In India II, mostly on dance and Indian temples, 20-96

This is the second group of emails (February 13-20, 2012) written by me on my first trip to India, The trip was largely to see dance and to investigate aspects of the Indian culture around dance.

I was writing both to individual friends and to groups. The topics of discussion varied drastically. Often I was trying to understand Odissi dance better, because the first dancers with whom I had spent time in India had been Odissiexperts; and I was due later to visit Odisha/Orissa, Odissi’snative state, for five days. But I was also writing to family and to Western friends, many of them non-dance people.

AM, February 2022.

21: Mahabalipuram (Tamil Nadu), Monday, February 13, 2012

I'm now at Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu. I dipped into the Indian Ocean for the first time this afternoon, and saw one of the oldest of all SouthEast Asian temples. Am loving almost everything so far.

Here’s <1> the temple at Mahabalipuram.

A: The seventh-century temple was the prototype for many that followed, apparently all over South-East Asia.

B: I wanted you to see (I want to see again) a temple beside the Bay of Bengal (when I swam in it later that afternoon, I thought it was the Indian Ocean, which I now understand is round the other side of India, though actually wikipedia is on my side and says both sides are Indian Ocean).

C: We can imagine what happened what the tsunami came. (Mahabalipuram is a little village largely geared for tourism; more than a dozen were killed there.)

And here’s <2> “Arjuna's Penance" at Mahabalipuram. Isn’t it stunning?

2.Mahabalipuram (Tamil Nadu), Tuesday, February 14, 2012.

This morning, there were VERY cute families of monkeys playing on a rock right beside some of the sculpture caves here, and two VERY cute baby goats (kids). One of the monkeys found a bottle of CocaCola and bit it open with its teeth and drank all the Coke as it dripped down onto the rock; then a big goat came along to take over the drinking, but the monkey picked up the bottle and took it a few few away where the goat couldn't follow; and the monkey drank all the Coke that was left.

I'm in the back of a luxurious air-conditioned car being driven (two hours) to the temples at Kanchipuram. Cows are wandering all over the road.

23: Kanchipuram (Tamil Nadu), Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Here <3> one snap of inside the largest temple at Kanchipuram. This is just one of many avenues of such pillars; the temples here frequently feature what are called "Halls of a Thousand Pillars".

<4> shows just one row of the temple’s virtuoso single-stone pillars, this afternoon, at Kanchipuram’s EkambareshvaTemple.

Several of you have asked whether I have yet seen an elephant. This one <5>, at Kanchipuram’s Kailasanatha Temple thanks, this afternoon, has been my favourite so far.

24: Mahabalipuram (Tamil Nadu), Tuesday, February 14

After yesterday and today in Mahabalipuram and Kanchipuram, I feel I need to see everything twice anyway (even though I have no time to do so): there's just so much and it's just so overwhelming. Everything is interesting; sometimes I've let a guide show me round, sometimes I've just relied on a guidebook, but I'm sure I've only taken in one per cent.

And much of what I'm taking in is just India itself: the cows wandering across the road, the people begging for money, the monkeys, the goats, the crazy but exciting traffic, the clothes, the way people catch your eye and hold it, the bougainvillea, the women in the rice paddies, the people trying to sell everything, the saris and the sarongs, the dirt, the Indian Ocean....

25: Mahabalipuram (Tamil Nadu), Wednesday 15 February, 2012

Here <6> are monkeys on rocks between two caves here this Wednesday morning.

26: Madurai, Wednesday 15 February, 2012.3.40pm

Madurai is the southernmost place I have ever been or will go on this trip to India; I’m here for just 24 hours. The hugest and most amazing thing is the temple (Sri Meenakshi-Sundereshwarar temple), which is said to cover fifteen acres and in part to date back to c. 1400 BC. Most of it was built more like 1500-1700 according to the Rough Guide - it's so vast that I lost track of which bit was what age as I was taken round by an excellent guide.

Unlike the temples I saw yesterday at Kunchipuram and many of the other temples I will see, it is painted in bright colours, especially on the ceilings and ornaments. It's also very much a working temple, with apparently fifty priests attached. While I and other tourists were moving around, people were abasing themselves on the floor in prayer, and there were several zones shut off to non-Hindus. Some of the primary-coloured painting is cartoon-like - Disney-cum-Bollywood - but this is offset by the astounding pillars, thousands of them each constructed from single blocks of stone, often making up multi-pillared halls that recall those in Egypt (Luxor, Karnak, etc.) and in the crypts of Romanesque cathedrals. The pillars aren't as vast as those in Egypt, but they are amazingly sculpted: some of the sculptures recall Egypt, a few Assyrian sculpture, and some really do recall the Romanesque. And the juxtapositions of coloured painting and august halls of pillars and vivid sculpting and intense worship makes for a very heady mix. <7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13>

These steeples (gopuras) are not actually as tall as one or two I saw at Kunchipuram yesterday, but they are much more primary-colour-painted, and there are far more of them than at any other Indian temple. <14>

27: Madurai, Wednesday 15 February, 2012.

Some of Madurai’s temple and palace <15, 16> make Southern Italian baroque look as if it was by the Puritan Fathers, and some of it is thrilling in the way Leccese baroque is <in southern Puglia>, and some of it is like Disney's or Bollywood's version of baroque but still sometimes fabulous.

Now I'm in an air-conditioned car. Did you use these in India? They're shockingly cheap, like everything else. Yesterday a man drove me two hours from Mahabalipuram to Kanchipuram, drove me from temple to temple (four in all) for another two hours, waited at each one, then drive me back: 2pm to 6pm for 2200 rupees i.e. $45. This 90-minute drive to the airport with views of the Indian Ocean, pelicans, herons, ibis, waterlilies, on the way is 350 rupees (which mean I was cheated rotten on the way here, when I paid three times as much - but was still little).

I liked the heat in Mahabalipuram, but suspect that the next nine days may be considerably warmer (mainly inland). Must invest in some insect repellent; have already been bitten several times.

28: Madurai, Wednesday 15 February, 2012.

The Vandiyur Mariamman Teppukulam tank, Madurai, today - scene of the recent annual floating festival

My last photo today to y'all <17>. This tank is apparently filled each year for the January-February floating festival when pilgrims take boats out to the shrine in the centre. Shiva and Meenakshvi are brought in procession to the tank and floated in a raft decorated with lights and pulled by devotees three times around the shrine. Then they let the water drain for the rest of the year.

I missed the ceremony - the main people around the tank were schoolchildren on their way home in uniform, with the girls wearing their hair in two long plaits looped up - and so this evening went to an amazing concert of Karnatic music featuring the singer Bombay Jayashree. My guide told me she is in the league of Subbulakshmi, the great Karnatic singer of fifty years ago; I certainly think she's a phenomenal singer, and was transported within the first phrases she sang. I was only able to catch two hours and a quarter: she scarcely stopped even between songs, and only occasionally stopped to let her leading instrumentalists have solos.

29: Madurai and Thanjavur, Thursday 16 February, 2012

We're driving through a lot of Tamil Nadu farmland, very flat but punctuated by a few very steep hills on the horizon here and there. I'm feeling very peaceful and very blest.

30: Madurai and Thanjavur, Thursday 16 February, 2012

An Indian friend in New York, who has been central to this trip, tells me that she remembers the temple at Madurai when the colours were softer; then they discovered Dulac. Still, I love it <7-13>, and find the photos exciting - the interior more than the roof. I wish I'd gone back to the temple, but decided this morning that I needed to pamper myself after three days on the go, so had leisurely breakfast, lovely pool swim, then my first-ever Balinese massage.

Then took taxi to Thanjavur - about two hours and three quarters, costing about 66 dollars (3500 rupees). Yesterday, a driver took me round Madurai from 4pm to 8.30pm, stopping for me to see various sights and returning for me when I left the Carnatic singer's concert, all for an agreed sum of 300 rupees (about 6 dollars) - he was thrilled when I gave him 500. Probably that price would have been higher had my guide not prearranged it, but actually a taxi driver in Delhi took me to the museum, waited 90 minutes, and drove me back, all for 300 rupees (his suggestion) - I really wasn't going to haggle at that price, and later I was anyway told that was an unusually good price.

People have very different ideas about hotels: one New Yorker firmly said "Five-star hotels only", a British friend said "Avoid all hotels that are on line". My experience in Mahabalipuram taught me that, at any rate in the South, it may be best to spend more on hotels: the two I stayed in there both had very noisy air conditioning, occasional power cuts (though shorter power cuts are not infrequent in better hotels too) and, horrid, mosquitoes that buzzed around in the small hours of the night. I have anyway been bitten more than I've ever been bitten before; the cream and ointment I have for bites helps, but I wish I'd brought repellent. Last night's hotel was a lovely bit I'm loving TN <Tamil Nadu> so far, though each town (and each hotel!) has been very different and on the first three days - especially in Madurai after I walked barefoot through a spread of shallow water in the temple - I was bitten as never before by insects. Have taken hundreds of photos myself, swum (well, wave-jumped) in the Indian Ocean, loved the vegetarian cuisine even when I have little clue what I'm ordering, been knocked out by the temples and sculptures, and had an astounding Carnatic vocal concert in Madurai (Bombay Jayashree, in whose recordings I must invest on my return). Am now in Thanjavur: the temple was ravishing at sunset yesterday <18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26> and now I'm off to the palace!

31: Thanjavur, Thursday, February 16, 2012

I'm loving TN <Tamil Nadu> so far, though each town (and each hotel!) has been very different and on the first three days - especially in Madurai after I walked barefoot through a spread of shallow water in the temple - I was bitten as never before by insects. Have taken hundreds of photos myself, swum (well, wave-jumped) in the Indian Ocean, loved the vegetarian cuisine even when I have little clue what I'm ordering, been knocked out by the temples and sculptures, and had an astounding Carnatic vocal concert in Madurai (Bombay Jayashree, in whose recordings I must invest on my return). Am now in Thanjavur: the temple was ravishing at sunset yesterday <18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26> and now I'm off to the palace!

32: Thanjavur, Thursday, February 16, 2012

In most of the emails sent yesterday or the day before, the main thing is the photos. I have taken hundreds as usual on my tiny camera, then download them on my computer at the end of each day. When my hotel has the right Internet connection and I have time, I send photos to everyone.

The flies and beggars are all you can imagine. Actually, because of experiences in Egypt <1999, 2007> and Marrakech<2002>, I was perhaps expecting the beggars to be worse, though certainly I have seen more beggars, a few of them maimed, than ever before. But I have never been so frequently bitten by insects: and the less luxurious hotels - even if they are among the smarter places in town - usually contrive to have a mosquito or two in the room, usually putting in an appearance if I wake in the small hours of the night. So it's not all magic.

Occasionally, the people get on one's nerves, because so many, if not begging, are trying to interest you in buying something. On the whole, though, they are wonderful: a high proportion of them are handsome in one way or another, and their manners, charm, and grace are really remarkable. The women tend to keep a demure distance - they lead a fairly chaperoned existence, though they are far more animated with their men than you ever see in Arab countries - but a number of the men, especially when I am walking alone, could not be happier or quicker to make conversation. In some cases there may be a sexual reason behind this - though attitudes to homosexuality in India are so repressive that they don't raise the subject (whereas in Egypt, even in 2007 when it was more Islamist than in 1999, some men could not have flirted more openly or suggested sex more readily). But often here men just make conversation almost at once out of sheer enthusiasm to share experience. Yesterday one sunny, virile, adorable man, in his thirties I assume, made conversation in a jiffy. When we kept bumping into each other around the same museum, he introduced me to his two older brothers, and suggested we met again for dinner or at the temple today; I think he just didn't want me to be alone.

It is impossible for me to work out the class differences, but one does sense them, especially in retrospect. Some of the charm includes a huge dose of self-abasement or deference, and I'm sure that's because they feel they know their place. The richer or more financially secure people are courteous, but with greater personal authority.

33: Thanjavur, Friday, February 17, 2012

You were asking: Which came first, egg or hen, sculptures of dance?

So am I right in guessing that it's hard to be sure which sculptures specifically depict dancing? So many of the sculptures I've been looking at here have a dance-like quality (especially in the movement of the torso and pelvis, but also of course the many in which gods are balanced on one leg). But the only ones that are labelled "dancing" tend to be where the limbs are moving very athletically. Are all these labels the guesswork of archaeologists? Forgive me if the answers to these questions are well-known.

The legend of Shiva beating Parvati in dance by getting his leg higher than hers: I'm afraid I haven't read the original texts yet. In the Alvin Ailey company, the men are forever throwing their legs higher than the women, but otherwise in Western dance it is assumed automatically that women are more supple and can get their legs higher. (I used to be able to do the splits till I was 51 - I haven't tried since I moved to America - but obviously most Western non-dancing men can't, and most dancing men don't anyway. In London, one female theatre critic and I used to do it side by side as a silly party trick, usually after at least two glasses of wine.) Does the myth imply that Parvati can't throw her leg as high as Shiva? Or that it would not be seemly for a woman if she did so?

Again, I hope I'm not asking questions to which everybody in the world knows the answers!

I'm looking at the sculptures in the courtyard of the royal palace as I write this. Now I'm off to look at the Chola bronzes.

34: Thanjavur, Friday, February 17, 2012

The old texts about Odissi dance: what do they tell us about music or dance phrasing? How much do we know of Orissan music before 1800, and how much has it changed? I ask because in Western dance these questions would be paramount.

35: Thanjavur, Friday, February 17, 2012

How interesting about the music. Outside the Royal library here in Thanjavur, I came across a book that contained copies and transcriptions (not in English, alas, though with an English explanatory preface) of ragas going back over two centuries - from the palace library. The preface said that these ragas could be (can be) played today as entirely modern. Do you think that is likely? In the West all music has changed hugely in every century since at least the mediaeval period. We Westerners love to imagine that the East is unchanging and timeless, but to some degree this must be just our fantasy: yes?

36: Thanjavur, Friday, February 17, 2012

Shiva is often depicted in attitude front croisé but with arms outstretched. <28> Nataraja - a form of Shiva, I think - is often depicted in the same attitude (amid a ring of fire, standing on a baby), very emphatically in fondu, with arms coming together though not touching, one paralleling the line of the raised croisé thigh, the other above it. It occurs to me that this is like the Karen Fink/Radford pose in “Pictures” <Merce Cunningham, 1982>: does this seem possible to you? Try Nataraja (Chola bronzes) on Google Images and maybe an image will come.

And the position Rashaun <Mitchell> holds in “Split Sides” <Cunningham, 2003>: back of the stage facing us, one palm one way, one another: I forget the details, but it does come back to me as I see so many images of divine benediction here, one palm facing up upright, the other facing us downturned. I'm fairly sure the manual specifics are different in “SS”, but the position is close enough for me to feel a deliberate evocation: Rashaun holds it a long time. (Who did R's part when it was new?)

37: Thanjavur, Friday, February 17, 2012
I can't help taking a small break to write to you after looking at the Chola bronzes. <28, 29, 30, 31> Perhaps you'll help me understand the degree to which Hindu worship and legend and art and dance are about gender and sex. So many of the myths are about asceticism as well as impregnation - a very striking and radical dichotomy - and so many dance performances show women contemplating or enacting masculine roles or men contemplating or enacting the feminine. I know nothing yet of the tradition of the gotipuas, but surely they are simply a symptom of a larger cultural fascination with how each gender can contain its opposite. Am I right? I don't know how much this is felt in India today, where so many Bollywood films seem to insist on a standard male/female dichotomy as much as anything in the West. But it does seem to me that Indian culture/worship in the past at any rate, as well as some traditional Indian arts today, continually address the way in which each of us can transcend our gender - contain qualities both masculine and feminine. Does this make sense or am I talking rubbish? It seems to me that this is just one way in which Indian culture has been very much more enlightened than ours in the West.

38: Thanjavur, Friday, February 17, 2012

Next series of questions.

In Greek sculpture, there's a moment - I think it's early in the 5th century BC but don't quote me - when the sculptors learnt how to show the human/divine body placing his/her weight on one leg, with a slight bend of the other knee and a slight shift of the pelvis (and, in the opposite direction, a shift of the torso). It's a slight change, but it feels huge. If you go to the Archaeological Museum in Athens, you can see the moment when it happens, and it has the effect of making the body look more human and more ideal at the same time. When the person is shown with weight held absolutely evenly above both feet, the effect is less real and less transporting.

Indian art shows both, doesn't it? I don't know when the Indian sculptors first learnt how to show the shift of weight, though. And what is striking is that by at least the 9th century AD, probably much earlier, they showed a really massive shift of weight, with the torso leaning sideways far further than ever in Western art. (In Greek and Roman art, the deity with whom the shift of weight is most marked is Aphrodite or Venus, goddess of love, and the point always seems to be to show how sexually suggestive or sexually confident she is.) But the abhanga in Indian sculpture and <Odissi> dance doesn't seem to be making any point about sex and perhaps not about gender. Is this right?

So these questions about abhanga <Odissi position showing a displacement of weight in the pelvis> are, on the one hand, a sequel to my questions about sex and gender in Indian art and culture; and on the other hand, they're also questions about you. To what degree do you, straight Neanderthal man that you are when you're not dancing, contain/enact/embody feminine qualities when you dance? And to what extent, if any, is your dancing intended as an expression of sexuality or sexual suggestiveness (or of transcending those things)?

Big questions, I suppose. Answer them at your leisure. At this rate, we will both be writing nonstop to each other until midnight! I'm aware I've much more to tell you later.

39: Thanjavur, Friday, February 17, 2012.

I arrived yesterday (my twelfth full day in India) in Thanjavur (Tanjore): noisy and busy and traffic-crazed, but making me happy. I arrived at the great temple, which is older than the one in Madurai and only painted in a few interiors, at sunset: there are several colours to the stone anyway, and sunset does wonderful things to all of them. There are three main gopuras (steeples/pagodas, call them what you like), all three visible in this picture <18>

Between the nearest and the others are two buildings, one of which seems to be the main shrine of several and one of which is a stone canopy over a gigantic stone sacred cow. I was there for perhaps ninety minutes; several religious ceremonies occurred during that time in various locations, with some priests or officials clad just in loincloths or dhotis, others with one or two more layers over their torsos. All around there is a walled courtyard lined with small open chambers, many of which have individually coloured frescoes.

Amazingly, it is said to have been built in 1010 (though I dare say it took longer than one year) i.e. before any of the Norman Romanesque cathedrals of Sicily and Italy. At one point this temple employed four hundred devadasis - temple dancers.

Tomorrow I am taking a car (driver, air-conditioning) for ten hours to take me to various temples to the northeast from here. When I asked the price from my hotel, which is booking it on my behalf, they said "2000 rupees" i.e. forty dollars or twentyfive pounds. When I take an autorickshaw from my hotel to the temple or palace here, they usually ask for fifty or forty rupees; I am shamelessly learning to beat them down to thirty, but I must admit I don't haggle much.

This is my fifth day in Tamil Nadu, and here are the things I am learning to take for granted: cows wandering the streets and main roads, often with long horns; goats and dogs wandering loose; green parakeets zooming through the air (and nesting in the gopuras of this temple); striped squirrels looking half like chipmunks; absolutely the most daredevil traffic I have ever encountered, with overtaking on all sides and amazing sudden turns and constant hooting; beggars, some of them with bowls, some of them dressed just in loincloths, some of them dressed in bright-colored cotton saris that would look ravishing at a New York soirée; women crossing dusty streets or standing at dirty bus stops while wearing fabrics of dazzling quality that would look resplendent at any gala. Many of the men and boys are eager to catch one's eye, wave, and, if time allows, make friends in ways that would seem strikingly flirtatious in a European (or in North Africa) but here is entirely innocent, always courteous, and very charming and sunny; the women are far more demure with strangers, though lively enough with each other.

40: Friday 17 February, Thanjavur
In Mahabalipuram and Madurai, I was bitten to death (about twenty-five stings to each foot!) but somehow this hasn't happened in noisy Thanjavur, where I love the temple and palace and where the Hotel Gnanam suits my purposes to a T. Off with a driver tomorrow to Darasuram, Gangaikondacholapuram, and Kumbabonam. My photos are driving all my New York and London friends wild with jealousy.

41: Friday, 17 February, Thanjavur

Well, I'm lucky but also, at least in this case, determined; I'd been planning to come to India for eleven years, but something had always arisen.

You must know Sunil better than I. I'd really only met him twice, and briefly each time, in 2010. By the way, one dancer (with an American accent, very unusual here) at the reception stood up and boasted of the review she had received in the "New York Times" - written, she proudly announced, by Deborah Jowitt. I'm afraid I forgot her name amid all the melée.

I do know Sunil rather better now I'm here! He's a puzzle, actually, because he writes in English, but I have met no Indian who finds his spoken or written English any more intelligible than I do; apparently his lectures are unfollowable. But everyone loves his enthusiasm, and he's certainly knowledgeable. And anxious to facilitate. Scarcely a day passes without him ccing to me an email he has written on my behalf.

It seems that the sociology of Indian classical dance involves a good number of wealthily married ladies. The Nrityagram women laugh ruefully about this - the men in their lives aren't remotely rich - and it must be true to some degree. Madhavi Mudgal is more or less at the top of the Odissi pecking order, as both teacher and performer, but it must cost her (or rather her husband, a designer) money to live where they do in New Delhi and to employ musicians for a number of rehearsals. But she is not one of the truly rich ones. Anita Ratnam, whom I haven't met but who has acted on my behalf at Rajika Puri's behest, is nicknamed “queen of Madurai” by some, and I begin to see why. She's actually in New York right now, but when I arrived at Madurai airport on Wednesday, one of her employees was waiting for me with a driver, whisked me off to the temple where he gave me an excellent guided tour including a couple of the zones usually barred to non-Hindus and/or tourists, booked me a front-row ticket for that evening's concert by today's foremost Karnatic vocalist (who was astounding), took me to my hotel and then took time booking me both a driver to take me round Madurai (incl the concert) from 4pm to 8.30pm (all for 300 rupees - about six dollars - I confess I paid him 500) and another driver to take me the three-hour journey to Thanjavur the next day (more expensive because of the distance and because the driver would be taking almost three hours either way, but still only 3500 rupees). (A train would have taken over five hours and would have involved changing.)

I'm now in Tamil Nadu, concentrating on temples and sculpture.

The insects and beggars are all you ever heard. After the temple at Madurai, where one walks barefoot and at one point through two inches of water, I had at least two bites to each toe and another fifteen to the rest of each foot. Some of the beggars are nonetheless wearing clothes that would look ravishing at a New York party, though I don't mean to be flippant: there are a number of maimed people and others who lead various kinds of scavenger lives.

42: Thanjavur, Friday 17 February

I should have added the most important thing. It's this abhanga - the very striking shift of weight onto one leg - that seems so dancelike. The Greek gods in sculpture look both ideal and human: they suggest movement but not dance. The abhanga in Indian sculpture does suggest dance, because it's so pronounced. Do you agree that this is one of the most remarkable peculiarities of Indian art?

43: Thanjavur, Friday 17 February.

And to what the degree is the abhanga particularly about the way the female pelvis moves (with its more striking shape beneath the more slender female waist)? It's so striking in every bronze of Parvathi here.

If I'm wrong, you'll tell me. If I'm right, then tell me how it feels to practice abhanga - not to mention tribhanga <another Odissi position with two further tilts or curves or displacements of weight>.

Forgive me all these questions!

44: Friday, 17 February, Thanjavur

1: The royal library in Thanjavur (Tanjore) isn't open to the general public, but holds an array of rare Asian manuscripts that's consulted by scholars the world round. It has one room of manuscripts, all in glass cases, for the public to see. Those from Europe seem largely to have been assembled c.1800-20, when a particularly enlightened ruler was on the throne. They include the 1787 music for:-

“Zemire et Azor

A Grand Pantomime Ballet

performed at the

King's Theatre Haymarket

by

Monsr Jojon, Monsr Henry, Mons Laborie, Mons Hur, Madle Mozon, Madle Simonet, Madle Perignon, Madle Delfevre &c:

adapted for the Harpsichord Pianoforte or Violin

By J. Mazzinghi

Price 3s6d.”

Amazing to encounter this here, of all places. The library also displays

(i)illuminated manuscripts of the Rigveda and Mahabharata

(ii) an 1804 highly illustrated edition of "The Punishments of China", translated from the French, a kind of fantasy textbook for sadists, showing the many, many kinds of physical punishment institutionalized by the Chinese

(iii) a 1785 copy of "Theatre des Grecs, par Le P.Brumoy, nouvelle edition

(iv) a 1784 copy of Johnson's English Dictionary, open at the letter A: what Johnson says on the three different A sounds (slender, open, broad) seems to suggest British English pronunciation has changed since then (the “open” A is exemplified by “father”, “rather”, “congratulate,” “fancy”, “glass” - which fall into two distinct types of pronunciation the way I say them). Also a startling picture of the storming of Rangoon, showing “heroic” British firing with bayonets at “alarmed” Indians wielding only swords and clad in just dhotis or loincloths.

2: The temple here at Thanjavur, even though many hundreds of miles from the Himalayas, is more like the setting of “La Bayadère” than anywhere else I have seen as yet. At sunset last night the largely unpainted stone looked just ravishing (photographs will follow); I will go back at other times of day. A number of religious ceremonies occurred just in the ninety minutes I was there, with some priests or other religious officials bare-chested and others with various degrees of more clothing. Four hundred devadasis (temple dancers - bayaderes, sort of) were kept here at one time! (There were also devadasis in Orissa, and they are one important link in the chain to modern Odissi dance today. I gather one devadasi is still alive, though she was a musician, not a dancer. But successive invasions wiped out the devadasis in the north centuries ago.) Balasaraswati, the great Bharata Natyam dancer of the mid-twentieth century, came from a matrilineal family of Thanjavur's devadasis dating back to at least the mid-eighteenth century here.

The devadasis, however, unlike the bayadères of European Orientalism or the heroine of "The Pearl Fishers", weren't vowed to chastity; they were women of great status, adorned with vast numbers of jewels in some accounts and taking partners by whom they had children. Some European foreigners wrote about the devadasis as whores, though they had to admit they were very unlike European whores; in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their status declined so that many of them did become some kind of prostitutes, and they suffered both from European (not only British) opprobrium and then from Indian reformist zeal to disassociate Indian traditional arts with any possibility of moral stain. Possibly in their great era they were more powerful than the priests: the relationship of bayadère and high Brahmin in “Bayadère” seems to be imposed from “La Vestale” and “Aida” and other Orientalist fantasies.

Still, there is a staircase at the side of the inner sanctum of the temple here <20> that is easy to imagine as the source of Petipa's first act.

It's hard, however, to see much grandeur about the Thanjavur royal palace now, even though members of the former royal family still live there. Goats wander the courtyards, which are strewn with weeds, and, despite a striking open throne chamber <27>, there's nothing like the spectacle of the palace at Madurai. I imagine Petipa's designers, the Soviet designers, and Sammaritani all consulted illustrations of a number ofpalace and temples here in Tamil Nadu.

But I don't think Minkus spent much time researching India's music! This morning outside the palace I came across a recent book notating ragas that go back two centuries and are recorded in the library here; apparently they could be played today as modern ones.

(You probably know all this, but I didn't, so am passing on what I am learning.)

45: Friday 17 February, Thanjavur

I think someone told me that this last Mahari had been a musician rather than a dancer: is that true? How old do you think she is now?

<She was at least 85. She was more of musician than a dancer, but claimed to know dance as well. I was sent photos 33 and 34 of her.>

46: Friday, 17 February, Thanjavur

PS: Every day I'm in India I find that something I learnt the day before was wrong or, more likely, not the whole truth. So here’s a correction I've just discovered. The devadasis of Orissa, the Eastern state and home of Odissi, were great ladies but were vowed to chastity: they were married to the Lord God of their temple and not allowed to take sexual partners. So maybe that Orientalist bayadère myth comes from there.

47: Friday 17 February, Thanjavur

I meant to add that the devadasis of Orissa were called Maharis. Two are apparently still alive, principally musicians - though cognizant of Mahari dance. I was just sent photos<33, 34> of one who, aged 85+, still manages to sing at a very few ceremonies with remarkable fervour and style and strength.

48: Friday 17 February, Thanjavur

The three main gurus who codified and re-established Odissi: one was the son of a Devadasi, and one had been a gotipua - is that right? The third came from South Orissa, I believe: but what was his particular source of Odissi? from a folk source, from another guru, or what? I'm sorry I can't remember the three gurus' names - my notebook is back in my hotel room; and I first heard of these three men only on March 6, my second day in India!

Dance takes from life, yes; but there are differences, don't you agree? The first thing that tends to establish a difference between dance and other movement is some kind of musicalphrasing - or so I believe. And (though there are exceptions) the second thing that makes a difference is some kind of footwork, usually some kind of rhythmic footwork. There are people in New York modern dance who would challenge me on these points, and now and then I will agree something is dance that doesn't involve footwork - but only, I think, because it involves the rest of the body and in a musical way. (By "musical", I don't mean that it has to respond to music. I deeply adore the choreography of Merce Cunningham, which as you surely know is independent of the music; but then I feel his choreography - even when its phrasing is very difficult and strange and challenging - is usually far more musical than the music that accompanies it.) And to me the life that footwork brings to dance is always transforming, often miraculous. The foot is such a small proportion of the human anatomy, but - whether it's Odissi or it's tap dance or Scots folk dance or flamenco or ballet or the dances of West Africa - it enlivens the whole body, even if all it's doing is merely a form of walking.

Let's go back to another aspect of sex, gender, and India. Something that startles many foreigners in India is the way Indian men, especially younger ones, love to make eye contact and often to make friends immediately. The use of the eyes and smiles is extremely easy to mistake for the behaviorof a highly flirtatious gay Western man; indeed only a few Western gay men would be quite so bold in holding another man's eye and immediately making a personal connection as a follow-up. Because I'm on my own in India, I feel this very much: boys and men (usually under 40) keep catching my eye, smiling, and then making friends at once. Maybe they want to see what my iPhone is, maybe they want me to take a photo of them, but usually they want some kind of conversation - they're eager for it. It's very charming; I love it. If they're too far away to talk, then they wave and smile from a distance: adorable. I don't know to what degree this connects to age and class: it seems that the more established and authoritative the man, the less he does it. (The same applies to men holding hands. Only the younger ones seem to do it.) Virtually no woman ever does it (the language of the eyes and smiles with strangers), though some schoolgirls do it. So it's something to do with gender, or with aspects or masculine gender roles as established in India. And I'm here to testify that, even when you're used to it (as I'm becoming), it's very easy to confuse with overt flirtation. Children all flirt innocently anyway, so that's something different; but grown-ups know what they're doing. The question is: why is it that Indian men, at least of some classes and ages, are so keen to do it? I don't want them to stop, and yet I'm still confused by it occasionally. I suppose it's part of a combination of the real innocent sweetness that so many Indians still have and the fantastically welcoming eagerness they show to make new friends. It helps me to feel in love with all India just now! But it's curious: why does Indian hetero male behavior and Western gay male behavior have so much in common?

Explain India to me! I'm just leaving the temple, which I so love. On my way back to the hotel.

49: Friday 17 February, Thanjavur

Don't worry - I've traveled in Morocco and Egypt. I'm aware that some Indians (especially in Mahabalipuram) were keen to make money out of this visiting white Englishman, but they are much less problematic than the Egyptians or Moroccans. The Egyptian and Moroccan men also flirt very overtly (less so since the recent wave of Islamism), almost always to make themselves some money one way or another if they can. Indians, even if they want money from me, are far, far more courteous and charming - and (though some beggars are very persistent, of course) they maintain a certain polite distance. I really do love them. As you say, they're simple and helpful; many of them are remarkably sweet. But, well, I'm by no means the only man who gets confused by the signals they give out: I actually think the only two men I've met so far who were interested in gay sex were actually very discreet and subtle about it (and very polite), whereas some of the other men who have made instantaneous friends with me have almost certainly been innocent of sexual intention, yet turned such charm and energy and Interest in me within the first few seconds that I think most white men would be taken aback.

(I wonder what on earth it's like for that rare thing, a white woman traveling alone.)

Many thanks for correcting me about the three gurus. How interesting about Guru Pankaj Charan Das not being the son of a Mahari: as I'm sure you guessed, I'd both heard and read that he was. Can you tell me what the difference between a Mahari and a devadasi is? I think someone told me he, Pankaj Charan Das, was the son of a devadasi. Was there any tradition of devadasis or Maharis in Orissa? Forgive me if these questions betray my ignorance - that's because I AM ignorant.

50: Friday 17 February, Thanjavur

How interesting this is about the Maharis: perhaps this explains why the Western idea of a bayadère is that she was chaste and married only to God. I shall have to send a correction to the email I sent about Thanjavur to you and half the dance critics of New York!

In a number of ways, Indians remind me of another race (if that's the right word) I adore: the Italians. I have visited Italy many, many times and, though this is a terrible generalization, I can't help thinking that both Indian and Italians are simply more sunny, more outgoing, more open, more spontaneous than most other people. That is a silly thing to say, since of course there are many Indians (especially in Britain and New York) who are guarded and conservative and interested chiefly in money; and heaven knows there are many Italians who are corrupt and cruel (e.g. the Mafia).

Tomorrow I'm going to Gangaichondakolapuram, Darasuram, and Kumbakonam; I've just hired a driver for ten hours.

51: Friday 17 February, Thanjavur

Am with my laptop in the foyer writing to all and sundry.

The examples of Abhinaya I've seen have involved more walking and lower-body phrasing than the equivalent mime scenes in classical ballet: is this atypical?

52: Friday 17 February, Thanjavur

Oh, I love this! I have been picking up already on so many hints of the internecine Orissa dance scene: “Well, you should call her, but then she is Aruna's main rival and you are staying at Aruna's husband's hotel”, endless variations on the biographical information about the three gurus who reconstructed Odissi and their sources, and many more such threads! I shall be most amused when I get there.

Sunil sent an email telling Aruna and others to throw a reception in my honor, but I wrote to her <Aruna Mohanty> et al. ten minutes later to say I'd really rather not - but that I hoped I would meet everyone individually. (The reception in Delhi helped the dance people to get a sense of me, but in no way for me to get to know any one of them except perhaps three sweet modern dancers.)

53: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

Food fine and occasionally wonderful: no Delhi belhi yet, though many have assured me I will succumb sooner or later. The religious ceremonies involved some particularly odd fanfares and some psalm-like chanting. Yesterday I just discovered that a dance festival will begin in the temple on the last two evenings I'm here; but the name and number to call on the website turns out to be a wrong number - so in one respect at least India resembles (some aspects of) the West!

54: Saturday, 18 February, Tamil Nadu

I am having a marvellous day: Darasuram this morning, now Gangaikondacholapuram, later Kumbakonam. More later, I very much hope.

55: Saturday, 18 February, Tamil Nadu

Well, no sooner did I write yesterday (guided by one Odissiexpert) that the devadasis of Orissa were chaste and consecrated only to the Lord God of the tempo than I was advised (by someone steeped in Indian dance anthropology) that this is in fact a middle-class myth and that the devadasis of Orissa and elsewhere all regularly bore children.

It turns out that one of the bigger bones of contention is about the parentage of Guru Pankaj Charan Das, one of the three crucial gurus who between the 1950s and 1980s reconstructed Odissi as a genre: was he the natural son of a Mahari (devadasi) or did she adopt him? Since I wasn't there, I can only pass on the controversy, but let's say that most of the people I've spoken to say he was her natural son - and some of them insist that the Maharishi weren't chaste but were powerful women who expressed their sensuality in art and in life.

56: Saturday, 18 February, Tamil Nadu

the main gopura, Thursday, Thanjavur

<When I sent photograph 19 to friends, one asked “Inside, can you go to the top? It's stunning.”>

Not in that one, no. The one in the Royal Palace is rather derelict inside with some broken windows, but you can get up to at least the fifth floor.

<Nine days later, I added “By the way, I went back to that gopura and went inside, but there is just one shrine at that level: no inner staircase to the top available to the public.”>

57: Saturday, 18 February, Tamil Nadu

more sunset on a gopura

You see? <21>

58: Saturday, 18 February, Tamil NadU

Holy cow!

I think the guidebook says this cow weighs 20 tonnes (how can they tell?); the married couple posing in front of it were very sweet. <22>

Here, as in several temples, the large stone cow faces straight into the temple. So, at the centre of the palace courtyard, there tends to be a straight line of the main attractions: maybe one gopura over one of the entrances (sometimes two), the holy cow, the central temple with its inner sanctum, then the most important gopura of all. The courtyard usually contains a number of other attractions - in the case of Thanjavur, several other shrines. So you feel, as with the great Romanesque cathedrals only more so, that the temple is a whole world. In some cases (not others), parts of the terrain feature shops, sellers, beggars, even someone on a bicycle in one temple today - but in only one case (not today) have I been allowed to keep my sandals on. Usually one must remove shoes: parts of the stone got hot in the sun (mats were provided at one temple today), but at Madurai I had to wade through several feet of shallow water, after which my already insect-bitten feet were bitten very seriously and pervasively. (My latest cure is to lather my feet in Cologne. I think it deters the buggers. Actually, they still bite me, but nothing has felt irritating for several days.)

59: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

The canopy over the cow

This <23> shows you quite a bit - the painted ceiling (incl. painted parrots), spectacular pillars and carving, and the cow with its blessed neckerchief.

58: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

"dancing girl" = devadasi? (Thanjavur palace, Friday)

This statue in the royal palace art gallery is from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries <32>. The label says"Dancing Girl". I wonder if that means she was a temple dancer (devadasi).

59: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

<To a Western friend who asked if the dancing girl/devadasi was the same as a bayadère>

Sort of, but it seems widely accepted (except by a few middle-class cleanuppers) that the devadasis took lovers and bore children. At their peak they were very powerful women, garbed in gold and jewels; Thanjavur had four hundred of them at one time - though I'm not sure that all 400 were clad in jewels from head to toe.

60: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

a Chola bronze from the eleventh or twelfth century, Thanjavur, Friday

The big deal of the Royal Palace art gallery is its collection of bronzes made under the Chola dynasty. This one, more Hellenic than most to my eye, is eleventh or twelfth century. <25>

61: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

After two temples at Darasuram, and over three hours since we left Thanjavur, my driver and I have stopped at the plainest restaurant I have ever been in - clean but empty of decor or customers. We are having the "vegetarian meal" - I wonder what that will bring. When they speak English, it is very very hard to understand - nor do they understand me, even with words like "Thankyou". Anyway, it fills the long siesta hour here before we go on to two other temples.

More soon: food here.

<The restaurant filled up; I was the only white person. The vegetarian meal turned out to be the most varied and delicious I ate in all four weeks in India in 2012.>

62: the temple with the gorgeous stair decorations, Darasuram, Saturday morning

This morning I was at Darasuram: this is the Airavateshvaratemple (and no, that was not today's worst tongue-twister). <35, 36, 37, 38> Very few people here speak more than a few words of English, and those words are often hard to understand. You say you live in New York; they echo “Newark”. One man asked me about “Last Angels”; it took a while before I realised he meant “Los Angeles”. Anyway, at least my driver today knew I wanted to see Darasuram and got me there. A Belgian threesome came up to me and said “Where are we? Our driver has taken us here but we don't know where we are.” To make matters worse, “Darasuram”wasn't in their guidebook. They read mine, however, and found their one had “Temple d'Airavateshvara”.

63: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

You speak of waking up “each day with a rejuvenated feeling of hitting the dance floor.” What kind of dance floor do you like or need? Lord Harewood wrote in his 1980 memoirs that, when he presented Balasaraswati at the Edinburgh Festival in the 1960s (he adored her, and announced that she was with Fonteyn and Ulanova one of the world's three greatest dancers), she was the only dancer he ever knew who asked for the hardest floors - because she had begun on stone temple floors. How many Indian dancers dance on stone today?

I'm pretty sure that, when I fell in love with dance at the age of twenty, it sublimated many of the most crucial currents in my life. I had been an asthmatic, who had grown up with a deformed chest; soon after my twentieth birthday, I had a major operation to change its bone structure/formation, and I had a wonderful physiotherapist who made me think about posture to make my "new" chest open out more. Well, I'd already seen ballet and liked it, but within the month it started to mean more to me: that can't have been an accident - it was the art that showed me in excelsis just what my physiotherapist had been talking about. And in those days I was much more repressed and confused about being gay - and about sex itself. So there was this art - ballet - where the hero and the heroine kept meeting spectacularly and/or romantically; there were male dancers (Anthony Dowell, Rudolf Nureyev) who embodied the way I wanted to be: that kind of grace and sureness and excitement. And there were female dancers (Margot Fonteyn, Merle Park, Lynn Seymour) who were thrillingly musical as I wanted to be, compelling dance actors as I wanted to be, and magically responsive to men's touch as I wanted to be. So unconsiouslyor subconsciously I've no doubt I identified with both sexes in ballet.

I always liked all kinds of dancing: my second sister, nine years older than I, had spoken about flamenco and Cambodian dance when I was small and made it sound wonderful. But I didn't get to see any of those at that moment, whereas ballet was readily available. I found myself steeping myself in ballet, ballet, ballet, as so many Western dance goers do. I saw modern dance and had no problem with it, but I didn't see any that seriously impressed me as choreography until I was twenty-three or twenty-four. I think I saw Mrinalini and Mallika Sarabhai around 1980 (is that possible?), but didn't know what I was seeing or what to say. Only around 1989 did I start to concentrate on looking at Indian dance - some quite minor British examples, but by that point I was an experienced dance critic and loved the new challenge of finding new things to see and say.

And I became a critic when I was twenty-two. When I was twenty four I met an important lover, a New Yorker, five years older than I, who was the first to make my body feel fabulous and with whom sex felt like the two halves of one whole meeting (only with him have I ever felt that sensation, as if I didn't know where I stopped and he began - not only in actual intercourse but sometimes simply when we lay with limbs intertwined). He and I had a very interrupted transatlantic relationship until I was thirty; usually we were on the other side if the Atlantic from each other so there were really veryfew times we actually had sex, and yet it felt right and life-changing for both of us. To cut the story short, however, he later died of AIDS. I hadn't caught it from him somehow - of course I had the test - and he was one of that 1980s generation of AIDS sufferers who simply withdrew from society without telling those they loved what was wrong. So I only discovered later than he had died.

Yet that's not the point of this story. The point is that, before I had met him, I had already found criticism and a life of dance-watching and dance-thinking so fulfilling that, if things had been different and if my New York dreamboat lover (who was far from perfect) had been able to live together at length, I think I'd still have put criticism first. That sounds strange to me now, even after thirty-four years, and yet that was how it was: I had found my destiny and committed myself to it - in thought and writing.

64: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

As you know, the depiction of India that most ballet people know is the (partly ludicrous) one in the full-length ballet "La Bayadère". Do you know if "La Bayadère" has ever been danced live in India? Indeed, what major ballet companies have visited India since Anna Pavlova? Am I right that there is no important Indian ballet company? Do dance people here know "La Bayadère" on video/DVD at all? I don't mean they ought to - I think it's a largely overrated ballet with substandard music - but it has become so well known in the West.

65: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

another possible location for "Bayadere"'s first scene

<35> Please note the well near the staircase!

66: two bas-reliefs/statues, Thanjavur, Thursday evening

I think we should all have these on either sides of our windows too. <25>

67: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

a 1040 statue incl. cobra round the waist and rearing dog

I'm not sure how they know this bronze dates from 1040, but that's what the label says. I hope you can see the cobra wrapped calmly around his hips and the dog rearing up to his hand.

< I was soon told “That is a beautiful deity of Shiva, but the animal is not a dog but a deer. In the Hindu iconography, especially in the South, Shiva is portrayed as holding a deer, which symbolizes impatience and restlessness. So Shiva is supposed to have tamed impatience and restlessness.”>

68: Saturday, 18 February, Thanjavur

a bronze group from the eleventh century

<31> Check out the details of hand and arms.

69: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

Well, I've been here two weeks today and no Delhi belhi so far. Yes about avoiding the water and salads; also ice. Feet doing OK now, bitten but not suffering remotely and working well. Most people (not all) say every tourist gets Delhi belhi at some stage; we'll see. Eating yoghurt or curds is recommended, and I do when the opportunity arises.

70: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

base of one pillar, Darasuram, February 18

The temple of Airavateshwara <at Darasuram> is said to have been decorated with "perpetual entertainment" in mind. A lot of the pillar decorations feature dancing girls (devadasis?).

71: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

one painted ceiling, Darasuram, Saturday February 18

As you see.

72: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

other gorgeous stair decorations at Darasuram, the temple of Airavateshwara, Saturday 18 February

This temple is small (though there are certainly smaller) but exquisitely formed.

73: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

another amazing staircase, Darasuram, February 18, 2

Yes, well.

74: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

another gopura for your collection - Darasuram, Saturday 18

I've got used to seeing gopuras now.…

75: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

Darasuram, smaller temple, another staircase, Saturday 18 February

Eccola quà.

76: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

and another staircase, Darasuram, smaller temple

Ecco.

77: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

I've already sent this <20> to several ballet friends, so please forgive any duplication, those of you who get it twice. If you know the full-length ballet “La Bayadère”, this moment, as soon as it happened on Thursday, is astonishingly like the first appearance of the temple-dancer heroine; it was breathtaking to see it in real life. I also thought of how the two men in “The Pearl Fishers” sing their famous duet about the glimpse of the heroine they had at the temple and how her beauty overcame them at once.

78: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

<see 58, 59>

correction - Holy BULL!

I've already been corrected - it's not a cow, it's a bull. Can't you just see the “New York Times” correction department typing itself up in knots over this one?

79: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

Thanks for the deer-Shiva correction!

I know how Sunil mixes with dancers; many New York and London critics do so too. I'm afraid I don't really believe it's possible to do this without prejudice, even if it isn't obvious; one can't and won't mix with every dancer in absolutely fairproportions. If one was to be fair, according to those principles, one would mix equally with the dancers one didn't admire and those one did admire. Then it's impossible not to want to write more favourably of dancers one finds fun or sexy or charming offstage, which is a nightmare if they actually aren't so good onstage. I've seen many, many critics writing about their friends; I've done it (to a lesser degree) myself. There are always moments of real bias. And the dancers one doesn't mix with are right to feel jealous or hurt.

But the most important thing, especially in my exposed “New York Times” job, is that, even if I could be superhuman and devoid of all prejudice about dancers I know, everyone could still say “Oh, Alastair Macaulay is only writing these glowing reviews of ABC because they're bosom friends” or “Hey, Alastair has given ABC a bad review - they must have had a quarrel - I wonder what ABC did wrong the last time they went out together!” I have not just to be as unprejudiced as possible, I have to be publicly SEEN to be without prejudice.

80: <unpublished>

Discovering Dance in India - 2 2012.ii.16

NRITYAGRAM, KARNATAKA. Sixteen girls and women - some in their early teens, some of them mature mothers - are taking their weekly dance class in Odissi style. One sequence is pure luxury to the uninitiated Western eye: the women count their way in unison through some forty individual positions of the hands and fingers. For many observers, it's the astonishing detail and precision with which individual fingers are deployed and in which the hands are angled that proves the greatest single charm of the dances of South-East Asia; but until now I've never seen dancers perform them as a classroom sequence.

This takes place at the singularly idyllic and far-from-the-madding-crowd Nrityagram Dance Village, founded in 1990 by the actress Protima Gauri Bedi. This is - as she intended - a disciplined Utopia, an hour's drive west of Bangalore (Bengaluru). Not all Ms. Bedi's original ideas could be realized: she planned originally that the village would offer instruction in the six foremost classical dance styles of India, but this could not be sustained so far from a city. After about three years, Nrityagam became a haven solely of the genre in which Ms. Bedi herself specialized: Odissi, a genre deriving from the eastern Indian state of Orissa but now widely practiced across India and the world.

The features that most identify Odissi are not its use of hands and fingers, gorgeous though those are, but its sensuous shifts of weight, creating a series of S-bend curves primarily at knee, torso, and neck; and its connection to sculptural depictions of dance. I watch these 16 women slowly, luxuriously create one curve, at the knee, as they step from the “chouk” to the “abhanga,” or three ravishing curves as they step from the “chouk” to the “tribhanga”. The chouk is a square position, with weight held evenly above turned-out legs and parted feet; in the abhanga one leg takes the weight while the other bends at the knee; in the tribhanga, the torso tilts to the other side and the neck or head curves in opposition.

Though she died in 1998, Ms. Bedi's name is still frequently spoken by the four women who do most to keep Nrityagram going: Lynne Fernandez (its executive director), and the dancers Surupa Sen (also its choreographer and rhythm composer), Bijayini Satpathy (the director of OdissiGurukul - "gurukul" means "resident school" or "family of study" - and in charge of new techniques for training), and Pavithra Reddy. It is not unusual for these and other dancers here to start work at 7.30 or 8 am and to finish between 8 and 11pm; I witness this while I'm staying here for four days.

In Delhi, the great dancer Madhavi Mudgal, widely acknowledged as today's foremost Odissi exponent on stage and in teaching, refers to Nrityagram as an "”oasis”. The village include vegetable patches, which produce most of the community's food, and gardens. Bougainvillea, orange “Flames of the Forest”, and other species are in abundant flower; the dawn chorus is an extraordinary polyphony of multiple pulsations and calls. The word "oasis" fits this far-from-the-madding-crowd haven to perfection.

81: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

I think I'll just do Chidambaram another year and stay there then. Too complicated now.

Will do Thanjavur on the 20th and 21st. Do please tell Nandini. I will ring her, but my days are quite busy with schlepping around TN just now.

I'm staying at the Hotel Gnanam: very central, clean and efficient, though with some of the dullest vegetarian cuisine in South India. Yesterday in Kumbakonam my driver took me to a very nondescript vegetarian cafe where we had the most delicious food I've had so far: he and the manager, neither speaking serious English, helped me in pacing and mixing the food the right way and so I muddled along very happily through a great many ingredients.

,82: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

I certainly don't write for dancers or choreographers; I always assume they know their own business. I'm writing for other members of the audience - and I don't assume that I am more enlightened than other people in the audience either. In a way, my lack of expertise - my ignorance - is my true starting-point, as it is for the rest of the audience. I hope this makes sense. Obviously, I've gained some knowledge over the years; there are even several areas now on which few people know more than I. But that's not the point: the point is that I sit out there in the dark at each performance seeing the same show as the rest of the audience. Artists such as yourself don't just dance for the experts or connoisseurs; you dance to reach the whole audience. Critics and artists, even good critics and good artists, will sometimes misunderstand one another and fail to appreciate one another; you and I are lucky in that we can talk freely. I'm sure I'll still get things wrong when next I write about your dancing, but then, as you say, you won't be dancing simply to get a good notice in “The New York Times”.

Horrid day. I dropped and lost my iPhone in Srirangam: my fault. Then I lost my driver (and with him half my belongings) in Trichy. Fortunately, he and I have now been reunited. But for the first time in India I feel as if I could use a stiff drink!

Tomorrow I go to Chidambaram for the opening of the festival <evidently I had been overruled>; yet again I'm being given the pukka sahib treatment, with car sent for me and hotel laid on (the performance goes on through the night, though I don't plan to remain after midnight). I was planning to visit Chadambaram anyway tomorrow: this dance festival has only just come to my notice.

83: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

I journey to Chennai on the 22nd. There is a festival at Chidambaram, by the way - I was going there tomorrow anyway as a tourist, but now am going as a critic too. The opening performance is through-the-night, but I have explained that I am very elderly AND on holiday, and they've said they're happy as long as I stay till midnight.... Then back here to Thanjavur on the 21st. There is a festival here too, also opening tomorrow; I will catch the installment on the 21st.

Let me know how late on the 22nd you may remain at Chennai.

84: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

I lost my iPhone today - my fault - which is infuriating. One can't get a Sim card for an Indian mobile phone without proof of residency. Fortunately, I have my iPad which at least sends email. For a few hours - it's been a tough day - I thought I'd lost that too, along with my driver, my guidebooks, my Nook (Kindle), and more; my driver and I lost each other in one traffic-crazed town for hours, and I had to return without him. Fortunately, he was traced and brought my bagful of stuff back to this hotel. But my iPhone was already lost.

Yes: this holiday is just so INTERESTING - just what I needed. I haven't had nearly as much swimming as I wanted and have hardly read anything at all, which is what I crave on any holiday, and yet it doesn't matter: my head is just full of new information, new thought, new sensation.

85: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

temple at Gangaikondacholapuram, Saturday 18

Well, I said yesterday that "Airavateshwara" wasn't the biggest verbal mouthful of the day. "Gangaikondacholapuram" means "temple of the Chola king who conquered (extended his realm to) the Ganges".

Ballet-lovers: this scene <35> is an alternative opening for Act One of "Bayadère". Please note the well.

86: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

I'm sure you're right about the dates. I have to write these emails rapidly in the hotel foyer: only place where the Internet works.

No, I'm just one of those people who takes too many photographs and is lucky when some of them work. The light here helps.

Am exactly halfway through my four weeks now.

87: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

No, there will be no real holiday component here; it just didn't work that way. But I will take something later on in the year.

I don't know how I kept as calm as I did today, now I look back. I lost the iPhone, looked for it thoroughly, resigned myself to its loss. My driver - almost nobody here speaks much English intelligibly or understands one's English easily - was pleasant but much more flusterable than I, coping with tricky traffic in a town he simply didn't know. (I don't know why they sent him: Sunday! I suppose.) Trichy then drove him into a panic, as it is a maze of one-way streets without parking spaces, and the Rock Fort, which is what I wanted to see, was in the middle of a pedestrian zone. So he sent me off to find it, pointing me the right way, and made sure I took his car registration number, implying - I thought - that he would somehow find a way of finding me. Actually, he could have done so: he should have just driven round and round the one-way system until I surfaced. But after I'd done the Rock Fort, I wandered the one-way streets where he'd dropped me for two hours or more, to no avail. I had no phone, no iPad, no guidebooks, no passport. Thank heavens I had money (and, in the afternoon sun, water). Poor man: I didn't understand the Tamil when he eventually returned to my hotel, but it sounded as if the hotel gave him ten times more of an earful than I would have. Somehow my energy here is just so good that I was irritated but not beside myself.

Now bed. Tomorrow Chidambaram.

88: Sunday, 19 February, Thanjavur

Somehow not lonely at all, though perhaps I will be more so from now on, because yesterday - grrrr - I lost my iPhone. Communication these days keeps one in company. I have the iPad, but one can't keep that in one's pocket or make 'phone calls with it. In the South, few people speak intelligible English, but I remember feeling lonely in Spain and Russia where I didn't speak the language, whereas not here. At Nrityagram, everyone spoke English and I was with people, all very endearing; tomorrow I will see dance people at Chidambaram; the day after that I'll see the "Times" photographer Briana <Briana Blasco> here and also the following week in (enjoy saying this) Bhubaneshwar, where I'll also be among (too many) dance people the whole time.

Well, I'm glad you're past the seriously freezing weather you had on the 4th and 5th (as when my phone had to wait at Heathrow to be defrosted).

Oh, I did mention cows in one email, and I will mention more in a later one. They wander the streets and occasionally amble or, in one case, skip across the main road. Often their horns are painted different colors: left red and right blue, for example, or green and yellow, and it looks to me as if the humans have often polished the unpainted horns too. The horns are often about twenty inches long and usually trace various arcs. Of course, I can't tell the difference between cows and bullocks, but it's probably the latter who are widely used as oxen to pull carts.

89: Monday, 20 February, Thanjavur

the Mahamakham tank at Kumbakonam, Saturday

I sent a picture of the spectacular tank at Madurai last week, but many towns and some temples contain such tanks. This is the most famous and revered of the several in Kumbakonam; the others I saw were unused, but this one, as you see, has people swimming, bathing, and doing the laundry. They were all intensely curious to see me: one waved while swimming and then emerged (he was wearing jeans) from the water and came up to chat ("Where are you from?" is always the first question). This tank is special because it is said to have filled with ambrosia collected from the pot filled by Shiva. The Rough Guide says that every twelve years, when Jupiter passes the constellation of Leo, it is believed that the water from the Ganges and other holy rivers fills the tank, whereupon it gains the status of tirtha or sacred river crossing, and as many as four million pilgrim show up.

90: Monday, 20 February, Thanjavur

Dear advisors on Indian culture,

I'm going today to Chidambaram to catch the opening event of the dance festival there. Can any of you tell me: Is the anywhere particular in the traditional literature - Rig Veda, Mahabharata, or other - where the legend of Shiva and Parvati and Shiva as Nataraja is related? I keep hearing it and reading it in guidebooks, but would love to see how it was written traditionally.

Speaking of which, what English books of Hindu myths can you recommend? I am reading the Penguin “Hindu Myths”, edited and translated by Wendy O' Flaherty, but this doesn't contain the Nataraja story; so I'm sure there must be others.

Even though I lost my iPhone yesterday at Srirangam - a real inconvenience - I am still loving this trip: I can feel how it's giving me all kinds of new energy. Of course, I look just like any other Englishman in the South, with my face and feet going a brighter pink every day!

91: <unpublished>

Dance in India 3 - 2012.ii.20

NRITYAGRAM, KARNATAKA. The Nrityagram Dance Ensemble has visited the United States a number of time since 1996; the Nrityagram Dance Village is in fact largely sustained by the Ensemble's foreign touring. But the production it brings to the Joyce Theater (March 22-25), and to other American cities this spring, is a joint effort: it also involves artists from the Chitrasena Dance Company from Sri Lanka: guru, choreographer, drummer, and two dancers.

Nrityagram's dancer-choreographer Surupa Sen supervises the whole production, “Samhara”, a remarkably subtle dialogue of two dance styles. She and her Nrityagramcolleague Bijayini Satpathy both say that they have encountered no other dance company with which they feel in such harmony: they call the Chitrasena idiom (which exemplifies the Kandiyan style of Sri Lanka) a "masculine" counterpart to the essentially "feminine" Odissi style they practise themselves.

The Chitrasena company is, like the Nrityagram one, internationally celebrated. It was founded in Colombo by the guru Amaratunga Arachige Maurice Dias, alias Chitrasena, in 1944; at the same time, he also founded its school . Chitrasena(who died in 2005) and his wife Vajira were renowned dancers ; their daughter Upeka, who retired from performance last year, is currently its guru and has been commuting between Colombo and Nrityagram for several months; two of her nieces are also part of the company.

Though its two dancers are remarkably lovely, slender, and long-limbed young women, you can see what's masculine about their idiom beside the Odissi dancers. They, the Kandiyan women from Sri Lanka, cover much more space both in the easy vertical lift of their limbs and in their horizontal traveling; they also move their arms, wrists and torsos in ways evidently different from the Odissi women; they have few of the meltingly sensuous horizontal curves that are so central to Odissi.

They also show facial enthusiasm with broad smiles, whereas the Nrityagram dancers, like most Indian classical stylists, maintain facial composure in passages of pure dance form (while, on the other hand, using vividly changing facial expressions in formally expressional sequences). And where Odissi dancers (as with most forms of Indian dance) wear a chain of bells wound three times around the ankle, these Kandiyan dancers wear bronze anklets with internal bells, attached both to angled and to second toe.

After watching a rehearsal or two, I can certainly identify these ways in which the Nrityagram and Chitrasena dancers differ from each other; I can also see where they come close to each other, like a meeting of finely attuned minds. What I can't see, however, is where the dancers actually take anything specific from each other's style. So I ask.

The answer is rhythm. Here the Western ear passes into mystery; Indian and Sri Lankan traditional music customarily uses metres of a complexity that perplexes many trained Western musicians and bewilders or dismays most Western dance people. (In Delhi, I watched Madhavi Mudgal teach a classroom of students an elaborately long phrase that included sub-phrases to counts of five and seven: she began by getting them to sing it. The practice of matching each movement to a syllable, so widespread here, is part of what turns most Indian and Sri Lankan dances into forms of music-making.)

One evening I watch Thaji Dias (a granddaughter of Chitrasena) and Mithirani Munasingha, the two Sri Lankan dancers, working for hours with their choreographer, HeshmaWignaraja, and with three of the Nrityagram musicians to perfect their rhythmic command of these syllabic dances ("Takateeta deena, Takateeta deena, Takateeta deen" is how one phrase sounds); the vocalist and violinist are as involved in the syllables as the drummer and the dancers. Watching the Odissi dancers at another rehearsal, I note that even a seemingly slow-motion phrase is set to a passage of brisk drumming: it seems that within the gradual movement there's a rapid sequences of minor pulsations, each to be judged with intense precision in the dance. There is always more to see.

93: Monday, 20 February, Thanjavur

flower-seller and flowers, Srirangam, Sunday

These flower sellers and their really exquisite garlands or posies <43> are to be found both around the temples but also on the streets in South India.

94: Monday, 20 February, Thanjavur

panorama of Srirangam gopuras from Rock Fort, Trichy

The Rock Fort at Trichy has a big view of the region. This <44> shows you two big gopuras at Sriranagam but also shows you that even the others in between are taller than anything else.

95: Monday, 20 February, Thanjavur

within the first courtyard of Srirangam temple, Sunday morning
The temple at Srirangam (Sri Ranganathaswamy) has seven courtyards, one within another. The first five at least feature painted and ornate gopuras (steeples). What's amazing <45> is how secular life is within the outer courtyards; there are bicycles, even cars, shops (selling hardwear, books, food, coffee, and much more). You are only asked to remove footwear in the fourth courtyard; and non-Hindus may not proceed beyond the fifth.

96: Monday, 20 February, Thanjavur

I’ll only be in Chennai for two nights (arrive Wed aftermoon, depart Friday dawn), and, apart from Kalakshetra, my main port of call will be the museum. Wish I was staying longer; will have to come back. The Nrityagram people also urged me to call at least one person there. Not sure if there'll be time to meet, though.... Well, yes, I'll just come back. The guidebooks all made Chennai sound largely unattractive, so it was only after I'd planned and replanned the journey that I found from several people that they think it full of excitement.

Will meet Nandini <Nandini Ramani, Bharatanatyam teacher> in an hour. Arrived at Chidambaram half an hour ago. The guidebooks all say that there is no good hotel in town, but this one, the Hotel Grand Park, will probably be the best - when they've finished building it! My room is elegantly modern, or will be: good fan, good loo, no water from the taps in the basin, exposed wires and gaps in walls at several places. What larks! It'll be fine.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2022