Bharatanatyam

For most of its history the dance now called Bharatanatyam was not a stage art. It was sadir, the service of the devadasis, women ritually dedicated to a temple deity who danced before the image, at festivals and in procession, and who held land, income and a hereditary place in the temple economy. The concert repertoire still danced today was largely composed inside that world: the Thanjavur Quartet, four brothers serving the Maratha court of Thanjavur in the early nineteenth century, fixed the margam, the sequence of items that carries a recital from pure rhythm into enacted poetry and out again. From the 1890s the dedication system came under attack, from colonial officials and Indian reformers who saw it as a form of prostitution, and from a nationalist movement that wanted the dance without the dancers.

The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947 ended dedication in the presidency, and the hereditary community lost its institution. What replaced it had already begun: E. Krishna Iyer had campaigned for the dance's respectability from within the reform movement, and Rukmini Devi Arundale, a Theosophist with no hereditary connection to the art, learned it, staged it in 1935, and founded Kalakshetra in 1936 to teach it. The name Bharatanatyam, tying the dance to the ancient Natyashastra rather than to the temple women who had kept it alive, belongs to that remaking. The dance survived by changing hands, and the cost of the survival is still argued.

A Bharatanatyam recital is built as a journey through the margam, the path, and its stations balance the dance's two registers. Nritta is pure dance: rhythm made visible in struck feet, held geometry and the sculptural bends of the body, without any story to tell. Abhinaya is the other register, the enacted poem, in which the dancer, nearly still by comparison, unfolds a lyric line by line through a codified vocabulary of hand gestures, the hastas, and through the face. The margam classically opens with alarippu, a short unfolding of pure rhythm offered as invocation, moves through jatiswaram and sabdam, and reaches its centre in the varnam, the long composition in which nritta and abhinaya alternate at full depth. After the varnam come the padams and javalis, slow love poems in which the beloved is a god, Krishna above all, and the recital closes with the fast, bright tillana. A vocalist, a nattuvanar keeping the rhythm with small cymbals, a mridangam drummer and usually a violinist accompany the dancer.

The repertoire's devotion is concrete rather than general: Nataraja, the dancing Shiva of Chidambaram, Murugan of the Tamil hills, Krishna the absent lover. The erotic longing of the padams is read inside the tradition as sringara bhakti, desire as the figure of the soul's want of God, which is why the same poem can be danced in a temple festival and on a concert stage.