‘Natyashastra’ is likely a shared heritage of Eurasia, says Padma Subrahmanyam

Padma Subrahmanyam's lecture-demonstration on Natyashastra and Bharatanatyam's global reach, showcasing the fusion of art forms and cultural heritage.

As the big screen played an excerpt of a younger Padma Subrahmanyam performing an experimental choreography, ‘Jatayu Moksham’, synchronised with Tchaikovsky’s fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet, the silence in the hall was of the kind when an audience soaks in the brilliance of a tour de force before breaking into applause.

And, what could exceed a two-dimensional appreciation of her artistic feat than to have the multi-faceted Bharatanatyam doyenne and Padma Vibhushan awardee in their midst?

Ms. Subrahmanyam was at the Alliance Francaise recently for a lecture-demonstration, “Natya Sasthra for Bharathiya Aesthetics” under the auspices of the regional centre of the Indira Gandhi Centre for The Arts (IGNCA).

The Bharatanatyam-Tchaikovsky synthesis was one of the examples that Ms. Subrahmanyam laid out to postulate that the Natyashastra, which codified the visual language of performing arts, was something of a cultural common for a vaster geography.

The Bharatanatyam dancer-choreographer, who is also a scholar and author, felt that as the earliest treatise on music, dance, drama and poetics, sage Bharatha’s Natyashastra was conceptualised for the whole Indian sub-continent and beyond.

It is perhaps because of the grand scale on which the foundational text, regarded as the fifth Veda, is envisioned that a dance form with origins in Tamil Nadu like Bharatanatyam, has transcended boundaries to become global art, she added.

It took over a century of research by several scholars across the world, including in France, to determine that the Sanskrit treatise comprised 36/37 chapters. However, in the lack of consensus on its antiquity, scholars have assigned for its origin a date range of a thousand years, from 500 BCE to 500 AD, Ms. Subrahmanyam said.