At a recent panel discussion, the panellists seemed divided on a single issue. It was the age-old question of the nayika: the pining heroine of Indian verse who remains the reigning protagonist of the dance repertoire. For one faction of dancers, the nayika was timeless, perennially relevant. For another, she was an embarrassing relic of gender-antiquated times.
World Dance Day seems like the right occasion to recall this controversial figure. The arguments on both sides are familiar. The ‘timeless’ tribe invokes the purity argument — how the nayika can only be understood by those who know “original” languages, ur-literatures, “real” tradition. The ‘antiquated’ tribe speaks of the desperate need to infuse new poetry into a repertoire that is feudal, sexist and passé.
I feel some sympathy for both viewpoints, but agree with neither. I am fascinated by the nayika. I also find her deeply tiresome. When I have watched dancers like Kelucharan Mohapatra perform, infusing a subtle, fluid love equation with unmistakable authenticity, I have had no doubt that the nayika is alive. When I have watched lesser performers go through a charade of insipid moues and flirty grimaces to indicate existential yearning, I am filled with fatigue.
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Many years ago, I wrote a poem to express precisely this discomfort. ‘Vigil’ was a poem about my unease with classical heroines who, on one level, do apparently nothing but wait for their lovers. It also expressed my deep fascination with a heritage of love poetry that can be richly archetypal, embodying the great roaring thirst of the individual soul for union with the divine.
When Bharatanatyam dancer Alarmel Valli chose to choreograph that particular poem, I was curious. I had no idea how she would distill this ambivalent modern gaze — its mix of irony and lyricism, critique and celebration. She proved, however, to be a particularly perceptive reader of poetry. She immersed herself in reading it, located its psychological spine (sthayi bhava), detected its tonal shifts (sanchari bhavas), evolved an entire aural architecture that combined music with the spoken word, and finally crafted her response in the idiom of Bharatanatyam. She treated the modern English poem, in fact, as she would treat a traditional padam — a lyric articulation of a heightened, psychologically complex state — and had no doubt that her own dance grammar was fully equipped to negotiate it.
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As my own journey as seeker has deepened, aspects of traditional Bhakti poetry have begun to resonate in ways I hadn’t imagined. I realise that it does not merely offer the archetypes of passive female seeker and dynamic male god. Instead, the roles are so often reversed that one is reminded of the crazily fluctuating power equations that characterise any intimate relationship.
In the ferociously erotic poetry of Gujarati poet Narsinh Mehta, the gopi chains Krishna’s arms to the bedpost; in Oriya poet Salabega’s verse, Radha banishes Krishna from her bed; in Telugu poet Annamacharya, the goddess designates god her slave; and in Jayadeva’s Sanskrit opus, Krishna pines for Radha with such poignancy that you cannot help but be warmed by the deep reciprocity of this relationship between human and divine. And so, the nayika’s endless ‘pining’ doesn’t always connote a spineless passivity; it can mean a dynamic responsiveness, a fiery, spirited, even ecstatic receptivity.
At ‘Stark Raving Mad,’ a festival of Bhakti poetry and dance that I curated in 2013 at Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, I invited dancers to respond to this wonderfully audacious heritage of poetry. I invited contemporary Kathak dancer Sanjukta Wagh, for instance, to explore personal and impersonal conceptions of the divine, to segue between the earthy saguna longing of the Maharashtrian Varkari poets and the more impersonal mysticism of Kabir. I also urged Alarmel Valli to read the translations of Annamacharya by V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, which inspired her to further explore this remarkable poetry where the erotic is inseparable from the existential. After consultations with music scholar VAK Ranga Rao, she finally decided to devote an entire performance to Annamacharya’s poetry.
Poetry comes alive in dance when a performer gets past the truisms and finds for herself the molten core that animates it. Until then, it is decorative language, empty, uninhabited, devoid of resonance. All the tired jivatma-paramatma rhetoric of the world will not save the controversial nayika. But all the attempts to infuse dance with new content will not erase her either. The nayika will endure for those dancers and rasikas who respond to poetry without the pat rhetoric of universality, or jingoistic ideas of topicality. She will endure for those who listen to poetry not because it is “eternal” or “topical,” medieval or modern, but because, in their experience, it breathes, pulsates, transforms, lives.
Living language is poetry. And when a dancer is truly moved by this transformative magic of words, her dynamic listening is the dance.