Think Indian dance, and one coherent image of its antecedents in sculpture is the Harappan “dancing girl”. One arm resting on her hip, she confronts you, sparks of impudence inscribed on every inch of her person. Found in Mohenjodaro and dating back to over 4,500 years, she is but a tiny bronze statuette the length of one’s palm.
Many girls train in classical dance at some point in their childhoods. One hears murmurs about men not being suited to dance or dance styles; it is seemingly more plausible for a woman to take to dance. It is this implicit acceptance that should bring us to question the order of things even more. That she was “born to dance” leaves a lot to the imagination. What are the paths that lead women to dance?

Narthaki Nataraj, a disciple of Tanjore K.P. Kittappa Pillai, is a popular face on the Chennai dance scene. Nothing perceptibly distinguishes her from her peers. However, as a transgender woman, Nataraj’s struggle to be recognised as a female preceded her struggle for recognition as a dancer. “My journey was a very difficult one, because I was born in the third gender. When I realised my femininity, I started breathing dance. When I felt the dance inside, I became a woman. I started working in the touring theatres of Madurai villages, and learnt by watching Tamil film actors like Vyjayanthimala, Padmini, Kamala and Jayalalitha. I would perform in school festivals and village temples. After seeing my performances, people would often ask me who my guru was. This made me feel the need for formal training. I trained under Tanjore K.P. Kittappa Pillai in a gurukul atmosphere for 14 years. He made me specialise in the Tanjore nayaki bhava tradition; thus, for me, femininity and dance have always been inseparable,” she recalls.
Tamil writer and independent researcher C.S. Lakshmi (Ambai) remarks that “born to dance” is a phrase mostly used after the dancer has become successful. Girls take up dance for several reasons.
Talking of her own dalliance with dance, she recalls, “I had a beautiful cousin who learnt dance because it was the thing to do. My mother thought I should learn too, as I was not considered beautiful and she wanted to tell people that I could dance too. But I loved it and it made me what I am.”
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues that the social presence of a woman is different from that of a man. He writes, “A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.”
In critiques of what a female classical dancer does on stage, aharya (costume and make-up) is always given great importance. She is not judged by physicality alone; extraneous elements constitute and frame her physicality. In contrast, one is rather unlikely to hear that the male dancer’s shoddily tied dhoti, hampered the reception of the dance.
Chhatisgarh-based Teejan Bai is an exponent of Pandavani, a narrative form of performance based on the epic Mahabharata. She performs the kapalik shaili of Pandavani, where the performer moves about in space and uses the body to express, as opposed to the seated style of performing that most Pandavani women performers adopted. In her teens, when she began to perform Pandavani in this style, she was ostracised by her family and community. Now, Teejan Bai’s name is synonymous with Pandavani, and she truly made it on her own.
In excerpts from her book Seeing Like a Feminist on Kafila, feminist scholar and political theorist Nivedita Menon is angered by the suggestion that a woman’s surname is only her father’s, after all. She challenges the assumption that a man’s natal surname remains his own, while the woman surname “belongs” to her father. Perhaps there are interesting parallels between the conundrum of surnames and the trend in some classical dances, which see a line of men as gurus, who pass on the form, and women, as performers, who perpetuate it in its present.
Yet, this is changing, as the question of livelihood becomes a better-voiced concern. A generation earlier, it may have been less tenuous to concur that some women would choose marriage, which gave them, in certain cases, a degree of freedom to pursue their interests, or “hobbies”. This is not to say that they were less driven than young women dancers today, who must make their talents work for them as much as the next man on the scene.