The Kama Sutra Diaries

by Sally Howard

  But no matter: these days, the concepts of Aryan and Dravidian have nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with ideology. During the days of the Raj, India’s highest and priestly caste, the Brahmins, co-opted Aryanism for themselves, citing their comparative whiteness as evidence of their divine right to rule. These ideas were formalised by the British, never ones to abjure the idea of white supremacy, who supported the Brahmins’ claims to superiority and bestowed on them power and privileges. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brahmin priests routinely abused these powers, claiming the right to deflower girls of lowlier castes and cherry-picking such girls to work as temple prostitutes.

  We drop Chullikkad in the old spice-trading quarter of Kochi, where trade is as brisk in the aromatic hole-in-the-wall stores as it has been for ten centuries. He is planning to get stuck into some Elizabethan sonnets. Dimple and I hope to rest, and perhaps work our way through a G&T or two, before our five-hour journey back to the north of the state tomorrow. As Chullikkad bows us a polite goodbye, I ask him what his take is on these time-worn polarities of north–south and white–dark.

  ‘It’s about mythology,’ he says, after a moment’s thought, ‘a mythology that’s grown up around the early settlers in the south, and the later Aryan invaders in the north. It’s about the story that India tells herself, about herself. You have to understand that in India we had no age of reason, as you did in the West. So instead of the process of logic, we have mythology. That’s why Marxism became such a weird and wonderful hybrid on Keralan soil.’

  I murmur in agreement. Only in India can a ‘communist’ run for local election on the promise of encouraging inward investment from Western multinationals.

  ‘And why your sexual revolution will be so different from ours in the West?’ I add, picking up a conversation we’d stared earlier, as he’d run us through Silk Smitha’s titillating oeuvre.

  ‘Yes,’ says Chullikkad. ‘For you it was about science, about cause and effect, the arrival of the contraceptive pill and what came next. For us in India it’s about mythology, about finding Tantrism again, about rediscovering the great Indian love stories and reclaiming our spiritual right.’

  12 | DIRTY DANCING, Kerala

  A female, therefore, should learn the Kama Shastra, or at least a part of it, by studying its practice from some confidential friend. She should study alone in private the sixty-four practices that form a part of the Kama Shastra. The following are the arts to be studied, together with the Kama Sutra: Singing, Playing on musical instruments, Dancing, Union of dancing, singing, and playing instrumental music.

  —Kama Sutra, Book One, General Observations,Doniger/Kakar translation, 2002

  ‘Victorian Britishers have a lot to answer for, Miss Sally and Miss Dimple… Yes.’

  It’s a complaint Dimple and I have heard variously during our journey across the east and north of the subcontinent. Our current complainant, Kaladharan Viswanath, has perhaps less cause for hard feelings than many who’ve advanced the same opinion. He is head of Kalamandalam, a Keralan dance school founded in the 1930s that’s suddenly booming, with an oversubscription of young Indians vying for a place on its full-time seven-year courses.

  Dimple and I are suffering stinging eyes and heavy heads. It’s the morning after our trip to the abandoned studio and we’d stayed up until 3 a.m., sloshing the gin we’d smuggled into what – we’d been dismayed to discover – was a dry, allveg ayurvedic hotel.

  Now we’re queasily embarking on a bumpy four-hour journey with Viswanath to Kalamandalam, based in the Keralan cultural capital at Thrissur. An hour in and the scenery is helping a little to soothe my throbbing brow: locals smile from roadside toddy stalls; ostentatious mansions, built with the wealth sent back by the 30 per cent of young Keralans who head to the Gulf to work in construction and nursing, peek out from between rubber plantations and coconut palms.

  Kalamandalam is named for Kalamandalam Kalyanikutty Amma, a Mohinyattam dancer who braved 1930s societal disapproval and the censure of the Raj to resurrect the sultry dance tradition, founding the school’s Mohiniyattam department.

  ‘Victorian morality planted in Indian soil with theological force,’ Viswanath continues, ‘and there were many, many victims. Hijras and tawaifs [concubines] lost their courtly patronage, and many music and dance traditions associated with these groups suffered. Mohiniyattam, for example, was depicted as a dance of the temple prostitutes, the devadasis – inaccurately, of course.’

  Believed to have originated in the sixteenth century, Mohiniyattam is one of the eight classical dance forms recognised by the Indian government national academy for the performing arts, Sangeet Natak Akademi. Kathakali, the second of the great eight to hail from Kerala, is distinguished by its dramatic plot lines, expressive gestures and bright face-painting, and is principally a male dance tradition. In contrast, Mohiniyattam centres round solo recitals by female performers.

  Mohiniyattam dancers

  The intention of the dance is to conjure sringara rasa, one of the nine rasas, or emotional sentiments, that Indian artistic traditions aim to evoke (from hásyam, or mirth, to kīruyam, tragedy, and vīram, or heroic mood). An emotional theme with no direct English translation, sringara is often described as something between erotic love and beauty. Of the nine rasas, sringara rasa is known as the king of sentiments (rajarasa). The invocation of sringara rasa in Indian art ranges from the grotesque, as seen in the grand gestures of fear and anger in the Keralan theatre tradition of Koodiyattam, to a refined or subtle take on the mood, like in the fluid Tamil Nadan classical dance from Bharathanatyam, or the flowing dance of Mohiniyattam. Locally, Mohiniyattam’s sinuous movements are likened to Kerala’s swaying palms.

  ‘The tradition was eventually banned by the British really quite surprisingly late, in 1925 – though the seeds of its demise were sown with the crackdowns after the rebellion of 1857,’ Viswanath explains.

  Now Mohiniyattam is being reclaimed as a historical Indian art, as a celebration of femininity, he explains as we restore ourselves after the journey with idli rice dumplings and coconut chutney at a café near the school. Yet, like the devadasi tradition, we are warned to be careful in describing this as anything to do with female empowerment.

  ‘Mohiniyattam promotes a male-centric vision of how women should be,’ he says. ‘You know, coy, pliant, coaxing; suffering intolerable angst when separated from their powerful lover, a figure who’s a proxy for a deity, love and feudal lord. So it’s complex adapting these ideas for the modern time. But it should be seen through the sixteenth-century world in which the tradition came about. This was an India of powerful male groups, in which lower castes were largely playthings of the Brahmins. Mohiniyattam is a postcard, a very pretty one, from a bygone age.’

  The development of Mohiniyattam coincided with the westerly push of the Telugu Brahmins into Kerala, Viswanath explains as we order another platter of idli.

  ‘The Brahmins arrived, and they created a sensation. They were intellectually advanced. They could calculate time and predict the coming week’s weather, skills which were understood by the Keralans to be godly,’ he continues.

  Like eighteenth-century European girls schooled in feminine accomplishments, or surgically enhanced would-be footballers’ wives in modern-day Britain, young women saw mastery of the feminine art form of Mohiniyattam as a means to the end of securing a coveted association with a powerful man.

  ‘There was a wilful surrender to the desires and fancies of the Brahmins,’ he says. ‘For women it was seen as a heavenly blessing to bear a Brahmin child.’

  Viswanath darts off to his office and Dimple and I tag along with a group of American visitors on a tour of the Kalamandalam campus. Thrissur is inland, far from the cooling Arabian sea breezes, and the mercury’s already inching into the 40s. The heat has parched the clay soil a stark red-yellow and made the leaves of the neem and peeple trees curl up in protest.

  It’s spring, so soon the mons
oon will break, bringing with it the three months of downpours responsible for the annual greening of the garden state. For now, the Kalamandalam students are beaded with sweat, into their third hour of morning tuition in the traditional windowless stone classrooms that dot the campus grounds. In one classroom 10-and 11-year-old boys, bare breasted and dressed in the simple southern Indian sarong, the lunghi, bang out complex rhythms on rustic-looking drums.

  ‘That’s the Madhalam,’ says Latika, an administrator for Kalamandalam who’s leading the site tour. ‘It’s a traditional drum made out of the jackfruit tree that’s important in Kathakali accompaniment.’

  We pass a classroom where Kathakali dancers practise: standing in one-legged, bent-kneed poses, contorting their eyebrows into the exaggerated, almost campy depictions of emotion typical of the art. We walk on, to a classroom deeper into the campus grounds, passing the make-up room, where all of the artistic tools of Keralan dance are housed: pigments and charcoals and the chundanga seeds dancers insert near to their tear ducts, to give their eyes a bloodshot appearance.

  At the next classroom, I find what I’ve been looking for: a group of 20 young women practising Mohiniyattam. They’re not yet wearing their heavy eye make-up and white-and-gold costumes of the Mohini – the dhoti with jarikar border worn around abdomen and chest, the hair bunched on the side of the head and dressed with a white flower – but still, their moves are unmistakable: posture erect, their hips swaying from side to side in gentle, sinuous motion.

  The girls’ mobile eyes hint one minute of modesty, the next surprise, then coquetry; their hands articulate the distinctive sign language of Mohiniyattam – now the cupped palms, fingers splayed, of the lotus-flower position; now the pinched index finger and thumb and arched ring finger of the peacock pose.

  Latika approaches as we watch, whispering an explanation. ‘This is Aliveni Enthu Chevyu. It’s one of the padams, or love songs, of Mohiniyattam. It was composed by Maharaja Swathi Thirunal, a nineteenth-century king who was an important patron and practitioner of the dance form.’

  I ask what the narrative is.

  ‘The heroine is talking to her dear friend who is endowed with long, beautiful curly hair,’ says Latika. ‘She addresses her friend as “Aliveni”, which means “one who resembles a beehive”, and says: “What am I to do, for my lotus-eyed lover has not come to me yet? The moonlit night, the cooing of the cuckoos, the sweet scented flowers and the variety of flowers, of what use is this, if my beloved does not come to me?”’

  In this plaintive lament, the Mohiniyattam dancer of Aliveni Enthu Chevyu is characteristic of Virahotkhandita Nayika, one of eight types of heroines delineated in the Natya Shastra, an ancient Indian treatise on the performing arts (written around 200 BCE). It’s said to be the embodiment of female romantic longing. She is not able to bear the pangs of separation from her lover and yearns to be reunited with him.

  In the rough and tumble of sexed-up, sexually repressed modern India, romantic stories such as this are often lost: Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal (of the Taj Mahal); or Rama gathering an army of monkeys to search for an exiled Sita (if you forget that Sita walked through fire to prove her chastity, inspiring many thousands of copycat immolations). So I can see the appeal of the extreme emotions invested in these narratives. Stories such as that of bold Natya Shastra, a ballsy heroine who braves storms, thunder and snakes in a fevered midnight pursuit of her lover, are surely more appealing than the drab present-day Indian adaptation of love to duty in the love-cum-arranged marriage.

  Dimple and I join the Mohinis’ line and try to copy their fluid movements. A foot taller than most of the girls, I’m nothing less than conspicuous.

  ‘You look a little like a tree blowing in the monsoon, Sally,’ laughs Dimple. Twenty girls giggle uproariously.

  Dimple fares better, though at 5 ft 4 in, it’s easier for her to undulate on command.

  As the class trails out for lunch, Dimple and I meet a couple of girls for a chat in a resinous wood-panelled library. Reshma Gopinath is 23 years old and resembles a south Indian Vanessa Paradis, with a catlike face and large, limpid eyes.

  ‘I chose Mohiniyattam as a means of self-expression,’ she says, ‘I express my own emotions through the heroines. I identify with their anguish and lamentation.’

  Seethu Mohan, also 23, nods vigorously in agreement, her pigtails bouncing up and down like restless snakes. ‘What’s difficult in Mohiniyattam is the sringara. It’s an emotion that’s difficult to express until you have experience in life, and love. I have no experience with sex and love, so in a way I improvise,’ she tells us.

  ‘How do you improvise?’ Dimple asks.

  Mohan colours at this, and gazes out of the window at the intense sun. ‘I suppose I think what it would be like to have a boyfriend; though I have never had a boyfriend.

  ‘But,’ she adds shyly, after a pause, ‘when I do get a boyfriend I will know what to do … I am growing up as a woman through the dance of Mohiniyattam.’

  The girls’ naivety is at odds with the British depiction of ‘Oriental’ dancers as brazen and sexually overt. In the nineteenth century, as with the Middle Eastern tradition of belly–dance or raqs sharqi (which was in fact often performed by women for women, as an act of sisterly bonding and self–expression), the lines between Indian female dance forms and prostitution were hopelessly blurred. Nowhere was this more seen than in the tradition of courtly dance, or mujra.

  The sensual dance of the tawaifs, mujra dates back to the Mughal Empire of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a period during which there was an explosion of art forms in the Indus Valley. But from the 1800s, tawaifs became a key focus of the Raj’s moral crackdown. There were political reasons for this, too: mujra performances had provided an opportunity for mutineers to meet and many tawaifs were actively involved in the movement. The British confiscated many of the tawaif kothas (houses) after the mutiny, disrupting tawaif teaching and succession.

  So by the early 1900s, many tawaifs had moved into prostitution. But like many of these ancient Indian traditions, their community endured. Some tawaifs went into early Bollywood, with mujra dancing items becoming a staple of Hindi films in the 1960s and 1970s. Others even recalcitrantly clung to their old patronage. It’s said that when attempts were made to convert the Lake Palace at Udaipur into a luxury hotel in the 1960s, the then regent, Bhagwat Singh, encountered stiff resistance from the palace’s tawaifs-in-residence. In the account of Didi Contractor, an American design consultant on the Udaipur job:

  When he came to the throne he inherited big problems, like what to do with the 300 dancing girls that belonged to his predecessor [Maharana Bhopal Singh]. He tried to offer them scholarships to become nurses but they didn’t want to move out of the palace, so what could he do? He had to keep them. They were old crones by this time and on state occasions I remember they would come to sing and dance with their ghunghats [veils] down and occasionally one would lift hers to show a wizened old face underneath. And he also had something like twelve state elephants.

  On another site, a ten-minute drive from Kalamandalam, we catch up with Leela Mar, one of the school’s heads and a Mohiniyattam dancer for 50 years. She has the perfect posture and neat hairdo of a superannuated ballet dancer.

  ‘The girls were correct,’ she says. ‘Mohiniyattam is, above all, about the play of womanhood. It’s an expressional form of dance, in which your whole body reacts.

  ‘So not all girls are suitable for Mohiniyattam. Many don’t have the temperament to dance Mohiniyattam, as it’s both mental and physical. So we test them for their aptitude as young girls. But if you really live the dance, it can be your salvation; especially in our difficult modern society.’

  This is an idea we pick up with Viswanath when we seek him out a few hours later. He’s looking fatigued by the moist heat and, I suspect, by the sheer piles of international correspondence piled up on his desk – testament to the interest the wider dancing world is beginning to show in K
alamandalam.

  And it’s not only dance enthusiasts abroad who are bombarding Viswanath. India’s middle classes are also focusing their attentions, and burgeoning spending power, on the old Indian art forms: they’re collecting fine-art textiles, they’re supporting Sufi musicians and they’re patronising Indian dance. Mujra dancing has become a faddish addition to wedding entertainment for the well-to-do and Viswanath’s brightest graduates land gigs in cities across the subcontinent.

  ‘There are good and bad things about our modern times,’ he says, his forehead beading with sweat in the sticky heat. ‘There is more money in India, so now these young artists you see around you have a real hope of an income from their craft. They will dance at shows and at private parties thrown for the rich of shining India. But at the same time, attention spans are getting shorter. The grand narratives of dance are being lost.

  ‘Modern life, as I see it, is all about an enactment of emotion rather than the feeling of emotion. So I work hard with the kids here to nurture their wild flames of passion. This, as I see it, is my vocation. But it’s a difficult thing: wild flames of passion and cell phones do not easily exist in the same life,’ he concludes.

  It’s the end of the school day and students are milling around campus: giggling thickets of girls, boys running through their dance positionings on patches of sun-scorched grass.

  Dimple and I find our cab driver and splay ourselves across the back seat for the long journey south, back to Kochi. Drowsily, we chat about what we’ve seen in Kerala.