Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance

Abstract

For the past several years I have been investigating the local circumstances of what is commonly referred to as a "revival" of dance in South India in the 1930s, working outward from a study of the padam genre of dance music.' Reading the work of Jennifer Post (1989), Regula Qureshi (1991), and Tapati Guha-Thakurta (1992), which describes and theorizes "revivals" in the performing and visual arts in the northern part of the subcontinent, has convinced me that the events in South India bear study as part of a larger pattern. Accordingly, I have been led to an investigation of pan-South Asian patterns of revival and of intellectual influences from outside South Asia upon these (self-consciously nationalistic) complexes of events. This study centers on Rukmini Devi (1904-1986), a central local figure in the South Indian revival of dance, and on Nataraja (literally, raja, king, of natanam, of dance), a primarily South Indian manifestation of the Hindu god Siva, who became the central icon and master metaphor for the revival of dance and, arguably, for the Indian nationalist movement as a whole. In an attempt to understand these local actors-one human, one divine-my gaze has been drawn outward from South India toward Bengal, which as the capital of British India served as a major conduit for intellectual currents between India and Europe; to the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875), a transnational creature bred by the United States, Europe, and India;2 to Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), initially a geologist, later a disciple of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, and finally a world-renowned aesthetician and historian of South Asian art; and to three American and European dancers who choreographed along Indian themes and performed these creations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia during the decades leading up to the revival. The term "revival" is a drastically reductive linguistic summary of a complex process-a deliberate selection from among many possibilities-which cries out to be examined from more than one point of view. While the "revival" of South Indian dance certainly involved a re-vivification or bringing back to life, it was equally a re-population (one social community appropriating a practice from another), a re-construction (altering and replacing elements of repertoire and choreography), a re-naming (from nautch and other terms to bharata natyam3), a re-situation (from temple, court, and salon to the public stage), and a re-storation (as used in Schechner 1985:69, a splicing to-