Tradition · Tamil classical dance form
Bharatanatyam
Also known as Bharatanāṭyam, Bharata Natyam, Bharatnatyam, Sadir, Sadiraattam, Thevarattam
The classical solo dance of Tamil Nadu, performed for Nataraja, built on a fixed torso, bent knees, footwork and a language of hand and eye gestures, with the guru conducting as nattuvanar. Its name is modern: the temple and court dance called Sadir was renamed at a Madras Music Academy meeting in 1932, as revivalists carried it out of the temples. Its concert order was fixed by the Thanjavur Quartet, and its postures are carved at Thanjavur and Chidambaram.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
The upper corridor of the Thanjavur Brihadishvara carries 81 of the 108 karana postures, with 27 blocks left blank for reasons no one knows, and the temple's inscriptions list its dance gurus and dancing girls by name and wage.
Claims of unbroken descent from the Natya Shastra and from an ancient devadasi culture are disputed; Davesh Soneji dates courtesan dancing to the Nayaka period of the late sixteenth or seventeenth century. The revival is argued over too, since it moved the form from traditionally performing communities to middle- and upper-class women.
Connections (5)
- Teaching lineageThanjavur Quartet
The Thanjavur Quartet developed the basic structure of modern Bharatanatyam by formalising it, at a Maratha court in Thanjavur that patronised classical dance. The shape of a recital, about two hours performed by one dancer who never leaves the stage, with the guru conducting as nattuvanar from among the drums, drone and singer, follows that codification. When revivalists of the 1930s championed the Thanjavur and Pandanallur styles, it was this court repertoire they were carrying onto the concert stage.
- Teaching lineageRukmini Devi Arundale
Rukmini Devi Arundale, with the lawyer E. Krishna Iyer, proposed renaming Sadir as Bharatanatyam in 1932, and she was among the artists, with Balasaraswati and Yamini Krishnamurti, who revived it as a mainstream dance outside the temples. She is credited with developing the Kalakshetra style and with shifting the practice towards middle- and upper-class women. That shift is why the revival is still argued over, read both as a reclamation of the art and as its moralising.
- Associated withChidambaram
Bharatanatyam is danced for Nataraja, Shiva as lord of dance, and the Nataraja temple at Chidambaram illustrates its vocabulary in stone. The southern gateway, of about the twelfth century, carries the 108 karanas, the dance poses described in the Natya Shastra. When the dance was standardised in the twentieth century, books on it were based on historical texts such as the Natya Shastra, so the gateway and the revived concert form look back to the same source.
- Associated withThanjavur Brihadishvara
The Brihadishvara at Thanjavur has been a centre for dance since about 1000 CE. An inscription there lists over six hundred temple staff by name, role and wage, among them dance gurus and dancing girls paid in parcels of land, and the upper corridor carries 81 of the 108 karana postures, with 27 blocks left blank. For the temple's thousandth anniversary a thousand dancers from India and abroad performed together there in a Bharatanatyam Yajna led by Padma Subrahmanyam.
- Institutionalised atThe Music Academy, Madras
The name Bharatanatyam was proposed in 1932 by E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi Arundale at a meeting of the Madras Music Academy, to give the dance then called Sadiraattam a measure of respect. The renaming came out of the revival that answered the anti-dance campaign begun in 1892. Krishna Iyer, a lawyer who had learned from traditional Sadir practitioners, asked why prostitution should need years of training in the performing arts, and argued that killing an art ended no social evil.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Bharatanatyam" and "Brihadisvara Temple". Farley Richmond, Darius Swann & Phillip Zarrilli, Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance (1993).
Open Bharatanatyam in the repository →