A few weeks ago, my friends and I battled our way through Chennai’s once-a-year rainy deluge to head to an Afro-dancehall workshop offered by the superbly talented Maryann Vincent and Nivetha Krishnan of Afrontal. As I bumbled my way through posture, style and step, I realised that I was clearly the outlier in a room full of young quasi-professionals, who swaggered their way through the intricate choreography with great seriousness and aplomb. By the end of it, they were set, while I was sore. Our instructors sat us down at the end of this session to tell us a little bit about the long history that we had briefly been privy to — a timely warning also, I thought, against easy consumption and cultural appropriation. But not a dampener on our collective joy at having been able to move in unexpected ways, and in temporarily being able to inhabit a different reality.
For God knows, the current one isn’t pretty. Those of us who can are investing serious amounts of money and effort in productive distraction, for pray how else to survive? And lest you dismiss my Meena-Kumari-like melancholia as liberalism-addled bathos, let me clarify. Or rather, let me direct you to read the headlines. Fear-mongering, violence, paranoia, antagonism, such are the ruling affects of the new year. Laws meant to scare everybody but most especially people on the wrong side of the religion, gender, class, and caste divide. Rampant police action, reminding one of the fundamental might of the state, no matter its political colours. Communicative clampdowns on all manner of speech and thought. Spectacles everywhere of fury and fire. The panopticon is, effectively, now.
New awareness
So if you thought that this was meant to cheer you up, for it is a new year and all, think again.
But let’s then do something far more in keeping with the newness of the new year. Not formless hope, and consumptive action, but a new awareness of what it might take to be in this world.
At the end of my dance lesson, I read up on dancehall — the dance and the music — and its many contestations and significations.
I am told that originating in Jamaica and Kingstown, dancehall allows for the bodies of the migrants, the workers, and the working class as it were to claim beauty and abandon, even as it is also accused of abandoning the old values of resistance as exemplified by reggae, for a heady mix of spirituality and consumption — in other words, the world as it were.
And now, everywhere, all I can see are these contestations of bodies moving in and despite themselves. At Arambol, I’ve seen both ageing and hipster hippies twirling ecstatic in the breeze of the sea, defying my scornful gaze and labels. In Mumbai, at a Navratri pandal , I see eight women across the ageing spectrum demonstrating a fugdi , a similarly ecstatic twirl of two bodies intertwined in a balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, in order to demonstrate how sisterhood and games between women are ways to pass on the work and rules of family maintenance.
Joy amid distress
My fondest snapshot of the recent protests has been the viral video of an elderly gentleman twirling à la Shammi Kapoor, and sending out joy in and along with our collective witnessing of deep distress and sorrow.
Bodies enact difficult worlds. In Paper Tangos , the anthropologist and dancer Julie Taylor writes about tango as embodying so many contradictions of body, masculinity, and history — “the blank face and still upper body opposing the rapid movement of legs; the macho pose of the male versus his inner feeling of sadness and loss; the apparent romance between the couple and their actual solitude within the dance.”
Dancing in this world is an act of simultaneous control and abandon, of staking a claim to a longer history of life, and of plugging, albeit temporarily, into a worldwide repertoire of possibility. And lastly, of reminding us that there is great joy to complexity. So let us not waste this new year in deepening our dependence on easy categories. Let us contend with both the radical difficulty of the world as well as the relentless need for individuals to think and dance together. Dance me then to the end of the world as we knew it last year. It’s all anew. Happy new year, you all.
The writer teaches anthropology for a living, and is otherwise invested in names, places, animals, and things.
