I am delighted to mark the arrival of - Mohiniyattam: A Reader, Vol. I and II a comprehensive anthology on Mohiniyattam in its local and diasporic manifestations spread over two volumes, with contributions from scholars and prominent practitioners.
Mohiniyattam has had to combat a lack of comprehension about its histories and repertory. This book valiantly battles ideas of derivative history and limited repertory and gives voice to its practitioners. We receive several versions of the history of the form's evolution into contemporary consciousness. Some of it consists of transcribed local oral histories, invaluable despite the mediation of transcription, without which they would not be available to global worlds of dance knowledge. The volumes are rich in alternative histories or her stories, narratives that are indigenous to local epistemologies. Indeed, several articles attest to how intimately the 20th-century development of the form is linked to teaching methodologies inherited from colonial and precolonial times. The voices in this anthology relate to diverse discourses and perspectives, although they refer to the same historical processes of tracing origins, loss, reconstruction and revision. This can be a bit confusing for the non-specialist readers, but it is worth the effort to extricate a personal vision of the many voices involved in the process.
Practice, description of repertory and its construction play important roles in the book as do the histories. Writings of authentic practitioners rich with vocabulary and inflections of Sanskrit, Malayalam and local English jump off the pages and enliven my experience of reading, particularly in Volume 1. It feels as if I were hearing speakers and were present at the telling.
This particularly enriches the sections on vocalisation, (G.S. Paul, p. 52) and choreographic process.
Vijayalakshmi's writing conveys the confidence of a dancer growing up with Mohiniyattam, in a global world from Kerala to the USSR and Hollywood while, for example, Priyadarshini Ghosh writes of relocating Mohiniyattam from Kerala to Bengal where she draws on Sanskritic Natyashastra principles to better analyse the movement vocabulary. Similarly, writings on teaching Mohiniyattam in diasporic situations, as in Australia, and its presence in contemporary visual media evoke an understanding of the form in urban spaces. Indeed, one of the takeaway impressions from the two volumes is that of negotiations between urban, global and rural/local visions of the form, and between insider and outsider Euro-American and scholarly takes on dance.
Since serving as an adviser on her dissertation and her publication of the anthology Scripting Dance in Contemporary India, I have actively followed and participated in the conceptual and practical explorations of the dance of one of the editors, Dr Mythili Anoop Maratt. Also, she recently performed her own creative work based in Mohiniyattam for the Erasing Borders Dance Festival, of which I am a curator. Her selection was unanimous by the committee of co-curators. She is on the faculty of Performing Arts at GITAM (deemed-to-be) University. Also editing these volumes is K.R. Kavya Krishna, Assistant Professor, in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-BHU) at Varanasi. Dr Kavya Krishna is a recognized writer on gender studies and has done her dissertation and published specifically on Mohiniyattam.
Mohiniyattam is a dance form from Kerala which acquired state recognition as one of the 'classical' dances of India. The 'reinvention' of Mohiniyattam as a 'classical' art and its revival trajectory demonstrates an intricate narrative of becoming a cultural symbol on the one hand, and an evolution into a form with robust technique and a diverse repertoire on the other. The history and practice of Mohiniyattam reveal a complex intersection of questions of nation, region, culture, aesthetics, caste, religion and gender. Even though Mohiniyattam is a prominent presence in the contemporary cultural scene of Kerala/India, there is a severe lack of scholarly works on the art form. This anthology is an attempt towards bringing together the works of academic scholars and major performing artists in the field of Mohiniyattam in two edited volumes for a critical analysis of the history and aesthetics of the dance form.
Mohiniyattam is currently a celebrated dance form which represents the region. The story of its reinvention and revival is usually traced back to the 1930s intertwined with the formation of the modern institution for performing arts of Kerala, the Kerala Kalamandalam. The homogenous narrative conventions of the history of the art form aimed at consolidating idealised national or regional identities, sidelined the divergent and ambiguous accounts about Mohiniyattam. Many marginal and personal narratives of the dance form are capable of revealing the politics of aesthetic reforms and the construction of stories about its past at the threshold of tradition and modernity. In that sense, the history of the dance form becomes a site to understand the operations of modernity in the region through performing arts. As Mohiniyattam was being considered as a dance form and for women for a long time; its history intersects with questions of gender. In carefully constructed histories of Mohiniyattam, the politics of gender which obviously intersects with questions of caste and religion in the Kerala/Indian context are often obscured.
Mohiniyattam which was considered as a threat to the morality of the middle-class women in early twentieth-century Kerala, has now become an idealised cultural form which represents the women of the region. It is performed with pride in state-sponsored programs in Kerala: it has traversed the regional geographical boundary with performances and institutions of repute in major Indian cities like Chennai, New Delhi and Kolkata, to diasporic spaces of household classes and dance floors in the United States and Australia among others.
In this book project, we try to bring together diverse narratives on Mohiniyattam from academicians and performing artists. We hope it can become a cornerstone and springboard to make possible serious academic studies on the dance form in the future. It brings together primary and secondary texts; archival materials from the 1970s onwards to articles written particularly for the anthology. The span of the materials consists of research articles on the history, aesthetics and techniques of the dance form to personal narratives of performing artists on their life as a dancer and on the creative process of choreographing particular dance items.
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