Another stupid article: Indian dance was invented in 1929!

[varsha]

Looks like Sadanand Menon was goaded into writing this innocuous piece. The opening paragraph has little relevance to what he may have intended as the main thrust of that article . And what was that I pray ?
Mr Menon has succeeded in keeping it well hidden.
He, like TMK , succeeds in firing a sten gun , incapable of handling the recoil and so ends up firing aimlessly in all directions.
Just poor writing , folks.

[uday_shankar]

Please quote the 1929 part and then try to defend it. That is what we are talking about.

Just to be clear, I have no interest in "defending" anything, including anything I may have said. I sometimes get asked in design meetings by marketeers, "are you sure you've got it right"... and my reply is always "yes, we're sure...until we're not! Then we will modify our theory and we will be sure again, until we're not again!". That really messes those marketing people up. But the real point is, one has to exercise the utmost due diligence, without biases, and get the best possible perspective at any given time so the odds of you being right is maxed, knowing that one's understanding may yet be incomplete or perhaps outright wrong.

So to quote again from the article:

"...Now every Indian classical dancer loves to say ‘Our dance is 5,000 years old.’ But divested of hypocrisy, it would be interesting to use the ‘dancing girl’ figurine to probably prove that ‘our’ dance is, in fact, a modern dance, invented in 1929. We can work with it to deal with contemporary themes and contemporary society. This could also lead to critical debates around what the old information has erased from public memory..."

I think there's merit here.

What I get out of it is:

1) Early 1900's: For who knows how many centuries, Sadir dance (and its pan Indian counterparts) was the exclusive preserve of devadasis and nobody presumably spoke of a 5000 year old tradition. They were just engaged in a hereditary occupation, perhaps constantly improvising and changing in some sort of dynamic way to keep it fresh. More importantly not a single person outside the hereditary caste probably practised it.

2) Early 2000's: There's nothing called Sadir dance, no devadasi caste, and all dancers are of upper caste, well spoken, and "preserving" a 5000 year old tradition with a different name, "Bharatanatyam".

So there's merit to suggest, tongue in cheek, that Bharatanatyam was invented sometime in this intervening period. Never mind they are dancing the same Sadir dance, perhaps "sanitized", under a different name.

Why stop with 5000 ? We can go back many yugas, back to krtha yuga and there were dancers. In Kathopanishad, Yama tries to entice Nachiketas "with dancing girls playing musical instruments" (paraphrasing from memory) away from that most important question... So it would be more truthful to assert that our dance is timeless. But then, that would be true of most things in other ancient cultures too, say Chinese.

People can cling to the "5000 years" idea or go where the truth takes them. It is a very spiritually weak position to seek solace from the notion of "ancientness" of something in human culture. 5000 years is a ridiculously meaningless instant in the universe. Judaeo Christian fundamentalist kooks think that 6000 years is a very long time! Islamic fundamentalists do even worse. In fact, only the Hindu theory of yugas comes closest in scale to modern reckonings of astronomical time... I think Carl Sagan even mentioned that in one of his books.

I am happy to be a Hindu not because something has been "preserved" over time but because in every age, there are new figures that breathe fresh life into its core essence. In relatively modern times we have had Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and of course Ramana Maharshi.

The "shastras" are neither "holy" nor concrete. They may be indicators, suggestions. And sometimes plain wrong, For example, I have pondered for a long time over the 22 shrutis part of the Natya shastra and have come to the conclusion that Bharata was winging that part. No physical experiment can be performed with actual strings wherein a string's pitch can be lowered or increased by a pramana shruti. That's not how tuning works. All tuning is relative, especially at this microscopic scale, and to change the pitch accurately by one pramana shruti at each steps is a non-trivial, near impossible, exercise even for trained tuners, leave alone musicians. This part of the natya shastra are the words of somebody who never performed an experiment with actual strings, that too with crude tuning pegs and guts strings of 2000 years ago.

[sureshvv]

Ok. If what he meant to say was that the term "Bharathanatyam" was invented around 1929, he may not get much argument. Or readers


Whether it is 2000 years old or 5000 is largely irrelevant except for the conspiracy theorists. Like his guru/chela, he invents plausible causes & scenarios with primary focus on dragging thru mud dead people's reputations & intentions.

[Sachi_R]

Ok, we are getting somewhere now.

By the way, Kathak, Manipuri, Yakshagaana, Kuchupudi, Kathakali, Mohiniattom, were not the preserve of devadasis. Even Odissi was taught in temples by Brahmins to non B/Brahmins all men.

I need to check...but I think royal patronage in Mysore and Tanjore and Travancore courts elevated the dance form to a level of technical virtuosity and theory. The Tanjore Quartet were a part of that tradition.

Bharata +Natya could not have been an E Krishna Iyer invention. These terms have been everywhere in our literature. Only his formulaic approach could have been an original.

Like Samayaittu Paar may have opened many taste buds like Sadanand Menon's to south Indian cooking, but Mylapore and Maami cooking were there long before then.
So....

[sureshvv]

And even if it were, what is the problem?

[Charu Venkat]

I would like a hit of whatever Mr. Menon was high on when he wrote this article. It seems effective enough to distort history itself, so I don't think it would be impotent in distorting my husband's late-night caterwauling.

[shankarank]

2) Early 2000's: There's nothing called Sadir dance, no devadasi caste, and all dancers are of upper caste, well spoken, and "preserving" a 5000 year old tradition with a different name, "Bharatanatyam".

The caste may not have been formalized and named. But the ingredients were there! Srauta smArta itihAsam has indicators. At that time likely Bramhins were marrying from lower vaRNas. The latest genetic foot print also indicates that. We are projecting our bias of a "lower caste" not well spoken person of today back to then. That itself is a bias.

Hear this : https://youtu.be/0KVYNTlqwLA?t=229 . He starts off with kannadasan, onto Haiku imported from japan ( yeah SR used it in the paTTimanRam too!) , to tiruvalluvar , to Avvai and 1/2 chIr - that is the best vyAkyAna for the shorter second line of tyAgaraja - that leads to a kArvai, as well as the shorter first line of dIkshitar ( devi's pAdam) that has kARvai. All in the venerated venue where legendary concerts of Madurai Somu et. al. took place!

If you hear Haiku in the bus stop - would that count as well spoken for you???

[shankarank]

I sometimes get asked in design meetings by marketeers, "are you sure you've got it right"... and my reply is always "yes, we're sure...until we're not! Then we will modify our theory and we will be sure again, until we're not again!". That really messes those marketing people up.

It messed them up because they were dealing with humans!!! If they dealt with a machine that would have been fine. You are saying , causation is not a valid method as we don't know all the causes, but correlation may be more effective . Entire stock market works on that premise. Indices and their movement is used to predict stock movements many times!

After scientification now it is data-scientification : https://swarajyamag.com/magazine/rethin ... prediction

And you should watch this from beginning to have a good laugh at it: https://youtu.be/xRjEPwL8Lxk?t=1783 . Watch the whole thing folks you will laugh the belly out!!

vAAstu compass, vAAstu compliant and computerized horoscopes

Well the whole thing about vAAstu and astrology is that the bramhan ( I will use this instead of a bramhin caste person!) is more important than the truth behind Astrology or vAAstu.

The practitioner of the sense of sacred and his vAk! And the feeling of goodness of interacting with him/her!

vAAStu --> the directions ( or space) are/is sacred
Astrology --> the motion or movement of time --> is sacred!!

So if you Androidify the Bramhan and take him out of the loop , the whole thing is meaningless anyways! As it is not science.

As one Dravidian critique noted, Hindusim will absorb everything, even accept, Islam and Christianity into its fold and even reject GOD, but it will never give up it's jAti , and Bramhanism. It will say vEdas are the truth. Accept Atheists into it's fold!

I concur somewhat in a positive sense with that. Even after Sankaracarya critiqued rituals ( he critiqued them more than he criticized Buddhism), as recently as the 1980s, muKKUR Lakshmi Naramsimhacariar was performing narasimha yagna in front of our Ganesh (Saivaite ) temple. Which was also Sanitized by Brahmins after the debate with Buddhists

He would periodically go into frenzy, when they will stop the vEdic recitation and drop down to ugram vIram, SlOka! So sometimes there are instances where vEdAs are also given up!

Bramhanism will live even if you annihilate caste.

BharatanATyam is old because - it is not that it is not old - more because E. Krishna Iyer did a old Bramhan act!!

[uday_shankar]

You are saying , causation is not a valid method as we don't know all the causes, but correlation may be more effective . Entire stock market works on that premise. Indices and their movement is used to predict stock movements many times!

In designing ventilator algorithms we start at a noble place, from the fundamental equations of pressure, flow and volume, apply good measurement and signal processing techniques, but there are some things we can never measure because the damn patient is in the way of putting a sensor. So we have to estimate some quantities, often based on the hedging a single parameter. So we work on pseudo gradient descents, throw the kitchen sink at it, hedge it one way observe the behavior, then tweak it again, etc hoping for a convergence . But the patient could always turn out to be a wild card. Another thing we tell one another is "times are no good... can't find good patients any more!" :

[rshankar]

The caste may not have been formalized and named. But the ingredients were there! Srauta smArta itihAsam has indicators. At that time likely Bramhins were marrying from lower vaRNas. The latest genetic foot print also indicates that. We are projecting our bias of a "lower caste" not well spoken person of today back to then. That itself is a bias.

Endogamy - i.e., lack of flow of genetic material between different groups of people, has been traced back to have occurred some 1500-2000 years ago (The Gupta kings?), prior to which exogamy was clearly evident. So, 'inter-caste' marriages were common before that period, and not after...

[harimau]

As one Dravidian critique noted, Hindusim will absorb everything, even accept, Islam and Christianity into its fold and even reject GOD, but it will never give up it's jAti , and Bramhanism. It will say vEdas are the truth. Accept Atheists into it's fold!

Bramhanism will live even if you annihilate caste.

In the book "Castes and Tribes of South India", in talking about the various peoples of the Madras Presidency, one Christian convert who refused to eat at the same table with other Christian converts is reported to have said, "I may have changed my religion but not my caste."

Most churches in rural Tamil Nadu have separate cemeteries for Dalit Christians as others refuse to buried alongside Dalits.

Most communal clashes in northern districts of Tamil Nadu are between Vanniyars -- classified as OBCs -- and Dalits, yet the newspapers report them as clash between upper caste men and Dalits. Same deal in southern districts where the clashes are between Thevars and Dalits.

Hinduism is a religion that seeks not to convert but to absorb. Thus the local tribe that worshipped small-pox as Goddess Mariamman was allowed to retain Mariamman as their goddess but as the Tribe increasingly sought to merge with mainstream Hindus, Mariamman slowly morphed into Kali/Parvati. But the endogamous practices of each tribe was retained by merely giving it a caste name if its own. So you have Right-hand Vellalars and Left-hand Vellalars, not because of the handedness of those groups of people but because they wanted to be seen as equal to each other in the caste hierarchy yet didn't want to lose their tribal/group identity by intermarrying.

So you are wrong to say 'Brahmanism will live even if you annihilate caste'.

The correct thesis is 'caste will live even if you annihilate Brahmanism'.

[Sachi_R]

Harimau, Shankarank,...
My understanding is that in any society where knowledge, learning, purity, honesty, service, self-abnegation, contemplation, prayer, pursuit of truth, non-violence, and goodness are found, there will be people who are Brahmins - ब्राह्मणाः.

The caste system merely institutionalised this as a social organisation based on ideas of rebirth and nature+nurture leverage. But anyone who aspired and practised these values would be revered and treated as a Brahmin.

I feel as a Brahmin, I have to constantly watch my own behaviour and adhere to the code of conduct enshrined in the idea. Debating that others are not right or pure etc., and bashing castes or Hinduism is a highly unintelligent way of leading my life.

The reductionism that all evils in Hindu society come from Brahmins is a horrendous untruth and we can see the proof of it in any issue of The Hindu paper 32 pages or 48 pages. Every page. Evil is not the preserve of Brahmins.

"Brahmcriminal" Reductionism is the worst disservice one can do to our country and society.

[shankarank]

Sachi gives me more hope than harimau. Well we fall into this trap of letting them use the word Caste ( and I have to use it to communicate) , when it is a Portuguese word and has a history in South America.

If you consider the privilege aspect of Caste which draws the most attention for critique, then British society has it still! If you remove the "By Birth" aspect, a significant portion of benefits from studying in Harvard or top business schools is the social network that is carried through life long, not necessarily knowledge or self worth. This is different from other areas of excellence in Science , Engineering and arts.

So caste has to be seen in materialistic terms not as a result of a religious book or tradition. Today it is the land owning class that is in the stangle hold of Caste. You think their representatives were fools to fall at the feet of leaders. They launched a Mohini avatar on the population. In the remote Villages of West Madurai, kallars will not work for moopars but will do for tEvars. So what we see as the travesty of politics and continue our focus on leaders and the sensationalism, from our arm chairs, is actually not! There is good reason for all that!

It is a cocktail mix of electoral democracy and property management. But we cannot be so critical of it, as none of us have really gone to the woods and grown a bag of rice!

And we talk as if Constitution and its directive principles somehow operate!

My thesis was based on the far fetched possibility of a Left revolution that may equalize Castes, but still cannot suppress the Bramhanism as that is a sense of sacred and passive, and does not depend on Temples and God!

As regards untouchability, yeah the Androidization of vAstu, the vAstu compass and the proposed Data Scientific Astrology loaded into the touch screen will solve it. Now you can touch it and get your advise - you don't need the pArpAn , the forseer