and the Performance of the Past”. In Dancing from

, editor Theresa Jill Buckland, 123-152. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

—. 2007. At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.

Sahu, Bhagirathi. 2004. . New Delhi: Sarup and Sons.

Sarabhai, Mrinalini. 2004. The voice of the heart. New Delhi: Harper Collins.

Sarabhai, Vikram. 1992. “The two cultures: An interview with Vikram Sarabhai” in Joshi, Padmanabh, Ed. Vikram Sarabhai: The Man and his Vision. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd, 38-42 (interview held in 1970 by Margaret Dale of the BBC on the occasion of “A Workshop of the Arts” organised at Darpana Academy of Performing Arts).

Walker, Margaret. 2009/2010. “Kathak Log ya Kathak Nrtya: The Search for a Dance Called Kathak.” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 40, 168-190.

—. 2010. “Courtesans and Choreographers: The (Re) Placement of Women in the History of Kathak Dance.” In Dance Matters:


Performing India. Editors, Pallabi Chakravorty and Nilanjana Gupta, 279-300. New Delhi: Routledge.

—. 2010. “Revival and Reinvention In Indian’s Kathak Dance.” MUSICultures 37, 171.

C. DARK WOMEN OF EPICS AND DRAMATIC LITERATURE

CHAPTER TWENTY

MAGICAL CONNECTIONS AMONG WOMEN WITH PASSIONS OF EPIC PROPORTIONS:

MEDEA, LADY MACBETH, SURPANAKHA

KETU H. KATRAK

Is that

Medea 1

Lady Macbeth 2

These provocative words by dark women from myth and literature demonstrate passions of epic proportions. In this essay, I analyze these female figures who are not given as much attention as positive women in Indian mythology and literature such as Sita, Draupadi, or Savitri whose stories combine the mythical, legendary, and historical. I contextualize these dark women’s passions in their particular histories and patriarchal societies where their many desires are thwarted. Since myths like histories do not convey one monolithic story, scholars today revisit iconic figures like Sita not only as the quiet and self-sacrificing figure of Valmiki’s Ramayana but as bold and outspoken as portrayed in folk versions. To glorify Sita only as the epitome of wifely obedience and suffering denies her multifaceted dimensions as a woman. Anita Ratnam choreographs a work called A Million Sita-s, and Mallika Sarabhai has a one-woman dance-cum theatre work entitled based on “the Sitas who refuse” remarks Sarabhai, “ever again to submit to the tests and trials of weak and doubting men.”3 Sita’s Daughters deals with the oppression of women and speaks out strongly against rape and other violence on the female body4 Similarly, I re-envision the usually negative interpretations of the extreme actions of three dark women – Medea, Lady Macbeth, and

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Surpranakha, exploring their back-stories as it were, and placing them in their male-dominated contexts.

The three women belong to well-known dramatic and epic literature across time and geographical spaces – Greek tragedian Euripides’ drama Medea of 431 BCE, Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1605), and the Indian epic, The Ramayana’s Surpanakha, 2000 years back. My discussion is in line with other contributors in this volume – Dr. Swarnamalya Ganesh’s demonstration of dynamic women of the Sangam era who combined the “beautiful and the terrible – women as mothers, protectors, and murderers evoking primordial emotions battling with the demands of civil society”; Rajika Puri’s representation of Eleni of Sparta drawing links between ancient Greece and India; and Chitra Sundaram’s drawing of creative connections among India’s Arundhati with the Greek Penelope and Mary, the Christian icon of motherhood.

Surpanakha, placed next to Medea and Lady Macbeth – human and rakshasi (demoness) – leads to a startling revelation, namely that the same human passion, necessary for creativity, can also lead to destruction. Further, paradoxically, these three women embody good and evil, demonstrating the potential for the virtuous to turn violent – such as Medea’s blinding rage and desire for revenge on her husband who has abandoned her and their sons, that transforms her from a nurturing mother to a murderer of her own children. Lady Macbeth’s ambition transforms her from a respectable wife to King Duncan’s killer, and Surpanakha’s anger, when spurned by Rama, is the catalyst for the battle between Rama and Ravana. What drives these women to acts of dark passions that reside, usually under control at the center of the female body in the womb? Why are these women always judged negatively without accounting for their status in patriarchal society? What kinds of power are they allowed to exert to assert themselves?

Along with placing these three figures side-by-side, I discover connections with females from epics in other parts of the world apart from India, Greece, and England where Surpanakha, Medea, and Lady Macbeth belong. A figure like Surpanakha is reminiscent of the goddess Ishtar from the Near Eastern Sumerian . Ishtar is enticed by Gilgamesh’s strength and courage, and offers to marry him. Gilgamesh, like Rama refuses and this enrages Ishtar who complains to her father, the god Anu who sends the sacred Bull of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh. But, Gilgamesh defeats the Bull and insults Ishtar further by throwing a piece of the dead animal in her face – reminiscent of Surpranakha being humiliated and disfigured when Rama and Lakshmana conspire to cut off her nose. Dr. Neena Prasad reminds us of Surpanakha’s words: “When my

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nose was chopped off, it was not as hurting as the scars that were drawn on my soul. History still only laughs at that dreadful abuse. What do humans know about feelings?”

I interpret Rama’s spurning Surpranakha’s lust as deeply disturbing to him and Lakshmana as though the demoness’ lust reminds them of the seamy side of their own passions, underneath a veneer of civility. They need to cut off any reminder of such negative emotions; hence they disfigure Surpanakha so that her mangled face looks nothing like their own. Their violent act distances them from the dark side of their own natures.

All three women are archetypal in their epic passions – Lady Macbeth’s ambition, Surpanakha’s desire, and Medea’s determination for revenge. Archetypes resonate from a deep place in the human psyche from what Carl Jung termed as “our collective unconscious” that connects us as human beyond the divisions of race, gender, class, and nationality. Is Surpanakha’s archetypal lust testing the virtuous Rama? Does this episode in fact reveal Rama’s unkind nature harkening to later events when he makes Sita undergo the Agni pariksha (trial by fire)? Is Medea’s archetypal drive for revenge such that in the extreme action of killing her own children, the Greek world-view, based on balance and order is challenged? Is Lady Macbeth’s desire to make her husband King so blinding that she can kill for it?

Each dark woman needs to be understood within her patriarchal context where she is controlled, and at times, the women become pawns in games played by men and gods. Faced with such domination, women may fight back or remain silent as embodied in the figure of the wronged Ahalya, turned to stone through no fault of her own cursed by her celibate husband Gautama when he sees the god Indra making love to her. How much autonomy does Ahalya have in that situation? Can she refuse a god’s advances? Further, since her husband is celibate, would she not have unfulfilled human desires? Although Rama releases her from the stone, a different version of the story explores Ahalya’s disillusionment with Rama when he imposed the trial by fire on Sita, and hence, Ahalya this time takes agency and chooses to become stone once again.

Medea’s Back-Story

We women, let’s just say, we are what we are … What men can’t do, see, the ladies can.

Medea

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One significant fact of Medea’s back-story is that she is an outsider to Corinth, a non-Greek who would never be accepted by Greeks as Jason’s wife although she had left her own home to help him. But in Greece, Medea is regarded as a wild, Asiatic, and hence untrustworthy woman. King Creon judges her as dangerous especially towards his daughter betrothed to Jason. The King exiles Medea from Corinth for no fault of her own and Medea, deserted by her husband, asks: “Whither can I fly, since all Greece hates the barbarian?” Medea knows that there is no justice in that male-dominated world for women, for outsiders, and for the weak in society. Her husband Jason abandons her and she struggles as a single mother with two sons in a place where she does not belong.5

Medea’s carefully calculated drive for revenge on all who have wronged her reaching epic proportions leads her first, to persuade the King, preying upon his fatherly emotions to grant her ONE day to prepare for her exile with her children. He relents to her pleading and she uses that time to deploy her skill in making a potion to poison “a dress of soft weave and a coronet of beaten gold” that she sends as gifts to the bride-to-be. The Princess dies when she wears the dress – it ignites and she suffers an awful death as does her father, King Creon, who when trying to save her sticks to her, his skin peeling off his bones.

The dark women’s uses of magic and the supernatural work because of their receptive recipients – in Medea, the princess is enticed with the fine gown and tiara, not that she lacks glamorous clothes or gold; in Macbeth, the Witches’ foretelling powers work because their words resonate with the Macbeths’ ill-conceived ambition to assume the throne. The supernatural colludes with human desire and ambition since human beings are susceptible to, and desire magic that can transform daily reality into something fantastical. Surpanakha as a rakshasi can assume different forms and trick human beings, though Rama sees through her transformation into an alluring female.

Medea’s horrific act of a mother killing her children makes her into a demon, similar to Surpanakha. However, as different commentators remark: “Medea’s crime is not strange. The ugly fact is that throughout human history, a certain percentage of parents destroy their young.6 Any Director of Medea has to decide whether to portray her as hideous or as human. “Medea’s acts may be monstrous,” remarks reviewer Ben Brantley, “but the woman who performs them is a mass of confused impulses and thwarted drives that elude easy categorization. It is this very blurriness that makes her so vivid, so haunting and so damningly easy to identify with7.” Medea, as reviewer Charles McNulty remarks, “taps into primal emotion” that


Frighten and fascinate us in equal measure. Try as you may to interpret the tale of a wife who, having sacrificed everything for her husband, murders their children to punish him for his unfaithfulness, there’s a mystery, a strangeness at the heart of this shocking crime that is ultimately irreducible8

Scholar Philip Vellacott notes that Euripides’ Medea shows “a moral pattern similar to his (Euripides’) last work,” namely, The Bacchae.9 Both plays open with outsiders – Dionysus and Medea – who initially arouse the Chorus’ sympathy. The Greeks considered themselves (similar to later European colonizers in Asia and Africa) to be the bearers of civilization, valuing balance and control over excess of any kind. “As a principle” notes Vellacott, “this [control of excess] applied equally to everything – politics, social habits, art.” However, as also in The Bacchae, Vellacott remarks, “barbarous excess is predominant in most individuals … The fiery Greek temperament made the menace of barbarism the excuse for its own excesses.” Greek civilized values are positive though limited, even but dangerous for society when reduced to inflexible rules disconnected from human emotion.

This balancing between extremes of control and abandon underlies the curious fact that the gods do not condemn Medea’s killing her sons as though passion, even violence may be necessary at times to balance coldness, rigidity, and injustice. At the end of the play, Medea appears in a chariot provided by the Sun god (Medea’s paternal grandfather). Although branded as a wild barbarian, she is on her way, ironically enough, to “civilized” Athens where Aegeus has promised her sanctuary.

Surpanakha’s Back-Story:

Surpanakha’s usual negative reception begins with her name that translates from Sanskrit as “sharp, long nails.” Valmiki describes her as “an ugly woman, pot-bellied and cross-eyed with thinning brown hair, a grating voice harsh to the ears, and with oversized breasts (‘translated to mean a heart full of wickedness’).” However, in a different version, her name at birth was Meenakshi, the fish-eyed one, beautiful as her mother Kaikesi and her grandmother Thataka. The Tamil poet Kamban agrees with this image of a slender and lovely Surpanakha, as one who used her magical powers positively to assume different shapes as when she approached Rama with her marriage proposal.

Surpanakha was married to Asura Dushtabuddhi who initially, had enjoyed her brother King Ravana’s favor but there was a falling out when Dushtabuddhi conspired for power. Ravana then had him killed, making

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Surpanakha a widow. She wandered in the forests visiting asura relatives. It was on one such visit that she saw Rama and was smitten with love. Her emotions for Rama are always represented as unseemly. Although she had been trained to believe that rakshasas were better than humans and gods, she recognized that humans had unusual beauty. Also, she had been told “long ago”, as Amit Chaudhuri recounts that “it was bad luck to fall in love with a god or a human being … The feeling of longing, too, was relatively new for her … this odd condition of restlessness was more solitary and inward, she found, than indigestion, and more painful.”10

When Surpanakha does tell Rama of her love, she cannot take “no” for an answer and keeps up her pressure. When Rama suggests the unattached Lakshmana to her (although he does have a wife whom he has left behind) Lakshmana makes fun of her. When Surpanakha then tries to attack Sita, Lakshmana with Rama cut off her nose and she is forced to return to Lanka. Her inciting Ravana to abduct Sita is also retold in some versions as Surpanakha’s desire to take revenge on Ravana who was responsible for the murders of her husband, uncle and grandmother. Surpanakha’s passion spurs a battle between Rama and Ravana because she knows that Rama will prevail over Ravana who has been indestructible to most opponents.

In conclusion, all three women’s passions of epic proportion are expressed via love that is dangerously coupled with power and ambition. As the Witches’ state: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Medea’s love for husband and children becomes distorted as represented most profoundly in her determination that “no one shall take them [her children] from [her]” – in life or after their death. Although the Chorus tries to reason with Medea, “You must not do it” (kill her children), and “we must not let her do it”, they fail. The Macbeths have no children – something that drives Macbeth crazy with fear. Lady Macbeth declares categorically, “Unsex me here” indicating her desire to be unwomanly, even to be able to kill an imagined babe suckling at her breast if she had to, in order to fulfill her ambition of becoming Queen. The parallel here with Medea killing her real-life human sons is chilling. Surpanakha’s desire for Rama when rejected is the catalyst for the remainder of the epic and the battle of good and evil.

Finally, human passions of epic proportion, necessary for creativity, assume macabre proportions in a mother killing her sons, or a subject murdering her King. Good and evil both lie coiled tightly inside the psyche; magic and the supernatural can ignite positive change or destruction. These three women remind us that rather than being judgmental, we need to be cognizant of the turn from good to evil, or from civility to barbarity that we are all capable of. Each woman’s limited power in patriarchal societies enables us to understand, even if we do not


sympathize with their desperate abuses of power. Their epic passions provide difficult lessons on how to conduct our frail human lives filled with struggle, temptation, and triumphs.

Notes 1 Euripides, Medea and Other Plays, Translated with an Introduction by Phillip Vellacott (Penguin, 1963). All quotations are from this edition. 2 Shakespeare, Maccbeth, The Riverside Shakespeare. 3 Sarabhai is referring to Rama’s testing of Sita’s virtue by making her undergo the agni pariksha (trial by fire) to satisfy his people. Later, after giving birth to their two sons alone in the forest, Rama demands another test. At this point, Sita prays to Mother Earth who opens up to receive her. 4 Sita’s Daughters has been performed over 500 times in Hindi, Gujarati, and English since 1990. Sarabhai’s goal is to raise women’s consciousness and enable them to reject being victims and find their own voices. “There are too many women taking all the crap and too few to raise their voices” comments Sarabhai. “Hence, the change is happening, but in a small way.” Sita’s Daughters is taught in certain colleges, such as Mumbai’s SNDT University in their Women’s Studies Department. The work is also recommended for Supreme Court judges to sensitize them regarding gender justice. When Dr. Sarabhai had staged this dance-theatre piece in Pune in 1990, the Hindu fundamentalist political party, the VHP had attacked her. 5 Medea’s struggles as single mother are echoed in performances during the Epic women conclave, of Mata Hidimba, portrayed by Rajashree Shirke, and Yashodara in Gowri Ramnarayan’s play, danced by Mythili Prakash. 6 Robert Weinert-Kendt, Notes on Medea, Illuminations Magazine: A Guide to the 2010 Plays, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Oregon. 7 Ben Brantley, Review of Medea, The New York Times, October 2, 2002. 8 Charles McNulty, Review of Medea (at UCLA), The Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2009. 9 Philip Vellacott, Translation and Introduction, Medea (Penguin Books, 1963). 10 Amit Chaudhuri, “Surpranakha”, http://www.littlemag.com/mar-apr01/amit.html (Accessed November 2012).

D. EPIC WOMEN IN POLITICS

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

EPIC WOMEN IN POLITICS

AMMU JOSEPH

Several governments and political parties in South and South East Asia have been led or are still led by women. The phenomenon of female political leaders is particularly predominant in South Asian countries – Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – despite the overall poor status of women and perilous state of gender equality in most of them.

The trend dates back to the 1960s. The first woman prime minister in the world was Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, elected into that position in 1960. Indira Gandhi became India’s first female prime minister in 1966. Among the other well-known and powerful female politicians who have reached the top at the national level in the region are Sheikh Hasina Wajed and Begum Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Chandrika Kumaratunga in Sri Lanka, and Sonia Gandhi in India (although the latter declined the opportunity to actually head a government).

Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail in Malaysia, Corazon C. Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from the Philippines and Yingluck Shinawatra in Thailand are prominent female politicians in other Asian countries

In India, a number of women have simultaneously occupied high governance posts in recent times: Pratibha Patil (President of India, 2007-2012), Sonia Gandhi (President, Indian National Congress and Chairperson, United Progressive Alliance, the coalition that has been in power from 2004 to date), Meira Kumar (Speaker of the Lok Sabha – lower house of parliament) and Sushma Swaraj (prominent leader, Bharatiya Janata Party and presently Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha) have all held key positions at the national level.

In addition, three state governments in India are currently headed by female chief ministers: J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu], Mamta Banerjee in Bengal] and Sheila Dixit in Delhi. Three others had women at the helm until recently: if former chief minister Rabri Devi (Bihar) is seldom taken

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seriously, Vasundhara Raje (Rajasthan) still wields power in the state she ruled a few years ago and Mayawati (Uttar Pradesh), who was profiled by Newsweek among eight women leaders worldwide who reached the top despite all odds, still wields power as a deal-maker or breaker in national politics.

Are any of these women Epic Women? Of the 10 Indian politicians listed above, nine were included in MSN She’s list of the ten “Superwomen of Indian politics,”1 along with Uma Bharti (Rabri Devi got dropped). Such lists are by no means authoritative but they are perhaps indicative of popular perceptions.

Few, if any, of these female politicians quite fit the definition of the adjective, “epic.”2 But the noun seems more promising.3 Whether or not any of these women is heroic or will be legendary, there is no doubt that at least some of them do or will figure in accounts of the history of their respective nations. And, whether or not they qualify as truly Epic Women, their success cannot but send out a welcome positive message to fellow women and, perhaps more importantly, girls.

The question of how and why they entered and rose in the field is another matter and has been discussed ad nauseam over the years. Much is usually made of the fact that many of them gained their positions either because they belong to influential political families (the daughter, wife, widow syndrome) or because they had a powerful, invariably male, mentor or patron. The fact that the majority of these politicians enjoy democratic legitimation, having won popular elections – some multiple times, is not emphasized nearly as much.

As Andrea Fleschenberg points out, several successful women politicians across Asia share strikingly similar patterns in terms of their political and social biographies.4 Many of them belong to the national political and societal elite, with connections to a political dynasty and/or access to the benefits of an affluent background and tertiary education, sometimes at leading international universities.

Most of these leaders entered politics with little or no political experience, especially in terms of holding formal political office. It is almost as if an elite background marginalizes issues such as political knowhow and gender. It seems to give these women the social status that, in turn, confers on them the legitimacy to lead, some flexibility in terms of “acceptable behavior” and, of course, the kind of time, space and agency that female counterparts in other strata of the same societies generally do not enjoy.

At the same time, there is a view that many of these women have actually subverted patriarchy in the process of assuming political

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leadership. According to Vidyamali Samarasinghe, if pioneers like Bandaranaike and Gandhi derived political mileage from family ties, it is because they actively made use of such family relationships, seeing them as the best available avenue for participating in the political process.5 And this did not prevent them from demonstrating, fairly quickly, that they were indeed charismatic leaders and astute politicians.

It is often said that Gandhi and Bandaranaike were just recipients of dynastic legacies. There is, of course, no doubt that they were propelled to power as the political heirs of a father and a husband respectively. But the fact is that both women played active roles in entrenching the dynasties. As Samarasinghe points out, if they had remained mere puppets in the hands of the male political leadership, as expected, the so-called dynasties would probably have weakened or disappeared during their tenure or after their time. Instead, they not only became powerful, effective leaders, but they made it possible for their adult children – and now, in India, grandchildren – to enter politics (whether or not this is a good thing and whether or not their progeny wish to follow in their footsteps). It is also worth noting that Gandhi and Bandaranaike managed to evade the traditional stigma attached to widowhood in South Asia. In the process they may have paved the way for other women in similar circumstances to join politics.

As Samarasinghe observes, Kumaratunga was not propelled into politics the same way that her mother, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and/or Indira Gandhi were. Instead, Bandaranaike astutely used her positioning as daughter and widow to emerge into the competitive public arena of politics. She actually superseded the traditionally anointed “male heir”, her brother Anura Bandaranaike, who had been involved in national level politics for longer. She was obviously the shrewder politician and made use of the opportunity created for her – as a “political widow” with name recognition – to grasp the opportunity to assume political leadership.

In the context of Epic Women it may be worth noting that Gandhi was alternately equated with Kali or Durga, both powerful Hindu goddesses. In Sri Lanka, where such deity-based religious symbols are not so pervasive, Bandaranaike was often referred to simply as “amma” (mother). The “mother syndrome” has since been effectively and repeatedly used by several female political figures in Asia to secure their positions.

Whatever their paths to political leadership, the fact is that most of these female politicians speedily dispelled any notion that they may be puppets in the hands of a set of male kingmakers. The majority of them had or have been in positional office or non-positional leadership for extended periods, rapidly becoming leaders in their own right: career

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politicians who exercised power like their male counterparts, often without further help from the male relatives or mentors through whom they came into leadership positions. So they are, in many ways, for better or for worse, role models who establish that it is not impossible for women to rise to the top in politics.

Nevertheless, their autonomy has not always been acknowledged and their performance has often been judged differently from that of male leaders. According to Lynette Lithgow, this may be at least partly due to the way the news media tend to present and portray female political leaders. Her study of the role of the press in shaping public perceptions of women in Asian political dynasties, focusing in particular on Kumaratunga and Aquino, revealed that the media commonly construct Asian women leaders in gender-specific and culture-specific ways.6

For many women who achieve positions of power, expectations of what are considered appropriately “feminine” behavior are often in conflict with qualities regarded as necessary for successful leadership. Lithgow found evidence of the media’s general reluctance to recognize women’s ability to become effective leaders in their own right, independent of their familial connections. According to her, the media’s evaluation of the performance of female leaders is often based on a higher competence threshold and harsher evaluative criteria than those used to judge male leaders.

What cannot be denied, however, is the apparent gap – in South Asia at least – between successful female politicians attaining the highest political offices, on the one hand, and the general under-representation of women in parliamentary and ministerial posts at lower political levels, on the other. There is little sign of the expected trickle-down effect. Instead, strange as it may seem, countries with a long-standing tradition of female political leadership (like Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka) reveal a gender-related democracy deficit.

In India, for example, the representation of women in parliament and the council of ministers remains poor nearly five decades after Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister. With just 59 women joining the 544-member Lok Sabha after the 2009 general election,7 women’s parliamentary participation was raised to a so-called “high” of less than 11 per cent. Women make up only 15.5 per cent of the present government’s council of ministers.8

The situation is better in grassroots politics, thanks to a Constitutional amendment reserving for women at least a third of all seats in the three-tiered Panchayati Raj, the base of decentralized governance in rural areas. An estimated 1.2 million women have been elected to these institutions of


local self-governance, with their representation currently pegged at an average of 37 per cent across the country. Several states have recently increased the quota for women in Panchayati Raj institutions – up to 50 per cent in some. At the same time, the Women’s Reservation Bill, seeking similar reservations for women in the national parliament and state legislative assemblies, has the dubious distinction of being the nation’s longest pending legislation, still in limbo after 17 years, even though the Rajya Sabha passed it in 2010.

Most female political leaders in India pay at least lip service to the need to ensure that the Women’s Reservation Bill is passed, although some – like Mayawati and the party she heads – have actively campaigned against it, presumably because it does not include quotas for specific caste and other groups. However, none of them seems to have been able or willing to get their parties to break the logjam.

Interestingly, the two Asian countries which seem partly to escape the gender-based democracy deficit pattern – the Philippines and Pakistan – do have a quota system in place at the national level, too, ensuring more equality in electoral outcomes between men and women.

The gender-specific dichotomy continues with respect to female participation in the party systems of many Asian countries. Although prominent female politicians lead parties in several South and South East Asian countries, few – if any – other female members of those parties appear to have much influence over policies or decision-making processes. Apart from that, the burning and somewhat tricky question often raised is: do women politicians make a difference, especially for other women? It is, of course, not the sole responsibility of women in politics to promote gender equality and improve the status of women. The obligation to transform society for the better lies with everyone: politicians, civil society and citizens as a whole. However, having opted for political office – presumably, at least partly, to serve the people – both men and women in politics ought to be working for a more just, fair and equal world. Nevertheless, it is perhaps inevitable that women politicians are expected to go the extra mile for fellow women.

In this context it is rather disappointing to watch and listen to the responses of many female politicians to a number of important issues to do with women’s position in society and the conditions of their lives. Take, for example, the aftermath of the horrific gang rape of a young woman in a bus in Delhi in December 2012, which triggered widespread, popular protests in India, condemning the growing incidence of violence against women and calling for decisive action to deal with it. Women members of both Houses of Parliament were reportedly “in the forefront in expressing

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shock and anguish over the incident.” However, the language some of them used to discuss the issue revealed how distant and disconnected they are from the groups and movements seriously working towards ending the scourge of gender-based violence. For example, according to press reports, this is what Sushma Swaraj said in Parliament, ostensibly to express her outrage: “If this girl survives, she will be a living dead,” “The rape victims, even if they survive, live like dead for the rest of their lives.” And this is what Girija Vyas, a minister and a former chairperson of the National Commission for Women, reportedly said: “When a woman gets murdered, she gets killed. But when she gets raped, she dies again and again.”

Their language reinforced the notion that rape is a fate worse than death. The fact is that the young woman whose gang rape everyone was so upset and shocked about had reportedly communicated that she wanted to live. The doctors treating her were reportedly amazed at her will to survive despite her terrible experience and grievous injuries. Tragically, her admirable fighting spirit did not help her survive the ordeal, but her attitude certainly belied the assumption that those who have been raped have no reason to live.

Fleschenberg suggests that certain factors should be considered while analyzing the apparently gender-neutral or gender-blind political agendas of elite female politicians in Asia. She points out that female leaders often lack a supportive system and structure to experiment with an alternative leadership style and political agenda. Also, like male politicians, they are also bound by party ideology and program, as well as the need to build up and secure their power base.

“Before evaluating a female politician’s performance and her political agenda,” Fleschenberg suggests, “we need to look first at the political system: How are the power constellations defined and what does this imply for political decision-making? How is the supportive system of the female political leader structured and who are the main actors behind her and her government? What are her structural and personal constraints (e.g. power distribution, party ideology, national budget, etc.) and what were the political bargains she undertook in order to achieve her leadership position (e.g. compromises on certain political issues)?” According to Fleschenberg, while evaluating the performance of a female leader, it is important to examine how far the structural and personal constraints she faces in the given political system context shape and limit her political agency and room for decision-making.

Admitting that several of Asia’s top women politicians are “roaring tigresses” in terms of electoral and governmental record, but “tame


kittens” in terms of pro-women agenda-setting, she clarifies that the idea is not to justify the failure of many female politicians to enhance the political participation and representation of fellow women. Instead, she calls for more in-depth and contextualized analysis of female political leadership, addressing two major questions: Why are there so few women in politics? Do women make a difference – and under what circumstances?

To end on a positive note it is important to recognize that there are many women active in different ways in politics of different kinds in different parts of the world and the region who may be the true Epic Women in politics. Among the countless heroic and legendary Indian women practicing politics of a more uplifting kind are: Romila Thapar, Aruna Roy, Medha Patkar, Irom Sharmila, Sharifa Khanam (of the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat), Dayamani Barla (activist and journalist leading the tribal campaign against Arcelor Mittal’s proposed steel plant in Jharkhand), Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla (survivors of the Bhopal disaster who have led from the front in the fight for corporate accountability against multinational Dow-Carbide and are Managing Trustees of Chingari), Rani Dasan and Thenmozhi Manickam (recent recipients of the ‘Chingari Award for Women against Corporate Crime’ as representatives of the thousands of brave women who have rallied against the powerful nuclear establishment in Koodankulam).

Please note: Parts of this presentation were incorporated into an article titled “Whose dynasty is it anyway?” by Ammu Joseph in the e-journal, India Together, published in August 2013: http://indiatogether.org/2013/ aug/wom-politics.htm.

Notes 1 MSN She’s list of top 10 powerful women politicians. Last accessed 5 August 2013: http://she.msn.astroyogi.com/editors-picks/super-women-of-indian-politics1. html. 2 “Characteristic of an epic or epics,” “heroic or grand in scale or character” according to the (Second Edition), Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2003. 3 “A long poem, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the past history of a nation,” “an exceptionally long and arduous task of activity”, (Second Edition), Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2003. 4 Fleschenberg, Andrea. 2008. “Asia’s Women Politicians at the Top: Roaring Tigresses or Tame Kittens?” In, Women’s Political Participation and Representation in Asia: Obstacles and Challenges, Ed., Kazuki Iwanaga. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 23-54.

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5 Samarasinghe, Vidyamali. “Subverting Patriarchy? Leadership and Participation of Women in Politics in South Asia.” In Women in Politics in South Asia, Ethnic Studies Report XVIII: 2, July 2000, 193-213. Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies. 6 Lithgow, Lynette. “A Question of Relativity: The Role of the News Media in Shaping the View of Women in Asian Political Dynasties.” Working Paper Series, The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University, Spring 2000. 7 India’s 15th Lok Sabha is expected to be in place till the next general election that is scheduled in 2014. 8 Council of Ministers, Government of India, last updated 17 June 2013 (last accessed 5 August 2013): http://cabsec.nic.in/council_ministersofstate.php.

E. FEMINIST EVALUATIONS OF EPIC WOMEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE POWER OF PERFORMANCE AND HUMAN AGENCY:

RE-ASSESSING FEMINIST EVALUATIONS OF EPIC WOMEN

KALPANA RAM

This paper explores the potential power of performance to unlock many of the oppositions we have inherited within modern discourses of politics, aesthetics and social theory. The focus will be on the oppositions that structure the central dimension of human agency. Both performance and questions of agency were central to the occasion for which this paper was written, as a group of dancers and a smaller group of academics came together with audiences over three days in the city of Chennai in 2012 to interpret the theme of “Epic Women”.

The questions we ask of epic women come to us pre-figured by broader conceptions of agency that have in turn been profoundly shaped by modern political traditions. Whether we interpret epic women as the women in the Indian epics, as did most performers, or as ‘modern’ epic women, the questions we ask of them are in significant ways, pre-given. So we ask them – each time as if for the first time: “Are you a strong, resistant, subversive, rebellious woman? Or, are you a victim of what patriarchy has done to you? And what are you doing about it? Are you reproducing it? Or are you subverting it?” And no matter what specific answers or combinations we come up with on any given occasion, the fundamental binary oppositions that structure the questions too will shape these. These are pervasive oppositions between victim and agent, between agency and power. As such they belong to specifically modern conceptions of human agency in general. But they gain further power from the specific opposition between female agency and power in the form of patriarchy. And where patriarchy takes the form of being demonstrably “traditional”, for example, where religion rather than “modern” “secular”

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forms of patriarchy dominates it then our binary oppositions take on their most ferocious of forms. The reasons for this ferocity must be historicized. For what we are wielding are in fact weapons that were forged and honed in Europe and in the colonies, in the process of a political struggle to establish moral hegemony by classes which, broadly representative of an ascendant capitalism, sought to morally discredit the “feudal” past.

It is not easy to simply discard such political traditions. They draw their force, not just from one set of political philosophies but also from a whole terrain defined by divergent, even warring, political philosophies. To make matters harder still for the women in epics such as The Ramayana, we are, as modern subjects, by now also thoroughly equipped with the realist distinctions made by the European Enlightenment. These bring with them a further set of oppositions between science and superstition, between reason and irrationality, and between true knowledge and myth. Such distinctions constitute not merely a theory of knowledge. They constitute aesthetics and ethics of what is good as well as what is right, proper and in that sense, what is pleasing. Epics such as The Ramayana are eligible not only for the opprobrium of being patently patriarchal, hierarchical and anti-egalitarian, but they fail even the test of true knowledge. Guided by the threads of such logic, we are drawn relentlessly to the baleful conclusion that epic women are an integral aspect of mythic ideologies that are positively inimical to the realist political project of realizing modern forms of female agency. To argue otherwise is to swim against the tide.

Yet, as I have argued in a number of publications (Ram 2000, 2011, 2010), we seldom attune ourselves to the theoretical lessons that are implicit in performance. It is a potential often squandered even as we witness and respond – often intensely so – to the aesthetics of performances.

Performance and the Myth/Reality Distinction: Bodily S Exercise

and Training of Agency

While such a persistent and multi-layered history as I have alluded to cannot simply be undone, attending to performance can help soften the harshness of binary oppositions. I begin with the representation of the epic as myth. Such a representation assumes there is no mediation between past and present, between fantasy and reality. Perhaps, if The Ramayana and other epics had never been performed, this may have been true. Yet this is hard to imagine, since reading a text, even ‘silently’, is a performance. It

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involves the imagination of the reader. It also brings in the various contingencies of reading – the interruptions, the time and place of the reading, the different meanings we forge when re-reading a text at different times in our lives. And we are dealing with epics that have not only been read but also performed in a multitude of sensory elaborations. They have been recited, sung, danced, incorporated into puja (worship), and into shrines and temples, themselves multi-modal sensoriums. With modernity, the epics have only further expanded their circuits of circulation and expressivity through each new technology of mechanical reproduction (prints, comics, cassettes), through radio, cinema, and television. But we are dealing with much more than a visual culture. Through different modalities of performance and sensory apperception, the epics can be touched, inhaled with the odor of incense, exhaled as song, incorporated into bodily movement as dance. They are not simply “internalized” as “ideology”. Instead, the epics become embodied, incorporated into the bodily tastes and dispositions of those who have been brought up in a relationship with them.

We can learn something about how this might happen if we pay more attention to the forms of pedagogy that still retain primacy in the formal performing arts traditions of India. Dance and music lessons in India typically begin, not with formal content and representations, but with training in bodily rhythm, the steps and movement of the limbs, and the movement of voice up and down the scales and svaras. As we heard at the Chennai conference, Balasaraswati is reputed to have trained her students just in footwork for two years. These modes of teaching are oriented towards giving primacy, not to the explicit content of representations but to bodily technique.

In teaching students in this way, formal training in turn draws on the way we learn about the world in the first place, as infants. Language itself, before it is learned in terms of formal meaning and representation, is first absorbed as rhythm, utterance, voice, intonation, as an extension of bodily gesture and movement – we begin to absorb this in the very womb itself.

Theatre/dance traditions help draw our attention to the centrality of the human body in all aspects of human existence. They explicitly classify different aspects of human embodiment because of their centrality to human expressivity. It is not only formal treatises such as The Natyashastra that draw our attention to and formally classify the different aspects of bodily capacities. We have been fixated for far too long on The Natyashastra and Sanskrit treatises, a tendency that testifies to the power of Orientalist and nationalist upper caste models in our representations of Indian tradition, and the accompanying marginalization of other forms as


“folk” genres (Ram 2010). In fact, all forms of training in South Asian traditions, including the non-Sanskritic traditions of performance such as, in Tamil Nadu and terukuttu, classify and train the different bodily capacities. They may do so in a practical form, if not always in the form of a treatise. But even in this practical training, our attention is drawn to certain capacities that are usually overlooked: our capacity to move our body as a whole, as well as separate limbs, our facial muscles, our tongues, our hands and fingers, our neck, torso and head, our eyes.

All of these capacities are central not only to human expressivity in the performing arts, they are central to expressivity in everyday life, and indeed, to what we ordinarily discuss as human agency. Without movement of some kind, there would be no agency, no capacity to come to understand the world we are born into and make it our own. Yet, we take all of these bodily capacities utterly for granted in daily life, except when we, or someone very close to us loses any of these capacities. In academic theorizing, it is typical to discuss human agency without reference to any of these bodily capacities. We could bring the body into theorizing through reflection on illness, disability and situations of breakdown of various kinds. But we can also, on a happier note, draw on the experience of learning more specialized skills such as theatre in order to see how we learn anything in the first place.

For we are born into a cultural world in which affect is conveyed from body to body, through the theatre we see all around us in others. We watch their facial expressions, their gestures, their ways of moving, their ways of speaking, the movement of their eyes, the turn of the head. Through these we not only grasp their subjectivity in the world, we also extend our own subjectivity through theirs, learning to see the world as they do. We can and should include in this account also the bodily orientations of other creatures, and indeed, of plants and trees, and indeed, moving objects – think of the child “becoming” an animal or a train or bus by incorporating its characteristic movements into its own. This is part of the theatre that is our everyday world in which mimesis plays a central part.

We would be mistaken to think of mimesis as pure imitation. In mimesis, the infant also incorporates and makes the expressions and gestures its own. Our subjectivities are therefore inter-corporeal. Our capacity to flow into the gestures of others, the way we effortlessly take our cue from theirs, might itself be thought of as a dance we conduct in daily life, one that is just as magical, if not more so, than any performance. Yet because it is so much the foundation of sociality, we take it for granted and it becomes invisible.

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The model of learning suggested above has implications not only for agency in general, but for the specific way in which those of us who were socialized early into the epics of The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, might be considered to have absorbed the normativity of these epics. We absorb, mimetically, the telling’s of the epics, gathering them up and integrating the epics with lived experience. Like other aspects of early socialization it can become so taken for granted that it recedes, becomes part of a background.

Such an incorporation is easily interpreted, particularly in terms of the kind of political traditions already alluded to, as an obstacle to change, and particularly as an obstacle to ‘progressive’ change. But the very fact that epics become absorbed indicates that they do not correspond necessarily to something which can be set apart as a ‘religious consciousness’. The epics may at certain times be foregrounded as explicit objects of attention. But that is not all the time. Instead, as part of a taken for granted world, they can become imaginative repositories for the innovative performance of the everyday. They may re-emerge in new forms that are not necessarily religious at all – as condensed allusive forms such as jokes, puns, aphorisms, riddles, allusions, and metaphors. My grandmother, who lives in Chennai and turned a 101 this year, would say, a little tartly, if I asked her a question she judged to be inattentive of what she had been saying, “ituenna … sitaikkuramaryaarunnuketkaramatiriiruke! … This is like asking who Sita is to Rama after hearing the whole

” Or, as a child, if I brought the whole basket instead of the specific item I had been asked for, I would be told I was Hanuman bringing the whole mountain. That is all that would be said – but in that reference hangs a string of tales told to the child, of Hanuman bringing the whole mountain of Sanjeevani when he could not work out which herb would revive Lakshmana. The semiosis, or the open-ended play of signs, does not stop there. It brings with it, riding on the tail (or tale) of the monkey as it were, a whole network of related stories. In their inventiveness, these narratives cease to be external points of reference alone. They are taken up and integrated into everyday practices. A woman cheated and betrayed feels herself a Durga in her anger. What may begin as narratives about deities become pathways for experiencing life in different emotional modalities.

Performance, when taken over time, therefore blurs the distinction between myth and reality, as well as between formal performance and informal performance of the everyday. It also means that the success of any given formal performance of the epics depends not only on the skill and talent of performers. It presumes the invisible background of this


everyday world into which the epics have entered and already become part of a shared subjectivity. It is from that shared background that this or that performance can be judged to be novel or dull.

Performativity and A-symmetry in Relation to the Epics

A concept that has proved particularly useful in foregrounding the agency that is built into performance is that of “performativity”. Performativity was initially described by the philosopher J.L. Austin as the capacity of certain kinds of utterances to not only affect participants but to accomplish a very real shift in the world that the participants inhabit (Austin 1962). The concept has subsequently played an important role in deconstructive philosophy and gender theory. One example of a performative statement given by Austin is that of the Christian marriage ritual’s climactic utterance “I do take this woman as my lawful wedded wife” (1962:5). But as any feminist would immediately be aware, this is not all that has been accomplished by the performativity of the utterance. The priest’s utterance “I now pronounce you man and wife” also prefigures the hierarchical encompassment of the woman in the marriage relation with the strikingly a-symmetry of the phrase “man and wife”.

In this sense, to speak of shared meanings need not imply that we are speaking of symmetrical positions within it. This is another one of those dualities we have inherited. We are encouraged either to speak of “shared tradition” as if it entailed identical experiences for all concerned – or, in postmodern critiques, we are encouraged to abandon any idea of shared meanings or continuities over time in order to be able to speak of subversion and critique. Yet without shared meanings, no subversion or critique would be possible. And a-symmetries of the kind we have noted, in turn, allow for different kinds of experiences and different interpretations of those meanings. A.K. Ramanujan’s essay ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’ (1992) invited us to consider the genuine play of differences in the understanding of epics. This is a very different proposition to a Ramanand Sagar considering all the different variants only in order to construct a synthesized master narrative out of it. The different interpretations draw on real differences of , many of which are based on power relations. A synthetic master narrative of The Ramayana cannot simply override such differences, mainly because in the first place, the narratives themselves never simply created these differences. Following up Ramanujan’s suggestion, Narayana Rao (1992) writes of gender differences in the telling of The Ramayana. But what he describes is no homogeneous version of “female experience” either. There

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are Telugu Brahman women’s tellings and there are the versions told by women who are agricultural laborers. The Brahman women’s songs of the Ramayana elaborate on episodes that have a direct bearing on their own lives. Rama’s birth and childhood is told through an account of Kausalya’s pregnancy, childbirth and early maternity. Sita’s life is followed as she comes to puberty, hopes for a properly matched husband, marries and travels to her in-laws, experiences both happiness and ordeals. The agricultural laboring women do not have the same experiences of life, and this shows in their telling of The Ramayana. For them, Sita does not simply ask for a golden deer – she is quite capable of asking for a bow and arrow herself to go and fetch the golden deer. There is generally less interest in rituals, saris and ornamentation – for their lives do not afford them the time or the money for such elaborations. And many of the songs are unfinished. It is as if, says Narayan Rao, “there is a lack of interest in finishing what does not really belong to them.” (1992:132, emphasis added).

For many in India, the epics are distant because they do not ‘really belong to them’ in the same way they do for Hindu upper castes. For those who inhabit this world shaped at least in part by The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, they can indeed seem complete and compelling. But like any culture one inhabits, it is not as universal as it seems. I was pulled up short when I started my ethnographic work in a Catholic fishing community in Kanyakumari in the 1980s (Ram 1991). I had gone there to engage with issues of gender and labor. I had not given much thought to the fact that they had been Catholic since the sixteenth century. It was when I was ‘relaxing’ from my chosen tasks that the gaps became most apparent. My mode of relaxation was to hang out with the children, and to tell stories. It became quickly apparent that much of my repertoire, taken from my own childhood, in fact presumed a Hinduism that was irrelevant to them.

But there was more challenge in store for me. It was not just that my Hinduism was irrelevant to them as Catholics. Insofar as they knew anything called Hindu, their references and those of other coastal villagers led me on a trail to a Hinduism that in turn I could barely recognize. The goddess Icakki appeared ferocious and gruesome to me, often sporting a mangled infant in her mouth. Her stories were blood curdling and meant to be so. It took me much time to recognize an ‘epic woman’ in these epics when I could see her as nothing but a harbinger of disease and terror. Yet today, I see in these cults as well as a broader set of practices around illness, healing and possession, concerns that are truly at the heart of much experience of injustice. As I explore in my monograph, Fertile Disorder:


Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern (Ram 2013), the tragedies that create epic heroines and goddesses in Tamil Nadu are not only about caste inequality but go to the heart of women’s experience of gender injustice – their abandonment by men they love, their lives cut short by honor killings. These women live on as vengeful goddesses, who emerge from the brutalized and mutilated bodies of women, to be worshipped and to re-enter the bodies of living women. In illness, possession and healing in subaltern Tamil communities, the line between performance and reality, between the living and the dead, between epic women and ordinary women, becomes well and truly blurred.


Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ram, Kalpana. 1991. Capitalist Transformation in a South Indian Fishing Community. Allen and Unwin, Zed Press. Also published by Kali for Women, Delhi, 1992.

—. 2013. Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its provocation of the modern. Manoa: University of Hawaii Press.

—. 2011. “Being ‘Rasikas’: The Pleasures of Music and Dance Spectatorship and Nationhood in Indian Middle Class Modernity,” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), 159-175.

—. 2010. ‘Dancing off-stage: Nationalism and its ‘Minor Practices’ in Tamil Nadu’ in Pallabi Chakravorty, Ed., Dance Matters: Approaches and Issues in Indian Dance. Routledge.

—. 2000.‘Dancing the Past Into Life. The rasa, nritta and raga of immigrant existence.’ The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 11: 3, 261-274.

Narayana Rao, Velcheru. “A Ramayana of Their Own: Women’s Oral Tradition in Telugu”. In Paula Richman, Ed., Many Ramayanas.The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 114-136.

Rumanian, A.K. 1992. “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation”. In, Paula Richman, Ed., Many Ramayanas. The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 22-49.

PART IV

PERFORMING ARTISTS’ PROCESS/CHOREOGRAPHIC NOTES: EPIC WOMEN OF INDIA AND BEYOND

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ELENI OF SPARTA: AN INDO-GREEK RE-TELLING

RAJIKA PURI

Figure 23-18: Rajika Puri showing egg from which Eleni of Sparta

was born Epic Women. Vipul Sangoi

Eleni of Sparta: An Indo-Greek Re-Telling 163

Introduction

The mainstay of the form of danced storytelling I have developed over the last seven years is the music: songs, chants, and vocalised rhythms of the Odissi and Bharatanatyam repertoires. Thus, though the narration is in English, the lyrics I sing to accompany my dance are in Sanskrit. So when asked by curator Anita Ratnam to present a fifty-minute work on a non-Indian ‘epic woman’, I not only searched for a character who fascinated me, but for an epic in a language I could imagine singing.

Already attracted to the Helen of Homer’s Iliad – a thoughtful, intelligent, being who possessed an overpowering “charisma” – I recalled the pre-occupations of 19th century European scholars with an ursprache that connected Greek and Sanskrit. From acting and singing in three different productions of Euripides’ The Bacchae, I knew something about ancient Greek modes and their similarity to Indian ragas. Imagine my delight to discover that of these modes were exactly the same as six of eight scales (thaats

I then learned that the western solfa, do, re, mi, equivalent to the sa, re, ga of Indian music, was developed by the Greek Orthodox Church albeit in the 13th century, , rather than the 13th century BCE attributed to the Trojan War. Finally, from a recording of Greek folk rhythms I realised that, like Indian music, it employed cycles of seven, five, and nine beats. This meant that I could start within the framework of music I knew, and then adapt it to embrace a Greek ethos.

The Structure of the Work

The story of ‘Helen of Troy’ – whose Greek name was “Eleni” and who was from Sparta – falls neatly into seven life-stages from infancy to enshrinement. The earlier part is gleaned from Greek myth, while we learn about the mature woman from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Every episode is a mini-story. I wanted to present each with a different blend of musical, choreographic, and theatrical elements, varying them like my Indian danced stories, some of which are performed to instrumental music, others to a garland of excerpts from songs; in one I even use a mask.

For the fifty-minute seven-part work, I used the framework of a typical Odissi recital, which is made up of specific dance genres each with its unique musical structure. The opening mangala charanam is centred round an invocatory Sanskrit chant; the second, sthai, is danced to vocalised rhythmic sounds; pallavi is choreographed to a melody sung to Indian solfa syllables. This led me to choose North Indian ragas similar to

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those of Odissi, and to develop from the sinuous Odissi movement vocabulary the flowing movements I imagined when contemplating ancient Greek vases.

As always with Indian dance, text came first: especially the lyrics for each section. For “Infant”, “Maiden”, and “Bride” I wrote, in turn, a chant to Zeus in Greek, drum syllables that captured the sounds of a tambourine, and solfa-like syllables derived from the names of Greek letters: “

”. For the section when Eleni and Paris fall in love, classics professor Bruce M. King suggested a well-known love poem by the 7th century Greek poet: “Sappho 16”, in which a warrior addresses his beloved. The first verse was perfect for Eleni, the last for Paris.

Our Indian music advisor and flautist, Eric Fraser, helped set these to ragas derived from each of the Greek modes, choosing for the Sappho a romantic nighttime raga, Des. For accurate stresses in Modern Greek pronunciation, I turned to our percussionist Mark Katsaounis’ Greek teacher, Koula Christodoulou. In this section, we meet Prince Paris Alexandros who leads an embassy from Troy to the court of Sparta. Eleni’s husband Menelaos is suddenly called away to attend to his ailing grandfather, leaving her alone to entertain Paris. The section is pivotal because, by falling in love with Paris, Eleni abandons throne, husband and child to follow him to Troy and, thus, brings on the Trojan War.

For the gesture vocabulary I decided to use neutral, ‘everyday’ hand shapes rather than the hand positions of Odissi, yet use them as in Indian dance to: create gestures that evoked the characters, objects, and situations suggested by lyrics. Eleni’s verse, Some say a thronging cavalry, some an army on the march, and some a swelling fleet is the most beautiful sight on this dark earth, but I say … it is that which you desire, conjures images rarely found in Odissi but recurrent in The Iliad: spear-wielding horsemen, warriors with bronze greaves (knee-coverings), oarsmen behind billowing sails.

The preludes to this song are instrumental sections: one in which gifts are exchanged, then a formal dance held in Paris’ honour during which he touches her hand and sparks a flame. The flute music was lilting, but our western music advisor, composer Justine Chen, suggested we add a harp, and brought on board the brilliant Bridget Kibbey. Adapting her chords to fit the chosen raga, she became the spirit of the Greek Helen, leaving Eric’s bass bamboo flute to echo the deep voice of the prince from Asian Troy.

This predominantly musical episode merges into a harp interlude that captures the clamour of the ensuing war, then segues into a twenty-minute episode in which, to the accompaniment of pounding drum rhythms, the

Eleni of Sparta: An Indo-Greek Re-Telling 165

whole story of The Iliad is told from Eleni’s point of view. This section is modelled on Odissi dances like , in which disparate episodes in the life of a deity are interpreted with mime performed to couplets from a seminal Sanskrit text. Each couplet is preceded by a rhythmic composition during which the episode is acted out in broad strokes.

The Storytelling

Throughout the work but particularly in the Troy section, the “storytellers” are several, a potential source of confusion in an epic tale with so many characters unfamiliar to modern audiences. The solo performer of – like any Odissi or Bharatanatyam dancer – often embodies one of the characters in her story. However, there is also an overarching sutradhar (carrier of the thread) who addresses the audience directly and comments on the action, draws parallels between the bronze age worlds of India and of Greece, and refers to episodes in the Indian epic Mahabharata that are similar to those in Eleni’s story.

This Storyteller sings the introductory invocation to Zeus, listing as one of his names “father Dyaus” of the Indian Vedas (clearly related to the thunderbolt-wielding patriarchal deity of Greek mythology). This voice reminds us that Eleni’s brothers, the Gemini, are the twin Ashvins of Hinduism and, at the beginning of the Troy section, quotes the opening couplets of the Hindu text Bhagavad Gita in which an old king, like Priam father of a hundred children, surveys two armies confronting each other in battle array.

Another powerful source of storytelling is percussion. Playing a range of world instruments, Mark Katsaounis, who developed the work with me in New York, or the brilliant Suchet Malhotra, who played at the Chennai premier, embellish the text with an array of timbres. The rape of Nemesis by Zeus is a bird-like screech; the galloping hooves of the Gemini’s steeds, and those of Patroclos and Achilles, are created with a Moroccan frame-drum; Eleni choses her prince to the accompaniment of an African clay pot.

For each character, I devised gestures to represent the epithets of Homer himself: “Hector of the glinting helmet”, or “gigantic Ajax”. Achilles is a “golden shield”; old King Priam ‘leans on a walking stick’. Our director Elise Thoron urged me to first inhabit these characters, then convey with changes in voice, facial expression and movement their overruling emotions: Agamemnon’s arrogance, Menelaos’ steadfast calm, the rage of Achilles.

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Fabrics, too, play their part in storytelling: the diaphanous stole given to Eleni by Paris envelops her with his allure; the curtain used for the Kathakali tirannoku (curtain look) at the beginning of the Troy section becomes, in succession, the tapestry she weaves telling the story of the war, the body of the dead Hector and, finally, the weight of her grief when years later she sings a dirge to lost heroes.

When Eleni returned to Sparta, she was greeted with joy by her subjects, who later enshrined her as a deity from whom over the centuries

Eleni sings a chant listing in Sanskrit and Greek the stages of her life from ‘Infant’ (vréphos/shishu) to ‘Goddess’, (theá/devi) then ‘flies’ to the heavens with the same swan-like movements with which the work began, when Zeus swooped to ravish her mother Nemesis.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE GOOD WIFE: ARNAEA & ARUNDHATI FROM S : N I C

CHITRA SUNDARAM

Figure 24-19: Chitra Sundaram. Vipul Sangoi

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My performative paper ‘Arnaea & Arundhati’ at Epic Women owes much gratitude to Anita Ratnam, Convener, and Ketu Katrak, Co-Convener for their truly inestimable support. I profoundly appreciate the opportunity to contribute to its documentation in this publication.

I offer a tapestry of extracts and ideas from my layered script, choreographic notes and reflections, comparatively drawing upon the patriarchally defined notions of female virtue and chastity of past and contemporary women, exceptional and ordinary, in Ancient Greece, in Christianity, and in Indian religious, mythological, and social practices.

Rolling the Dice

Draupadi, the feisty princess of The Mahabharata was wagered and lost by her husband, the Pandava prince Yuddhisthira, in a game of dice; she was “recovered” through war, like Eleni of Sparta a.k.a. Helen of Troy.

Arguably, across cultures, classes and times, women have provided the palimpsest, the parchment for repeated performances of inscription and dedication, erasure and re-writing. Being about women, my essay is about performance – both my own, and by women qua women executing daily their inscribed lives and prescribed roles.

Not by virtue of being “female”, but by the culture of “female virtue”, we carry in ourselves a “terrible beauty” (as the Old Chiefs’ noted about Helen, per Homer) that is to be traded and tamed, bedded and blamed, one way if not the other.

So, does Hamlet gift Ophelia a curse or truth when he states, “if thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny” (Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1).

Men have made the most pronouncements on chastity, from ancient lawgivers and revered poets to contemporary stand-up comics. John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, contends that a woman is safe to roam “unharbour’d heaths” and “Infamous hills” like the warrior goddess Artemis because: “Tis chastity, my brother, chastity; She that has that is clad in complete steel”.1

Yet chaste virtue isn’t armor enough, even for ‘good’ wives like Arundhati of India, and Arnaea a.k.a Penelope of Greece.2 Nor did it suffice Mary, the origin-al ‘Immaculate’ one. Here are the summaries of the lives of three remarkable ‘chaste’ women – Arundhati, Mary, and Penelope:

The Good Wife: Arnaea & Arundhati from Sthreedom 169

Arundhati is a woman, not a goddess, a scholar and the only female to secure an honored place alongside the venerated Saptarishi or Seven Sages enshrined, according to Vedic Hindu lore, in the constellation Ursa Major. Such is the power of Arundhati’s chastity that even the god Indra cannot seduce herby impersonating her husband, the Sage Vasishtha; the other Sages’ wives succumb.

Mary of Nazareth, shares her name and devotion with an ex-prostitute, Mary Magdalene. The former Mary – wife of Joseph and mother of Jesus by ‘Immaculate Conception’ – is later anointed the ‘Virgin Mary’, by stalwart men of her son’s church; Mary Magdalene follows closely in the height of her beatific elevation.

Penelope is cousin to ‘Helen of Troy’ in whose name the Trojan War was fought. Young Penelope’s husband Odysseus sets off to Troy, and doesn’t come back for twenty years. Managing a dwindling estate and waiting endlessly for her husband’s return as suitors press intolerably, Penelope promises to re-marry when she finishes weaving her father-in-law’s shroud. She weaves by day, and by night unravels it, until Odysseus arrives, kills her tormentors, and saves her and the day.

In oral tellings, these women are complex, inviting artistic and intellectual engagement: Arnaea-Arnacia-Penelope is part of a Mother Goddess cult, and accused of betrayal; “wise” and “circumspect” Penelope gets iconised for fidelity and chastity much later – via Homer of the Greek epics written centuries after the Trojan War (1200 BCE), and via Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE), who nevertheless felt for her.3 Chaste Arundhati is invoked in Hindu wedding rituals for the bride to emulate: a transgressive oral telling of her “serving” all seven sages is officially little mentioned. 4

Millennia after the Blessed Virgin’s death, the ‘truth’ of her ‘perpetual virginity’ splits churches and devout churchgoers.

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Figure 24-20: Chitra Sundaram. Vipul Sangoi

Staging the Good Wife

Dressed in black, I’m a canvas for those that I want to speak for, in color.

Arundhati

I have a Hindu bride’s auspicious red-and-gold sari in my hands. Ritual incantations invoke Arundhati along with my words and her little known personal tale of loss and remembrance. Arundhati, downstage, meditating, turns and addresses the audience, with mischievous glint and bharatanatyam gestures, intoning:

I shine among some very skilled and cle I am clever too, but I am also a bit dim, in that I hold myself back behind my husband and his six wise cohorts.

And even though I am mostly unseen, it is in my name, you take your vows of devotion, of fidelity, of chastity and become ‘wife’.


I don large gold bangles and a netthi-chutti jewel in my hair-parting to signify ‘bride’. I circle the dais in saptapadi, the ritual ‘seven steps’ around the sacred fire that make a ‘bride and groom’ a ‘wife and husband’. Projected on the backdrop is the image of a southern Indian bride’s decorated foot, held in her groom’s hand and ritually placed on a flat stone marked with sacred patterns. I use the gestural language of bharatanatyam abhinaya to convey the word meaning of “The Good Wife”, a popular medieval Sanskrit verse sung here in Carnatic classical modes.5 Relentlessly, Sanskrit words from the text (below), and their English word-associations, fill the screen – and overwhelm the bride’s image:6

Kaaryeshu dasi in housekeeping/serving (literally in work), a servant/handmaiden Karaneshu mantra in counselling (literally in his ear), a minister/advisor Bhojeshu mata In caring for him (literally in feeding), a mother Kshamaya dharithri in forbearance, in forgiveness, the Earth Roopecha Lakshmi in looks, auspiciously beautiful (lit. the goddess Lakshmi) Shayaneshu Rambha in bed, an adept (lit. the celestial seductress Rambha)7 Shatkarmayukta She who is yoked to these six actions Kuladharmapatni is true ‘wife’ in the eyes of the clan.8

Mary

Unwinding from a Crucifixion posture – my back to the audience, arms outstretched, feet together, knees and head bent to the side – I gesturally explore the hymn ‘Ave Generosa’ by the Saint Hildegard von Bingen of Germany.9 Bingen was a 12th century feminist and prolific composer of hymns to the Virgin Mary, which were considered frequently erotic.10 On the backdrop, the Latin sung text is imprinted on a tight close-up of a lily.11 (“The Lily” is a purity symbol from my catholic convent schooling days in Bombay.) Bingen hails Mary as “the pupil in the eye of chastity, into whom was poured a potion made flesh, a lily that God knew before all his other creatures”.

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Arnaea-Penelope

Young Arnaea tells her early story till Odysseus’s departure with text inspired by Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and The Greek Myths by Robert Graves – alongside “Delphic Hymn” by Dinos Constantinides.12 A billowing white fabric signifies youth, wedding, and ship’s sail. As the mature Penelope, I recite and dance a visionist poem by England’s Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy entitled “Penelope”. Lengths of diaphanous colored fabric wind and unwind, capturing the poem’s colors and turns. Duffy’s “Penelope”, alone for twenty years, is now

self-contained, absorbed, content, most certainly not waiting, when Odysseus arrives to stake his claim with a … far-too-late familiar tread outside the door 13

Sthreedhom

My project title, Streedom: Notices on an immaculate conception evokes many resonances:

Streedom (a coined word), rhymes with ‘freedom’; Sthree: woman/female in Sanskrit etc., more commonly spelled “stri”; “dom”: as in dominion/domain – province/protectorate/state/ territory Three: a trinity – Mother-Goddess/Wife/Whore: consecrated/ controlled/commoditised Notices: announcements/cautions/communications/signs/warnings etc. (I considered “Notes” instead of “Notices”) Immaculate: unblemished, pure; un-avoided Christian resonances Conception: pregnancy/notion/perception/thesis/belief/construction

Arundhati and Penelope, and the two Marys – Holy Mary and Mary Magdalene – are co-opted, anointed and rendered unto patriarchal heteronormative order: pristine, iconic, untroubled and untroubling. Ever so subtly, a life-station on the high ground of chastity appears safe, benign and ideal – especially in ‘purity cultures’.

Historically, male chastity has had no exchange value in a heterosexual marketplace: women are the sellers, or the sold, generating female collusion.14 But the supremacy of ‘purity’ among feminine virtues insidiously endangers and disempowers the female – even disembowels, like it did “Nirbhaya” of Delhi (The woman who was gang raped in


December 2012). Rape, of body and/or honor, has been about power and punishment in war, and so it appears in peacetime: “purity culture” has shown itself to be “rape culture”, solely burdening women with the protection of their “chaste” bodies and name.15

The stakes are raised when women become honor-bearers for family and clan, when that honor dangerously, unsafely resides in the vagina: think honor killings.16 Thus, too, women become unsafe not just for not “knowing their place” but as a symbolic object fit for despoiling for whatever callous reasoning or rivalry that separates groups into “us” and “them”: think Asian men systematically grooming white girl-children, and Muslim men strategically grooming Sikh girl-children; long-established networks have been exposed, and perpetrators prosecuted just this year.

Heartbreakingly, as Good Wife material as she can be, when this girl-child-woman totters and falls under honor’s weight, it is she who gets discarded, sent away, destroyed – by those whose honor she supposedly bore.

Yet, there’s hope it seems: gracious Indian goddesses are displaying their less fortunate sisters’ bruises on their own faces.17

Notes 1 In 1642, Milton, 35, married Marie Powell, 16 who found him “insufferable” and

return, nine years later, after the English civil war, and had children with him. 2 In early myths, “Arnaea” and/or “Arnacia” was the name of the daughter of Icarius, King of Sparta. She was called “Penelope” (meaning ‘duck’) following her rescue as an infant by a clutch of purple-striped ducks from the watery end ordered by Icarius. See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths. In parts of India, a woman is often renamed when married. 3 Penelope’s lovingly compelling missive to Ulysses, translated by A.S. Kline, 2001. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Heroides1-7.htm 4 Scholar Shri Anantharama Shastrigal a.k.a Mohan Guruji, interviewed Chennai, February 2013. 5 Composed and sung by Manorama Prasad. 6 Visual arrangement by Vipul Sangoi. 7 A popular sanitization: the original word when I was instructed in my maiden years was veshya (prostitute). 8 There is no equivalent description for “husband” in the Neetisara, though feminist men have put up some heartwarming coinages on the web. Sadly, actual wedding vows, which are quite gender-equal and admirable, are not popularly known. 9 Anita Ratnam devised the Crucifixion image for me. 10 I was in St. Mary Magdalene’s “Blue House” throughout school but never learned about this “other Mary” then. Pity.

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11 The hymn is sung by Soprano Patricia Rozario; visual arrangement by John-Marc Gowans; photo by Chitra Sundaram. 12 The vocalize is sung by Soprano Patricia Rozario. 13 Evoking the Hindu’s “Good Wife”, Joseph Heuring: “Penelope’s personality mixes the opposing characteristics of Artemis and Aphrodite […] the faithfulness that everyman expects of his wife, but also exudes the sexual desire he wants from a lover.” http://www1.union.edu/wareht/gkcultur/guide/1. 14 Baumeister, Roy F. and Vohs, Kathleen D. ‘Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions’ in Personality and Social Psychology Review 2004, Vol. 8, 339-363 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 15 Awesome piece: E.F. Graff http://prospect.org/article/purity-culture-rape-culture. 16 Writer, activist Sohaila Abdulali, 49, gang-raped in Mumbai at 17, writes: “I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina, just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals.” New York Times, January 7, 2013. 17 An Indian anti-Domestic Violence ad campaign shows traditional images of revered Hindu goddesses but with cuts and bruises. http://www.buzzfeed.com/ regajha/indias-incredibly-powerful-abused-goddesses-campaign-condemn.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

GOLDEN PEACOCK: ON MYANMAR’S AUNG SAN SUU KYI

ANUSHA SUBRAMANYAM

Figure 25-21: Anusha Subramanyam. Vipul Sangoi

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Figure 25-22: Anusha Subramanyam. Vipul Sangoi

I had read Aung San Suu Kyi’s book, Freedom From Fear a few months before Anita Ratnam asked me to present a piece at the Epic Women conference. Choosing my Epic Woman was an easy choice.

It was inspiring to read Suu Kyi’s ideology of life and living. At its core, is the idea that for a positive change to occur in a society, both the oppressor and the oppressed have to overcome their fears. As a leader of the Burmese independence movement she believes that everyone has the responsibility to bring about this change in the status quo in the society. In a world where there is so much strife and despair this idea has a real resonance. To create change in the outside, we must make changes in ourselves. Personal action = Social action. Personal change = social change.

On a personal level, I found Suu Kyi to be a very interesting personality. She is an army man’s daughter who believes in peace. A wife and a mother, who sacrificed both, for a cause she really believes in. A figure, feted around the world as an inspiring leader, she has the

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challenging task of being a major force in rebuilding a divided Burma. Her isolation through imprisonment almost gave her a mythical status, which will be tested in changing landscapes and the real world politics of Burma.

I started working on the piece with Vipul Sangoi to create a conceptual framework and structure. Vipul who trained as a designer, has seen and photographed dance for nearly 30years. He has contributed to a lot of my work over the last two decades. My other collaborator, Sylvia Hallett is an eclectic musician whose work I greatly admire.

On discussion with Vipul, it became apparent that a dance piece, which focused on Suu Kyi’s writings, was one option. The ideas in them have existed in the writings and actions of others throughout history. What makes them special when Suu Kyi says it? The other conceptual approach was to create work that explored her life – the daughter, the elite nomad, student, wife, mother, leader and politician. The work would explore the contradictions that make Suu Kyi such an iconic figure and one whose place in history is still work in progress.

The work was divided into four sections – chronologically linear, but with glimpses of the memories, the actions and events from the past – each section reflecting the development of the person. The first section was the birth of Burma as an independent country from imperialist British and Japanese forces and the birth of Suu Kyi, her connection with her father and the military, which is strong in her, to this day. That birth of Nation was immediately followed by the assassination of Aunt San. The second section was Sue Kyiv as a privileged world citizen, who finds her love and family with an English man, Michael Airs. She had a brief period of normal life in Oxford where she had two sons. Her husband Michael Aris was a very important figure in her life and he helped in writing and editing her book. The third section was sacrificing her immediate family, first to look after an ailing mother. She subsequently became leader of NLD, heir to her father’s legacy, to fight for democracy for the Burmese people. She came to be known as the peaceful resistance fighter who crystallized her beliefs in isolation under house arrest over long periods of time. The fourth section reflected her status as an international icon grappling with challenges of becoming a politician.

The title of her work is direct reference to the symbol of NLD, a peacock.

Before I started on the choreography, I discussed the ideas for the music with Sylvia. We researched audio material that reflected Burma, voices of Aung San and Suu Kyi and other related sound clips. I also worked with Manorama Prasad, Carnatic vocals and RR Prathap on mridangam (drum), to create possible material for the work. Sylvia created

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an amazing score, rich with imagery reflecting the story as well as elements of Carnatic music. We kept tweaking it to nearly the last two days before the performance.

The movement vocabulary reflected a much more active collaboration with Vipul’s ideas. To condense Suu Kyi’s life into a 13 minute piece was a challenge. The generation of the movement material was an organic process. It was really interesting for me to see that Vipul began discussing the choreography by moving to the ideas in the work and the music. He began creating a structure that I liked. I expanded on the ideas and explored alternate movements. These drew upon everything from theatre, film, and photographs of Suu Kyi, photographs of Burma, contemporary dance and bharatanatyam. While making the piece, Vipul also re-edited the music to better reflect some of the content of the ideas we wanted to convey.

The final presentation was the first sharing of the idea. The piece has been reworked since this first sharing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

ON KAANHOPATRA & MATA HIDIMBA

RAJASHREE SHIRKE

Figure 26-23: Rajashree Shirke and group. Vipul Sangoi

It is my most precious fortune that in the course of my artistic life, I have encountered, researched and worked on two iconic female characters: Saint poetess Kaanhopatra and Hidimba the Rakshasi (demon) princess from The Mahabharata.

Whenever I decide to portray any particular female character, my preliminarily step is to enter into the psyche of that iconic female persona. I read as much as I can, over and over again – right from the original story text, to the many by-stories and other cultural folklore that surround the life and era of that character. This brings me closer to understand and realize the nature of the emotional state and the life situation that “she” is

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in. The next step is what I believe in firmly – I try to put myself into her life-situation and think about what I would have done or decided, had I been in her place. This probably helps me to relive “her” life and also see the uniqueness of her mental and spiritual framework; as to how she had led her life with conviction and courage, and how, and from where she derives these strengths.

Kaanhopatra

The main crux in Kaanhopatra’s struggle for salvation begins with society labeling her as “mad”. It is because she instinctively gave in to the “unknown mystic longing in her soul” and chose not to conform and “behave” according to the mundane norms, notions and “approved” codes of caste, creed and gender in society. According to them, she hailed from a clan where to sell one’s beauty and body and to live a life of extravagance was the “right” way to go. Hence, this patriarchal society could not digest a “woman” having a “non-conforming” attitude along with any sort of unknown emotional or spiritual yearning for something that she herself did

en more ridicule and restraint from the society because she was a woman. Had it been a man, there would be reverence and respect for such a ‘lofty’ motive in life.

While choreographing “Sangeet Kaanhopatra” I sought to establish Kaanhopatra as a courtesan from the ancient Maharashtrian era. Researching the historical and political upheavals in Maharashtra and the rest of India at that time. I specifically aimed to create the feel of an archaic setting of ancient Maharashtra, especially with the “Rang Mahal ” the house of courtesans – with the courtesans who would move and dance in a distinct manner from that era. The courtesans of those times displayed themselves through their talents of dance and music, hence the use of the Indian classical dance style of Kathak, its footwork, gestures and movements that would accentuate the behaviorisms and body language of the courtesans of those times. Also the sound and the choice of music were deliberately kept old-fashioned.

Another criterion was to illuminate the intensity of the juncture where Kaanhopatra realizes that Lord Vitthala was the “One” whom she sought and the exuberant rapture of bliss that she feels when she sees the joyous frenzy and bliss that the ‘Vaarkari-s’ exude as they dance and chant Lord Vitthala’s name. Typical dance steps of the ‘Vaarkari-s’ in their long processions, the ecstatic frenzy and bliss that they are in, chanting aloud, “Vitthala, Vitthala, Vitthala” along with the rhythm, music, cymbals and the chanting mounting to a breathtaking crescendo, and finally their total

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surrender when they lie prostrate and roll over in reverence and devotion, on the holy grounds of Pandharpur. They touch each other’s feet symbolizing the shedding of their ego and attaining equality of mind and soul. All these authentic devices were particularly used through the idiom of Kathak and Indian classical music framed in the Kathakaar Paddhati genre, to highlight Kaanhopatra’s blissful realization of having seen her “Lord” with her own eyes.

When Kaanhopatra realizes that the “One” she seeks is Lord Vitthala, her faith, conviction and courage validate her “eternal longing”. Any mortal being who realizes her aim in life will readily do all to safeguard its path and win its own freedom. She finds herself trapped – with the King’s guards outside the Lord’s temple, waiting to capture her and nowhere to escape. She urges Vitthala with outrage and defiance:

I will not give myself to anyone else – I will not go out of here, because if I do, they wait to take me away – O Lord, what justice is this when I have surrendered to you?

You have to lift me away from this mortal life, so that I can eternally be

My ‘maternal home’

Let me share what I have experienced and realized in the making of “Sangeet Kaanhopatra.”

Kaanhopatra’s persona, I believe, is the incarnation of the maxim that if one has a noble, strong motive or longing in one’s mind, one’s unabashed determination, intense yearning and ceaseless devotion shall certainly bear its rightful and blissful fruition. So much so that by mesmerizing devotion, even a woman born and raised in the family of courtesans can attain Divinity. The culmination of her devotion lies where she binds the entire world to further remember Lord Vitthala himself, by the name – “Kaanho-Vanamaali” that spells out that Lord Vitthala is eternally bound to Kaanhopatra.

Hidimba

Hidimba is a unique character, the Rakshasi (demon) princess the pride and jewel of her forest kingdom. Young, educated, skilled, courageous, she is free-spirited and extremely strong-willed; who came in nobody’s way and never let anyone cross her. In the choreographic sense, I used verbal syllables of rhythmic language, free-spirited music, and robust, yet graceful movements to portray this character sketch of Hidimba.

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Belonging to the Nishad Jati (the expelled clan) then known eloquently as Anaarya (non-aryan) there was a constant tussle with caste-discrimination that fills her life, giving her sorrows and dilemmas till the end.

The central theme in the character of Hidimba however is that of a Mother. The story of Hidimba shows that even beyond all discrimination that she faces and stands up to she is primarily a fierce mother who does not look beyond the safety, upbringing, good future and a noble life for her child. As a mother, she fights any obstacle or situation that would hinder the well being of her child. Hidimba’s story as a mother is not only about her, but also about Almighty Mother Nature who is distressed at the sight of war and bloodshed between her children (human beings). She knows that war is never a good thing and is never a solution to find peace. War only gives birth to more war and each time it is unleashed, it brings more evil, more destruction and death for it only grows to consume all of mankind.

These thoughts are reflected in the strife that she has with Krishna saying that advocating the notion of war into young minds and using the youth (like her son Ghatotkach) for war, just to satisfy the political urges of domination and power for the Pandavas is downright vain and selfish. This will cause nothing but destruction, death and unending sorrow; something that only a mother has to bear in the end. Every man who dies in war is not only someone’s husband, but is first, someone’s brother or son. Hidimba is an apt representative of the intense and inexplicable bond and affection between a mother and her child.

Even after being notably abandoned by Bheema, Mata Hidimba raises Ghatotkach independently as a strong single-mother. As a mother, she teaches her child harmony, patience, humility, courage, responsibility and balance with nature contrary to the training he (Ghatotkach) receives from the Pandava’s Guru-s namely, violence, hatred and anger.

From the perspective of the Kathak idiom, I felt that all the training and values instituted by the mother should be shown through soft bol-s (rhythmic syllables) and movements rich in the lasya anga (gentle body movements) whilst the training given by the Pandava Guru-s shown through broad, heavy movements of the taandava anga (strong body movements) and robust bol-s from the traditional Paran-s and the pakhawaj.

Moreover, when Hidimba senses danger to Ghatotkach’s life, the intensity and strength of her affection is shown by a dream sequence, where she sees her anxiety for his well being in the form of nature – signs that warn her of the danger. She calls out to him with all her mystic

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powers, and knowing that no other place would be safe to protect him now – she opens up her womb and envelopes him inside, so that he could stay safe and she could protect him. This has been depicted through the Kathak dance in a very non-conventional, abstract choreography to show her (Hidimba’s) esoteric bond with her child. All these unique artistic devices amalgamate to form a new genre of artistic presentation called “Ranga Nritya” – which is a unique story-telling technique; a beautiful alliance of Kathak, Indian Classical Music and Indian Theatre. All the remaining dancers/disciples from the troupe contribute to the music as equally well-trained singers and actors to this artistic “Ranga Nritya” endeavor in Kathak, called “Mata Hidimba”.

I believe, from my experience of working on these two iconic female personas that their situations are very relevant and exist vibrantly even today. Every woman with a new radical thought, every mother who fights society is met with the same situations as they were in ancient times. The reason these women are iconic is because their tales serve as a beacon of hope, inspiration and strength for each and every woman today. Recognizing their contemporary relevance and seeing their situation as mine makes me react and respond artistically through all my authentic idioms of dance, theatre and music, expanding my horizons to express intensely all the sentiments that inspirationally arise within me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

PULAMBAL: ANGUISHED VOICE

LAKSHMI VISHWANTHAN

Figure 27-24: Lakshmi Viswanathan. Foto Cylla

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The term “epic” instantly conjures up women larger than life. However, a close look at “epic” literature reveals a spectrum of female characters without whom the larger “epic” picture would be incomplete. As the saying goes, “they also serve who only stand and wait.”

My question to myself while I was exploring the dance worthiness of epic women was how I would focus on some unsung women who played those key roles in the making of an epic. They are not heroines. They are women who have strength of character, and resilience in their hour of challenges. I ventured deep into the character of the mother – Thai – universally she is a most respected woman.

Her sacrifices are legend. Her nobility is unparalleled. She is the icon of essential womanhood.

Whatever the epic in which she is fore-grounded, she towers with strength. But is she not vulnerable as all other beings are? Is her love, Vatsalya, less powerful than the passion of a heroine? Is her quiet acceptance of her fate not worthy of admiration? Is her voice heard? More importantly is her anguish at separation from her child not the most poignant, most telling, and most epic in magnitude?

I found the voices of Devaki the mother of Krishna, and Kousalya the mother of Rama speaking to me through the poetry of great savants. I read and re-read Tamil verses from the pens of Kulasekara Alwar and Kamban. Eloquent and minimal, that is how I would describe their verses. I need poetry of that kind to make my ideas for dance come to fruition.

I gave my choreography the title Pulambal (Tamil): The Anguished Voice. The poetry of Kulasekara Alwar is in fact a genre of poetics, namely, Pulambal.

For me, Devaki the hapless mother who had to send her son Krishna away to be brought up by Yashoda presented a perfect opportunity for portraying separation. I followed the poetry in content. The verses speak of Devaki lamenting her loss, by singing a lullaby with the ditty “taalelo”, to an empty cradle. Her imagining all the pleasures of motherhood enjoyed by Yashoda whilst she herself did not, presented a challenge for me in dance. One had to portray both mothers: the foster mother exulting in the play of Krishna, and the real mother’s lamenting lullaby. Joy and sorrow came and went like sunlight through a wind blown tree. I showed all the joyous moments of Yashoda and Krishna, and returned to the cradle, each time with more dejection. A lullaby for a child, a Supreme avatar, who is present everywhere, yet not there in his mother’s arms … that was the thrust of my abhinaya (gesture language and expression of emotion).

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Kousalya: Kamban portrays the moment when she learns of Rama’s exile. He himself tells her of his exile, just when she is preparing to see him in the splendour of his coronation attire. Struck as if by a thunderbolt, she breaks down, weeps, moans, and questions the dharma (right path) of it all. She laments her fate. She seeks justice. She accosts Dasaratha with questions and demands an explanation. She even accepts Bharata as Crown prince. She concludes that she too must go to the forest with Rama, or end her life. Her agony is inconsolable. The whole of Ayodhya weeps with her. Her anguish is in direct contrast to Rama’s equanimity.

The verses were sung in suitable ragas chosen by me. I think the blend of music and lyrics with abhinaya had the impact I intended – the intensity of emotion in anguished mothers, and their helplessness at separation from their beloved sons. They question the meaning of existence. They try to resign themselves to their fate. But not before voicing their sorrow in poignant words – Pulambal. As a dancer, it is a singular pleasure for me to bring Pulambal to the spectator as visual poetry.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

IN THE SPIRIT OF FRIDA

KALPANA RAGHURAMAN

Figure 28-25: Kalpana Raghuraman. Simone Richardson

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The Creative Process Behind Creating ‘The Spirit of Frida’

How to create a dance piece about Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), a woman who experienced so much hardship and was a true lover of life? How to do justice to her volcanic personality, her contribution to Mexican art and the emancipation of women in Mexico?

Due to a bus accident Frida Kahlo was terribly injured at age 18 and as a result, she had 35 operations during her life. Although she regained her ability to walk, she had many relapses. She knew intense pain and she was often confined to her bed at home or in the hospital for months at a time. Frida paints from her bed and her wheelchair and fights pain through her creativity.

Creative Points of Departure: Pain and Potency

After doing my research by reading books about her and watching Julie Taymor’s marvellous movie ‘Frida’ several times, I decided that I did not want to create a biographical work in which I narrate her life journey through choreography. Nor did I want to focus solely on her paintings. So I asked myself why she was an Epic Woman to me? How does she inspire

gave me the key to enter the creative process. I would focus on two things. One focus would be on Frida’s pain since this was the source of inspiration for her paintings; she incorporated symbolic references of physical and psychological wounds in her work. The second would be to focus on her joyous, sensuous and fiery personality and activities: married to painter Diego Rivera, Frida (together with Diego) was very active in the Communist movement in Mexico. She was known for her temperament and had several (bi-) sexual affairs. Despite her physical problems she was fearless and daring. And it is this daring quality, her courage to tap into her potency and be a roaring lion that I wanted to emphasize when juxtaposing the segments dealing with her pain.

Physical Restriction

In order to work on the physical pain and express this through movement sequences, I instinctively felt I had to create physical restriction. Knowing that Frida often painted while being confined to her bed was a great source of inspiration. I used this as a starting point. I lay on the floor as if on a bed, and started creating movement material by

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giving myself tasks: How would I move if I could not move my legs? How would I move if I had been lying in bed for a whole month and had no idea when I would be able to get out? How would I feel emotionally and how could I embody this?

Creating this ‘floor-phrase’ ended up being more intense than expected. There were several moments that I ended up in tears. This really gave depth to the work and fuelled my artistic process.

From there I went to look at how Frida must have felt when she tried to walk again for the first time after her bus accident. And consequently, how Frida would have moved as she regained more strength.

Rhythm

In order to create a scene about Frida’s fiery, courageous and sensual personality, I decided to let rhythm inspire me. I used the 7-beat count (takita takadimi/123 1234) to build movement material and create a feeling of this woman who defied everybody and everything and was a true fighter and lover of life. Two important questions I asked myself here were: How would Frida have danced? And: how can I embody sensuality, pride and defiance in a subtle manner?

lips

I was looking for a way to include images of paintings by Frida to connect my choreography to her work and her life. I ended up creating three small clips with the help of a videographer (Josanne Buiting) in which I used images of Frida’s paintings. I placed each clip into the structure in such a way that it would be another layer to the work and not function as an informative moment. I created a connection between the image and my own movement so that the projection would be an integral part of the choreography and not just an add-on. In the first clip it is a self-portrait that she had made (1926, “Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress”). I placed this clip in the section after the “floor phrase”, just before she tries to get up and walk. In the second clip, it is a painting of her body full of thorns (1944, “The Broken Column”), which served as a bridge to the rhythmical section. The final clip shows Frida’s painting in which she is lying on a bed (1940, “The Dream”).

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Music

Peter Lemmens assisted me in doing the musical arrangement using existing compositions and adding soundscapes to create one musical universe. I started by researching different kinds of Mexican music but soon realized this was not working for me. I wanted a main composition that would be preferably guitar-based. I ended up with a beautiful composition by the Spanish Aaron Martin called “Sisters” and this became the musical line through the entire piece. His composition was used for the opening. For the part that I struggle to get up and walk, Peter created a soundscape. We incorporated motives of Martin’s composition into this soundscape and ended it with segments of a female voice singing the traditional Mexican song “La Bruga” which is about death but also has double-meanings related to seduction.

For the 7-beat rhythmical section, we made alterations to a composition Peter had made for me in the past. This became a very distinct musical moment in the piece. Ending this rhythmical section with motives from Martin’s composition allowed for the musical line to be continuous. I selected parts of the song about the black bird “Paloma Negra” as the closing of the piece. This song has a melancholic and soft touch to it that I felt would be the right closing. To me, Frida left this world perhaps in pain yet with a sense of peace and love.

“Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?” –Frida Kahlo

CONTRIBUTORS

-Khan

Fawzia Afzal-Khan is Professor of English, and a University Distinguished Scholar. She is currently Director of the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at Montclair State University. She is Contributing Editor at The Drama Review (TDR) and Founding Chair of the South Asian Women’s Caucus of the National Women Studies Association (NWSA). Her books include: A Critical Stage: The Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (2005), Lahore With Love (2010), Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (2005), The Pre-occupation of Postcolonial Studies (2000) and Cultural Imperialism and the Indo- (1993). She is currently working on a documentary film about Pakistani female singers, for which she received a development grant in 2011 from the National Endowment of the Humanities. She is also a published poet and playwright, as well as a performer trained in the North Indo-Pakistani classical vocal tradition. Contact: Dickson Hall 120, Women and Gender Studies Program, Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

Veenapani Chawla

Veenapani Chawla established Adishakti: Laboratory for Theater Arts Research in 1981. She creates residency programs for Adishakti and workshops for national and international artistes. Veenapani, who has studied Mayurbhanj Chhau, Kalaripayattu, Koodiyattam and Dhrupad singing, has an MA in History (Delhi), and Political Philosophy (Mumbai). She was briefly in Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret at Holstebro, Denmark. Since 1987, Veenapani has created a performance methodology based on old knowledges, involving a physical craft to facilitate the actor’s vocal, bodily and psychological expression. Her unique aesthetic for contemporary theatre disseminated though workshops and papers at national and international venues, makes theatre relevant in the age of cinema.

Veenapani has directed most of Adishakti’s performances and scripted half of these. Impressions of Bhima (1996), Brhannala and Ganapati are

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her landmark productions. In 2008, she designed a three-year project on The Ramayana entitled, ‘Pluralism and Performance: The Many Voices in The Ramayana.” Since 1999, Veenapani has designed the Adishakti campus in Pondicherry that houses the Adishakti Theatre, Dance, Music and Puppetry Repertory Company. Veenapani has received several prestigious recognitions including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Puruskar for Theatre Director (2011), and the Zee Astitva Award for excellence in Theatre (2006). A forthcoming book, The Theatre of Veenapani Chawla:

by Shanta Gokhale will be published by Oxford University Press, India.

Padmini Chettur

Padmini Chettur was born in 1970. She began her training in traditional Bharatanatyam. In 1990, she joined the company of Chandralekha, to date the most important Indian artiste to contemporize dance in India. During the ten years spent working with Chandralekha, Chettur began her own study and research of the body’s geometry and its relationship with space. The politics of developing a contemporary dance idiom from within Indian physical forms, rather than by a study of western ones continues in Chettur’s work. She has performed with her company at Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), Springdance (Utrecht), Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels), Bozar (Brussels), Seoul Performing Arts Festival, and the National School of Drama Festival (New Delhi) among other venues.

Swarnamalya Ganesh

Dr. Swarnamalya Ganesh is a well-known Bharatanatyam dancer and a dance history scholar, as well as a choreographer, musician, teacher, Indologist and a popular media person. She is trained in Bharatanatyam under Guru K.J. Sarasa, later under the Tiruvazaputhur sisters (hereditary community dancers) as well as Dr. Padma Subrahmanyam (karanas).

Dr. Ganesh, a visiting faculty at the University of Madras and at Dr. M.G.R Janaki College, holds an MA in Bharatanatyam and a Ph.D in Dance History from the University of Madras. Her knowledge of Tamil and Grantha epigraphy facilitates her archaeological projects on dance history, including site excavation and documentation.

As Director of Ranga Mandira Trust and School of Performing Arts, she has devised a unique performing arts syllabus. Her recent choreographic works include a dance-drama on Madhavi’s story from Silappadikaram. Her research papers for journals include a recent


breakthrough work on re-identification of Sarangapani Temple Karanas for The Oriental Journal of Asian Studies. Her doctoral work has culminated into a performance series called “From the Attic” that she is currently premiering.

Andrée Grau

Dr. Andrée Grau trained in dance in her native Switzerland and in London where she studied at the Dance Centre and at the Benesh Institute of Choreology. She has an MA in Ethnomusicology (1979) and a Ph.D in Social Anthropology (1983) from the Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. She is Professor of the Anthropology of Dance at the University of Roehampton, London where she directs the Centre for Dance Research and convenes the MA in Dance Anthropology and the Erasmus Mundus Masters Choreomundus – International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice, and Heritage in collaboration with universities in France, Hungary and Norway. She has conducted fieldwork in Southern Africa, Australia and India as well as in the UK and published widely on a variety of issues including: identity, gender, politics, multiculturalism, cross-cultural aesthetics always through the lens of the dancing body. A detailed profile and selected publications can be found at http:// roehampton.academia.edu/AndreeGrau.

Ammu Joseph

Ammu Joseph is an independent journalist and author based in Bangalore, writing primarily on issues relating to gender, human development and the media. Joseph’s six published books include, Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues (1994/2006), Making News: Women in Journalism (2000/2005), Storylines: Conversations with Women Writers (2003), Just Between Us: Women Speak about their Writing (2004), Interior Decoration: Anthology of Poems by Indian Women (2010), and -Terror: Women Speak Out (2003). Joseph has also written/edited numerous other publications and contributed chapters to several books, both Indian and international.

Joseph has been a visiting faculty at several journalism schools. She was the India coordinator for the Global Media Monitoring Project 2010 and South Asia coordinator for the Global Report on Women in News Media (2012). She has contributed to several recent UNESCO projects, including the Report on World Trends in Freedom of Expression and

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Media Development (2013), Gender Sensitive Indicators for Media (2012) and Towards Media and Information Literacy Indicators (2011).

Ketu H. Katrak

Dr. Ketu H. Katrak (originally from Bombay, India), is Professor in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and Founding Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies (1996-2004) at UCI. Katrak completed her Ph.D from Bryn Mawr College (USA), and BA and MA degrees from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay. She specializes in Drama, Dance and Performance, Postcolonial and Diaspora Literature, and Feminist Theory.

Katrak is the author of Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers from the Third World (2006); and Wole Soyinka and Modern Tragedy on the Nigerian Nobel Laureate. She has published widely in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Amerasia among others. Katrak is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Award to India (2005-06), University of California, Humanities Research Institute’s Fellowship (2002), The Bunting Institute Fellowship (1988-89) (Harvard/Radcliffe), among other awards. Katrak is currently on the Fulbright’s Senior Specialist roster (2010-15)

Katherine Kunhiraman

Katherine Kunhiraman and her husband K.P. Kunhiraman founded Kalanjali in Berkeley, California in 1975. Together they earned many awards and grants and remain among the most respected teachers in the US. As preservationists more than innovators, they worked hard to bring Kalakshetra’s aesthetic philosophy to their world. Performances of traditional Kathakali and Bharatanatyam repertoire, school lecture-demonstrations and community performances brought them visibility and respect.

As a teenager, Katherine came to India with her parents. Her background and passion in theatre, design, graphics, ancient history and religion led naturally to Indian dance, studying first in Calcutta and then Chennai. Katherine studied music as well, and has conducted her students’ performances over the years. After observing Rukmini Devi for two and a half years at the pinnacle of her creativity, she joined the Dhananjayans in the fledgling Bharatakalanjali, learning organizational skills, enabling her


to establish Kalanjali. She remained with them for nine years, and was their first graduate.

Aditi Mangaldas

Aditi Mangaldas is the choreographer and principal dancer of the Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company – The Drishtikon Dance Foundation – in both the classical Indian dance form of Kathak and contemporary dance that stems from Kathak. With extensive training under the leading exponents of Kathak, Guru Kumudini Lakhia and Pandit Birju Maharaj, Aditi is today recognized for her artistry, technique, eloquence and characteristic energy.

Aditi has broken new ground by using her knowledge and experience of Kathak as a springboard to evolve a contemporary dance vocabulary infused with the spirit of the classical. Her solo performances and group ensembles, both classical and contemporary, have received critical acclaim at leading festivals all over the world.

As Aditi remarks, “There has never been a contradiction between the classical or contemporary. I look at the ancient dance form of Kathak with a modern mind. I have tried to work with the dynamism of Kathak and strengthen it with the yoga spine. Kathak is not a tether that holds me back, but a deep root from which I draw the strength to grow, and to explore new forms.”

Prema Nandakumar

Dr. Prema Nandakumar obtained her Ph.D in 1961 for her study of Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem “Savitri.” Since then, she has been an independent researcher, publishing critical and biographical works. As a translator, her career spans half a century, with UNESCO publishing her book on Subramania Bharati. Dr. Nandakumar’s translation into English of “Manimekalai”, the ancient Buddhist epic in Tamil has been received with enthusiasm. She is also a creative writer in English and Tamil.

Dr. Nandakumar is a resource person at various national and international conferences in India and abroad, including the first International Conference on Buddhism and National Cultures. She draws her inspiration from sources as varied as the Vedas, Sanskrit and Tamil epics, and modern Indian literature. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Sri Aurobindo Puraskar (West Bengal), Pandita Ratna (Warangal), U.Ve. Swaminatha Aiyar Award (Coimbatore) and Thamizh Peravai Chemmal (Madurai Kamaraj University).

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Madhavi Raghav Narsalay

Dr. Madhavi Raghav Narsalay is Assistant Professor of Sanskrit in the Post-graduate Sanskrit Department of the University of Mumbai. Her areas of specialization include Religion and Mythology in textual as well as oral sources. Many of her research papers establishing a link between the Epics and Puranas with Vedic Literature have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Narsalay has been working in exploring different aspects of female divinities in ancient India with special focus on Maharashtra, taking into consideration the early Marathi literary sources, especially Saint Literature. She also loves to explore the area of Indian aesthetics. Her special field of interest is the application of Indian theories to contemporary and classical art. As a young scholar, she received the performance based incentive award of the University of Mumbai, and was felicitated by the Governor of Maharashtra in 2008.

Performer, choreographer, educator and arts entrepreneur-Madhu Nataraj, was chosen as one of India’s 50 young achievers by the magazine, India Today. She has received several awards, recent amongst which are the Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar from the central Sangeet Natak Akademi and the Mohan Khokar award for excellence in dance.

Madhu studied Kathak from her mother Dr Maya Rao and from Smt. Chitra Venugopal. Although she also trained in contemporary dance in New York, Madhu returned to India with a vision to create a unique dance company with its own distinctive contemporary Indian dance identity – the Natya STEM Dance Kampni.

A graduate of commerce, journalism, and choreography, Madhu has also trained in Indian martial arts, ritualistic/folk dance traditions, pedagogy and yoga.

Madhu believes that dance is a potent medium for change in the public domain. Ranging from education, social issues, creativity, and documentation to healing, her projects aim to materialise this philosophy.

Madhu has created over 75 choreographic works (short pieces and productions) in the 16 years of the Kampni’s existence. She is also a panelist at important design, cultural and academic institutions and is often invited to perform, design programs and choreographic works for prestigious cultural organizations across India, UK, Australia, New Zealand, UAE, Southeast Asia, Europe and USA.


Mythili Prakash

Los Angeles and Chennai based Mythili Prakash is a young Bharatanatyam dancer who is gaining national and international attention for her work as a solo performer and as a choreographer of original solo and ensemble works that combine tradition with innovation. Trained in the Tanjavur school of Bharatanatyam from age four by her mother Viji Prakash, Mythili continues her dance education in Chennai under the tutelage of celebrated Bharatanatyam exponent Malavika Sarukkai.

A recipient of numerous awards and honors in India and the USA, she has performed at major festivals and venues all over North America, Europe, and Asia. Her 2013 collaborations include Yashodhara with Gowri Ramnarayan, Svatantrya with Anoushka Shankar, and the multimedia dance and musical theatre work MARA conceptualised, scripted, and composed in collaboration with her brother Aditya Prakash. www.mythiliprakash.com.

A dancer, storyteller, and choreographer, Rajika Puri is trained in Bharatanatyam and Odissi. Rajika performed internationally for many years in traditional solo recital, including a command performance for the President of Mexico. Since 1986, when she played the dual role of ‘Narrator/Kali’ for a Lincoln Center production directed by Julie Taymor (of Lion King, and Spiderman fame), she has had an active career in western theatre, particularly in classical theatre.

In 1987, she began to develop a form of danced storytelling in which she sings or chants in Sanskrit and narrates an English text as she dances. Evening-length works like TAPASYA: Ascetic Power and Tales of the Ganges (2009) unfold a theme through choreographed dances set to “new” Indian music and danced stories from Indian myth. A solo show entitled,

-MALIKA: a garland of danced stories on the feminine divine in India was presented Off-Broadway (New York City, 2008).

In 2011, Rajika gave a “Ted India”presentation on ‘The Importance of Myth’, which includes two danced stories.

An M.A. in the Anthropology of Human Movement (New York University), Rajika also lectures and writes about Indian theatre and dance.

in which she sings in ancient Greek is her first non-Indian story. http://www.facebook.com/rajijkapurianddancers.

Contributors

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Kalpana Raghuraman

Kalpana Raghuraman is an European contemporary choreographer who also holds a Masters degree in Cultural Anthropology (University of Leiden, the Netherlands).

In her work, Kalpana questions the centralisation of contemporary dance coming from the ‘west’ and simultaneously strongly questions the thought process in Indian choreography and the way Indian dance choreographies are created. Hence, her work is an artistic view which is enriched by both Asian and European aesthetics yet adheres to the rules of neither.

As an artist in residence at the Korzo theater (the Netherlands), Raghuraman has created several pieces of work with classical Indian and contemporary dancers. In the Netherlands, Raghuraman is known for her pioneering work on the dance scene, and is now making her mark internationally.

Sukanya Rahman

Sukanya Rahman, dancer and visual artist, was born in Kolkata. She studied painting at the École National des Beaux Arts in Paris on a French government scholarship and at the College of Art in Delhi. She carries on her grandmother Ragini Devi’s and her mother Indrani’s dance tradition.

Sukanya has toured internationally performing solo in Odissi, Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam, and in joint concerts with Indrani. She has performed in the US at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Lincoln Center, Asia Society, and in the UK at the Edinburgh Dance Festival.

The winner of numerous dance fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sukanya is also the author of a memoir Dancing in The Family published by Harper Collins, India.

Sukanya and her playwright husband Frank Wicks, divide their time between an island in Maine and the Yucatan in Mexico. They have two sons and two grandchildren. www.sukanyarahman.com.

Kalpana Ram

Associate Professor, Dr. Kalpana Ram lectures on power and performance in India, gender, social movements and embodiment at the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Australia, where she is also the Director of the India Research Centre. She has published


(Allen and Unwin 1990, Kali for Women 1991), a study of a fishing community in Kanyakumari District, Tamil Nadu, and has co-edited two influential collections: Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and

(Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Borders of Being: Reproduction in Asia and the Pacific (University of Michigan Press, 2001). Her most recent book, Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern (University of Hawaii, 2013) explores rural women’s interactions with modernization projects, and then analyzes spirit possession practices to discover what new light they shed on women’s lives and wider issues of social theory, politics and justice.

Nandini Ramani

Bharatanatyam exponent, teacher, choreographer, and writer on dance, Nandini Ramani carries forward two illustrious legacies, one of her renowned father, Sanskrit scholar, Dr. V. Raghavan and the other, her teacher, the legendary T. Balasaraswati. As Managing Trustee of Dr. V. Raghavan Center for Performing Arts, Nandini propagates the varied aspects of Indian culture and heritage. Well trained in Carnatic music under Prof. B. Krishnamurti and T. Mukta, she values the inter-relationship between music and dance.

As Secretary of Samskrita Ranga, Nandini continues her father’s mission of producing Sanskrit drama on stage by acting, directing, and staging these plays at renowned venues across India over five decades. She has successfully incorporated dance technique into Sanskrit drama, thus enriching other aspects of total theatre. Nandini has been a former Secretary of the Madras Music Academy, former Executive Board member of the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi, Expert Member of the Ministry of Culture and Central Dance Audition Board, DD, New Delhi

Nandini is the recipient of the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, Natya Kala Sikhamani from The Indian Fine Arts Society, and Kala Seva Bharati from Bharat Kalachar, among several others from well-known cultural organizations. She has two publications on dance.

Anita R. Ratnam

Dr. Anita R. Ratnam, based in Chennai, India, is highly respected as a performer, writer, speaker and arts entrepreneur and culture mentor. Her four decade career, with over 1000 performances in 27 countries, intersects the varied disciplines of dance, theatre, storytelling, feminist

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themes, arts production, music and costume design. Dr Ratnam’s Neo Bharatam repertoire distills the classical dance traditions of her Bharatanatyam training with a focus on ritual traditions reinterpreted for the modern concert stage. Using voice, singing, Vedic hymns, drumming, contemporary mythology and devised movements, her various choreographies include SEVEN GRACES, MA3KA, A MILLION SITAs and NEELAM. Dr Ratnam is a member of the Executive Board of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, India’s largest apex body for the performing arts, the ICCR, India’s Government panel to select performers for international tours, a fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a voting member of the Dance Critics Association, USA.

Malavika Sarukkai

Intense, extraordinary and luminous are the qualities that distinguish Malavika Sarukkai‘s dancing. With her artistic mastery and technique, she commands a presence on the world stage. She is acclaimed globally for her creative dance choreographies, which cerebrate and celebrate taking the viewer to the heartbeat of dance, beyond specific geographies.

As a passionate, path-breaking Indian dancer, she has contributed a significant and large body of work. Her collaborative productions have synergized through dialogues with artists from different media – poets, musicians, painters, sculptors and contemporary writers. These interactions bring to her choreographic interpretations the incandescent beauty of the classical language and the energized articulation of a contemporary mind. Sarukkai’s work is fêted by critics, connoisseurs and the general public.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria

A poet, writer and translator Priya Sarukkai Chabria is a recipient of the Indian Government’s Senior Fellowship to Outstanding Artists in Literature. Priya edits Poetry at Sangam (www.sangamhouse.org). Her books include Dialogue & Other Poems (Sahitya Akademi, 2005), Not Springtime Yet; Poems (Harper Collins, 2009), fiction Generation 14 (Penguin-Zubaan, 2009), The Other Garden (Rupa & Co., 1995) and most recently, literary essays Bombay/Mumbai: Immersions with photographer Christopher Taylor (Niyogi Books, 2013). Her work is in journals like Soundings (UK), South Asian Review (USA), Alphabet City (Canada), Post Road (USA), India International Centre, The British Journal of Literary Translation (Australia) etc., websites


etc. and anthologies Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from The Beyond (Norton, 2008), The Literary Review (USA, 2009), The Harper

(India, 2012) etc. Priya’s work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Hindi,

Italian and Tamil. She has been invited to the Frankfurt Book Fair, The Writer’s Centre (UK), UCLA (USA), Jaipur Literature Festival, Kala Goda Festival of Arts (Mumbai) among others, and has co-curated two seminars for the Indian Academy of Literature. The Autobiography of a

translations of 9th century Tamil mystic Aandaal’s songs in collaboration with poet Ravi Shankar is forthcoming with Zubaan. More at www.priyawriting.com.

Rajashree Shirke is a respected guru, an acclaimed academician, a famed creative choreographer, a gifted writer and an awarded actor. A performer par excellence, she has imbibed the technique and nuances of both Kathak and Bharatanatyam dance styles. She is the Founder-Director of the Lasya Centre for Dance Education and Research, an institute that conducts University certified Diploma courses in Kathak and Bharatanatyam.

Rajashree has been trained and groomed in Kathak by late Guru Madhurita Sarang (from Lucknow, Jaipur and Benaras Gharana) and has received guidance from Pt. Birju Maharaj. In Bharatanatyam, she has been trained under Guru Kadirvelu, Guru Thangamani Nagarajan and extensive abhinaya training from Dr. Kanak Rele.

Rajashree has performed all over India and abroad in most of the reputed national dance festivals and has a number of creative productions to her credit that have received unanimous acclaim.

Anusha Subramanyam

Anusha Subramanyam, artistic director of Beeja, a London based dance theatre company, performs and teaches internationally. She has choreographed several performances with artists from a variety of disciplines creating work that is accessible, entertaining and thought provoking. Anusha integrates dance therapy, somatic and contemplative practices into her work. She also teaches and choreographs on “The Centre for Advance Training” (CAT) program as a subject leader for Bharatanatyam. CAT is a national program in the UK, administrated by

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DanceXchange and Sampad. Anusha’s work is diverse reflecting the world we live in including “NaAst” performed at Windsor, “From the Heart” (inspired by Anusha’s dance therapy work with physically and mentally challenged people), “Lotus Feet” duet, created and performed with Francis, learning-disabled dancer, for Anjali dance company, “Tea and Tiffin”, an interactive performance work created for the elderly and family audience. Anusha received the Asian Women of Achievement Award, 2011 in Art and Culture.

Chitra Sundaram

Chitra Sundaram is respected internationally as a distinctive exponent and voice in South Asian performance. Trained by traditional masters in the dance-theatre idiom of 20th century Bharatanatyam, her choreographic and performative practices also draw upon her research and non-traditional explorations into conceptual, textual, and physical scripts with other artists and collaborators. Her internationally acclaimed “Moham – A Magnificent Obsession” premiered to serious notice in Krishna Gana Sabha, followed by Narada Gana Sabha, during the Chennai dance season. Kartik Fine Arts featured an excerpt of her work “Skull” a.k.a “amHas – The Immortal Sin.”

A noted contributor to British dance in the 1980s, Chitra shaped South Asian dance discourse in the new millennium as editor of Pulse, the premier South Asian dance magazine in Britain. Chitra teaches South Asian dance-theatre performance methodologies at Goldsmiths College, London, and is a member of the Classical Indian Dance Faculty of the Imperial Society for Teachers of Dance. Chitra is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Sthreedom is a writing/performance/outreach project with Research & Development funding from Arts Council England.

Nirupama Vaidhyanathan

Nirupama Vaidhyanathan is a dancer, teacher, choreographer, and arts writer. She has over 200 solo performances to her credit in Afghanistan, United States and India. She trained under an impeccable lineage of gurus – Swamimalai SK Rajarathnam, Kalanidhi Narayanan and Kamala Rani.

Sankalpa Dance Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Nirupama in the San Francisco Bay area, has featured her choreography in several full-length productions. Nirupama has won grants from the California Council for the Humanities, and Theatre Bay Area for her


artistic endeavors. She documented through oral history techniques the early days of Indian classical dance in California. Nirupama has an MA degree in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a gold medalist from the University of Madras.

Rama Vaidyanathan

Rama Vaidyanathan is the foremost disciple of the legendary dancer Yamini Krishnamurty. After her arangetram (debut performance) in 1977, Rama has performed continuously and today she is one of the most sought after dancers of her generation. She is the Director of Ganesa Natyalaya in Delhi, an institution founded by her mother-in-law and Guru, Saroja Vaidyanathan. Rama has received the “Nadanamamani” title from Kartik Fine Arts, “Kalaimamani” from the Government of Tamil Nadu, and the Sanskriti Award from the Sanskriti Pratishthan. She is a top-ranking artiste with the ICCR (Indian Council for Cultural Relations) and has represented India at several world capitals.

Audiences are struck by Rama’s unique thought process and fresh approach to dance. While deeply rooted in tradition, she has evolved her own individual style without forsaking the core principles of Bharatanatyam. Critics have lauded her for her choreographic talents and her ability to harness the language of her dance form. www.ramavaidy anathan.com.

Archana Venkatesan

Dr. Archana Venkatesan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. She has received numerous grants, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies, and Fulbright. Her research interests are in the intersection of text and performance in South India, as well as in the translation of early and medieval Tamil poetry into English. She is the author of i (Oxford University Press, 2010), the forthcoming A Hundred Measures of Time (Penguin Classics, 2014) and is collaborating with Francis Clooney of Harvard University

i.

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Kapila Venu

Kapila Venu is a devoted practioner of Kutiyattam from Kerala. She is a disciple of the legendary Kutiyattam maestro Guru Ammannur Madhava Chakyar and daughter of Kutiyattam exponent G. Venu and Mohiniattam exponent Nirmala Paniker. She has been performing Kutiyattam both as a solo performer and together with the ensemble at Natanakairali and Ammannur Gurukulam in her home state of Kerala, all over India and in several prestigious international venues including Dance Hakushu, Japan, and Asia Society, New York. Her repertoire is replete with both traditional performances and new experiments. Kapila has also worked over several years under the guidance of renowned Japanese farmer/dancer Min Tanaka in Japan. She is presently the Director of Natanakairali, Research and Performing Centre for Traditional Arts. She is a visiting faculty at National School of Drama, New Delhi and Intercultural Theatre Institute, Singapore. Kapila has received the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar and the Sanskriti award among others.

Lakshmi Vishwanathan

Described as a poetic dancer and a dancer’s dancer, Lakshmi Vishwanathan, a prime disciple of Guru Kanjeevaram Elappa Pillai, is an exponent of the Thanjavur style of Bharatanatyam. Special to her technique are graceful movements, intricate footwork and evocative abhinaya. She is a trained vocalist. She is the author of several acclaimed books: Bharatanatyam – The Tamil Heritage, Kunjamma – Ode to a Nightingale, Kapaleeswara Temple, Women of Pride – The Devadasi Heritage. The Festival of India commissioned her film entitled, “The Poetry of Dance.” The Mamallapuram Dance Festival started in 1991 was Lakshmi’s brainchild.

Lakshmi has been honored with awards like Kalaimamani, Nritya Choodamani, Nritya Kala Shiromani, Natya Kala Sikhamani and the national Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. She has served on several arts committees and as Vice President of the prestigious Music Academy, Madras.

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