My personal relationship with Kapila Vatsyayan, beloved czarina of Indian culture and the performing arts, who passed away last week, goes back to the1990s when I was conducting my doctoral research in India. Vatsyayan was revered as a global Indian who had placed Indian performing arts on the world map.
Her passing ends an era of scholarship in the arts, which Vatsyayan realised by working as a cultural minister, administrator, curator, institution builder and scholar. For her multifaceted contribution to the arts, Vatsyayan was honoured with numerous national awards. Internationally, she received the Rockefeller award, Congress on Dance Research award, the Thalia prize and many more. A towering personality, a great orator, and a legend in her lifetime, Vatsyayan leaves behind a huge void and a monumental cultural legacy which I hope will be reclaimed in the years to come.
Returning after her studies to India, Vatsyayan became involved in the post-Independence nation-building initiatives of the 1950s. Her cultural vision was unique because it was rooted in the cultural ethos and plurality of Indian traditions but was also international and modern at the same time. We can see this double commitment in the numerous institutions that Vatsyayan established and her pioneering performing arts scholarship which she crafted in the 1960s and 1970s.
An institution builder
As an institution builder, Vatsyayan worked closely with Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, and translated Nehrus vision of Unity in Diversity into reality. Her vision is enshrined in the cultural vision of the three national Akademis and the Centre for Cultural Resources and Training, which she helped conceptualise. In 1972, eight years after Nehrus passing, Vatsyayan published Some Aspects of Cultural Policy in India, which described the many cultural institutions that Nehru and Maulana Azad had envisioned for the preservation and modernisation of the arts. This book is used as a textbook for policy studies in India and abroad. After Indira Gandhis assassination in 1984, Vatsyayan conceived the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), as a tribute. All the cultural institutions that Vatsyayan helped establish in the decolonial period of the 1950s were modern, national and international in vision but rooted in the ethos of Indian culture and civilisation.
As a scholar, Vatsyayan authored over 20 books and published more than 200 research papers. I see Vatsyayans three early books, Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts (1968), Indian Classical Dance (1974) and Traditions of Indian Folk Dance (1976), as representing a trilogy of intertwined texts that challenged the Orientalist conceptions of Indian arts. Vatsyayan not only rejected this scholarship but created a new, interdisciplinary field of arts scholarship by recontextualizing Indian performing arts within the world view of Indian culture, classical literatures, ancient texts, archaeology, sculpture, painting and civilisation.
Linking traditions
While Vatsyayan identified common themes, principles and techniques that linked the classical with the folk and modern traditions of India, she clarified that this cultural continuum has been maintained through guru-sishya systems of transmission which stand at the heart of Indias classical and folk arts production. In her role as vice-president of the Indian Council for Cultural Affairs, Vatsyayan explained to the world that the guru-sishya concept of living tradition is unique to India. She presented eminent artiste T. Balasaraswati (1918-1984) as a singular embodiment of this living tradition, with a family lineage going back seven generations.
When second-generation Indian classical dancers migrated to the US and UK in the 1980s, they packed Vatsyayans three texts into their suitcases and used these creatively to transmit Indian traditions within guru-sishya frameworks in the Little India schools they established around the world. Vatsyayans trilogy thus served as bridging texts linking global cultural production with the local and enabled the globalization of Indias classical dance traditions.
I had the honour of spending many hours in conversation with Vatsyayan both in India and abroad. On one occasion, I recall asking Vatsyayan to identify the key differences between Orientalist and Indian nationalist dance scholarship. Vatsyayan shook her head firmly and told me to figure this out myself! In another context, when we were talking about the future of Indian dance scholarship, she explained that we are all Macaulays children and must feel free to engage the cultural history of Indian performing arts from diverse viewpoints. I was struck by her generous response and realised in that moment that Vatsyayan was not just a daunting scholar of Indian tradition, but also an anti-colonial Indian, imbued with the deep passion to counter Macaulays pejorative vision of Indian culture and replace it with the real cultural history of India as it is embodied in the complex plurality of Indias culture and her parampara traditions.
Although Vatsyayans passing represents the ending of a foundational moment in world dance history and cultural policy, I am hopeful that her global Indian arts legacy will abide as living memory and remind us of the singular modernity, plurality and globality of Indian performing arts.
The writer is the convener of the post-graduate
South Asian Dance Studies Programme
at Roehampton University, London.read more
Kapila Vatsyayan’s global vision
