Ancient Dance :Towards Reviewing the History of Art In India

06-06-2005, 11:22 AM

This is an important realisation for any art history in India,
especially for a historian interested in the history of thinking
about the arts in the country, which reveal the basic approaches to
it and the cultural impulse or quest they manifest. The earliest
thinking in the realm of the arts, which assumed the status of a
formal sastrika discipline, crystallised in the pure arts of music
and dance, which were self-consciously abstract and svayam-pratistha.
This happened much before the enterprise of sastra-making took a turn
towards art as representation.

Ancient Dance :Towards Reviewing the History of Art In India
Writer : Mukund Lath

For the historian. Who looks at the descriptions of the various
independent arts and their sastras, what comes through with a great
force is an astounding realisation : he can clearly see that the
history of the art in India is a journey, quite the opposite of what
we know from the west, and what we have almost, perhaps
unconsciously, rationalised as the 'normal' or 'paradigmatic'
development of art in the history of all civilisation
or 'civilisation' as such. Abstraction - or certainly. Consciously
cultivated abstraction - or certainly, consciously cultivated
abstraction - we believe, comes late in the history of art; it has
done so only recently in the west, which, indeed is in the forefront
of this movement, spreading it to the rest of the world, and lagging -
behind cultures. In the west- as the west believes - it has come as
a result of a long historical development, and especially as a result
of the complex new age of 'modernity' with its profound,
almost 'axial' changes which have brought about deep-rooted
structural changes in the environment of man and, as a result, also
in his consciousness.

>From Bharata's text, however, it is plainly evident that his picture
needs to be entirely revised, at least in the case of India. Two of
major arts, he was heir to, namely, music and were, unlike his own
imitation oriented art of theatre, quite self-consciously abstract in
form and conception. And he was himself quite aware of this. His text
is in a large part, a conscious attempt at transforming the given
abstract arts into the figurative, the representational
or 'programmatic'.

Bharata clearly had deep knowledge of the already existing rich and
sophisticated traditions of music and dance, both as to prayoga and
sastra . These, he knew, aimed at creating autonomous or ' svayam-
pratistha' , worlds of their own, to use Abhinavagupta's term for
them, Much of his own endeavor is geared towards transforming these
svyam-pratistha art for representation or anuvyavasaya- 're-
creation', to use another term from Abhinava. I
have discussed his procedure, formal as well as conceptual, in detail
in an article entitled, 'Bharata and The Fine Art of Mixing
Structures'.

Bharata, we believe, can be made in intellectually significant
landmark for stepping into a new way of thinking about the history of
the arts in India. His own intellectual enterprise can provide a poin
of entry from where we can get a meaningful view of both what came
before and what came after,

Svayam- pratistha arts were analysed into units and the smallest
units of the independents, svayam-pratistha arts were called matrkas.
The word the independent, svayam-pratistha arts were called matrkas.
The word matrka is an ancient world, first used, perhaps, in the
tradition of siksa, the ancient Vedic discipline of language,
especially, phonetics , which aimed at teaching and transmitting the
word of the Veda in its right pronunciation. Siksa had developed a
sophisticated science of phonetics , since the Vedic word was
basically an 'uttered' word. This ancient science has, indeed, been
the inspiration through indology, of the modern science has indeed,
been the inspiration through indology, of the modern discipline of
phonetics in the west, Siksa analysed speech into syllables , varnas,
the smallest units of speech to which it can be meaningfully
analysed. The varna were divided into different classes and sub-
classes on the basis of their function, the kind of effort that went
into their pronunciation, and the anatomy of their production. They
were grouped together into what was called the varna-matrka, a term
most of us are quite familiar with Varna-matrka was the 'matrix' of
speech, containing its building -blocks.

A similar ' matrix', or collection of basic building blocks, is to be
found also in the 'vyakarnaa; of ancient dance, the Tandava. Tandu ,
who wrote the earliest known full-fledged sastra on dance, so far
known from anywhere in the world, also used the term matrka ,nrtta-
matrka. Nrtta-matrka is the smallest structural unit in Tandava,
which was a pure abstract dance. It has been claimed that the nrtta-
matrka contains a complete set of building blocks not only for
Tandava, but also for all dance, or even, all possible human
movements. This is not true, though the vocabulary is an extremely
rich one. It is perhaps richer than the varna-matrka, which, as we
clearly know, does not contain all possible building blocks for
speech.Even in India, new svara and vyanjanas had to be incorporated
by later grammarians for analysing Prakrit, Apbhramsa and Desi speech.

Tandu's work is now lost as an independent sastra-work, which it
evidently was, and it now forms part of the Natya-sastra, where,
however, its contours and contents can be readily discerned (as I
have shown in a paper entitled, 'Tandu, The First Theoretician of
Dance').

The ancient sastra of music, known as Gandharva-sastra, which
describes a from of music called Gandharva, parallel in its pure
abstract intent and content to the dance of Tandu, is also
incorporated in the Natya-sastra. But unlike the sastra of dance, its
extant independent of the Natya-sastra. There were, evidently, a
number of sastrakaras who had written on Gandharva before Bharata
wrote his own sastra, in which he used the sastra of Gandharva before
Bharata wrote his own sastra, in which he used the sastra of
Gandharva, formulating it in his own way and orchestrating it for his
vrtti-oriented purpose of creating theatre, Dattilam, now a well-
studied ancient work of Gandharva, is quite independent of the Natya-
sastra, and perhaps antedates it (for a detailed study of dattilarm
and its place in the history of sangita-sastra, one may see my A
Study of Dattilam : A Treatise On The Sacred Music Of Ancient India).
It is clear from the Dattilam that it is a work written in a mature
tradition with other works pre-dating it , Dattila, indeed, name sand
quotes from sastrakaras who had written earlier, while making no
reference at all to Bharata. The Gandharva sastra, unlike the sastra
concerning dance of Tandu, does not use the world matrka. But the
notion could have been meaningfully used to analyses its structures,
which are pure structures such as that of Tandu's nrtta. In music, in
fact, there is a natural matrka, the smallest unit, namely, svara.
This matrka is so obvious and self-evident in all musical praxis that
it does not need to be separately marked out, as in speech or in
dance. Later in the history of sangita-sastra, however, a concept,
very similar to the concept of matrkam analysing savara - formations
into smallest possible cluster, was incorporated in musical analysis.
This was the concept of sthaya. The move, it appears was made by
musicians, who called it thaya(in their own vernacular parlance,
called Bhandira-bhasa); later it entered the discourse of the sastris
in a Sanskritised form as sthaya. The concepts of svara-mandala and
on varna in Dattila are, one might say, somewhat similar to the
concept of varna-matrka and nrtha-matrka, though they are not
accorded the central analytical and transformative role that matrka
has in vyakarana and nrtha.

This is an important realisation for any art history in India,
especially for a historian interested in the history of thinking
about the arts in the country, which reveal the basic approaches to
it and the cultural impulse or quest they manifest. The earliest
thinking in the realm of the arts, which assumed the status of a
formal sastrika discipline, crystallised in the pure arts of music
and dance, which were self-consciously abstract and svayam-pratistha.
This happened much before the enterprise of sastra-making took a turn
towards art as representation.

We notice that the ancient svayam-pratistha arts are what are today
called 'performing' arts. To use Kalidasa's words, they are prayoga-
pradhana, though one might say that in all are, unlike though,
prayoga is essentially more central to the realm itself, and so in
the distinction , pryoga and sastra, which is to be found in all
traditions of art in India, prayoga assumes a dominant role. Yet
music and dance are prayoga-pradhana in that their works have no
performance outside prayoga. This is the reason that historian have
largely neglected these arts, as is obvious from the minor role they
are assigned in the portrayals of culture and civilisation . the
models for such portrayas have been western portrayals of Greece, to
which they trace the roots of their civilsation and which, for them
forms the 'classical' expression of their culture, especially in the
arts, but there is a strange divide here which, I think, has hardly
been paid attention to , and has not been seen in the perspective of
other civilisation. Witness that in music, the 'classical, of western
music is only a few centuries old, and , moreover, it hardly has any
Greek roots, being very different in its very nature: the western
whereas Greek music was monadic and more like that of India in spirit
and form. Historically, Greek music seems to have greater links with
the music of Western Asia, perhaps through the influence of Byzantine.

In India, the picture is quite different. The classical-most arts in
India, as we have seen, are the arts of performance, music and dance.
They have an extraordinarily ling continuity coming down to the
present, when , indeed, most of the other arts have become estranged
from their own classical traditions and have forged links with the
alien tradition of the west, their history now being more securely
rooted in the west than in their own past. Their classical is western
classical. This Indian phenomenon of the divide in the 'classical' is
very different from that in the west, and needs a separate historical
deliberation, which we hope will find room in
another deliberation by us. Music and dance, indeed may be also
called the culturally most dominant arts in India. This reflection
present us with a focus on the art-history of Indian entirely
different form art-history as we know it from the west and use
unthinkingly as a paradigm. By 'art-history' we have by habit come to
mean the history of the plastic arts but properly it should mean a
history, where art, that is the whole field of art is viewed as a
whole in the perspective of a civilisation. In the self-image of the
west, which is essentially a historically-oriented image,
the 'classical' ideally goes back to Greece, and so, only those of
the arts, which happen to reach back to Greece, namely, 'plastic'
arts are really classical. The 'classical' in dance is practically
absent in the west, even in the limited sense of being
relatively 'old', such as music is. All art-dance in the west is
clearly a 'modern' phenomenon. Dance, as an independent and
sophisticated art form with a status and profundity comparable to
that of the other arts, is perhaps not more than two centuries old.
The history of dance in the west, consequently, hardly has the
importance in western thought and culture, which the plastic arts
have.

It was the German idealists who gave the importance to the concept
of 'civilisation' that it now has. Civilisation was the supreme
creation of man as a man. It was seen as an almost self-sufficient,
self-contained, or svayam-pratistha being, since it was not just a
creation of man, but something, which also created him. It was man
himself. It was distinct, however, from nature, which was seen as
the 'other' and as alien to man. Being man himself, civilisation was
something man could understand from within, unlike 'alien' nature. A
distinction was made between 'knowledge' and 'understanding'.
Understanding was cognition form within, such as man has of himself
and his creations, whereas knowledge was cognition from without, as
in purely casual knowledge. Understanding, needless to add, was
considered superior to mere knowledge. Nature, in this view, cannot
be understood. It cannot, in other words, be truly known, it can only
be 'known' from without through the science and casual method. The
knowledge of civilisation, on the other hand, is self-knowledge.
Knowledge of nature being merely casual, lacks the profundity and
inwardness of man's 'understanding' of himself. History was a
discipline aimed at understanding civilisation. The value and the
great ideological force that history has today is a legacy of the
German idealists. Art was conceived of as one of the deepest self-
expressions of man, and hence the importance of art-history as an
integral part of any total history of civilisation today.

The thinkers we have in mind were interested in civilisation in

general, with a breadth of vision history lacked before them.

Historians of other civilisation other have never been interested in
the

study of civilisation other than their own, with the kind of universal

vision spanning man as whole, in the manner that the German

idealists have been. And even when they have placed Man in time,

such as the Puranas do, the vision has been a purely mythic, quite

different from the empirically oriented 'cognitive' discipline we know
as

history, and which the idealists as students of civilisation espoused.

Yet, despite their breadth of vision , the German idealists did not

really consider civilisation as a plural civilisation, was for them
the

centre and the apex of civilisation activity. It was also the
civilisation

of the future for Man as such. Their discovery of a self-image, which

they found the civilisation to which they were heirs, was at same

time the discovery of civilisation itself. Their Greek roots became,
for

them, the roots of civilisation itself. No wonder, then that as Greek

became central to understanding Civilisation, the arts of Greece with

the most profound influence in the later culture of the west became

the centre of attention for art-historians. Unfortunately, such an

attitude was adopted not only by historians of the west, but also for

those of other cultures who took them as their guru.

But if the 'classical' is a phase of art with the profoundest

normative influence and the longest continuity, then, in India, unlike

the west, music and dance would have to be given place much above

the plastic arts. We should not also forget that India is he only

civilisation with a 'revealed' corpus of music. Sama , the Vedic
music,

we cherished with the same impulse as the mantra, and, like the

mantra, it was sruti. It was, moreover, sruti its own right and not as

liturgy, or music sung to words, and thus sacred only by association.

There were strong sampradayas of Sama as sruti. The literature of

these Sampradayas reveals an attitude to music, which values it as

svayam-pratistha, or sufficient in itself, independent of the sung
word

or the rk mantra.

Dance, unlike music, seems essentially a post-Vedic art.

Attention in depth was hardly paid to it during vedic items. The Vedic

culture has song but not dance or theatre, or even sculpture and

painting to speak of. Dance emerged as a great art around the age of

Buddha- with whom, however, one can hardly associate dance-

during the period when the new cults of Vaisnavism and Shaivism

were emerging out of the vedic fold, partly as reactions to the

world-deying, Sramana sampradayas of Budda and others. These

cults also imbibed much from the new Sramana ethos and world-view,

and yet they were entirely different in spirit. For us, one
remarkable,

life-asserting difference lies in their positive attitude to the arts,
an

attitude, which continues down to this day. Siva and vishnu are

dancing Gods, as well as creators of the other arts. This is

unimaginable of the Buddha or the Tirthakars, or the Gods of

Christianity and Islam. True, the Sramana traditions also took to the

arts as they grew and spread, and it would be interesting to explore

the attitude and thought towards the arts in these traditions,

contrasting-as well as interrelating- them with Shivism and

Vaisnavism.

The pure dance of Tandava, emerged, evidently, among Saiva

sampradayas. Siva himself is said to have created and danced the

Tandava. Tandava is thus 'divine' in a sense similar o Sama as

revealed sruti. Tandava has been the parent and model for many

dance forms and traditions in India over the last two and half

millennia, and is still a living presence in classical dances such as

Bharata-natyam, Oddisi and Mohini Attam. It is parallel to music in
the

extraordinary continuity it has in our culture.

Dance also exercised a great normative influence upon the

plastic arts. Its influence on Indian sculpture and painting is
obvious;

it was, in fact, a very self-consciously imbibed influence as the

Vastu-Sastras and Sastras concerning painting show. Indeed, the

very ideal of the human body in the Indian plastic arts, whether the

male or female is that of the dancer, and not that of the athlete as
in

Greek and Greece influenced European sculpture. In the best of

Indian sculptures, the body, sitting standing or moving-be it in
sthiti

or in gati, to use terms from the discourse on dance-does so like a

dancer. The very details of its sthiti or gati seem to be consciously

modelled on the dance. Interestingly , this is true not only of Hindu

gods and goddesses but many Buddha figures, too. One difference

between he Buddha as carved by the Gandharan artists and their

more inland brethren, lies in this: that the Indian sculptor has dance

in mind, whereas the Roman - or the Roman-trained sculptor -does

not. It is not that the Mathura or Sarnath Buddha is dancing - that

would be inconceivable - but his stillness, the presence of his body
as

something 'inner' and more than physical, has the glow and grace of

the dancer. Contrast him with the Tirthankara and this suggestion

might come more alive. The best sculptures of the Tirthankars, in the

characteristic kayotsarga - mudras( the attitude of giving up the

body) are entirely up-dance-like. Their denial of the body seems,

indeed, to be conceived as a denial dance. This becomes visible in

many jain temples, where all the other figures: of goods and

goddesses, kings and queens and soldiers, including musicians and

dancers are quite like their Hindu - or Buddhist - counterparts,

conceived in the images of the dance.

Needless to repeat, that such dominance and continuity of

music and dance and the proliferation of their influence on the other

arts, calls for an art-historical approach very different from the

approach donated by the plastic arts which we have learnt from the

west. In the west, as we have noted, it was part of a historical

search for self-understanding dictated by the specificities and

continuities of European culture. The inspiration to study
civilisations

through history as an empirical and comparative study is also

European model in detail. The notion of civilisation has been from its

inception a pluralistic notion: European historians have thought of

'civilisation' in the plural. But this pluralism has been lost in the
equally

strong historical monism is bound to be overshadowed by the

suggestions of European imperialism, continuing in an intellectual

garb. If 'civilisation' is man himself, and is also plural, then his
vision

commits us to a deeper plurality than the historical, intellectual

tradition of the west has shown. We could make the plurality of art

itself our model: great civilisations, like great works or art
constitute

distinct 'universals' in and through their individuality. The spirit
with

which to study them should be the Vedic spirit of 'rupam pratirupam

babhuva. A student it in its own terms, viewing it at the same time

like a work of art, an instance of the universal. An individual can be

compared to another - such a comparative understanding is part of

comprehending individuality - but it should not mean the monistic

projection of any individual as 'the' universal, or the sole ideal.

To come back to the sastra of Tandu, we also find that his

approach is significantly different from that of Panini, whose sastra
is

often considered an Ur sastra in India, a paradigm for all subsequent

sastric thinking. Bharata has a story behind the composition of

Tandu's work, which gives it a context connecting it with Bharata's

own endeavour. Bharata says that Siva asked Tandu was to teach

Bharata the nrtta, which Siva danced, and this was the occasion for

Tandu's enterprise. The idea was that Bharat would then incorporate

Tandava within his own natya. The story, clearly, is an attempt by

Bharata to proclaim an immanent relation between his own sastra and

that of Tandu, which was an obviously earlier sastra.

Siva's nrtta consisted of thirty-two complex dance formations,

called angaharas. Tandu, like Panini analyses these formations into

simpler units, calling them karanas, which he further analyses into

nrtta-matrkas. He then gives us a grammar consisting of simple rules

for combining karanas, using which nay number of anagaharas could

be formed, limitlessly, beyond the thirty-two created by siva now,

this is quite unlike panini. True, one could use pinini to form new

words, but this was not his intent, nor did the tradition take his
work

with such intent. Indeed, Patanjali pointedly remarks that a

grammarian is not like a potter, you do not go to him for new words.

But one could go to Tandu for a new dance, and the tradition has

been doing so for more than two thousand years. The only extant

commentary on Tandu's sastra: by the famous Abhinavagupta (10th

-11th centuries), pointedly raises the point we are here concerned

with. We discover, Abhinava says, that a sastra apparently designed

to describe and teach the sacred anaharas danced by Siva, ends up

by describing a process through which any number of new angaharas

can be created. What, he asks, is the status of the new angaharas

which are plainly inherent as palpable possibilities within the
sastra,

and are being realised in actual practise by natyacaryas? His answer

is that any angahara based on Tandu's sastra is Tandava. All of

them, he further says, are to be considered sacred like the angaharas

created by Siva, although, he adds, the thirty-two angaharas danced

by Siva are relatively more sacred.

Interestingly, the sense of the sacred was associated by later

tradition with Panini's sastra too, and Sanskrit soon became 'divine'.

Tradition, even now, values Panini's grammar as a Smrti, a sastra for

teaching dharma and not just an ordinary laksana(descriptive,

analytic) sastra. Panni's own intention perhaps did not have anything

to do with dharma. His Astadhyyi has no such signs, but dharma,

evidently,entered the Paninian tradition soon after Panini as an

important prayojana(goal) of his sastra. Patanjali, as authoritative
as

Panini himself in the Paninian tradition, wrote two or three centuries

after him, and he clearly conscious of the dharma motive of grammar.

Grammar - that is , Panini's grammar - he proclaims, teaches the right

word, picking it out from among others in common usage which are '

Apabhramsa'(distorted0: they have a similar sound and the same

meaning(such as 'gava', 'goni' etc. For the correct 'samskrta' 'go').
To

use the right word, he declares, is dharma.

Tandu's sastra, we cannot but remark, is very different in

spirit. His sastra extends the arena of dharma or the sacred, rather

than limit it, as Panini's sastra is taken to do: it allows new
formations

to enter the circle of the dharma, forms, which, without his sastra,

would have remained outside, perhaps as apabhrasta. The later

history of Tandu's nrtta is sastra, but also the inclusion of new

formations taken from loka, or what we would call 'folk'- the sastra

calls them Dsi- which were thus sacralised as Tandava.