In her article 'Dance and Cultural Identity' Dr. Grau has addressed generic and important issues concerning dance and cultural identity and partially in response to my query. I would like to clarify here, the nature of our exchange and respond to her reading of my personal queries. My first message to Grau was a spontaneous emailed response to a handout on the South Asian Dance in Britain (SADiB) project. A thoughtful reply from Magdalen Gorringe, Grau's colleague informed me, 'you are in fact the first person to respond to a Narthaki invitation put up some time ago - and I was beginning to despair of any response at all!' 'Sucker!' I reproached myself as I read those lines, 'You fell for it while everyone else stayed away.' Everyone else, in this imaginary situation consisted of the international readership of the Narthaki website dedicated to Indian dance and generated from Chennai, as well as the persons attending the 2001 Navadisha Conference in Birmingham, U.K. who like myself had received a printed announcement of the project. Several months later, having left all this behind (1) (I cannot even locate the original email cited in the article) I was very surprised to receive Grau's courteous email informing me of her article in Animated. She also was so considerate as to airmail to me, a copy of this article and invite me to respond. Reading it, I was disappointed at how my intentions had been misinterpreted but pleased that indeed a dialogue has been set in motion.
The gist of my spontaneous email had been that a SADiB project should include a British person of South Asian origin, at a significant level of participation and I objected to the label 'South Asian' specifically as it is applied to dance in Britain.(2) Grau chose to read my objection to this term (South Asian dance) as ignoring 'the multiplicity of discourses within the Indian subcontinent and diaspora.' I do not take issue, in fact, I agree, with her arguments about blurred cultural spaces and the inter-implication of colonial and indigenous ways of knowing in postcolonial times. My own dance repertory included traditional bharatanatyam, (on demand by European sponsors and also Hindu-centric institutions as Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan) transgressive forms of bharatanatyam and what I called New Indian Dance - a contemporary hybrid form I invented as I went along. It also included the works of some East Asian, African-American and unmarked (by difference) choreographers. With this background, having lived many of the arguments put forward by Grau, I value inclusivity and celebrations of diversity.
The proximity of the 'random multicultural'(3) in our everyday urban environments demands that we need to leave behind outworn anthropological theories and tools as applied and developed while working in hermetically insulated and authentic 'primitive' cultures. In the book that Grau has edited, on how dancers in European nation states have negotiated transculturalism(4) (Europe-based aesthetics) and local identity issues, hierarchical language is not as evident as it is in description of the SADiB project where dancers of the Indian subcontinent can serve only as subjects and informants for Anglo-European researchers. The structure of the project suggests that the researchers are more objectively situated and better equipped intellectually to analyze and so define what kind of dance it is, than some of their best friends, the South Asian subalterns, do.(5) The summary of the SADiB project circulated at the Conference 'Navadisha 2000' in Birmingham, U.K., suggests that South Asian dancers are so taken with negotiating 'respectability and status' and becoming 'integrated in the mainstream of British dance culture' that they are unable to represent themselves. Although Andre Grau in person expresses and demonstrates much sympathy towards the South Asian persons who dance, yet I argue here that despite her generous intentions, the structure of her research project on 'South Asian Dance' subtly marks this way of dancing with marginality, and perhaps unconsciously repeats colonial power structures.
While I agree with Grau that cultural heritages today are all inter-implicated, yet I question the idea that once a cultural artefact becomes public domain, the users of such artifacts have no moral obligation to give back to the sources of the traditions. Therefore I ask, who will benefit from any research and documentation project?(6) After all, the entire history of copyright laws derives from European ideas of creativity and individuality.(7) The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) set up an Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore in 2000. According to WIPO, 'traditional knowledge is actually contemporary knowledge.'(8) One of their projects involves protecting traditional knowledges in negotiations (or lack thereof) such as between traditional medicinal systems and multi-national pharmaceutical corporations. Any legislation arising as an outcome of such negotiations, will also apply to music and dance.
In my email to Grau, I believe that I spoke of the discomfort aroused by the category South Asian dance. The term includes but often glosses over geo-cultural and temporal distinctions between the aesthetic visions and perspectives of diaspora Indians (persons living in Pacific Asia, Africa, West Indies, The United States, Australia, Europe, and in innumerable places on earth) and dancers in or from India. Diasporic Indians include both persons of temporally immediate Indian origins, as well as persons whose Indian origins blurr into a distant past. I need however, to clarify that I had in mind the label 'South Asian' as it is applied specifically to dance in Britain. In the United States, South Asian studies are an academic field, comparable to American studies and East Asian studies. Within the dance scene in the United States, (considerably less well funded than in Britain) one is more likely to speak of a bharatanatyam concert, an Odissi concert or a contemporary work with Indian, or West Indian influences/origins. One might however speak of South Asian dancing in the context of communal celebrations where many kinds of vernacular and art dances masquerade as each other, and are performed with varied levels of commitment to dance as an art. In such events the edges between Bollywood, diaspora and 'classical' are blurred so as to specularize a kind of trans-Indianness.
Anyone who cares to read current writings on 'Indian Dance' as opposed to writings on 'South Asian Dance' cannot help but notice how there is a considerable distance between the associations aroused by the writings of those living in India, and the writings of 'South Asian dancers' working in the diaspora.(9) From my perspective, the phrase 'South Asian Dance' is repeatedly embedded within a discourse of pain and anger, a discourse that interrogates whiteness, and negotiates a place for itself in a white driven power structure. On the other hand, the words 'Indian dancing' invoke a relatively more self-defined cultural space.(10) In this space, another aesthetic, the rasa theory, is a taken-for-granted base from which modernism and its consequents are explored, even when the concepts and conventions arising from rasa are not intellectually defined for the speaker/dancer. Within this safer space, I am able to indulge in the luxury of inclusivity. For example, when I dance within India, 'Indianness' of person is not so much of a commodity as it becomes in the market beyond India's geo-conceptual borders.
While European nation states move towards a larger European community, British artists struggle with the effects of cultural diversity within Britain, and on Britain's own indigenous traditions. Concurrently, many formerly colonial geo-cultures including India, still struggle to complete their rehabilitations of self, operating in opposition to whiteness while using its discursive languages and tools. Thus, self-defining processes generate as much confusion as clarity. To complicate matters even further, global forces operate not only as implosive forces from a geographic beyond, but also from internalized inter- and intra-cultural spaces.(11) Nonetheless, to be Indian in India is comfortable. It does not signal alterity. (Given the current political situations, as a Zarathustrian, I find it necessary here to clarify that I do not read Indian as equivalent to Hindu but rather as an (rapidly disintegrating?) ideal of democracy and nationhood that includes a multiplicity of religious orientations and culturally distinct communities. Agreed, the word 'Indian' too is problematic in that it masks profound and numerous differences, but at least 'India' invokes a nation whose diverse people agreed to work together, not so very long ago, in their struggle for self-determination.
Self-determination, the need to represent oneself, is precisely the source of my personal discomfort with the term South Asian Dance. (12) Identifying characteristics and criteria might at first seem like a harmless aesthetic exercise, but these have a way of cementing into criteria for funding allocations. Policies of allocating funds, even responsive and flexible policies, determine what forms of creative expression will be more visible than others. Without wishing to be exclusionary, it is here that the significance of the idea of the location of the definition-maker vis-a-vis the culture being described, becomes crucial. It is here, that the admirable comprehensiveness and coolness of socially derived theories of performance cannot be counted upon to apply across locations. Theorized generalities gloss over and thereby discount the glowing hot consequences of embodied experience that performance celebrates. The proverbial 'outsider' cannot be counted upon to be any more impartial than the implicated 'insider' when it comes evaluating the work of each artist-performer.
The idea of location remains essential because it allows for distinctions between dances as collections of 'ethnic' movements and forms, culturally-cruising-choreographies and more densely embedded artistic expressions. For those whose bodies do not permit stepping beyond 'Indianness,' and most of all for those of Indian origin born outside India, a sense of (Lacan's) lack, inadequate access to recognition and the need to see oneself in changing representations rather than static representations of alterity are driving issues. When alterity cannot be sloughed off, but persistently and definitively separates one dancer's access to self-representation from that of her sister, then it functions as a boundary so insidious that it becomes conflated with identity and skin. This is NOT to conflate alterity with RACE, the discourse of inherited, congenital difference. Being privileged is often equated with whiteness. But, when privileged brown dance is dependant on an external gaze to recognize and so bestow the privilege, then being privileged cannot be said to alleviate alterity. For dancers in the diaspora particularly, location is crucial. Location, or the issue of who may say what to whom, has inevitably to do with discourses of power even among artists. It matters where a speaker is located in relation to issues being discussed, and it matters what geo-cultural practice is being negotiated. Again, and again location surfaces as the issue. I argue consistently that location allows for interactive inter-implicated dances and writings. (13)
So it is, that I would continue to recommend to the SADIB project staff, that such a project would work better if it included staff at a significant level of the project, from the very groups of 'South Asians' being investigated. (14) At the very least it would generate more wholehearted participation from the British South Asians who (wisely) seem to have kept their distance so far. Meanwhile, I am indeed grateful to Andre Grau for her courtesy in instigating my response, and so clarifying my own thoughts and wish to acknowledge the intricate personal and human dimensions to our interactions, notwithstanding issues of location. Also, I cannot conclude without acknowledging all the presenters at the international symposium on postcolonial 'South Asian' dance at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, whose varied perspectives further stimulated and informed this writing. (15)
References
(1) On a personal note, for those of us who live a few blocks from the World Trade Center, who saw first hand the plane as it impacted the second smoking building was enough to demand energy and contemplation. The events unleashed globally in its aftermath, were no less affective, because of family ties to persons in Afghanistan, Canada, India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States and friends with Islamic and Israeli orientations
(2) Grau writes in Animated Autumn 2001: Coorlawala also argued: 'I am puzzled as to why such a project would be run by a person with a non-Indian name? And went on, I am kind of fed up by that kind of liberal on the outside, hold the reins tight on the inside way of organizing projects. Having organized an information bank, how do I know it will serve South Asian interests?'
(3) Randy Martin uses the phrase in "Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation" Meaning in Motion ed. Jane Desmond, Durham: Duke University Press) 1997
(4) See Grau, Andre and Jordan Stephanie, eds. Europe Dancing: Perspectives on Theatre Dance and Cultural Identity, London & New York Routledge 2000
(5) See Coorlawala, Uttara, 'Speaking Back' in Dance Research Journal 33/1 Summer 2001
(6) See Rustom Bharucha has argued that those who 'borrow' artistic traditions and make symbolic or actual capital from them have a moral obligation to repay the debt. Bharucha, Rustom, Theater and the World Routledge: London and New York (c) 1993, (c)1990
(7) See Anthony Seeger's keynote address at the symposium on Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis in December 2000. The Symposium was held in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and the American Folklife Center. www.loc.gov/folklife/fhcc/propertykey.html
(8) For information on WIPO see www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/index.html?wipo_content_frame=/aboutip/en/studies/index.html
(9) See the Narthaki website www.narthaki.com for at least one typical agonized exchange, see posting by Anita Ratnam in the interactive section on October 07, 2001
(10) It is 'relative' in the sense that British and postcolonial Indian expressions of identity are inextricably inter-implicated as Grau, Jeyasingh and many others have already stated
(11) See Priya Srinivasan's discussion Re-negotiating South Asian and American National Culture through Bharata Natyam Performance Practice presented at the International Symposium at Swarthmore College on "Dance in South Asia: New Approaches, Politics and Aesthetics" in March 2002
(12) I am indebted to the perspicuous scholar-dancer Ananya Chatterjea who observed that this discomfort pertains to the power relations implied by the exercise of naming
(13) Coorlawala, "Kapila Vatsyayan Formative Influences, An Interview" Dance Research Journal 32/1 2000" Ananya and Chandralekha-A Response to 'Chandralekha: Negotiating the Female Body and Movement in Cultural/Political Signification'" in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader Wesleyan University Press, 2001 Reprinted from Dance Research Journal 31/1 Spring 1999. "Ruth St. Denis and India's Dance Renaissance" Dance Chronicle Vol.15. No.2. 1992 Reprinted in Sangeet Natak Akademi Journal 104 April-June 1992
(14) At the time of this writing at least four British persons of Indian origin come to my mind, who are well qualified to participate at a seminal level of this project rather than as consultants or as informants. They include a prominent dancer and dancing-administrators
(15) In order of presentations the speakers were Kumudini Lakhia, (India) Alessandra Lopez y Roya, (Italy -U.K.) Priya Srinivasan, (U.S.A.) Andre Grau,(Switzerland and Great Britain) Roxanne Kamayini Gupta, (U.S.A.) Janaki Patrik, (U.S.A.) Chitra Sunderam, (U. K.) Ratna Roy, (U.S.A.) Ananya Chatterjea, (U.S.A.) Uttara Asha Coorlawala, (India-U.S.A.) Divya Kumar,(U.S.A.) Lata Pada, (India-Canada) Janet O'Shea, (Canada and Britain) Pallabi Chakravorty, (U.S.A.).