Mohiniyattam and the Death of the Other
Murder, She Wrote
I had my first vision of Mohini by moonlight as she glid gracefully between the columns of a colonial manor. We were late for the performance; understandably so, for a holidaying family caught hopelessly between doing nothing and having nothing to do. The night air was cool, and redolent of the backwaters, as we took our seats under the clay roof of the bistro where we were to dine and watch on.
Mohiniyattam was already in full swing, and the danseuse, clad in pristine white brocaded gold, pulsed smoothly through movement and poise. They were to be the key to my understanding of her art, for her facial expressions were lost to me by the rather myopic decision to leave my spectacles behind.
I still remember the incongruous comparison that came to mind then: she reminded me of the women of Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings and their supple fluidity playing off precision. I found no other way to reconcile the statuesque elaboration of her stances with the undulations in which they were floated or submerged.
Of course, the entire comparison could have more to do with Lempicka’s soulless faces, which is the best representation I have of my own poor attempts to reconstruct Mohini’s countenance. These exertions were interrupted by the serving of a lobster dish. My highbrow pretensions could not have met a more natural end, even as she drew to languorous surcease against a swell of music.
I caught a glimpse of the danseuse on the walk back to our room. At that moment, she seemed constrained by the coat she had draped over her shoulders. Carrying an unwieldy radio in one hand, she cut a strange and ever so slightly desolate figure amid the soft, lambent decorations adorning the courtyard hall. I was struck that the same woman, who now seemed straitjacketed to me, had danced in triumphal splendour not one hour before. This moment of fascination would prove to be the beginning of a bizarre correspondence between myth, method, and, a bit precariously, myself.
In a gender bender (risking irreverence) of epic proportions, the Hindu god Vishnu assumes the form of Mohini, the divine enchantress. Lord Vishnu/Mohini does so to secure for the Devas [deities] the possession of an elixir of immortality they fight with the Asuras [demons] over. Mohini’s ploy, put very simply, is to charm them into giving her the elixir, which she then distributes (the Asuras still caught mesmerised, and therefore unawares) to the Devas. The regenerate forces of good then go on to triumph over those of evil.
It is this simple episode in Hindu mythology which gives rise to the dance form of Mohiniyattam. The Dance of Mohini is a celebration of conquering feminine grace. Set in the delicate Lasya style, it is tranquil yet charged, sensuous yet spiritual, and evokes the “garland” the French poet Baudelaire wreathes on the great work of art:
Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté / Luxe, calme et volupté.
(There, all is order and beauty / Luxury, calm, and voluptuousness.)
Mohini’s story has captivated me since childhood; Mohini’s dance, more recently so.
When I saw the straitjacketed performer, I immediately mapped the distinct shade of apathy I sensed to the un-facial performance that I believed had exalted her then and effaced her now. Instinctively, it made sense to me: hers was a highly ritualised performance, and I can only assume that she is bound to weekly repetition for an ever-changing and inconstant audience who, for the most part, have hardly been initiated in the mysteries of her art. In spite of any passion for the art form, it is bound to take its toll.
And this could very well be the humdrum tragedy of every artist; it is painful to ponder upon.
My own thoughts shifted towards the art form and the underlying myth. I felt that, in some way, they captured a truth about the relations between artist and audience, and performer and spectator.
The history of the dance, Mohiniyattam, is as rich a material as any for a postcolonial study. And for the right person, the circumstances of my narration — among other things, first-person indigenous tourist in a British bungalow in God’s own Paradise — would furnish a wealth of themes and perhaps a store of irony. The myth is still more fertile. Even without taking its abstruse wisdom into consideration, gender is quite possibly one of the many things encoded in it for us to find. One might, for example, correspond the outer manifestation of Mohini with (the awareness of) the inner gaze of Vishnu as Mohini in the context of the myth. But I am well out of my depth here.
I must also confess that I am not exactly familiar with Roland Barthes’ famous essay, The Death of the Author. Call it heresy, hubris or hebetude; I have not read it. I do know that its main argument runs along these lines: neither the author’s intentions nor the facts of their life should be made to impose on their text; they are only really scribes or scriptors whose texts or libers offer a liberatory pleasure to the freely interpreting reader. Whether or not this argument is in earnest, its loci furnish the third term of a triad: artist and audience, performer and spectator, and now, author and reader.
I am a writer. At least, that is what I like to tell myself. I have not discovered my identity as one yet; perhaps there is nothing to be discovered there at all. What I have discovered, though, is that such indeterminacy comes along with the occasional thought of strangling my reader-to-be. Rest assured, this reader is adversarial, philistine, and imaginary, as I am sure you are not. Besides, these violent urges are a relic of the past.
In earnest, however, continual frustration, as well as the inherent solitude of writing, had rendered me doubtful. I have often felt terribly unsure of what I was doing; I yearned once more for the insolence of a poete maudit or an enfant terrible.
And I faltered haplessly in front of the reader through no fault of theirs: it is their obligation, after all, to practise pococurantism nine times out of ten. I do not begrudge them because I ultimately write for myself. But a prolonged period of sensitivity had forced me to rethink my relationship with the reader — this great, elusive, ubiquitous Other I grapple with.
It so happened that the performance would be a critical piece of the puzzle. That night, I had really been in league with the proverbial Asuras — indulgently brutish, slothful, and altogether incapable of being excited by a fine sentiment. Despite myself, I had transmogrified into the Other; I had stepped into the shoes of its crudest denominator. And later, its recrudescence led me to an epiphany so damningly obvious in hindsight.
What I had witnessed was, at its root, an act of seduction.
I do not mean to imply that the dance was lascivious. Nor am I merely referring to the fact of the seduction in the underlying myth. Having somewhat shared in the nature of the Asuras (albeit more in gluttony than in lust), I came to realise the intrinsic earthiness of it all; something which had earlier been glossed over by the circuits of ritual and formality, and apathy and aesthetic disinterestedness. Mohini seduces the Devas and the Asuras, supremely so. And as long as I can be earthy myself, I want to imagine that she must have felt smug, and perhaps somewhat culpable, being the singular, self-conscious muse of her own art.
This refreshing (re-)discovery would allow me to parse the relations between performer and spectator (and artist/audience and author/reader) in terms of the prospects of a surplus pleasure and enjoyment. Surely, such enjoyment exists not only on the plane of art but also over and under.
The artistic and the extra-artistic approach a perfect synthesis in the case of Mohini.
There is no need to elaborate either on the artistic merits of her dance or the distinctly erotic pleasure it must have bestowed on both the Devas and the Asuras. And beyond revelling in herself and her immaculate deception, Mohini’s own enjoyment (in my construction) is highly psychological.
I return to my remark that Mohini must be culpable. She plays the game of seduction; a game which involves acceding to grisly sexual realities such as objectification, at least on partial terms. But the obverse of this assent, heightened by the feeling of culpability, is the symbolic victory of the seducer over the seduced, on the latter’s terms. It is the delectation of stooping to conquer.
Mohini, the “supersensual, sensual wooer” and the woman who “by the nose leads.”
So it would seem, by extension, that an artist can derive surplus enjoyment from playing to perfection a game ruled by the arbiter. A temporary surrender to them, if you will. My own argument for it hinges on the issue of culpability, which, to us mortal hemi-semi-demiurges, is more often a downer than a stimulant. The causes range from compromising one’s loftiest artistic ideals to “selling out”. Another source of culpability is not doing justice to the art or the ideal, but this is different. At any rate, I believe that such feelings gnaw more or less quietly at every artist insofar as they are dependent on an audience for their sustenance, and so try to play by their rules. And though it seems ideal that a creation should be in-and-for-itself, it is impossible not to create without an audience in mind, whether they lend themselves to tenderness or spleen.
Thus, the artist reluctantly treads a tightrope. But the symbolic victory that would make it all worthwhile is so difficult to come by in reality. One is then stung by sorrow and remorse at having sacrificed all ideals and idealism, when they could have merely made do without recognition.
The only thing to do then is to abandon the tragic tightrope. Become ever so slightly bad and wicked, seductive and superfluous (and also delusional and perhaps delirious), and avail yourself of some supersensual enjoyment. Stoop to conquer.
There is an alternative to this if you seek to remain pure and chaste.
I return to Mohini yet again by way of illustration. Against the grain of universal admiration, there was one Asura who broke the sublime trance (and not deception, seduction, etc.!) induced by Mohini and saw through her purpose. He was instantly decapitated.
The lesson then, and I would urge this upon my fellow artists, is this: kill the Other. Get rid of the vexatious components of your audience. Preserve your rapture and your rhapsody, and also your peace. The least you can do is call them out on their barbarity. Make them feel guilty. But exercise subtlety, lest you should accidentally banish the Maecenases in the process.
I would be remiss not to mention that the Asura in question did partake of the elixir and so achieved immortality. His head drifts eternally through the vast firmament. And every once in a while, he makes a dreadful appearance, does this Rahu, namesake of the infamous Rahukala. It seems that there is no escaping him, nor the Other.
In parting, I would like to observe that death by femme fatale is quite possibly the ultimate gratification of sexual fantasy. You may draw your conclusions.
