SOUTH ASIAN DANCE IN BRITAIN:

NEGOTIATING CULTURAL IDENTITY THROUGH DANCE

(SADiB)

Andrée Grau, F.I.Chor, MA, PhD

Leverhulme Research Grant F/569/D

July 1999 – July 2001

Research Team: Ms Magdalen Gorringe, Researcher (full-time), Roehampton

University of Surrey
Dr Andrée Grau, Director, Roehampton University of Surrey
Dr Alessandra Lopez y Royo, Senior Researcher (part-time),
Roehampton University of Surrey

Board of Consultants: Sanjeevini Dutta (Kadam), Pushkala Gopal, Shobna Gulati,

Shobana Jeyasingh, Dr M.N Nandakumara (Bharatiya Vidya
Bhavan), Piali Ray (Sampad), Subodh Rathod, Nasreen Rehman,
Nahid Siddiqui, Anusha Subrahmanyam, Chitra Sundaram

Location: Centre for Dance Research

Froebel College
Roehampton University of Surrey
Roehampton Lane
London SW15 5PJ

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 CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: 4

1. SUMMARY: 6

1.1. Aims

1.2. Main outcome and findings

1.2.1. Multiplicity within South Asian dance

1.2.2. London as a privileged home for South Asian dance
1.2.3. The emergence of the South Asian dance profession
1.2.4. The importance of social class as a parameter for South Asian dance
1.2.5. Institutionalisation and ideological discourses
1.2.6. Institutionalisation within a diasporic context
1.2.7. Identity of the work - Identity of the artist
1.2.8. Identity and ownership of repertoire
1.2.9. Ethno-aesthetic and the assessing and reviewing of South Asian dance
1.2.10. Funding

2. OVERVIEW OF THE FIELD AND RECOMMENDATIONS 12

2.1. South Asian Dance as a British phenomenon

2.2. Recommendations

3. BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH 16

3.1 Its sources

3.2The research team
3.3 Researchers -Informants

4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 26

4.1.Theoretical framework

4.1.1. The anthropological approach

4.1.2. The concept of identity
4.1.3. The institutionalisation of dance
4.1.4. South Asian dance and globalisation
4.1.5. South Asian dance and aesthetics
4.2.Performing as a way of knowing
4.3.Sharing of the research

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5. DISCUSSION OF MAIN FINDINGS 38

5.1. What is in a name?

5.2. Issues of identity
5.3. Identity, dance writing/evaluating and the exoticisation of the South Asian dancer
5.4. Making sense of history
5.5. Arangetram as a signifying practice of heritage and social prestige
5.6. British institutions and South Asian dance
5.7. Funding and the 'professionalisation' of South Asian dance
5.8. South Asian dance and issues of class
5.9. Aesthetics and Ethno-aesthetics
5.10Filmi dance as a ‘unifying’ practice

6. FUTURE RESEARCH 75

7. APPENDICES 76

7.1. Performances attended

7.2. Talks, discussion groups and other events
7.3. Interviews & observation of dance classes
7.4. Practice as a research tool
7.5. Public output
7.6. Talam on the Thames
7.7. Original application submitted to Leverhulme

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY 82

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 1. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for its generous financial support and patience when
the writing of this report was delayed and especially its director, Professor Barry Supple, for
opening Talam on the Thames, an event at the South Bank Centre in August 2001 when the
SADiB team was able to share some of the findings of the project to a wide audience (see
appendix 7.6).

The bulk of the field research has been carried out by Magdalen Gorringe, the full-time
researcher of the project, and I would like to thank her for being not only a first class researcher,
but for her flexibility and willingness to pursue any line of enquiry I suggested. Dr Alessandra
Lopez y Royo worked on a part-time basis as a Senior Researcher, her expertise and insights
have been invaluable and I thank her for this. I thank them both too for their comments on this
report.

I would also like to thank the Board of Consultants, made up of senior members of the South
Asian dance community. Although it only met once formally as a group at the beginning of the
project, each of its number was interviewed in some depth. Additionally all have been a regular
source of support and advice. They not only shared their expertise with us with immense
generosity but they also suggested ideas for further investigation as well as contact with other
practitioners whom they felt we should interview.

The research took place under the auspices of the Centre for Dance Research at Roehampton
University of Surrey and I would like to thank all my colleagues within Dance, the School of
Arts, and the Research Office. I would especially like to name Dr Stacey Prickett for her help
with Talam on the Thames and her desire to pursue in her own research some of the themes
SADiB raised, as well as Shoba Sait, who has not only been doing a fantastic job looking over
all the finances of SADiB, but has also been an invaluable source of advice on Indian cinema
and on contemporary Indian literature. I would also like to thank Ann David who offered to do
voluntary work for SADiB and do some archival research, which has provided an extremely
rich source of data, as well as pursuing a line of enquiry which we could only touch upon, for
her doctoral research. Additionally I would like to thank my two sons Julien and Aristides
Bernard-Grau for the help they gave us during Talam on the Thames, the former by doing much
of the video documentation, the latter by helping out with the children's workshop. Both have
also shown, along with their father, a great deal of patience with a mother and partner who was
constantly disappearing in the name of her research.

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Finally I extend our gratitude to all the artists, promoters, administrators, students who took part
in this research and are too numerous to mention here individually. Their good will,
cooperation, hospitality, and generosity have made this work a rich and rewarding experience
and I hope that they will see some practical value to this research.

Dr Andrée Grau
October 2002

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 1. SUMMARY

1.1 Aims
The original aims of SADiB were:

♦ To carry out an in-depth study on what can loosely be labelled the British South Asian
dance phenomenon. Therefore focusing on South Asian dance in a non-South Asian
context as an acknowledgement and recognition of the increasingly significant role that
the South Asian dance profession plays in British cultural life.

♦ To study this British South Asian dance phenomenon in all its manifestations and
implications by looking at:

o The impact of globalisation on South Asian Dance in Britain taking into

accounts the current debates on definitions and re-definition of South Asian
dance aesthetics in Britain and elsewhere.
o The power relationships that exist within creative practice looking at them in
terms of colonialism/neo-colonialism, race, gender, and class; as well as taking
into account issues of institutionalisation, education, training and
professionalism.
o The issues of creation and re-creation of dance forms and genres generally and
of South Asian dance particularly.

♦ To bridge the gap between practitioners (the South Asian dance profession) and the
body of academic research in Britain, through the use of research methods which give
due emphasis to the doing of dance as well as its conceptualisation and to the teaching
process.

1.2 Main outcomes

Ten major outcomes will be briefly presented here, as they are considered crucial to the SADiB
project. The issues surrounding them will be discussed further throughout the following
chapters and especially within section 4.

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1.2.1 Multiplicity within South Asian dance
Although the dance communities of the United Kingdom have largely adopted the label
South Asian dance, there is no doubt that considerable debate surrounds the term and
this came again and again throughout SADiB's research. Whilst a generic term is
useful, it is also problematic in that it overlooks the multiplicity of genres, which exists
under the label, and simplifies the complexity of the situation. Interestingly we also
found that in different parts of the country the label does not attract necessarily the
same kinds of connotations.

The SADiB project started with a very broad brief of looking at the South Asian dance
phenomenon. Although this was constantly at the back of our mind and a number of
dance genres were investigated ranging from the classical dances, to what has been
labelled Asian freestyle dances that take place in clubs, to the contemporary
developments by artists such as Shobhana Jeyasingh or Sonia Sabri, there is no doubt
that not all received the same degree of attention. Much of the research focused on the
classical genres and of these Bharata Natyam was privileged. This reflected the general
situation found within South Asian dance in Britain generally.

1.2.2 London as a privileged home for South Asian dance

Although South Asian dance happens throughout the country and the SADiB project
investigated the phenomenon in a number of locations in England, as well as in Wales
and Scotland, though not, for financial reasons, Northern Ireland, even though we are
aware that South Asian dance has a presence there (see Appendices 7.1-7.4), there is no
doubt that London has a privileged situation. Indeed this was reflected, for example,
when the national organisation for South Asian dance, Aditi, originally opened in
Bradford in 1989, yet moved back to London in 1996 as it made much more sense to be
based in the capital.

Most of the investigation carried out by SADiB was within the London area, because it
was where the greatest activities took place. It was striking for us to note how far
London is ahead of the rest of Britain in terms of South Asian dance developments.
This was a conclusion we would have preferred not to reach – and this is not to say that
excellence is only represented in London. Indeed, we have found first class work
throughout the country. London, however, is unparalleled for the sheer concentration of
dancers and dance events – and this inevitably affects the quality and the inventiveness
of work developed. Just as a rough indication, there are about 60 dance schools in the
London area alone – compared to another 60 for the whole of the rest of the country.

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 1.2.3 The emergence of a South Asian dance profession
Generally South Asian dancers in the UK had been primarily female and not making a
living out of their dance practice. A shift, however, started to take place in the late
twentieth century. The genre is still dominated by women but a number of men are
making a very strong mark and providing role models for future generations of dancers.
Whilst in the past dance was seen as something additional to other professional
practices such as medicine, law or accountancy, a new generation of dancers is
emerging. These dancers want to devote all their time to dance and earn a living from it
and are becoming increasingly successful in their endeavour. It also worth noting, that
they are often resentful towards those who do not commit themselves full-time to
dance.

1.2.4 The importance of social class as a parameter for South Asian dance
Whilst a number of studies have shown that the parameters of social classes and castes
had been central to the revival of dance in India in the 1930s, SADiB found that these
were relevant too within the British context of the late twentieth century, that certain
genres considered ‘art’ were associated with the middle and upper classes and received
a greater attention and a greater access to resources than others associated with a
'community' practice. SADiB’s research highlighted the divide that exists, as with
Western dance forms, between ‘classical’ and ‘folk’ dance – with ‘commercial’ and
‘social’ dance hovering somewhere on the outskirts of both. There are obviously
subdivisions within the classical and folk worlds – but people tend to at least know of
each other across these subdivisions – while the worlds of Bharata Natyam, a classical
form, and Bhangra, originally a folk form, now widely used within community settings,
for example, are poles apart. The research has noted, however, that the dance activities
within the ‘community’, whilst receiving no public funding and little public
recognition, nevertheless have an important impact in the everyday lives of individuals
of both South Asian and non South Asian origins and undoubtedly make their life
richer and more enjoyable.

1.2.5 Institutionalisation and ideological discourses

In Britain, South Asian dance has become institutionalised in a way that parallels what
has happened in India in the sense that different types of institutions have been
promoting different kinds of ideological discourses and visions of history. On the
whole one can see two main trends: one presents the classical dance traditions as part
of an unbroken lineage over two thousands years old whilst the other interprets the
heritage not as a continuous line, but acknowledges ruptures, parallel histories, and
reconstructions.

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1.2.6 Institutionalisation within a diasporic context
Whilst formal training outside of the traditional guru-sishya-parampara (teacher-
student-tradition) set exists in India and is paralleled in Britain by a variety of
Institutions that promotes music and dance such as the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan or the
Tamil schools, institutionalisation within a broader British context has taken place,
especially through the addition by the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD)
of two South Asian classical forms, Bharata Natyam and Kathak to its portfolio of
dance syllabi in 1998. Although it is too soon to measure the impact this will have on
the dance forms themselves as they are practiced in Britain, there is no doubt that many
artists are concerned that the syllabi may end up promoting certain styles within the
two genres to the exclusion of others and that this may impoverish the forms. The
research also noted a sense of resentment among teachers who choose to work outside
of the ISTD system at the idea of being told what to do or how to teach.

1.2.7 Identity of the work - Identity of the artist

The research has shown that many artists are reluctant to see the concept of identity as
being central to their practice, this is primarily because they do not want to be
marginalised as they see that Western theatre dance, be it ballet or the numerous
contemporary genres, are rarely given this 'cultural' treatment, even though it would be
useful if they were. This is evident, for example within the South Asian dance syllabi
of the ISTD, which incorporate a large component dealing with contextual content of
dance whilst the other genres focus solely on the bodily aspect of the techniques.
Nevertheless the concept is central for a number of reasons: some artists see
themselves as the heirs of traditions that they want to continue with their work. Others
see themselves as working within a primarily contemporary Western medium yet
acknowledge that their work is informed by a distinctive socio-cultural identity and
sensitivity. What the research has shown is that a distinction needs to be made between
the identity of the artists and the identity of their oeuvres and of the technique they
work in and that all dance genres within the UK would benefit if they were examined
in such a way.

1.2.8 Identity and ownership of repertoire

Issues of identity are linked to issues of ownership of repertoire, which, in turn, is
usually linked to access to resources. As more non-South Asian dancers are becoming
practitioners of South Asian dances, their participation within the art form is being
challenged by some. On the one hand uninformed audiences often equate authenticity
with skin colour rather than with dance expertise. On the other hand, within a field

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where resources are limited some professionals see the incorporation of white
practitioners within a genre traditionally non-white as a continuation of imperialist
tendencies. The fact, for example, that the ISTD examination system is set up by non-
Asians is a cause for concern for some. This is so despite the fact that the syllabi had
been instigated by Akademi, South Asian dance in Britain, an organisation which
promotes South Asian dance and has a British Asian director; and that they are taught
primarily by British Asian and Indian teachers. The concerns of the critics is that they
feel that perfectly adequate examination systems, validated by Indian organisations,
existed already in the country and they see with suspicion this alliance with
an‘imperial' institution.

1.2.9 Ethno-aesthetic and the assessing and reviewing South Asian dance
Whilst artists generally wants their artistic practice to be assessed in their own terms, as
the products of original artists showing their individuality, SADiB's research has shown
that many artists are unhappy with the way their work is evaluated by funding bodies
and reviewed by critics. In their eyes these evaluations and reviews are often
ethnocentric in that they use parameters that are often alien to the particular practices
being looked at. What the research has shown is that a concept of ethno-aesthetic is
relevant for all dance genres; that each aesthetic represents the norms of the dance
genre and that these are constantly being negotiated and re-negotiated by individual
artists; and that it is important for assessors and critics alike to acquaint themselves
better with the aesthetic underlying the genres they are writing about.

1.2.10 Funding
Dance in the UK is undoubtedly the Cinderella of the arts in terms of funding and
South Asian dance gets less than 2% of the overall dance allocation. Our research has
shown that South Asian dancers at one level are not necessarily worse off than
'contemporary' dancers in similar situations, all getting piece meal funding. Both types,
for example, have to create and sell their work simultaneously. That is, they find
themselves in a situation where they have not yet made the work, yet they have to sell
the tour.

There is no doubt, however, that many South Asian dancers see themselves, rightly or
wrongly, as having to work with discriminatory criteria set up by the funding bodies, in
contrast to their colleagues within more mainstream genres who do not have to comply
to artistic directives to the same degree. They argue, with some reasons, for example,
that hybridity is seen as synonymous to 'challenging' and 'innovatory' and therefore
worthy of funding, when this could also be the case within classical idioms, which

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receive little funding. This is in contrast to the situation of Western theatre dance where
classical works, ballet primarily but some contemporary genres too, get the largest
share of the allocation.

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 2. OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The focus of the SADiB project was identity and how its many facets are negotiated through
dance. We had no intention of carrying out a full survey that would give a complete national
picture of where south Asian dance is as at the beginning of he 21st century. Indeed this would
have required a very large team of researchers. Nevertheless the project has given us an insight
into what is happening within the South Asian dance scene in Britain. Having spent now over
three years on this topic gives us a privileged position to give an overview and to offer some
recommendations as to what we feel could be achieved through a few simple measures, to
ensure that South Asian dance reaches the place its deserves within the national dance culture.

2.1 South Asian Dance as a British phenomenon

SADiB’s research has highlighted the complexity of what one can refer to as the South Asian
dance phenomenon. There is a huge variety of dance forms practised under this label – and
consequently a huge variety of subcultures that go with them. The world of Bhangra for
example, with its national and international competitions and stylistic variations (including
‘disco Bhangra’) deserves a whole study in itself, as does the unique blend of Bhangra, hip hop
and ‘classical’ moves that make up Asian club dance. Similarly the world of Arangetrams
discussed in some details below in 5.5 could be the focus of an entire research project; and a
choreographic analysis of the dream sequence of the 1951 film Awaara, mentioned later in
section 5.10, cries to be done. This is a ten minutes sequence choreographed by Madame
Simkie, Uday Shankar's dance partner and thus is significant in historical terms in view of
dance development in India. It demanded over three months of work and is simply
extraordinary in its construction, and its choice of movement vocabulary to represents heavenly
nymphs in contrast to the movements used for a hellish underground.

The research has also noted that South Asian dance is very vibrant within both the ‘art’ and the
‘community’ scenes and is a significant aspect of contemporary British culture. Although links
with the Indian subcontinent remain very strong - and there is a great deal of movement to and
fro - South Asian dance in Britain has acquired a unique identity and has become important for
British Asian and non British Asians alike. Despite this our research has shown that it is not
represented in any significant ways within British dance ‘institutions’. Whilst diverse levels of
dance training and education in Western performance styles are available within the education
system throughout the UK, through GCSE, A Level, B-tech/national diploma courses,
contemporary South Asian dance forms in themselves have only a small presence. They are
often, however, represented institutionally in a tokenistic manner, by the inclusion of one of

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Shobana Jeyasingh’s choreography for study in the GCSE syllabus, for example.

Within the university system, South Asian dance has made greater inroads, but nevertheless
remains very much within the margin. It has been included, for example, into course outlines in
a number of dance programmes throughout the country, and its classical genres are treated as
additional dance techniques and examples for discussion in dance theory classes. It is worth
noting too that Middlesex University and the University of Surrey Guildford respectively offer
Bharata Natyam and Kathak as techniques alongside western theatre genres. A student
interested primarily in South Asian dance, however, has nowhere to go within British Higher
Education institutions, either to pursue it as an academic study or with the intention of gaining
training within a conservatoire BA programme, such as exists for ballet or contemporary dance.
In 1992, De Montford University validated a South Asian BA honours dance degree, yet for a
variety of reasons to complex to discuss here, has unfortunately not been able to maintain it.

There is no doubt that Western theatre dance as artistic practice has been greatly enriched by
being supported on the one hand by a professional network of writers and reviewers who
analyse and write about performances for a wide audience in a great variety of magazines and
thus disseminate the performance work to a wider constituency in this country and abroad; and
on the other hand by an academic network of scholars, dancers and choreographers who train,
through the university programmes they are engaged in, the next generation of dance workers.
South Asian dance has nothing of the sort to support it. There is no academic journal in Britain
that specialises in the field, for example, and only one professional magazine Pulse exists.
Furthermore, although research projects such as ours have been and are carried out; and a
number of PhDs have been awarded and more are being undertaken, everything is piecemeal,
sporadic and isolated. We feel that the circumstances at the beginning of the 21st are propitious:
South Asian dance is being recognised artistically in Britain to an extent that never existed
before and it is about time that it is given the academic and professional support it deserves.

2.2 Recommendations
In our view, four fairly simple measures could provide a first step to support South Asian
dance, giving it a framework, which would help it develop and flourish further as artistic
practice. Firm academic foundations within Higher Education would feed into the profession,
providing better informed critics, promoters and general dance practitioners and lead to the
establishment of a conservatoire when the time is right, comparable to what exists for ballet and
contemporary dance, so that future generation of dancers in this country will enter the
profession not only well trained physically but also having received a rounded dance and
general education.

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We would recommend the following actions:

2.2.1 Set up a number of bursaries to carry out doctoral research, both text and
practice based, on a variety of topics within South Asian Dance by British
Asians. To use affirmative action in this way would ensure that a core group of
scholars would be trained and mentored, providing role models for their
communities so that South Asian Dance could begin to be promoted as a
legitimate field for professional and academic activities. At a later stage further
bursaries could be offered to a larger constituency, as it is important that South
Asian dance is looked at by as many people with as many frameworks as
possible.
We would suggest that these bursaries be set up in a London university, such as
Roehampton University of Surrey which has a number of qualified staff
members to supervise research in South Asian dance, and in a university outside
London. Leicester, with a population that is made up of 25% British Asians
would be a good option, and De Montford University has clearly demonstrated
its interest in the field and has expertise among its staff. Links at research level
already exists between academics of both institutions. Funding would be needed
in each university for a Fellowship, which would later on be taken over by the
university, to make sure that staff members are relieved of some of their teaching
commitment in western theatre dance and can be involved in the promotion of
South Asian dance. With five bursaries awarded in each institution, a very solid
research culture could be established and the mapping of South Asian dance in
Britain and choreographic research into South Asian dance could begin.
Although this would not be cheap and funding for three years for such a scheme
would come to about £500,000; it would relatively inexpensive in term of the
impact it would have in the field. Furthermore Roehampton has just been
awarded, with The School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) and The
University of Surrey (UniS), over £800,000 by the Arts and Humanities
Research Board (AHRB) to set up the AHRB Centre for Cross-cultural Research
in Music and Dance and support eight research projects over a period of five
years. If a bursary scheme could be developed during this period its impact
would be even greater.

2.2.2 Establish an academic journal, which would provide a forum for scholars to
debate and discuss their investigations, comparable, in some way to Asian
Theatre Journal produced at the University of Hawaii.

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2.2.3 Encourage the publication of monographs looking at aspects of south Asian
dance so that a growing body of knowledge can be developed for both teaching
and research.

2.2.4 Provide further support to Pulse, in addition to its Arts Council‘s grant, so that it
can develop into a truly national and international magazine and have an impact
in the world of dance similar to the one Dance Theatre Journal has for
contemporary dance for example.

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 3. BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH

3.1 Its sources

Inspiration for the project came from many sources. What follows may read as a linear history
of research questions raised over the last two decades and half, yet it is important to note that
this is a construction situated in the present, informed by the SADiB project, my involvement
with what one can loosely call the anthropology of performance community, and especially by
the discussions I have had over the past three years with Gorringe and Lopez y Royo, my
fellow-researchers on SADiB. Nevertheless I think it is important to situate ideas and to
establish some intellectual genealogical lineage, to situate what I see as significant moments in
the development of ideas, which directly shaped the research carried out by SADiB, since the
construction established by the researchers will be paralleled to the construction established by
the artists being investigated.

Between 1986-1989 I worked with the theatre group Pan Project, a multiracial performance
group of professional actors, dancers and musicians, which, since its creation in 1983, has been
exploring traditional performance styles from Africa and Asia, by inviting master teachers from
abroad to give workshop and by carrying out research overseas itself. I had worked as a
researcher for the Leverhulme funded Inter-Cultural Performing Art (ICPA) research project,
under the leadership of Professor John Blacking and Peter Creswell, at Goldsmiths College,
University of London. This work was in many ways a continuation of collaboration with John
Blacking, which had started in 1976 when I first met him, through my training in
Ethnomusicology and Anthropology, and was to end in 1990 with his premature death.

Pan Project's work was, in part, about expanding further the rich and varied cultural heritage of
contemporary Britain and part of its aims was to bring together the culturally diverse, to learn
and synthesize each other’s traditions within a framework of mutual respect and equality, and to
develop a style of integrated theatre that would be both interdisciplinary and intercultural.

Over the three years of the project I had noted that, regardless of artistic merits, performances
which seemed to emphasise the cultural differences between the dominant white 'Anglo-Saxon
culture' and the minority cultures found in Britain tended to be more successful in terms of
audience attendance and sponsorship than performances that were more obviously
'intercultural'. Pan Project's productions which were perceived by their audiences as being
culturally rooted in 'African' or 'Indian' traditions, for example, tended to cover their costs and
occasionally made a profit whilst those which were more obviously seen to be attempting to
create a new kind of hybrid intercultural performance style including Western as well as non

16
Western traditions regularly lost money. I realised that people - audiences, sponsors and
promoters alike - established links, often erroneously, between artistic practice and ethnicity.
These links were part of an implicit culture in the sense that they were rarely, if ever,
articulated, yet they were of immense importance in that they impacted on the livelihood of the
artists I was working with. Clearly more research was needed around these issues in order to
unpack how consumers and producers situate artistic practice within a broad socio-economic
framework.

On the other hand I also noted that even though identity was clearly part of the framework Pan
Project was working under it was evident that the artists making up the group, whilst
acknowledging their cultural diversity, did not see themselves as culturally displaced persons
seeking a sense of identity through involvement in other cultural traditions, or in those of the
places where they or their ancestors had once lived. They were culturally displaced only in so
far as they wanted to work outside a traditional framework of theatre. Neither did they see
themselves as 'cultural ambassadors'. They were first and foremost professional artists seeking
new modes of self-expression and the communication of ideas. They were a performing group,
and their research was concerned more with developing new subtleties and nuances of
performance than with exploring the varieties of cultural expression (Grau 1990, 1992). Clearly
what was at stake was the tension between different kinds of identities: on the one hand there
was the socio-cultural identity of the artists, what made them what they were as social beings,
as products of socio-historical forces; on the other hand there was the identity of their artistic
practice, the identity of their performance work. Again I found that more work was needed to
elucidate further the dynamic tension between the two.

Whilst what I have described so far could be seen to be taking place at a micro level, one also
needed to look at what was happening at a macro level in the sense that the efflorescence of
artistic cross fertilisation within performance practices which I was observing was undoubtedly
part of a bigger movement which was re-defining the British artistic and cultural landscape at
the time. New artistic practices were established and increasingly were being institutionalised.
What I mean here by institutionalisation is the process through which new genres gain
respectability and status, are accepted, and become integrated in the mainstream of British
performance culture. In the unfolding of this process, new configurations, influenced by
comparisons and analogy with a variety of models, Western and non Western, are coming into
being which in turn are affecting or will affect new educational/teaching programmes. Again
this was an area that needed further exploration.

In 1988, whilst attending in Essen, Beyond Performance: Dance Scholarship Today, a

conference organised by the Federal Republic of Germany Centre of the International Theatre

17
Institute, to present some of my research, I heard the renowned Indian scholar, Kapila
Vatsyayan. In her paper Vatsyayan discussed the misunderstanding held by most Western
viewers of Indian forms. 'It is true', she said, 'that all that is recognised the world over today as
the ancient traditions of Bharata Natyam, Kathakali, Yakshagana, Odissi, Manipuri, and Kathak
are at one level young re-constructs on the basis of textual and sculptural evidence and a
musical score which had a continuity in the oral tradition (...) In the period between 1950 and
1980 (...) the reconstructed neo-classical forms came to stay. They are accepted as Antiquity'
(1988:8-9). She used Odissi as an example: 'the present form of Odissi was an intellectual
endeavour by dancers and dance scholars at a conference in 1951 called Jayantika, where a
dance form was evolved, given a textual base, a technical terminology and a repertoire. Once
the performance was accepted then the search into text sources also began' (1988:11).

This was a revelation, not so much because one could see the foundation of the Indian classical
dance canons based on an 'untruth', but rather because it demonstrated the social construction of
history and the roles that dancers had within it. A dance form was created and when it was
convincing its makers looked for its historical roots! This completely throws our common
'Western' vision of history. It is important to insist here that I do not interpret the situation as a
lie on the part of the dancers; rather I see it as being rooted in different concepts of tradition,
transmission and transformation and it is important to elucidate further how these are
conceptualised, constructed and put into practice by their protagonists. This has become an
important aspect of my work generally and a strong element of SADiB.

As part of ICPA I had participated in Kathakali workshops in London and in 1986-7 spent four
months in India, in Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka documenting Pan Project's tour of villages
as well as studying local performance practices. This rekindled, in my imagination if not
necessarily in my body, the little Bharata Natyam training I had received as a teenager. In the
early 1990s I convened, for a number of years, Introduction to dance of another culture:
dances from the Indian Subcontinent at the London Contemporary Dance School, a course set
up in close collaboration with The Academy of Indian Dance (in 1997 it was renamed
AKADEMI, South Asian Dance in the UK). This allowed me to start a discussion with Mira
Kaushik, the director of AKADEMI, which has been going on and off to this day; and to meet
many South Asian dance practitioners and see how, through their teaching, they represented
different strands of the number of histories of Indian classical dance and how they situated their
dance practice within these histories and within a diasporic context. In 1998 I wrote Eyewitness
Dance for Dorling Kindersley and the book had a strong Indian component. During the process
of writing it and of putting together visual documentation, on the advice of Mira Kaushik, I met
the Bharata Natyam dancer Anusha Subrahmanyam who was subsequently invited to be a
‘subject’ for the book and act as a consultant. She later became a member of the SADiB's

18
Board of Consultants.

From an academic start in dance anthropology focusing on dance practices within highly
specific cultural settings (the Venda of Southern Africa and the Tiwi of Northern Australia) I
had moved to an extremely broad artistic framework of 'interculturalism'. The time was right to
move again towards more specificity and over the years my interest became more focused,
gravitating towards the Indian subcontinent and its European diaspora.

In 1997 Lopez y Royo worked on research commissioned by AKADEMI, exploring the setting
up of a vocational degree in South Asian Dance. This culminated in the report South Asian
Dance: Mapping out models of vocational training and delivery mechanisms. (Iyer 1997a)
which raised a number of issues relating to how South Asian dancers situate themselves, their
work and their practice within a diasporic context. Discussing the different possibilities of
training it was clear that most wanted an emphasis on “British-ness” as opposed to “South
Asian-ness” in that they aspired to a vocational training that would be British and British
oriented. Although ‘the South Asian pilgrimage’, as some called it, had some value, it was a
personal choice and not everyone felt the need to travel to the subcontinent to soak up in the
cultural background surrounding the different dance forms they studied. They were British
dancers working within a British context. Yet many also acknowledged cultural differences and
felt that they often had to work within a framework were definitions of terms did not take into
accounts diverging views. This imposition of conceptual frameworks was for some tantamount
to cultural imperialism. They argued, for example, that 'professionalism' should be redefined
and should not be solely determined by taking as its criterion that of performing and teaching
dance as the principal source of income. For them professionalism was about excellence of
performing standards and should not be taken to be commensurate with the earning
potential/ability of the performer. Historically, South Asian dance was more likely to be
performed in a context in which one’s livelihood was earned through other means, with no
reflection on the high performance standards of the dancers. Whilst they acknowledged that the
British socio-economic context was different, they nevertheless argued that in a culturally
diverse society, one should be allowed to retain the freedom of performing without this being
linked to earning money from dance, if one so wished, without a perceived consequent lowering
of one’s performance standards.

What was evident was that there were many voices within the South Asian dance scene, and
that a number of parallel, sometime contradictory, discourses were taking place which clearly
needed further investigation and that investigation had to take into account the broader issues of
globalisation and localisation and how these phenomena affect the development, the
institutionalisation and the training of South Asian dance.

19
Lopez y Royo at the time felt that a wider, international readership should know about the
vibrant new work and the commitment of South Asian dancers from Britain. This led her to
propose a special issue of Choreography and Dance to Harwood Academic Press which
responded in a positive way and commissioned South Asian Dance: The British Experience
(Iyer 1997b) which allowed a number of artists and scholars South Asian and non South Asian
to debate some of these issues. My contribution to the volume was a chapter entitled Dance,
South Asian Dance, and Higher Education (Grau: 1997).

Through this collaboration between Lopez y Royo and myself the seed of SADiB was sown. It
was further fertilised by the inspiration given to us by two prominent figures within the British
dance world: the choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh who, through her choreography and writing,
is constantly challenging our views on identity and its constructions and on the aesthetics of
South Asian dance; and Mira Kaushik, the Director of Akademi already mentioned, who with
her leadership and sensitivity to changing socio-cultural contexts has supported over the years
many innovative and exciting projects.

What we felt was crucial was that, although the research we were interested in doing, was to
gravitate around the concept of identity, it was important that it was not an idea solely linked to
a socio-cultural framework. As Shobana Jeyasingh argued in one of the discussion I had with
her when preparing the proposal to be submitted to the Leverhulme Trust 'why should South
Asian dancers always be studied by anthropologists, wasn't time to bring the aestheticians in?'

3.2 The research team

The research team consisted of three researchers, all white, middle class, and female, ranging in
age from mid twenties to late forties and coming from a variety of backgrounds.

The full time researcher, Magdalen Gorringe, is a non Asian Bharata Natyam dancer. She has a
first class BA Hons in Theology and Religious Studies from Jesus College, University of
Cambridge, and an M.Phil. in Classical Indian Religions from St John's College, University of
Oxford. In both instances her dissertation was rooted in dance. The former, Reaching the Pure
through the Impure: Dance as a means of Transcendence, explored the religious uses of dance
within the Vaisnavite and Saivite traditions. The latter, Daughters of Rudra: a study of the
devadasi institution was a study of South India's temple dancers. Gorringe started her dance
training in India as a child but most of her advanced training took place in Britain, under the
tutelage of Sri Prakash Yadagudde, of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in London. During the
course of working with the SADiB project she also started training with Mavin Khoo and
continues working with him to this day. This experience of training with two different teachers

20
encapsulated in many ways what many South Asian dancers are going through as they situate
themselves vis-à-vis tradition and change and was invaluable for the research as we were
unpicking the multitude of tensions, artistic as well as social, that exist with South Asian dance.
Her arangetram, or professional début, took place in August 1999 at the beginning of the
research. Again, although independent from it, it was a rich source of data, in terms or
organisation of the event both socially and artistically. Similarly Gorringe choreographed and
performed as part of the Christian Aid project Dance Against Debt in 1999. She also took part
in Akademi’s site specific performance Coming of Age in August 2000, and was part of Mavin
Khoo’s company when he choreographed Images in Varnam at the Clore Studio of the Royal
Opera House in 2001. All these events provided invaluable data in terms of using performing as
a distinct way-of-knowing as well as allowing Gorringe to re-think her experience and
understanding of her twenty odd years of training and involvement with Bharata Natyam both
in India and in the U.K. For her, being an insider to the tradition whilst at the same time,
behaving as an outsider for the sake of the research, was both interesting and challenging. As
she put it herself:

The fact that I am a dancer has had advantages and disadvantages both for myself
as a dancer and as a researcher. As a dancer I hold rather passionately certain
views on what is and isn’t good dance, and what does and doesn’t constitute good
teaching practice – and I have had to be careful to try and prevent my views
influencing or leading the answers of respondents in interviews. It has
occasionally been difficult to listen and document rather than engage and argue.
On the other hand, self-consciousness of myself as a researcher has been very
helpful in enabling me to deal with situations, which would otherwise have been
difficult. I can watch with composure a 10 minutes argument on the question of
bhava in the middle of a 45 minutes class, and can patiently attempt to identify a
suitable holy day for my performance by reminding myself that it is all good
anthropology!

Alessandra Lopez y Royo worked one day a week as senior researcher on the project. She has a
PhD in Art and Archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London and a background of studies in the visual arts, archaeology and history of performance
of both South and Southeast Asia. She has practical knowledge of a number of South and
Southeast Asian dance forms and, although not a professional performer, sees her own practice
as central to her research. Some of her recent work has, for example, drawn on the
reconstructed dance techniques in the context of South and Southeast Asian contemporary
choreography and performance. Interested in the archaeology of performance, she has
investigated a computer animation of the dance reliefs of the 9th century CE Prambanan
complex, in Central Java, following the publication of her book Prambanan: sculpture and
dance in ancient Java. (199) She has written extensively on Asian dances, on art
interconnection in the context of Indian artistic practices and on issues of dance reconstruction,

21
drawing parallels with archaeological methods and practices in the subcontinent and in
Southeast Asia.

As project director, spending one day a week on the project and coming with a background in
dance, Benesh Movement Notation, ethnomusicology and anthropology I brought another
dimension to the research. I hold a MA in Ethnomusicology - Ethnochoreology and a PhD in
Social Anthropology, both from The Queen's University of Belfast. In contrast to my colleagues
on the project I am not a specialist on South Asia. The bulk of my work has been carried out as
an Oceanist, looking at issues of embodiment and body intelligence. As mentioned earlier,
however, I have always had an interest in the Indian subcontinent.

Although the starting point, or point of entry, of each of the three researchers may be quite
different, it would be difficult to establish clear cut boundaries between what each brought to
the project. It is obvious that at some points our interests and approaches converged, in the
sense that all three were interested in the processes by which people look at their past, construct
it, interpret and re-interpret it and how, in this process, artistic canons, traditions and heritages
are constructed and established. One can nevertheless say that overall Gorringe brought her
expertise as a dancer at the start of her professional career, and that this knowledge was
enriched by her academic background in Religious and South Asian Studies, as well as coloured
by her views as a social and political activist. Lopez y Royo's contribution was primarily from
the perspective of an investigation of South Asian dance aesthetics and content, looking at the
dance itself and the fluidity of its boundaries in the context of tradition and innovation within
the subcontinent, Britain and more generally Asia. Through examining the existence of different
frameworks and therefore different aesthetic codes, she looked for connections and dynamic
interactions, visual codes, and unspoken terms of reference. Whilst, as an anthropologist, I was
particularly interested in the social construction of reality and on different conceptualisations of
dance and of the dancer's body that may exist. I was looking at the people involved with dance
and at the social mechanisms they set up around the dance, looking especially at the different
agendas they set up for themselves.

We were also very aware that the project could be seen by some as three white middle class
women of respectively Swiss, Italian, and English descent, looking at dance practices outside of
their own heritage and therefore hijacking cultural forms for their own benefits within a neo-
colonial setting. Therefore we felt it was important for us to have a Board of Consultants made
up of designated members of the major South Asian dance institutions/organisations found in
the UK and of leading members of the South Asian dance profession, so that artists and
promoters would be given a voice within our project. The Board was appointed in the first few
months of the research and its members advised throughout the project.

22
3.3 Researchers - Informants
When Lopez y Royo and myself wrote the application to the Leverhulme Trust we included a
budget that would allow us to employ a number of consultants in addition to our Board. We
were aware that many South Asian dance practitioners and promoters would not be able to give
time to our research unless they had some financial compensation. When we started we decided
that flat rates would be used, as it would be difficult to differentiate between individuals and
allocate different scales. People giving us an interview were paid an honorarium of £50, based
on the University Visiting Lecturer's hourly rate at the time of £28. If we asked more of their
time, when for example we may have asked them to produce a report about some events they
had been involved with, they were paid the usual university daily rate for researchers, £95 a
day. If travel was included expenses were covered, though mostly we went to them rather than
the opposite. What is interesting is that the vast majority of those interviewed were pleasantly
surprised by the provision of such a fee – and in fact had we not mentioned the matter, the issue
of being paid for the interview time is unlikely to have arisen. Nevertheless, the payment
undoubtedly benefited the project in terms of confirming our respect for the participants and
thereby developing a sense of good will towards our research. It also helped in terms of
communicating that the research project was a serious undertaking and ‘not yet another survey
of South Asian dance’ as some complained when first approached.

We were also aware that the people we talked to would not necessarily be interested in our
research, in that it was not necessarily relevant to their work and interests. We therefore tried to
create opportunities where we could somehow return the generous gifts of knowledge that our
informants gave us. We did that in a number of ways. Magdalen Gorringe, for example, offered
and carried out voluntary work with all the South Asian dance organisations, which worked
with us. She carried out a number of duties that needed doing ranging from the fairly menial to
the more expert (further details can be found in Appendix 7.4).

We also worked towards creating some spaces in which our informants could share their views
and expertises in ways that were directly useful to them. Some were fairly private and involved
a small group of interested people. For example a meeting with the Arts Council of England
(ACE) was set up so that a focus group discussion with promoters and programmers could
discuss issues re funding and promoting South Asian dance in the presence of ACE officers.
Others were public and of different scales, for example Mavin Khoo, a solo artist was employed
to perform and discuss his work as part of Roehampton Dance Diary series. More importantly
in August 2001, after the project was officially finished, SADiB had the opportunity to host a
day at the South Bank Centre, which we called Talam on the Thames, to present issues of South
Asian dance in Britain today. Although not all people who had helped us throughout the two

23
years could be involved, some sixty people, artists, promoters and researchers, came to present
their own viewpoints to a wide audience within a prestigious setting. Again all were paid, this
time in line with Equity's (the Actors' Union) rates, and had their expenses covered. This event
was high profile and extremely well attended with hundreds of people milling about the South
Bank Centre attending the many events we had set up.

Nevertheless, working within a marginal art scene with limited resources, tension occasionally
occurs between researchers and artists. When I had worked with the ICPA project, mentioned
earlier, I had noted that Pan Project immediately delineated two groups: on the one hand there
were 'professional artists' (Pan Project) and on the other there were 'academic researchers' (Peter
Cresswell, John Blacking, myself, and the members of the Council of Management). It did not
matter that many of the academics were, or had been at one time, practising artists; the point
was that the professional artists perceived our interests and concepts of research as different
from their own and consequently saw us as 'academics'. One of the reasons for us to have a
professional dancer as part of the SADiB research team was in part to anticipate such a reaction
from our informants. At least some of the questions we were raising were relevant to them as
professional artists, since Gorringe shared many of their concerns in terms of access to training
or paid employment, for example.

Within SADiB there was no doubt that some informants saw a demarcation between individuals
on a regular secure income - if temporary for Gorringe and Lopez y Royo, more permanent in
my case - and themselves who were often struggling to get funding for their work. Although not
often voiced, the question 'what is in there for you?' was undoubtedly in the background.
Furthermore the fact that none of us were of Asian origins somehow placed us for some in a
privileged and perhaps authoritarian stance. Indeed one of the first communication we received
was about such an issue when SADiB went public on Narthaki, a website dedicated to Indian
dance, generated in Chennai, with an international readership. The Asian American scholar and
performer Uttara Asha Coorlawala contacted us and asked 'I am puzzled as to why such a
project would be run by a person with a non-Indian name?' arguing that she was 'kind of fed up
by that kind of liberal on the outside, hold the reins tight on the inside way of organizing
projects. Having organized an information bank, how do I know it will serve south Asian
interests?' (Cited in Grau 2001). Later she articulated her feeling publicly and argued that in her
views within the SADiB project 'dancers of the subcontinent can serve only as subjects and
informants for Anglo-European researchers' (Coorlawala 2002) even though she offered no
evidence to substantiate this. This will be discussed further in Section 5 as it is very important
and clearly at the heart of postcolonial theory, which informed much of SADiB’s research.

Similarly not everyone we talked to was happy to be interviewed. A number of people seemed

24
disenchanted with research arguing that innumerable reports were written, but nothing ever
changed. Others were suspicious of our motives. Teachers at one of the Tamil schools Gorringe
visited, for example, wanted an assurance that nothing bad would be written about them – and
asked why we were interested in them – they minded their own business and we should mind
ours! These teachers, in common with a number of other interviewees, reacted quite defensively
on the subject of the ISTD syllabi – and while fortunately no one shouted at Gorringe, as they
did at Sushmita Ghosh when she carried her research on the subject as part of the ISTD project -
there was clearly a sense of resentment at the possibility of being told what to do or how to
teach, by individuals seen as coming ‘from above’.

Furthermore as our research rested on the grounds that artistic action and the negotiation of
meaning must be contextualised, we asked questions which artists occasionally saw as trivial
and irrelevant to their artistic goals. Similarly when organising Talam on the Thames we wanted
a wide range of individuals to be given a voice as this would give a broad picture of the
contemporary South Asian dance scene. For some of the more established artists, this meant
giving access to a prestigious venue to individuals who in their view 'did not deserve it', whilst
not giving a chance to other performers, 'more worthy' artistically, and we had to defend our
choices.

We were also very aware that individuals working for official bodies which either dealt solely
with South Asian dance, or whose remit included South Asian dance, may occasionally hold
views that do not necessarily coincide with the official ones given by their organisation.
Furthermore it also came to our notice that some individuals were concerned about possible
conflict of interest between the kind of documentation we wanted to achieve and what their
organisation was about. For these, and other reasons, some refused to be interviewed by us,
though generally being gracious and telling us that constraints of work did not give them any
time to talk to us.

One must not forget that it is a rare privilege to be able to carry out research without strings
attached, and it is understandable that some queried our motives. On the whole, however, we
have had tremendous support from all involved, even from those who did not want to be
interviewed. The consultants approached have been overwhelmingly helpful and generous with
their time, their thoughts and sometimes their materials. Most seemed to enjoy reflecting on
their experiences as South Asian dancers in Britain; and occasionally people remarked that the
interview had sparked an idea. There was also a sense of wanting to be heard – especially on
subjects to do with the changing aesthetics of the form, and the funding system. All together we
have gathered a vast amount of data, which can only be touched upon in this report.

25
 4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

4.1 Theoretical framework

SADiB's aims were to link dance studies with cultural, historical, socio-political and economic
issues, intersecting a number of disciplines. It looked at representation, power relationships and
colonialism, orientalism, exoticism, race, gender and class, education and training, access to
resources, all through the lens of South Asian dance, involving in the process current debates on
the definition and re-definition of its aesthetics and forms.

As a way of gathering data the research relied broadly on an anthropological approach to dance
because it gives a framework that allows an examination of all artistic practices. The Swiss
ethnomusicologist Laurent Aubert described his field in his recent book, The Music of the
Other (2001) and his description applies to dance anthropology as conceived by the SADiB
team too.

Ethnomusicology as a science is not defined as the study of ‘other’

musical cultures. It does not refer to a specific domain, which would group
arbitrarily all non-western musics. Rather, it corresponds to a cluster of
methodologies, which allows one to take into account every parameter of a
musical fact. It is therefore possible to study a symphonic orchestra,
techno music, or rave parties, as well as Carnatic music from India, or
Bambara court musicians from Mali. (2001:20)

4.1.1 The anthropological approach

In anthropology dance is not perceived as an ‘artistic’ entity divorced from its socio-cultural
reality. Both are closely connected and indeed inseparable. Dance, as a symbolic form, is not
just a way of making sense of the world, but it can also act upon it. As a socio-cultural fact it
carries meaning and values associated with the group that produces it. It is therefore carrier of
history. Dance can bring people together, acting like a badge of identity, and allow people to
recognise themselves within it. We must not forget however that dance can also exclude those
who do not belong, or those who cannot afford or are unable to participate for other reasons.
This exclusion is also significant in terms of individual feelings of belonging to a group.
Therefore an anthropological approach will be especially interested in looking at boundaries:
where are they situated? And by whom are they established and invoked?

To situate dance in a socio-cultural context is not denying its aesthetic dimension. Rather it is
acknowledging that artistic sensitivity is also rooted in power relationships. When South Asian
artists, for example, discuss classicism in a transnational context, they are not just talking about
choreographic and musical structures. They are also referring back to a value system. Each state

26
in India, for example, wants its classical form and Sangeet Natak Academy in New Delhi sets
up commissions to look at each application. The state of Assam, for example, had one of its
dance forms recently declared as ‘classical’ (David 2002). In the past fifty years or so Kathak
saw its status change from ‘semi-classical’ to ‘classical’. To us it is obvious that these actions
have a political dimension and are not just about 'art' and to ignore this would, in the long run,
be detrimental to artistic practice.

It must be noted, however, that this movement of ‘classicisation’, coming largely from the
north, irritates many artists and intellectuals, especially in the south, and that many within the
subcontinent have opposed this internal hegemony. Indeed as Appadurai has argued

Dravidian India has moved out of the shadow of the ever-hungry classicizing
North, nonverbal genres have begun to edge into the privileged territory of
verbal material, and oral materials have began to compete for attention with
written ones. These inversions of our conventional thinking, and of others', did
not, of course descend on the scholarly world ex nihilo. They built on earlier
debates about "great" and "little" traditions, about Sanskritization and its
variants, about the roles of classical models and meanings in a polyglot,
vernacular world, about bhakti as a counter-system to orthodox Hinduism, and
about the hidden alternative discourses of Untouchables, poet-saints, and
women in the subcontinent. (1991:5)

We will see later when discussing further the notion of heritage, how these oral and textual
traditions are invoked to elaborate different versions of history.

Looking at South Asian dance in Britain from an anthropological perspective thus allowed us to
look at dance in terms of both product and process, taking into account especially the way in
which people make sense of their world and situate themselves and their practice within this
world.

One could say that three keywords underlie the rationale of the project. They are: identity,
institutionalisation and aesthetics.

4.1.2 The concept of identity

As an anthropologist I have always been interested in the study of identity, or rather in studying
the process of identification, as we must look at the concept of identity as something dynamic
rather than seek a fixed identity. The essence of identity is room to manoeuvre, flexibility of
strategies and tactics of choice. In my work I have always been fascinated by the way in which
dance can be used to forge identities and how in the history of decolonisation, for example, one
can see, in many countries a revival movement emerging. These movements looked into the
countries artistic heritage, including dance. They preceded and somehow laid the foundations

27
for the independence movements that were to emerge. Their search was to provide national and
ethnic group symbols and to create a cohesive power and instrument for the mobilisation of
people against the oppressive regime. After independence the retrieved heritages became an
important tools to define national identities in the postcolonial situation. This happened in
Ireland, in Finland, in South Africa, and of course in India.

In the past 25 years having carried out research in South Africa, Australia, India as well as
England it became clear to me that in dance, society is not only represented, it is interpreted,
manipulated and occasionally invented. It is essential not to see the arts only as mirrors of
society, and artists as reacting to society's views. Rather we need to look at the potential of
social life being first formulated in the arts, and to look at artists as creative agents bringing to
the fore new ways of looking at the world, which may occasionally have considerable impact in
society. My research in small scale, relatively homogenous societies had undoubtedly showed it
to be the case. The ICPA and SADiB projects allowed me to look at these issues in a large
complex, stratified and heterogeneous society and to explore to what extent this is true there
too.

By studying dance, culture is studied and the ways in which cultural knowledge is transmitted.
As a performing art, dance is continuously changing under the influence of its contexts, be they
physical, historical, social, cultural and/or political. Thus it provides an opportunity for
reflection on society, its norms and its values. Processes of change in society affect the content,
form and organisation of dance. Some dance genres disappear, as they no longer fulfil the
needs of society. Other genres are creatively changed in content and form and adjusted to new
situations caused by technological and commercial challenges as well as by new audiences.
New genres are created.

4.1.3 The institutionalisation of dance

Traditions are never static. They are ongoing processes of passing cultural knowledge from one
generation to the next and are influenced by changing social contexts. One of these influencing
factors is institutionalisation, the process through which cultural forms become generally
accepted and standardised. In this way institutions are seen as programmes imposed by society
upon the conduct of individuals. They are regulatory patterns. This is why the study of
institutionalisation of South Asian dance within the British context was of special importance to
the SADiB project especially in so far as institutions are typified in part by their historicity,
coercive power and moral authority

1. By historicity I mean that institutions have a life of their own. Although individuals
mark them, they tend to exist independently of them: they existed before their

28
 involvement with them, possibly even before they were born, and will be here after they
stop being linked to them, possibly even after they die. Therefore they have a history
and this history must be documented as it has an impact on the contemporary
incarnation of the institution.

2. By coercive power, I mean that because of their objective reality - we all agree the
institutions exist, therefore they are 'objective' - we cannot wish them away, regardless
of whether we like them or not, approve of them or not. If we want to participate in,
collaborate with them we need to follow the norms shared by the people involved in
them. Even if we want nothing to do with them we cannot ignore their norms as they
shape other people's perceptions and therefore how we, in turn, are viewed.

3. By moral authority, I mean that institutions have a claim to the right of legitimacy. They
are established, recognised as such and in the example of the arts they have helped into
the creation of aesthetic canons, the yardsticks by which the arts are evaluated.

By studying institutionalisation the intention was twofold: we looked at the process of the
emergence of new institutions within a historical framework. How did dance genres such as the
South Asian ones, develop and become accepted by society in their new home? How did they
gain respectability? How did they become integrated within the mainstream of society? What
kinds of public bodies were set up to support them? What ideological discourse did they
follow? And how did they change over time? These were the questions asked by the research
team and we sought to study the dynamics of these processes within the context of present-day
culturally diverse Britain. Rather than look at South Asian dance as a phenomenon that could be
isolated from the rest of society we wanted to see it as a contemporary British phenomenon.

On the other hand we also wanted to investigate how individual artists situated themselves vis-
à-vis those institutions as we had noted that British born and trained South Asian dance
professionals or aspiring professionals were becoming increasingly successful in earning a
living for themselves and in adjusting their performances to the changing taste of the audience,
reacting creatively to newer technological and commercial challenges. Did they see themselves
as having an influence on the institutional set up? For example, the research clearly showed that
there had been a process of adjusting to the requirements of funding bodies for the
commissioning of new work. What was the artists’ perspective on this? How did they relate to
other practitioners in the field of South Asian dance particularly and the broader field generally?
How did they negotiate the ethnicity associated with their dance form by the majority of their
public?

29
In this way processes of identification and institutionalisation became closely linked as they
clearly influenced each other. Data was collected through interviews, direct observation,
participation in dance events as participant or audience, reading in a wide range of material:
academic texts, reviews of performances, reports by public funding bodies, novels by South
Asian authors, as well as by looking at popular Indian cinema and the place dance has within
these films.

Furthermore we recognised that marketing techniques were crucial in shaping British audiences'
response to South Asian dance and that they were an important element within the process of
creating a dance for audiences' consumption. The project therefore collected a great deal of
publicity material produced by artists and by institutions. This formed part of the exhibition we
prepared as part of Talam on the Thames and which was subsequently donated to the Theatre
Museum in London as their curators felt it was useful material.

4.1.4 South Asian dance and globalisation

We live in a time where big multinational companies and banks often have more power than
governments, where communication systems have transformed the world into a global village,
where the dominant mainly Western technological societies have enforced a large degree of
conformity. This globalisation process is not only expressed in economic/material terms. It is
also found in artistic spheres: for example in 'popular culture' the rise of the so called 'world
music', where indigenous musical forms from around the world are mixed with Western
musical structures and rhythms, is a typical example of the phenomenon. In a more 'elitist
culture' one finds a great deal of so-called 'inter cultural work', I am thinking especially of the
work of theatre practitioners like Peter Brook or Eugenio Barba. One could argue that the
artistic discourse taken by Brook or Barba in their search for universals is a quest for a unity,
maybe mythical, in our humanity, thus giving another perspective, more human and nobler, to
the socio-economic dimension.

Parallel to this in a climate where so much is becoming the same, people are looking for their
identity, looking back into their roots, possibly also mythical, in order to cope with the wider
world. A number of countries have promoted throughout the 20th century the creation of many
dance groups, for example, with a great deal of interest in anything 'authentic' and 'traditional'.
These two concepts are used and accepted by most without question, even though they are
highly contentious and need to be looked into. I do not want to go into it now but suffice it to
say, for the moment that even the closest reproduction of earlier models is, in the context of a
stage performance, a re-creation. Dances are often "corrected", "enriched" or "embellished".
They are almost always standardised and often condensed.

30
At another level we live in an era of political upheaval, with large movements of people
crossing borders as refugees, political or economic, in a period of recession, with high
unemployment, where individuals easily feel threatened in their identities. Such feelings often
colours people’s judgment. I remember doing an informal survey among the dance students I
was teaching at UniS, after the 1991 census had taken place. I asked them to guess how many
black people lived in the country. Almost unanimously they quoted figures between 10 and 20
millions. Yet the census recorded 2.54 million black people, fewer than 900.000 of them from
Afro-Caribbean origins out of a total population of over 54 millions! Even giving allowance for
the possibility of people refusing to enter such details in the census for ideological reasons, the
discrepancy between perception and reality is staggering.

At this level identity, in its ethnic mode, becomes divisive, it is used not only as a way of
emphasising differences but of grading these differences into better and worse; thus not only
separating 'us' from 'them', but justifying any possible dominance and oppression. This
dichotomy of 'self' and 'other' is always present at every level of society. Taken to an extreme it
can become extremely dangerous and lead to discrimination and racism.

Once again I would stress that a discussion of dance in our times cannot be held without taking
into consideration the socio-political conditions of the early 21st century. It would be naive, for
example, to think that all the discussions on cultural diversity, whether in society at large, or
within the performing art for the last thirty years or so have appeared out of the blue or that the
creation and sponsorship of dance is apolitical. Scholars like the theatre critic and practitioner
Rustom Bharucha (199), or the dance anthropologist Anca Giurscescu (1990) have analysed
very carefully how, respectively ‘Indian’ and ‘Rumanian cultures’ have been reduced to
commodities by their governments, who have shaped, marketed, and transported this ‘culture’
to different part of the world.

In this way globalisation has affected the way specific South Asian dance genres are performed
on stage in Europe, America, Australia and Asia and play their role in cross-cultural
communication. This interaction between performers and different audiences has brought new
dynamics to the role of the performing arts. Western forms have been affected and the practices
of South Asian dance in Western countries such as Britain also have been profoundly affected
by it.

In discussing the concept of nation state, Appadurai pointed to the many "non-state forms of
macro political organization: interest groups, social movements and actually existing
transnational loyalties" of these days. He went on to discuss the many diasporic groups and how
these groups expose " the gap between the powers of the state to regulate borders, monitor

31
dissent, distribute entitlements within a finite territory and the fiction of an ethnic singularity on
which most nations ultimately rely" (1996:49-57). The British case illustrates this aptly.

South Asian dance forms are increasingly being studied and practised by non-South Asian
dancers, for example, whether they want to use it as part of what one can label cross-cultural
hybrid work (in contrast to intra-cultural work which would be about the mixing or
juxtaposition of, say for example, ballet and Cunningham techniques); or whether they see
themselves as 'authentic' practitioners where the authenticity of the dance forms is seen as
residing in the body of the performer and the extent to which this body transmits the aesthetic
ideal embodied in the dance practice. In this way South Asian dance forms are seen as
transnational and as transcending the original cultural set up in which they developed. This,
however, does not happen without questioning on the parts of those involved and issues of
ownership play a very important part in South Asian dance practice.

These issues obviously will have effects on the dance forms themselves, in the way, for
example, that there is no doubt in ballet that the new physicalities which entered the form in the
twentieth century, with first dancers of Asian origins and more recently of African heritage,
both challenge the form but also offer exciting new potentials for development. Very little
work, however, has been done to examine this closely.

Another interesting development is that of the British trained South Asian dancer exporting her
art to the subcontinent and /or other countries, in the context of globalisation. What is the
impact of such developments on South Asian dance globally?

We were also very interested in documenting the tension between on the one hand what one can
call the cultural hegemony coming from a Euro-American perspective, the so called
macdonalisation of the world, and, on the other hand the way people manage to transform
cultural imports into their own world-view. As De Coppet has pointed out 'the social dimension
of what is human is currently the object of far-reaching debate, given the planet-wide
standardisation of certain cultural traits and the astonishing contrast between this
standardisation and the vitality of specific cultures, with their faculty for integrating
contradictory influences without, for all that, losing their sense of identity" (1992:1).

Obviously our research could only touch on these issues but we had them very much in mind
for aspects of our research especially those dealing with aesthetic.

4.1.5 South Asian dance and aesthetics

Dance as an artistic practice, has an important aesthetic dimension. The view taken by an

32
anthropological approach is that all dance practices have an aesthetic dimension, no matter the
genre they belong to, be it 'classical', 'popular' or anything else, in the sense that if people label
the performance of an individual as splendid, mediocre or anything in between, they clearly
have in their mind, consciously or unconsciously, aesthetic criteria that allow them to make this
judgement. Sometime the criteria are explicitly articulated and verbalised in terms of alignment,
posture, relationship with the space or the music, or whatever. This is generally the case with
the forms that are labelled classical, which sometimes are also supported by dance treatises that
codified the dance form and established strict canons of excellence. In other instances, however,
they are much vaguer, as would be the case generally in the dance forms, for example, that are
labelled popular, and when pressed individuals may come up with a verbalisation that may not
use a vocabulary that is obviously aesthetic. Indeed one could argue as anthropologist Jacques
Maquet did that 'some very ordinary words of our everyday language point out to the variable
quality of our [aesthetic] experiences. This assessment is part of our common reality that
"everybody knows"‘ (Maquet 1986: 31)

Finding interconnection within different domains of experience is central to the anthropological

venture and this includes the field of aesthetics. Many anthropologists, however, are
uncomfortable with the term aesthetics because of its connotation with the Western notion of
'Beauty' and its connection with a field of Western philosophy. Some use aesthesia rather than
aesthetics (cf. Keali'inohomoku 1976, for example), whilst others refer to the aesthetic
dimension as 'making special' (Dissayanake 1988, 1992). It is clear that one must be careful not
to assume aesthetic universals in that there may be many contrasting and conflicting ways of
'making special'. This is true intra-culturally as well as cross-culturally. The aesthetic principles
underpinning Bharata Natyam are not the same as those underpinning ballet, for example,
though there may well be some overlap. Similarly what is praised in a dancer in a London club
where DJ Ritu is working is unlikely to be the same as to what is praised in a dancer,
performing on the stage of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, even though the dancer could well be
the same person in both instances.

In the SADiB research our notion of aesthetic followed in the step of the dance anthropologist
Adrienne Kaeppler when she noted in 1971 that:

Ways of thinking about cultural forms, including the standards by which they are
judged, are largely determined by the cultural traditions of which they are part.
Each society has standards for the production and performance of cultural forms.
These standards, whether they are overt and articulated, or merely covert, can be
said to constitute an aesthetic for that society. An individual cannot be said to
understand the aesthetic principles of another society unless she or he can
anticipate indigenous evaluations of artistic performances or product
(Kaeppler 1971)

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In this way, to use the terminology coined in the 1960s by the ethno-sciences, there are many
ethno-aesthetics. This is extremely important in the sense that it underpins many of the
complaints many South Asian dancers shared with us when they argued that their performances
were not evaluated appropriately either by funding bodies or by critics.

The anthropologist Alan Merriam had remarked that in the arts 'basic attitudes, sanctions, and
values are often stripped to their essentials' (1976:13). Blacking, talking of music, put it in the
following way:

One of the advantages of studying music is that it is a relatively spontaneous and

unconscious process. It may represent the human mind working without
interference, and therefore observation of musical structures may reveal some of
the principles on which all human life is based.
(1973:115).

Such remarks can apply, similarly, to dance. In this way dance offers a point of entry into a
cultural system and may help us elucidate the 'logic' behind it and aesthetics could be seen as a
fundamental principle that underlies societies.

The 'logic' of a culture is rarely verbally expressed, and certainly rarely in a written form. On
the contrary, gestures, ritual behaviour, dance and music, often are very useful additional
sources of information. The human body is a carrier of culture, and dancers’ bodies often
literally embody the worldviews of their societies (Grau 1995, 1997, 1998), exemplifying
different ethno-aesthetics. Saskia Kersenboom, for instance, mentioned the different
conceptualisations of Tamil literature by the Tamil themselves and by Western scholars of the
past: 'When referring to Tamil literature Western scholars referred to Tamil palm leaves, while
the Tamils themselves conceive of their literature [...] as Tamil discourse marked by the
markers of word, sound and image' (1995:14).

In our research we thus documented in what way the dancers themselves discussed their
practices, to see what this ethno-aesthetic of South Asian dance entailed at the beginning of the
twenty first century and to see whether or not these aesthetic principles were influencing and/or
wider socio-cultural principles.

We also took into consideration the fact that most, if not all the artists, who work within the
South Asian dance field perform for a variety of audiences, many of them outside of the
traditions which are at the roots of the dance forms. What clues did they give, if any at all, to
their audiences to help them fully appreciate what they were witnessing?

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4.2 ‘Performing as a way of knowing’ and other investigative techniques
One of the distinct approaches of anthropology is the technique of participant-observation. In
the anthropology of performance this implies "learning by performing" in which a researcher
learns to perform and thus acquires a better understanding of the relevant concepts and issues
through verbal and non-verbal communication with the dance/music practitioners, therefore
focusing on the value of performance as a way of collecting data. Performing as a way of
knowing therefore emphasises that not all knowledge is verbally based and that people use
kinaesthetic as well as intellectual intelligence to process information. For this reason it is
extremely useful when enquiring into different types of conceptualisation. This technique was
very much at the root of ethnomusicological practice when it started to develop as a distinct
field of enquiry in the 1960s and was exemplified by the concept of bi-musicality.

The ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl described the concept of bi-musicality as being about 'active
performance and even composition in the idiom of another culture as a way of learning the
essentials of its musical style and behaviour' (Nettl 1964:22). It works in much the same way
that learning another language helps people to understand their own language and studying an
alien culture can provide insights into the institutions of one's own society. Performing is not an
aim in itself but a tool for achieving better research results. This research method has been
employed in different contexts and at different times by all the members of the research team,
whose practical dance experience is varied and considerable. In the context of this project this
method was rigorously applied and involved 'learning' in practical classes and workshops,
experiencing the dance and absorbing the complex levels of non-verbal discourses. Indeed, as I
mentioned earlier, it was for this very reason that the research team included a researcher who is
both an academic and a performer. Though, in this instance, there was no question of bi-
musicality, as Gorringe is a Bharata Natyam dancer with as yet little other dance experience,
and, in her own life, performing is indeed an aim in itself. In terms of the research, however,
Gorringe looked at her performing through a different lens. Appendix 7.4 gives details of the
contexts in which Gorringe used this research technique.

Learning by performing was important too in providing a link with the second research method,
involving observation, and which focused on an investigation of the creative processes
employed by South Asian dancers as well as on teaching techniques and teaching material for
South Asian dance in different educational contexts. As fieldworker, Gorringe attended almost a
hundred different performances, lecture demonstrations and rehearsals of many different styles
of South Asian dance across the UK, from Gravesend to Glasgow. She took part in and
observed classes, assisted in the day to day running of South Asian dance organisations, and
interviewed over fifty dancers, venue managers, promoters and others connected with
developing South Asian dance in Britain. Most of these interviews have been tape recorded to

35
ensure that verbatim quotes could be used to allow artists ‘to speak with their own voice’ – an
early concern raised by one of our consultants. Selected classes, workshops and other events
have also been recorded on video.

Performances, workshops and classes to attend and observe were decided with a view to
covering as wide a variety as possible – a variety in terms of the type of dance as well as the
context and location in which it occurred. Thus a Bharata Natyam performance at the Queen
Elizabeth Hall, for example, is very different to a Bharata Natyam performance for the
Malayalam Association in East Ham, just as a class in central London is quite different to a
class in Luton, Glasgow, Manchester or London suburbia. All events were analysed bearing in
mind the three key project research areas of institutionalisation, aesthetics and identity.

While all fieldwork for the project was assimilated bearing in mind these three key areas more
specific guidelines were followed for the various types of events attended:

1. For each performance event, five main areas were recorded: information on the
performers themselves, on the format of the show, on the audience, on how the
performers represented themselves and on how they were in turn represented by
reviewers. Notes on the performers covered their ethnic origin, their training
background, their current professional status and the standards of the dance. Notes
on the format of the work covered where it stood on the scale between classical and
experimental work, observations on the choreography as well on the costumes, set
and lighting employed. Notes on the audience covered rough ethnic make up and
audience reactions. Finally notes were made on the publicity materials and notes for
the performance and any reviews received. Obviously, a number of these areas, such
as the standards of the dance and choreography, and perceptions of where a piece of
work stands on the experimental – classical scale, are highly subjective. To try and
overcome this problem, selected performances were watched by two or even all
three members of the research team.
2. Notes for the classes and workshops observed covered such topics as the nature of
the spaces in which the classes took place; whether the teachers included warm up
and cool down sessions in the class; whether the teaching took place in English or in
a South Asian language; the race and gender mix of the class; numbers of students
and so on.
3. With regard to the interviews, while the interviews for dance teachers followed a set

36
 format, for most occasions the interview had to be individually adapted. In general
the interviews addressed issues such as difficulty or ease in making a living as a
South Asian dancer; standards of South Asian dance in the U.K; attitudes to the
introduction of the ISTD exams for South Asian dance; attitudes towards
arangetrams; views on classical / contemporary work; relationships with dance and
arts agencies, South Asian and ‘mainstream’, voluntary and governmental

Through the variety of investigative approaches we have been able to gather together an
extremely rich and varied data. Only some of which can be presented here.

4.3 Sharing of the research

The way the SADiB team worked was that all three researchers would share the data collected,
and that all three owned the research in as much as they were involved in it. Since we all came
from different disciplines, there was therefore a likelihood that we would not want to present
our respective analyses within the same settings or if we did it was likely that we would take on
different perspectives on the data. We did not anticipate any conflict of interests and indeed so
far we have been proven right. The SADiB research has already been at the basis of quite a
substantial public output, listed in Appendix 7.5, ranging from conference presentations
nationally and internationally, research seminars, public lectures, and articles in scholarly as
well as professional journals, by all three researchers.

Originally we had anticipated that the writing of the report would be a joint effort. As the
collection of data far exceeded the duration of the research, however, this did not happen. We
all became involved with other work ventures and as we had used up our research budget it
would have been inappropriate for me to expect Gorringe and Lopez y Royo to work unpaid for
the compilation of the report. They did, however, comment on it and added to it.

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 5. DISCUSSION OF MAIN FINDINGS

Our findings reinforced what had already been apparent to me during the ICPA project of the
1980s: audiences, sponsors and practitioners when looking at dancers and choreographers of
different origins often use different parameters.

The Amsterdam based Czech choreographer, Jiry Kilian, for example, was made much fuss of
when, searching for inspiration for a new work, he observed Aboriginal dancers during a three
days festival on Groote Eyland, Northern Australia in the early 1980s. A Dutch television crew
followed him and the result was the documentary On the Road to Stamping Ground, which was
broadcast in the United Kingdom to great acclaim. The programme highlighted Kilian’s
creativity and he became somehow a specialist on Aboriginal dance, his short experience giving
him the authority to talk about it. To be fair, Kilian‘s remarks on the movement material he had
observed were perceptive and he posited himself clearly as a Western artist in need of
inspiration rather than an expert. My point is, however, that if an Aboriginal dancer had decided
to spend three days at Covent Garden, people would probably accept with difficulty that he
could make perceptive comments about ballet. If he then used his newly acquired knowledge to
re-invigorate his artistic practice it is likely that he would be seen as 'borrowing', even possibly
as corrupting his 'traditional' form, rather than as being creative.

What one needs to be aware of is that multiple standards may be held without the protagonists
necessarily being aware that this is the case. This was clearly illustrated at the Navadisha
conference held in Birmingham in 2000 when David Bintley, the artistic director of
Birmingham Royal Ballet, pleaded against the erosion and extinction of cultures, and argued
that 'we must retain our differences' He commented that he had always enjoyed South Asian
dance as a form 'less polluted' than other art forms. I cannot imagine for one moment that he
would talk in the same way when referring to ballet and his own company. In this rather
romantic vision, South Asian dance must remain ‘pure’ and become part of a museum – or zoo!
- culture for the enjoyment of people like him. So what we see here is a kind of ethnocentrism
that is not derogatory on the surface, in the sense that Bintley is genuinely interested and
appreciative of the dance forms he is talking about. Deep down, however, he holds prejudices
that set aside South Asian dance from the art dances of the West. One could refer to this as
‘romantic ethnocentrism’.

Similarly experimental dance works of some South Asian dancers have been received with
diffidence by sections of the British dance media. In an 1998 issue of The Dancing Times, for
example, Reginald Massey, British doyen of Indian dance connoisseurs, stated:

38
 Much Asian inspired dance that is being passed as contemporary and creative
is suspect because the choreography is usually based on an uncertain grasp of
the innovative possibilities of Asian dance allied with, to put it mildly, a
misunderstanding of contemporary Western dance idioms.
(Massey 1998:939)

For him if the trend is supported then we will be ‘guilty of fostering multi-mongrelism, in the
name of multi-culturalism’ (ibid). One can argue, along with choreographer Christopher Bruce
when his work was criticised in the 1960s that ‘mongrels often make the most interesting
dogs!’ (Cited in Palim), but there is more at stake here as what is being evoked are, in part,
issues about boundaries, and especially rights over crossing these boundaries.

Though it is important to note that Massey is primarily discussing artistic criteria and that he
has nothing against experimental work per se as comments from the review he wrote about
Mallika Sarabhai demonstrates, it is nevertheless important to note how a writer can position
himself as a guardian of an artistic form and its canons deciding on who has the right to do
what. In some way this is exactly what the role of a critic in the West is.

Truly experimental, the technique was nevertheless firmly grounded on

Bharata Natyam and Kathakali. (...) So far, I must confess I have seen very
little experimental work from India or, more precisely, experimental work
based on Indian techniques that has moved me, Now, thanks to Mallika
Sarabhai, John Martin, and their musicians Adrian Lee (who composed the
music), Dawson Benhassine-Miller and Tiken Singh I see a light at the end of
the tunnel.
(Massey1969:361)

The negotiation of identities underlying the artistic practices we were investigating was the
central tenet of the framework set up prior to the research. The data collected has shown
without any doubts that it was indeed a significant parameter to make sense of performance. I
will discuss this further, starting with the very label South Asian dance.

5.1 What is in a name?

Dancers and arts officers coined the label 'South Asian dance' to replace the term 'Indian dance',
a term widely accepted despite the fact that it was reductionist and simplified the complex
Indian situation, with its many cultures, religions, languages and dance systems. Creating a
label that was further generalising, was done for political reasons: practitioners argued that the
dance systems falling under the category were not practiced in India alone, and they felt that a
more generic term would be more appropriate by being somewhat more neutral. Just as the term
'contemporary' dance is a generic term that overlooks the differences that exists, for example,

39
between Graham and Release techniques, and instead recognises the similarities in terms of
aesthetics, of ways of making sense of the body, or of apprehending space and music within
these techniques, South Asian dance similarly irons out differences and foregrounds
similarities.

Within a diasporic context one could argue that it also removes the dance from a notion of
clear-cut lineage and a nostalgic notion of lost heritage, to find its place in a new setting.
Situating oneself as South Asian, rather than Indian, or Gujarati, or whatever, establishes a kind
of distance. Sudha Koul, the Kashmiri-American author raises interesting issues about being
South Asian which are pertinent here, in her book The Tiger Ladies: a memoir of Kashmir
(2002)

Whenever I hear of a South Asian exhibit or event, if I can make it I do. It tickles
me; this is a new nationality, South Asian, forged for us by time, pulling us
together when we have torn ourselves apart. The fact is that we are the same
people. Our language, food, clothes, music, the things that make us laugh and
cry are all the same. Ours is the only region in the contemporary world where all
the heads of state have been women, at one time or another. We have something
buried underground, but not yet excavated, that ties us together. I believe that
although South Asia has been chopped and sliced, we have been pushed together
again by our underlying forces, in time that lives in cycles.
(Sudha Koul 2002: 212)

The way Koul generalises is interesting, as is her use of being ‘the same’, because it
acknowledges a certain sensitivity, which is South Asian and which can be contrasted to the
North American reality she is living in.

In contrast, the British based choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh argued at the South Asian
Aesthetic Unwrapped conference, organised by Akademi and held at the Opera House in
London in autumn 2002, that ‘the term South Asia sounds like a country but it draws together
disparate countries, linked by geography but defined by difference’. In her words ‘her creative
journeys these days generally start in a North that is post-most things and is linked to a South
that is post-nothing, except – colonial, yet whose population tends to be cleaners at the
sophisticated airports of the north’.

Others have difficulties with the label because it lumps together Indian, Pakistani, Ceylonese,
Nepalese, etc. dance forms, ignoring the differences between them, therefore not giving each
dance technique the attention and respect it deserves. They are wary of a monolithical vision
that erases individual choices. In this way the term South Asian could be seen almost like a
prison and therefore more a hindrance than a support. Indeed referring to the image evoked by
the term, at the South Asian Aesthetics conference mentioned earlier, artist Anish Kapoor

40
argued, following a comment by dancer Chitra Sundaram that the conference could have been
called South Asian Aesthetics Unplugged that 'maybe we should unplug properly and let the
South Asian flow out!’ Our research has also shown that artists are very much concerned that
any label attached to their artistic practice conflates the artists that they are with the genre they
work in.

Farooq Choudhry, ex contemporary dancer himself and Company Manager for

Kathak/Contemporary dancer Akram Khan, for example, told us during the focus group of
dance promoters and ACE officers referred to earlier:

I think there is a danger with promoting an artist's work by looking at it from the
point of view of promoting the art form itself. For example in contemporary
dance, this has always been a problem – the blanket term is very dangerous
because it loses the sense of the artists’ identity. The artists themselves give the
art form its identity through the way that they choose to express it. There are of
course specific styles, and one must acknowledge that there is Bharata Natyam,
Kathak etc that involve certain technical virtuoso skills. However, I am very
sceptical myself of using blanket terms like South Asian dance.

Yet promoting works by using the performer's name implies that his or her name is sufficiently
well known for the potential audience. Vayu Naidu, former artistic associate of the Asian
theatre initiative at Leicester Haymarket Theatre (Natak) responded to Choudhry's comment by
saying:

Akram Khan is Akram Khan and his work can come to Leicester with his name.
So you have the Akram Khans, the Shobana Jeyasinghs and the Nahid Siddiquis
in one tier. Then you have other companies like Angika and we have to say: this is
Bharata Natyam. It is South Asian dance – this description has to be fed in. In the
intermediate tier of groups you have to keep the genre as the title – you can’t just
go by the name.

We may need to simplify reality or to use schemas in order to communicate. This may lead us,
for example, to see cultures as homogeneous and talk about them in the singular. It is important,
however to recognise that within each culture, there is a rich diversity linked to social classes,
gender, age or whatever. In dance, for example, we talk about 'African' or 'Indian' dance as if
such had a continental reality. We can accept these expressions as a short cut, just as we may
talk about 'folk' or 'popular' dance, but we must always remember that any generic term not only
simplifies reality but also, more importantly, may well be about establishing power
relationships. As dancer/choreographer Jiva noted:

When an artist's work involves any reference to a non-European culture or sexuality

that is not heterosexual, the work is seen as suddenly culture or sexuality-specific.

41
 A ballet-derived grand plié or jeté in Wayne McGregor's Random Dance Company
is seen as a shape of movement to exemplify hypercool postmodernity, while the
bharata natyam extracted mulu mandi or prayanganam in the Shobhana Jeyasingh
Dance Company is seen as cultural difference.
Both artists are equally drawing on a classical heritage, but the latter is seen to be
hiding behind the thin veil of Indian dance, somehow inhibiting it from making any
meaningful 'real art'. This double standard employed by the gaze of the spectator
assumes a universality of the former, therefore implying a superiority over the latter
- but fails to notice that both artists are enhancing their work through their
respective classicisms.
(Jiva 2000:17)

The author Salman Rushdie had the same kind of argument in mind when in his novel
Midnight's Children (1981) he had one of the characters, Aadam Aziz, reflect on how he had
learned from his German friends that

India - like radium - had been 'discovered' by the Europeans; [...] this was finally
what separated Aadam Aziz from his friends, this belief of theirs that he was
somehow the invention of their ancestors.
(Rushdie 1991:11)

Many of the artists we talked to, were very much aware that their practice had to be situated
within what is currently being called 'postcolonial theory' and could articulate just as Jiva cited
above could, how their work was being looked at. Naseem Khan, the chair of ADiTi, the
national South Asian dance organisation, from 1989 to 1997 recalls the launch of the
organisation in Bradford in 1989:

We were not a little nervous when the procession took off, crossing the road from
the stern statue of Victoria to beat on the symbolically closed doors of the
Alhambra, the very representative of Eurocentric culture.
(Khan 1999:11).

As a theoretical framework having grown out of anti-colonialism, a movement informed by

socialist ideas of social justice, one could argue that one of the primary aim of postcolonial
theory is to change people from objects of colonial violence into subjects of history. As such it
can bring together solid intellectual questioning and moral considerations. Yet, many of the
artists we talked to were also aware that, with some exceptions, the powers of today are the
same as the powers of the colonial era, albeit transformed by the diaspora. In what way, they
asked, is the contemporary situation that different to what happened under the old colonial
empires? Indeed one could argue that not much has changed. In the past the Non Western world
provided raw materials for the West to develop its industries and get richer. Today this situation
continues, whilst additionally the Non Western world provides further elements so that
intellectuals and artists within the Western Academies can elaborate theories about cultural

42
diversity and create intercultural performances. This is very much was at the heart of
Coorlawala's argument mentioned earlier when she stated that dancers of the subcontinent can
serve only as subjects and informants for Anglo-European researchers.

What is interesting is that the artists we worked with were both willing and able to articulate
their engagement with such a monolithical label, because of its expediency, whilst at the same
time being very much aware and willing to discuss publicly the heterogeneity within the field of
South Asian dance. This was evident in the comments a number of individuals made about
ADiTi, for example, when it celebrated its 10th anniversary in 1999. Abha Adams, ADiTi's first
director mentioned that in her eyes the organisation's greatest challenge was 'to bring together
what was perceived to be a divided dance community' (1999:10). Similarly Shreela Gosh,
ADiTi's director between 1992 and 1995 argued:

With my Indian background and penchant for mythological stories, I ought to have
relished the opportunity to ride such a multi-headed, many-winged, multi-faceted
creature... I wish all those aboard ADiTi a very pleasant flight, but do remember to
fasten your seatbelts! (1999:122)

Within another context Kathak artist Pratap Pawar discussed how in his life he had 'seen many
egos interfere with good teaching and learning practices' (in Holland-Matzos 1999:15). Whilst
in its column in Extradition magazine, the anonymous ‘Mozzie’ compared the South Asian
dance scene to extended families and their 'scandals, insults, generosity, liveliness. Backbiting
as much as back scratching ... ‘(Mozzie 2000:32).

This multiplicity of discourses, heterogeneity and robust interchanges between people were
present throughout our research and I was often reminded of one of Vikram Seth’s characters in
A suitable boy who argues:

Dear Chacha Nehru, I felt like saying, this is India, Hindustan, Bharat, the country
where the fraction was invented before the zero. If even the heart is divided into
four parts can you expect us Indians to divide ourselves into less than four
hundred?’
(Vikram Seth 1993: 1112)

What is interesting, however, is that whilst their own heterogeneity is recognised and discussed,
that of their 'opponent', 'the Eurocentric culture' referred to by Naseem Khan, is not. In his
discussion of "The West and the Rest", Stuart Hall has eloquently argued that the West has
never been any more homogeneous than the Rest. Furthermore the West has always had its
internal excluded and exploited 'others' both in the shape of specific social groups or minorities
and of women (Hall 199) yet this is generally not discussed by South Asian dancers.

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5.2 Issues of identity
On the one hand SADiB investigated the phenomenon of transplantation of South Asian dances
in the British context through the agency of diasporic South Asian communities, by looking at
the way South Asian migrant groups in Britain have used dance to construct their cultural
identity at first, second and third generation level. In this way SADiB followed in the
intellectual footstep of the numerous studies in ethnomusicology and dance anthropology,
which have shown that music and dance form potent symbols for identification. It also drew
from the work of cultural theorists such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy,
Stuart Hall and Biku Parekh, to cite a few, taking into account the cultural diversity of present-
day Britain and situating South Asian dance practice within a broader political and historical
framework of globalisation, world economics and post-colonial reality.

At one level one could argue that our research demonstrated that dance is in part about
embodying cultural heritage, tradition, and history. Yet one needs to un-pick these concepts and
emphasise their complexity. The notions of ‘identity’ and 'tradition', in themselves are not
particularly useful, unless we emphasise identity- and tradition-in-the-making. As the Jamaican
anthropologist David Scott observed:

A tradition... seeks to connect authoritatively, within the structure of its

narrative, a relation among past, community, and identity. A tradition
therefore is never neutral with respect to the values it embodies. Rather a
tradition operates in and through the stakes it constructs (cited in Hall
1999:14)

Yet throughout the project we were also very much aware of the danger inherent in any research
dealing with identity in that it can be seen to “ethnicise” its subjects and in this way continue in
the steps of the very colonial discourse, which we are questioning. Indeed despite all our efforts
to the contrary we were criticised for doing exactly that by Coorlawala, mentioned earlier. What
is crucial is that one must avoid “othering” members of minorities. Issues of identity must be
looked at throughout the society and that this must be done within a framework of
inclusion/exclusion and of access to resources.

Generally comments on ethnicity crop up when dealing with South Asian dance – indeed this is
probably true for all non-white dance - whilst white ethnicity is never an issue for dance
audiences and reviewers. Over 30 years ago Joann Keali’inohomoku wrote her landmark article
‘An anthropologist looks at ballet as a form of ethnic dance’ (Keali’inohomoku 1969). Since
then it has been republished many times. I have been teaching at different universities now for
over twenty years and this article has remained on the reading list of most of my courses! Every
year students discover it and every year they are ‘shocked’ by it.

44
They are shocked because they have never thought of ballet in this way. Because ballet is
transnational, it is perceived as being universal and as such as a-cultural, despite the fact that
one can easily contextualise it within a European socio-historical framework. Yet Bharata
Natyam, which is also transnational, remains rooted for many in a specific image of an ancient
Indian culture, despite the historical fact that it has been largely constructed in the 1930s.

Ethnicity for most is something that belongs to minorities. In the United Kingdom as part of our
professional lives we fill many forms supporting ethnic monitoring and affirmative action.
Whilst there are many variations under the labels ‘Black’ and ‘Asian’, ‘White’ is generally
singular. I am not going to go in details as to why this is so, suffice it to say that when people
have been in a position of power for a long time; this becomes a natural state of affair. Because
they hold the reins they have no need for knowing much about they people they control over.

This was recently highlighted by Alan Wilmot, a war veteran from the Caribbean, when
interviewed by The Guardian for an article about the soldiers of the British Empire. Talking
about the attitude of people in England towards him and his compatriots, he recalled

The English were very, very curious about us. In Jamaica, we knew everything
about the British Empire. But over here, they knew absolutely nothing. Once your
face is black, you must come from Africa. We said 'We are from Jamaica' and
they would say 'what part of Africa is that?' At first we thought they were taking
the mickey when they asked us, 'Where did you learn to speak English" or 'Did
you live in trees?' They did not have a clue.
(Wilmot in Rogers 2002: 5)

People in power are the norm, and every body different is ‘other’. Think of concepts, such as
Western/Non Western that are constantly used, the ‘norm’ versus the ‘other’. Choreographer
Shobana Jeyasingh put it in this way

The assumption [is] that ‘East’, myself, must be a simple unchanging essence
which stands for Tradition and The Past, and ‘West’ represents change,
modernity and dynamism.
(Jeyasingh 1997:31-32)

It is important that we move away from the museum culture attitude and that we look at the
complexities underlying processes of identification.

The issue of identity was especially poignant when Gorringe had her authenticity as a performer
questioned by some of our informants. Although from her perspective the authenticity of a
dance form resides in the body of the performer, and the extent to which this body transmits the

45
aesthetic ideal embodied in the dance technique, some people, whites and browns, linked
authenticity with skin colour. Before working for the SADiB project Gorringe recalled that she
had never really reflected on being a white dancer. The research, however, forced her to be
more attentive to people’s comments and reactions – and in fact to actively seek them out. An
early piece of research work for the project occurred while Gorringe was dancing everyday for
a month in an Indian restaurant in Edinburgh during the time of the international arts festival.
As part of her data collecting she handed out questionnaires to try to get a sample of people’s
awareness and understanding of South Asian dance forms. She asked people to list the names of
forms they knew about, to state whether they had seen any before, and asked them whether it
met their expectations of what they considered to be ‘Indian dance’. Several of the comments
she got back gave her a rude awakening to people’s perceptions of the genre, and, linked to this,
her own performing of Bharata Natyam. ‘My children had hoped for an ethnic dancer’ wrote
one woman. ‘We expected native dancers’ complained another. Throughout the month she
received a constant stream of jokes about which part of India she came from.

What is interesting is that most of the time, any issue with her being white has come from
audience members, and not from other dancers. Though it is worth mentioning that one Bhangra
group she visited was consumed with curiosity on learning that she danced Bharata Natyam,
and a Kathak teacher she visited in Manchester insisted in taking her step by step through her
potted description of the form, despite Gorringe’s protestations that she was reasonably well
versed on the subject to understand and discuss the principles underlying Kathak.

Audience’s expectations then, may have less to do with the inherent aesthetic quality of the
dance and more to do with a supposedly cultural “authenticity”. A performance can become the
artistic representative of “Indian-ness”, an ethnic display rather than a serious artistic product
contributing to a larger framework of theatre dance within a culturally diverse society.

This issue of whether white dancers can perform South Asian dance as been with us for many
years. Dancer Ram Gopal, even though he employed white dancers in his company, felt that he
needed to raise the question:

Inevitably the question arises: can the British or the Europeans learn this art?
Are they supple enough? And do they have the inner Indian feel of the dance for
qualifying both professionally and amateur -wise for learning Indian classical
and folk dancing?
(In M. Varadarajan ed. 1983: 58)

Reginald Massey similarly argued:

46
 The question I am often asked is: can someone who is not an Indian really be
any good at Indian dance? My answer has invariably been that with application
and perseverance there is no reason why one should not be able to excel in the
arts of the Orient. There are today some excellent artists from the East who
perform western classical music and Zubin Mehta, from India, is a conductor of
world class. So why cannot there be traffic in the opposite direction?
(Massey 1969: 361)

When Western artists, choose to learn, assimilate and perform forms which do not belong to
their own heritage, they are often faced with negative reactions, not by their teachers or their
direct entourage who accept their expertise, but by society at large who often view their
performances and teaching as lacking authenticity, even more so if their training took place in
the UK. A number of practitioners, both Whites and British Asians, pointed out to us that once
they had a period of time in India, this somehow validated their practice, especially to the
British Asian parents who then felt more comfortable to have their children taught by them. One
artist mentioned that after a performance within a community setting, an announcement was
made that the following year they would have 'real Indian dancers, from India, to take part in
the event'! The fact that these dancers would probably perform very much the same repertoire
as what had just been seen did not really enter the discussion.

Until recently most White dancers performing South Asian dance took an Indian name, rather
like British ballerinas in the past took on Russian names: Alicia Markova had a ring of
authenticity that Alice Marks did not; Anjali sounds more authentic than Anne Marie Gaston.
Just as in ballet the practice has largely disappeared, this is beginning to happen too within
South Asian dance, and artists like Gorringe or the Kathak dancer Noni Jenkyn-Jones, for
example, have, to my knowledge, never considered adopting a stage name.

According to our informants White South Asian dancers have generally more difficulties
getting funding and finding venues than their British Asian counterparts, regardless of their
quality as dancers, because there is an unvoiced policy that affirmative action means that British
Asians must have priority. What is fascinating is that the very people, who deny them funding
and therefore authenticity, would probably have acclaimed and funded Zubin Mehta, even
though his music was, for him, out of another culture. Again what are highlighted here are the
different sets of criteria used to evaluate different artists and their practice.

In this way ethnic identity and aesthetic identity were linked as well as contrasted and what
came out distinctly is the tension that exists between on the one hand a desire by some artists to
be seen as independent artists working in the 21st century, using a variety of movement and
musical vocabularies, without having their work labelled as 'Indian' or 'Asian' in opposition to
works proposed by White colleagues which are rarely, if ever, analysed by audiences, funders,

47
promoters or reviewers in terms of their ethnicity; and on the other hand not wanting to deny
their roots, or to stop drawing upon ‘civilisational knowledge’ as photographer Suran
Goonatilake put it.

Many felt that if they were classed as ‘Indian artists’, this usually led to exoticisation and to an
engagement with the work that remained at surface level, forgetting the multiplicity of layers
found in both cultural and artistic understanding. They did not deny the significance of issues of
geography and boundaries, and that the construction of their identities was negotiated within
them. They also generally agreed that most British Asians share an experience of relocation, but
they stressed that this relocation was multi-faceted. Furthermore it is important to note too that
relocation is not the prerogative of British Asians. London, after all, is known for being (and
having been throughout its history) a city of migrants, whether coming from the Home Counties
in the eighteenth century; the West of Ireland in the nineteenth; or colonies further a field in the
twentieth. As Goonatilake mentioned during the South Asian Aesthetics conference, location
matters, and London’s unique characteristics has allowed for 'shaping a hybrid, thus making a
new form rather than a fusion where the strands remain visibly separate'. This is why for many
artists, London has acted as a kind of engine, which, as Christopher Bannerman argued in his
summary of the day, ‘has provided a location where identities are up for a fluid understanding’.

Within cultural hegemony, artists also discussed some of the advantages of marginalisation.
Jeyasingh, for example, perceives herself as ‘a creature of the margins’. She feels ‘drawn to the
edges, away from the traditional narrative of the body in dance’. For her, concepts of
marginality are manifold: the physical margins of space through which she challenges the
hierarchies and conventions of European stage space by resisting centre stage (literally
‘revelling in the space near the wings’), and her personal sense of marginality through a lifetime
as a foreigner, for example. Various identities as 'other' stemmed from labels linked to nation,
ethnicity or religion. ‘A Christian in India, a Tamil in Sri Lanka, an Indian in East Malaysia, an
Indian in Britain’, Jeyasingh's pool of experience is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan and literary
one, allowing for multiplicity of layers and the opportunity of creating choice at what is taken
up within her work. Everyday life, multiple identities and choreographic exploration constantly
intermingle. In her keynote speech at South Asian Aesthetics Unwrapped she highlighted how
individual practices transcend monolithic boundaries. Her personal aesthetic choices are made
in the studio, with questions asked where the answers often appear years later in other dances.
Her work challenges the classical quest to establish a consensus of beauty - instead she argues
that she ‘wants to present her voice through the narrative of a body she recognises’ one that
draws on diverse threads of her life journeys. Among these threads, for example, exists the
day-to-day experience of street games - a narrative of the body in extreme contrast to the
structures of the body invoked in the dance studio. Raid, for example, created in 1995,

48
integrates the two bodies - the studio and the street, through the classicism of Bharata Natyam
and the street game Kabbadi. In her view the narratives in her work are embodied by the
dancers, thus what she does is ‘immensely practical’. Her enquiries relate back to the body, in
discourses where ‘the limb that makes the straight line in the studio is the same one that runs for
the bus’.

As well as the notion of margin, another theme that cropped up regularly during our research
was the idea of hybridity. There was, however, no consensus about the usefulness of the term.
Indeed the editor of Pulse, when reporting on the South Asian Aesthetics conference, wrote in
her editorial:

Whatever else I did, or did not, learn from the symposium, one thing was drummed
into me: we, as a South Asian artistic community, were HYBRID. I left feeling
uncomfortably like a mutant life-form and with a burning desire to never hear that
word again.
(Dawood Nasar 2002)

In response to this editorial, musician Clem Alford wrote:

I am a musician. There are certain classical genres in Raga Sangeet e.g. dhrupad,
khayal and thumri. These have evolved over time but were once hybrids. They
have defined grammars, as does most art music. For example dhrupad has the
opening rhythm free alap followed by the rhythmic jod and then the fixed chez.
Western symphonic music has various movements; the second usually slow after a
very powerful opening one.
I don't see myself as a hybrid musician. Should I mix two different genres of
music, then my resultant music may be hybrid. When I sit down to play Raga
Sangeet on my Sitar, I see myself as an exponent of performing a classical type
proceeding through its formal structures.
(Alford 2002:2)

Musician Mukul Patel similarly argued that it was more important for him to look into what it
means to be a musician than what it means to be South Asian. He cannot see his work in a
dualist fashion where the British and the Asian come together to create a hybrid form. In his
eyes his work is much more complex and owes to an immense multiplicity of sources.

Theatre director Indhu Rubasingham, in a similar fashion, compared herself to a magpie in her
artistic practice. Being able to make a living as a freelance director meant that she was not
confined to a specific aesthetic linked to a building, to an institution. For her, what was
significant was to look for collaborators coming from a variety of genres as well as cultural
backgrounds. Since her training and education took place within a British context, she generally
considers herself to be 'British' rather than 'British Asian'. She recognised, however, that she has

49
often had to fight against the assumption that, as her family comes from Sri Lanka, she is
supposedly equipped with a great deal of 'cultural expertise' on 'Asian theatre'. She also
reflected that being able to tick the boxes of 'Female' and of 'Asian' in institutional paperwork,
her entrance into a mainstream theatre practice came up against the double bind of gender and
ethnicity. Ultimately, for her, however, issues of representation are critical and she revels in
challenges of subtle confrontation, as in casting actors regardless of ethnicity so that they can
play off viewer’s prejudices in subversive ways. In keeping with her resistance to labels,
Rubasingham also offered a different spin on Rushdie’s confining concept of roots, which were
seen as restrictive, arguing that roots also help one to flourish through the nourishment they
bring.

5.3 Identity, dance writing/evaluating and the exoticisation of the South Asian dancer
Dance writing, like other writing, reflects both the point the view of the writer and the time he
or she is writing in. One could read, for example, in a 1924 edition of the Dancing Times:

There are many reasons why the majority of western dancers, who advertise
themselves as “Indian dancers”, cannot give real Indian dances. First of all, the
dances in India are traditional, and not evolved by individual dancers. The
dancers therefore who would dance a true Indian dance must have imbibed
Indian culture from her childhood.
(Metta 1924:1138)

Often dance reviewers, when writing about genres they know little about technically, write in
an impressionistic manner, not realising that they are using criteria quite different to those they
generally use when evaluating a performance. The renown dance critic Arnold Haskell, for
example wrote in the following way about Shanta Rao:

Then she started to dance: a mixture of silk and steel, rippling water and sledge
hammer blows. Every movement was crystal clear in a school of dance that
combines as none other the mathematical and the dramatic, the abstract and the
emotional. And this first impact, tremendous as it was, grew with a cumulative
effect that became completely hypnotic.
I am told that the dance lasted half an hour. I was not conscious of it: the dancer
had abolished time just as she wiped out the drab surroundings, creating her own
bright atmosphere.
This dancer is a genius – and I use the word after careful consideration – is
Shanta Rao, known in the east as Fonteyn in the West.
(Haskell 1955:483)

In a similar fashion Richard Buckle wrote about Balasaraswati in 1963.

I had long known the fame of Balasaraswati (born 1918) and read about her in
the Other Mind, the late Beryl de Zoete’s record of her inspired wandering.

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 And suddenly here the legendary dancer was: the living embodiment of
countless centuries of sculpture, painting, music, dance and song: for in India
all these are part of one art designed by Shiva to lead us to a comprehension of
the two infinities – inwards, inside us, and outwards, beyond the stars.
(Buckle 1980:220, first published 63)

Although both Haskell and Buckle were clearly enthusiastic about what hey saw, the reader has
little idea of what really happened during the performances they are writing about. Yet both
writers would have been much more informative when writing about ballet.

Writing can also be stereotypical and prejudiced. Wheel chair bound contemporary dancer Petra
Kupper, for example raised many issues at the Momentum conference held at Manchester
Metropolitan University in 1999 which I felt offered close parallels to South Asian Dance. She
argued, for example, that a large range of embodiments is lumped together under the label
‘disability’, and that the disabled body is generally perceived as wanting to be ‘other’. She
thought it was rather tiresome, for instance, that her whizzing around the stage on a wheel chair
is almost always perceived by both audience and critics as her ‘overcoming her limitations’.

Similarly much of South Asian dance is perceived in stereotypical fashion, linked to prejudices.
When doing educational work, for example, South Asian dancers are still often treated as
exotica, and expected to provide a whole cultural experience, rather than as dance artists
practising highly sophisticated and demanding techniques. Some dancers, for example,
mentioned being asked by school teachers to produce the whole 'package': tying saris for the
children, making some Indian food, as well dancing! Shobhana Jeyasingh recalled how in the
past people expected her to turn up in full Bharata Natyam concert costume to give a workshop
when they would never have expected a ballet dancer to turn up in tutu and point shoes. It was
interesting too, that after the production of the Kathakali King Lear by the Keli Company at the
Globe in the summer of 1999, a production that had superb dancing, reviews mentioned
headdresses that looked like toilet rolls, and costumes that were vulgar because of the false
breast attached to the front when both belong to the traditional Kathakali costumes. Similarly
dancer choreographer, Subhod Rathod reported to us and later articulated it further in print that:

It was interesting to note than an assessor sent to appraise the show, had no
obvious knowledge of South Asian arts. The kurta pyjama I was wearing
was described as a ‘sari’ – which to a reader who has a sprinkling
knowledge of South Asian culture refers to the cloth worn by women or
men in drag – and the Kathak bols used were referred to as ‘gargling
noises’
(Rathod 2000: 21)

It is nevertheless important too, to look into the ways artists have presented themselves and to

51
what extent they have contributed to the exotic construction they rightly criticise. Shobhana
Jeyasingh for example recalled with amusement that when she was a young dancer, a
photographer visited her when she was doing a full dress rehearsal. During a pause, as she was
thirstily gulping down a can of Coke, he continued taking photographs of her. After he had left
she suddenly felt very concerned about this, wondering if she should veto any photographs of
her drinking. Her reaction was not so much that she did not want to endorse a multinational
company, but rather that she felt at the time that this was not an appropriate image for a Baratha
Natyam dancer.

The way a whole generation of dancers has presented themselves and their art form was bound
to create an exotic vision in the west. The quote below is typical of a whole genre of Indian
representation of dance

The dance of India is an eloquent expression of an ancient civilisation, whose

timeless wisdom continues to evoke the passionate search of man for conscious
identity with God
(Sarabhai 1979:1)

I am not implying that Sarabhai did not believe this. Indeed this is very much part of her vision
of dance. My point is, rather, that a Westerner will read the statement in a way that is not
necessarily what was intended by the author as she interprets the historical connotation.

5.4 Making sense of history

There is no doubt that the issues of identity mentioned so far do not exist in vacuum but are part
of socio-historical forces. Dance and dancers cannot exist outside of these forces. The re-
creation of the classical dances in India in from the 1930s onwards, for example, was
conditioned by the social, intellectual, religious and political reality linked to the movement of
independence and to the construction of a modern India. Similarly the current craze among
some social groups in the UK for everything 'Indian', from Zadie Smith's novels, to the TV
serials Goodness gracious me, to Lloyd-Weber's musical Bombay Dreams, to Shobana
Jeyasingh's work cannot be divorced from Britain's colonial past, from the different racial
discrimination acts passed between 1965 and 1976, the africanisation of African states such as
Kenya and Uganda which brought to the UK a more moneyed class of immigrants with a better
knowledge of dance, or from the more recent 'political correctness' movement within liberal
classes. This framework acts as the background to contemporary British Indian dance's
construction.

Although I cannot go into great details here one can look at Bharata Natyam as an example of
history-in-the-making. The name Bharata Natyam is a modern invention, probably coined by

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Rukmini Devi, one of the great dancers of the dance renaissance of 1930s India. Bharat is also
the name of the sage who is said to have written the Natya Sastra, the Sanskrit dance treatise
often invoked by the dancers. There is also some suggestion that the term Bharata originally
referred to an actor in a drama, so that a treatise dealing with an actor's craft was called the
Bharatasastra, a term that was later interpreted as the Sastra by Bharata. Some say too that it is
an acronym taking the first syllables of bhava, tala, and raga, representing respectively the
emotion, melodic and rhythmic systems basic to all Indian performing arts. Whichever
etymology one chooses to invoke there is no doubt that the name is not neutral, but is linked to
concepts of national and cultural identity, which evoke as sense of ‘pan Indian-ness’.

Bharata Natyam is derived from a dance system originally used within the temple and royal
courts of Tamil Nadu and parts of Karnataka by the devadasi and rajadasi, literally god's and
king's servants. These dancers had an ambiguous status. In contrast to most women of the time,
they were highly educated, earned money, often owned land, and had a greater control over
their sexuality. Some, encouraged by their patrons, became very wealthy. There is no doubt that
under British occupation, traditional patronage suffered. There is no doubt either that Victorian
Britain did not see dancers with a positive perspective. As time went by dance became less
central and some dancers became more and more dependant on people willing to protect them.
A reform movement was set up with the aim of abolishing the devadasi system, because of its
links – alleged and/or real - with prostitution. This eventually came in 1947. Dance itself kept
its status, but dancers lost theirs.

This separation between the status of dancers and status of dance form is not unique to India.
Indeed it is quite common around the world where one find pattern in many societies of low
status of artists and high importance of art; of artists being allowed to be deviant and of them
capitalising on it as a way of compensating for their low status.

Ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam reported that among the Congo Basongye the dichotomy
between musicians and music was marked when he did his fieldwork in the 1950s.

Life in a village without musicians is not to be considered worth living, and people
spoke of leaving the village were no musicians present, [...] without musicians a
village is incomplete; people want to sing and dance, and a number of important
village activities simply cannot be carried out without musicians. The villagers are
unanimous in stating that musicians are extremely important people; without them
life would be intolerable. Thus the attitude towards musicians among the Basongye
is ambivalent: on the one hand, they can be ordered about, and they are people
whose value and behavior do not accord with what is considered proper in the
society; on the other hand, their role and function in the village are so important
that life without them is unconceivable.
(Merriam 1964:136)

53
In the West, similarly the general assumption is that 'talented people have always lived on the
edge, very often behaving a little crazy. We accept that, we like it' (Armitage 2002:3). In this
way artists have greater freedom and are often indulged in behaviour that is not normally
acceptable, because they are expected to behave in certain ways, which are outside those
sanctioned for other people. Merriam and Mack talking about jazz musicians in the 1950s
reported also that:

From the standpoint of the outsider, the members of the jazz community appear
fearful and withdrawn, leading an abnormal life, which deliberately rejects many of
the things popularly considered 'good' in our culture.
(Merriam and Mack 1960:220)

The ambiguous role attributed to devadasi, mentioned earlier, is similar. They were allowed
greater freedom than ordinary women but paid for this by being also perceived with some
suspicion. Similarly today performing artists in the UK may enjoy greater freedom of action,
yet they have to pay more for their car insurances than teachers!

As part of the independence movement of the 1930s, a renaissance movement emerged in India,
promoting a traditional culture suitably transformed and revised by Indian intellectuals who saw
their role as saviours because in their eyes it had become corrupted. This is an interesting
phenomenon because it parallels the colonial discourse towards Asia at the time. In contrast to
African colonies, which were seen as needing western civilisation, Asian colonies were seen as
civilised - the great temples and palaces found throughout Asia demonstrated this - but they
needed to be saved from the barbarism of their people.

I cannot go into detail about this revival movement, as it is extremely complex. Others, better
informed, have been doing it (cf. the works of Allen, Chakraworthi, Coorlawala, Meduri,
O'Shea, listed in the bibliography to cite a few). Suffice it to say here that there are two main
currents headed respectively by Tanjore Balasaraswati (1918-1984) and Rukmini Devi (1908-
1984). The former came from a hereditary family of dancers and musicians linked to the court
of Tanjore. She was a direct descendant of devadasi; though her mother and grandmother had
both become musicians rather than dancers because of the stigma attached to dance. The latter
came from a Brahmin family. She married at 16 George Arundale, an English theosophist, and
led a cosmopolitan life. She met Anna Pavlova, fell in love with dance and started taking ballet
classes with Pavlova's dancer Cleo Nordi. Pavlova encouraged her to look into her 'own'
heritage and she started to study dance in Tamil Nadu. Later she established Kalakshetra the
dance academy near Madras/Chennai, which became immensely influential in the development
and diffusion of modern Bharata Natyam.

54
We thus have two dancers more or less living during the same period. One comes from within
the tradition, the other from outside. One started to dance as a child, the other as an adult.
Rukmini Devi was clear in her statements: her mission was to deliver dance from its
depravation and its corrupted movement vocabulary had to be erased. In order to reclaim its
ancestral purity dance had to be put under the protection of 'respectable classes', i.e. middle
class and Brahmin. Balasaraswati on the other hand argued that dance did not need to be
purified since it was not polluted in the first instance.

At first view one could interpret the situation as on one side an 'authentic' owner of the tradition
and on the other an outsider, influenced by an older, English, indophile husband, appropriating
it. There is some truth in this interpretation but the situation is far more complex. As I
mentioned earlier neither the mother nor the grandmother of Balasaraswati had become dancers.
Although she situated herself in opposition to Rukmini Devi, she too transformed the dance and
taught it to the middle classes. Although she invoked an oral tradition in contrast to the written
traditions of the sastras invoked by Devi, she too contributed to the nationalist discourse, which
saw dance, as incarnating an ancient spirituality, linked to the construction of Indian identity. In
this nationalist discourse, dance and music became sanskritised Hindu institutions both in the
south and in the north, even though classical music and dance in the north had clear links to a
Moslem past.

Pallabi Chakravorty also demonstrated how dance became a prototype for Indian womanhood,
virtuous, spiritual and dignified (1998). This image of the dancer, created in India, is very much
alive in the British diaspora, and many dancers talked to us about the dignity embodied in the
practice, about how spirituality is an integral part of the movements. Anurekha Ghosh, in a
letter to the editor shared her dismay about South Asian dance at the turn of the century which
she saw as journeying 'towards mass popularity' and losing in the process 'its spirituality and
aesthetic beauty'

The very synthesis of Kathak and other South Asian dance forms are in their
innate spiritual beauty and aesthetic characteristics. The origins of Kathak from
North Indian temples and the Mogul courts have endowed this great art form with
sublime beauty and spirituality. The practice and propagation of this aesthetic
form is the culmination of a lifetime sequence of ryaz (practice) and tyag
(sacrifice), rarely possible in the context of today's market-oriented facilities and
lack of dedicated guru-sishya training opportunities.
If these classical forms have lasted centuries, because of their inherent spirituality,
the modern dance forms, bereft of their aesthetic base, may soon pale into
insignificance.
My image of a Kathak dancer is of a dynamic miniature portrait, delicate, subtle and
complete with serene beauty from head to toe, imbued with a great sense of

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 spirituality and aesthetic excellence. This art form has considerable appeal, and truly
we should be grateful to the "Almighty' for sowing the seeds of this beautiful art
form within us. We would be doing it an injustice if we fail to explore its innate
qualities, and allow it to be yet another vehicle of commercial entertainment.
(Ghosh 1999: 3)

This 1930s construction of South Asian dance cannot be divorced from an imperialist discourse.
The independent movement was in the hand of an educated indigenous elite, who had come
back from its European studies having taking on board the discourse on liberty and equality.
It is important to note too, that this elite was not always necessarily knowledgeable about the
many strands of indigenous cultures. Indeed many felt English. War veteran Weerawarnasurya
Patadendige Jinadasa Silva, stated recently:

Of course we felt English. Particularly going to boarding school. We knew more

about English history than our country’s history. It’s not the best thing, but that’s
how we were.
(In Rogers 2002: 6)

This elite, whilst fighting against the colonial system, created a nationalist movement, which
was against the orientalist colonial discourse, yet perpetuated it by its evocation of a pure,
authentic, spiritual past, based on the sastras. Dance became an ancient institution, debased by
colonial rule, illustrating this glorious past. Both dancers and researchers from the 1930s to the
1980s constantly reiterated this vision of dance. In the early 1980s some writing came out
referring to the 1930s revival. To my knowledge, however, it is only in 1988 that Kapila
Vatsyayan mentioned earlier, started a discussion, which explicitly questioned the revival
movement.

During South Asian Aesthetics Unwrapped, the theatre practitioner and director of the Nehru
Centre in London, Girish Karnad, gave a broad historical overview of what happened within the
theatre and visual art scene, providing a critical commentary of the confrontation between
British and Indian arts over the past 150 years. He showed that a trajectory similar to what I
have described for some aspects of dance, was taking place within theatre too. For him two
seminal aspects of the intersection between cultures were: the introduction of English in 1835,
which opened up new ways of thinking, and the creation of colonial cities (Bombay, Calcutta
and Madras) where British values reigned supreme. In his view the importation of British
values contributed to the commodification of Indian theatre and changed the nature of theatrical
practice, including legitimising acting as a career choice for the middle to upper classes.
Dichotomies appeared in various artistic practices through the integration of outside elements.
Chasms appeared - between folk and traditional theatre, between a new class of gentlemen
painters and artisans with an emphasis on craft, aligned to a working class legacy.

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Karnad also highlighted the polyvalent character of Indian aesthetics. In addition to a colonial
presence, the threads of Muslim and Parsee cultures and languages, for example, had been
evident for a long time in the artistic productions sponsored by the courts of Lucknow in the
north and Tanjore in the south, which established the rich foundations on which South Asian
aesthetics are now based. Indeed one could argue that this blending of cultural traditions
accepted and encouraged in earlier era on the subcontinent is in sharp contrast to what is
happening in contemporary India, especially in Gujarat for example. On the other hand the (re)-
construction of an Indian heritage by an Indian intelligentsia in the light of British occupation is
also worth considering and contrasting with similar grand narratives in British cultural history,
where certain artists were endorsed whilst other were left out. From a contemporary perspective
one may wonder, for example, how it was possible for someone of the intellectual calibre of
Rabindranath Tagore to anoint American dancer Ruth St Denis and her orientalist dances.
Looking at he history of the arts within the Indian subcontinent in the twentieth century one can
see a distinct ‘colonising’ of art forms by the middle and upper classes. What one can see as the
rejection of the holders of the traditions within institutions such as Kalakshetra, offers ground
for reflection, for example, that would need detailed analysis.

It is also important to note that this questioning of the construction of the past is not universal.
In the UK and elsewhere, for example, most families who send their daughters to Bharata
Natyam classes do it with the conviction of continuing an ancestral duty. In this respect it is
worth here discussing the institution of arangetram, which we looked in some details during the
research, as these events show to what extent for some individuals heritage and social prestige
have greater significance than aesthetic and artistic practice.

5.5 Arangetram as a signifying practice of heritage and social prestige

The term arangetram comes from the Tamil. It literally means ‘ascent to the stage’. A
contemporary Tamil dictionary defines the term as ‘début’, ‘première’, or ‘presentation in front
of a public of experts’ (Gorringe 2001). In the devadasi tradition mentioned earlier, the
arangetram represented the transition from student to professional. It was also the final rite of
passage that dedicated the dancer to the temple as well as being the moment when the dancer
was seen as being ready to have a patron. (Gaston1996). With the disappearance of the devadasi
system the institution of arangetram became secularised.

Both Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi, discussed above, performed an arangetram. The former
in 1925 at the age of 7 in the Kamakshi Amman temple in Kanchipuram, even though she never
became a devadasi, whilst the latter performed it in 1935, at the age of 27, for the Diamond
Jubilee of the Theosophical Society. Her performance shocked Madras’ respectable families,
yet it only took ten years or so for the practice to be accepted, when Bharata Natyam became

57
‘entirely appropriated and domesticated by the middle classes’ as Allen put it.

Today’s arangetrams are not only entirely acceptable, they are also an event when girls of good
society somewhat ‘come out’, debutante fashion, showing off their talents, indeed many
informants referred to dancers being 'presented at an arangetram’, a little bit like young
Western aristocrats were 'presented' at court as part of their coming of age. Through it they can
show how they have acquired a difficult technique, showing their perseverance, but they also
demonstrate that they know Indian mythology, and that they embody the feminine ideal by
being, humble, hard working, respectful, elegant and so on. All these qualities are present both
in the dance and in the other actions performed by the dancer as when she honours her parents,
teacher, and musicians; and in the actions of compères and honoured guests who take part in the
event.

At one level the arangetram can be seen as a sort of exam. When teachers consider that their
students have reached a high level of expertise and that they are able to perform solo the full
classical recital, then they will decide to show them in front of a public made up of experts,
friends, and family. At another level the arangetram can also be seen as a link with the past as
one could argue that it represents a sort of reconstruction of a court concert. The audience does
not pay, it is fed, and everyone who helps, one way or another, receives a gift. Every one except
the dancer of course. Her family is inviting and spending a great deal of money on her behalf.
Costumes, jewellery, beautiful programmes and invitations, delicious food can be extremely
costly. Anita Ratnam at the Navadisha conference in 2000 mentioned a cousin who had asked
her daughter whether she wanted a car or an arangetram! Although, for obvious reasons, we
could not have access to precise financial figures, some of the arangetrams that were
investigated during our research could easily have cost over £25,000, so we are talking BMW
here rather than 2 CV!

What is interesting is that very few of these young women become professional dancers. As it
was last century, dance has a high status but dancers have not. These young women will
become solicitors, doctors or accountants. They may give a few performances but most will
stop performing when they will marry. Indeed I recently found a paper on the web, giving
advice on the organisation of the arangetram. The author had listed it - among her scientific
papers! - as she wanted to help other mothers in the same situation. She commented that the
arangetram was a rehearsal for the wedding! Indeed, we noted during our research that often
invitations used the same kind of stationary as the one used for weddings.

The arangetram is thus a way of showing both one’s wealth and that one’s daughter is
accomplished. Within the diaspora it is also demonstrating that one has kept with one’s roots,

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and that one continues a glorious tradition in the modern world. The arangetram is filmed and
the cassette is sent to the family in India. Wealth and ‘Indian-ness’ are thus demonstrated. This
is particularly expressed in the public comments made by the chief guests whether verbally in
between dance sections, or in writing in the brochure that is distributed to the guests. Comments
like the ones below are extremely common: ‘She has had the opportunity to learn her religion
through dance’, ‘we maintain dancing in different countries to keep up our religion.’ ‘We have
to keep to the Natyasastra in its purest form’; ‘Bharata natyam is a form of yoga and is the fifth
Veda. It was conceived and compiled by the gods’. Thus the mythological explanation of the
origin of Bharata Natyam recorded in the Natya Sastra is heralded seriously as fact. Arangetram
in this way can be seen as a means of cultural bonding and as an occasion for conspicuous
consumption, where the dance sometimes signifies little.

Because of this many people, both in the diaspora and in the subcontinent have doubts about
arangetrams. Shanti Nagarajah, the last director of ADiTi before the organisation folded in
2001, wrote about arangetrams in ADiTi News in 1995 and argued:

Given their young age the young performers are not equipped to draw on their own
experiences and are pushed into imitating the interpretations of their teachers [...],
which can adversely affect their development as dancers.
(Nagarajah 1995)

Considering that today most dancers will perform their arangetrams as teenagers - some
teachers mentioned to us the pressure they were put under by parents who wanted the
arangetram 'done' before their daughters started work on their GCSE examinations - this
comment is worth considering in line of Balasaraswati's arangetram at the age of 7.

In 1999 Nagarajah took up the issue again as part of debates within the magazine Extradition,
which looked at the pros and cons of a number of key issues. Then she argued that despite the
fact that 'she enjoyed the social razzmatazz connected with the celebration' one should not
forget that:

Even for those performing in arangetrams at a more mature age, the significance of
the event is too often overplayed. There is hardly anything left of the spiritual
depth which once attached to the term arangetram.
The arangetram was not ever and certainly is not now a qualification of a
measurable standard. It is not equivalent to a teaching qualification or proof of any
choreographic ability, and yet is often used as such. Many dancers, having been
presented at an arangetram, are soon to be seen calling themselves choreographers
and setting up companies.
(Nagarajah 1999:20)

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 Nagarajah’s comments were echoed by many of our informants who were concerned with
aesthetic standards as long as ‘teenage Bharata Natyam students continue to believe that they
are professional as soon as they have performed their arangetram’. Indeed a dancer put it in
very strong terms ‘The teacher should be shot for allowing such dance on stage, and for putting
the child through such excruciating embarrassment at such gross expense to her parents’!

Srimathi Uma Chandratheva, who took the 'pro' stance within the debate, argued on the other
hand that:

The principle of holding an arangetram is a good one. After several years of hard
work under the watchful eye of the guru a student reaches a point were a decision
is made to present the first solo public performance, with the support of the
parents. The arangetram should be seen as an important milestone to aim for. It
gives a clear objective to work for and should be seen as a public examination in
front of an invited audience, among whom there will be connoisseurs, teachers,
critics, who will scrutinise every aspect of the performance.
(Chandratheva 1999:21)

What is clear from the above discussion is that once again artistic and social parameters are
totally intertwined and it makes no sense to analyse any dance event with the exclusion of one
or the other.

5.6 British institutions and South Asian dance

The varied and sometime contradictory visions of South Asian Dance in Britain that we have
examined so far can also be looked at institutional level. As an example here I will look at and
juxtapose two London-based institutions: Akademi: South Asian Dance in Britain and the
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.

Both organisations were set up in London in the 1970s with similar aims. Akademi, known then
as the National Academy of Indian Dance, saw its role as advancing 'the education of the public
in the understanding, appreciation and development of the art of dance generally and in
particular Indian dance mime and music both percussion and vocal'. Whilst the aim of Bhavan
was to ‘bridge barriers between old and new as well as the immigrant and host communities,
which is accomplished through the preservation and study of the heritage of India, its art and
culture.’ When the then Prime Minister James Callaghan opened Bhavan's premises, with
Viceroy Louis Mountbatten and Harold Macmillan in attendance, he stressed a role for the
institution which remains true today: that of ‘educating people in Britain about the Indian
community, and helping Indians to put down roots in their new home without sacrificing their
heritage’.

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Tara Rajkumar the founder of Akademi had been disappointed with the lack of facilities
available to those interested in learning Indian dance. She sought, from the time of her arrival in
the early 1970s, to remedy the situation by catering to this specific demand. In her eyes, the
solution lay in ‘Access’, ‘Profile’ and ‘Mainstreaming’, that is, making South Asian dance
accessible to the British public and she argued that:

This meant taking Indian Dance to the British people (origins no bar!) through
an Art in Education programme that they were comfortable with. Being a
highly structured art form, classical Indian dance lends itself well to seminars,
workshops and discussions, and can be analysed at various levels of artistic
sensibility, and cultural evaluation.
(Rajkumar 19)

Interestingly, Naseem Khan wrote that at the beginning the main participants for the classes,
and indeed the main audience for performances hosted by Bhavan were Westerners. (Khan
1976: 67). In this sense Bhavan of the 1970s could be compared to the Theosophical Society
today. This society, based near Baker Street in London, in many ways has the atmosphere of
being caught in a time warp and still runs primarily Indian events attended in the main part by
Indophile Westerners. In a dramatic reversal from the 1970s, the main participants and audience
of Bhavan today are 95% Asian. This could be, in part, linked to shifts in the socio-political
realm where once 'integration' was the buzzword thrown at diasporic communities, whilst now
'cultural diversity' is being promoted.

By the time of its 21st anniversary, in 2000, Akademi had on the one hand sanskritised its name,
whilst at the same time it was also promoting itself as being 'cutting edge'. Its director Mira
Kaushik saw her institution as being a ‘silent laboratory within which South Asian dancers have
experimented and stretched the boundaries of their dance forms within a contemporary social,
educational and artistic context.’

In contrast, Bhavan continues with its original mission statement. It celebrates major Indian
festivals (still primarily Hindu), and hosts regular concerts given by resident and visiting Asian
artists. The main aim in its programming continues to be to promote and preserve the classical
forms. On this principle, Bhavan does not host contemporary based work, even when based on
traditional forms. Mathoor Krishnamurthi who set up Bhavan in the 1970s and, even though he
has now moved to Bangalore, is still closely associated with the institution, is adamant on this
subject

No, we don't want. We say, if you want, we have nothing against. We have to
have some principles on which we shouldn't compromise. Otherwise, it will be a
disservice to the pure art. Classical means classical. Late classical means late
classical. Mixture means mixture. Classical dance and music - they are divine. A

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 sacred thing has to have dignity to it. I'd be the last to say 'she does it wrong'. But
if you say you do it - I am sorry we won't
(In Nagarajah 2000:8)

In this way, Bhavan is promoting a very specific kind of heritage, which, one could argue,
shows contemporary Indian culture as a passive reincarnation of an imagined ancient self, and
largely ignores the fact that scholars both in the West and in the subcontinent have questioned
its antiquity.

Bhavan's funding comes primarily from membership and class fees, and to a large degree on
private sponsorship. It has received a London Arts Board’s grant for many years, but the grant
does not constitute a significant part of its income. At £10, 000 for a year, it is barely enough to
cover the salary of one of the administrative staff members. In this sense there has not been
much change since the 1970s, when the Asian business community and even the Indian
government rather than British organisations, governmental or otherwise, provided the funding.
Recently, however, Bhavan has received a large lottery grant to provide better facilities and will
receive some Arts Council funding in the future.

In the view of Mira Kaushik its director, Akademi, in contrast to Bhavan, is working from
project to project reinventing itself every few years. Looking at the evolution of Akademi as an
institution, for instance, one can detect a shift from the promotion of 'a classical, highly
structured art form' in the organisation’s early days, to the current situation where the 'classical'
has lost its hegemony and shares a space with popular culture. Projects incorporating Bhangra
and rave, for example, are avidly promoted to reflect contemporary Asian street dance and
music trends, alongside the more traditional pursuits of master classes with renowned teachers
from India, expected from an institution like Akademi.

With such a vision of South Asian dance, Akademi sees outreach work as essential. Unless an
audience can situate cultural references, it will miss, for example, the ironical reference to filmi
dance in the works of choreographers like Jiva or Shobna Gulati. A shift of movement style
may be obvious, but without at least a superficial knowledge of Bollywood movies the
reference gets lost and the reading of the work becomes much poorer. Akademi has been
particularly successful in bridging this knowledge gap. Programmes such as Summer Synergy in
1999, Images of Women in 1997 or the earlier Chipko project in 1991 offered to a wider
audience sophisticated visions of the variety that South Asian dance encompasses.

In the 1990s Akademi sought to increase 'the understanding and appreciation of Indian dance as
a valuable cultural and social resource' and 'to increase the use that Indian dance offers as a
medium to encourage people's awareness and understanding of different contemporary issues'.

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One could argue that Chipko epitomised this latter mission statement. Inspired by the Chipko
women, whose concern over the devastation of local Indian forests by logging companies
compelled them to embrace the trees to prevent them from being felled, the project was carried
out in London schools, and was linked to the National Curriculum. Through South Asian dance
therefore, students were encouraged to reflect on local and international ecological issues while
absorbing a new movement tradition.

Akademi's shift of focus from classical artistic products to issue-based works and events is also
observable within the wider world of South Asian dance and in many of the works
choreographed today: homosexuality, AIDS, world debt have all become hot topics for today's
creators. Indeed, the narrative quality of many South Asian dance classical traditions makes
them ideal for this kind of work. In my view, at a time when contemporary dance, for the most
part, tends towards abstraction from anything recognisably to do with human experience, and
where issue-based work is thus too readily dismissed as naive, it is reassuring to find a new
generation of British Asian choreographers turning to this medium.

Throughout its existence, Akademi has seen itself as a part of a British mainstream. It has never
pushed 'political correctness', for example, to the point that only individuals of South Asian
descent can talk about, perform and/or promote South Asian dance. Whenever Akademi has
recognised excellence, it has supported it.

One could argue too, however, that the great contrast one can observe today between the two
institutions promoting South Asian dance discussed here, is not just that they start from
different ideological premises but has been, in part, shaped by the way they have been funded
over the years. Although Akademi and Bhavan have both been in receipt of both private and
public sponsorship; the former has been primarily funded via the public purse and the later via
the private one. Bhavan has not had to change its ideology because the private sponsors, who
have been supporting the institution, largely shared it. Akademi on the other hand has had to
play the game abiding to the rules set up by state agencies under a number of different
governments and adapt itself to them. The fact that it has largely managed to do this without
losing sense of its integrity and mission statement is worthy of admiration.

Earlier I had argued that artistic and social parameters were totally intertwined and that one
could not analyse any event, dance or otherwise, without invoking them both. I would like to
suggest now that similarly the economic realm cannot be ignored and it is worth looking closer
at this stage to issues of funding and linked to it to the new type of 'professionalisation' that is
currently happening within the field of South Asian dance, that our research has highlighted.

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5.7 Funding and the 'professionalisation' of South Asian dance
Earlier in this report, I made reference to the research Lopez y Royo had carried out on behalf
of Akademi. Issues of 'professionalism' had been raised by her informants as they felt the
concept should be redefined in order to take account the many views that may exist in a
culturally diverse society. In the West one is generally considered professional if one earns a
living from the activity one is engaged in. This, however, is by no mean a universal definition.
Anthropologist Joanne Keali'inohomoku already discussed this issue many years ago
(Keali'inohomoku 1972). For Lopez y Royo's informants, professionalism should not be solely
determined by its economic criterion where performing and teaching dance is the principal
source of income for the dancer. For them professionalism was about excellence of performing
standards and should not be taken to be commensurate with the earning potential/ability of the
performer. I suppose one should note the difference between professionalism as an approach to
artistic practice with professionalism as belonging to the economic realm. Bithaka Chatterjee,
for example understands professionalism in the latter sense and this made her state recently:

The UK has the largest concentration of South Asian dance teachers and
performers in Europe, but there are only a handful of performers, and even fewer
performers who could be termed full-time professional dancers.
(Chatterjee 2002:9)

Historically, there have been periods in the subcontinent when South Asian dancers, made a
living through their activities as dancers, though they were never 'salaried' as such, as has been
the case for Western theatre dancers, once the royal courtiers left the place to professional
dancers at the end of the 17th century. In a more recent past, however, since the 1930s
renaissance, South Asian dance in India was more likely to be performed in a context in which
the dancer's livelihood was earned through other means - often through the dancers ' husband
acting as patrons - with no reflection on the high performance standards of the dancers. This
situation was exported into the diasporic contexts and, as is also the case today in the
subcontinent, it is not anymore just husbands - though many still do! - who subsidise dance but
also the dancers themselves through their earning as doctors, solicitors, bankers, or whatever. A
copy of the law society gazette, for example, recently featured a picture of a ‘professional
Bharata Natyam dancer’ while announcing her new full time job as a solicitor for Landau
Zeffert Dresden.

It is interesting to note, however, that our research has shown that now dancers are getting less
tolerant of others who do full time work and dance as they feel it demonstrates both a lack of
commitment but more importantly that they do not do justice to the form they perform because
they do not practice sufficiently. Informants mentioned, for example, being ‘fed up with
housewives with flabby stomachs’! Promoters also commented that there were some dancers

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who simply did not have the stamina to tour as would be expected of contemporary dancers, for
example, because many train only as a concert looms on the horizon rather than as a daily
practice.

What is interesting is that a small group of dancers, often having started their dancing career in
India or other countries with a substantive South Asian community, such as Malaysia for
example, and having moved to the UK to continue it, have been full time dancers all their lives.
This group is continuing to grow, incorporating more and more locally trained dancers. The
latter often insist on their ‘indigenous’ status as it irritates them that their dance practice should
be legitimised by India, and they want to stress that high standards of training exist in the UK
too.

What was significant in our research was that most dancers today expect to earn a living from
their dance work. It is quite telling that when dancer choreographer Jiva was profiled in ADiT!
DOZEN a rubric in the journal Extradition, when different South Asian personalities answer
twelve key questions, he responded to the questions 'What was your best professional
experience?' and 'What was your worst professional experience?' respectively by 'Getting paid!'
to the former and 'Not getting paid - doing yet another project as a favour because it's good for
the CV' (Jiva 2000: 32) to the latter. For Chatterjee, cited above, 'it is money that divides the
South Asian dance scene' (2002:10)

It is also worth noting that despite the fact that men are far fewer in dance classes, our research
has shown that on the whole they seem to be doing better than women. This is very much in line
with what is happening within Western theatre dance: male students are nurtured even when
they do not demonstrate innate talent, whilst female students would be told that dance is not a
profession for them. It is interesting too that in both genres males are often used for advertising
courses! Prickett, for example noted that

The marketing of South Asian dance by the ISTD places the male dancer at the forefront.
A recent issue of their journal Dance has Kali Das Chandrasegaram on the cover, a male
Bharata Natyam dancer, while the free video summarising the ISTD has Akram Khan
Kathak demonstrating his exquisite Kathak technique. Thus the publicity defies traditional
gender associations of the forms, although the ratio of male to female dancers is uneven in
most Western dance forms as well. Therefore, the use of male dancers in promotional
campaigns through video and print media is not limited to the South Asian Faculty.
(Prickett 2002)

In the autumn 2002 issue of Pulse, Anu Giri, the Arts Council of England's (ACE) senior dance
officer was asked to clarify the Council's policies for dance generally and for South Asian dance
specifically. When asked about the view generally held within the South Asian dance scene that

65
ACE is reluctant to fund classical works, she argued that 'this seems to be one of those urban
myths floating the South Asian dance sector'. She argued that ACE had funded both classical
and contemporary works and listed the companies which had received awards from the National
Touring Programme, a fund for artist who 'have developed a profile, can show a demand for
their work regionally and nationally and wish to show their work to a wider audience' over the
last three years. These were: Imlata Dance Company, Nahid Siddiqui & Company, Akram Khan
Company, and Sankalpam, which had all received two awards and Angika, Bimba Dance
Theatre, and Srishti - Nina Rajarani Dance Creations, which had received one.

Interestingly when Gorringe interviewed Rajarani, she was told that for her classical work, she
is not 'even bothering approaching the funding bodies'. She feels that they wouldn’t be
interested – and that even if they were, by the time she had gone through the whole process of
talking to them, '[her] idea would not be the same as [her] original plan, but would have been
inevitably shaped by the funding body requirements'.

Similarly the people Chatterjee interviewed for the Pulse article mentioned above told her
'again and again that public money only encourages a certain type of work, which does not
reflect the bandwidth of South Asian dance' (2002:10). To what extent then is this very
generalised view among dancers indeed the urban myth that Giri talks about? Only detailed
research looking into which company got what, for what kind of work, covering a number of
years will give the data necessary to give such an answer

Dancer, Priya Pawar, when interviewed by Gorringe definitely felt that hybrid works were
funded over classical ones. Her concern was that funding primarily 'the merging, contemporary
this and that’, would end up in a situation when ‘one day, the actual art form will die down!'. In
her view not giving money for the ‘authentic art’, will suit some people, because 'for those who
don’t know much you, they can just take a bit from here, a bit from there – do anything' in
contrast to the classical dancer with a high degree of expertise. Chatterjee too is worried about
the way she sees classical forms as losing their integrity. For her the very label South Asian
dance may be at fault as it

Promote a general blur, reflected in the state of the contemporary South Asian
dance scene, There is, after all, no point in talking about separate dance styles
when many choreographers have not even got a deep knowledge of the dance
style they claim to be trained in.
[...]
Many of the contemporary dance companies feature technically weak dancers,
but continue to be applauded and funded. Innovation is cool and exciting but
where is the dance in all of this and why is being mediocre an accepted standard?
Why do the majority of well trained dancers withdraw from the scene, preferring
to stay in the background while mediocrity and banality rules? If quality and

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 standard of dance no longer matters - why do we train dancers? How about
training only choreographers and spin doctors and forget about teaching dance
technique and nurturing the soul of the artist. After all, what's the point?
(Chatterjee 2002:10)

What we have here is undoubtedly a cri-de-coeur laden with emotion and throughout our
research we heard similar views. What is important to note, however, that though stated
publicly in the case of Chatterjee, privately in the many dancers we talked to, there is rarely
hard evidence given to support the argument. Indeed on the whole we found that the intra-
cultural reviewing within the South Asian dance scene tends to be extremely polite, in contrast
to the Western theatre dance scene where critics can savage artists who are not up to scratch
technically. Cross-cultural reviewing, by the critics writing for the national dance press, on the
other hand, tend not to go into technical details about the classical techniques, either because
the knowledge of the critic is at the best skimpy and at the worst inexistent, or because they do
not want to be accused of racism if they are critical, or a mixture of both.

There is no doubt that aesthetic values are at stake here and this will be discussed later. It is
worth looking into another issue, however, which is that of placing different techniques within a
hierarchy where classical is at the top and any other genres as being below, where one could
link dance genres and social classes. This clearly happens within the Western dance scene,
which places ballet at the top, though in contrast to South Asian dance, this means that ballet
gets the majority of the funding attributed to dance.

5.8 South Asian dance and issues of class

Talking to British Asian dancers about different styles and techniques found in the
subcontinent, I have been fascinated by their choice of vocabulary, 'I teach folk as well as
technique' a dancer may comment, as if folk forms have no technique and technique is the
prerogative of the classical forms. Similarly, the type of terminology used to classify the
different repertoires of the Indian subcontinent is rooted in a hierarchy, which can hardly be
labelled value-free. In a recent publication, for example, one can read statements such as it was
'a meeting place for many of the regional, classical and semi-classical dance forms' (Sarkar
Munsi 2001:242) or 'the vast variety of dance traditions which can be broadly classified as
tribal, rural, 'folk', and more sophisticated and individualised classical dance styles', (Kashyap
2001:101).

For over a quarter of century now scholars like Buckland (1983), Keali’inohomoku (1969,
1972, 1980), Glaser (1995) or myself (1993, 2001) have articulated the problems underlying the
classification of dance forms into art, folk, ethnic and so on, yet little seem to have changed
within the consciousness of many dancers and dance scholars and many are still unaware that

67
'terms such as the folk, genre, text, performance, and tradition itself, have become
problematized' (Appadurai et al 1991:4). It is evident that, similarly to what is happening in the
Western dance scene, what we have in the South Asian dance scene, are value judgements made
about dance and about people, where both are set up within a hierarchy and relationships of
power. This demonstrates that an‘orientalist’ discourse is not necessarily a Western prerogative.
As a consequence to this ideological framework one sees a great chiasm between the
‘community’ and ‘art’ scenes.

Our research has shown how important class and the position of women within class remained
within sections of the British Asian population and how forms such as Bharata Natyam and
Kathak, in the hands of primarily upper classes female practitioners with university education,
are much more visible than forms such as Bangra, in the hands of male practitioners working in
professions such as car mechanics. It is also interesting to see how filmi dance is becoming re-
appropriated by the middle classes and institutionalised now that it is entering centre stage
through the production of Lloyd Weber's musical, Bollywood Dreams.

The belief among some that 'the arts'' are good for middle class women was exemplified in
March 2002 when the Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy was sentenced for one day
'symbolic imprisonment', after India supreme court found her guilty of criminal contempt (she
was accused by lawyers of having shouted abuse and threatened to murder them during a
demonstration outside the supreme court in Delhi protesting the court's decision to approve a
dam project in the Narmada valley (cf. Rushdie 2001 for a fuller description). The judges
stated: 'Showing the magnanimity of law we keep in mind that the respondent is a woman, and
the hope that she should return to the cause of art and literature' (cited in Harding 2002).

As discussed above it is only fairly recently that, both in the subcontinent and in Britain, we see
dancers who do not see dance as something to occupy women, offering temporary escapes from
housewifely duties, but who want to make a living out of dance and who are fighting for their
right to do so.

Looking back at hierarchies, positions of power and oversimplification, one could examine how
tribal people have been and are treated in India, and question the notion of Indian individuals
generally, and Indian dancers particularly as ‘subaltern’, which is the subtext of those criticising
the involvement of White scholars and artists in the South Asian dance scene. Can we really
present the latter as belonging to a single category that could be labelled 'subaltern' when so
many of them come from the privileged classes? It is important that my remarks are not seen as
criticisms towards individuals, everyone one in society, whether we want it or not, is implicated
in this hierarchy of power, and it is only through clarity of analysis that one can become to

68
question this hierarchy.

Issues of class can also be invoked when looking at some of the non Asian historical figures
that have marked South Asian dance in the 20th century and see how they are remembered as
this also throws lights on the social construction of South Asian dance. It is interesting, for
example, to note how the two western artists, Anna Pavlova and Ruth St Denis, who have been
influential in the Indian dance revival early last century, are perceived. The former is revered,
the latter ignored. It is not so much due to their respective choreographies. Both were orientalist
in their approaches, in the sense that their vision was based more on the myths that the west had
of the east and on a superficial observation of Indian dance systems, than on a true reflection of
their own dance practice in relation to the ones observed. What give them their current status
are more the contexts of their creations and the place given to them within western dance
history.

5.9 Aesthetics and Ethno-aesthetics

The discussion so far has clearly indicated that historical and socio-economic forces impact on
artistic creativity and aesthetics. There is no doubt, however, that artists should not be robbed
of their individuality and that aesthetic choices are less aligned to nationality than to intuitive
processes, mediated by the experiences of national, religious, ethnic and other identities. It is
not that aesthetic is separated from the rest of our lives. Creative dancer ad teacher Bisakha
Sarker put it very aptly when she said

Aesthetic is a framework through which I perceive the world around me. […] Its
rules are sometimes clearly specified and sometimes elusive. Through the
association with different experiences of life; lights, colours, shapes, smells and
sounds all acquire special meanings. Everything from the mythology behind the
forms of religious icons to the borders of my mother’s saris, have contributed to
develop my early sense of aesthetics.
(Sarker 2002:21)

In a similar way Kathak dancer and teacher Sushmita Gosh considers that

Training must go beyond learning a few compositions in a dance class, once or

twice a week. While learning thukras and thumris, one needs also to be guided
towards an inner journey that leads to a deeper perception of the reality of human
existence.
(Cited in Gorringe 2002:22)

On the other hand it is this very life that is in part responsible for an aesthetic sensitivity that
may be quite specific. During the South Asian Aesthetic Unwrapped, for example, Musician
Talvin Singh told of his teacher's comment after one of his performance where he had not used

69
melodic instruments as accompaniment, that although beautiful, his playing without the
surrounding melody was somehow 'homeless'; similarly visual artist Anish Kapoor spoke of a
ritual of space and ultimately, a sense of wonder, a sense of awe emerging from a
communication with space that manipulates the viewer into entering. Comments such as these
reinforce a notion that there are indeed different ways of making sense of the world, and that to
talk about ethno-aesthetics makes sense.

Within the history of much of South Asian dance, for example, religion had played a great part.
Remnants of this religious background can still be observed today, even though over the years
the dance has been through a process of laicisation, and has become primarily a theatre art form.
I am thinking here of the theories, texts, and symbolism that underpin the dance practice, as
well as the way dancers behave towards their teachers, for example. As we saw throughout the
text, spirituality remains undoubtedly significant for many dancers in contemporary Britain.
Looking at choreography one can see that observing the way dancers approach the dance space
shows another kind of links with spirituality. In many genres space is consecrated by the
dancer’s invocation, for example, and this invocation transforms it so that it can be inhabited in
a special way. Talking about ‘spatial roots’ therefore makes sense.

Within the classical forms – and I suppose this is the case throughout the world - one could
argue that when dancers enter into the genres, they somehow swear a quasi oath of allegiance to
its canons; ‘I will keep my back straight, achieve a clarity of lines and well defined symmetry,
keep to the beat etc.’ These principles provide the structure, which will underpin their
performance practice, establishing it boundaries in terms of space, gesture, and musical
accompaniment. These rules are both supportive as they give guidance, but they can also be
inhibiting. Occasionally dancers want to get a way from them. Shobhana Jeyasingh, for
example takes ‘pleasure in the messiness of mixing the classical and the Other’ and she
proclaims her commitment ‘to untidiness and the notion of a polymorphous body of 21st
century’.

Looking into the dance-music relationship, one notes immediately how within many genres
dance is about being seen and heard. Furthermore the choreography is built around musical
structure and repertoire, which have been internalised by the experienced artists to the point that
they can engage in a dialogue on stage which each other. Often the word improvisation is used
to refer to that ‘discussion’. Personally I prefer to think in terms of spontaneous composition, in
line with Kaeppler’s concept of ‘spontaneous choreography’ as improvisation is a rather vague
concept, which may have connotations that are inappropriate for South Asian dance.

This exchange between dancer and musician creates an immediacy and unpredictability, which

70
in turns creates a sense of tension for the audience. What we appreciate is that extraordinary
communions between artists where they anticipate each other’s moves. In Leela
Venkataraman’s words

The dancer was judged by her ability to capture the dhawani, or resonance, of the
poetic word and melody through her danced interpretation. This gave both the
poetry and the music an added dimension of the dancer’s art around each musical
statement
(Venkataraman 2002: 6)

Yet many teachers feel that dancers in the UK do have enough opportunities to work, practice
and rehearse together with musicians. Because of this they cannot really develop their sense of
music. Furthermore issues of status come up again and musicians can be reluctant to
accompany dance because accompanying musicians are often less respected than concert
musicians and this has financial implications. Dharambir Singh, musician and lecturer at Leeds
college of Music, for example, gives the low status of the accompanist as a reason for having
stopped accompanying dance.

Playing or composing for a studio recording is ‘very safe’ for [my] reputation as
a concert musician since a studio session doesn’t involve being ‘on stage with a
dancer.
(In O’Shea 2002:13)

We are far from the dream cherished by Sushmita Gosh which would: ‘see a future where
Britain has a pool of musicians interested in working with dancers – without bankrupting them
in the process’ (Ghosh in Gorringe 2002). Once again we see that ideology, economics and
aesthetics are inter-related.

5.10 Filmi dance as a ‘unifying’ practice

As a tentative ‘conclusion’ I would say that, in this widely diverse scene, what possibly unites
the imagination of South Asian dancers across the board is the dance in Indian movies.
Throughout the research we have heard comments by artists about the influence of filmi dance
on their work or especially on their decision to become dancers from a whole range of dancers –
from pure classicists like Sonia Sabri and Mavin Khoo to Bhangra dancers, and inevitably by
individuals such as filmi dancer Rakhi Sood.

Filmi could also be a link that is beginning to bring in a new Western audience. In the past year
or so Indian cinema, especially in its Bollywood incarnation, has been very much in the British
media. Every week, over the summer of 2002, it seemed, that one could find at least one article
in newspapers or magazines, and often many more, reporting that Lagaan was nominated for

71
the Oscars, that Ashoka won a prize at the Venice Film Festival, or that Devdas was the most
expensive Indian film ever made. Parallel to this we have Lloyd Weber's musical Bombay
Dream, currently running at The Victoria Apollo Theatre, as well as the season in Selfridge’s
department store during the summer of 2002, both inspired by Bollywood. Whether this will be
more than a short, media generated, craze remains to be seen though.

This term Bollywood is a fairly recent invention. Indeed when I first discovered and became
interested in Indian popular cinema in the 1980s, because of its distinctive feature of including
music and dance, as far as I can recall, the word Bollywood did not exist. The term that was
generally used to refer to the genre was filmi. I also remember that at the time, a colleague who
wanted to investigate Indian film music for her PhD at SOAS had been told that it was an
inappropriate topic, yet today SOAS offers courses that look at Indian popular cinema. So times
have changed!

The Bollywood label, contracting Bombay and Hollywood, seems to have been coined by a
journalist in India; and Indian film practitioners and audiences have divided opinions about its
usage. It has, however, somewhat caught the imagination and it is likely that it is here to stay
despite its problems. Two recent books on Indian cinema, for example, use it: Nikhat Kazmi's
Dream Merchants of Bollywood was published in 1998 and Nasreen Munni Kabir 's Bollywood:
the Indian Cinema Story in 2001.

The problem with the term, just as with so many of the labels which have been discussed within
this report, is that it essentialises and simplify a complex phenomenon. First, Indian cinema is
not synonymous with Bollywood. Bollywood is just one genre. In continental Europe in the late
1960s when I started to go to the cinema as a teenager, for example, Indian cinema was Satyajit
Ray. Indian cinema does not have a single tradition, but at least two broad genres: the art film,
of which someone like Ray would be representative, that do not have songs, and the popular
films which, one could argue, are almost built around the songs. In the past 30 years or so there
have also been other films that can be seen to be a bit in between: films directed towards an
educated middle class audience and emerging from what has been labelled the New Cinema, but
not quite as austere in their aesthetic as Ray's films are.

Originally the filmmakers belonging to New Cinema in the early 1970s rejected the use of song
and dance in their narrative and concentrated on themes such as political corruption, the
exploitation of workers, or oppressive landlords, in sharp contrast to the popular cinema's
emphasis on romance. It is worth noting, that the government, through the National Film
Development Corporation, sponsored many of the New Cinema films. Box-office returns were
therefore not quite as crucial as for popular movies, which were not subsidised. Making popular

72
Indian films demands great skills as they must be both commercial and ‘please the Indian
Yuppie in New York as well as people in rural Bihar' (Kabir 2001:7). What is interesting,
however is that dance and song seem to be creeping in the art genre, though in a more ‘realistic’
manner, i.e. when the story actually requires a dance number, rather than as a way of illustrating
a love story.

Whilst it is undoubtedly true that Bombay has the largest film production in India, Chennai,
Bangalore, Kolkota and Hyderabad also produce large numbers of films. Indeed it was a Tamil
film, which made Mavin Khoo want to be a dancer, for example. It is estimated that over 800
films a year are made in India, quite a staggering amount, when estimates for Hollywood tend
to be around 400. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his preface to the 1999 edition of the Encyclopaedia
of Indian Cinema, states that some 23 million Indians go to the movies every day. I presume
this is around the world as other sources say that in India alone 12 million peoples go to the
cinema every day. With such a massive audience no wonder Indian cinema can be so prolific.
One must not forget that whilst there are masterpieces in Indian cinema, such as Umrao Jaan,
Awaara, or Mother India, to cite my favourite classics, it is also true that the very worst exists
too. I remember during the research wanting to go and see Devdas, Finding it sold out, I went to
see the only other Indian film that had subtitled, a Gujarati film called Earthquake. I do not
think I have ever seen a worst crafted and acted movie!

Throughout SADiB’s research, over the past three years, it was quite clear that for most British
Asians, whether they liked Indian popular cinema or not, it was quite clearly a part of their
imagery. Everyone seemed to have had a diet of popular Indian videos at some time or other in
their lives and one could argue that popular films convey a sense of certain kind of Indian-ness
to its viewers. Considering the number of cultures and languages within the Indian subcontinent
it is fascinating to see how popular cinema has overcome regional differences to become the
dominant form of entertainment. It did that by creating a composite world with a strong fantasy
element. Divisions of religions, castes, regional cultural differences and so on are generally
glossed over in popular cinema. Instead the typical popular film would be selective in its
cultural-picking to appeal to a pan Indian audience. They emphasise a sense of ‘tradition’,
which somehow seem to outline values that define what it means to be ‘Indian’. The
screenwriter Jaed Akhtar, discussing the variety of cultures within India, argued that Hindi
cinema was one extra culture, one extra ethos that is familiar throughout the country. In his
words 'Hindi cinema is our nearest neighbours, and we know our neighbours well and
understand them' (cited in Kabir 2001:3)

In a way one could argue that what is at the centre of Indian popular films is interculturalism.
When sound came to the Indian screen in the 1930s, it allowed a new genre: the all-

73
singing/dancing film, which became extremely popular. The inspiration for the genre was what
has been referred to as the Urdu Parsee Theatre, which in itself was already a intercultural
phenomenon in the sense that it blended Persian love legends, Victorian plays, and North Indian
classical music. Over the years more and more traditions became incorporated into films, at first
from within India and quickly more global ones so that cinema-goers today are not particularly
bothered that the heroes moves from genre to genre, dancing Bhangra at a wedding, serenading
a loved one with a classical song in front of a Scottish castle, dancing a regional folk dance
among peasants in the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland to demonstrate the exuberance of their
love, or mirroring Michael Jackson and Madonna in the Lake District. Consistency of style and
‘authenticity’ is unimportant; spectacle and drama are.

A recent film that has been a huge success throughout Europe is 2001 Mira Nair’s Film four
sponsored superb Monsoon Wedding. It has been a hit both among ‘non resident Indians’ as
they are referred to in the film and among non-Asians and. I would argue that, although clearly
not a Bollywood film, through the take it has on the genre, it epitomises a sense of Indian-ness
in the modern world which is Bollywood created. Although dealing with taboo subjects such as
child molestation and the bride continuing an affair with a married man as the wedding
preparations are taking place, it is in the same time extremely conservative in its support of
traditional values: family is supreme, blood is thicker than water and the bad guy is not really
‘family’ but had been ‘adopted’ in as fictive kin. I must say that it was quite refreshing to see
arranged marriage in a positive light, as an alliance based on trust and respect and out of which
love can grow, rather than the usual forced marriage representation offered by English soap
operas. What was clear is that, even though directed to a middle class and international
audience, the film assumed an understanding of Bollywood genre and of its repertoire. When
the marriage organiser, for example, whispers ‘tell me you love me’ to the back of the young
servant he is falling in love with, and she turns with a query, he answers ‘I mean have you seen
the film Tell me you love me, in direct reference to Kaho Naa.Pyaar Hai

In term of SADiB’s research what was particularly telling within Monsoon Wedding were two
scenes towards the end of the film. The first shows how, one of the young woman having
prepared an act, imitating a filmi dance, to entertain her relatives at a pre-wedding celebration,
is joined by two young men who ‘fight’ over her through dance. As all the relatives join in, one
sees how film music is indeed music that everyone will dance to socially, and how different
styles of dancing produced by people of different generations overlap with marvellous ease. The
second scene sees the young woman at the wedding itself, dancing with the young man, who
has ‘won‘ her the previous day. He is from Melbourne - via Muscat; and she tells him ‘We
finally made an Indian out of you!’ His ability to dance validated his identity.

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 6. FUTURE RESEARCH

Although SADiB’s research was planned officially to stop in July 2001, it went on for much
longer. As mentioned in the report we had the opportunity to present our work at the South
Bank Centre in late August 2001 in an event we called Talam on the Thames. In anticipation of
this we kept some funds to support the event in addition to what SBC provided as support, as
we wanted to have a comprehensive event. This meant that we gathered further data, which
needed to be looked at in some details. In this way the project did not really stop. Indeed it will
continue formally for two of the research team’s members, myself and Lopez y Royo, with
funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board under the newly created (September
2002) AHRB Centre for the cross-cultural study of music and dance, a joint venture between
SOAS, Roehampton and UniS, with comprises 8 projects, one of them entitled New Directions
in South Asian Dance: Postcolonial Identity Construction.

Because we felt that SADiB did not go sufficiently into the analysis of choreographic practice,
it has been highlighted in the new project, which will involve practical work and residencies of
artists. This project will also involve fieldwork in India.

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 7. APPENDICES

Appendix 7.1: Performances attended

London
Classical Bharata Natyam
1. Sita Nandakumara and Mythili Prakash Bhavan 3rd July 1999
2. Bharata Natyam, Malavikka Sarukkai QEH 18 Oct 1999
3. Bharata Nrtyam: Vena Gheerawo Bhavan 28 Nov 1999
4. Sita Nandakumara and Kumaran Bala Bhavan 29 Jan 00
5. Navtej Johar Nehru centre 18 July 00
6. Shruti Laya Sangham BN dance drama Logan Hall 8 Oct 00
7. Pancavati Logan Hall 4 Nov 00
8. Mavin Khoo Nehru Centre 22 Nov 00
9. Priyadarshini Govind Bhavan 6 July 01

Classical Kathak
1. Sushmita Ghosh and Gauri Sharma Tripathi Bhavan 14 April 00
2. Akram Khan – Polaroid feet Purcell Room 10 April 01
3. The Legacy of tradition – Triveni Dance Co. QEH 5 July 01

Classical Other
1. Pratap Pawar and Sharon Lowen in Lahren Purcell Room 15 July 1999

Experimental or contemporary South Asian dance

1. Flames, by Anurekha Ghosh,
as part of Resolution! The Place 15 Feb 00
2. Dance Like a Man,
a festival of gay South Asian dance Waterman’s Arts Centre 18 Feb 00
3.Shobana Jeyasingh Company QEH 18 April 00
4. Angika – the Triple Hymn and Mayuri Boonham -
The Fifth Veda The Place 9 May 00
5. Once Upon a Time, Siddiqui and Co. The Bull 24 May 00
6. Mavin Khoo and Chris Bannerman
in ‘Cast in stone’ Purcell Room 13 Sept 00
7. Shiver, Wisethoughts company Purcell Room 10 Oct 00
8. Scene Unseen, Nahid Siddiqui and Co. Purcell Room 17 Oct 00
9. Akram Khan, Fix and Rush Lilian Bayliss theatre 26 Oct 00
10. Sankalpam Purcell Room 8 Nov 00
11. Love and Good Manners Jackson’s lane 24 Nov 00
12. Flames and Fire, Pratap Pawar and others Purcell Room 3 Dec 00
13. Jiva: Paki Boy Bloomsbury theatre 4 Jan 01
14. Jasmine Simhalan: Chathi Bloomsbury theatre 5 Jan 01
15. Sonia Sabri: You Bloomsbury theatre 22 Jan 01
16. Rani Nair: Asian Overground Bloomsbury theatre 23 Jan 01
17. Liz Lea in rehearsal Jerwood Space 26 Ma 01
18. Mayuri Boonham and Sonia Sabri Purcell Room 6 June 01

Community

1. LPO with input from BN troupe Southwark Cathedral 10 July 1999

2. Arangetram of Sushma Gobindram Bhavan 16 Oct 1999
3. Arangetram of Aparna Jagadambe Bhavan 23 Oct 1999
4. Arangetram of Krishieka Logan Hall 20 Nov 1999
5. Arangetram of Risha Hathi Bhavan 12 Dec 1999
6. Students of Anusha S - BN to Haydn Somerset House 13 May 00

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7. ISTD Day @ Blazing SBC 11 August 00
8. FRESH @ Blazing SBC 12 August 00
9. Hindu Forum event @ The DOME Millennium Dome 10 Dec 00
10. Arangetram of Ulle Muurisepp Bhavan 27 Jan 01
11. Arangetram of Jeena Nadarajan
(Mavin’s student) Commonwealth Institute 19 May 01

South Asian dance in theatre

1. Kathakali King Lear The Globe 13 July 1999

2. A Dark River Young Vic 16 July 1999
3. Krishna Avatar Logan Hall 19 Oct 00
4. Crazy Lady Drill Hall 11 November
5. Nine Nights Nehru Centre 16 November
6. Revelations Copland College 8 Dec 00
7. Millipede Museum of London 30 Nov 00
8. Hijra The Bush Theatre 6 Dec 00
9. Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral The Lyric 17 Feb 01

Club
1. Sister India QEH 8 Oct 1999
2. Kuch Kuch @ Bar Bollywood Bar Bollywood 23 Nov 00
3. Club Kali Club Kali 2 Feb 01

Religious/Temple dance
1. Navaratri Celebrations Wembley High School l6 and 7 Oct
2. Attend Sivaratri celebrations Highgate Temple 21 February

Outside London
1. Livin’ ‘Ere, Subodh Rathod
Issue based work Edinburgh Festival 13 August 99
2. The Story of Amba Dance in theatre Edinburgh Festival 14 August 99
3. Dance India Live Classical BN Edinburgh festival 29 August 99
4. Chitra Visveswaren Classical BN Birmingham 24 Feb 00
5. Nahid Siddiqui Experimental Kathak Birmingham 24 Feb 00
6. Sister India Club Oxford 8 Ma 00
7. Dounia Cross cultural Birmingham 14 July 00
8. Disha Mixed showcase Manchester 23 Sept 00
9. Unsuitable Girls Dance in theatre Manchester 29 Nov 00

Appendix 7.2: Talks, discussion groups and other events

1. Talk on Vilasini Attam by Swapnasundari Nehru centre 11 Oct 1999
2. Discussion of Akademi’s ImprovisAsian Voicebox, SBC 25 Oct 1999
3. Mavin Khoo in rehearsal Jerwood Space 4 Nov 1999
4. The launch of Extradition Nehru Centre 1 March 00
5. The launch of the Dancer’s Sabha Nehru Centre 3 March 00
6. Bharata Natyam examinations Greenford Tamil School 6 May 00
7. Lecture demonstration by Mavin Khoo Roehampton Institute 10 May 00
8. Kadam Party Bedford 12 May 00
9. Imlata, lecture demonstration Nehru Centre 27 June 00
10. Art in Action Oxford 20 July 00
11. Kadam Summer School Bedford 31 August 00
12. Aditi, New Voices event Studio theatre 24 Oct 00
12. Dance talk and demonstration with Sunil Kothari Bhavan 10 Nov 00
13. KADAM CD Rom launch Nehru Centre 4 Dec 00
14. Sharing of work by Unnikrishnan and Chitra Sundaram Chelsfield Room 4 April 01

77
15. Sharing of work by Vena Ramphal Chelsfield Room 29 June 01
16. Focus group discussion with promoters/programmers ACE 9th July 01

Dance work in the community

1. Anusha Subrahmanyam leads a workshop @ Flower Lane Centre 27 Oct 1999
for people with special needs
2. ROH work on Bollywood opera, Villier’s school Southall 7 March 01

Appendix 7.3: Interviews & Observation of dance classes

1. Sushma Mehta, Kathak teacher, London 29 Jan 00*
2. Dance teachers and the head, Kingsbury Tamil School 30 Jan 00
3. Sunita Golvala, Nava kala, BN and Kathak teacher, and students 12 Feb 00*
4. Sushmita Ghosh, Bhavan’s kathak teacher 15 Feb 00*
5. Anita Ratnam, dancer, choreographer from Chennai, India 5 March 00
6. Priya Pawar, Odissi and kathak teacher 14 March 00*
7. Alpana Sengupta, kathak teacher 17 March 00*
8. Amina Begum, kathak teacher 24 March 00
9. Pushkala Gopal, BN teacher, dancer, choreographer 27 March 00
10. John Muir, office administrator, Bhavan 28 March 00
11. Mavin Khoo, Bharata Natyam dancer 18 April 00
12. Naseem Khan, ACE Policy Officer 19 July 00
13. David Henshaw, ISTD Board member for South Asian dance 1 May 00
14. Deepa Patel, BN student, London 2 May 00
15. Subodh Rathod, kathak dancer, London 3 May 00
16. Vijayambigai Indra Kumar, Bharata Natyam teacher, London 5 May 00*
17. Rachel Heap, dance animateur and administrator, Bristol 15 May 00
18. Kiran Ratna, BN dancer and teacher, Bristol and Cardiff 15 May 00*
19. Manick Govinda, Arts Admin May 00
20. Dr John Marr, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan 30 May 00
21. Nilima Devi, kathak teacher, Leicester 30 June 2000
22. Pratap Ranawaye, of the arts organisation, Sruti arts, Leicester 30 June 2000
23. Tina Cockett, Aditi Board member 17 July 00
24. Vayu Naidu, Leicester Haymarket theatre 18 July 00
25. Vicky Spooner, ACE 8 May 00
26. Piali Ray, Director, Sampad 21 July 00
27. Jigisha Patel, Dance officer, Sampad 21 July 00
28. Vena Gheerawo, BN dancer, London 27 July 00
29. Bina Patel, Odissi dancer, London 2 August 00
30. Simon Dove, Spring dance 29 August 00
31. Chitra Sundaram, dancer, London 19 Sept 00
32. Kalpna Khurana, Kathak dancer, Manchester 23 Sept 00
33. Dick Matchett 11 Oct 00
34. Anusha Subrahmanyam, dancer 21 October 00
35. Nahid Siddiqui 25 October 00
36. Shobna Gulati 10 November
37. Nalini Gordhan 15 November 00
38. Prakash Yadagudde 1 Dec 00
39. Sanjeevini Dutta, Kadam 5 Dec 00
40. Sonia Sabri 7 Dec 00
41. Nasreen Rehman 10 Jan 01
42. Nina Rajarani 19 Jan 01
43. Bisakha Sarker 20 Jan 01
44. Jiva 23 Jan 01
45. Chitra S re. Madras 30 Jan 01
46. Dr Nandakumara 6 Feb 01
47. Sudarshan Dheer 8 Feb 01
48. Raka 11 Feb 01

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49. Telephone interview with Smita Vardnekar 19 Feb 01
50. Clare Robertson, Scottish Academy of Asian arts 23 Feb 01
51. Chix Chandaria 27 Feb 01
52. Members of Jugnu Bhangra, Gravesend 1 March 01
53. Interview with Shobana Jeyasingh 19 March 01
54. Interview with Hilary Carty, ACE 14th June 01
55. Interview Shireen Isal, Association Sargam 27th June 01
56. Interview Beth Cinamon, Studio Theatre 28th June 01
57. Interview with Stella Subbiah 6 July 01
58. Interview with Julia Carruthers, South Bank 11 July 01

Dance classes observed

1. Kathak classes with Sushma Mehta, Morley College, Westminster, London 29 Jan 00
2. Bharata Natyam, Kingsbury Tamil school, Brent, London 30 Jan 00
3. Kathak and Bharata Natyam classes at Nava Kala, Holborn, London 12 Feb 00
4. Kathak classes with Alpana Sengupta, Kenton, London 17 March 00
5. Kathak classes with Amina Begum, Bull Theatre, Barnet, London 24 March 00
6. Bharata Natyam with Vijayambigai Indra Kumar 30 April 00
7. Bharata Natyam with Kiran Ratna, Bristol and Cardiff 14 May 00
8. BN with Unnikrishnan, London 21 May 00
9. Kathak with Gauri Sharma Tripathi, London 7 July 00
10. Bharata Natyam with Anusha Subrahmanyam, Patidar Hall, London 21 Oct 00
11. Bharata natyam with Anusha S, White Lion youth Centre, London 31 Oct 00, 6 Feb 01
12. Kathak with Sujata Banerjee, Luton 28 Nov 00
13. Folk and filmi dance with Satish Shah, Cannon’s High School 5 Dec 00
14. Honey’s academy: Bhangra and filmi with Rakhi Sood, Kenton 7 Feb 01
15. Sudarshan Dheer: filmi class, Slough 8 Feb 01
16. Women’s group folk dance class, Glasgow 23 Feb 01
17. Class with Priya, Edinburgh 24 Feb 01
18. Bhangra class, Jugnu Bhangra, Gravesend 1 March 01
19. Kathak Class @ Surrey University, Led by Noni Jenkyn Jones 14 March 01
20. Pushkala Gopal and Chitra Sundaram teach BN to Goldsmith’s Drama group 16 March 01
21. Honey Kalaria filmi dance class, Copland Community College 25 March 01

Conferences attended
1. Momentum conference Manchester Metropolitan University 9-12 Sept 99
2. Exploding perceptions conference, University College Chichester 30 Oct 99
3. Navadisha conference, Mac arts centre, Birmingham 24-26 Feb 00
4. The National Kathak Conference Leicester 29 June 00
5. Patrons, Performers and Audiences, Leiden University, Netherlands 23-27 August
6. 16th conference of Modern South Asian studies, Edinburgh University 6-8 Sept 00

Appendix 7.4: Practice as a research tool

Workshops attended (Magdalen Gorringe)
1. Chau with Sharon Lowen White Lion Studio 7 July 1999
2. Connections 2 with Paula Hampson and Swapnasundari GDA 4 - 8 Oct ‘99
3. BN workshop with Malavikka Sarukkai Bhavan 21 Oct 1999
4. Workshop with Malavikka for contemporary dancers Hothouse, South Bank 23 Oct 1999
5. ImprovisAsian workshops with Akademi Hothouse, South Bank 25, 26 March
6. Training day with Akademi for work in hospitals Chelsea & Westminster 7 May 00
7. Migrations workshops with Akademi Church Hall nr Angel 20 – 22 June
8. Artists Training Day with Akademi Islington Arts factory 8 July 00

Performing & Teaching (Magdalen Gorringe)

1. Arangetram Bhavan 1 August 99

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2. Performance @ Diwali Banquet for Bhavan Hotel Radisson 17 Nov 99
2. Performances in the Raj restaurant Edinburgh 5-13 August
3. Performances in the Museum of Scotland Edinburgh 16-19 August
4. Performances as part of the project, Dance Against Debt Throughout England Various
5. Workshop for the Asian Deaf Women’s association London 5 Nov 1999
6. Workshops for infants’ school London October 99
7. Performance for the Theosophical Society London 17 Feb 00
6. Attending classes with Prakash Y and Mavin Khoo Bhavan, Gower Street Various
7. Teaching own classes Oxford Nov 99 - 00
8. Coming of Age, Akademi South Bank, London July-Aug 00
9. Leading ‘Migrations’ workshops for Akademi Allen Edward School Sept–Dec 00
10. Performance @ the V and A with Mavin V and A museum 10 Nov 0

Volunteering (Magdalen Gorringe)

1. Volunteering for Bhavan (Oct – Dec 1999)

2. Volunteering for Aditi (reviews co-ordinator Oct 99 – Oct 2000)
3. Volunteering for Sampad (a day helping to prepare costumes for the show Dounia)
4. Volunteering with Kadam proofreading the text for the CD ROM (March 2001)

Appendix 7.5: Public output

Conference presentations and public lectures

Gorringe, Magdalen
2000 ‘How Dasi Attam became Bharata Natyam: The history and Current trends of the dance style’ The Pitt
Rivers Museum, Oxford:
2000 ‘Arangetrams, performance or party?’ Patrons, Performers and Audiences Leiden University,
Netherlands
2000 ‘Arangetrams: performance or party? 16th conference of Modern South Asian studies, Edinburgh
University
1999 Momentum conference, Manchester Metropolitan University

Grau, Andrée
2002 ’Dance in Indian Cinema’, in ‘Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood’, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.
2002 Danse, communauté et héritage culturel: le Bharata Natyam au Royaume-Uni, in ‘Pratiques, figures at
mythes de la communauté en danse depuis le XXème siècle, Centre National de la Danse, Paris
2002 ‘Postcolonial theory, Red Guard rhetoric, and South Asian Dance’, in ‘Dance and Postcolonialism: South
Asian dance in Britain as case study’ at Roehampton @ Riverside
2002 ‘Dance and Postcolonial Theory: South Asian Dance in Britain as case study’, in ‘Dance in South Asia’,
Swarthmore College. Plenary session.
2001 ‘Dance and cultural identity’, world conference of the International Council for Traditional Music, Rio do
Janeiro
2001 ‘Tradition, cosmopolitisme ou zapping culturel? la danse indienne au Royaume Uni’ ZED Centre, Paris
2001 ‘Epistemology of fieldwork: working in a complex culturally diverse society’, 3rd Ethnochoreology
Seminar, Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand
1999 ‘Creative interdisciplinarity or intercultural mongrelism?’ Momentum conference, Manchester
Metropolitan University

Lopez y Royo, Alessandra

Publications

Gorringe, Magdalen
2000 Navadisha 2000, Extradition
2000 ‘Reconstructing the Devadasi’ Extradition
2000 ‘The National Kathak Conference’ Extradition

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Grau, Andrée
In Press ‘Disemia: contradiction and creative tension in South Asian dance’, London: Akademi
2001 ‘Dance and cultural identity’, Animated (autumn): 23-26

Grau, Andrée and Stacey Prickett

In Press ‘South Asian Aesthetic Unwrapped’, London: Akademi

81
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