Chapter 10
Conclusion: A History of Kathak

Kathak, the classical dance of North India, is a twentieth-century dance with roots reaching back to at least the thirteenth century. It is a syncretic genre that emerged from the hybrid context of colonialism and achieved legitimacy as a national dance at the same time as India itself achieved independence. The rhythmic repertoire of hereditary male performers, expressive dance-songs of female courtesans, and various North Indian theatre and storytelling traditions were fused together through the national revival to become what we now call kathak dance. Before the twentieth century, there was no dance called kathak. There were communities of performing artists in the nineteenth century known either as Kathaks or by the surname Kathak, but there is not an identifiable dance specifically associated with them. There are a variety of performing arts, some of which are documented as far back as the thirteenth century, that seem to have some connection to today’s kathak, but they are neither homogeneous nor clearly connected to a single group of performers. Certain families from the birādarī or endogamous community of performing artists called the Kathaks, however, emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century as central culture bearers capable of performing and teaching a variety of music and dance repertoire from male, female, rural and court traditions. Certainly some of this material is Hindu and devotional, but there is no evidence that places it in temples as part of Hindu ritual. Yet, the connection of the Kathaks to Vaishnavite storytelling and theatrical practices like Rām Līlā and Rās Līlā allowed an Orientalist history to be constructed that legitimized the new tradition with an invented past linking it to ancient worship.

Kathak dance thus did not begin in the temple, and it cannot be claimed that the Kathaks of today are the descendants of Vedic storytellers. Their ancestors were more probably members of one or more of the hereditary communities of performing artists who sang, danced, acted, played instruments and told stories. As these artists and entertainers migrated to promising centres of patronage they would have adapted their performing arts to the demands of each new context. It is possible that both men and women performed, and although there was most likely some differentiation between male and female repertoire, transgendered performance was common. Evidence of their arts can be found in the treatises and one finds descriptions of footwork, turns and the expressive rendering of kavitā in Sanskrit documents like the thirteenth-century Sagītaratnākara. With the advent of the Mughal Empire, Persian female dancers introduced a slow dance that was performed to a song and used gestures with the veil. By the seventeenth century, one also finds explanations of improvisation in dancing and also graceful dances with expressive postures. One does not, however, find Kathaks, even in Ā’īn-i Akbarī, which lists the names and occupations of performing artists in some detail. Some of the groups in Ā’īn-i Akbarī, however, are Hindu performers who dress up boys as women in order to perform plays about Krishna. This evokes a convincing connection with Rās Līlā, the devotional theatre genre depicting the boyhood of Krishna. Part of the Rās today includes small dance pieces that use movements and bols that are very similar to some kathak movements and bols. Yet other even clearer similarities can be seen between kathak and the dance of courtesans, and still further correspondences appear with the dances of cross-dressers and dancing boys.

This can seem like quite a tangle if one is looking for a single dance or dance style that can be identified as the ancestor of kathak. There was no such dance. Rather, there were a variety of performing arts and styles, executed by a range of hereditary groups in an assortment of contexts. Bhands and Bhagats, Dharis and Dholis, and others whose names are lost performed footwork with ankle bells, engaged in rhythmic play with accompanying percussion, illustrated poetry with mimetic gestures, told stories and presented comic mimicry and other entertaining feats like dancing on plates. They performed in Hindu and Muslim courts, in village squares, at private functions and perhaps even outside temples. They did not occupy a particularly respectable position in society, but could ameliorate their status through patronage, association with a higher status group or by specializing in a particular form that had more importance or substance. In shifting categories, a group could split off from its original community and adopt a new name and identity.

This is the probable origin of the Kathak community. It is impossible to pinpoint exactly when and how the Kathaks emerged, but as there is no sign of them in mid-eighteenth-century documentation yet they are present in travelogues from the early nineteenth century, one can hypothesize that the shift took place through the second half of the eighteenth century. Which group they split off from is equally mysterious, although it is easily argued that the existing hereditary groups were not as discrete and uniform as they are now portrayed. A strong candidate, nevertheless, is the Bhagatiya. In the court of Akbar, the Bhagats produced plays about Krishna with young boys as performers. If one indulges in a related conjecture, that the Ras Dharis who direct today’s Rās Līlā performances descended from the same group, this would not only suggest an explanation for some of the choreographic similarities and but also provide a possible reason why the Kathaks are sometimes said to be related to Ras Dharis. The Bhagats disappear through the nineteenth century as the Kathaks become prominent, yet Wajid ‘Ali Shah identified Bhagats, not Kathaks, as performers at his court.

Part of the process of increased status for hereditary performing groups was likely the removal of their women from the public arena. Yet, as female singing and dancing still formed a significant part of court and private entertainment, the men continued their occupation as accompanists and teachers of the women who did perform, quite possibly learning from the hereditary Muslim musicians also associated with the courts. Thus, by the mid-nineteenth century, one finds both the Kathaks and the Mirasis enumerated in the census reports as musical communities whose women do not perform, but whose men make their living as accompanists to dancing girls. Rather than being a fall from grace – the priestly Kathaks sadly reduced to accompanying prostitutes – this situation is an example of increased status: Kathak women do not perform in public and thus are not prostitutes, which raises the status of the whole community. The Kathaks also gradually adopted higher caste behaviours, first emulating Brahmans and eventually identifying themselves as Brahmans, particularly to imperial census officials and early musicologists.

The choreographic and gestural vocabulary of the hereditary female performing artists, although never called kathak in the contemporary documentation, is clearly preserved in significant parts of the twentieth-century dance. The slow opening items āmad and salāmi are clearly related to the Muslim court context, although perhaps not inarguably associated with women. There are instructions in the Urdu treatises, however, that tell the dancer to keep her ‘fingers, palms, elbows, waist, … [and] chest … moving fluidly’ (Sarmāya-yi Iśrat: 167) and to maintain ‘coordination between hands, feet, neck, eyes, eye-brows, all body parts both internal and external’ (Maūdan al-Mūsīqī: 204). Turn-of-the-century colonial accounts are similar, explaining that in female expressive dance: ‘the body is made to swing to and fro and the hands are clenched’ (Pingle 1989 [1898]: 286). Used in the semi-improvised stream of graceful movements and soft tihā’īs called hāh, this swaying is now known as kasak-masak. One of the most common postures used during hāh and also for marking the end of a short ukā or tihā’ī is the stance documented as the janaśīn ki gat, a stance now explained with connections to Krishna rather than to courtesans. The janaśīn posture along with gestures with the veil or ghūgha and the gliding walk described since the mid-eighteenth century as part of the dance of women can be still found in gat nikās, items danced in the drut section of the twentieth-century kathak solo. Finally, the dance-song humrī, the quintessential item in a awā’if performance, is still danced with mimetic gestures although it is very rare that the kathak dancer will sing.

The mid-nineteenth-century court of Nawab Wajid ‘Ali Shah is promoted as the birthplace of kathak, and members of the Kathak birādarī migrated to Lucknow along with other artists. The resultant atmosphere was undoubtedly one of tremendous creative activity as sophisticated artists from Delhi, actors from rural Awadh and performing troupes from Kashmir rubbed artistic shoulders and benefitted from immense aristocratic patronage. In the years after the deposition of the Nawab in 1857, the court of Wajid ‘Ali Shah grew in memory and assumed a semi-mythic status as the place of the last, glorious flowering of lost culture and refinement. Yet, although this was certainly true for the courtesans, the connection with kathak and the Kathaks is tenuous. There were definitely Kathaks in Lucknow, and although they were not all dancers some were renowned and can be identified as the ancestors of today’s Lucknow gharānā Kathaks. A number of Kathaks are named in Maūdan al-Mūsīqī, but they are only a few of many singers, dancers and instrumentalists and Wajid ‘Ali did not identify them in his books. It is not until Sharar’s articles from the early twentieth century that the suggestion that Durga Prasad might have taught Wajid ‘Ali Shah to dance appears. There certainly were Kathaks in Lucknow at the time of Wajid ‘Ali Shah and the Nawab was a great patron of dance who was studying the gats but the close connection of kathak or Kathaks to the Awadhi court is due to Lucknow’s central importance in artistic memory rather than any supporting historical evidence.

The development of the dance that would be called kathak comes into more focus in the last decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. By this time, the Kathak-Misras were not the only performers in India calling themselves ‘Kathaks’. During these decades, there were artists called ‘Kathak-Bhands’ in the employment of the Guījankhānā of Jaipur in Rajasthan. To claim that they were dancing material similar to today’s kathak – rhythmic footwork, physical renditions of drum pieces, expressive kavitā – is very reasonable. This repertoire was not specifically the dance of the Kathaks of Lucknow or Jaipur, but the cultural inheritance of North Indian hereditary performers. Furthermore, it makes sense to assume that the dance and drum pieces performed in Jaipur and Lucknow courts would have differed, although they would have had rhythmic structures and tāls in common. It is also in these years leading up to and away from 1900 that female hereditary performers lost status and became marginalized. The Lucknow Kathaks continued their association with the women, but gradually adopted the courtesan repertoire into their own performances as the hereditary women ceased to perform it. One might accuse the Lucknow Kathaks of appropriating the women’s art, but one should also argue that they in large part preserved it. If some young Kathaks from Rajasthan did in fact come to learn from Bindadin in the 1890s, as has been claimed (Kothari 1989: 51), it is possible that they were interested in learning the awā’if gestures and postures, which were part of the Lucknow men’s artistry.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the process of amalgamation continued as shifting centres of patronage took the Kathaks to a final few courts and then finally to the cities of Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi. The patronage of non-hereditary female dancers like Leila Sokhey, connoisseurs like Nirmala Joshi, and institutions like the Delhi School for Hindustani Music and Dance further legitimized the authority of the male dancers and began a process of gentrification and classicization closely connected to the nationalist revival. Male and female, Muslim and Hindu, court and rural repertoires were juxtaposed then fused as the classical dance called kathak took its place on the proscenium stage and in the emergent dance schools. Without this new patronage and institutionalization, it is difficult to know what kind of kathak would have developed, or even if there would ever have been a kathak dance at all. Other developments – the standardization of dances in solo performance, the organization of curriculum and attendant conformity of style, the introduction of Sanskrit items and removal of items derived from court or courtesans – can be even more clearly connected to the influence of non-hereditary female dancers and teachers. Yet, the gharānedār Kathaks were no less involved in the moulding of the dance during these decades, and the fact that Shambhu Maharaj and subsequently Birju Maharaj were key creative forces needs to be recognized, not the least because their presence at the centre of tradition creation in Delhi contributed to the eventual authority and hegemony of the Lucknow gharānā.

It is thus first in the juxtaposition and then in the fusion of repertoires that a dance called kathak finally appeared. This claim may initially seem like nothing new, but most writers point to a synthesis of Indian and Persian material in the court of Akbar, and then maintain that there was a second blend in the court of Lucknow when the priestly Kathaks arrived with their storytelling temple tradition. I argue that the dance we know today began to take shape only in the late nineteenth century and did not become kathak until the 1930s when non-hereditary women began patronizing, learning, performing and eventually disseminating the blended form. Nevertheless, in an odd sort of way, the story of the storytellers migrating to the courts can be argued to be true, except that rather than priestly reciters of sacred epics, they were rural people, flexible and talented performers skilled in theatrics, singing and dancing, and it was not in ‘the court’ where kathak emerged, but rather in the bourgeois environment of ‘neo-Hindu metropolitan nationalism’ (O’Shea 2008: 173).

Kathak dance has thus not been modernized, but rather arose as a dance genre in response to modernity. Its roots are in the performing arts of past centuries, music, dance and theatre traditions that were all part of a wider North Indian inheritance, and the Kathaks themselves, rather than having been secluded in temples, belong to this larger tradition of hereditary performers. This is why one can, in some ways, see kathak everywhere. From the rhythmic steps of Rajasthani scroll readers to the ukās of the Rās Līlā, from the spins of Rajasthani ghūmar to the recitation of kathā, suddenly all North Indian performing art becomes a type of kathak. It is easy, when looking for an ‘original kathak’, to be confused by all these seeming sidelines. The problem comes from placing kathak too far back in the past. Beginning with an ancient kathak, whether it is a temple performance, a storytelling tradition, a devotional theatre or a gypsy dance, and then trying to trace its evolution into the present dance, is an impossible task. One is faced again and again with trying to explain how all these related forms must have branched off from the original dance, or how the pure form must somehow have been appropriated or corrupted. Only by placing the birth of kathak in the early twentieth century does it become clear that a variety of performing arts sharing a common rhythmic, kinaesthetic and cultural vocabulary co-existed and continues to co-exist. Kathak dance is only one, fairly recent, manifestation of this heritage.

It is in their creativity and flexibility, however, that art forms continue to retain relevance and cultural meaning. In saying that kathak is a product of the twentieth century, of colonialism, nationalism and a certain attempt at Sanskritization, I am not saying that it is any less Indian, any less significant, or anything to be ashamed of. The attempt to connect the dance to some mythical origins, to a lost temple dance, or to the Nāyaśāstra is futile – it simply does not belong there, and the history itself belongs to the legacy of Orientalism and the needs of nationalism. There is obviously nothing wrong with today’s dancers and choreographers drawing inspiration from treatises and sculptures as they create original works, but these are new dances, not ancient ones. This dance called kathak belongs in the India of the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries. It is as multi-cultural, with as many origins, influences and traditions, as the sub-continent itself.

Scholars have suggested that historical ‘truth’ may lie in the disruptions and discontinuities of recorded narrative as much as in the more comforting linear chronologies (Southgate 2003: 164–5 and Raddeker 2007: 96). I was drawn to this investigation because of the gaps in kathak history and I hope through this study to have identified and dealt with some of the disparities in a useful way. Many of my findings contradict other histories and some of my proposed sequences are the reverse of accepted accounts. My research, however, is based on careful scholarship from as wide a variety of sources and methodologies as I could manage. There will, no doubt, be those who simply dismiss these findings. Many of my assertions and hypotheses shake beliefs about kathak, its antiquity and its origins, to their foundations, and will seem blasphemous to some. One can never challenge faith through logic, however, and it is foolish to try. This study is not addressed to those who hold such convictions, but rather to South Asianists, ethnomusicologists and dance scholars who are curious about the historical context of this dance. To all those who have wondered about the history of kathak, who may have seen the inconsistencies, the imbalances and the mysteries, I hope this enquiry has provided not only significant answers, but also a foundation for future scholarship into kathak dance.