SATTRIYA BEGAN WITH ONLY MALE DANCERS. NOW, THERE ARE WOMEN EXPONENTS TOO. BUT FEW ARE NONASSAMESE
Nestling in the heart of South Delhi is the Srimanta Sankaradeva Bhawan under the Assam Association of Delhi. From its façade, a giant mural of two traditional performers watches over everyone walking through its gates. Snatches of Assamese and beautiful aromas waft up from the kitchen. The tranquillity of the place cuts it off from the bustle outside, making it stand apart like an island — much like the river island of Majuli in Assam, which is synonymous with the dance form celebrated by this institute, Sattriya.
“In keeping with the beautiful philosophy of Srimanta Sankaradeva, we dance and sing… this work is an act of spiritualism, a mission, a thought process, and a journey into discovering the self,” says Bhabananda Barbayan, founder and adhyapak or teacher of Sattriya dance at the institute.
Originating in and deriving its name from the ‘sattras’ or Vaishnavite monasteries of Assam, Sattriya, the dance, was introduced by the 15th century neo-vaishnavite poet-saint Sankaradeva.
As this Vaishnavite Bhakti movement gathered momentum in Assam, the sattras began to be recognised as spiritual, artistic and cultural seats of the state. Today, there are over 900 sattras in Assam, spread across four orders or Sanghatis that emerged after Sankaradeva’s death, amid rifts between disciples vying to succeed him.
Until recently, monks were the sole exponents of the dance, with performances led by a sattradhikari or sattra chief in the prayer hall. It was only in the 1920s that women began to be included, following an initiative by Pitambar Dev Goswami, a significant social reformer of Assam, and sattradhikari of the Garamur Sattra.
Later, the inclusion of women in the performing spaces was given a bigger thrust with Rasheswar Saikia Barbayan, another Sattriya stalwart, setting up the Sangeet Sattra in Guwahati in 1968, to train women and, eventually, take Sattriya out of the sattras. To this day, though, only the male monks are allowed to perform in the prayer hall.
Women are the flagbearers of the dance form on the public stage.
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Although this is a rich living tradition with a history going back 500 years, it was only in the year 2000 that Sattriya was recognised as one of the major traditional, or ‘classical’, dances of India, by the Sangeet Natak Akademi — the apex body for the performing arts in India, under the Centre’s Ministry of Culture.
Of the eight ‘classical’ dances of India, Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kathakali and Manipuri received the titles first, followed by Odissi, Kuchipudi and Mohini Attam. In India, the ideas of what make for a ‘classical’ art form still draw from the Natyashastra, a Sanskrit text believed to have been compiled by Bharata Muni around 200 BCE.
The ancient temple and court dances of India were incorporated into the Natyashastra, and followed its guidelines of Nrittya, Natya, Bhava and Rasa (roughly, Movement, Drama, Emotion and Aesthetic). The intended purpose plays a role too. Dance forms that the Sangeet Natak Akademi recognises as classical are Maargi (ones that show the path), as opposed to desi or folk forms, drawing on conventions of the Natyashastra.
Bharatanatyam got its classical tag first. “This gave it first-mover advantage,” says Arshiya Sethi, a scholar whose research focuses on Sattriya and its politics. “The whole process of nomenclature is a politically ridden process. A name can’t be more politically ridden than the term ‘Bharatanatyam’,” she adds.
In an essay, Odissi exponent and scholar Ananya Chatterjea says not only did “Sadir’s renaming as Bharatanatyam (have) its own symbolic weight”, but because it was the first to claim classical status, “it effectively set a clear model for how ‘classicism’ might be interpreted” with respect to the Indian dances.
There is a lack of understanding of this politics in the dances as we see them today, Sethi adds. “One group that refuses to see it like this is the dancers themselves.”
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It was Maheswar Neog, an eminent Assamese scholar and authority on Sattriya heritage, who first argued for it to be included in the classical pantheon, at a seminar organised by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in Delhi in 1958.
“At the time, Shanti Dev Ghosh of Santiniketan too supported the idea. In fact, he even advanced the proposition that the origin of Manipuri lay in Sattriya dance,” Sethi says in her research. However, Sattriya failed to make the cut; Odissi, Kuchipudi and Mohini Attam raced past it to the finish line. Soon after, an expert committee was set up by the government. The committee included Neog, Sanskrit scholar and musicologist V Raghavan, and Rukmini Devi
Arundale, the legendary exponent of Bharatanatyam.
In 1959, on their recommendation, Sattriya artistes were made eligible for
Sangeet Natak
Akademi awards, but under the ‘other traditional dance forms’ category.
Why it took another 41
reenacted scenes from the life of Krishna.
The dance form is marked by lilting, sprightly movements, “reminiscent of the waves of the Brahmaputra,” says scholar Arshiya Sethi. Instruments like the khol terracotta drum, flute and cymbals accompany a performance. Costumes include the dhoti, chadar and paguri or turban for men, and ghuri or skirt, chadar and kanchi or loincloth for women. Masks and headdresses are also used. Colours were restricted to white, red and gold. In recent years, performers have begun using other vibrant colours on stage as well. years to get the coveted tag “is difficult to explain, because there isn’t any written documentation as to why it happened,” says Anwesa Mahanta, an Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar awardee for Sattriya and currently a resident artiste at Iitguwahati. “A lot of work still needs to be done because most people still don’t know about Sattriya.”
A Google search for Sattriya training institutes in Delhi shows the Assam Association as the only legitimate result. This isn’t the only challenge facing the dance form today. Mahanta attributes the lack of widely accessible literature and scholarship in the Sattriya arts as another reason for its slow growth in popularity.
Because the knowledge was passed on orally from one generation of monks to the next, “Sattriya was in its own zone… We do have shlokas and written theatre traditions by the saint poets, but most of the repertoire is in Assamese or Brajabali, not even Sanskrit. Most research was also done in Assamese. Even now, not much is being done on Sattriya in English,” Mahanta says, adding that she too suffered due to a lack of resources while conducting field work for her research.
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The language barrier and geographic isolation of Assam played important roles in deciding Sattriya’s destiny, as did the politics of the movement. From its inception, the sattras and Sattriya adopted an anti-establishment stance, denouncing the caste system and all animal sacrifice. And then the politics of the state vis-à-vis the Indian state came into play.
Soon after independence, the massive Province of Assam (which also included the princely states of Manipur and Tripura) began to be broken up.
The next few decades saw the riverine state slowly turn into a conflict zone amid the growth of regional militant groups and an influx of migrants from Bangladesh. The political situation in Assam reached its boiling point when the major insurgent group, the United Liberation Front for Asom (ULFA), demanded separation from the Indian state. Soon after, then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi signed the highly contested Assam Accord, in 1985, in which the union government promised to ‘renew their commitment for the speedy all round economic development of Assam’.
“In the accord, the Union government, in a sense, accepted the charge of neglect of Assam,” says the Sattriya scholar Sethi. Thereafter began a rather obvious attempt at corrective federalism, with infrastructure set up, awards instituted and statues installed to reflect the culture of Assam in the state and in the national Capital.
When the Srimanta Sankaradeva Kalakshetra was set up in Guwahati in 1998, it was inaugurated by then President KR Narayanan. Later that year, the iconic Assamese singer-songwriter Bhupen Hazarika was appointed chairperson of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. And then Sattriya was declared a ‘classical’ dance, in November 2000, under the chairmanship of Hazarika, in a general body meeting held in Guwahati — the first held outside Delhi since the Akademi’s birth in 1952.
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Sattriya dancers now had a spot on the national stage, but practitioners continue to struggle to expand its reach. Bhabananda Barbayan trains 35 students at Srimanta Sankaradeva Bhawan in Delhi and another 25 at a centre in Gurugram. Nearly all are Assamese; Bhabananda admits they “need non-assamese students” if the form is to gain a more diverse audience.
Bhabananda, who is from the Uttar Kamalabari Sattra of Assam, trained in the Sattriya arts as a monk, since age three. He eventually stepped out of his monastery to embrace a larger, more public stage, and did a PHD in Sattriya in West Bengal. He travelled abroad for the first time in 2008, to France and Portugal, and staged 36 performances at 18 cultural festivals. “It was a huge success for Sattriya,” he says.
Anwesa Mahanta, the award-winning exponent, blames a lack of government initiative to recognise and harness Assam’s magnificent cultural heritage as cultural diplomacy, or even cultural tourism.
“Not a single fellowship is awarded to practitioners,” she says. “The government remembers the Sattriya dance only when there is a delegation arriving and they want a 15-minutes performance.”
Raju Das, deputy secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi and director of the Sattriya Kendra in Guwahati, says efforts are being made. “We organise festivals outside Assam, at Banaras Hindu University, at Pune University, in Karnataka. Pune now has a course in Sattriya… We are funding research and publications,” he says. He believes maintaining the sanctity of the living tradition is essential to its growth, and the dilution of the form by some artistes, needs to be strictly monitored.