2. Dancing ancient text and temple sculptures

(1) pulse (with a small p) is a unique, London based publication in English about south asian dance in Britain but with a truly international remit. pulse is published by Kadam, with a subvention provided by the Arts Council of England. Aimed at a general readership of south asian dance practitioners, at the same time pulse is an important voice within south asian dance, internationally.

(2) Here however there are only 81 karana panels, rather than 108, the sequence being unfinished.

(3) It has been a matter of speculation why the karanas are found on southern temples. The Natyasastra is believed to be a Kashmiri text. Vasundara Filliozat reports that inscriptional evidence indicates a continuous movement of Saiva teachers from Kashmir to the South and that Kashmir may have been the original home of many Agama texts (Kak 2005).

(4) However, as will be seen in chapter 5, the dance reliefs of the 9th century Javanese temple of Loro Jonggrang, at Prambanan, identifiable as representations of the karanas of the Natyasastra, use an animation device: the movement sequence is performed by three figures in each dance relief, whose positions, performed in succession give the overall movement pattern (Iyer 1997). This seems to be a clever attempt to solve the paradox of representing a movement through a static medium.

(5) A bharatanatyam dancer is regarded as an artist, whereas an acrobat is at best an artiste, a term usually reserved for cabaret and show-biz.

(6) The differentiation into marga and desi is post-Natyasastra: marga refers to the Natyasastra, whereas desi is the regional dance. Bose explains desi as a stylistic variation of marga, which in time grew into an independent mode of performance (Bose 1991:217) . It should also be noted here that in texts other than the Natyasastra different sets of karanas are mentioned, under the desi karana label (Bose 1970,147-164;1991, 225; Raghavan 1965, 119-128). Clearly the polarisation of marga/desi needs to be reconsidered and further nuanced.

(7) A culture,in other words, based on the timeless Sanatana Dharma. This is the indigenous, Sanskrit name for Hinduism, where sanatana means eternal and dharma is the natural law.

(8) Some of this rhetoric was more recently taken up, with a sinister twist, by some of the supporters of the present day Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who talk of Akband Bharat, the unification of the entire Indian subcontinent (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan) under Hindu Indian leadership.

(9) This is one of the many examples: “ I have enjoyed his benign blessings as a tiny tool , gaining some historic significance, just because of having been in his holy hands” (Subrahmanyam 2003, 206).

(10) It should be noted here that Western feminist critique seems to have misread ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ in Indian classical dance theatre traditions, interpreting them in terms of an oppressive patriarchal bipolarity and it has done so making “extensive use of the Freudian psychosexual paradigms activated by the eye, such as voyeurism, scopophilia and fetishism” (Meduri 1992,95). It is important to understand that in a Hindu context “seeing” (darshana) “implies the integrated operation of all the senses and…is a two-way communication in which seer and seen have to participate mutually for the experience of Rasa or aesthetic joy. This mutuality in seeing is not peculiar to the religious experience but is restated in the aesthetics texts, the poetics and the commentaries of the Natyashastra” (Meduri 1992,95). See also Coorlawala, 1996 and her elaboration of the concept of darshana in the Indian classical dance tradition.

(11) In bharatanatyam there are specific schools or lineages (bani) of individual dance masters with their own characteristic interpretation of the bharatanatyam movements and repertoire. Padma Subrahmanyam was a disciple of Guru Ramiah Pillai, of the Vazhuvur lineage.

(12) Vena Ramphal is not a bharatanatyam dancer, as she situates her work in the contemporary arena, beyond bharatanatyam proper. She did however train in bharatanatyam for several years.

(13) The distinction between dancer and choreographer is not so clearcut in Indian dance practices, therefore the term is here used to denote both.

(14) Prarthana Purkayastha, a former student of Manjushri Chaki Sircar and Ranjabati Sircar, currently engaged in PhD research at Roehampton University, has brought to my attention that at Santiniketan - the institution founded by the poet Rabindranath Tagore in West Bengal in the early part of the 20th century - a study of poses from frescoes and paintings was part of the curriculum devised for the dance students (Purkayastha, pers. comm.)

(15) Within bharatanatyam (and other Indian classical dance genres) nrtta denotes dance without any acting whereas nritya and abhinaya refer to expressive, mimetic dance, which involves acting.

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