Learning Kathak

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Learning Kathak Learning kathak, for the dedicated group of practitioners with whom I worked, is about learning a new way of being-in-the-world. Becoming a kathaka involves a transformation of body and self, one that is rooted in the traditional learning relationship between guru and shishya. It is from within the one-to-one guru-shishya relationship that total education is said to originate. Learning to be a kathaka is thus grounded in the student's subordination to their guru, to the art, and to the discipline of training. It is impossible to pry these elements apart. I focus on training, on the lived reality of learning in a dance form, and the hundreds and thousands of hours that go into those short-lived moments on the stage. For a small group of committed practitioners, the journey of becoming a kathaka has become a consuming way of life. Through careful attention to the longer temporal process of learning we can understand why it is that practitioners devote themselves to their guru, and commit their lives to the pursuit of this art. The further I progressed in my apprenticeship in kathak, the more the wider parameters for learning became clear. Learning was entirely bound up with and dependent on one’s relationship with the guru. This is therefore an ethnography about learning dance under the kathaka, Pandit Chitresh Das, and within the larger community of dancers that had formed around him. I provide a phenomenological, sensual and corporeally grounded account of learning kathak dance under a master, describing the daily grind of training, and the emotionally loaded relationship between the guru and disciple that provides the foundation for the learning of this art form. I describe what it feels like, looks like, sounds like, and means, to take up this new way of being-in-the-world1. I describe the experiential nature of learning kathak from this master, as he moves between two sites: Kolkata, India and the San Francisco Bay area in U.S. Practices such as kathak provide the learner with what is, in effect, their own way of knowing. The perspective of the learner enables the student – and the apprentice- ethnographer – a form of entry into such new ways of knowing the world. It is from my situatedness as an apprentice in this art that I describe this way of being-in-the-world. 1 The term ‘being-in-the-world’ begins with Heidegger’s 1962 work, ‘Being and Time’, but has entered the field of philosophical language and is therefore wide in circulation, including in phenomenological anthropology. 1 Transnational Flows, Embodied Practice Pandit Chitresh Das’s lineage of kathak existed between two primary sites, Kolkata and San Francisco. Transnationalism is a defining feature of this lineage and of others. It is not unusual for artists, gurus, performers and teachers of the Indian arts to live and work between two worlds. The contemporary field of kathak is defined amidst such transcultural flows of people, goods and ideas, between India and its many diasporic locations. Yet this feature is not in itself a particularly new attribute in kathak’s long history. Transcultural flows have long since contributed to shaping this dynamic art form. Mughal Empires, Persian courtesans, Sufi ascetics, Bhakti devotional movements, folk traditions, and British colonial rule have added to the particularity of this transnational form. Although the unique conditions of the current socio-economic epoch we call ‘globalisation’ certainly adds to the particularity of transnationalism today, intercultural exchange as such has been an enduring characteristic. Arjun Appadurai traces this interconnectedness back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, commenting that ‘historians and sociologists, especially those concerned with translocal processes and the world systems associated with capitalism have long been aware that the world has been a congeries of large-scale interactions for many centuries’ (Appadurai 1996: 27; see also Abu-Lughod 1989; Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982). India's long history of shifting empires, trade, religious movements and migrations exemplifies such interconnectedness and overlap. It is a past evident in kathak's distinctive form and repertoire. In a sense, then, the kathak tradition is now doing what it has always done, namely, adapting to the present era. From this perspective, too, the continuities with the past seem as remarkable as the changes. We can say, then, that it is not change per se which is new, but the nature and magnitude of transcultural flows. Such a phenomenon has certainly been magnified in the last historical epoch of globalisation, [T]he problems of distance and the confines of technology have generally restricted the interactions of the past, so that is has been very difficult to sustain dealings between culturally and spatially separate groups…It is really over the course of the last century with the advent of modern technology – particularly with the innovations in transportation and communication…that we have entered into a more profound condition of neighbourliness. (Inda and Rosaldo 2008: 37) 2 Kathak's recent history highlights the particularity of this new global order of large-scale interaction. Increases in the flow of people between India and the west, the rapidly growing diasporic populations in the U.S., Canada, Britain and Australia, have facilitated the growing transnational dynamic evident in many Indian arts. New forms of social media, like Face book, YouTube, and Twitter, now figure centrally in disseminating information to an even wider audience. All have been central in Chhandam’s representation and definition of itself in the larger field of kathak. The availability of images, videos and the new ease of dialogue across geographic locations, have all provided a stronger sense of the field in which Das’s dancers strive to make their mark. Transnational flows, as the literature recognises, are not equal flows in all directions. They follow pathways of power, although these are themselves not uni-directional. Peripheries, as locations on the margins of a central power, are capable of generating their own counter flows and reformulating what is handed to them (Hannerz 1989: 69; see also Hannerz 1996). Equally, ‘as the peripheries develop their own definitions, centres of power co-opt, reformulate and again disseminate these definitions in order to continue their hegemony’ (Basch et al. 1994: 27). The ‘centre’ has tended to be equated in the literature on development with western and European metropoles. But for the many large Indian diasporic communities throughout the world, that centre may well be India. Immigrants seek ways to remember and participate in the culture of their homelands. In this sense, the remembered ‘India’ provides a powerful pull, a centre for the definition of true Indian culture abroad (see also Ram 2000a, 2002, 2005). Yet the communities outside of India are not homogeneous. Some of the more wealthy and powerful of these diasporic communities, such as Chhandam now teaches in the San Francisco Bay area (hereafter SF Bay area), may have themselves operated as a locus of power in their own right2. An affluent U.S. based Indian diasporic community has emerged in the SF Bay area, in large part, through the phenomenal growth of the information technology (IT) industry in the Silicon valley (Radhakrishnan 2008: 7)3. The story of Indians in the Bay area ‘is now frequently told in terms of the dominant narrative of “Indian success” in the Bay area, most notably the Silicon valley’ (Mankekar 2002: 79). A social group with such a profile is 2Chhandam has a number of students from what could be loosely referred to as upper class and wealthy Indian families, but it also caters to a wider demographic of Indian families, including those referred to as middle class. Purnima Mankekar explains that while Indian immigrants to the SF Bay area have been constituted in high numbers by computer related professionals, ‘the number of Indians working in blue collar occupations, the service industry, and in small businesses has increased’ (2002: 79). 3 Radhakrishnan further explores how affluent US Indian communities, emerging from the India’s flourishing IT sector in the Silicon valley, co-construct a new India alongside a growing number of transnational professionals in India, many of whom are returning immigrants (2008: 7). 3 capable, as this one has been, of figuring prominently in establishing a centre of power outside of India. Its influence has been particularly prominent in establishing the success of the Indian arts in recent years4. In turn, we may represent the matter as one in which the arts have figured prominently in allowing diasporic communities to establish themselves as important sources of authority, not only economically but culturally. Within this larger framework, Chhandam is becoming increasingly successful at defining its own particular brand of legitimate Indian culture. Das and his dancers are able to help redefine this diasporic ‘periphery’ as its own centre of knowledge and understanding, at once distinctive and similar to the site of origin in India (see chapter 5). I am therefore drawing attention, at the very outset, to the complexities of the flows of transnational knowledge, as what once were peripheral centres of knowledge-making become significant players in the construction of knowledge at the centre. Artists like Das, and his community of dancers, have become authorities on kathak from outside of India. A striking feature of the transnationalism of this lineage is that it has produced an Americanised guru and a group of American pupils who lecture to students in India about ‘their culture’ and its inherent value. For mobile figures such as Das, a privileged mode of moving between worlds enables easy adjudications on culture. Das acknowledges that he has selectively incorporated aspects of Indian and American culture in the creation of an idealised lifeworld for the art form.

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