Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism

Prarthana Purkayastha

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137375179
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This book examines modern dance as a form of embodied resistance to political and cultural nationalism in India through the works of five selected modern dance makers: Rabindranath Tagore, Uday Shankar, Shanti Bardhan, Manjusri Chaki Sircar and Ranjabati Sircar.

1

Rabindranath Tagore and Eclecticism in Twentieth-Century Indian Dance

Rabindranath Tagore’s plays, poetry and dance dramas, written and performed for twentieth-century theatre and non-theatre spaces and for audiences in Bengal, are today commonly considered to be a cultural repository and the hallmark of a Bengali school, style or tradition of performance. A number of different descriptive labels for Tagore’s dance – Rabindra Nritya, Rabindrik Nritya or ‘Tagorean’ dance – simultaneously point to the indelible presence of a clearly identifiable Bengali culture, embodied and performed through dancing bodies not only in West Bengal, India, but also in Bengali communities spread across the Indian subcontinent (including Bangladesh) as well as in the international Bengali diaspora. Tagore’s vast repertoire of writing in prose, poetry and drama continues to provide material for staged and outdoor performances for a significant global population of more than 250 million people. These performances range from local community shows, for instance the para (neighbourhood) performances held in numerous venues during several festive occasions across the Bengal region in India, to community events and formal proscenium arch performances viewed by audiences both nationally and globally.

This chapter, however, is not concerned with documenting or analysing the traditions of Tagorean dance that are dutifully maintained across Bengali communities in India and the global diaspora or with the innovative dance and theatre performances that continue to grow out of Tagore’s writings in the twenty-first century, although these undoubtedly offer fascinating modes of enquiry into the politics of performing identity. Nor is this chapter interested in celebrating Tagore’s contribution to dance in India, because such celebratory acts of writing have preceded this book (for example, Banerjee 2011). Instead this chapter, following the scholarship of postcolonial theorists such as Partha Chatterjee (1993), Ashis Nandy (2004) and more recently Esha Niyogi De (2011), examines Tagore’s dance works vis-à-vis debates on twentieth-century Indian cultural and political nationalism, internationalism and transculturalism. Drawing upon archival research, oral interviews and an analysis of his letters and dance drama texts, this chapter focuses on Tagore’s peculiar position as both colonised subject and wilful agent of change whose initial critiques of both British colonial and Indian anti-colonial violence in the political domain eventually led him to stage his resistance to the Empire and to Indian nationalism through other modes – alternative pedagogic methods and hybrid dance drama forms of performance. The chapter follows Tagore’s movements and travels across regional, national and international borders during the colonial period to examine the intercultural exchanges and borrowings that shaped his writing for the stage and informed the eclectic dancing bodies he inspired. Instead of focusing on the well-known Euro-American adulation of Tagore amongst international modernist literary circles (Dutta and Robinson 1995; 1997), the chapter highlights the lesser-known local reception of Tagore’s experiments on stage, which underscore the contradictory pulls and fissures of a gendered and divided colonial Bengal. This chapter exposes the ruptures, controversies, secrecy, careful negotiations and calculated risks that constituted Tagore’s experience and journey as a modern pedagogue and artist. It critically examines the role that female bodies in his dance dramas played in reconstituting and reworking Bengali performance in the twentieth century, in turn offering an alternative yet legitimate form of dance modernity.

De-orientalising Tagore

No full-length discussion of late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Indian, and specifically Bengali, social, cultural, religious and political history can be considered complete without taking into account the contributions of the Tagore family. Dwarkanath Tagore (1794–1846) was an entrepreneur, patron and philanthropist. His son Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), called maharishi (‘great sage’), was a major figure in the Brahmo Samaj, the Hindu religious and social reform movement begun by Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) in 1825.¹ Debendranath had nine sons and six daughters. Of them, Rabindranath Tagore made his presence felt in a major way in the international literary world following the 1913 Macmillan publication of English translations of his poems and songs Gitanjali and The Gardener. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on 13 November 1913, becoming the first ever Asian to win such an accolade. His international travels and positive reception amongst modern literary circles in Europe and America sealed his image as an oriental and mystical prophet-like figure, whose poems offered a palliative for a war-torn Europe.² Yet, as poet, novelist, playwright, composer, educationist, philosopher and freedom fighter, Rabindranath had remained – if sometimes uncomfortably – embedded within the national psyche of the Indian people for at least three decades prior to the international fame, recognition and reverence he received after becoming a Nobel Laureate.

Rabindranath Tagore, along with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), was one of the most significant voices in India’s journey towards modernity and postcolonial agency. Their relationship, and the relationship that each shared with members of the Indian intelligentsia and the Indian public, was not without tensions, as highlighted in an article by Ashis Nandy (2004), which discusses the variant forms of nationalism that Gandhi and Tagore advocated. Tagore’s disenchantment with nationalist ideologies can be illustrated by two instances from his life. First, he had been involved with the Swadeshi movement,³ and in 1905 he became the leader of this political movement mounted against the British-led partition of Bengal. However, in less than two years he withdrew his support, disgusted by the violence, bombings and killings advocated by other party members. Secondly, Tagore refused to support Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement in 1921, nor did he accept Gandhi’s idea of the spinning wheel (charkha) and hand-made cotton as a solution to India’s economic problems. He said to Gandhi during the latter’s visit to Shantiniketan, in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner: ‘Poems I can spin Gandhiji, songs and plays I can spin, but of your precious cotton, what a mess I would make’ (Cox 1986: 38; see also Monk and Robinson 1986). These events diminished Tagore’s prestige in the eyes of both firebrand nationalists and Gandhian supporters during his time, but he remained firm in his stance against both violent and non-consensual forms of nationalism and even gave (rather prophetic) lectures on the dangers of nationalism in Japan and the USA between 1916–17, which were later compiled and published in a book simply titled Nationalism (Tagore 1917).

We could read this as Tagore’s withdrawal from what Partha Chatterjee (1993: 6) terms the ‘outer domain’ of political contest with the British Empire in India and an intentional self-location in the ‘inner domain’ of national culture. He played an instrumental role in modernising the Bengali language, was a prolific writer of Bengali novels and short stories, created the Bengali dance drama (nritya-natya) genre of performance and composed patriotic songs (both India and Bangladesh’s national anthems were composed by Tagore). He was also a prominent artist in the field of modern art from Bengal and started his own educational institution at his Shantiniketan ashram in 1901, which in 1918 became the Visva Bharati University. His delicate and sensitive portrayal of women’s place in patriarchy in his short stories such as Nastaneer (The Broken Nest, 1901), novels such as Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1916) and dance dramas such as Chitrangada (1936) and Chandalika (The Untouchable Girl, 1938) reflect the idea of the ‘new woman’ (naba nari) that had first emerged at the time of the Bengal Renaissance, as was particularly evidenced in the literary works of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, a novelist preceeding Tagore (Kaviraj 1995). Through his literature and music, his educational institution and his art, rooted in the impulse of political self-assertion, Tagore contributed significantly to processes of both regional and national identity formation in modern India. Yet, as will be shown below, even within the inner domain of Indian national culture, Tagore carved an alternative variant space for his experimental and intercultural ideas on education and art. This differed significantly from other nationalist projects intent on safeguarding Indian culture and its products from the corrupting influences of colonialism.

A vast body of literature has been devoted to the study and analysis of Tagore’s works and aspects of his life, both in Bengali and in English. Yet when it comes to critical analysis of his experiments with the performing arts, specifically dance in Shantiniketan, there is a relative paucity of articles, essays and books published in English.⁴ Some dance scholars in India and abroad have previously recognised the contribution that Tagore’s vision made to the revival and growth of dance in India (Kothari 2003), but most stopped short of carefully examining how this was done. They also tended to ignore the interrelationship between Tagore’s modern literary works – in this context mainly his dance dramas – and their performance, as well as the performance history of the dance productions in Shantiniketan and how they related to other experiments in dance across India at that time. This silence on Tagore’s repertoire of dance works can in part be attributed to the difficulty of accessing and analysing Tagore’s dance drama texts written in the Bengali language, and in part to the Indian nationalist cultural discourse, which had no place for Tagore’s hybridity and eclecticism in its canon of ‘pure’ Indian dance tradition.

Fortunately, recent dance scholarship, primarily from female Bengali academics in India and overseas, has attempted to address this lack of attention towards a significant experience in India’s performance history. Mandakranta Bose (2001; 2009) has noticed connections between Sanskrit performance traditions and texts and Tagore’s experiments with the dance drama genre in Shantiniketan in the early 1900s. Aishika Chakraborty (2010), Urmimala Sarkar Munsi (Dutt and Munsi 2010) and most recently Esha Niyogi De (2011) have all been attentive to gender and female agency in their critical analysis of Tagore’s dance works. These scholarly writings have made significant contributions towards de-orientalising Tagore and have argued for a reconsideration of his position and legacy as a modern artist and pedagogue. This chapter adds to the current critical mass to examine in detail the local and international flow and exchange of aesthetic and political ideas during the colonial period and the effect of these on the forms of Tagore’s literary and dramatic output. To understand how revolutionary Tagore’s experiments with moving bodies were, we first need to consider the socio-cultural milieu of colonial Bengal within which Tagore lived and worked as an artist and educationist.

The early dances: international and local influences (1888–1926)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the chief forms of dance performance prevalent in Bengal were the bai naach, khemta, raibeshe and brotochaari dances and the jatras (Ghose 1983: 3; Roy Chowdhury 1943). The bai naach or the courtesan dances had the stigma of disrepute attached to them, and other forms such as the khemta, which originated in the villages of rural Bengal, were considered too unsophisticated and ‘folksy’ for the tastes of the urban middle-class Bengali. Only women who occupied subaltern or fringe spaces – those who hailed from dubious backgrounds, such as courtesans and those who came from the periphery of urban centres such as the folk performers – danced in public. Dance was not considered to be a serious art form; it was a means of pleasurable diversion for either the bacchanalian entertainments of the aristocracy or the village audience. In late nineteenth-century Bengal, to have a female member of a respectable, educated Bengali family dance in public was therefore not only unheard of and utterly unthinkable, it would be considered immoral, blasphemous and shocking. It was in such a social and cultural atmosphere that Tagore not only introduced dance to the curriculum at his newly established educational institution in Shantiniketan in rural Bengal, first for male and then for female students from middle-class Bengali families, but also had them performing on stage to his poetry and songs, often to very bad press from local newspapers. Even though the emergence of the naba nari in the socio-cultural sphere since the Bengal Renaissance had led to the higher visibility of women in the public domain, the perceptual leap from the platform occupied by the public figure of the morally depraved dancing woman from a space of disgrace to one of respect demanded that the Bengali bhadramahila (‘respectable woman’) acquire an altogether new identity in Tagore’s dance productions.

It is beyond the remit of a single chapter to discuss every single one of Tagore’s experiments involving dance or dancing bodies. Instead of providing a detailed historical account of his staged repertoire, it is useful to focus on key moments from Tagore’s career as a playwright and dance dramatist which reveal the new intercultural influences on form and thematic content that he would introduce to twentieth-century dance in India. Tagore’s own involvement with the stage as an actor dated back to his youth when he would take an active part in the plays that were written and performed by him and his brothers in the Jorasanko house, the Tagores’ Calcutta residence. Two instances stand out from this early period: first, Tagore had choreographed the dance of bandits in his first play Valmiki Pratibha, staged in Jorasanko in 1881, for which he had apparently received a lot of praise from his audience.⁵ Second, a year earlier, in 1880, he had choreographed a dance to accompany a song Ay tabey shahachari (‘Let us all dance in a round’) in a play titled Manmayi, which was written by his artist-playwright elder brother Jyotirindranath Tagore (the play was later restaged as Purnabasanta in 1899, for which Tagore choreographed a dance for the same song).⁶ Shantidev Ghose, first a student and then music and dance teacher at Shantiniketan from 1930 onwards, writes that perhaps Tagore’s experience of English social dancing during his stay in England between 1879–80 (when he briefly studied at University College London) influenced the group dances that he choreographed for these plays (Ghose 1983: 7).⁷ Tagore’s colonial education in Britain may have been brief, but within a year of his return to India, he was staging plays that brought together Sanskrit and European material both in terms of scenography and choreography of bodies to music. Tagore’s body remembered and retained influences from both European opera and social dances, which he consciously injected into his earliest theatre and dance experiments.

One of the earliest performances written by Tagore and performed by female bodies was staged on 29 December 1888: the geeti-natya (musical play) Mayar Khela was performed by an all-women cast in the Bethune School grounds in Calcutta, on the occasion of a crafts fair organised by a women’s group called Sakhi Samiti. Although there is no record of specific choreographed dance sequences in the first staging of this play, Mayar Khela was performed several times over the next two decades with the inclusion of dances inspired by Japanese and Southeast Asian dance forms (the influence of Southeast Asia on Tagore is discussed later in this chapter). Other stage events worthy of mention took place in Shantiniketan in May 1911 on the occasion of Tagore’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. Students and teachers staged his play Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber) in which some dancing featured along with acting and singing. Amongst the audience members was Sita Devi, daughter of Ramananda Chattopadhyay, a very well known Bengali intellectual and founder-editor of the journals Prabashi (1901) and Modern Review (1907). She visited Shantiniketan again in the autumn of the same year to see the staging of Saradotsav (Autumn Festival) and in 1914 saw the stage performance of another play titled Achalayatan. Sita Devi was visibly impressed on all occasions and spoke appreciatively of the performers, their acting and dancing, and especially about William Pearson’s dance in Achalayatan. Pearson (1881–1923), a Christian missionary in India to begin with and then teacher at Shantiniketan, acted and danced in another play, Phalguni, in 1916, in which Tagore himself played the part of and danced as a blind baul (‘wandering minstrel’). As suggested by these historical records, dance in the early days of Tagore’s Shantiniketan was not restricted to trained Indian bodies, but rather was viewed as an open...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Rabindranath Tagore and Eclecticism in Twentieth-Century Indian Dance
• 2 Uday Shankar and the Performance of Alterity in Indian Dance
• 3 Shanti Bardhan and Dance as Protest
• 4 Manjusri Chaki Sircar and Feminist New Dance
• 5 Ranjabati Sircar and the Politics of Identity in Indian Dance
• 6 Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index