Tiruvarur, Arudra Darshanam, December 1975... “Tyagesa… Tyagesa!” First time in India, first time in Tiruvarur, first time witnessing Siva Tyagarajaswami’s dance, the Ajapa Natanam. A young Dutch student of Indology, theatre, ballet, Indian dance… starry-eyed and in love with the riddle called Devadasis. There, in Tiruvarur, it all fell in place! Which place? Where do the foreigners belong? Where do the academic researchers fit in? Who are the priests, musicians, dancers and devotees? Is there a Conta Ur ‘own place’ in such global encounters?
Back in the 1970s, Dutch Indology was a Philological discipline — which means grammar, texts, translation, reading about history, literature, philosophy, aesthetics, (performing) arts and eventually emendating, translating and annotating an unpublished manuscript. That was the trajectory to a Ph.D. No theories, paradigms or discourses on socio-cultural matters let alone contemporary politics that form a living context to the subjects that we studied within the walls of Universities. The distance between Utrecht and Tiruvarur seemed immense, unbridgeable yet crucial.
Two years later I returned to Tamil Nadu on an ICCR student fellowship. My classes with Prof. Gonda were now complemented by the private, erudite teaching of Dr. V. Raghavan, the strict discipline of Classical Ballet was matched with the morning and afternoon classes in Bharatanatyam in the lineage of T. Balasaraswati with Nandini Ramani, my amateur singing with Carnatic vocal classes by B. Krishnamoorthy and veena with Veena Ramani, Tamil language and literature by Prof. Kamil Zvelebil turned into fieldwork in Hindu temples: Oduvar, Nagaswara musicians, Gurukkal and former Devadasis enfolded me into their perspectives of a conta ur — one’s own place.
As I was living in the homes of orthodox Brahmin families, of Mudaliar nobility and of my former Devadasi teacher P. Ranganayaki, the distance between my native Utrecht and beloved Tiruvarur dissolved into a new Conta Ur . In this new ‘bi-polar’ own place I performed and taught Bharatanatyam while Nandini Ramani joined me there to teach my students, at Dance Academies and perform in the same Dutch Theatres.
I defended my thesis — ‘Towards the semiosis of the devadasi tradition in South India,’ on May 18, 1984, at the Utrecht University. Unfortunately, the 300-year-old discipline of Philology was not to stay in Utrecht University, despite its brilliant international staff. A few years after my doctorate, the entire Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures was closed down for reasons of ‘economic cutbacks.’
The ‘Academic Shastra’ that had reigned so far was now at a loss for a vital ‘Prayoga.’ This created a wide chasm between universities and the world-at-large. My own journey had taken me deeply into prayoga – the cultural practices. Earlier, immersion in temple ritual, performing arts of music and dance, Tamil poetry and prosody had been held against me as ‘romantic’ and ‘gone native’. Now, it turned out to be the saving grace.
The onslaught of national economic cutbacks in the second half of the 1980s resulted a serious ‘brain-drain’ of young academicians out of The Netherlands. The insight that linguistics, literature, rituals and performing arts are systems of ‘applied knowledge’ earned me a Fellowship at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, in the first badge of the ‘Lost Generation’ scheme. My proposal was to study Tamil as Muthamizh combining the cultural practices of Iyal, Isai and Natakam.
Chennai 1985-89: A new period of intensive fieldwork and training took me back to Tamil Nadu. Prayoga studies dictated a concrete proof of abstract understanding of culture. During this period two events marked such graduation — on the one hand the demonstration of ritual Devadasi repertoire at the Music Academy in the presence of Ranganayaki, former devadasi at the Shri Subrahmanya temple in Tiruttani.
Utrecht 1990-95: The realisation that prayoga encapsulates cultural practices that are multi-medial, embodied and doubly interactive challenged the dominance of sastra normative, disembodied knowledge systems that I had encountered within academic careers. Prayoga resists the reduction of art to the printed word. This critique took the form of studying the contrast between ‘Orality versus Literacy’ and found its way into new ‘places of belonging’. The first professional transition was into Linguistic Anthropology. As Associate Professor at Amsterdam University, I was free to develop the perspective of Orality and Multi mediality further through research, teaching, publication in print and then novel multi-media.
In 1995, Word, Sound, Image — the Life of the Tamil Text was published with an interactive CD, Bhairavi Varnam enclosed… a first of its kind ICCR, India and the Foundation Non-Western Music and Dance, The Netherlands sponsored a Book Launch, demonstration of the CD and concert tour through India and the Netherlands with full orchestra.
Paramparai Foundation
This ongoing journey from Europe to India, back-and-forth, from academic disciplines to the stage, showed me that one’s ‘own place’ is an organic, flexible texture of the people, relationships and practices that survive by free exchange and communication. History shows that without such interaction and application knowledge is bound to dry up.
This lesson inspired me to create the Paramparai Foundation as a platform for cultural interaction — between the layers of time, between local and global centres of dissemination, and between local and global performers. Until the middle of the last century, the arts of Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music belonged to the temples and courts of South India and their hereditary artistes. However far their performing arts might have migrated and are now shared among international students, artistes and audiences, it is vital to habitually return to their Conta Ur , their place of origin and belonging. This journey is inspiring and invigorates the arts with their poruttam — their natural qualities.
Paramparai Foundation travels between the villages of Legend, Hungary and Tiru Pugalur, Tamil Nadu. Bharatanatyam is taught there at a leisurely pace and as an inter-disciplinary art of poetry, music and dance. The courses are small-scale and fully contextualised in the continuation of the Devadasi’s intangible cultural heritage.
The Mohamana workshop took students back to Tiruvarur and the seven shrines of Siva Tyagarajaswami to whom this Varnam from the Thanjavur Quartet is dedicated. At Paramparai Foundation, the transfer of knowledge from generation to generation, from place to place, from practice to practices has become a global interaction. It aims to offer artistes and academics alike an immersion in local real time and real space of the Conta Ur of the Devadasi performing arts.
(The author is a former Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology and Theatre Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Director Paramparai Foundation, Hungary and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Dance Council CID-UNESCO, Paris. Visit www.paramparai.eu)
