Love is universal, as is the language of dance. It’s not uncommon for Bharatanatyam dancers to resort to these trite assertions when faced with the evergreen challenge of keeping Bharatanatyam relevant in a modern and globalised society. To some extent, the love stories in Bharatanatyam are easily relatable; the archetypal female protagonists are characterised by emotional states such as yearning, jealousy, joy, misery. But when the love stories are marked by the same unsurprising narratives and imagery, I question whether this ‘relatability’ is not better defined as ‘familiarity’. When the deity-hero fails to appear before his beloved for the thousandth time, you can expect to see the heroine expressing her loneliness and dejection in one or more of the following ways; taking off of jewellery, searching in vain for him, berating him with curses, praising him in hope, watching the birds stop singing and the flowers withering. While talented dancers and powerful music can make any performance moving, these predictable trajectories are more stale than universal. So I’m inspired to write about the time that Rama Vaidyanathan staged a tense psychological drama that revealed the potential for the age-old metaphor of Radha and Krishna to be definitively modern and relevant.
Waking up to Krishna’s absence, Radha forgoes the usual melodramatic representations of pain, and simply sits down in contemplation instead. As she sinks deeper and deeper into meditation on Krishna, she finds herself empathising with him to an unprecedented extent. A superbly creative interpretation of the thumri "Radhika Kanha ko Dhyan Kare, To Kanha veh Radhika ke Guna Gaave” (As Radha meditates on Krishna, Krishna sings Radha’s praises), the audience sees Radha writing love letters to herself. She seems to have become Krishna, and with an enamoured expression on her face, she writes about the beautifully round, fragrant breasts of Radha. When Radha regains her presence of mind, she is so shaken and confused that one cannot place her as any nayika or heroine. As she notices the letters strewn over the floor and recognises her handwriting, she is overcome with fear and shame. Her lapses in consciousness are so severe that she even wonders whether her name is Radha or Krishna. This loss of identity is a novel representation of Radha’s devotion to Krishna, and credit goes to Rama Vaidyanathan for being creative. But, almost more compelling than the concept is Radha’s reaction to this event; Radha’s subsequent helplessness makes her more vulnerable than any audience has ever seen her. By depicting a level of mental suffering that is rarely seen on stage, Radha has become less of a motif and more personable.
When later Radha quietly accepts her psychological union with Krishna, the usual flamboyance of an ending is missing, allowing the powerful middle to continue resonating with the audience. We have space to ponder over what we’ve seen, rather than sit back in the simple satisfaction of having experienced something emotional. And when Radha leaves the stage, one marvels at the complex character layering; Bharatanatyam dancers are apt at switching convincingly between different characters, but here we saw Radha imagining Krishna imagining Radha. There were two Radhas on stage - the one that was the protagonist, and the one that was the product of Krishna’s imagination, who was actually a product of Radha’s imagination…Perhaps such a feat can only be achieved by the dancer who is known for frequently disappearing behind her characters, but hopefully the stage has now been opened up for more exciting levels of nuance that the vocabulary of Bharatanatyam can clearly accommodate.
[Photo credit: Rama Vaidyanathan]