Tradition in the Education of the Future The Bharatanatyam Story

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thank you all

it’s wonderful to be here when we think

about the education of the future the

conversation

always centers on the digital world

technology and innovations that can

replace

age-old models of thinking but what if i

told you

that the education of the future

incorporating tradition would be one of

the most progressive moves that we could

make as a society

let’s start with the example of movement

as children we are expected to crawl and

then walk

and eventually run all of this is

genetically encoded in our experience

when we think about movement to me

the most primal extension of the

function of movement

is to dance when we codify and

politicize something as

complex as dance however the story gets

complicated

and to be honest with you i had no sense

of how complicated this story was

at all i grew up in a white jewish

neighborhood

on long island in new york with very

limited knowledge of indian movement

systems

luckily i come from a very illustrious

musical family

and pictured here is my great aunt who

retired as the principal of the mysore

music college

i was surrounded by music and dance in

my household

and my mother would drag me to dance

classes on the weekend

much against my will i used to ask her

why it is that i have to go to dance

class and she said something to me which

i found confusing she said

we need to preserve our tradition

what does tradition mean ama i used to

ask her

and she chuckled at me and say that when

i was older i would understand

well soon i became older and contrary to

her promises i still had no idea what

tradition meant

but luckily i fell in love with the art

of dancing

and at the impressionable age of 19 i

decided to leave everything i had ever

known in the united states

to move to india to pursue my quest

for the meaning of tradition in indian

art

the second i landed here everyone had a

book recommendation for me

manuscripts texts sometimes textbooks

that were six inches thick

books upon books upon books of the

oldest

texts written about indian art

and each of these texts full of codes

prescriptive rules do this don’t do that

this building isn’t complete without

this figure and that palace isn’t

complete without that one

unless you hold your hand at the exact

position that it’s supposed to be held

the entire pose is not accurate

how did i make sense of these codes

mathematics time cycles

measurement systems even the placement

of a sculpture’s

navel was as important

as the movement of a dancer’s lower lip

and all of these codes written in

sanskrit

a language exclusive to the brahman

community

for five years after i discovered these

texts

i tried to read everything i could find

the ngati sastra

the shilpa sastras the puranas

and after five years after

learning as much as i could i decided to

out into the world and find a real life

art practitioner

to confirm all the knowledge i had read

in these books

the first person i confronted or the

first person i met

was nephew of ace architect

and legend in the sculptor community mr

dakshina

i walked into his office quite

confidently having a printed list of

technical questions about the shilpa

shastras

he took one look at me and said

we don’t use those shilpa sastras

my jaw dropped to the floor he continued

we used the stapatia veda which was

written by

our ancestors of the viswakarma

community

not the brahmin community and passed

down orally

from one generation to the next in fact

we keep the book of the stapatia veda

in our puja room and we worship it

so i kind of peered at him and i said

but how do you build such beautiful

temples

and within a second he whipped out a

piece

of white paper and on that piece of

paper he began

muttering his ganapati dhyana shloka and

in a second before me appeared this

beautiful image

of a ganapathi sculpture or a sketch for

a ganapati sculpture rather

he tried to explain to me that

the crux of understanding the sapatya

veda

understanding the craft of being

astapati was to use

your finger length and use the length of

your hand

as a measurement system now

this is an a highly individualized sort

of an art form

the next person i went to meet was

someone who is a legend in her own right

she’s the last

living dancer associated with the temple

tradition of pudukote

muthukanamal mudukana malpati

is the woman that i want to be when i

grow up

she has a big round bindi infectious

energy

laughter that’s contagious and a

swagger in her step that i could not

manage

at 32. forget 82.

muthukana malpati was someone who i

approached because i wanted to

understand the origins

of the bharatanatyam tradition all the

people that i had met told me to read

all these texts and i had memorized all

these videogas and i went to her and i

said

patty i need help i’m trying to show

this one particular

mudra this one particular gesture to

depict a concept

she laughed at me and she said why are

you making it so complicated

it’s quite simple and within a second

she solved my problem

thousands of hours of reading had

nothing on hundreds of years of

embodied temple dance tradition

so this presents us with the age-old

dichotomy that appears in

all the fields that we know of which is

the dichotomy

between theory and practice

the dichotomy between the people who

make knowledge

and then the people who apply that

knowledge to the field

scientists versus engineers historians

versus conservators the list goes on and

and on and what do we learn from this

dichotomy

on one hand we see the brahmanical

tradition of

text it’s a detailed handbook

it’s a guidebook that’s precise and

thorough to

fault but on the other hand

you have the tradition of the artisans

of the courtesans of the stapathies it’s

practical it’s malleable it’s adaptable

to suit the moment

what the codes lack in soul

the artisans make up for in self-assured

swagger they are the tradition

and this brings us to

really understanding tradition

and the hunt for tradition so going back

to my story

i’m really happy to report after

almost two decades of searching for the

truth

in the presence of my mother who’s here

at the auditorium this evening

i would like to define for you what i

understand is tradition

tradition is intangible it is embodied

it is ephemeral but it adds to education

a perspective

that often we lack

tradition is important

because we must teach the traditional

way

if only to expedite the need to deviate

from it

take for example the the art of birth

nation

tradition is an adjective that we use

and overuse so many times

because we feel like bharatnatyam is a

form that is

museumized that is kept in stone

well the dance that we danced today that

we called bharthanatyam

i’m surprised to report is probably no

more than

55 to 100 years old

we use codes that were developed much

earlier

but basically the core of tradition is

change

and so i encourage you all

to think about history

as a living thing

don’t trap history or tradition in an

abstract glass cage

talk to it fight with it

play with it and if you’re brave enough

question it

wrestle with the complexity question the

stereotypes

read the narratives in a way that is

different than

everyone else and find your own truth

today i present to you a dance piece

that has resulted from this tradition of

questioning

and this dance piece questions the great

iconic

figure of krishna himself

and three women of three different age

groups

are talking to krishna asking him to

marry her

and her alone so let’s see what krishna

says at the end

thank you

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foreign

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yes

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