Between Temple and Forum: South Asian Dance and the refiguring of cultural identities
by Ranjit Sondhi
Editor’s note: Ranjit Sondhi originally presented this article as a keynote paper at Navadisha, a conference organized by the British organization SAMPAD, in Birmingham, UK on February 25, 2000. The title at that time was, “A conference for South Asian Dance today: A Global Cultural Overview.” For further description of Navadisha and SAMPAD, see notes at the end of this commentary.
As Piali Ray, director of SAMPAD, has reminded us, this conference on South Asian dance around the world today provides an opportunity for both a celebration of the art form and a timely evaluation of its development. There are others who speak with much greater authority on both of these issues, so I will confine myself to sketching a more general overview - constructing a background against which other contributions, from both speakers and artists, might be located. I want particularly to concentrate on South Asian dance as a cultural art form and dwell briefly on three related themes: the nature of culture itself, the explosion of cultural diversity in an increasingly pluralist world, and the construction of cultural identity as a complex network. I hope that the relevance of these themes to both the subsequent discussions and demonstrations of South Asian dance in the conference will prove to be self-evident.
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Photograph from No Male Egos, choreographed and performed by Mavin Khoo and Akram Khan.
Photograph by Peter Teigen |
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Raymond Williams described culture as one of the most complicated words in the English language, but because it is being used loosely these days it demands some explanation. Culture has been described in its widest sense as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, the arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities or habits acquired by human beings as members of society. It has also been seen as a system of learned and shared behaviors and perceptions of a group, transmitted from generation to generation. So culture includes all aspects of our knowledge, attitudes, and behavior that have been learned and transmitted. It includes famous writers and public ceremonies right through to conventional ways of dressing, eating, sitting, and above all communicating, not only verbally, but also by means of overt body language and the subtlest of gestures. This communication, in its more or less stylized form, is after all what we understand by dance.
Culture, however, is not a comprehensive, exact experimental science but an incomplete, semiotic one. Any reference to culture contains, in the same moment, both a descriptive aspect as well as a deeper meaning. It lies in the hearts and minds of human beings. It is as much about social-psychological structures as it is about collecting artifacts, counting traits, and classifying cultural institutions.
I am trying to resist the suggestion that South Asian cultures, whether on the Indian subcontinent or in Britain or elsewhere in the Western world, have somehow been preserved in aspic. There is and always has been in all cultures a tension between tradition and modernity, between continuity and change. In this sense, cultural identities have always been dynamic, fluid, ambiguous, and elusive. At any given historical moment, a culture in its entirety can never be defined completely and accurately.
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