I was twelve when K.P. Kittappa Pillai asked me to show him what kind of a dancer I was. As the star pupil in my previous teacher’s school, I was rather sure of my abilities. Kittappa Pillai endured about five minutes of my jatiswaram before deciding that I had best begin with the ‘thaiyya thai’ — the most basic steps. To my own astonishment, I agreed meekly. In every aspect of my life except dance, I have resisted authority. As a teacher, I have valued the moments when my students thought for themselves, especially if it meant that they disagreed with me. But to Kittappa Pillai, and to him alone, I cheerfully surrendered a good deal of my autonomy. I have been thinking for a while now about how and why I did that.
Dance theorists Karen Bond and Susan Stinson studied the responses of young dancers to their experiences in classes, and compiled a list of rewards that dance offers — mastery, heightened awareness, relationships, and transcendence. (See “I Feel like I’m Going to Take off!: Young People’s Experiences of the Superordinary in Dance.” Dance Research Journal , 32.2 (Winter 2000–2001). I borrow that list to outline the pedagogic and personal gains that Kittappa Pillai made possible for me, both inside and outside the dance class.
The reward of mastery (of technique) Bharatanatyam, like other forms that require highly disciplined movement, is cruel to the body, and mastery of technique requires, first and always, finding ways of dealing with pain and fatigue. Looking back at my lessons, I realise that I intuitively did the psychic work necessary to set Kittappa Pillai up as a superego figure. My fear of not meeting his expectations drove me to make greater and more unrelenting efforts. But this anxiety was always offset by the thrilling quality of his music. His presence and his singing were, for me, sources of energy that overcame bodily reluctance and allowed the experience of the kind of competence where difficult movements could at least look effortless.
The reward of relationships: Kittappa’s choreographic imagination was so rich, his musical genius so unmistakable, and his teaching presence so charismatic that I felt an entirely spontaneous, unforced sense of awe in his presence. He was also a visionary; his historical foresight made him a wonderful teacher for our transitional times.
His own ‘tradition,’ paradoxically, had emerged from a moment of huge political and cultural upheaval in Thanjavur (in the 19th and early 20th centuries), with Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, English and Sanskritic linguistic contributions, and Hindu/agamic, folk, courtly, and British/military aesthetic traditions merging into a vibrant and volatile new ethos.
Survival of a tradition
The pessimism of Kittappa’s intellect (to use Antonio Gramsci’s phrase) regarding Bharatanatyam’s future made me admire him the more, because he refused to shelter behind comforting platitudes about the survival of his tradition. Yet, despite his almost cynical clearsightedness about the futility of his own artistic labours, he was an optimist in his will. Each lesson, each choreographic experiment and each performance, welling up from the vast and deep reservoir of his knowledge and imagination, became an affirmation of creative depth almost without his intending it to be so.
Perhaps the most endearing and liberating thing about Kittappa Pillai, in my eyes, was his good-humoured and deeply intelligent tolerance for difference and individuality. He accepted his students’ intellectual, moral, romantic, marital, and religious choices with complete equanimity. He actively bonded with students’ partners and took my Anglo-Indian husband in his stride. Steadfast in his devotion to his own ancestral gods, he had no trouble at all accepting students who were Christians or even atheists. His was a free spirit, which welcomed free spirits, as long as they were disciplined enough to deliver good dance.
The reward of heightened awareness
In lessons with Kittappa Pillai, as with many teachers from hereditary nattuvanar families, the choreographic sequence unfolded in the space between master and student, and demanded the intense psychic and somatic focus of both participants. An example: for about ten minutes, before teaching a jati, Kittappa Pillai would try out the mathematics of adavu combinations within the time-frame of the taalam, mumbling the syllables to himself, using the tattu-kazhi with one hand, and keeping the beat with the other.
I would be a quivering antenna, trying with my eyes, with my ears, with every fibre of my being, to track the emerging pattern. Sometimes, the development of his choreographic idea would evade me; sometimes I would just be able to follow the combination of unpredictable syncopation and gentle agreement with the base beat that kept the aesthetic balance of his choreography. When he finally tapped out the jati with his stick and spelt out the steps, and when the whole jati was danced out and completed, I would feel utter delight. Bringing a master’s choreography to life and completion had elements of the intellectual joy of solving a puzzle and of the aesthetic joy of seeing a pattern emerge through bodily understanding.
The richest reward of them all, transcendence
Bond and Stinson describe this as the dancer’s ability to achieve “superordinary states in which bodily feeling is heightened with … awareness of transformation.” Perhaps the biggest psychic hurdle to the dancer’s achievement of a sense of being transformed by art, and “out of the body,” is self-consciousness, made acute by the awareness of being watched. In my dance classes, Kittappa Pillai’s praise — withheld, deferred, wished for — was coded as the highest reward, higher than the egoistic satisfaction of exhibitionist drives. I did not feel I was the object of any gaze except an impersonal, mentoring, critical one. Allowing me to immerse myself in movement and music with a ferocious single-mindedness, Kittappa Pillai gave me that greatest of artistic gifts — full subjectivity, a kind of transcendence.
My novel, The Undoing Dance pays homage to Kittappa Pillai not so much by drawing on his character as by offering a meditation on the gifts that a brilliant teacher can give a dancer.
