Dance Images in Temples of Mainland Southeast Asia ... - Repository

een interpreted to indicate that the fi gure is actually a dancer and, moreover, that the dance
seems to be related to later Indian classical dance styles (Vatsyayan 1977a, 271). Khanna (1999,
42) has even seen similarities between this ancient fi gurine and a performer of kathak, a dance
form developed during the Mughal period in the 16 th century.
The movements and standing poses of these early statuettes are, no doubt, suggestive of
later developments of Indian dance and visual arts. There is, however, a considerable gap from
c. 1500 BC to c. 400 BC, during which the only references to dance can be traced in the Vedic and
later Buddhist and Jain literature, but no actual dance images are known (Vatsyayan 1977a).
The earliest actual dance scenes, i.e. portrayals of dance performances accompanied by
musicians, can be found in the second century BC bas-reliefs in the Udyagiri and Khandagiri
caves in Orissa, in eastern India. Approximately during the same time and somewhat later, in
the early Kushana period Buddhist stupas at Bharhut and Sanchi, as well as in a Satavahana-
Ikshvaku period stupa at Amaravati, the sculptor’s vocabulary expanded to include more and
more poses and gestures, which bear clear resemblances to those described in the Natyashastra.
They include the very common outward-fl exed position of the knees ( kshipta) [2/3], variations
of poses indicating fl ying, and a pose depicting intertwining the tree, typical of the tree-nymphs
of early Indian sculpture. The open-leg position and fl ying poses found their way to Southeast
Asia [2/20, 5/8, 5/9].
In India the whole phenomenon of the interrelation of dance and the visual arts, and indeed
of other art forms as well, is a most crucial one. The question is not merely of borrowing and
exchanging materials and ideas from one art form to another. In Indian thought dance, and all
art, is basically a religious sacrifi ce ( yajna). Art is also regarded as a form of yoga and a discipline
( sadhana). Through the creation of a work of art the artist/craftsman strives to evoke a state of
pure joy or bliss ( ananda).
The human body was seen as a vehicle of worship and thus dance becomes an act of invoking
the divine. During the period c. BC 200–AD 200, as stated before, the complicated techniques
of dance, as well as the rasa system, were codifi ed in the Natyasashtra. It is signifi cant that in
the Indian tradition it is dance, a temporal and corporal form of art, which is regarded as the
ascendant art form. It set the measure for other forms of art, since they adopted the theory of
bhava and rasa from the tradition of the Natyashastra.
Dance has been so predominant in its position that some textual sources stress that
sculptors and painters cannot succeed in their work without a basic knowledge of it (Guy 1997,
34). The Natyashastra sets the physical and dramatic tools for evoking the rasa or the emotional
state appropriate to worship. On the other hand, the Shilpashastra, manual of iconography
and sculpture was intended to help in producing corresponding fi gurative representations 9 .
Consequently the principles of movement, however complicated they may be, are the same for
both a dancer and a sculptor. The fi nal goal of this intricate science of movements, measurements,
poses, gestures etc. is to create the rasa, the actual object of presentation, and fi nally, to reach
even further in evoking the state in which transcendental bliss can be experienced.
All the three Indian religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism share the same theoretical
basis for dance and the visual arts. And so the dance techniques, in spite of their local stylistic
variations, bear strong similarities in all of these three traditions. Consequently, their imagery
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