By Donovan Roebert
Having spent more than three years searching out pictorial data for the history of Indian dance, I look back on this period with a delight akin to that of the committed astronomer. What I have uncovered for myself is a sky of historical dance pictures that shine for me like the bodies of a given section of the universal dance cosmos.
The idea is not as fanciful as it may at first seem. The visual history of anything, including the history of Indian dance, travels across space-time towards our perception by means of a certain measure of speed. In cosmological terms it is the speed of light that brings the existence of heavenly bodies to our notice, so that any of the stars that we are able to see are only visible because the light they emanate has finally arrived at the threshold of our vision. Countless numbers of these bodies indeed no longer exist in themselves but still exist for our perception because the lights they emitted aeons ago have reached us only now.
The hundreds of historical pictures that I have searched out have only become visible to me because of the time it has taken, through a process of the interrelationship between search and availability, for them to become revealed to my sight. In this sense, like the stars and planets. their gradually revealed visibility in ever-increasing numbers places them in an historical sky in which each is in some way related to the other – like galactic bodies.
What this means in the first place is that the history of Indian dance, searched out visual item by visual item, begins to assemble itself in a way that, though it is past, is at the same time as present as the stars in the firmament. Each star or planet or moon or sun radiates its contemporaneous visibility at one and the same time, even though one knows that they are not of simultaneous occurrence in the course of the history itself. In the second place, because the pictorial items, despite their disparate occurrence in history, are now all shining in the sky at one and the same time, a sense arises of their systematic and ordered nature. One sees how the various individual items and clusters of items are related in time and space one to the other and all together. One sees the spectacle of the historical dance of Indian dance, and one sees it in the now. The history becomes alive and pulsating with the arrived light of its hundreds of visual elements shining in a sky that can never be dimmed precisely because those elements have been fixed in a perceptible place and arrayed in an inevitable arrangement.
This was one of reasons why I chose to discover the history of Indian dance in just this way. The other and equally important reason is that I did not want to approach that history in a systematic manner, drawing conclusions about the sky of dance before I had seen, one by one, the bodies whose historical existence has usually only been described and ordered in words. I did not want to be prejudiced as to what I should expect to see with my own eyes and through my own telescope. I wanted to be surprised by each and every new discovery as in a personal journey rather than instructed in advance as to what that journey ought to reveal.
Every picture tells a story, as the old adage goes. And in the world of online research those stories are manifold and complex. Every picture leads to an article or an essay or a book, or even to only a caption at the source. Every picture is charged with and surrounded by a nimbus made up of a complex of grains of information, a verbal, discursive light by which the single item of pictorial data is made to radiate with historical meaning, even while each item at the same time begins to shine its informational light on every other. What is at first fragmented starts to gather itself into a meaningful whole. And this is an exponential process: the more items there are, the more light is individually and collectively radiated, and the more saturated with meaning the discovered whole becomes.
So that what one is eventually brought to see is the history of Indian dance in its metachronic form – the wholeness of the presence of the past that goes beyond the boundaries of its pastness to shimmer with vitality in an ongoing and never-fading presentness – just like the stars in the sky.
What this means is that the study of the history of Indian dance becomes an holistic object of present contemplation. One can contemplate it as one does the night-sky, moving from element to element and from body to body throughout the manifold constellations rescued from death by the working of light and perception on each other. One contemplates a history whose self-revealing patterns and interrelationships are all the more real because all the more visible to the eye.
Then whatever is read about this history emerges from the flattened surface of the verbal and takes on a plasticity of dimension. Individual visual items act to shine forth the living facticity of the facts and resolve themselves into visual types, multiplying and refracting themselves across the spectrum of the anecdotal record. They are more than merely illustrations. They are the visual proofs that bind the historical narrative to themselves as by the force of a kind of historical gravity.
Through this visual-verbal interactive dynamic the history of Indian dance becomes an object not only of knowledge and insight but of sensibility and awe. One looks up at the visible sky and sees how dancers dancing today are emitting their own flickers of light within that vast firmamental whole. They are not separate from the historical past whose visual light has taken a century or more to arrive only this morning at our eyes.
The journey through the galaxy of the pictorial record is a journey of joining the dots until a sense of singless in variegation makes itself apparent. The reading and study to which it naturally leads is endless and open-ended just like the universe itself. One can never say that every star or planet has finally been discovered. There is always one more picture waiting to be found. Travelling at the speed of search and availablity, it could surprise you as early as tomorrow or as late as next year. And when it does, it finds its place within the already discovered whole and shifts the balance of its particular galaxy accordingly.
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Aspects of Pictorial Indian Dance History 