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8. ConclusionIntroduction
A theatre in New Delhi, London, New York, Singapore... To the beat of the mardala drum, the dancer, her back to the audience, enters stage left, flowers in her cupped hands, her feet tracing small arcs as she steps forward, her torso rhythmically moving sideways, walking languidly towards the centre of the stage. She turns around herself in the chauka (square) position, stops centre stage facing the audience and begins to perform her Bhumi Pranam (Salutation to the Earth) and Mangalacharan, (Invocation), at the end of which flowers will be scattered on the stage, as an offering. On her left, downstage, there is an image of Lord Jagannath, the god enshrined at the Puri temple, garlanded with flowers, with coconut and incense offerings. On her right, the musicians and singers are seated. In the background there may be a cloth from Pipli village, famous for its appliqué work, or there may be a large photograph of one of the Orissan temples.
She wears a costume which is loosely modelled on the attire of a mahari (temple dancer), cut of a raw or white silk sari with typical Orissan patterns. She wears only silver jewellery and her make up will include heavily kohled eyes, an elaborate tilaka on her forehead and, optionally, a series of white dots all around her forehead and her eyes, down to her cheeks. She is, as far as her audience is concerned, the re-embodiment of a mahari; the whole performance will play on this ambivalence. The dancer from time to time will speak to her audience, moving to the side of the stage and using a microphone, explaining what she is about to do, translating Oriya and Sanskrit poetry into English, giving an indication of what the gestures mean, those same gestures she will use in the piece she is going to dance (1). Throughout, Jagannath will dominate the proceedings from his seat and the smell of sandalwood joss sticks will be all pervasive . The stage has been turned into a temple; the dancer beckons her audience to follow her in her worship (2).
video-clip of odissi dancer Sujata Mahapatra
What I have just described is a performance of odissi, a genre of Indian classical dance (3). Paralleling the southern bharatanatyam, odissi has been reinvented as a temple ritual to be re-enacted on the proscenium stage, performed by a dancer who takes on the persona of a mahari. The identification of odissi with ritual dancing once performed in ancient Orissan temples constitutes its allure and mystique (4). The majority of contemporary writings about odissi seems to endorse this reimagining of the history of the dance. Countless articles, penned authoritatively by reviewers, experts and practitioners reiterate odissi’s myth of origin, in magazines, newspapers and on the web (5).
Desperately seeking to be ancient…
Odissi was canonized in India as ‘classical dance’ in the late 1950s. This makes it barely half a century old. It is now taught and performed in Orissa, in major Indian cities outside Orissa, and globally, in south asian diasporic contexts (6). The history of odissi and its classicization is complex and is articulated in different registers: that of the mahari temple dancers, of the gotipua or street boy-performers, of the akhada or the gymnasia of Puri, and of the naca or the local dance practices of the Orissan villages, in a balancing act of religious ritualism and secular practice (7).
Prahlada Nataka.mp4 Village theatre performance, Orissa
*MP4 File 5.9mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
Odissi was born in the theatres of Cuttack, in the 1940s, bearing no special name and was devised as entertainment within plays (Citaristi 2001; Pani 2000). The 1940s were clearly marked, nation-wide, by the revival of bharatanatyam, and by the larger significance of this act of recuperation in cultural and political terms. Thus, odissi was fashioned by its 20th century male gurus as a paradigmatic, quintessentially female form in the ‘classical’ mode, loosely inspired by the Hindu ritualistic dance practices of the maharis. A performance aesthetic was evolved for it, modelled on the aesthetics of bharatanatyam. The latter was being constructed as the genre which most perfectly embodied Indian dance classicism, and thus became instrumental for its institutionalization. Odissi and other dance forms followed suit (Chatterjea 2004,147).
Odissi was systematized with classificatory borrowings from ancient texts on dramaturgy - the pan-Indian sastras written in Sanskrit, such as Abhinaya Darpana, but also regional texts from Orissa, such as Abhinaya Chandrika whose date will continue to remain controversial, though routinely pushed back in time as a guarantor of antiquity. Throughout, odissi classicism has been used in contrasting ways to essentialise femininity and as a marker of Oriya and Indian identity, in India and, in more complex ways, in the south asian diaspora. Thus odissi is a participant and interlocutor in local, supralocal and global dance discourses of the ‘classical’.
Most current historical narratives of odissi seek to establish neat continuities, and skillfully avoid ruptures, differences and ambiguities. Their main objective is to establish the antiquity of odissi, in an effort to give a lineage to the dance of today. The Rani Gumpha caves of the pre-Christian era and their reliefs of dancing scenes; the alasa kanyas, indolent maidens, of the Rajarani temple in Bhubaneshwar ; the voluptuous Konarak stone dancers of the Sun temple; and the Jagannath temple in Puri all mark significant moments in this reimagined ancient history. The sacred maharis and their erotic (8) rituals performed for the god enshrined in the temple, Lord Jagannath , are central to such narratives, even though the maharis’ actual input into odissi dance remains hard to quantify. The gotipuas, young boys street dancers who mimicked the sacred rituals of the maharis, dressing up like them and performing acrobatics, also play a role in this narrative and are often pitched against the maharis (9).
Photo: The Puri temple of Jagannath
Photo: The Sun temple, Konarak
Photo: Sun temple, Konarak: wheel of Surya's chariot
It is the gurus - the majority of whom were former gotipua dancers but also performers of yatra and other forms of street theatre - who are the protagonists of this dramatic tale of restoration. The gurus realized that the sacred art of the maharis might disappear forever, unless they acted fast and together, so the story goes. Never mind about the maharis themselves - out of the temple, poverty had corrupted them and they were seen as no better than prostitutes. But their art was sublime. Thus the gurus began to work on the dance in earnest, teaching girls from respectable families, some of whom, as for example the late Sanjukta Panigrahi (acknowledged by all as one of the greatest odissi exponents of our time) went on to become dancers of international repute. Working together with scholars, the gurus refined and redefined their craft, found a name for it - odissi (that is, 'from Orissa') - and turned it into one of the classical genres of Indian dance, fighting off some initial resistance from the bharatanatyam reformers who would rather see odissi as an offshoot of bharatanatyam (10). This whole endeavour was inscribed in the artistic revival and reconstruction of post-independence India and its rhetoric, where each region’s creative arts were being rediscovered and brought to attention, nationally and internationally.
The story has a happy ending, at least for some of the people involved, who acquired wealth and status. In this search for antiquity, sometimes instead of beginning with Rani Gumpha, the story starts with the Indus Valley: the Harappan bronze statuette of a bejewelled woman in a pose described as proto-tribhanga is presented as evidence that odissi is pre-Vedic and wholly indigenous. Sometimes the rivalries between the gurus are downplayed or highlighted, depending on the circumstances - some of them ‘made’ it, others did not, and this caused, inevitably, bitterness and jealousy and accusations of being inauthentic.
Photo: Tribhanga demonstrated by Rekha Jena
But the gurus could not have done it all without the scholars’ support. The scholars unearthed manuscripts (and occasionally attributed to them greater antiquity than warranted (11), found references to the odissi technique in old Sanskrit manuals with a resulting Sanskritization of the dance (and attempted ‘brahmanization’ , though never as successful as that of the southern bharatanatyam), helping to connect temple sculptures with dance movements, in sum, following the agenda of rewriting a suitable history of odissi, once more to make it respectably ancient. In the official history of the dance, odissi and ritual are intertwined and almost interchangeable: odissi is seen first and foremost as a banned temple ritual and this is central to its mystique, which contributes to the way odissi has been marketed on the urban and international performance circuit.
Photo: Palm leaf manuscript
Yet the real history of odissi is more interesting and exciting than its myth of origin. As mentioned earlier, the dance was actually born in the theatres of the city of Cuttack, in Orissa, in the mid-1940s. Until then there had been no odissi and it would take at least another 15 years before the name odissi began to acquire some currency, finally validated at the end of the 1950s. What happened is that a number of musicians, former street dancers and actors, began working together. These were people who had been exposed to dance from outside Orissa - such as the dance of pioneer modern dancer Uday Shankar at Almora and the resurgent bharatanatyam and kathakali in the South - and were receptive to the major changes that were sweeping across the country. Dance numbers were added, for entertainment, to the plays performed in the Cuttack theatres, in an attempt to attract larger audiences. Among the people involved in the Cuttack theatre movement and who later formed the Jayantika group, led by Kalicharan Pattnaik, were Pankaj Charan Das, Kelucharan Mahapatra and his wife Laxmipriya, Durllav Chandra Singh, Hariharan Rout and a number of others (cfr Chatterjea 2004, 151). It was in the Cuttack theatres that what later became important compositions of odissi were actually created: among them was the Dashavatar (The Ten Incarnations of Vishnu), performance of which has now become de rigueur in most odissi dance recitals, choreographed and re-choreographed by a number of dance masters (Citaristi 2001, 71-73).
Kelucharan Mahapatra went on to become the most famous and the best established among the gurus of odissi, honoured by the Government of India, the Orissa State Government and a number of international learned bodies and organizations and acclaimed on his tours to Europe and the US. He trained thousands of dancers among whom the great Sanjukta Panigrahi, said by all to be the ‘quintessentially’ Kelucharan’s dancer, best representing his choreographic style. Kelucharan Mahapatra, affectionately known as Kelu Babu, was of a low caste family with no music or dance background, from Raghurajpur, a village near Puri which is home primarily to chitrakaras or makers of patachitra paintings. Kelu Babu danced as a gotipua when he was a boy and learnt to play the mardala drum and the tabla, which was later to be a great asset for him as a composer and choreographer of odissi.
Photo: Sanjukta Panigrahi (Photographer unknown)
Pankaj Charan Das, was also a famous guru of odissi, though never as successful as Kelu Babu, whom he initially taught (or so it is recounted). Pankaj Charan Das came from a mahari family and it is often said that he taught the mahari style of odissi. He has been turned into a mythical last representative of a lineage of temple dancing (12). The obituaries following his demise in 2003 certainly seized upon the mahari connection and presented him as the torch-bearer of a lost, authentic, traditional odissi, somehow playing down that he was involved in creating a new dance when he was working in the theatres of Cuttack with the other gurus. No doubt Pankaj Charan Das knew songs and tunes which traditionally belonged to the mahari’ repertoire, but it is also true that he choreographed and re-choreographed dance pieces from scratch, emphasizing male dancing and creating several new dances for himself - he was an outstanding performer, a tall and handsome man with tremendous stage presence - and for others. How much of his odissi was mahari dance will remain his best kept secret.
Some of his dazzling choreographies are also in the repertoire of dancers who never learnt from him: the pieces are so well known that they have ‘travelled’. One could say that Pankaj Charan Das taught the ‘Pankaj Charan Das’ style of odissi, just like Kelu Babu taught his own. So did Deba Prasad Das whose background was again mixed - he had been an akhada pila, akhadas being places in Puri where young men, among whom gotipuas, trained in combat and practiced body building techniques, played the mardala and danced and sang in the evenings to entertain each other, sometimes with generous consumption of bhang (13).
akhada.mp4 Demonstration of akhada training, Puri, 2003
*MP4 File 2.7mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
All these ‘styles’ of odissi are very much a modern creation, a way for the gurus to differentiate from each other’s work, but still in keeping with a set of rules which they established, more or less collectively, as they went along. Sometimes it is difficult to draw boundaries: some performers are happy to cross them, despite the efforts made by the odissi dance establishment in Orissa to maintain distinctions and to create an odissi dance canon, and more generally, ‘policing’ the form, making sure that the rules of a newly established classicism are not transgressed, constantly invoking purity and authenticity to silence any dissenting voice.
Going against the odissi canon
The earlier peaceful coexistence of the mahari/gotipua/akhada and the interaction of ritual and secular entertainment have been turned into territorial demarcations and bipolar oppositions between a refined/unrefined, traditional/non-traditional, female-owned/non-female owned, classical/non-classical, Oriya/non-Oriya odissi, through which competing local, supralocal and global identities for the dance have found expression.
There are, for example, forms of odissi, which are regarded as transgressive by the extremely conservative (and somewhat insecure) odissi dance establishment. One of such forms is the odissi fashioned by Guru Surendranath Jena.
Initially one of the younger members of the Jayantika, Guru Surendranath (Surababu) moved to Delhi in the 1960s and began to teach at Triveni Kala Sangam. He evolved his own style of odissi, recreating it from his interpretation of the dance sculptures of the Konarak temple, which provided him with a dance vocabulary in stone and which he imaginatively exploited to fashion his new dance.
Photo: Guru Surendranath Jena (Courtesy of Pratibha Jena)
Surababu recounts that the creative stimulus came to him after he travelled to Konarak in the early 1970s with one of his foreign students, Fredèrique Apfell Marglin, who was then engaged in research about the maharis of Puri. It struck him that the poses of the Konarak nata mandapa could be turned into dance movements. Until then he had taught the standard Jayantika odissi but on his return to Delhi he composed Konarak Kanti, a dance piece inspired by the dance narratives of the temple. He then began to reformulate odissi in keeping with his newer insights.
It is remarkable that Surababu did not attempt to disguise his creativity by claiming he was engaged in recovering the lost dance of a golden ancient past - a tack taken by other gurus and dancers. He went ahead with his exploration, somewhat protected by his association with Triveni and his continuous engagement with teaching - now continued by his daughters Pratibha, Rekha and Rama Jena and his son Nirmal.
Photo: Pratibha Jena at Triveni
All the odissi gurus claim to have been inspired and guided by Orissan temple sculpture in their remaking of odissi. So, in what way is Guru Surendranath Jena’s odissi different? The divergence from other odissi styles (or schools) is significant. The main difference arises from the way he converted the sculpted poses into codified movement units and vocabulary.
Typically, in all odissi styles, the iconic poses of the Orissan temple sculptures are linked together through the footwork and gestural language devised by the Jayantika group for the dance, whereby the poses become ‘highlights’ of a dance sequence. In Guru Surendranath’s style, the poses themselves are dynamically stretched and energised, deriving a complex movement unit from the manipulation of the initial static pose. He achieves this by reimagining the ‘missing portions’ of the movements frozen in the sculptures of the Konarak nata mandapa. In his odissi, the basic movement vocabulary is provided by twenty-four dance movement units, all originating from the Konarak temple.
These units can be further divided into sub-units involving movements of the upper part of the body and movements of the lower part of the body. This process of segmentation and re-assemblage can be more easily visualised if one imagines a horizontal axis along the circumference of the waist cutting the body into a top and a bottom half, and intersecting with a vertical axis which coincides with the straight spine and divides the body into a left and a right half. This imaginary partitioning of the body provides a three-dimensional geometric structure and a planar grid for the projection and extension of each sculpture and its movement.
Guru Surendranath has named his movement units borrowing the nomenclature from the silpa sastra (treatises dealing with sculpture and architecture) rather than the dance/drama treatises. Scholar Kapila Vatsyayan, who was for many years one of Guru Surendranath Jena’s students, and among the first to appreciate his iconographic insights and the plasticity of his movements, has discussed his work, in conversations I had with her during my field trip of 2004 in Delhi in terms of karana units. Each unit devised by Guru Surendranath is a karana, but not in the sense of being a reconstruction of any one of the 108 karanas listed in the Natyasastra and seen in the reliefs of the Southern Indian Chidambaram temple, among others. The karanas of Guru Surendranath are conceptual, in keeping with the definition of karana given in the sastras (14), but materially new.
The conceptualisation of dance units based on the Konarak sculptures is not the only distinctive feature of Guru Surendranath Jena’s odissi. Because of the iconicity he visualised for the dance, his basic tribhangi and chauka, the two main stances of odissi, involve deeper bends than seen in other odissi styles. The chauka in particular is performed through a slow lowering movement from middle to low level, down to a squatting position and rising again to mid-level. This is done while retaining the equidistant sideways position of the bent legs, in order to form a square - a chauka - and involving simultaneous side shifts of the torso. His tribhangi is again based on a clear shift of the torso from the central vertical axis, in a way other styles of odissi would regard as exaggerated. Another important feature is the raising and lowering of the body while dancing, creating an undulating effect through a continuous change of level.
Photo: Jaya Chattopadhyay demonstrates chauka
Jaya.mp4 demonstration
*MP4 File 580kb download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
There are also other differences, which have turned Surababu’s odissi into a ‘transgressive’ dance form and which are perceived as somewhat threatening. I remember clearly how my interest in Guru Surendranath’s work was greeted with a horrified look, by one of the First Ladies of the form in Orissa, followed by the melodramatic statement “That man should be jailed for what he has done to odissi!” as he had broken all the “age old” rules of this “tradition” of dance. And in Delhi, a well-meaning dancer thought I needed better guidance in my research as I had obviously not understood that there was only one odissi, and that was Guru Kelucharan’s: “You are wasting time, these forms are not classical, I will put you in touch with the real exponents of odissi” she declared. In saying this, they were both taking sides in the context of the rivalries internal to the odissi dance world, and were doing this through invoking Tradition, presenting it to me as immutable and perennial.
What gets the odissi establishment ruffled? Several things. Unlike other odissi gurus, Surendranath Jena does not believe in choreographing dance-dramas, which require groups of dancers and a certain kind of acting, which in his view lacks subtlety. Instead, he favours the solo performance, which can have a strong narrative and dramatic content without deploying the dance-drama kind of acting. Worse still, in the view of his many critics, Guru Surendranath has choreographed dance pieces in which the abhinaya (acting) explores in full force the raudra and bhibatsa sentiments (fury and disgust) rather than just suggesting them. This is seen as a serious blow to the notion of odissi as quintessentially feminine, beautiful and sensuous, and it has been dismissed not as merely ‘non-classical’, but as positively ‘anti-classical’ and a subversion of the very notion of odissi classicism. When I raised this with Guru Surendranath, he reminded me of the Chausat Yogini temple at Hirapur (the temple of the sixty-four yoginis) which has inspired him as much as Konarak. Hirapur’s iconographic renditions of the different moods and aspects of the tantric yoginis include imagery of horror and fear (15). So, the concern of Surababu’s critics may be deeper: tantrism is itself a transgressive religious movement (16), and in Orissa it has strong links with older indigenous witchcraft practices. This is definitely a ‘no-go’ area, totally against the sanitized version of religion which the Oriya Hindu middle classes strive to project .
Photo: Hirapur, Chausat Yogini temple
The history of odissi is inscribed in the broader project of modernization and classicization (in Euro-American terms) of Indian dance (Meduri 1996, Lopez y Royo 2003) of Indian dance on the whole. The dance has been shaped by the different dance discourses in the subcontinent and their entanglement with political power. For example, when ‘appropriation’ was raised as an issue, in the late 1970s and 1980s, in the context of bharatanatyam - appropriation of the dance which rightfully belonged to the devadasis of the South at the hands of middle class Brahmin women, such as Rukmini Devi Arundale, the founder of the Kalakshetra school (Allen 1997) - the history of odissi also began to be written in terms of appropriation, with dispossessed maharis looming large in the picture. Maharis were indeed dispossessed but not exactly of their dance, as there was, in practice, very little left of it. Even scholars earlier actively involved in the search for a mahari lineage of the dance later began to invoke some caution: “the idea that Odissi evolved and was nurtured in the temple of Lord Jagannath at Puri is partially incorrect” writes Jiwan Pani, an Oriya expert of odissi music and dance, “ what was being danced in the temples, including that of Lord Jagannath at Puri was basically ritualistic in character” (Pani 2000,147). But maharis have become symbols of odissi and odissi has been re-fashioned in their image, re-imagined as a mahari ritual - and this remains true regardless of all claims arising from time to time that this odissi one sees today is entirely based on the gotipua imitation of the dance of the mahari and it is thus ‘inauthentic’.
Maharis and contemporary Odissi performance
Maharis were women in the service of the temple of Jagannath, in Puri. Dedicated to the temple from a young age, they were married to the god. Their main duty was to sing and dance ritually at specific times of the day and evening. Whereas in Southern India the devadasis were banned from the temples in 1947, as they were perceived to be associated with prostitution, in Puri they continued until the early 1960s to perform their seva (service) in the temple. The practice died of its own accord because of the enormous political, economic and social changes that took place and the pressure on maharis to discontinue their seva (service):
the view of the devadasis as morally degenerate women and of the royal courts and the kings as the instruments of this degeneration solved a contradiction for the nationalist elite who were concerned with the “revival of Indian arts”. The attitude of revivalists in Orissa had a definite effect on the devadasis of Puri (Marglin 1985,29).
Marglin’s Wives of the God King (1985) based on her research in Puri in the late 1970s marked an important moment in reappraising the mahari. Until then maharis had been regarded with a sense of embarrassment by the nationalist reformers. Marglin, an anthropologist, trained in odissi with Guru Surendranath Jena to performance standard and later went to Puri toconduct research about the maharis. Through her work, the role of the maharis as ritual specialists of traditional Orissa was better understood, with a new emphasis given on their sexuality and its auspiciousness, connecting maharis with tantric practices. Though married to Jagannath, the maharis were closely involved with the king, who was the earthly representative of their husband. They were associated with palace rituals, as well as temple rituals. Marglin identifies the maharis as “the auspicious married women” (17) and views them from the perspective of the “values of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness” from which “women are seen in a very different light. They are creators and the maintainers of life, the sources of prosperity, well-being and pleasure” (Marglin 1985, 300). This she contrasts with the earlier “exclusive binary opposition” of purity/impurity which until then had dominated most work on Indian ritual practices.
Marglin’s study was timely and significant. This reappraisal of maharis was not however intended as an act of restitution of odissi to the maharis. Marglin eschews a discussion of odissi, solely focusing on mahari rituals. What actually transpires from her account is that odissi and maharis do not really belong to each other. Marglin lived among maharis of old age, for long periods, and was told by them when in the old days, specific dances would be performed as part of the various rituals in the temple and at court (Marglin 1985, 171-175). She also, apparently, learnt a couple of dances from one of the maharis. These dances are however never described in her book. What is clear, from Marglin’s writings , is that maharis sang together with their dancing (18). It seems that the dancing itself was of the abhinaya type - or “performing bhav” as the maharis would say (Marglin 1990, 220), referring to an emotional and intellectual state rendered through gesture and glance.
Odissi was being created anew as a re-imagined mahari ritual and the maharis were apparently excluded from this process, though at least one or two maharis were active participants in the revivalist movement (Marglin 1985, 30-31). Whether this should be construed as an act of appropriation is arguable - the situation is much more complex then this notion of appropriation would entail. Leaving aside the issue of the stigma attached to maharis, which caused a number of them to change status and sever links with Puri even before the odissi reConstruction was in full swing - the 1955 census reports only thirty devadasis in the Jagannath temple (Marglin 1985, 25), it is worth considering some of the practicalities involved. By the end of the 1950s maharis had virtually ceased to dance and their daughters were not being trained in the hereditary practice but were studying in schools and trying to move out of Puri. The only maharis left in Puri were no longer in their prime. As odissi was a new invention, old maharis making up the rules of what was essentially a form unknown to them could have been problematic. Maharis did not have a ‘dance’ (as in stage dance) repertoire as such, they knew abhinaya songs and their abhinaya was in a style which did not suit the proscenium stage. Maharis had no theatrical experience and odissi, the new dance, had been born out of the theatres and was meant for the stage, not for the temple; the gurus, including Pankaj Charan Das, were reinventing it, keeping an eye on other dance developments at a pan-Indian level.
Conversations I had in summer 2003 in Bhubaneshwar with dancers and odissi gurus, including Guru Gajendra Panda, a disciple of the late Guru Deba Prasad Das, pointed to this: the space available for dancing in the temple was rather small; the maharis could not perform an elaborate nrtta within such constraints; thus it was most unlikely they would have substantial nrtta pieces in their repertoire which could be used outside the temple. Abhinaya pieces, when performed on the modern stage, need to be stretched and interspersed with high-wrought nrtta, to fill the space. Gotipuas and akhada pila on the other hand had had a rigorous body training, involving acrobatics, which could be adapted to the new dance.
Photo: Guru Gajendra Panda with one of his youngest students
Odissi is a composite dance and one should be wary of establishing continuities, in an effort to guarantee historical authenticity. I am obviously not denying that maharis had a repertoire of ritual dances but I am skeptical with regard to their nrtta content, unconvinced that their bhav found its way into odissi without substantial theatrical changes and even less sure, unlike what is commonly assumed, that old maharis, who had stopped dancing altogether by the 1950s, could later fully remember their repertoire and pass it on ‘as it was’. It is never entirely clear what exactly the full dance repertoire of the maharis looked like and what it consisted of: Roy maintains, for example, that maharis also performed dance dramas but does not provide sufficient details.
The issue of the relationship of odissi with mahari dancing remains open to controversy and it is worth reviewing some of the arguments. Citaristi, for example, who trained with Guru Kelucharan and then went on to research the dances of the maharis, has endeavoured to describe their training and her sources were Harapriya Devi and Kokila Prabha Mahari, interviewed when still alive but definitely well past their prime. She also relies on information taken from textual sources, such as the Madala Panji (though she does not give details of which manuscript she used). The Panji is a text of uncertain date though some scholars believe it to be earlier than the 18th century (Kulke 2001,8). Citaristi also refers in her account to an 18th century manuscript by Lavania Mahari – whose provenance she does not discuss (Citaristi 2002, 15-23). Thus it is not very clear to what period the training described refers to. In any case, the description of the ‘training’ is nothing more than a description of the rituals involved in establishing a relationship with the dance master and the rules of propriety a mahari should follow. Description of dances in Citaristi’s essay is minimal - here is an example:
{when the midday meal started} the performance usually consisted of nrtta (rhythmic dance) accompanied by the sound of the pakhawaj (percussive instrument) without any melody or song…the dancer would at the beginning execute a triple turn to be able to offer a triple obeisance to both God and King. The devotees present would stand and watch from the two sides (Citaristi 2002,17-18).
This passage only tells us that the maharis danced to the pakhawaj and executed a triple turn but we remain in the dark about the actual mode of rendition.
Uttara Asha Coorlawala is of the opinion that odissi and mahari dance are distinct and that mahari dancing is wholly defunct. However, on the basis of her first hand knowledge of the dance and of odissi dancers in the 1970s, she believes that we can see glimpses of the richness of the full fledged mahari dance repertoire, comprising both nrtta and abhinaya in “the style codes and movement grammars, inherited from his mother” that Pankaj Babu taught. This would be especially evident in the panchakanya series of dances (inspired by the stories of five women, including Draupadi, from the Indian epics) that Ritha Devi, a known disciple of Pankaj Babu, used to perform and which exhibited a female quality “that other Odissi does not have” (Coorlawala 2004, email communication).
With due respect for Coorlawala’s scholarship, I remain unconvinced. We know that Guru Pankaj, more than on his knowledge of the mahari tradition relied on his own creativity, through which that knowledge was filtered, to make his work. I have never seen the panchakanya choreography as danced by Devi, so I cannot comment on it, but it seems clear that it was adapted by Pankaj Babu for the stage (perhaps choreographed anew?) – how much adaptation and polishing was involved we cannot gauge. An experienced performer such as Devi would, moreover, further nuance the rendition of the piece. The female quality “that other Odissi does not have” may well be due to the performer, who interpreted the piece through her late twentieth century woman’s sensibility, rather than being an inherent quality of the dance as taught by Pankaj Babu.
Recently, Frederique Apfell Marglin has also lent her authoritative opinion on the question of odissi and its relationship with mahari dancing, oddly endeavouring, on one hand, to mark a distinction, and on the other, to establish a neat continuity. As mentioned, in her 1985 work she does not engage with the recent history of the refashioning of odissi, whereas in a recent article she begins by giving a brief account of the origin of odissi dance. Glossing over the events which took place in Cuttack during the 1940s, she reiterates that odissi grew out of the dance of both gotipuas and maharis (19) and maintains that among the first gurus appointed by the State Academy for Dance and Music in Bhubaneshwar in the 1950s-1960s were a number of gurus who had taught both maharis and gotipuas, among whom her guru Surendranath Jena (20). The dance of the gotipuas and that of the maharis did not differ much in form, she claims, only in purpose, which in the case of the maharis was exclusively ritualistic:
the musical form, the hand gestures and body movements {of odissi}remained pretty much the same. What changed was the repertoire and the details of the choreography. The dance of the devadasis was segmented into much shorter items to suit the attention span of the theater audiences (Marglin 2003,4).
But would such changes not be already fairly substantial?
That some old Puri gurus, such as the late Mohan Mahapatra, taught both maharis and gotipuas was also reported by Dhirendra Patnaik in his first book on odissi (Patnaik 1971,61) and this makes the connection between the so-called mahari style with that of the gotipuas perhaps more fluid than usually warranted, with some possible overlaps. Nevertheless, the dancing style could not be quite the same, if only because the bodies of the dancers differed and also, to a great extent, their training - gotipuas were young boys schooled in acrobatics, whereas even from the scant descriptions given of mahari rituals, it seems most unlikely they would perform the acrobatic feats for which gotipuas were known and admired. Also, the difference in purpose noted by Marglin would be reflected outwardly, in the way the movements were articulated by the dancing body.
Marglin goes on to consider in great detail the rituals performed by maharis at the Puri temple, at the time of the midday food offering and in the evening, when the deities are about to go to sleep. Like Citaristi, she only tells us that the mahari faced south during the midday ritual, which was performed in the dance hall, and that she danced to the sound of a pakhawaj between food offerings placed on her right and left (Marglin 2003, 5-6), watched by a large crowd of devotees. The dancing as such is not discussed but the liturgical significance of the midday and evening rituals are, by contrast, dwelled upon at some length. In the late 1970s Marglin was initiated as disciple by K.C. Rajaguru, one of the elderly Brahmin priests of the Puri king, known as purohitas, the “overseers” of all the sevas at the Jagannath temple. K.C. Rajaguru taught Marglin about the esoteric content of the mahari dance rituals (the women themselves would not apparently divulge this secret teaching to anyone): the midday and evening dance are a maithuna, a form of sexual intercourse. As she performs the rituals, the mahari turns into a goddess (calanti devi) and stimulated by her own movements she sheds (?) on the ground her sexual fluids and sexual essence (or sakti ucchista). This sexual union with the god is her seva which ensures the well being of the kingdom (Marglin 2003,4-9; cfr. Marglin 1985).
After bemoaning the disappearance of this seva and, consequently, the disappearance of a "feminine presence" in the performance of the rituals of the Puri temple, an event which would signal a "serious patriarchal turn" and the severing of an "uninterrupted link" with "Goddess-centred religions" across Asia and Europe, Marglin ends by wishing for odissi to be the vehicle for the ritual efficacy of the lost seva, to be thus passed on to contemporary audiences:
The dance as an artistic performance still preserves the power of that ancient form but the efficacy of its enactment is now entirely at the whim of each witness to the performance. Let us hope that the transformative power of the temple dance is evoked in some among the audience who can open themselves to receiving the blessings of the goddess (Marglin 2003, 8).
What we have here is the very interesting phenomenon of a secular dance, whose sources are most varied, being classicized and refashioned to reflect a re-imagined temple ritual – though clearly not equivalent with it - with the dancer taking on the persona of a temple dancer. The set repertoire of an odissi performance is made up of dances of offering, nrtta pieces built around complex cross-rhythms, abhinaya pieces choreographed on the verses of the Gita Govinda, an erotic devotional poem in Sanskrit about the divine lovemaking of Radha and Krishna, Oriya devotional poems and a final piece called mokshya, liberation, a nrtta which in its cadences attempts to convey the movement to soul liberation and serenity. Temple songs, street dancing, sculpturesque poses inspired by the rich imagery of Orissan temples, folk songs and tunes: they all went into today’s odissi, as well as aesthetic developments derived from other Indian classical dances (21). Nevertheless the odissi/mahari equation still holds strong, at all levels, playing down the input from other sources.
It is also important at this juncture to be aware that odissi embodies Oriya sensibilities and reflects Oriya nationalism and Oriya identity and this complements and runs parallel with its identification as an Oriya temple ritual. An interesting co-development of odissi was the research focused on Jagannath by the Oriya School of the 1970s, with its work focused on the culture of Puri, attempting to go beyond the local to participate in a pan-Indian discourse. These newer studies on Jagannath “seem to have evolved into a full fledged project with Jagannath as a metaphor of Orissa’s multifaceted culture” (Kulke 2001,12). The odissi dance culture, with its emphasis on Jagannath, partakes of this.
Situating odissi between the global and the local
Odissi as the-dance-of-the-mahari-of-Lord-Jagannath continues to play on the ambiguity and ambivalence of a ritual and exotic spectacle, when performed out of its Oriya home. In Orissa itself there is no real theatre-going audience and odissi is either performed at state functions, tagging along at the end of so-called cultural programmes - or it is performed at international festivals such as the winter one at Konarak, a major tourist attraction, or it is performed at five star hotels, to an audience of non-Oriya visitors.
In the past twenty years there has been a whole movement within Indian dance which has attempted to subvert the dominant notion of dance classicism and has tried to go beyond parameters set by traditionalists resulting in vibrant and influential work. From the 1980s onwards there has been a sustained attempt , originating in the cities, at breaking regional boundaries in terms of dance forms (e.g. bharatanatyam usually seen as southern, hence to be performed by southerners, now performed by non-southerners etc.) and working with the classical dance vocabulary, going beyond traditional themes, no longer upholding a notion of tradition as static and immutable.
This movement , very strong in the context of bharatanatyam and kathak - one only has to think of the work made by Chennai based Chandralekha and Kumudini Lakhia , from Ahmedabad, for bharatanatyam and kathak respectively, has only just begun to touch odissi. There is a serious attempt to work with group dancing rather than the solo form and tentatively, some non-Oriya odissi dancers are working creatively within the classical format, moving away from the mahari-inspired ‘ritualistic’ odissi, but retaining its aesthetic conventions (22). I should make it clear, at this juncture, that I am in no way condemning what has now become, in the course of nearly six decades, ‘traditional’ odissi. It is a breathtakingly beautiful dance form, rich and complex. I am a great admirer of the work of the odissi gurus, who made this richness and complexity possible. But my enchantment with odissi does not stem from a fascination for an exotic temple ritual performed by an exotic dancer (cfr. Curda 2003).
What appeals to me is the perfection of its formal structure as a dance and its immense, still largely untapped creative potential, beyond the imagined ritual fiction. Dancers can continue to invoke Krishna and turn themselves into heroines longing for their lord’s cooling touch and the audience can continue to revel in the melody of the odissi tunes: the magic of the performance will not be lost if the audience knows that odissi was never danced by maharis, was never a ritual dance, but was instead born out of the concerted effort of a group of very creative men and women working in the theatres of Orissa.
The reimagined history of odissi, based on a manipulation of archaeological data; its relationship with the naca or local dance practices of Orissa; its global identity; and its self-defined classicism: this chapter has attemped to address such issues. Unlike bharatanatyam, which has arguably been sanitised through its complete and absolute classicization, in so doing gradually removing it from the local but also opening the way to its relocation(s) in a global context (O’Shea 2001), in odissi the interaction of a local and supralocal identity is played out on uneven ground, through different power networks.
One hardly ever hears that to dance bharatanatyam well one has to be Tamil (or more broadly, South Indian) - if at all, the question is feebly put in terms of Indian versus non-Indian. But it is constantly reiterated, in Orissa and by Oriyas, that to dance odissi well enough one has to be Oriya. The understanding of odissi classicism that ensues is marked by the unease and insecurity generated by a situation in which the local is aggressively confronted by the supralocal and the global. Thus, on one hand people cling to reassuring notions of Oriya-ness, coinciding with an Oriya high caste and middle class socio-cultural elitism of which odissi dance is seen as an expression, on the other any reference to local, non-elite culture projected in the dance is seen as a dangerous threat to its classical status, determinedly won through a re-alignment with, and in imitation of, a hegemonic form. In this context, this hegemonic (and global) form is an ahistorical, reconstituted bharatanatyam, synecdochic of Indian culture as a whole.
There are nowadays influential non-Indian practitioners of odissi, some of whom settled in India, non-Oriya dancers and performers, of Indian and non-Indian origin, who locate themselves in the south asian diaspora, each one with a different vision for odissi. A growing number of odissi performers outside Orissa, under the stimulus of an engagement with broader theoretical issues and post-structural modes of analysis, have begun to question the established odissi classical canon, creating work which counters a reinvented and normative classicism and breaks from its straight jacketing effect. In some cases this takes the form of explicit critique of an apolitical odissi, foregrounding the dancer’s body as the site of power struggles.
The transnational relocation of odissi is ambivalently posited as a much-coveted goal as well as a challenge to the distinctive regionalism of the dance, which is in danger of being eroded and obliterated by a neo-colonial globalism. This tension between global, supralocal and local is embedded in the very articulation of the process of classicization, inscribed in the power play of social constructs of nature, culture and tradition, of ethnicity, of femininity and masculinity, and as such is reflected and embodied by the dancers themselves.
The controversy over odissi music, felt by a number of dancers outside Orissa to be still “insufficiently classical” is but another expression of this tension. Yet it would be naive to see this as a tension between an increasingly sophisticated urban classical odissi practiced outside Orissa by non-Oriyas, and a less sophisticated but equally classical, more village-rooted odissi practised by Oriyas in Orissa (23). Here, the transgressive form of odissi created by Guru Surendranath Jena seems to challenge such a polarization and demands that we review (and further nuance) our contemporary understanding of odissiclassicism, its ongoing contestation as well as its significance to the different groups and communities involved.
Forward to: 4. Dance: cross-cultural representation
Return to: 2. Dancing ancient texts and temple sculptures
Posted at Feb 09/2007 04:00PM:
Dr. Bijay Kumar Parida:Interesting indeed. Will you please leave some information about where to find some samples of pure forms of odissi songs?
