The Dancing God

Staging Hindu Dance in Australia

Amit Sarwal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000761993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Tanz

The Dancing God: Staging Hindu Dance in Australia charts the sensational and historic journey of de-provincialising and popularising Hindu dance in Australia.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonialism, orientalism and nationalism came together in various combinations to make traditional Hindu temple dance into a global art form. The intricately symbolic Hindu dance in its vital form was virtually unseen and unknown in Australia until an Australian impresario, Louise Lightfoot, brought it onto the stage. Her experimental changes, which modernised Kathakali dance through her pioneering collaboration with Indian dancer Ananda Shivaram, moved the Hindu dance from the sphere of ritualistic practice to formalised stage art. Amit Sarwal argues that this movement enabled both the authentic Hindu dance and dancer to gain recognition worldwide and created in his persona a cultural guru and ambassador on the global stage.

Ideal for anyone with an interest in global dance, The Dancing God is an in-depth study of how a unique dance form evolved in the meeting of travellers and cultures.

1 Hindu, Hinduism and Hindutva¹

As mentioned in the introduction, in Europe and the United States of America, the “Hindu temple dance” was reborn with predominantly “white dancers.”² Even in the case of Louise Lightfoot, she first introduced Kathakali dance to Australia with the Hindu tradition of temple dancing as the point of reference – famously called Hindu dance.³ Her own dance group in Australia was named the Hindu Dance Group, and as an impresario, Louise’s interest was in presenting authentic Hindu culture and art to an Australian audience.⁴ So, my starting point as an interdisciplinary scholar specialising in literature and cross-cultural relations is comprehending the nuances of being Hindu, Hinduism in Kerala, Hindu dance, and the interrelationship between religion and art in India. The words Hindu, Hinduism and Hindutva have today come to possess a unique attraction and have become a recurrent topic in a variety of forum discussions in both India and abroad. Without getting caught up in the controversies surrounding the recent debates on Hindutva, a term that has been, since the 1990s, widely used for the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in India,⁵ let us start with the idea of Hindu and Hinduism.⁶

The scholars specialising in the history of the Hindu religion and tradition claim it to be the world’s oldest religion based on textual evidence from the Rg Veda.⁷ The pertinent question here is – did the Hindu religious traditions arise in the Indus Valley civilisation? Or did they come with the Vedic Aryans?⁸ With reference to the development of Hinduism, there have been two major theories, namely, the Aryan invasion theory and the cultural transformation theory. According to the first theory, Aryans invaded, and their religious texts – the Vedas – became dominant in the Indian sub-continent. The second theory interprets Aryan culture and sacred texts as part of a development narrative of the Indus Valley culture.⁹ As the Hindus did not believe in the linearity of time, a notion colonialism brought to them, exact dates are unavailable. However, periods of their history have been logically inferred from textual references. This proves the fact that Hinduism has existed in India as a belief system and an unbroken intellectual tradition over the past three thousand years. Unlike the Abrahamic religions, Hinduism is not a single religion; rather, it embraces many ancient traditions and philosophies and therefore goes back several thousand years. In fact, it is no religion in the Abrahamic sense. There is no single reference book to practice the belief systems, which are diverse and often contradictory to one another. The word dharma that the Hindus use typically refers to their spiritual practice as well as daily ethical living and denotes righteousness of thought and action.

Scottish historian and philosopher James Mill, in his The History of British India, distinguished three phases in the history of India, namely Hindu, Muslim and British civilisations.¹⁰ This is a very simple division of a problematic time line. The following time line presents a brief but elaborate chronology of the development of Hinduism in India:

• Up to 2000 BCE: The Indus Valley civilisation
• 1500 BCE to 500 BCE: The Vedic period
• 500 BCE to 500 CE: The Epics, Puranic and Classical Age
• 500 CE to 1500 CE: Medieval Period and Islamic invasion
• 1500 CE to 1757 CE: Pre-modern period and Bhakti Movement
• 1757 CE to 1947 CE: British period, Hindu renaissance and the emergence of the Hindutva ideology
• 1947 CE to the present: Independent India and Hindutva ideology in politics

Sharada Sugirtharajah, in her book Imagining Hinduism, has argued that Hinduism has been a central feature in “Western consciousness” and redefined mostly in “Western categories.”¹¹ While Romila Thapar and Arvind Sharma have highlighted scholarly attempts that have been made to trace parallels of India’s (Hindu) past with Biblical theories and the rise of these terms in a Hindu-Muslim polarity.¹² This is similar to the views of Welsh orientalist William Jones, who, in 1799, pointed to the close resemblance between the classical languages of Europe and Sanskrit and declared that the four Hindu yugas (ages) – Satya or Krita, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali – have affinity with Roman and Grecian ages. He placed the idea of Hindu yugas within a biblical framework based on common or similar theistic practices. Jones observed,

We may here observe, that the true History of the World seems obviously divisible into four ages or periods; which may be called, the first, the Diluvian, or purest age; namely the times preceding the deluge … next, the Patriarchal, or pure age; in which, indeed, there were mighty hunters of beasts and men, … – Thirdly, the Mosaick, or less pure age; from the legation of Moses, and during this time when his ordinances were comparatively well observed and uncorrupted – Lastly, the Prophetical, or impure age; beginning with the vehement warnings given by the Prophets to apostate Kings and degenerate nations, but still subsiding and to subsist, until all genuine prophecies shall be fully accomplished.¹³

For Jones, looking from a Biblical lens, Hinduism was an “erroneous religion” which had more to do with imagination than reason.¹⁴

So, are Hindu and Hinduism misleading terms? Hinduism, the religion, is a tradition that encompasses various ideas – from the Vedic to present-day thoughts and values. The Vedic period, which was from 1500 to 500 BCE, is now known for the composition of the ritual texts, the epics, the Sutras, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, the Upanishads and chiefly the four Vedas – the Rg Veda, the Samaveda, Yajurveda and the Atharvaveda. But the term Hindu, post-Vedic period, originally comes from the Sanskrit word Sindhu (Sindhu River or Indus River), the region of the cultures of the Indus Valley civilisation (2500–1500 BCE).¹⁵ These people, in some ways, may have been related to the Dravidians in South India, but it is still debatable, as the script and writing have yet to be deciphered.¹⁶ J. Brockington in The Sacred Thread comments, “it must not be forgotten that the religion of the Vedas was an alien culture brought into India by the Aryans.”¹⁷ The theory of an Aryan presence in India before the Indus Valley Civilisation has not been fully validated and has been debunked by some scholars and historians.¹⁸ In fact, in 1914, Sri Aurobindo discredited this theory by pointing to the exaggerated, overstated and superficial claims made in the nineteenth century by comparative philologists in favour of the linguistic commonality between the Aryan tongue and the Sanskrit language.

The first error committed by the philologists after their momentous discovery of the Sanskrit tongue, was to exaggerate the importance of their first superficial discoveries. The first glance is apt to be superficial; the perceptions drawn from an initial survey stand always in need of correction. If then we are so dazzled and led away by them as to make them the very key of our future knowledge, its central plank, its bacic platform we prepare ourselves grievous disappointments. Comparative Philology, guilty of this error, has seized on a minor clue and mistaken it for a major or chief clue.¹⁹

Debate continues on the myths of the origins of India and Hinduism, particularly about the extent of fusion of Aryan and Dravidian traditions.

Noted Indian historian Romila Thapar, in her article “The Theory of Aryan Race and India,” has shown how Aryan theory started as an attempt to uncover the beginnings of Indian history and explain the society’s mythical origins.²⁰ With it as a framework, the roots of an Indian identity were established and later used in Hindutva politics.²¹ The upper-caste Hindus have used the Aryan theory to prove their superiority to indigenous populations of India and equality to Europeans. Scholars belonging to or sympathising with the lower-castes in India and abroad have used it to provide “the Dalit version of history.”²²

Scholars of Hinduism have also argued elsewhere that the term Hindu was mostly used by Persians or Muslim conquerors to refer to the inhabitants of the areas near the Indus River and not to any...