Sleeping with Movie Stars - Part 2

By Gitanjali Kolanad

At Kalakshetra we were taught that everything great in music, literature, poetry, dance had already come and gone, and the best we could do was try to recreate it. Bharata Natyam was taught as an axiomatic system: Let the legs form a square. Let the shoulders, elbows and wrists share the same plane; as if by adhering to the rules, just as surely as the square of the hypotenuse would equal the sum of the squares of the other two sides, beauty would result.

But aramandi, ‘half-sitting,’ is a difficult first proposition. Heels together, toes apart, so that the feet make a straight line. Bend at the knees so that the thighs and calves form a square. Don’t bend forward at the waist or stick your bum out at the back. Relax! Stay in that position until the quadriceps burn. Raise the right foot and stamp it, but without shifting the weight to the left, without moving the hips, without coming up out of the aramandi position. Raise the left foot and stamp it. Continue stamping in the first, slow speed while clapping out the rhythm. Don’t stop. Shift into second speed, two stamps for every beat of the time cycle. Don’t stop, no matter how much it burns, because if anyone stops, the whole class must start over again from first speed. The teacher sits in front of us and beats out the “thai ya thai” with a stick. "Sit more! Sit more! Have you come all the way from Canada to make me suffer? You look like a hunchback!" Shift into third speed – four stamps for every beat. After many tries, starting over from the beginning no matter how close to the end we were when someone stopped, we finally as a class finish one whole step to the teacher’s grudging satisfaction. At first it seems as if we have accomplished a near impossible task, but after a few months, we are doing not one but eight ‘that adavus’ in three speeds without stopping in a way that doesn’t incite the teacher to wrath and lacerating sarcasm.

In theory class we were taught this history of bharata natyam: once, the Gods were bored, so they asked Bramha to create an entertainment for them. Bramha passed the job on to Bharata Muni, telling him to take something from each of the four Vedas and make something new. He created a performance using the Apsaras, the celestial dancers, showing the episode of the churning of the ocean, when Amrita, the nectar of immortality, had risen like butter on the surface of the sea. The Gods were so pleased that they asked Shiva to teach Bharatha Muni his vigourous Tandava dance, and Parvathi to teach him the graceful Lasya. Bharatha Muni in turn imparted this knowledge to his hundred sons, and so it came to human beings as the Natya Shastra. Then, the devadasis (I understood these to be a kind of dancing nun) performed it in the great temples of India for the Gods. The British, Victorian after all, and therefore prudish, banned the dancing in the temple, and the devadasis were flung out on the streets, where they had no choice but to become prostitutes. The dance became very degraded.

Luckily, Rukmini Devi came on the scene. She studied ballet with Anna Pavlova, who said to her, "Go and study your own dance," not in a peremptory way, but in a prophetic ‘Go forth and multiply’ way. So Rukmini Devi did just that, refining the dance form, removing all that could be considered crude or vulgar and returning it to the state of purity that it had had in the temples. Despite the inconsistencies, it was a compelling narrative. The pain of the aramandi was the means by which we kept faith with those ancient temple dancers.

In theory class, we were then taught the hand gestures that we could use to create the rasas that, we were told, were the whole point. The pataka hasta, the simplest one, all the fingers held together, could be used to "a forest, saying ‘no’, the night, a river, the heavens." It could also be used to show "seven case endings" which looked like patting seven little ones on their heads. I wondered what kind of dance it was that required showing seven case endings. I hadn’t even seen a bharata natyam performance at that point in my life.

In December, the dance festival started. We dressed in our finest, walked to the theatre built according to the precepts of the Natya Shastra, sat on the floor right in front of the stage while the rest of the world sat in comfortable cane chairs behind us and watched what Rukmini Devi had wrought. I was enthralled, by the colour, the patterns, the rightness of every movement, every gesture. When Rama was sent away to the forest I was sad.

One evening, I came to the theatre with my long hair loose. Kalidasa might have compared my thick wavy black mane to a peacock’s tail, or the night. But Rukmini Devi was there, not Kalidasa. She scolded me, "What do you think, you are just a dancer in the dance class? You are always a dancer. Go back to the hostel and tie your hair properly!" I had an inkling even then of what she meant, but the effect of that truth was the opposite of what she intended. I was not an obedient girl. I snuck in through another door. But I never forgot her words, and later, many years later, I understood them.

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