Let's Humanise History

Artistes and their social, economic, political background should be the primary context for recording the history of a classical dance form and not the dictates of a contrived, elitist social class that has usurped the art, argues Davesh Soneji, performing arts historian and author of ‘Unfinished Gestures’

History often benefited from the angst of its explorers. Explorers who did not stop at scratching the surface but went deep into the grooves and recesses, crevices and crannies and brought out the unseen, untouched and, most importantly, unrecorded facts of each era. They are the ones who lent authenticity and perspective to history and fought against any effort to gloss over inconvenient facts.

Davesh Soneji is one such inquirer. A performing arts historian whose congenial demeanour betrays none of the angst he feels at the way the dominant discourse takes us away from the reality of the performing arts. He questions the fault lines in the traditional arts in India, starting with music and then dance. He is troubled by the way some communities usurped the domain of dance and defined it with a superficiality that excludes the real roots of the essential aesthetics.

“I believe there is a disconnect between the idealised aesthetic world, based on the ‘shastric’, and the real world. The world that musicians and dancers live in is insular, inward-looking, some kind of a bubble. A majority of even professional dancers are disconnected from the everyday realities that people live,” he says.

Now, Associate Professor of South Asian Religions in the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Dr Davesh Soneji started asking questions at an early age. Born into a middle-class Gujarat family in Canada, he was drawn early to Carnatic music and trained for 14 years when he started exploring dance. “Even as a child I had many questions about the invisibility of traditional female performers but I was told not to dare to ask such questions.”

As an adolescent Soneji met Kittappa Pillai, the famous Nattuvar and the scion of the Tanjore Quarter and was invited to Tanjore. The visit was an eye-opener for him as it was the first time he was exposed to non-Brahmin dancers and gurus and other artiste, otherwise known as the Isai Velalar community. “That was when my interest in the subject grew.

As I met women in that community and talked to them about their experiences, I realised that there was a lot more to Bharatanatyam than what was written in books.” And he slowly began to read what was not written in the history books and about people who do not make it to the dominant histories of these art forms.

Interestingly enough, Soneji’s family had no familiarity either with the arts or with issues of gender sensitivity, making his work mostly intuitive to start with. As he watched the bifurcated system of women and men performing separately, he perceived the gender gaps and the overwhelming presence of Brahmin gurus, bringing the caste and gender fault lines into sharp focus. His training in music for dance and Nattuvangam from Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai’s grandson made him well-versed with dance and hence gave further insights.

“As I started my research work, it was not my intention to write the history of Bharatanatyam but about the people, the community of Devadasis and how the dance forms were part of their lives along with many other issues such as sex work, mariginalisation and stigma and reforms.”

Soneji says he once heard a prominent dancer say that they were family women who took art from the traditional community but ‘we are not them’. “I think that is the most superficial separation of the art from the artiste. Separating the art from the artiste is an act of appropriation. You are appropriating an art on to your body without thinking where the art is coming from. You can’t separate the artistic product from the location of the production,” he asserts.

And thus began Soneji’s journey into a genre that comprised of writing about arts embodied. A work that takes into account caste, class, gender and sexuality aspects of the artiste, beyond the manifest form. “Today, Bharata Natyam is said to be one of the top five fastest growing dance forms in the world and yet, ironically, it is the only art form that has no critical history so far, one book that we can pull off the shelf, something that takes into account the politics, the nationalism, the gender issues.”

In his much-acclaimed book “Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India”, Davesh Soneji presented his seminal work on the Devadasis or courtesans in South India, highlighting the stigma and marginalisation and disenfranchisement that the community faced, pushing them into shadows even as their art was seized and moulded to suit the purposes of a modern and dominant milieu.

So, as more researchers begin to question the fissures, what should be major points of departure in recording performing arts history?

Soneji recommends that a triumvirate should be central to any new research. Of caste, class and gender. A paradigm that should be applied to any study, especially in the contemporary context. Caste for its hierarchies, power relations, dos and don’ts. Class for the economic factors, production, patronage and distribution, opportunities to perform, to maintain performance culture. “When we talk of something like Devadasi disenfranchisement, why does something like that happen? It is the disappearance of an economy, a sexual as well as an aesthetic, political economy.”

Gender is probably the most important issue when we study the Devadasi community as there is strong tension between the men and the women therein, especially in the post-reform period, he says. “The place of women relates to the caste identity and men want to redefine that identity. They want to assert that they are not the sons of ‘dancing girls’. There is a clear attempt to recast the system into a patrilineal one from the matrilineal system that it has been.”

Aesthetics are produced by these three factors. It’s not some abstract thing, it has to be embodied and the bodies where the Abhinaya lives, the beautiful dance lives, they are people who have economic, social, political lives, Soneji reiterates. And these dynamics are rarely ever mentioned in Indian historical records, he laments.

Davesh Soneji’s recent work focuses on the post-reform status of the courtesan community. “There is still stigma for young women of that community despite globalisation and economic privileging.” And it is more difficult for those who remained in the rural economy, denied access to opportunities, who have to still depend on sex work and on endogamous marriages.

The background serves as a deterrent for the traditional communities to venture again into the performance arena. “We have made Indian performing arts such a highly elitist project. To be a professional dancer, you need money and influence today. You need economic, social status. How can a young girl who belongs to the marginalised traditional community ever hope to break into this professional arts world?” Now, the dance forms are not ‘classical’ - they are popular and elitist forms that need immense capital, he states.

“It has been my effort to encourage young women in rural communities to try to take up the art form, even as an amateur practice so that when their grandmothers and mothers die, there is still an embodied memory...” Davesh Soneji has also launched a social programme called the Mangal Initiative.

“But the big problem is that there is always a value judgment; what I called a ‘taste habit’ which is a caste, class-inflicted taste habit, use of rigid definitions and language, culled from the Sanskrit texts and brought into practice in the 20th century for a particular reason. And that is what makes the urban elitists frown at the traditional performers, disregarding their historical and social value.”

He advocates a conscious effort to bring a parallel or alternate world into operation, a radical intervention that will have people move away from the art juggernaut that rumbles and tramples every other layer. By people who will take their blinders off, save the women getting pillaged of their art and bring them into a system that has social justice as its centre.

Davesh Soneji regrets the irrevocable linkage of dance and religion. “In the 1930s, art forms became allegorised in the framework of ‘religion’, ‘spirituality’, the ‘occult’. People started believing in narratives that were not historically accurate. Such as Bharata Natyam being more than 2000 yrs old and being a temple dance. It was not, it was a courtly art form that entered the temples in a courtly idiom. This essentialisation of dance as religious worked because religion and nationalism were the two main pivots that people could relate to at that time.”

We are stuck with a frozen art form from 1930s, with imagery that is steeped in religious allegory and the danger is that dance is relegated to only the religious realm, he says.

“When in today’s world, Hinduism refers essentially to the Hindu right, where is the space for this art form? The only space where something like Bharata Natyam can live; it has no relevance anywhere else. The art form styled its own history in the same language in the Hindutva mould.”

Bharata Natyam is a secular art form with elements of religion, so much more complex than the Shastras and essentialised the notion of religion today, he says. “It is fundamentally secular and even Muslim artistes were involved its development. In the Kalavanthula families, Muslims were part of the Melams. So how is it religious? Let us reexamine the history, recognise what was wrong with it.”

Invaluable is the research work that pre-empts the danger of recorded history perpetuating inequalities and injustices of a skewed society. And Davesh Soneji’s work marks a major landmark in this process of inquiry.