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long process of study that ends with a solo début
concert, an arengetram, involves large fees
and expenses for costumes. Ranee’s father,
the well-known entomologist Dr. T.N.
Ananthakrishnan, wanted to save the money
and put it toward her dowry.
“In those days,” Ranee says, “in my
family it was not considered proper
for a woman to dance onstage.”
In ancient Hindu temples, female dancers
spoke directly and personally to the gods—who
also danced—through a highly coded gestural
language. Perhaps this helps to explain the
vibrant tensions that animate a form where the
dancing body can be both a zone of sensual
experience and a vehicle of worship. Unlike
the dichotomy between body and soul, sacred
and secular, flesh and the spirit often found in
Western culture, Hindu philosophy embraces
a range of what has traditionally been seen
in the West as conflicting and contradictory
points of view.
Audiences new to Bharatanatyam are often
seduced by the fluidity with which the dancers
transform themselves from one deity, character,
or emotional state into another. It is the very
nature of the technique that informs this kind
of protean presence. The dancers embroider
rhythmic strands through slapping feet,
pliant torsos, highly articulated hands, arms,
even faces (there is a whole vocabulary of
gestures for the eyes alone). And each part of
the body is moving in a different rhythm, with
a different quality.
Ragamala’s dancers alter the very
textures of their bodies as they shift registers
from fierce to fragile, stately to ebullient,
spiritual to erotic. While the Hindu legends
and the gestures, or hastas, that are used
to illustrate them may not be familiar to
contemporary Western audiences, the sense of
one body containing diverse (and often dueling)
obligations and desires most certainly is—as is
the need to reconcile these opposing forces into
a state of harmony.
T T T
There is a saying in India that dancers are not
reincarnated because they live so many lives
onstage. Ranee has also lived her share of varied
and demanding lives offstage. After an arranged
marriage in India in which she was engaged at
17 and married at 20, she faced the situation of
living in a joint family where her in-laws moved
in permanently. “If there is compatibility
between family members, this can be a great way
to live, with relatives who help you out,” she
explains. “But I was not the kind of daughter-inlaw
they wanted—a serious woman who was only