by Michael Wood
In the meantime, in the restaurant, the tables had been pushed back, and a little stage set up. The Malaysians had asked that while they were in Chidambaram, the home of the dance, they might see a classical dance recital and this had been arranged. Presently the troupe arrived – teacher, dancers and three musicians, with drone vina and drums. They laid a white sheet on the little platform where they were to sit; then they lit incense and placed flowers on a low table with lamps and a bronze statue of Nataraja, to which these days the dancers pray before they begin.
The two dancers were beautiful young women. One in crimson, one in kingfisher; trails of jasmine were plaited into their long black hair; red gold in the nose and ears, stamped on the forehead and clustered at the throat. Their hands and feet were patterned with henna, so that when they lifted their feet they looked as if they had been stepping in blood. They wore silver bangles on their arms and heavy silver dancer’s anklets which shook like rain with each footfall. In the unsteady light of the hotel generator we watched as the banal surroundings of the restaurant were transmuted by the little lamplit mise en scène.
The senior dancer began; she was still only about twenty I would guess. She had a bewitching smile and black shining eyes – ‘eyes like spears’, as saint Sundaramurti would say. (He fell in love with a dancing girl from Tiruvarur.) Her guru stood before her unsmiling, an old lady austerely dressed with severely parted hair brushed back tight against her skull: a Madrasi Miss Brodie. The girl knelt and touched her feet, a traditional mark of respect to one’s guru; then she took up her opening position, struck the floor with her heels and the drum began.
The performance comprised songs from the traditional repertoire of the Bharata Natyam. The system of gesture is made up of the 108 main poses of the sacred dance, poses which are carved on the walls of the East Gate of the Nataraja temple and in the upper ambulatory inside the vimana of the great temple at Tanjore; poses which were already laid out in the first-century classical-dance treatise, the Natya Shastra. It is an art which goes as far back into the life of the south as it is possible to trace.
She turns her heels in and bends both legs out, back ramrod straight. She brings her flat right hand to her breast, then out, and turns it upwards. The right hand goes up to the face, the left down to the waist, then right down, fingers open. Now the head is cocked, mouth smiling and eyes gleaming. Chastely, tastefully, precisely, her body is miming desire: a girl who is torn by overwhelming passion (physical, spiritual) for her divine lover. ‘My husband is calling. Shall I go to him, my beloved Lord?’ Her feet beat the floor, her head, looking straight forward, now moves from side to side. In the audience some of the Malaysians have tears in their eyes as their video cameras whirr away recording the world they have lost.
In the Middle Ages dance was one of the great expressions of Tamil culture. Creation was a dance, god was a dancer and his temples were full of dancing girls dedicated to his service, devadasis. There were dancers in all the main temples, four hundred of them in Tanjore alone. The temple dance was part of a wider archaic tradition, which has distant parallels with the custom in the Bronze Age Near East of dedicating women to temples, sacred prostitution. All over India from the tenth century the custom grew. The popularity of tantric cults which promised liberation through sexual ecstasy added to the spread of the practice. In many parts of India the temples themselves were adorned with sculpture and painting depicting in the most unabashed way every possible variety of sexual activity, magically lustful couplings; not for them the chaste kiss of the Hindi movie. The custom has never died away completely. In many parts of India today, from the Harijan villages of Bihar to high-caste communities in Kamataka, the dedication of women to temples continues, but now linked more and more to the AIDS-stricken fleshpots of Delhi and Bombay.
In Tamil Nadu reformers worked against the tradition from the nineteenth century. The custom of dedicating women to temples was banned in the 1920s. Then the reformers moved against temple dancing itself, despite the fact that in many temples in Tamil Nadu there was a different kind of deuadasi, women from families who had traditionally given their daughters to be ritual specialists, dancers and singers – ‘ever-auspicious women’, whose training and way of life could not have been further from prostitution. Before they left, as one of their parting shots, the British passed an act banning dancing inside the temples – amazing, considering what they had on their plate at that moment, with partition looming. ‘However ancient and pure in its origin, there is no doubt the custom has led many women into a life of prostitution,’ said the Devadasi Act of 1947.
However justified, the ban dealt a great blow to the continuance of the age-old dance which had been so tied to the temples and it destroyed the livelihood of the hereditary dancing families, who had maintained the religious content of the ancient repertoire. ‘I don’t know whether in our reformist zeal we’ve done anything to help stamp out prostitution,’ wrote one of the legislators, ‘but we have certainly killed off a great artistic tradition.’ Now former devadasis, the ‘ever-auspicious women’ who had only ever worked as hereditary ritual specialists, were very reluctant even to admit to their past, and still less to hand on the now-despised tradition. In the anti-temple, anti-Brahmin mood of post-war Dravidian politics, the dance declined as an art to the point where its continuance was in doubt.
It was saved from an unlikely quarter. The dance had gone into secular concert halls as early as the 1930s and there had been a series of historic performances at the Music Academy in Madras which had opened the eyes of many educated Tamils to the value of the tradition which was about to be lost. So, as it died out in the temples, it was kept alive in secular venues. Then, in the sixties, in Tamil Nadu, some of the old dancers began to be tapped for their secrets and this eventually led to a huge upsurge of interest – as has happened all over the world when such traditions are about to disappear. Bharata Natyam has now become the best-known classical dance of India, recognized worldwide. Foreign women now flock to Madras to Kalakshetra to learn it. (It features in Louis Malle’s haunting film Inde Phantome, banned by the Indian government.) In West Car Street in Chidambaram, the Shiva Sakti Dance School draws many local girls (and some boys) prepared to embark on the long, hard discipline necessary to master even the basics.
And in the process of this rediscovery, the dance is also being re-ritualized, its traditions reinvented. Denied temple performance, they bring Nataraja on to the stage instead. In their old age, the last of the pre-war dancers are now getting belated recognition: Bhanumathi, an old Kumbakonam dancer, has been honoured by the state; Tiruvarur Kamalam, a former dancer now living in Chidambaram, is helping to teach the new generation; girls like Mala’s daughter Jaya are learning it as a fitting accomplishment, not as a sacred art. A recent chief minister, Karunanidhi, himself the movie scriptwriter son of a temple dancer, even suggested the time had come for the dance to go back into the temples. Others, though, say that time has already passed. One of the old devadasis of Murugan’s shrine at Tirutanni, not long before her death a year or two ago, was quoted in the Madras papers as saying that she had no interest in seeing the art revived. The spiritual conditions which make it meaningful, she said, no longer existed.
SATURN
The monsoon season was coming to an end. More and more often the rain would stop for a few hours, and the sea breeze would chase the clouds away, leaving a blue sky and a town bathed in gentle sunlight. Then you start to feel the heat of the sun again, spirits rise; people leave their umbrellas at home and come outside at the golden hour, in clean shirts and fresh saris. Life takes to the streets once more.
Tamils are sociable people: they hate being in on their own, and when the rains last for too long they become withdrawn. Their idea of happiness is society; they walk down the streets holding hands; families live and sleep together in a single room. Mala could never understand it when I went back to the hotel to rest, as if I needed to be on my own.
‘Why don’t yo
u take your rest here?’ she would say, pointing to the mat at her feet, in the room crowded with neighbours and friends. ‘Just sleep here with us while we carry on talking.’ One of their worst fears is to be left alone. Unless one is a renouncer, why separate oneself from society? Hence when the rain pours and forces you indoors, it is the least favourite time. For Mala, the heat of the month of Adi is the best, when the warmth is saturating, and when you sleep outside and talk half the night. So with the first November sun there came a rush of happiness: it felt good to be alive. Right across Chidambaram people were jolly once more as the last pools dried up, and by the canal bridge the shanty dwellers were able to mend their huts, sweep the floors and mark out the kolams again on the earth at the threshold.
So one lovely November Saturday, as the last monsoon clouds clung to the furthest northern horizon and the sun cast a golden light over the tea stall in East Car Street, Mala and I went to the bus station early to take a journey to the coast, to visit the last stop on the journey given me by Rajdurai Dikshithar four years before: Saturn.
We took the bus to Tranquebar, an old Danish colony with a crumbling fort on the beach (the one earmarked by the Taj chain as ‘a future five-star facility’). Opposite the bus stop, a stream and the eighteenth-century brick gate of the Danish town, a line of blue sea at the far end of main street, Lutheran churches. The bus stand was covered with political graffiti: elephant, cock, wheel, hand, rising sun, the emblems of today’s parties reusing all the old religious symbols. At a little thatched stall we sat and drank sweet tea; above us was an imposing monument to a loyal Indian servant of the Raj, Rao Bahadur Ramasami Nadar (died 1922), ‘erected in grateful loving memory by his friends and admirers: 25 Nov. 1926 stone laid by J.A. Thorne Esq. ICS Addl. District Magistrate, Tanjore’. Next to it a hand-painted sign advertised the Tranquebar Rationalist Forum (estd 11.07.1982) with the admonitions of Periyar (E.V.R. Naicker again, the anti-Brahmin, anti-caste, anti-Hindu rationalist and agitator): ‘No God!! No God!! No God exist at all!!! Creator of God is a fool! Propagator of God is a scoundrel!! Believer of God is a barbarian!!! Relinquish God; remind Man!’
The afternoon bus took us up to Karaikkal. The road runs along a palmy shore with the sea glimpsed through the trees. At Karaikkal we waited at the bus stand near a little temple to the ‘Mother of Karaikkal’, the famous female renouncer saint and poetess who lived about AD 550, one of the sixty-three Saivite saints still known throughout Tamil Nadu. Mala told me her story.
‘Once upon a time in this town, there was a merchant. His name was Paramadatta, which means “endowed with heavenly gifts”. He had all the earthly good that a man could ever wish. Most of all, he had a beautiful and faithful wife called Punnidah-vatiyar, which means “She who is pure”.’
‘The same name as your eldest daughter?’
‘The same. I named her after the saint. She was very devout, and always fed poor followers of Siva who came to her door.
‘One day a wandering sadhu came to her house begging for alms, and she had nothing to offer but boiled rice. Now her husband had recently received two beautiful mangoes from a friend, so she gave him one with the rice. When Paramadatta came back home and ate his meal, he asked for one of the mangoes, and he liked it so much he asked for the other as well. Punnidah didn’t wish to tell him what she had done, so she prayed to Siva, and instantly found another mango, which she gave to her husband. It was of wonderful sweetness – supernatural indeed.
‘To cut a long story short, when the miracle was revealed to Punnidah’s husband – and it was not the only one – he came to the conclusion that she was touched by god, and he no longer dared make love with her, withdrawing his presence and his affections. Then, without telling her, he equipped a ship and on an auspicious day he sailed away to foreign lands, where he made a new life, and in time a new fortune.
‘Some time later, pining for his native land, he returned to Tamil country, remarried in another town, and gave his baby daughter the name of his former wife. But now Punnidah’s women relatives and friends got to hear of her husband’s return, and they decided to take her to him. When they came face to face, he and his new wife and daughter prostrated themselves before her, and he called himself her slave and her his goddess. The women were angry with him and said he was mad: “Who but a madman worships his own wife?” He answered that he had seen her miracles with his own eyes; and that she had ceased to be his wife, but was divine.
‘Punnidah was heartbroken. She prayed to Siva to remove her beauty: “Take away from me this beauty which I cherished for the sake of my husband alone,” she said. “Remove from me this burden of the flesh and give me the form and features of one of your demon hosts who are always by your side to praise you” – the spirits who forever attend Siva in the cremation grounds, he haunts. This he did. Then the gods rained flowers on her, and her relatives in awe paid her adoration and departed. Then she became a wanderer. No longer was she Punnidah, but Karaikkal Ammaiyar, the Mother of Karaikkal. Literally she became a pey, a demon. Finally, the story goes, she walked all the way to Mount Kailash, the Himalayan abode of Siva, and there she heard a voice telling her to return to Tamil Nadu where her devotion would be rewarded; where she would see Siva’s dance of bliss and sit at his feet for ever.’
‘Did she?’
‘Yes. At Tiruvalangadu near Madras. There she spent the rest of her days. She composed poems about Siva’s dance there which are still recited today. In every Siva temple in Tamil Nadu you will see her at the feet of Nataraja. And here at Karaikkal on full moon day in Ani month there is a festival, where in a hall by the temple, curd, rice and mangoes are given to the poor in her memory.’
Tirunallar is two miles outside Karaikkal; it is a busy little town famous for its ancient Siva temple. Siva here is ‘Lord of the Darba Grass’; the temple priests will tell you the place existed in the four previous aeons under different names; and in its present incarnation for just the last few million years. The more historically minded will be satisfied to learn it was sung by Appar and the other saints from the seventh century onwards.
The temple is dedicated to Siva, but Saturn has a shrine inside the outer wall of the enclosure. He is popular all over south India: every Siva temple has a shrine to the planets, in which Saturn is the most frequented. He is the keeper of boundary, the extreme outer limit in Indian astrology, and is even more pervasive in influence than Yama, for even death must bow to karma, and Saturn is the Lord of Karma.
Small as it is, this is the most famous Saturn shrine in all India. The priests’ wealth is legendary, founded on donations of the Tamil business fraternity across south-east Asia. The tradition here is of a form of sanctuary, a kind of karma-free spiritual zone; Saturn is temporarily unable to exercise influence on any person inside the precinct. According to legend Saturn was made powerless when King Nala placed himself under the protection of Siva; after he came here and bathed in the tank, he was released from an ancestral curse. Saturn promised not to touch those who pray here in Nala’s name. This is propitiation pure and simple, for Saturn cannot be deflected.
To the right of the inner gate is a copper-ornamented shrine to Saturn, a small wizened old man, silver-chested. In the West we tend to see karma as guilt which arises from our deeds, especially bad deeds. But it is much more than that, for it is accumulated over generations of the individual’s family and caste. It is a kind of coded essence: not exactly a genetic code, but a print given you by your family and your society; a history, if you like, in which genetics is one part. It is the essence of you, the stuff of you, which interacts with the stuff of the universe. Saturn (or what he symbolizes) is potentially the most serious influence over this; over the generations karma can build up and in our lives we may attract good deeds or bad – storms and cyclones, disease, death and pestilence, auspiciousness and inauspiciousness. All this is the domain of the Lord of Karma.
At the gate there were renouncers sitting waiting for alms, which are generously given
here. Some were deformed, some performing austerities. Theirs is Saturn’s domain too: pain, restriction, discipline and duty. The renouncer who stands on one leg for years or with one arm atrophied in self-generated penance is acting in ultimate obeisance to this Saturnine principle of things. To us their course is unacceptable, irrational. But for them it is a quest to break the bounds of this natural existence, they aspire to a transcendent absolute freedom, which to us is no freedom at all.
‘Saturn is always said to be malign,’ said the priest (who was not, by the way, sporting a Rolex). ‘But he can be very beneficial if you never forget him. Adversity is testing. Discipline, endurance, the power to endure all sorts of privations, make a person austere and singularly profound in his mode of thinking. So without the help of Saturn one cannot become a high-order thinker. We say no one would choose the path of inner search, if Sani did not spread his influence.’
Which I suppose makes Saturn not an end to a journey, but in a sense the journey itself.
TO THE SEA
It was nearly sunset when we reached Poompuhar at the old mouth of the Cavery, where crowds still gather on full moons to bathe and stare out to sea. We arrived at the coast that Saturday evening in a soft light, to the roar of rolling breakers; along the strand were beached catamarans of split logs lashed with coir rope. Poompuhar is a popular place with holiday-makers and weekend trippers as well as pilgrims; food and trinket stalls line the road to the beach, and there is a strange art gallery full of stone sculptures celebrating the Roman-period Tamil epic Silapaddikaram, which is set here. Silapaddikaram is rather like one of the late Shakespearean romances: a tale of love and passion, mistaken identities, shipwrecks and sea changes and fateful coincidences. The young lovers are the captain’s daughter Kannaki, she of ‘a body like a golden creeper’, and the merchant’s son Kovalan, who was ‘Murugan incarnate’. At the centre of the tale, malign as Desdemona’s handkerchief, is the lost anklet which brings disaster on its possessors.
