Bharata natyam, a classical South Asian storytelling dance, exemplifies a mostly elite representation of Indian culture on stages throughout the world today. Beginning in the 1930s, the traditionally Hindu art form and its hereditary exponents were caught up in a complex “crisis of representation” of Indian nationalist causes and values espoused by Western social and religious organizations, as the dance shifted from one performed by professional, hereditary artists to a predominantly institutionalized “pure, ancient, textually-based reconstruction” (p. 104). While explicitly not a history of bharata natyam (p. xviii), Balasarawati: Her Art and Life offers a compelling and accessible historical biography of a key figure at the center of an ongoing debate centered on the question of who represents bharata natyam. While this book serves as an important corrective to the absence of a complete narrative of the most famous hereditary dancer to perform during the twentieth century, Knight deftly offers a more intriguing hypothesis: “It is how dancing is done that is a more suitable basis for distinction between hereditary and institutional dance than what the content is or who performs the dance” (p. 103).
The author has unique insider/outsider standing as a member of Balasaraswati's artistic and social family through both musical training and marriage, allowing him to provide a rare glimpse into Balasaraswati's private life. Knight successfully integrates mostly never before seen materials housed in the family archives to produce an invaluable oral history set against a kaleidoscope of appropriate, even if at times over-simplified, historical and social frameworks. While other works examine the political, social, and economic forces at work in the shaping of bharata natyam with more scholarly complexity, the focus here is on the people who shaped Balasaraswati's life and career, such as her “first and only guru” Kandappa Pillai (p. 49), and in turn those with whom Balasaraswati collaborated over the years in India and abroad, from Uday Shankar to Martha Graham. The inclusion of impressions of personal experiences such as Balasaraswati's arangetram (debut recital) (pp. 55–56), her devotion to Devi Karumari Amman (p. 133), health issues, and daughter Lakshmi's late professional training, as she absorbed Balasaraswati's “atma,” or self, into her heart (pp. 201–204) provide a humanizing picture of what has been previously misunderstood or fragmented in understanding.
This work is accessible to non-specialists because of its narrative approach and the use of a minimum of technical terms; at the same time, historians of Asian post-colonial history, performance studies, dance, ethnomusicology, and globalization studies will benefit from the content and scope of this volume. One of Knight's most important contributions is his re-positioning of music at the center of hereditary family performing arts traditions. As inheritors of three prominent lineages of Carnatic music (p. 35), Balasaraswati and members of her extended family were musicians first. The inseparable nature of music and dance vividly shows itself throughout, as exemplified by a discussion about the ways in which the introduction of kritis, a devotional music genre, into the repertoire of bharata natyam created difficulties in the layering of abhinaya, or expressional gesture sequences (p. 119).
Knight also provides a refreshing rebuttal to a common depiction of hereditary artistic processes as stagnant in opposition to reformers who came in to “rescue” the tradition by making improvements. Instead, the author draws attention to the dynamic qualities and integrity of self-determination in maintaining a living art form that was certainly not dead in the early twentieth-century, regardless of reports to the contrary (pp. 23, 67). Balasaraswati's guru, Kandappa Pillai, made several modifications to the dance program connected to instrumentation, use of female singers, and seating of the orchestra that “predated later efforts by the nontraditional community to ‘save’” the arts (pp. 71–74). The “capacity for adaptation, and the comfort with inclusion and modification of material used for performance” (p. 98) is consistently and energetically demonstrated throughout the book in the direct correlation between Balasaraswati's artistic processes and her upbringing in a home with an influx of visiting artists, her collaborative conversations with Hindustani musicians and kathak dancers while on tour, and her later work with American scholars and modern dancers.
In this sensitive portrayal, Knight furthers an understanding of how artistic hereditary processes were experienced within Balasaraswati's greater extended family in the midst of great, often devastating, social changes. The author may be faulted for at times over-utilizing admiring, even idolizing reviews. Further, the use of the term bharata natyam to refer to the dance style before the word was coined in the 1930s is also jarring at times, but may have been an editorial choice to maintain consistency. These minor issues do not belie the worth of Balasaraswati as a welcome addition to a crucial growing body of work on the multiple voices and experiences involved at this watershed moment in the 20th century history of South Asian arts.
