The Celestial Dancers

Manipuri Dance on Australian Stage

Amit Sarwal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000625509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

The Celestial Dancers: Manipuri Dance on Australian Stage charts the momentous journey of the popularization of Manipur's Hindu dances in Australia.

Tradition has it that the people of Manipur, a northeastern state of India, are descended from the celestial gandharvas, dance and music blessed among them as a God's gift. The intricately symbolic Hindu dances of Manipur in their original religious forms were virtually unseen and unknown outside India until an Australian impresario, Louise Lightfoot, brought them to the stage in the 1950s. Her experimental changes through a pioneering collaboration with dancers Rajkumar Priyagopal Singh and Ibetombi Devi modernized Manipuri dance for presentation on a global stage. This partnership moved Manipur's Hindu dances from the sphere of ritualistic temple practice to a formalized stage art abroad. Amit Sarwal chronicles how this movement, as in the case of other prominent Indian classical dances and dancers, enabled both Manipuri dance and dancers to gain recognition worldwide.

This book is ideal for anyone with an interest in Hindu temple dance, Manipur dance, cross-cultural collaborations and the globalizing of Indian Classical Dance. The Celestial Dancers is a comprehensive study of how an exceptional Hindu dance form developed on the global stage.

1 Understanding Hinduism and Vaishnavism¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205203-2

The “Hindu temple dance” or dances associated with the Hindu temple tradition were reborn in Europe and the United States with predominantly “white dancers” performing and transforming religious rituals.² Manipur's Meitei and Vaishnava dances too were first introduced to the global stage contextualized as traditional temple dancing—and referred to as “Hindu dance.”³ Lightfoot's own dance group in Australia was named the Hindu Dance Group, and as an impresario, Louise's interest was in presenting “authentic Hindu culture and art” to the Australian audience.⁴ As prelude to history, politics and religion in Manipur, this chapter dwells on the nuances of being a Hindu, of Hinduism, Vaishnavism, and the interrelationship between religion and dance as art in India.

The words Hindu, Hinduism and Hindutva have become variously charged over the past several years and have become a recurrent topic of fraught discussion in a variety of fora, both in India and abroad. Without getting caught up in the controversies surrounding the recent debates on Hindutva, a term that has since the 1990s been widely used as a marker for the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in India,⁵ let us start with the idea of the Hindu, and of Hinduism.⁶

Scholars specializing in the history of the Hindu religion and its traditions claim it is the “world's oldest religion” based on textual evidence from the Rig Veda.⁷ The knotty question of whether Hindu religious traditions arose in the Indus Valley, 3300–1300 BCE, or whether they came with the Vedic Aryans is directly pertinent to developing an understanding of how, much later, Hinduism came to and was established in Manipur.⁸ There are two major theories: the Aryan Invasion theory and the Cultural Transformation theory. According to the first theory, the Aryans invaded and their religious texts—the Vedas—became dominant in the Indian sub-continent. The second theory interprets Aryan culture and its sacred texts as part of the development narrative of the Indus Valley civilization.⁹ The commonest argument goes that since Hindus did not believe in the linearity of time before colonialism imposed it as an organizational construct on them, exact dates of Hinduism's development are unavailable. However, periods of their history have been logically inferred from textual references. Hinduism has existed in India, as a belief system and an unbroken intellectual tradition, for three thousand years. Unlike the Abrahamic religions, Hinduism is not a single religion but embraces many ancient traditions and philosophies, going back even longer. In fact, it is “no religion” in the Abrahamic sense. There is no single reference book to practice the belief systems, which are diverse and often contradict one another. The word dharma as used by Hindus refers not merely to religious or spiritual practice but also ethical daily living and denotes righteousness of thought and action.

Scottish historian and philosopher James Mill, in The History of British India, distinguished three phases in the history of India: Hindu, Muslim and British civilisations.¹⁰ This was of course a very simplistic division of a problematic timeline. The following timeline presents a brief but still more elaborate and accurate chronology of the development of Hinduism in India:

• Up to 2000 BCE: The Indus Valley civilisation
• 1500–500 BCE: The Vedic period
• 500 BCE to 500 CE: The Epics, Puranic and Classical age
• 500–1500 CE: Medieval period and the Islamic Invasion
• 1500–1757 CE: Pre-Modern period and Bhakti movement
• 1757–1947 CE: British period, Hindu renaissance and the emergence of Hindutva ideology
• 1947 CE to the present: Independent India and Hindutva ideology in politics

In her book Imagining Hinduism, Sharada Sugirtharajah has argued that Hinduism has been a central reference point in “Western consciousness” and has been defined mostly via “Western categories.”¹¹ Historians Romila Thapar and Arvind Sharma have both noted scholarly attempts made to trace a correspondence between theories of India's (Hindu) past and Biblical ones that have consistently framed it also as Hindu–Muslim polarity.¹² In 1799, for instance, Welsh orientalist William Jones pointed to the close resemblance between the classical languages of Europe and Sanskrit. He declared that the four Hindu yugas (ages)—Satya or Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali—have an affinity with Roman and Grecian ages, and those deriving from them. He placed the idea of Hindu yugas within a Biblical framework based on common or similar theistic practices. Jones observed:

We may here observe, that the true History of the World seems obviously divisible into four ages or periods; which may be called, the first, the Diluvian, or purest age; namely the times preceding the deluge… next, the Patriarchal, or pure age; in which, indeed, there were mighty hunters of beasts and men, …—Thirdly, the Mosaick, or less pure age; from the legation of Moses, and during this time when his ordinances were comparatively well observed and uncorrupted—Lastly, the Prophetical, or impure age; beginning with the vehement warnings given by the Prophets to apostate Kings and degenerate nations, but still subsiding and to subsist, until all genuine prophecies shall be fully accomplished.¹³

Nevertheless for Jones, through a Biblical lens Hinduism was an “erroneous religion” which had more to do with imagination than reason.¹⁴

Given this multiplicity of interpretations, are Hindu and Hinduism misleading terms? Hinduism, the religion, is in fact a tradition that encompasses various ideas—from the Vedic to present-day thoughts and values. The Vedic period, which was from 1500 to 500 BCE, is now known for the composition of the ritual texts, epics, Sutras, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, Upanishads and chiefly the four Vedas—the Rig Veda, the Samaveda, Yajurveda and the Atharvaveda. But the term “Hindu,” post-Vedic period, originally comes from the Sanskrit word “Sindhu“ (Sindhu River or Indus River) the region of the cultures of the Indus Valley civilisation (2500–1500 BCE).¹⁵ These people, in some ways, may have been related to the Dravidians in South India but the point is debatable, as the script and writing have yet to be deciphered.¹⁶ In The Sacred Thread, J. Brockington comments: “it must not be forgotten that the religion of the Vedas was an alien culture brought into India by the Aryans.”¹⁷ The controversial theory of an Aryan presence in India before the Indus Valley Civilisation has not been fully validated and has been debunked by some scholars and historians.¹⁸ In fact, in 1914, Sri Aurobindo discredited this theory by pointing to the exaggerated, overstated and superficial claims made in the nineteenth century by comparative philologists in favour of the linguistic commonality between the Aryan tongue and the Sanskrit language. He observed:

The first error committed by the philologists after their momentous discovery of the Sanskrit tongue, was to exaggerate the importance of their first superficial discoveries. The first glance is apt to be superficial; the perceptions drawn from an initial survey stand always in need of correction. If then we are so dazzled and led away by them as to make them the very key of our future knowledge, its central plank, its basic platform we prepare ourselves grievous disappointments. Comparative Philology, guilty of this error, has seized on a minor clue and mistaken it for a major or chief clue.¹⁹

Debate continues on the myths of origins of India and Hinduism, particularly about the extent of fusion of Aryan and Dravidian traditions. In her article “The Theory of Aryan Race and India,” Thapar has shown how Aryan theory began as an attempt to uncover the beginnings of Indian history and explain the society's mythical origins.²⁰ By using it as a framework, the roots of an Indian identity were established and later used in Hindutva politics.²¹ Upper-caste Hindus have used the Aryan lineage theory to prove their own superiority to the indigenous populations of India and equality with the Europeans. Scholars belonging to or sympathising with the lower castes in India and abroad have used it to provide “the Dalit version of history.”²²

Scholars of Hinduism have also argued elsewhere that the term “Hindu” was mostly used by Persians or Muslim conquerors to refer to the inhabitants of the areas near the Indus River and not to any religious denomination. According...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding Hinduism and Vaishnavism
• 2 The Hindu Dances of Manipur
• 3 The Making of an Australian Impresario
• 4 The Prince and his Master Drummer
• 5 The Goddess of Dancing
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index