Caribbean Beat — November/December 2021 (#167)

Originating in south India almost two thousand years ago, Bharatanatyam,
a major classical dance form, is little known in Trinidad, where most Indian
cultural traditions are rooted in the north of the subcontinent. Alana Rajah has
set out to change that. Trained at the Kalakshetra school in Chennai, her goal
is to establish Bharatanatyam in her home country — adapting and improvising
as needed. Sharda Patasar learns more
We are meeting at noon. It’s because she
begins teaching some days at 7 am, and
finishes close to lunchtime. But even
before that, she does her own training
online with her teachers from India at
4.30 am.
“It takes a toll, you know,” says Alana Rajah, when in our
warmup conversation I mention that I am planning on taking a
course that will begin at 4 am, five days a week. “That was how
I got injured. At 4.30 in the morning, my body is still waking
up here, while they [in India] are nine and a half hours ahead.
Nowadays I am constantly tired.”
Rajah’s fatigue is only natural. She has been on this schedule
for the past year. 4.30 am daily online training — the COVID-19
pandemic has made travel to India impossible — 7 am departure
for work, 5 pm return home to begin teaching her own dance
students.
“When I told my family that I was going to pursue dance, they
very honestly told me that it would be a very difficult life,” she
recalls. “My adulthood would be quite a strain, because dance
does not have that safety net, that financial cushion . . . I valued
their opinion, and they were very much correct,” she says, laughing,
“but I didn’t feel bad about it. I always felt that I was strong
enough to work as well as pursue my career as a teacher and
performer. I prepared myself mentally to work a full-time job
and come home to work another full-time job, because it isn’t
something that we as artists can control. Even though we are
born with a passion, or a talent, or the art within us, it’s a societal
fact that it is an industry that does not afford you a luxurious
lifestyle.”
Rajah’s chosen artform is Bharatanatyam, one of the oldest
classical dance forms of India, and perhaps one of the most
physically demanding. “The physical body lends itself to the
practical aspect,” she explains. “We have yoga and kalari. Those
are two things you learn first to build leg strength to help your
body become accustomed to the geometric lines or patterns that
make up the style of Bharatanatyam.”
At the Adavallan Art Academy, which she established with
the vision of creating her own dance school in Trinidad, Rajah
does not sacrifice this aspect of her students’ dance training.
Diet and fitness are essential disciplines, even for students
as young as five years old. “I feel that discipline is something
that does not hold true to Caribbean culture or Trinidadian
culture,” she says. “It’s something we don’t have as a people. It’s
something we don’t see even in the highest of positions, from
government to public service to customer service. So, for me, it
was my personal goal to inject that into the society.”
And how does she contextualise herself as a Bharatanatyam
performer in Trinidad, where up to today Indian arts are seen
as rooted in India rather than Trinidad? “It’s unfortunate,” says
Rajah. “All of us exist within the same space, and there are things
that lend to the beauty of our culture, our cultural identity, and
Indians make up a large portion of that population.”
Perceptions of artforms like Bharatanatyam are slowly
changing, at least in relation to the outside world. Social
media has been instrumental in the growing awareness of the
Caribbean Indian diaspora and its artists. In 2020, at the annual
South African Indian Dance Alliance’s Global Dance Conference,
participants from Guyana and Trinidad were invited for the
first time, to work with other dancers and share experiences as
artists of the Indian diaspora. “We are becoming more embraced
and recognised,” says Rajah. “Because even for India, it took a
long time for them to appreciate dancers of the diaspora outside
of India . . . they didn’t understand the history of Indians being
taken from India and settling across these various countries and
islands. That is a concept that is now settling within their minds.
And that appreciation is growing, which I am so grateful for.”
In Trinidad and Tobago, before Rajah’s emergence, there had
been only one practitioner of Bharatanatyam dance. Under the
tutelage of Rajkumar Krishna Persad at the Trinidad School
of Indian Dance, a basic foundation was enough to take Rajah on
a quest to deepen her knowledge of an artform that dates back
approximately two thousand years.
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