My Arangetram - Seven Years Ago

September 11, 2020

My Arangetram - Seven Years Ago

(I started this essay on August 11th 2020 - but just finished it today!!)

Seven years ago today I completed my Bharatanatyam Arangetram.

At the time, it was a triumph against the odds. Dance was how I connected to my heritage, the one medium I had to explore and assert my identity as an Indian-American girl growing up in a small lil Georgia town. Dance introduced me to a community of girls who looked like me, had parents like mine, were fun and vibrant and confident, who weren't held back by hairy arms or a eyebrows that needed threading - girls who sometimes took their insecurities out on others, who had cliques of their own that I never quite fit into. I've learned since that no one can make you feel like you don't belong if you decide for yourself that you belong - but lil teenage me was keenly attuned to the ways she didn't fit in, the way she didn't have close friends or confidants so she really took the little reminders that she wasn't good enough at face value. Because at Kruti, being good enough and belonging were one and the same. You couldn't really be part of the community if you weren't a skilled dancer. I wasn't very good at first, which wouldn't have been a problem if I was younger but I had two years to do what girls who were much more talented did in three or four. The audacity I had back then - and a lot of stubborn willpower that I don't know if I could summon today. Looking back, I don't know which one I really wanted - did I want to mold my body and mind against rigid rules of classical dance in pursuit of an asymptotic perfection or did I just want to fit in?

Anyways I can't be too melodramatic here because I did end up making a lot of friends - friends who noticed subtle changes in me like towards the end of my first semester, I had been training at the gym three times a week, and one girl flagged me down after class to tell me that she noticed I was getting stronger, it was the first time I remember a Kruti girl complimenting my dancing. Friends who had been volunteering to teach classes to younger girls longer than I had, but welcomed me into the room with warmth and fun conversations. Friends who were the first one to stand up for me when something ridiculous happened, before I even realized it was ridiculous. Friends who made their circle at lunch a lil bigger to fit me. Friends who would come early and stay late to run extra drills with me, who would watch me with a careful eye and see exactly what I didn't realize I was missing and then gently guide me to get there.

I had these wonderful girls in my life, girls who really believed in me and cheered me on. On my big day though, and I was so afraid to admit this that I didn't tell anyone until a year later, I didn't feel like I had earned it. I didn't feel like I was good enough. I had grown so much and these girls told me how I good I had become, but I didn't let myself believe them - I thought they were just saying that I was a good dancer to be nice to me, because they were my friends now yknow? I knew I was expressive, I had a wide range of facial expressions and could emote a story with my face; I had a strong grasp of abhinaya (the art of expression) and I loved my angry, defiant shabdam and my soft, sad, nostalgic padam. It felt like there were two dimensions of our dance training, one was the raw strength and technicality which was drilled into us, the other was this expressional component that sometimes felt optional. So some pieces didn't have much abhinaya, they were all sharp angles and clean lines and flexed fingertips; looking back, I had attained mastery over these dances too but in my quest to get better, I lost sight of how far I had come. I was so focused on what I was lacking, my aramundi bouncing every once in a while or my thumb poking out of my pataka, that I couldn't appreciate the beauty my body was creating.

All this time, I thought classical dance just had harsh rules and that it was me who didn't measure up. But I've learned some new things about classical dance recently and now I'm not so sure.

The history that we were taught is this - Bharatanatyam was an ancient art handed down by the gods etc etc and devadasis were sacred temple dancers who dedicated their lives to the art. When the British took over India, devadasis lost their spiritual status and were forced into prostitution (we learned a euphemism but we got the idea). Rukmini Devi and a few other revivalists saved the dying art, cleansed Bharatanatyam of any questionable content, and then shared it with the world. I never thought to ask what happened to the devadasis.

I started reading more about the history of modern Bharatanatyam though and this story just isn't it. I'm very much still learning so this is isn't a complete revelation but I wanted to share some of what I've learned. Devadasis were beautiful, talented women who occupied an ambiguous political and social space. They danced in temples but also in the courts of local royalty, and some of them did have nonconjugal sexual relationships with powerful men. They didn't quite fit the mold of how women were supposed to be - their agency and mobility were incompatible with colonial and Indian nationalist ideas of femininity. Devadasis did start losing economic stability as the courts dissolved through British takeover, but it was Indian people, including other Indian women, who wanted them gone. There were multiple acts of legislation between the 1920s and 1940s that sought to abolish devadasis all together under the guise of protecting women from exploitation. What these efforts really did was make it impossible for devadasis to continue their traditions and way of life as they were systemically discredited and demonized by Indian society.

Around the same time, Rukmini Devi had traveled the world and learned Western classical dance - she wanted to reconnect with her roots so she studied Bharatanatyam and was the first Brahmin woman to perform it in public. Rukmini Devi's high caste privilege recast this dance as a palatable hobby for middle class girls, and she opened a school to teach her own brand of Kalakshetra Bharatanatyam, ultimately getting credited with "reviving" the art. One reading of this history is that her caste privilege allowed her to appropriate a historic dance, pick out elements that she decided were spiritual and cast out what she deemed vulgar, and then receive an international platform to disperse her work. The devadasis continued to exist though, and their descendants are still around - they're just completely shut out of the Bharatanatyam world, unable to teach or be seen as credible experts or given fair opportunities to perform. When they speak up about the exclusion, they're met with sharp criticism from the mainstream (high caste) Bharatanatyam circles. Maybe this isn't the whole story, but we never talk about how caste influences how we think about classical dance and the aesthetics it idealizes. As south asian americans grapple with BLM and racism in the United States, I think it's important for us to consider these questions of caste too.

I had never thought to question Bharatanatyam's rigid poses and had always accepted the standards that I was taught in my training. I had bought into the this "hierarchy of taste" that Davesh Soneji describes in his book Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India: "Loose limbs, footwork and mudras; or unstructured improvisation, explicit and excessive eroticism, lack of emphasis on 'proper' raga and tala - these are the aspects of devadasi performance that were and continue to be configured as in 'bad taste'." This reflection on abhinaya (the art of expression) by Yashoda Thakore discusses why maybe abhinaya was devalued by the revivalists: "the abhinaya is something nobody can replicate. Even she cannot replicate the abhinaya she has done once. So when this virtuosity could not be transported on the bodies of the upper-class girls, the next best way to gain visibility and acceptance was to make it complicated".

My dance style at its core IS closer to "bad taste" than to the aesthetic ideals laid out during my training and I had internalized that. But my research has made me question - who decides what is bad taste? It's also shown me that the devadasi style was more expressive than I realized, that my dance style actually does fit in with a tradition of sorts. For someone who has such little connection to my own family's history, it feels really special to still have a connection to the legacy of the original devadasis. It also makes me want to be more vigilant about the stories I've heard about Indian culture, more tuned in to the way caste operates invisibly and controls who has a voice, who gets to rewrite narratives. My time with BASS2020, a group of rad south asian folks working towards justice in all kinds of spheres, gave me the language and framework I needed to start critically examining casteism and hindu nationalism. I want to continue learning and unlearning how this all operates in classical dance and in the larger south asian diaspora. As an artist, I want to keep leaning into my softness.

I wanna end with some photos from my Arangetram days : ) The Navras are the nine cardinal emotions of Bharatanatyam, the building blocks for the abhinaya we use to tell our stories.

Shaant is peace.