The following is based on a seminar paper I presented at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies on 21st February 2008. It clarifies some aspects of the film and gives some detailed references to the site of Hirapur. You can download a podcast of that seminar from the OCHS website and also a .pdf of this paper.

Performing Hirapur: dancing the Sakti Rupa Yogini

© 2008 Alessandra Lopez y Royo

This paper is about research carried out from 2004 to 2006 which focuses on the interface between Indian classical dance of today, in particular the form known as odissi, from Eastern India, and Indian temples, in particular the Hirapur temple, dedicated to the 64 yoginis (1).

I will discuss the documentary film conceived and scripted by me about the odissi dance of guru Surendranath Jena (2) , and will focus in some detail on the relationship that one of his compositions, Sakti Rupa Yogini, composed by Guru Surendranath Jena in the 1970s, has with the Hirapur temple.

The documentary film on DVD is accompanied by short films of the dance performances discussed in the documentary, without any explanation or commentary. One of these is a film of a performance of the Sakti Rupa Yogini at Hirapur in 2005.

I will begin with a couple of caveats. One can watch/engage with a documentary film about dance in several ways, considering for example in some depth the technical aspects of film making, and more broadly, the issues relating to documentation and recording of dance performance on film. There is much that could be said in this context: this film is in the much criticised “expository” mode and this raises questions about the reflexivity engendered (or not engendered) in the viewer through the mode chosen and the sense it may give of privileging the word over the image. The “expository” documentary model was, in this instance, a pragmatic choice: partly inexperience, partly financial constraints, made it the only viable option – incidentally, I had planned for a series of interviews to be part of the film, but eventually these could only be uploaded on the accompanying website (3).

Thus in this documentary the chosen mode is not particularly adventurous: there is a story conveyed through a voice over by a narrator (4), and this immediately puts an explicit distance between viewers and subject, in the words of MacDougall, it seems to “circumvent the subjective experience of interiority” (MacDougall 1998, 102). Having resorted to the expository model, I was keen, however, that the voice over should be provided by a male voice, because I did not want the connection between odissi and femininity to be suggested, if only at an unconscious level, by the use of a female voice, thus reinforcing a stereotype. I also wanted a young British voice, because the documentary was made in UK, rather than in India.

But as said, such issues relating to documentation practices, though very important, are not the focus of my paper.

My second caveat is that although the film refers to religious practices and to the cult of the yoginis in particular, it is NOT a film about such practices: it is a film about the odissi of Guru Surendranath Jena.

Thus, the way I would want my audiences to watch this film is by noting its specific exploration of the relationship of dance, in this case, odissi, and archaeology, here represented by the Hirapur site and the site of Konarak, where several of the dance performances were filmed. What I wish to foreground, through the film, is the use we make today of archaeological sites and of dance performance in our project of re-imagining history and re-imagining the past.

The making of the film

In 2002 Roehampton, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the University of Surrey (UniS) came together to form a research centre funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), The Research Centre for Cross-cultural Music and Dance Performance. The Centre, with a life span of five years, had a portfolio of several research projects, focused on exploring the dance and music performance of Asia and Africa. I was involved in two of these projects, one about Indonesian dance and music heritage, which I convened, and one about South Asian dance and postcolonial identity construction, jointly convened by Dr Andree Grau at Roehampton and Dr Janet O’Shea, at the time based at UniS. This film has a link with the latter project. A large team of researchers was involved in this South Asian dance project which focused primarily on dance forms like bharatanatyam and kathak (5) . I had a specific interest in odissi which I first encountered in the early 1980s through a performance by a student of Guru Surendranath Jena. So, as part of that project, I decided to investigate odissi in the twenty first century and spent the whole summer of 2003 in Orissa.

As I wrote elsewhere (Lopez y Royo 2007a and Lopez y Royo 2007b), Odissi is one of the recognised classical dances of contemporary India and is said to have originated from the ritualistic and age old dance and singing practices of the maharis (temple dancers), attached to the temple of Lord Jagannath at Puri until as late as the early 1950s. The history of odissi is complex. The dance really evolved from the 1940s theatre performances of Cuttack, in Orissa, and it incorporated different performance streams. Turning odissi into a classical dance form was not a unique phenomenon, it was part of a broader process of classicization and concomitant modernization of Indian dance, of which odissi was only a chapter, so to speak. There are different forms of odissi, some of which are regarded as ‘transgressive’ – by which I mean transgressive of its reconstituted canon - and, to a great extent, seen as antagonistic to the very principles of classicism invoked for odissi as a form, such as the softness and femininity of the dance.

One of such transgressive forms is the odissi reimagined by Guru Surendranath Jena. While I was doing field research in Orissa in 2003 this point was reiterated by the odissi dance establishment, so I decided to take a closer look and went to New Delhi where Guru Jena still lived (6). I was intrigued by the way he had re-imagined odissi and recreated it out of his engagement with the Sun Temple at Konarak, a temple complex which is now an archaeological park, and the sixty-four yogini temple at Hirapur, both of which seem to have sustained his choreographic output. In Guru Jena’s odissi we have a different notion and understanding of femininity, which is being put across through his choreography.

I decided to do further research into this style of odissi and was able to do so in 2004 through a British Academy grant which allowed me to stay in Delhi for some weeks to observe Guru Jena’s way of teaching and participate in classes with his daughter Pratibha. Then the idea came to me to record his work. I am relating this story to mark the process I went through and the kind of reflections I engaged in, which led to the making the film. I had no experience of film making whatsoever and in a very naïve way I thought of documentation as taking a camera and videoing everything, the way which unfortunately continues to be fully endorsed by several funding bodies – what Caroline Rye, earlier involved with PARIP (Practice as Reasearch in Performance) describes as the ‘documentation trap’(Rye 2005), or as I would say, fallacy. I obtained a further British Academy grant in 2005 so that I could document Guru Jena’s work using a digital video-camera. It is at this point that the shift in my thinking occurred. What exactly did I want to document? what did I mean by documenting? I decided that my documentation was going to be a narrative, my story of Guru Jena’s reconstruction of odissi.

As said earlier, I had been very struck by how Guru Jena’s odissi related to Konarak and to Hirapur in particular. The relationship with Konarak helps to situate Guru Jena’s dance making within the contemporary Indian classical dance discourse - and thus it has an important role to play in my narrative – but it is the Hirapur connection that I interpret as being of particular significance. I asked Guru Jena’s eldest daughter, Pratibha, to perform there the dance piece inspired by the site, the Sakti Rupa Yogini. To witness that performance was quite an extraordinary experience, which opened up a new understanding of the relationship between dance in India and Indian temples, going beyond stereotypical notions of a dance made up of beautiful sculpturesque poses. What we see in the film shows how through the choreography the site is animated, breathing life into the imagery of the powerful yoginis, reactivating the defunct practices of worship of their ancient cults.

Let us not forget that the main purpose of this film is not “to establish the truth about Hirapur”, in other words to make an authoritative intervention in the contemporary religio-philosophical discourse about this site and its significance in the study of Tantric practices, nor does the film aim to discuss how people used to worship there in the 9th or 11th century. The purpose of this film is to see how an Oriya artist of today, a man who regarded himself as a devotee of Devi - and by this I am not saying that , in his worship, he would disregard Jagannath, the ubiquitous and quintessentially Oriya god - reconnected with this ancient temple in his performance work and reconnected with the yoginis from his own contemporary location, as an artist and as a worshipper.

About Hirapur

This paper is to be seen as a way to expand upon the voice over commentary, providing additional references, information and comments which will further contextualise the documentary. Thus I will here elucidate a series of points /issues raised only very succinctly in the film.

(a) Date of the site - David Gordon White (2003, 137) gives the date for Hirapur as circa 900 CE, following Vidya Dehejia (1986), and suggests it was built by a ruler of the Bhanja dynasty. Other dates have been put forward by other writers and it has been suggested that the temple may be as late as 11th c. (Michell 1988,236; Huntington 1999,443). There is unfortunately no consensus on this issue.

(b) Mahamaya - She is the Mother of the Universe; Yoganidra of the god Visnu – I stress this connection with Visnu because of the strong Vaisnava strand in Orissan culture. Elinor Gadon describes Mahamaya at Hirapur as follows: “One image, enshrined in niche 31, directly opposite the entrance and larger than the others, is ten armed. As the presiding deity, she stands on a full-blown lotus. Iconographically this image conforms to the description of Mahamaya in the fourteenth-century Kalika Purana. Kali was identified with the maya principle, the power of cosmic delusion emanating from the god Vishnu…she is still in worship by the locals as their gramadevi... She is the only Yogini at Hirapur to have an altar in front of her in which there is a spout for the run-off of the sacrificial blood offering” (Gadon 2002, 3).

(c) Sarala Das – Author of the Oriya language Candi Purana, he was a devotee of goddess Sarala. In the cult of this goddess, particularly at Jhankad, there is a conflation of Vaisnavism and Saktism. Sarala Das describes her as a Vaisnava deity, though she is Bhairavi and destroyer of the demon Mahisa (Mukherjee 1981, 52). Sarala Das is usually seen as a Sakta but we need to bear in mind that he wrote in the 15th century, when Oriya Saktism was already being overlayered by the cult of Jagannath, and Vaisnavism.

(d) Vaisnavism and Saktism - The film commentary refers to the conflation of Vaisnavism, Saktism and Buddhism, very evident in the cult of Jagannath. In the Candi Purana, which was the basis for the Sakti Rupa Yogini choreography, the goddess Narayani and Durga are the same: he addresses Durga as Devi Narayani and the sanguivorous yoginis are her emanations; they relentlessly fight against demons, having a constant need to drink blood and eat flesh. Sarala Das names the sixty-four yoginis, including among them the Matrkas (The Mothers, traditionally seven or eight ) , who, says Dehejia, are not seen at Hirapur (Dehejia 1986,92). Among the yoginis listed by Das there are local names. These local goddesses are to this day worshipped in their own right, with independent temples e.g. Narayani has a temple near Chilika Lake : the presiding deity of this temple, is a Mahisamardini Durga, shown as killing the buffalo demon with her trident. Hirapur represents a much older yogini cult than what attested in the Candi of Sarala Das, who does not seem to be aware of this or other yogini temples in Orissa and neighbouring regions, never mentioned in his text (e.g. another temple is at Ranipur Jharial, near Madhya Pradesh and a third one at Bheraghat, near Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh).

Archaeologist Prabhas Kumar Singh writes: “Although Purusottama Kshetra (Puri) came to be recognised as a great centre of Vaishnavism, particularly during the reign of Imperial Gangas, it was also a centre of Saktism of India as attested from literature, tradition and archaeological remains. In the tantric lore, Lord Jagannath is considered to be a Bhairava and Vimala is worshipped as Mahadevi… In the early medieval period Saktism, Saivism and Vaisnavism entered into the fold of Jagannath. A later sculptural representation in the Bhogamandapa of the Jagannath temple depicts the figure of Siva, Mahisamardini Durga and Jagannath in one panel… Saktism in Orissa began with the cult of Stambhesvari and was ultimately synthesised in the assimilative character of the Jagannath Cult.” (Singh 2005,99)

It is significant that at Hirapur there is a Krisna panel, not far from the yogini temple, clearly not coeval with it. It is in worship. A photograph can be seen at the following weblink

I would also like to flag up, in this context,that some writers have noted a considerable Orissan contribution to Vaisnava Tantra ( Singh Deo 2000, 53).

(e) Sakti pithas – Mythologically these pithas are connected with the pan-Indian story of Daksa yajna (The sacrifice by Daksa of his daughter Sati) but there are localisations of the place-names traditionally associated with the body parts of the goddess ( Pasayat 2003,12). An important sakti pitha in Orissa, mentioned by several sources, is the Narayani temple near Chilika. The platform or sakti pitha at Hirapur is now regarded as a sakti pitha, as part of an oral tradition, though strictly speaking Hirapur is a yogini pitha. Certainly, Guru Surendranath Jena regarded it as a sakti pitha and we need to note this.

(f) yoginis - In the film the sentence “yoginis have individual names and identities, they are goddesses in their own right and consorts of gods” can be heard.

Here the script conflates a number of concepts relating to the yoginis and does not necessarily refer specifically to the Hirapur yoginis, whose details of worship will continue to elude us.

Yoginis in Orissa, and more broadly in India, can be understood to have, in many ways, a fluid identity. Dehejia makes the point that the word yogini “allows a number of different interpretations, each being entirely at variance with the next and yet quite correct in its own context” (1986,11) and goes on to give a list of different kinds of yoginis from adept in yoga to yaksis, to patron goddesses of the Kaulas or Kaula Marga, a tantric division (7) .

Dehejia, unhesitatingly, sees the Hirapur yogini as associated with Kaula Marga. Gadon (2002) also understands Hirapur as connected with the Kaula-Kapalikas. An important contribution to a reassessment of Hirapur has, however, more recently, been provided by Davidson (2003) who disputes the connection made by Dehejia with the Kaula sex rites, as the iconography of Hirapur bears no evidence of such rites. Instead, he considers the possibility that these yoginis may be dakinis associated with Buddhism. White (2003, 204) comments that the Hirapur yoginis seem to be standing over heads with smiling faces and he interprets this as being a reference to the corpse or skull practice, in connection with the ‘flight’ of the yoginis(8) .

In more recent writings, it has been noted that the shape of the Hirapur structure is representative of the linga-yoni (female and male sexual union) (Mishra 2000,14), something that Dehejia does not dwell upon, although she relates the circular shape to a cakra(9).

Dehejia feels that the yoginis’ association with Devi was a much later development, when it became necessary to incorporate the yogini cult into the Brahmanical system (1986,23). As mentioned, she does not allow for any identification of the Hirapur yoginis with the Matrkas, but she notes however that in descriptions of Bhairava, in more than one Kaula tantra, Bhairava is seen at the centre of a cakra of yoginis surrounded by a mandala(10) of Matrkas (Dehejia 1986, 31)

But in religious texts, yoginis are referred to as the attendant deities of the Great Goddess, so there is a conflation of yoginis with Matrkas. We also know that in Orissa the cult of the Asta Matrka (Eight Mothers) was widespread and in full swing by the 11th c.

(g) The central mandapa - This is a point raised in the voice over which unfortunately does not sound as it was intended (11).

The point in question is the idea that there would have been only female figures on the reconstructed mandapa with just one central Bhairava, thus implicitly admitting to the presence of Matrkas. The eight Matrkas are known as Brahmani, Mahesvari, Kaumari, Vaisnavi, Varahi, Aindri, Camunda and Mahalaksmi. I have described the female figures, in the voice over, as female versions of the main gods, rather than naming the Matrkas in order to make the explanation more accessible.

The reconstructed small central pavilion has altogether eight niches. Three of these have additional unidentified yoginis (only sixty are in the niches along the circular wall), one is missing. In view of the number of thefts that seem to have taken place at the site, the images currently in the niches of the central pavilion could be replicas, rather than originals. Also, whether all the sixty yoginis along the circular wall are in their originally intended place will remain impossible to ascertain, as we do not have any textual reference to help us in identifying the Hirapur cakra. The sixty-first yogini, which would have been on the mandapa with the other three is, as noted, currently missing. Some travel guides from the Department of Tourism, mention that there were only sixty yoginis at the site and the remaining four of the prescribed number sixty -four, would perhaps have been housed in the mandapa, but could no longer be seen (12).

The other four niches currently have images of Bhairavas, including Siva Ekapada. They are ithyphallic, as is usual for such images in Orissa. Dehejia reports that there would have been a central Siva , but this was apparently stolen soon after the discovery of the temple in 1953 (Dehejia 1986,95). The central shrine’s reconstruction is perceived to be odd: the combination of four Bhairavas does not appear in similar yogini temples, where usually only one central Bhairava is found. Dehejia is uncertain about the arrangement at Hirapur but refrains from probing further (1986,102), although she definitely mentions the existence of this main Siva image which has vanished. Only further research will allow us to determine whether the central mandapa would have housed Matrkas and whether it was a later addition. But it would seem, on balance, that the recent reconstruction attempts to marry more ancient beliefs with more contemporary sensibilities.

(h) The choreography of Sakti Rupa Yogini - The documentary explains the choreography of this piece and additional information on the choreographic process is given in an interview with Guru Surendranath Jena which can be accessed at here (interview 2).

McDaniel has talked about “folk tantrism” which emphasises ritual practice, direct experience and pragmatic results, as a primarily oral tradition. It seems to me that this is the kind of tantrism one still sees in Orissa today, merged with bhakti, and this is what Guru Jena seems to be describing (Mc Daniel 2004,71)

The choreography of the piece is in two parts. The first half invokes the yoginis as named by Sarala Das, but with reference to the iconography found at Hirapur, the second half refers to village practices of worship which can be reconnected with older tantric rituals.

Conclusion

My narrative in the film begins by historicising odissi, paying attention to its reconstitution, but soon turns into a reflection on temples and dance performance. Temples in India have been and continue to be instruments for the performance of ritual, their function being, to quote Meister “ to web individuals and communities into a complicated and inconsistent social fabric through time” (Meister 2000, 24), creating a fluid ritual arena. Yet they are studied principally as “indicators of royal generosity” but what of the communities around them? (Ray 2004, 366) The dance performance which took place at Hirapur was not an established ritual nor a locally recognized performative tradition; informed by the syncretic vision of the choreographer, Guru Surendranath Jena, it resonated, nevertheless, with the local villagers and their contemporary re-appropriation of the temple as a site for worship.

The current reclamation of Hirapur by the villagers for their daily puja is apparently a new phenomenon: Gadon maintains that Hirapur was not in worship back in the 1990s, though apparently the shrine was used at night for tantric practices – but this was a rumour, never corroborated (Gadon 2002, 1). It should be noted that there are now regular tours to Hirapur by the adherents of the transnational feminist spirituality oriented Goddess movement e.g. Gadon herself and Roxanne Kamayani Gupta, a dancer and academic from the US, have taken groups of women to Hirapur since the year 2000 (13).

What comes out of this film is the idea that choreographed movement seems to be vital to imagine the mobile forces that were at work at archaeological sites such as Hirapur, rendered still and turned into an artefact in the present. Such sites, it should be noted, are not officially in worship and in the case of Hirapur there are now plans to transform it into a major tourist attraction, as reported by The Hindu in February 2007 : a new road will be built and a ‘heritage gate’ will be placed at the entrance of the village and there will be landscaping of the temple site (14).

So my film is about the kind of connection between sites and dance performance and the contemporary project of re-imagination of the past. Taking dance to Hirapur has showed that opening sites up to performers might be yet a further way to contextualise humanity: far from suggesting re-enactments, I am envisaging the use of choreography and performance as an interpretive tool, conducive to an intellectual, aesthetic and emotional engagement with the archaeological site. The project of re-imagining from the perspective of today enriches our lives by suggesting alternative ways of conceptualizing the place of art and life in society and the relationship between them, avoiding the projection of the past as an immobile moment.

References

Chakravorty, Pallabi (2008) Bells of change. Kathak dance , women and modernity in India. Oxford: Berg

Davidson, Ronald (2004) Indian esoteric Buddhsim . A social history of tantric Buddhism New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass

Dehejia, Vidya (1986) Yogini Cult and temples. A tantric tradition Delhi: National Museum

Gadon, Elinor (2002) “ Probing the mysteries of the Hirapur temple” ReVision, June, 22, 1-5

Huntington, Susan (1999) The art of ancient India Whetherhill (1st edn 1985)

Lopez y Royo, Alessandra (2004) “Bharat Natya” , Keywords in South Asian Studies, [link]

_____________________ (2007a) ReConstructing and RePresenting dance: exploring the dance/archaeology conjunction Stanford Metamedia/Humanities Lab Collaboratory

________________________ (2007b) “The reinvention of odissi classical dance as a temple ritual” in The Archaeology of Ritual E. Kyriakidis ed, Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, pp. 155-182

MacDougall, David (1998) Transcultural Cinema Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press

McDaniel, June (2004) Offering Flowers, feeding skills. Popular goddess worship in West Bengal Oxford University Press (US)

Meister , Michael (2000) Ethnography and Personhood: Notes from the field New Delhi: Rawat Publications

Michell, George (1988) The Hindu temple Chicago: Chicago University Press

Mishra, Prithiwiraj (2000) “Shiva and his consorts. The Yoginis of Hirapur” Manushi, 118, pp.13-18

Mukherjee, Prabhat (1981) History of medieval Vaishnavism in Orissa New Delhi: Asian Educational Services

O'Shea, Janet (2007) At home in the world. Bharatanatyam on the global stage Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press

Prasayat, Chitrasen (2003) Glimpses of tribal and folk culture New Delhi:Anmol Publications PVT

Ray, Himanshu Prabha (2004) “The archaeology of sacred space. Introduction” in H.P. Ray and C. Sinopoli eds Archaeology as history in early South Asia New Delhi: Indian Council for Historical Research

Rye, Caroline (2005) “Video writing: the documentation trap or the role of documentation in the practice as research debate” Paper presented at the Workshop on Media and Performance, SOAS, 23rd April 2005

Singh, Prabas Kumar (2005) “Shaktism in Purusottama Kshetra” Orissan Review, July, pp. 99-102

Singh Deo, Jitamitra Prasad (2000) "Contribution of Kalahandi district to Vaishnav Tantra in Orissa", Orissa Historical Research Journal Vol.XLV, No.1-4, p.53.

White, David Gordon (2003) The kiss of the yogini Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press

Endnotes

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Posted at Feb 22/2008 02:15PM:
Alessandra: For a useful resource on Dakinis and Yoginis visit khandro.net