Pirouetting around gender

In the summer of 1995, Lingaraj Pradhan, accompanied and encouraged by his cousin, made his maiden trip to Bhubaneshwar. He filled the application form for Utkal Sangeet Mahavidyalaya’s Odissi training course. Pradhan, a 15-year-old, had no training in the dance form. But when he was accepted into the programme, all hell broke loose back home.

“I come from a village, and my family is culture-oriented. Yet, the notion of my learning dance was unsettling for them,” says Pradhan. The eldest of five children, he was expected to be the breadwinner of the family. And of course, there was talk in the village over why a man would choose to dance? Yet, rebel that he was, he chose Odissi over family compulsions. He trained under Guru Gangadhar Pradhan and Guru Bichitrananda Swain, and now performs across India, the US and Europe.

At the core of Pradhan’s experience are middle-class India’s gender politics and notions of sexuality. The idea of what makes a ‘man’ is a checklist that specifies certain professions, pursuits, interests, attributes and characteristics: dance simply doesn’t make the cut. Even now, young boys aspiring to take up dance as a vocation are faced with such dilemmas.

Nishanth Panicker, 16, has been learning Kathak for over six years and performing for nearly four. Initially, he hid his interest in the performing arts from his friends at school for fear of ridicule. But eventually, Panicker wisened up. He was not the problem, it was those judging him — “The irony is that so many great dancers from India happen to be men.” Pankaj Sharan Das, Kelucharan Mohapatra, Gangadhar Pradhan (Odissi); Birju Maharaj (Kathak); Kottakal Sivaraman (Kathakali); CV Chandrasekhar, PT Dhananjayan, Uday Shankar, Ram Gopal (Bharatanatyam), among others, are some of the pillars of Indian dance. “Why, even the God of dance is Nataraja! I think it would be unfair and inappropriate to say that dance is a girls’ activity,” he says. The power and impact of Birju Maharaj and Kelucharan Mohapatra’s female impersonations, for instance, are legendary, and even women dancers have rarely come close. In recent years, efforts have also been stepped up to include more male characters on stage. Bichitranandan Swain and Lingaraj Pradhan’s Odissi group, Rudrakshya, for instance, has promoted male dancers through performances exclusively designed for men. Bharatanatyam too has witnessed a similar shift — Ramachandran Muralidaran, who has created over 750 such compositions says, “I was not comfortable performing female roles all the time. I realised I needed to express myself as a male dancer.”

Historically, Indian dance — classical, folk or tribal — was dominated by men who were gurus, composers and performers. For centuries male dancers were neither a rarity nor an exception, neither was it questionable for a man to pursue dance as a vocation, or be identified by his sexual identity and orientation. Since dance was linked to temple rituals, women were largely not allowed to dance due to taboos linked to the impurity of the female body. Women who defied such mores were devadasis, mujrawalis and their ilk.

It was perhaps, only in the 19th and 20th century — following the Indian society’s brush with Victorian moralities, a time when dance moved out of temples and courts to urban audiences, and when the Devadasi system was abolished — that there was a visible shift in the perception of performing artistes and their roles. That the Indian Nationalist movement engendered an ‘idealised vision’ of men as the professional, warriors/soldiers and women as the custodian of culture and home, didn’t help matters either.

Art critic and commentator Sadanand Menon says, “When dance was performed on the urban upper-middle-class stage… was when the issue of who’s the dancer and who’s the spectator began. And they made a clear distinction that women are the dancers and men are the spectators,” he says. This period where dance was entertainment for men lasted about 30-35 years. Men were now the revenue-paying spectators, sponsors and patrons of the women who performed.

Bharatanatyam dancer and author Tulsi Badrinath mentions an incident that happened to her guru, VP Dhananjayan, in the ’60s. “He had recently left Kalakshetra and taken up a temporary job with a company. People there used to taunt him about dancing. But today he is so well-known and has national awards to his credit. So, times have changed,” she says.

Kuchipudi dancer MV Murthy, empanelled artist with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, says, “When I started working, it became difficult to manage work and dance. When I used to take leave for performances, colleagues always asked why I got leave for pursuing the arts. This way Indian artists are always at a disadvantage. We have a system where sportspersons are hired by organisations and supported so that they can play. But the same encouragement is not offered to those in performing arts. We are the cultural ambassadors of this nation, after all.” This reflects a typical middle-class mindset that endorses sports and academics, but considers dance and music “hobbies.” Murthy adds that, as it is, dancers are paid peanuts by sabhas, which still prefer women, saying “this is what audiences want”. Also, it is difficult for dancers, especially men, from small towns or without famous gurus to succeed and pull through the initial years. Murthy says, “From sabhas to newspapers, dancers from established families or the few top performers are repeatedly called or written about. What about those who are up and coming?”

The link between dance and gender remains complex even today. Masculinity struggles to assert itself on stage. Belgium-based Bharatanatyam and Odissi dancer Sooraj Subramaniam sums it up in his poem ‘Identity Crisis’: So you understand why I can’t define myself simply by the whiskers on my cheeks.

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