Entanglements of Brass and Thread and Skin
I love the sound of ghungroo—brass dancing bells, strung onto a braided rope to be tied around your legs, just above your ankles. Those two hundred bells make such a joyous sound. I fell in love with their sound as I would walk up the stairs to the dance studio in Ottawa where I began learning kathak.
I was then beginning my Master’s degree, and feeling increasingly alienated in my city and at school. This isn’t to say I haven’t made lasting friendships from my time in Ottawa or during my masters. The exhaustion of feeling continually othered; however, and the pressure of having to repeatedly offer explanations for my topic of research, my history, and my experiences took its toll. The sound of ghungroo filling the studio lobby above Rideau Street was an annunciation of a space where my body needed no explanation, but could take up space on its own terms.
Most of my childhood was spent in Ottawa. I am not tall by North American standards—I barely hit five feet—but I felt small. Not just short. I recently moved back to Ottawa from Bangalore, and I can feel my spine working against that feeling again. As the layers of sweaters and scarves begin to take their place on my body again, and I slip back into old routines, I am trying desperately to resist that smallness, and hold on to the strength my spine discovered over the three years I spent away.
Shortly after I had settled into life in Bangalore, I started looking for a kathak class to join. What had begun as a way to stay fit and ‘rediscover my roots,’ to fulfill that diasporic cliche, had evolved into an expression of empowerment for me - and an area of academic study. I couldn’t give it up; and what better opportunity to further my training than while in India? Despite being in the South India (kathak grew out of northern South Asian cultures), there were enough classes scattered across the city. The first few I tried out were either too far or not to my liking—too filmy or too centered around performances. However, I found a class I liked not too far from my flat, at least by Bangalore standards, and after a trial class I quickly joined.
What followed over the next three years is difficult to put into words. My class of some eleven women, ranging in age from our early teens to our fifties, along with our teacher, became entangled in a quiet but deeply felt community of love. What is most fascinating to me is that much of this was unspoken. It was embodied. Long before I could even articulate the thought that I cared for these women, my body had learned to love them, to read them, to know when something was wrong, when they were stressed or upset. On bad days, I would look forward to dance class less for the dancing than for the comfort that these women gave me with just their presence. Far more than a stress-releasing workout, moving with them, synchronizing our bodies to the same bols and taals was a reassurance of our deeply embodied friendships. The space we occupied twice a week was shaped by a generosity and kindness that was transferred body to body as we moved through space. There is so much I still don’t know about these women and their lives, and yet I know them intimately. They are family.
As we danced, we learned to make space for each other, continually trading places, creating and breaking formations, ensuring we were visible to an audience (our teacher, the streetlights outside, the neighbour’s balcony, etc.) We never competed for space at the front during class or a performance, nor for more attention from our teacher. We privileged instead the cohesion of the group, ensuring we could all be seen, felt, and our pounding feet heard.
As with most forms, kathak changes slightly from teacher to teacher, region to region, gharana to gharana. In Ottawa, I was taught basic tatkar/footwork as (right) heel, flat, flat, (left) heel. In Bangalore, my teacher insisted every beat was flat: right, left, right, left, left, right, left, right - ta thei thei tat, aa thei thei tat. With the heel technique, the first beats following the heel (one, five, nine and thirteen in a sixteen-beat cycle) come down harder and louder as the ball of your foot hits the floor - a beautiful, assertive, clear smack. The flat technique demands that each beat obtains this sound without being facilitated by the slightly raised foot in the heel technique. It also allows you to become slightly more rooted. The sound of twelve pairs of feet pounding out each beat evenly, though, is fantastic. That pounding was audible from the alley outside our second story classroom, over the din of the adjoining main street.
To be clear, this was not a radical space in the usual sense of the phrase, particularly in socio-economic terms. My class, and most others in the school, were largely comprised of upper caste and middle or upper-middle class girls and women. Though this is something my teacher is actively seeking to change, and with some small but significant successes, my dance family remains more or less typical in its composition.
Yet I learned so much from these women, and from the open, safe space we shared. Together, we created a community we could experiment in, jump, run, roll, rage, laugh, and cry in. And talk. Listen. Share. We came from a range of experiences, backgrounds, lifepaths: some of us were just starting, some were well established, and some struggling to make sense. It was with these women that, for the first time, I was able to release a grief I did not know I carried. With them, I was able to mourn for my childhood, for the girl who moved constantly between Canada and India, for whom ‘home’ could not be singular or whole or understandable; torn and tugged between comfort and roots; for whom identity had no clear shape, with a body always out of place, and always so small.
As we began to discuss the outside world in our classroom, the gendered world we lived in, the kinds of discussions we shared were unlike those I have experienced in any other setting. It felt to me that the bond our bodies shared shaped those conversations. There were disagreements, certainly, but no anger, and no competition to speak. Rather, each viewpoint was allowed a life in the conversation, to exist alongside others. From these women I also began to see the range of resistances to patriarchy across generations: see where compromises were made, boundaries were shifted, and where anger raged, and walls were brought down. Intersectional feminism must begin with listening.
Over time, our studio also became a place where I listened and learned to examine my own privilege as a woman raised primarily in Canada. Though of course there were some overlaps in experience, listening to these women, I began to understand the nature of (particularly of upper caste/middling class) India’s brand of patriarchy in a way I did not have access to in Canada. That I did not have access to at my place of work either. My most burning experiences of discrimination and exclusion, and many of the references I brought to conversations on those topics, were racial. Though my skin no longer set me apart as other in Bangalore, I carried my race with me into that dance classroom, though it could not be read by my dance family. It remains part of how I define myself, and my dancing body.
It took me months just to unlearn the heel technique. Today I am still pushing myself to stamp out each beat evenly, and clearly. A week ago—the day the tornado hit Ottawa - I went to my first class back in Ottawa. As usual, the class began with footwork. Heel, flat, flat, heel. I could not bring myself to use my heels, though - to give up those four more stamps. More than the sound of ghungroo, now, I love that sound. It is powerful, confident, and commanding. The taal does not dictate the dancer’s movements, but the dancer moves across the taal, riding it, feet first.
These days I have been practicing on my own, trying to craft my own practice of riyaz. It’s difficult work, and can be quite isolating, much like writing. Likewise, it can also be very fulfilling. My body, however, misses the presence of my sisters, and the labour of their bodies pounding the floor beneath them alongside mine. I long to dance beside them and be connected to them without speech or text, and surround my body with the embrace of solidarity I feel when I move with them
Arpita is currently a PhD student at York University. Her research builds off of my background as a kathak dancer and a public historian to ask if 'classical' kathak can be opened up to make visible the absences that foreground its practice and performance today. Alongside Sinead Cox, Arpita also co-directs Staging Our Histories, a not-for-profit organisation that acts as a platform for performing artists whose work explores history, memory, and the past. With Mridula Rao, Priyanka Chandrashekar, and Sammitha Sreevathsa, she also helps run "Speaking Sakhi," an online space invested in fostering conversations between artists about the politics, possibilities, and pedagogy of classical dance in India. Some of her writing has been published in Art India Magazine, Intermission, kaur.space, and Rungh.