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Kapila Vatsyayan
Long ago, I met briefly in Stockholm with Mrs Kapila Vatsyayan. It was
immediately clear that this lady was a person of deep knowledge, highly
refined culture and the impressing capacity to communicate both with ease.
When later reading her writings, I was equally struck by her clearness in mind
and the rare and specific beauty in her writing.
A person from the Western world easily feel helpless in front of the Indian
culture and its performing arts. We are looking for story lines and characters to
identify with, and we easily get suspicious when feeling lost in the fogs of
spiritualism and religion. Here, the guidance of Kapila Vatsyayan is firm and
distinct and miraculously combine a wide perspective, a historical one as well
as a philosofical and political with the microcosmic notes on gestures and
movements, masks and coulors, rythm and sound. She introduces the ignorant
reader with great efficiancy:
”A mention of the performing arts of India immediately bring to one’s mind the
single-bodied and many-armed image of Durga, or Shiva in his form as
Nataraja, ever destroying, ever creating new forms of the dance Tandava.
These symbols in plastic form suggest at one level the unified equilibrium, the
still-centre, and at other, the continual play of ‘energy’ and rythm in plural
forms. The two aspects are interconnected and mutually dependent.”
(Introduction, Traditional Indian Theatre, multiple forms)
The challenge to the Western reader is a fact. Where we are trained to analyse
through distinctions, differences and trying to overlook by organising our
thinking into disciplines, sorting even the arts into boxes labelled theatre,
dance, music and image/scenography separately, the Indian tradtition invites
us to look for other ways of understanding the arts.
In fact, understanding early western modernism as well as post modern styles
and even post postmodern performing arts is helped or guided by the ways a
scholar like Kapila Vatsyayan has been working. Typical enough, her writings in
the 70’s and 80’s grew essential to students and scholars in the Western world
in a time when the Beatles approached the Indian raga and distant cultures
came close through the opinions against colonialism and post-colonial atitudes
as the US war in Vietnam.
It might sound bizarr, but it is through studies on Indian performing arts that
I learned how impossible the separation between dance and dramatic theatre
is. In studies in kathakali and its variations, I learned how the dramatic
expression is within the movement, and it made me turn back to the European
theatre with a new look on European history of the stages, where, in fact
theatre, dance and music was inseparable until the middle of the 19th century.
A divorce took place between theatre and dance for some time, but the artists
of modernism longed back to the great possiblities of cross-over-forms.
Time in the sense of continuity and diversity in the sense of multi-layers are
Indian classical thinking, but also highly contemporary. You will find it in
contempoary butoh dance from Japan as well as in Bollywood film, or yet
another remake of Hamlet. The notion of ”time” on stage, time in re-telling
both as a structure and as counting minutes and seconds open doors to the
contemporary performing arts as well as music videos of the so called MTVgeneration - already getting grey hair. Time when shown on a stage can be
perceived as re-make of the time already passed, or in Indian classical dance
as an elastic material, or as Kapila Vatsyayan puts it as a ”kinetic re-living of
the frozen moment”. The Indian dramatic dance-theatre could easily focus on a
time period, freeze it and make it as large as is interesting for the
interpretation. A moment could last for hours, and it is possible to move freely
within the story telling, go back and forth in a way that is as original as
contemporary.
Europeans and Americans have repeatidely searched among Asian traditions
looking for inspiration, ideas, material, forms, following an old pattern of
importation of the treasures from the far East. Orientalism and exotism has
flavoured the arts of the western world through centuries and it has to be
noted in the writings of Kapila Vatsyayan that her analysis is cristal clear
concerning colonialism, being colonialized and living in a post colonial era. She
puts the colonial time into her vast scheme of multiple layers and the fact that
there is not one tradition but traditions in India - which goes for any area of
the globe.
” When India became a colony, the process of mutual influence and
acculturation continued: while on the one hand, India was being politically
conquered, its culture, or at least a curiosity for it, was also makng inroads
into the minds of the adminstrators and organizers representing the rulers.
Many civil servants who came to India were brought up in the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century liberal-arts tradition of Europe; a spirit of inquiry and
desire for intellectual adventure was engrained.” But she continues to point out
that this ”must be understood in the proper perspective”, that is the English
colonial power founded a new educational system and ”by the time India
attained political independance, there was a very definite dichotomy between
the institutions of traditional culture ....and the institutions of education.”
(Some aspects of cultural policies in India, Unesco 1972)
In this way Kapila Vatsyayan shows elegantly that despite that all Indians were
forced to accept a foreign system of education, the culture in it self contiuned
it’s life and formed a solid base for the new independet Indian nation. Diversity
and multi-layer was all the time a principle of understanding, which served as
a resistance of mind and a reservoir tank for times to come.
In the decades ot the 20th century when globalisation and multi-culturalism
was highly influential on the stages of the western world her clear analysis and
insightful understanding of the Indian tradition enlighted the way to true
exchange avoiding ”cultural tourism”.
The continuity of the Indian philosophy makes the notions of classic and
modern melt together. It creates a perspective of very long lines, and of
something very precious in our time: tolerance. When desicribing the many
layers of Indian culture Kapila Vatsyayan does not structure hierarchies, she
puts folklore and popular tradtions a long elaborate and refined forms and
discuss cultural variations and regional traditions with the same energy and
values. Tolerance and equality, freedom and colourful multitude are values
between the lines of the many books and studies of Kapila Vatsyayan.
The Thalia prize of IATC is a young one, and we would like it to be given to
someone who made a change to us, the critics. Someone who made critics or
theatre goers in the world learn something new and guide us all to a better
understanding of the performing arts, their tradition and to what extent they
are parts of global exchange and patterns. Indeed, Kapila Vatsyayan made
such a change. Her importance in India is deep and wide, but to the world
outside the subcontinent she has described the richness of her tradition in such
a precise way that it put our own tradition in a new context. To be able to
present her as our forth Thalia prize laureate is a great joy and a true proof of
the frutifulness in a global work.
Margareta Sörenson