Kiraṇ Kumār | Graphic-Essay
PICKING (ON) PREFIXES

This graphic-essay forms one chapter of a larger essay-performance 'Dear Dead Dancer(s)' which addresses figures pivotal to my personal practice of dance: Kelucharaṇ Mahapātra (1926-2004), Rukmiṇi Devi (1904-1986), Chandralekhā (1928-2006), Kapila Vatsyāyan (1928-2020), Astād Deboo (1947-2020) and Sānthā Bhāskar (1939-2022), among others. Auto-ethnographic notes, photographs, documentary film footage and live performance of song and dance, all collectively articulate some complex entanglements inherent to the practice, pedagogy and performance of those dances around the Indian Ocean rim which answer today to the call of ‘national classical’. 'Dear Dead Dancer(s)' is the first instalment in a long-term artistic research 'Epistolary Ancestries', that traces a personal filiation of practice through a corpus of open letters made out to and for already dead persons. 

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Rukmiṇi Devi (1904-1986) 

Rukmiṇima, namaskāram. I must admit that in moments of my deeper discontent with dance, you often come to mind. So it seemed only natural to articulate my thoughts to you sooner than later. 

At the outset, I will say that my initial intention was to write only to Kelubābu ('On Pedagogy & Partridges'), critically voicing concerns with my practice of dance which I saw as having inherited from him. Yet his Oḍissi which was born in the 1950s, was modelled heavily on your strategies for (re)constructing Bharatanāṭyam in the 1930s. In a newly formed Indian nation state, your Bharatanāṭyam stood as an exemplar of what the Indian government, through its Sangeet Natak Akademi and Ministry of Culture would come to declare as ‘Indian classical dance’. This has since been a label of rather high purchase that many other dances have desired and acquired. In the initial years of my training, this double declaration of dance as ‘Indian’ and as ‘classical’ seemed to me little more than a linguistic bureaucracy of delaying the dance. And this delay was the source of much of my discontent. 

Two (and) too (make) many 

How you dealt with your discontents, I do sometimes wonder, for I often take long walks with mine, silently airing them in the open. Something often happens through these walks; we live a little longer together, resisting the urge to hack haplessly at each other with emotional or analytical tools. On one such self-prescribed walk in the south of Delhi, I emerged from one of the city’s many lush public parks to a street view of this: 
Kamkhya Kalapeeth Facade | © Kiraṇ Kumār As I stood across the street from that banner, I realised that it would be naive to merely wish these words away. This barrage of words on the banner paints a more complex picture than that offered by the two officiated prefixes alone. With the national flag fluttering and the byline reading: ‘School for Dance Music Yoga Indian Culture’, the conjunctive prefix ‘Indian classical’ unambiguously evokes the civic nation and the sanctions of culture espoused by this nation. And, in a seeming compliance to a governmental family planning program (“हम दो, हमारे दो”; ‘we two, our two’), the civic and its espoused culture sprout two further registers. In alluding to the Kāmakhya Śakti Pīṭha, a temple upon the Nilanchal Hill in Assam (built for the genitals of a once dead deity), ‘Shri Kamakhya Kalapeeth’ evokes a presumably religious register in opportune collaboration with the register of kalā or art. In what follows, I propose to decouple the prefixes ‘Indian classical’, in order to pick (up) on some nuances of the four further registers they evoke: civic, cultural, religious and artistic, with the specific intention of rethinking their continued relevance for my dancing body. 

Here, keep this little sum for your needs 

Even at a first glance, the word ‘Indian’ already has an unmistakably nationalistic ring to it. As it stands today the word points to the geo-political nation-state that is India. The civic identity of this Indian nation-state is marked by its declaration of independence in 1947, is inscribed in its constitution drafted in 1950, and is also constituted by the continual accounting and documenting of people within its geo-political borders. To contemplate the relevance of this civic register for the dancer, let us (re)turn to Kumar Sahani's filmic portrait of Kelucharaṇ Mahapatra's Odissi: 

Bhavantarana freeze frame | © Kiraṇ Kumār What we cannot hear in this frozen re-enactment is a young Kelubābu singing melifluously as he works the field, just as a benevolent benefactor approaches him, urges him to (figuratively and also quite literally) dance to his own music, and then offers him some money to help ease his professional migration from agriculture to art. The cinematography strategically conceals the dancer's benefactor behind the camera’s lens. But the filmmaker's own benevolent benefactor is not so: the Public Diplomacy Division, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India; the commissioning body of this film, among others on Indian classical art. 

The strongest relevance of the civic register to dance is in the patronage that it affords the dancer, in as far as the body of this dancer is circumscribed by the body of the nation. This circumscription often amounts to a de-scription of the dancer as citizen or sanctioned migrant, but always accounted for, documented, and often even certified by the civic nation. To date my own dancing body has been circumscribed and described so by many civic nation bodies, from Singapore to Hong Kong, Germany, India and Indonesia. In 2000, I moved to Singapore on a high school scholarship. Three years into this move, a first year undergraduate course on ‘Singapore Studies’ taught me that my state sponsored migration to the nation was part of a long term social engineering project to bolster the nation-state's development in science and technology. And three years after my graduation when I migrated from engineering to dance, my dancing body had strayed from its conscription as one among the nation's techno-pedagogical investments. In 2012, in what seemed at the time a benevolent civic migration, a scholarship from the National Arts Council of Singapore supported my graduate study in dance at the University of Arts Berlin. What had bolstered this enthusiastic exchange of my dancing body between the two civic nations was a then fresh declaration: "Deutschland ist das Land der Ideen. Mit Ideen für das Land gestalten wir unsere Zukunft - weltoffen, tolerant und mit Begeisterung." Germany is the land of ideas. With ideas for the land/country, we design our future - worldly/open-minded, tolerant and with enthusiasm.
In 2018, three years into making annual field trips to Java from Germany, I made an application to the Indonesian Ministry of Culture for a year-long scholarship to live and learn Wayang Kulit (shadow puppetry) in Java. A friend who was already on this scholarship for studying dance advised me on my application; "at the end of the day," she said with a knowing sideward glance, “tell them what they would like to hear”. And so I did, and I was offered the scholarship.  During my visits to Indonesia to learn 'Javanese classical' dance, I was often confronted with what seemed to me a disturbing trend of keeping caged birds as a sort of symbol of beauty or prosperity or some such aspiration. "Why don't you free the bird?" I asked pointedly to one man. He was slightly taken aback by the confrontation. And then he half-apologetically responded: "Even if I opened the door, he doesn't want to fly." On another day, while in the same place, I saw the bird doing this: 

© Kiraṇ Kumār
I was astonished. He was sitting silent and perfectly still, his wings thrown wide open. His sculptural commitment to the posture surprised me. Did he not know what to do next? Had the confinement of the cage rendered his wings vestiges? Does he have no memory of his capacity to fly? 

This is, indeed, a question to reflect on deeply - our own self-implication in (native or non-native) national cultures. 

Patronage, as the distilled relation of the dancing body with/in the civic body of a nation, is never just a unilateral transaction from benefactor to beneficiary. It is rather a bilateral collaboration between civic nation and citizen (or sanctioned migrant) towards the sustenance of that crucial second register: the cultural. 

Come on, Pina, admit it 

In his critique of European modernity, Gregory Jusdanis argues in his 2001 study ‘The Necessary Nation’ that national culture as an idea has been a necessarily belated invention, and that “nationalists exploit the resources of culture.. its institutions.. and its ideology.. in order to promote the creation and maintenance of a nation.” But he doesn’t stop here; carrying his argument to a conclusion that is in “contrast to a dominant trend in political theory, and one ignored by cultural studies”, he proposes that “nationalism is ultimately a cultural phenomenon.” In doing so he puts into question “the possibility of a purely civic (noncultural) conception of nationalism, that a nation-state can be based on an idea, that it can flourish in a purely political sense, that it is held together by its constitutional documents and democratic institutions.” 

On Nationalism | © Goethe-Institut Delhi Gregory's critique rejects the notion of a purely civic nation, giving way instead to a national culture. Sadanand Menon begins his 2016 essay titled ‘From National Culture to Cultural Nationalism’ with a recollection: 

On Nationalism Sadanand Menon | © Kiraṇ Kumār The director of the cultural institute was not publicly coaxing Pina to admit to her civic identity as a German, for that would have already been affirmed by documentation and verified at the national borders of Germany, India and any other civic nation that her journey might have necessitated her to pass through. But the more subtly complex cultural identity of 'German-ness' in her art, now that would need to be performed publicly, nationally and internationally, and the performer was reluctant. Yet Pina wouldn't be the only European artist to reject cultural identification. In his 1993 film ‘Je vous salue, Sarajevo’, Jean Luc Godard quipped: “There is culture, and that is the rule. There is exception, and that is art. Everything tells the rule: cigarettes, computers, T-shirts, television, tourism, war. Nothing says the exception. That is not said. It is written, composed, painted, filmed. Or it is lived. And it is then the art of living. It is of the nature of the rule to desire the death of exception.” 

Eloquent as they are, I remain wary of uncritically acquiescing to Pina and Jean Luc's rejection of the cultural register in association with (their) art, for that, for me, would be resorting to easy Euro-centric universalisms as ready-made antidotes to narrow nationalisms. I must stand instead in artistic solidarity with them, yet avoid hastily reenacting their gestures, for in India, our choreographies of gestures differ. 

In 2017, while visiting temples in the Kaveri delta, in the small village of Thirupugalur I saw a defunct site and signage. Unable to read my mother tongue then, I photographed it and sent the image to a friend: 
  © Kiraṇ Kumār

I preferred 'arttemple' for its curious conjunction at the t-s. I was drawn into the image also for its curious conjunction: the only standing leg of a dancing Śiva and the smooth curved head of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.  Yet the conjunction of the most internationally celebrated icon of Indian classical arts and the most internationally celebrated architect of the Indian nation-state, is housed in an abandoned arttemple where there is no dance. The shadows cast by the setting sun across the arttemple’s dilapidated western wall only intensified the theatricality of absences.  These shadows paradoxically reveal another register beyond the national and the cultural: the (arguably) religious. Obfuscated in the conjunctive crevice of the national cultural prefix 'Indian classical', is an anxiously absent presence: ‘ancient Hindu'. But does the latter promise better prefixity for our dances than the former today? Before picking/on any new/old prefixes, we must first deconstruct the choreography of this obfuscation, starting with secularism. 
To understand secularism as a choreography is to understand it as active/operative score rather than as speculative concept. For this, I turn to Abhinav Chandrachud's 'Republic of Religion' (2020) in which he patiently peels out layers of utility and futility of secularism from the vantage point of a practicing advocate. What he terms “colonial secularism” was instituted by the British with a view to dismantle the deep association of what they perceived as indigenous Indian ‘religions’ with the public life of Indian peoples; this at a time time when Britain’s own monarchy and church remained unquestionably entangled. In (an)other('s) words, the aim of colonial secularism was to “pave the way for the introduction of Christianity into India” (‘Secularism, Islam and Education in India, 1830-1910’, Robert Ivermee, 2015). But this was a failed project, as A P Nicholson already admits by 1930. Tucked away in an Indonesian archive, I chanced upon his surreptitiously titled book ‘Scraps of Paper’.  Nicholson's perspective is provocative because it foregrounds the complex entanglements between India and Europe that are fundamental to the task of decolonising that which could not (even) be colonised. Testament to the (soft) success of this Europeanisation of India is what Abhinav calls "soft secularism", a tactic for constitutional expression by a civic nation that, perhaps from being so scarred by partition, willingly obfuscates mention of religion at numerous junctures resulting in many a legal euphemisms and their associated (mis)interpretive ambiguities. A deeper deconstruction of the principles of secularism would necessarily have to involve a study of Europe, and that is what Jakob de Roover offers in his 2015 book ‘Europe, India and the Limits of Secularism’. Jakob's study traces the illiberal origins of secularism in Europe, and questions its relevance today as a liberal, humanitarian value seemingly worthy of global aspiration. 

A critique of secularism unequivocally destabilises the sacred assumptions of a national cultural construct. And yes, such a deconstruction of the prefix 'Indian classical' only risks exposing its somewhat unsecular doppelgänger: 'ancient Hindu'. Indeed we may even argue that through euphemistic-obfuscation the problematic prefix has been offering an unwarranted immunity to the doppelgänger. But let it be clear that such an exposure of the the ‘ancient Hindu’ does not condone its reification. Contrarily, the risk of such exposure only renders it more vulnerable to further deconstruction. And for this vital and urgent labour of corrective historiography, I have much gratitude for the likes of Daud Ali, Indrani Chatterjee and Manu Devadevan. 

In fact the very first paragraphs of Manu's 2020 study 'The 'Early Midieval' Origins of India' make it amply apparent that the 'ancient' is itself an uncritical avowal of a colonial historiographic project of retelling the subcontinent's story in three chronological periods: the ancient, the medieval and the modern. As a legacy of colonial secularism, this questionable analytical frame is designed to quite simply reify the modern period as "a British period informed by principles of civilisation, nationalism, rationality, and legislated law. The preceding epochs were religious, ritualistic and dogmatic, and therefore qualified only to be called 'Hindu' and 'Muslim'." 
Cartographi collage forgotten friendships | © Kiraṇ Kumār As for the 'Hindu' in ‘ancient Hindu’, suffice it to say that Pina's performative perspicacity in her resistance to acquiesce to prefixes was pitifully lost on those people of Punjab back in 1881 when a census official "remarked that whenever an Indian was unable to identify his religion, or said he belonged to a religion that was not recognised (by the state), he was classified as Hindu” ('Ideologies of the Raj', Thomas R Metcalf, 1995). And not just the construct of 'Hindu', S.N. Balagangadhara cautions us that the very anthropological conception of premodern indigenous practices as ‘religions’ in a Christian theological sense may be argued as constructing false equivalences. In his opening remarks to the 2008 conference, ‘Rethinking Religion in India’, Balu draws a controversial conclusion, “fundamentally religion is not to be found in all cultures and.. India, and Asia, would be cultures without a religion.” 

ಬಿಟ್ಹಾಕು ಶಿವ (Come on, Śiva, snap out of it) 

In India, and Asia today many dances (all too easily) acquiesce to the twofold prefixity that is ‘national classical’. Since 2015, I have been travelling around India, and Asia, and in both guided and auto-didactic environments I have been actively expanding my learning of many such dances, from Oḍissi, to Kathak, Chhau, Kuchipuḍi, Bharatanāṭyam, Mohiniāṭṭam, Kathakali, Balinese and Javanese court dances. Over the next years I am enthusiastic to expand this learning into Kandyan, Khon and Khmer dances of Sri Lanka, Thailand and Cambodia, as well as to those from regions of Assam, Manipur and Myanmar. In folding into these shapes and tapping into these rhythms, my body has felt an eerie consonance and a resonance so resplendent. Yet to my deeper discontent, since their respective conceptions, the civic nations of the region have all been performing various variations of another multi-armed dance: on the one hand rightfully rejecting colonial narratives of cultural supremacy, and on the other hand unwittingly casting their own rebuttal within such derivative frames as 'classical' culture; on the one hand (more or less) effectively resisting mass proselytisation, not succumbing to the condition of so many pre-Christian cultures, and on the other hand, at once both over-assimilating their diversity of mytho-poetic-practices under yet another derivative frame of 'Hindu religion', while also muffling their miscellaneous majorities under such euphemisms as secularism. 

Cartographi collage On the one hand dance | © Kiraṇ Kumār Once upon the mountains, Śiva plunges into despondency and rage over confronting the corpse of Śakti. He takes her burning body upon himself, dancing a dance of mayhem that threatens to throw all the lands and lives under the mountains asunder. Viṣṇu, seeing no other way, cuts into bits the corpse of Śakti just so Śiva can cling on to her no further. Her body flies in flaming bits and falls far and forever. An eye in a lake, a breast in the east, a toe here and a tongue there. The people under the mountains say: oh look, another mother! And they do what they do best. They enshrine her every bit in a temple. Across lands and lakes of Pakistan-India-Nepal-Bangladesh-SriLanka, they consecrate her broken body within sixty four sacred sites, each a seat (pīṭh) for Śakti. To bring life to her (which is not to bring her to life) they re-member her dis-membered body through timeless pilgrimage, stitching sites together with mere mortal footsteps. As their soles draw out the sacred span of her body, their breath heaves a broken song for her country; an-anthem-without-a-nation. 

The mytho-poetic-practices of dis/embodiment of a country can be quite a chaotic process, for this country is not an always-already-available idea (as national culture would have it) but a necessarily re-markable contour, performed periodically in perambulatory pilgrimage of patriotic proportions. 

Indeed in India, and Asia our choreographies of gestures must differ: challenging the purity of the civic nation, recognising the national as always-already cultural, understanding the national cultural as the repression of the religious, collapsing the very frame of the religious and then, and only then, culling the cultural. And yet, even after the collapse of the civic, religious and cultural, our dance stands (on that one foot, barely) clothed in a fourth-skin, and this skin is that of art. But in dancing these dances across subcontinental and archipelagic sands and ponds, I am often irked by a question: is (any of) this art? 

I do not ask this question with disdain towards art as such. But when it comes to these somehow surviving deritualised reconstructions, I have come to see art as a sort of benevolent refuge within which they were necessarily sheltered during tectonic times of religious and cultural confrontations that threatened their very survival. Yet today within structures of the art academy, theatre and museum, I often wonder if these dances have well overstayed their opportune, artistic invitation. Indeed I see the two in a state of mutual deadlock; neither have the dances honed their pluriform mytho-poetic-practices of dis/embodiment while sheltered within the frame of (national classical) art, nor has the modern frame of art sufficiently decolonised its Euro-centricism for having (open-mindedly, tolerantly and enthusiastically) offered refuge to a premodern immigrant for so many decades now. 

Rukmiṇima, I am at an impasse. Not dejected, but quite un-rested. How you rejuvenate yourself, I do wonder, for I sometimes turn to entertainment. Something often happens over a few frozen frames; banal (or brilliant) perspectival shifts as gazes glance sidewards from protagonist to paraphernalia; a dance(r) breaking free from the shackles of a song(stress), a seductive freedom, he wore black, a Miss India, she wore white, their combined (in)capacity for song-dance, to miss India, tricolour cape, hackneyed Hero, silent slanted smiles, (re)turns, second thoughts(?)