Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharata Natyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Moving Bodies is a detailed and critical examination of the role of the South Indian classical dance form bharatanatyam in the context of war-torn Sri Lanka, specifically as practiced in the capital city, Colombo. Drawing on choreographic analysis, dance ethnography and dance history, Satkunaratnam traces the rise and evolution of bharatanatyam within Colombo, and the different roles and resonances that the dance form has sustained in the face of a changing and frequently violent political backdrop. While there are growing bodies of scholarship considering the history and role of bharatanatyam in India and beyond, as well as reflecting on the history and significance of the twenty-six-year Sri Lankan civil war, apart from an excellent article by martial artist and scholar Janet O’Shea (2016), there is no work hitherto that has brought these two areas of enquiry together. Satkunaratnam’s book fills this gap. At the heart of the book is a reflection on the construction of identity, a process that takes on a particular urgency and significance in the context of a “time and place” made “dangerously transient” by war (46). Key to her discussion is a commitment to understanding identity as inherently fluid, following cultural theorist Homi Bhabha’s insistence on culture as “transnational and translational” (21). At times of war, she argues, the space for the recognition of cultures as shifting and hybridized is submerged by the desire for a fixed cultural signifier that can serve as an identitarian rallying point. The first half of the book considers ways in which “bodies and movement” (6) are represented and refracted in ways beyond their control to serve the specific ideologies and institutions of politics and state. The second half looks at ways that dancers and choreographers negotiate and challenge such imposed identities, reasserting agency through choreographies of resistance. In this way, Satkunaratnam records how bharatanatyam has been classified variously as “Oriental,” “Indian,” “indigenous,” and “Tamil,” depending on the differing agendas and contexts of those imposing the classifications. She highlights, for example, how the experience of the vicious anti-Tamil riots in July of 1983 (“Black July”) “inscribed [bharatanatyam] with significance as a uniquely Tamil practice” in the face of “institutional, national and social exclusion” (49). She shows how, since 1972, bharatanatyam has been included within the mandatory “aesthetics” module of Sri Lankan state education, as a signifier, she suggests, of a Sri Lanka that is “multicultural” and accepting of diversity. And yet, a little probing reveals the limits of this inclusion and the extent to which it can serve to contribute still further to segregation along ethnic lines and an ultimate positioning of bharatanatyam as “Other.” In the second half of the book, she explores how creative choreography can subvert the very fixity that nationalism clings to, permitting a sense of choice in a space and time where there can be little or no choosing” (7). Drawing on Diana Taylor’s distinction between the “archive” and the “repertoire,” she shows how a seemingly unexceptional choice to stage an “often excerpted” (80) section of the Mahabharata (drawing on the familiarity of the archive) can be used to critique the present without the danger of explicit protest. Following the well-known archival narrative, the piece Draupadhi Sabatham highlighted “the suffering of civil society” (89), whereby an innocent woman is victimized due to the cruel and irresponsible actions of two opposing factions of “the same family” (85). Any parallels with the brutality and the weaponization of rape in the civil war are left for the audience to draw for themselves, though for Satkunaratnam, the echoes with the contemporary situation are compelling. Against the backdrop of “white van syndrome” (89) and a growing number of “disappearances” of perceived dissenters, the appeal of a critique of the abuse of power focused on a canonical story is clear. Other danced interventions that can be seen to disrupt or question the status quo include the hard-won inclusion of a piece privileging bharatanatyam within the Sri Lankan TV show Shakthi Superstar, navigating the demands for the more immediately accessible forms of