World Dance Day and Indian Classical dance (original) (raw)

In December 1935, the elite in Madras was all agog with the news of a young Brahman girl, getting ready to perform the dance of the low devadasis, the mistresses of the Lord, who had danced for centuries to please Him and his high caste followers. This was at the height of the controversy that Dr. Muttulakshmi Reddy, the daughter of a devadasi and a father she would never know, had raised as she campaigned vigorously for the abolition of this shameful system and the dance form as well. On the other hand, there were others like the Brahman, E Krishna Iyer who protested that the enquiste and ancient dance form had to be retrieved and preserved, while the controversial institution of the devadsis could be dumped. It was in the background of this war that the young Rukmini Devi went up on stage at the Adyar Theatre, before an amazed audience. She had shattered tradition and disrepute, but social leaders from her own community got up, straightened their angavastarams and just walked out, in sheer disgust. This was around the same time that an American, re-born as Ragini Devi, was voraciously consuming the skills of Kathakali and other forms in order to revive them, through re-packaging. Many others were also active in this decade that really began the determined 'salvaging and sanitising' of the arts from the moral depths to which they had sunk over centuries, in both temples and royal palaces. Care was, however, taken by the brahmanical classes to imbibe and retain the traditional esoteric skills that the devadasis and courtesans had jealously guarded for several generations, before society chose to forget them. Kathak, for instance, had to extricate itself through the Maharaj family from the opprobrium of being the sleazy nautch of the tawaifs that was notorius enough to enter the English dictionary quite early in a rather derogatory sense. Odishi, said to be oldest of the classical dances of India with pre-Christian era bas relief sculptures to prove its antiquity, had also fallen into disrepute with the mahari dancers at Puri and elsewhere being treated as objects of lust, despite centuries of skills and aesthetics.