Navigating Tradition
The idea of tradition has been a concept that’s been heavy on my mind lately, for a myriad of reasons.
On a personal level, I had a bit of a world reset after stumbling across a piece by a journalist who was also from a South Indian Brahmin family, and also married to an African American man, who she also met at the same university I attended and met Bertel, and she beautifully explored her family’s story and her own through the interweaving strands of tradition, immigration, community, and necessity. It reminded me vividly about the concerns I had about what traditions and legacies I was walking away from by choosing to enter this relationship, and wondering what would remain of them in my future.
Given the time and space to reflect on my own family and community as a result of the stay-at-home orders vastly changing routines, I was struck by how I attribute the most “radical” and “non-traditional” aspects of my own life and career to the principles and traditions set forth by my own family - my parents’ generation and my grandparents’. The very aspects of myself that made my Indian-American peers question my “Indian-ness” have been things I can draw a direct line from the legacy of my family for independence, passion, and sheer determination.
Hasan Minhaj’s standup “Homecoming King” had a recurring theme of the thing Indian parents ask that crushes dreams: “Log kya kahenge” and, I have to say, I cannot remember my mother ever uttering the Telugu equivalent of that phrase to me. I can remember the pressure I placed on myself when I was 18 and didn’t know what I wanted to do in my life. My mother knew she wanted to be a dancer and my aunt knew she wanted to be a surgeon, so I felt like I was falling short. I grew up hearing about the fervor with which my grandfather encouraged my mother and her siblings in their passions, and seeing his own unorthodox approach and unbridled passion to, well, everything I’ve ever seen him do. The legacy we are hopefully carrying forward? The freedom - no, the responsibility - to find that passion and drive in yourself.
I think that sets the backdrop to how I understand tradition as it applies to the arts. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, my introduction to music was a curious mix of very traditional and very unorthodox. At a young age, I began learned sangeetham from my grandfather, practicing daily, starting with the sarali swaras and then going through the janta swaras, alankaras, and so on. But, in addition to the swara patterns, I learned his own sahityam for each - a novel concept. Why? Again - because of tradition. The lyric is so foundational in our arts, and it is words that are brought to life through song and dance, words that breathe emotion. So, he felt it was imperative that students of music understand the importance of the words and their adherence to the melody, as well as how the interplay of words and melody brought the meaning and emotion to life. Through example, of course.
Dance became the art I pursued with much more rigor and focus as I grew older, but as the years passed, I absorbed this very radical approach to tradition that my grandfather took. A steady undercurrent of my life, whether or not I was learning dance, was the analysis of dance. We always had Mastergaru’s dance dramas playing on the TV, and any time my mother and her friends from dance class (as close to me as my own family) convened, the topic was inevitably the analysis of dance. And, it became clear to me that nearly every aspect of Kuchipudi that they were learning and practicing, from pedagogy, to choreography of specific items, to aesthetic norms, were all based on very fluid concepts. You can visually see the evolution in aesthetics and presentation in the dance drama cassettes, based on how performers (sometimes, the same ones) danced in the 80s into the 90s. There’s a distinct evolution in the choreographic approach as well that’s visible in the dramas. Likewise, I remember detailed, in-depth analysis of variations in approach and even execution for various phrases of items, and even fundamental nritta movements and steps. Listening to these discussions just reinforced this idea that even the most fixed seeming things were always evolving.
This concept become one we revisited again and again with academic rigor through the Kuchipudi masters program at the University of SiliconAndhra, while taking a much wider lens: the evolution of the larger Kuchipudi form, a survey of evolving concepts in dance literature, in the ways folk traditions and historical movements impacted the dance: who danced, how they dance, what they danced, and where. The current state of the global pandemic has been another microcosm in the study of those very things: who dances, how, and where, as well as what they dance.
A couple of weeks ago, these ideas came to head again as a result of a vociferous debate among some of the cohort members of the Kuchipudi MA program about what is acceptable within the strictures of tradition and what becomes undue experimentation. At the end of the day, I don’t think we came across a single right answer. This was, however, my takeaway: The overall trajectory of any art is determined by thousands of individual decisions and experimentations plus what survives the test of time. Individually, we need to apply a thoughtful approach based on both our understanding of traditions and our understanding of texts and inherently, time and audience reception will handle the rest of how the larger art form evolves.
On the heels of that discourse, an artist who has been an immense inspiration to me in the last few years gave a beautiful image in his talk about tradition and innovation. In a web series for ICFA Bengaluru, dancer and choreographer Kasi Aysola talked about tradition as a beautiful garment that is passed down within a family. As it goes down through generations, it may need to be altered to fit or meet needs of the moment, but it is still the same material. He brought that concept to life by presenting a thillana that he inherited from his guru, as well as his own choreography. There was an undeniable continuity in the language used in those two pieces, but his own voice came through in his choreography. This reminded me of a recurring theme I’ve found myself exploring within the dance class - how Mastergaru’s choreographies carry a distinct voice, and how it echoes in choreographies of his disciples while their own distinct voices come through.
I came across a quote that captured that concept much more elegantly than I could - the 19th century European composer is credited to have said “Tradition is not to preserve the ashes but to pass on the flame”. Inherently, to keep the flame alive, we need to continue to give it oxygen and fuel, and based on what is available, that means change. But yet, it is the same flame this is carried forward.
