(This article, about Guru Surendranath Jena was published in pulse, spring 2005. Copyright pulse, spring 2005)
Intro Tracing modern history and examining the work of the lesser known masters, particularly that of Guru Surendranath Jena, Alessandra Lopez y Royo shows us that odissi is a site of contestation and identity construction, complete with transgression and transformation, and a lot of expedience. Though the cocktail flares up especially in discourses of ‘classicism’ and authenticity, both in the Indian/Oriyan and diasporic contexts, there are actually several, significant alternative odissi-s beyond Kelubabu’s style, and Guru Surendranath’s is a significant one among them.
Photo: Guru Surendranath Jena
Odissi was canonized in India as ‘classical dance’ in the late 1950s. It is now taught and performed in Orissa, in major Indian cities outside Orissa, and globally, in south asian diasporic contexts. 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.
Odissi was born in the theatres of Cuttack, in the 1940s, bearing no special name and devised as entertainment within plays. 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 practices of the maharis. A performance aesthetic was evolved for it, subtly 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.
Odissi was systematized with classificatory borrowings from ancient texts on dramaturgy – the pan-Indian sastras written in Sanskrit, but including 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’.
In the second half of the 20th century the odissi ‘school’ of Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra (‘Kelubabu’), a former gotipua with a keen sense of rhythm and an eye on the larger picture, gained wide national and international recognition, and became synonymous with odissi itself. Guru Kelucharan’s illustrious disciple was the late Sanjukta Panigrahi, a high caste woman who, as a young girl, had studied bharatanatyam at Kalakshetra, in Madras; she was decreed by all, deservedly so, as the greatest odissi exponent of the 20th century. Yet classical odissi is not monolithic. Side by side Guru Kelucharan’s style, there are also the styles of Guru Pankaj Charan Das and Guru Deba Prasad Das, who were equally acknowledged as the gurus who shaped odissi into a classical form – even though they have been completely overshadowed by Guru Kelucharan’s stardom.
Guru Pankaj Charan Das is known as a mahariguru. He was the son of a mahari and husband to the daughter of one. But he has also been turned into a mythical last representative of a dying lineage. 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, and that he was a highly imaginative choreographer and a terrific performer, with a tremendous stage presence. He choreographed pieces for himself which showed off his unique qualities as a perfomer. How much of his odissi was mahari dance will remain his best kept secret.
Guru Deba Prasad came from the akhadas and gave to odissi postural strength and a slightly rustic flavour, maintained by his disciples Durga Charan Ranvir and Gajendra Panda. He believed that odissi’s link was with the naca of the villages of Orissa and that this should be brought out fully in the dance. Among his famous dancer disciples, there is Ramli Ibrahim, a Malaysian who de facto, through his own performance work, has done much to subvert more entrenched ideas of odissi as a soft female form.
A transgressive odissi As a largely reinvented and (re)created form, the boundaries of odissi’s renewed classicism have been heavily policed by a newly constituted odissi dance establishment , constantly invoking purity and authenticity to silence any dissenting voice. 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 this extremely conservative (and somewhat insecure) odissi dance establishment. One of such forms is the odissi (re)constructed by Guru Surendranath Jena.
Initially a member of the Jayantika, the group of gurus who were actively involved in fashioning odissi in the late 1940s and 1950s, Guru Surendranath (‘Surababu’) moved to Delhi in the 1960s and began to teach at Triveni Kala Sangam. He evolved his own style of odissi, reconstructing 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.
Surababu recounts that the creative stimulus came to him after he travelled to Konarak in the early 1970s with one of his foreign students, Fredérique Apfell Marglin, who was then researching the history of 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, 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.
Why is Guru Surendranath’s odissi different? 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 his odissi different? Surababu’s divergence from other odissi styles and /or schools is significant. The main difference arises from his particular work in converting the sculpture 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 24 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.
Why “that man should be jailed…!” 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 Dr Kapila Vatsyayan , who was for many years one of Guru Jena’s students, and among the first to appreciate his iconographic insights and the plasticity of his movements , has discussed his work 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, for example, the Southern Indian Chidambaram temple. The karanas of Guru Surendranath are conceptual, in keeping with the definition of karana given in the sastras – a movement of the upper body, a movement of the lower body and a stance – 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 basic chauka , which characterise 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.
There are also other differences, which have turned Surababu’s odissi into a transgressive dance form. These differences 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!” 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.
So what gets the odissi establishment ruffled? Several things. Unlike other odissi gurus, he does not believe dance-dramas – requiring groups of dancers and a certain kind of acting – really work. Instead, he favours the solo performance, which can have a strong narrative and dramatic content without deploying the dance-drama kind of acting. Worse, Guru Surendranath has choreographed dance pieces in which the abhinaya explores in full force the raudra and bibatsa 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. So the concern may be deeper: tantrism is itself a transgressive religious movement, and in Orissa it has strong links with older indigenous witchcraft practices.
Situating odissi between the global and the local I think this raises some interesting questions relating to odissi, its relationship with the naca or local dance practices of Orissa, its global identity, and its self-defined classicism. 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, 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 global form is an ahistorical, conceptually reconstituted bharatanatyam, symbolic 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 – this is evident, for example, in Ananya Chatterjea’s feminist activism which she translates into deeply moving, unconventional odissi choreography.
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. Unlike Hindustani or Carnatic music, odissi music does not have a concert tradition and is not supported by an equivalent systematic classification, and, hence, a specific theoretical knowledge of ragas, talas and their nuances on the part of its musicians. This is perceived as a lack of classicism and it has prompted a number of non-Oriya dancers to rely more explicitly on Hindustani musical accompaniment, to ‘classicize’ the music and the dance further, thereby subtly modifying the odissi form.
Yet it would be naïve 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. 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 odissi classicism, its ongoing contestation as well as its significance to the different groups and communities involved.
A glimpse of the technique of Guru Surendranath Jena's odissi
