By Chitra Sundaram

A fierce argument was averted at a gathering of Indian classical and contemporary dancers late last year.

Ms. W, A young white performer of Indian classical dance, announced that she had not bothered applying for a job requiring a ‘contemporary’ dancer only because she wasn’t sure that the recruiter, a world-renowned British dance conservatoire, would even consider her classical Indian form as ‘contemporary’ to begin with.

Her remark was received in obdurate silence by most dancers present: they had individually made their subcontinental pragmatic peace deals with the politics of nomenclature. After all their livelihoods depend on it. They trade where ‘cultural’ product is of value: the ‘curry-and-quota circuit’ for performances, the heritage/lottery/charity network for funding, and the community outreach/teaching programmes for stable sustenance.

Ms. W was more right than wrong to be sceptical – about the Dance Establishment here.

But then a somewhat more activist seasoned Bharatanatyam dancer, Ms. S protested vehemently: “We must really address this question of what is ‘contemporary’ dance. We really need to define it!” (The Chair deferred the topic for another time. Phew!)

But why the urgent ‘must’? Because there’s ‘artistic’ (not ‘cultural’) status, recognition, ‘mainstream’ performance opportunities and prestige involved here. It’s more than money.

So, what Ms. S was really saying was that the western dance establishment cannot have the lock on what is deemed ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’, especially their capitalised versions – and, thence, its clear advantages.

This question, of what is and what isn’t ‘contemporary’, and more importantly, who decides, and on what basis, is festering among thinking dancers, Undeniably, there is a frisson of ‘Cultural Imperialism’ in the sector. Years ago, with her delicious talent for memorable phrase-making as much as dance-making, British contemporary choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh called it “colonisation through categorisation”.

And could it have been done better than backing it up with money? Given the moola gene in the Indian DNA, Indian dance has unsurprisingly followed the money on a programmed journey from ‘Indian/classical/ethnic’ in the ‘80s to  ‘South Asian/innovative/diverse’ in the last decade. And a clever series of crumbs on the forked road offloaded the traditional Hansels and Gretels onto community work sites – and there’s enough (re)building to do there as the Government grapples with integration issues.

But it is in integrating (ingratiating?) itself with the movers and shakers i.e. Contemporary art world that the struggle gets interesting – and global – for Indian dance and other arts.

One hugely reputed venue’s programming executive virtually(!) apologised on the venue’s website for featuring Ratan Thiyam’s Nine Hills One Valley. She had thought it would be more contemporary theatre than it turned out to be. In India, Thiyam is considered contemporary. (Admittedly, the work, though modern, is not as cutting edge ‘contemporary’ as stuff we get to see here.) Ouch!

Yet there’s blood memory of exotic India in other quarters. Responding to a review of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry, the anthology editor Jeet Thayil protested in the Guardian, 10 December, that reviewer William Radice’s “orientalism would be quaint enough to be endearing – if it weren’t so annoying”. The critic had complained that the poems – from Ramanujan to living poets – lacked “the colours, the light, the heat, the skies, the crowds and the birds of India”. Ouch, again!

Indian dance too is a candidate for schizophrenia here. It needs to smell of India to get the more dependable subcontinental and Indophile audiences and ghettoising Lottery funding – forget the Indian corporates here; it needs to be ‘contemporary’ as it is understood here – not in India – to get tax monies and reach ‘wider’ (read: ‘whiter’) dance audiences through mainstream venues.

But back to the interesting struggle I mentioned earlier. With ‘Classical’ reserved for western music, ballet and opera – likely forever – ‘Contemporary’ is the only other option for esteem-worthy self-expression for non-white British art. It is a long way up there on the Respect ladder, way above the recently officially minted ‘Diverse’ (previously ‘ethnic’) tag reserved for non-western forms and other such messiness.

In true post-colonial subversion, many dig in, tweak the classical and obstinately self-describe their work as contemporary. Their onslaught is slowly breaching the establishment’s defences – with the aid of Bollywood-style ‘popular’ appeal.
A few others have convincingly made hybrid contemporary. These artists don’t just tweak the classical forms. They recognise that the underlying belief systems are different – even in opposition. They subscribe to the Contemporary ethos.

But there is an as yet unrecognised risk for them: their success may be double-edged. “Your work is like ours, so it is one of ours. But then we may also say it is not original or somehow authentic, because it is, again, derived!” They haven’t got there yet. For now, our image is good and British. But, I daresay, some dance historian may well do so in the future. Call it western-influenced, that is. But then he/she will say that of all that is modern. Within reason.

As did the influential English Art Historian W. G. Archer of the work of Gaganedranath Tagore, one of the India’s first modernists. He considered it derivative, i.e. not original, “based on a cultural misunderstanding, … simply bad imitations of Picasso”. Author Partha Mitter adds: “Behind this seemingly innocent conclusion rests the whole weight of Western art history”.  Ouch!

As for globalisation of discourse, the contention of many esteemed Indian classicists that their work is contemporary simply because it is happening in the here-and-now…, ah, therein lies a whole ocean of difference – not just of semantics.