Dance

We cannot simply view India as a single cultural entity and then compare it's dances with the Javano-Balinese dance tradition. It is a vast subcontinent with several dance traditions of different origins. Some of these dances are relevant for comparing with Indic Javanese and Balinese dances, others are not. Looking at dances from various parts of India while thinking of links with Javanese and Balinese dances, an overall north-south division emerges : the subcontinent's southern part shows better candidates. In general, the northern part proves to be more conventional in terms of West Asian esthetic quality. A notable exception is the Katmandu valley where a dance similar to the southern forms can be found nowadays. This dance looks as if it has been isolated from the south by the emergence of kathak and Mughal culture in North India. Turning now to dance in South India, a further caution must be taken because much of the Indian classical dances we see today are merely reconstructions of a lost art. Demography, colonization or other factors have brought dance out of its context, its ritual function. A lot has been forgotten in the reconstruction, including technique, costume, setting and ritual ambiance. Perhaps, nowadays, Kerala and the Malabar coast have dances that can be best compared with those of Java and Bali. Baris, for example, is better compared with kathakali than with bharata natyam. On the other hand, Balinese and Javanese dance sometimes lack a certain dynamism that we can find in South India and Sri Lanka. Eroticism, also, can be present in India but seems to have never passed to Southeast Asia. In Java, dance gestures and rhythm appear inhibited too often. It is a loss of dynamism that can partly be explained by the new West Asian faith that spread there. But there must be at least two other factors, present in Bali as well. Indonesia has also a style of dance that is slow moving, non-rhythmical, with arms lowered. This dance is presumably not of Indian origin and might be comparable with dances of some Pacific islands. It has influenced the Indian dance of Javanese and Balinese courts and temples. As a result, the so-called dance can become boring to watch. Even in less boring dances in Bali, the leg movements of feminine dances seem poorer than their counterparts in South India and Sri Lanka. Male dances of Java and Bali have better kept intact an Indian way of moving the legs. Over the centuries, the Indian dance's musical accompaniment in Java and Bali grew bigger and bigger, resulting in today's large gamelans. These large gamelans are as heavy as intricate. They are hard to manage musically, unite, conduct. Indirectly this has been a burden to the dance. In the end, a sort of compromise has happened during the artistic development of dance and gamelan : the Indian dance has given away some of its energy to its accompanying ensemble. The gamelan, although a heavy set of broken apart pieces, is maintained rhythmically and melodically malleable thanks to the dance's needs. It manages to produce real music.

The number of codified hand positions and gestures, the mudras (the exact dance term is hasta), is higher in India than in Java or Bali. It has been stated that they have been forgotten as the dance was transmitted from India to Java. Hand positions and gestures are nonetheless as important in Javanese and Balinese dance as in India. Whether in India, Indonesia or Cambodia, hands have a typically ornamental role and emphasize the dance's delicate intricacy (or intricate delicacy ?). In India, the main difference is that hand positions have more meanings, almost like a sign language. We could hypothesize that, in present-day India, the over-codified hand language is a more recent development. In Sri Lanka, the Singhalese have a dance equivalent to bharata natyam of Tamil Nadu. Both dances developed from a common South Indian dance of ancient times. Although the Singhalese form knows fewer meanings of hastas, it seems more faithful to the ancestral dance than bharata natyam is.

Dynamism of dance, leg use, presence of eroticism, the excellent Nepalese and Singhalese forms are arguments in favor of India. But Java, Bali and Southeast Asia in general also have theirs. First is their testimony of forms now lost in India. Then, the chance of seeing vulgar gestures is even more remote than in India. In bharata natyam, incongruous gestures, sometimes vulgar, do occur. Thirdly, theater and dance in Southeast Asia never stages this kind of excess of sentimentalism performed mostly in North India but too often present in bharata natyam. Perhaps, the greatest argument for Java and Bali concerns the musical aspect. The typical accompaniment is the gamelan, a musical ensemble specific to Java, Bali and Malaya. It shares some common heritage with the Thai-Khmer piphat ensemble. But it is absent in India. Relation of Indian dance with music is sharply different between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. The musical accompaniment is mostly percussive in Southeast Asia whereas it not always so in the Indian subcontinent. This disparity would be tricky to clarify (see the India problem).