Lord of the Dance, By Marina Warner

By Marina Warner

1.

In the mid-Sixties when I was first in London, the look was elfin for both sexes: girls were boyish – think of Twiggy or of Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle, the film that announced the spirit of the decade in l959. And the most exciting of the boys were girlish – Mick Jagger, all soft curls, big pouty mouth, leaping in a silk blouse – a kurta – his matchstick legs with the bulge sheathed in velvet. Ram Gopal the dancer was ahead of the times, of the Beatles’ passion for Ravi Shankar, of the cult of Liz Taylor as Cleopatra in the l963 disaster. But he heralds something of all of that: he embodies the Orientalist fascination which was to take such a hold. His masquerade even prefigures Taylor’s: she starred with Ram Gopal in a film made on location in India in l954, Elephant Walk.

The western love affair with the exotic now makes a lot of us uneasy: we are wary of English nuns driven to mad lust in the Himalayas as in Black Narcissus (l946), and we have had our critical sense sharpened by Edward Said over casting the East under a great cloud of sacred, magic, sexual wonder, feminising and infantilising it. The philosopher and economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen argues forcefully for the countervailing history, about rationalism and science in India long before Europe, while the narrator in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet says, ‘Excuse me, but some of us aren’t falling for it, some of us are trying to break free into the real.’ Some of us are trying; some of us can try. But the unreal still pulls hard, and it’s been a central part of my writing to explore this. Ram Gopal was a dancer, who brought classical Indian dance – and music, and drums, and mythology – to Europe in the Thirties. He was exotic, he was beautiful, he was innovatory, he was superbly gifted, skilled, and disciplined. He danced by himself and with Alicia Markova and other great ballerinas. He was born in Bangalore, perhaps in l912 (he never said), and he died in London, where he had settled, in 2003.

Ram Gopal was a phenomenon.

2.

Ram Gopal heard the gods hammering on the towering anvil clouds as the sky loured black; Gulab the family servant was calling to him from the verandah to come in from the storm, this minute, but the boy ran away, shinned up the big mango tree at the end of the garden and hid there, laughing as he heard Gulab ‘s cries, growing now more wheedling, now more threatening. Ram would be given no supper, and worse, Gulab would tell on him to his father, but the boy in the tree hung there, quiet, laughing to himself silently. Soon the sound was drowned by the rain, the vast, heavenly, mad drumming of the downpour as it beat the garden into mud in accompaniment to the roar from the darkness closing in above, and the wonderful flashes as the gods hurled their lights down to the garden, where Ram Gopal, five years old, flung himself down from the tree and began to dance in the liquid red earth. That was the beginning of his art; of his ecstasy. At least that is how Ram Gopal tells the story at the start of his memoir Rhythm in the Heavens, which was published in London in l957, when its author was an icon, celebrated for reviving classical Indian dance and taking it all over the world, from London to Tokyo, Los Angeles to the Philippines. Ram Gopal’s art descended on him in thunder and in rain, and many many photographs show how he danced for the gods in temples in Mysore and Tangore like a living divine image, an avatar of blue Krishna, Lord of Love, flirting with the milkmaids, of Siva Nataranja, dancing Siva, cosmic Siva, and Siva the tender husband of Parvati, and their androgynous fusion of their bodies.

3.

Ram Gopal won a patron in the brother of the ruler of Mysore, who invited him to perform, when he was still a boy, in front of the British Viceroy and over a thousand guests. With the support of the Yuvaraja he began the rigorous training all classical dancers must undergo. Ram Gopal could turn out his feet and turn back his fingers, leap up and turn on a sequin, flutter his eyelids and wobble his eyeballs, and he acquired this technique by arduous exercises. He and his guru Kunju Kurup rose together in the middle of the night to begin the work. He describes the hours and hours of discipline, as he learned to stretch his eyestrings, to roll his eyes in his head, to dart them from side to side. He describes the shaping and moulding of his limbs, which were to become famous for their litheness, strength and silkiness – he was made of tungsten but looked soft and smooth as rose petals. He discovered every finger and every joint of every finger and learned how to bend and point and curl each of them to express a facet of the drama he was dancing; he discovered every joint of every toe as well and learned to bend and point and curl each of them to deepen the power of the dance. He was kept on a strict and frugal diet, and a rigorous regime of alternating activity and sleep. His youth was as dedicated and ascetic as a monk’s because his art was not an art but a state of mind and a way of being and he had to inhabit it fully in order to extend its expressive range to the utmost – to embrace the whole of existence through pulse, motion, gesture, which combine to embody feeling; his dancing makes significant form out of passions.

Classical dance in India, says Ram Gopal, embodies rasas (sentiments), a word which really means juices; there are restaurants now in London with that name which specialise in fruit curries and pulses and vegetables prepared in the Southern Indian style, dyed in the hot earth colours of purple and cinnabar, violet and saffron and turmeric and cumin. Feelings come embodied, like tastes, like smells: a dancer must communicate them: they include Eroticism and Fury, Valour and Pathos, Disgust and Fear, Wonder and Serenity. The equivalent word in English – affect – is all cold, pale, and dry by comparison. Ram Gopal was training to make these juices flow under his control from his body to his audience’s. There were conventions about how to communicate the rasas – mudras, the poses of hand and fingers, taken from the images of the gods, form an elaborate cipher. They don’t drive straight to the nervous system of the spectator the way the drumming does or the sound of the flute and the feet of the dancer slapping the ground, when the excitement the dance creates spreads out and divides into different moods. His desire sets up accompanying yearning in the audience, his fury ignites anger, and his disgust prompts shared aversion: the dancer is the passion, incarnate: the danced-to feels its force play through them.

I was once in an apartment in Paris and worked at a table with a chandelier hanging above it: when my neighbour upstairs did her laundry, and the washing machine reached its spin cycle, the crystal drops on the chandelier began to shake to its rhythm. As the spin gathered speed, they began to hum in concord with it, until they sang out a pure harmonic chord. This is how it was, I imagine, when Ram Gopal embodied the rasas and his audiences were caught up with him in their power.

4.

William Hurrell was the Hollywood studio portraitist who discovered Vaseline on the lens would do what cosmetic surgery could not: wipe away time from the faces of the stars. Ram Gopal was taken by him in the Forties, when he was touring the United States with his company. Hurrell understood lighting as few have done before or since; he loved the dance of highlights and shadows in mirrors and glass, satin and crystal, jewels and hair, his vision enhanced the Hollywood stars’ sleek, glossy, slippery and sinuous glamour: his was an art of seduction. Ram Gopal looked into the photographer’s adoring lens; it became a mirror for his most beautiful dreams of himself. His costumes glittered and shone and bristled; he turned himself into a frilled lizard, a jewelled scarab, a ruffed apsara; he copied his costumes from Rajput and Moghul miniatures and temples lent him gems and head-dresses and ornaments from their collections. He posed for Hurrell from his famous dance of the Cobra, his fingers flicking in imitation of the snake’s tongue and hiss. He could become a peacock, too, quite naturally, and spread his spangled tail.

When I look at the photographs, at so many photographs of him, I try and imagine myself in the audience at Sadler’s Wells in London in the early Thirties who saw classical Indian dance for the first time in this country. Or I try and place myself among the WAAFs and the soldiers who turned out en masse to watch him in l945 when he entertained the troops as part of the ENSA entertainments put on by the Naafi, or National Army and Air Force Institutes. My own father was out in India then with the Eighth Army – did he see Ram Gopal dance? Did Ram Gopal dance after Vera Lynn sang her sentimental songs and George Formby clowned so perkily with his ukulele?

By all accounts, Ram Gopal was a huge success with the British army: an RAF fighter pilot called Edward Sparkes met him and stayed with him in his palatial mansion there. ‘Sparkie’, who until his death in 2005 must have been one of the oldest bloggers on the web, called his blog his Mumblings. He set down some erotic reminiscences about Ram Gopal too, and when he left, Ram gave him a packet of photographs of himself dancing in the temples. Sparkie wrote that ‘He was a beautiful creature and knew it. His limbs belonged neither to man or woman…’

5.

Dance and eros, ecstasy and androgyny: they twin and grow together, in mysterious relation, like the words for cosmos and cosmetic, which share the same root, the Greek for beauty. I can’t begin to tell here the many stories about male and female bodies interchanging and fusing that occur in Sanskrit myth: Wendy Doniger has written an inspired book about these weird and wonderful tales around twenty-five years ago, with the title Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, and she shows how transvestism, hermaphroditism, transsexualism, male pregnancy, and all the myriad permutations of male-female, boy-girl switch, masquerades and interchanges are central to the religious imagination of Indian sacred narrative. The Upanishads tell how ‘In the beginning was Soul alone… He had no joy, and desired a second. No he was as large as a woman and a man in a close embrace, and so he caused his self to fall into two pieces, which became a husband and a wife. Therefore it is said, ‘Oneself is a half-fragment.’ This original couple then give birth to every creature in the world in pairs – to the bull and the cow, the male ant and the female ant – and of course to more men and women.

Occasionally, androgyny has rather practical ends: Parvati fuses with Siva to keep him from straying. Traces of these stories are deeply imprinted on the classical mythology of Europe: there are whole and complete beings at the origin of the world, according to Aristophanes in the conversation about love at the banquet Plato describes in his book the Symposium, but they split in two, into a male and a female half; and so we spend our lives searching for our lost other part. In several cases, young girls pray to be turned into men – after they have been raped: on occasion, their wish is granted. The beautiful Caenis, who had the misfortune to attract the love of the god of the sea, is changed by him in just the way she had asked for. She grows up to become an invincible warrior, who could suffer ‘a thousand blows, without any injury to his person’.

Not for nothing did Dionysus, the long-haired, loose-limbed god of wine and laughter, orgies and ecstasy come from India. He was born in a miraculous male birth out of the thigh of his father, and was represented as a lovely girl who keeps something of the boy about him. But you’d never mistake him, any more than you would take Mick Jagger for a woman.

I would like to have seen Ram Gopal dance, but the images and the drawings give a sense of his presence.

To view the Ram Gopal collection

Click Here