Anita Desai has widely been praised as the finest Indian writer of her generation in the English language. (She was in fact born to a Bengali father and a German mother, but grew up in Delhi hardly aware of her mother being a foreigner, as she wore sari and cooked Indian food. When her mother died, Anita and her sister gave her a cremation and immersed her ashes in the river; it did not occur to them till later that they could have considered a burial.) Anita's daughter Kiran Desai is also an accomplished writer and has incidentally just won the Booker Prize with the novel The Inheritance of Loss. That should be next up in my reading list then, but anyway I want to talk here about a novel by Anita Desai I have just finished reading, namely Clear Light of Day, from 1980. (It happens to be one of three novels by her nominated for Booker Prize, all without any luck though.) It tells the story of three or four siblings who grew up in the years of India's independence and partition. The narrative structure is somewhat interesting, as it virtually runs in reverse time order from adulthood to childhood. It opens with an old family house in Delhi in the present day, when the elder sister Bim, a teacher with grey hair, has a visit from the younger sister Tara who since long ago has married and moved abroad with her husband working in foreign service. Part two deals with their teenage years when they had their first romances and their brother Raja was rebelling against the family with his interest in Urdu literature and eventually left for Pakistan. The third part goes back further in time to their naive childhood with all the happy times but also petty fights. The novel returns to the present only in part four, not with a big melodramatic reunion but a reconciliaton among the siblings symbolically.

The novel is not just about the decline of a family's fortunes or the love-hate relationships among siblings. It is also a story about compromises between dreams and reality in life, a theme made more poignant by the reverse time order. As children, Raja used to say that he would want to be a hero when he grew up and Bim said she wanted to be a heroine; they laughed at Tara who said she wanted to be a mother and knit for her babies. Their aunt Mira had to console Tara by saying: "There, there, you'll see you grow up to be exactly what you want to be, and I very much doubt if Bim and Raja will be what they say they will be." It turned out to be so true, as Tara eventually found escape from the family's dwindling fortunes by marrying well. Bim on the other hand rejected a great potential romance in her younger years and got stuck in the family house living a largely solitary life. The young Raja liked to fancy himself as a poet ever since he struck up a friendship with a neighbouring Muslim family and started reading Urdu poetry apart from English. His used to impress guests of the Muslim family by reciting the great Urdu poet Iqbal's verses: "Thou didst create night but I made the lamp/Thou didst create clay but I made the cup/Thou didst create the deserts, mountains and forests/I produced the orchards, gardens and groves/It is I who made the glass out of stone/And it is I who turn a poison into an antidote." His dreams would inspire him to enrol in a college for Islamic studies, to violent objections from his father, who said Hindus would be after his blood and Muslims too since they would not trust him. Those were the days of impending partition and indeed Raja soon witnessed the house of his neighbour Hyder Ali go up in flames.

Raja was ultimately to abandon his family and move to Hyderabad in search of his like-minded friends, an act that his sister Bim held against him throughout their adult years. As Bim would remark to Tara, he never became much of a poet despite his attempts. His poems just seemed very derivative to Bim whenever she took them out of her drawers to read. "He had made no effort to break the iron ring of cliches, he had seemed content to link them, ring to ring ... ... One could see in them only a wish to emulate and to step where his heroes had stepped before him." Nevertheless, Bim continues to cherish the memory of Raja sharing his joys of poetry with her. The last pages in the novel make a beautiful conclusion to the themes of friendship and bonding, pursuits of the arts and life in general, with a description of Bim at a concert where an old singer is accompanied by the tabla and so on. His voice is a little cracked, "inclined to break, although not merely with age but with the bitterness of his experiences, the sadness and passion and frustration". "He sang like a man who had come, at the end of his journey, within sighting distance of death..." Suddenly she recognised something the man was singing: "Your world is the world of fish and fowl. My world is the cry at dawn." She was filled with excitement. Iqbal's, she whispered, Raja's favourite.

Sigh, they just don't make movies like they used to any more. I'm talking about old movies like all the mythological stories in technicolour, where the characters with their magic power can appear or disappear here and there like teleportation, emanate fireworks from their hands or throw weapons in a projectile to fight in mid-air, all this against a landscape of mountains that is so obviously a studio backdrop. Movies with heroes of such special aura like Sivaji, or clowns like Nagesh who just tickles your funny bones like nobody even before he opens his mouth and talks. At that time it must seem like all the entertainment one ever needed. Could people then have imagined that movies one day would be so full of non-stop fighting and bloodshed or raunchy dance numbers like what we have today?

It's after the recent passing of actress Padmini that I decided to watch her legendary movie Thillana Mohanambal, featuring her as a dancer pitted in a contest against Sivaji as a nadaswaram player, a rivalry turned love affair. The story has a typical character of a greedy and class-conscious mother coming in the way of true love, and Nagesh plays the comic role of an opportunist who would steal a cut from the artistes' performance, when he is not busy being a pimp arranging match-make of the danseuse for a rich landlord or some nobility. Padmini as the lovelorn danseuse must have mesmerised an entire generation of male audience with her big watery eyes batting those long eyelashes. Her pink lips find perfect enhancement in a rosy pink saree, but if you think that looks seductive, wait till you see her dancing in a glittering orange dress, with thin stripes accentuating the contours of the voluptuous bosom and legs. It was not exactly classical dance of course, more like flashy poses and exaggerated bouncing and swaying to show the exuberance of the body. It's entertainment, so who's to complain?

The movie is certainly not without kitsch, silliness or quirkiness. You will find a musician fighting in the temple by knocking his opponent's head with his taalam (cymbals), a landlord with a mini Chinese palace for a harem, not forgetting an American couple which applauds our nadasawaram player and then asks if he is able to play western music on the Indian instruments. Our nadaswaram player, who has just walked out of the show venue and returned his performance payment, refusing to play for a bourgeoise audience who has swing dance before his item, takes up the challenge readily. He breaks into something that sounds like a waltz, apparently set in Sankarabharanam to imitate western music. I recognised it as a tune I have also heard on an album by Dr Chittibabu. In fact, as I now learn, it is a piece known as the Madurai Mani notes. (The composer Madurai Mani Iyer himself, by the way, seems quite a character - he is known for refraining from singing "Nidhi Chala Sukhama", ie "is money the cause for happiness", since he thought it was hypocritical when he was accepting money for his performances.) You can guess that scene suggests the growing influence from the West was felt even in those days. Entertainment value aside, hopefully the movie can serve as a reminder of how music and dance are indispensable to our culture and also that artistes should be given due respect?

My thoughts dwelt on Agni this week, as I walked out of the house every day and saw a sky of grey. The haze is due to the primitive method of land clearing by fire in Indonesia. Now Agni is identified in Hinduism with the sacrificial fire and seen as the mediator carrying the offerings of men to gods. The very first hymn in the Rig Deva is addressed to him; in fact with 200 hymns addressed to him, he is the most important deity there next to Indra. There is a story in the Mahabharata about Agni devouring the Khandava forest with his flames and coming into conflict with Indra who is pouring rain; Agni then gets help from Arjuna and Krishna to fight Indra and soon regains his vigour by consuming the forest. Historians have speculated that Vedic hymns telling of Agni burning his way eastwards were probably a reflection of migrations by Indo-Aryan language speakers down the Ganga basin, burning and cutting down forests through the generations. It is not by pure coincidence that in Greek mythology there is also the figure of Prometheus, who stole fire from the heavens to give to mankind, incurring the anger of Zeus. The discovery of fire for cooking, lighting, etc marked the dawn of civilisation around the world. Incidentally fire is also a sacred symbol in Zoroastrianism, referred to in hymns as the son of supreme god Ahura Mazda; one may add here that the Zoroastrian sacred text of Avesta is written in Old Persian which has close affinity with Sanskrit, but let's not discuss the history or myth of 'Aryan' people now.

Talking about history, there have also been parallels drawn between the ten avatars of Vishnu and the evolution of nature and mankind. You can see Matsya as representing fish and other lifeforms in water, Kurma as representing amphibians, Varaha and Narasimha as life on land or mammals and so on, you can think of Parashurama with an axe as signalling early human development through invention of tools whereas Balarama with a plough symbolises development in agriculture, and of course for the most important avatars, Rama embodies social order or the ability to govern nations, while Krishna represents the delights in science and art. If you include Buddha, it's up to you to interpret, maybe he can be a symbol of philosophical reflections, or harmony with man and nature, but then again there are people who think he came just to confound.

There is a nice song Sri Satyanarayanam I was just listening to, by Muthuswami Dikshitar, it's in the haunting raga of Subha Pantuvarali. In the charanam it goes like "... Kaliyuka prasannam ... Matsya kurma varahati ...". I don't quite understand the words but it's like an earnest prayer to Vishnu the preserver, with emotions sounding like desperation to my ears. Sometimes I can't help feeling we are indeed living in the era of Kali Yuga, and the end of the world is coming soon, at least for human beings who have done everything other than helping to preserve nature. We have gone through all the evolution and all the agricultural and industrial revolutions, all the advancement of the intellect, only to help destroy mother earth and ultimately ourselves. Global temperature is rising and people are still denying anything has gone wrong or simply refusing to do anything about it. Call it human logic, which has value only in serving the beast of economic development.

Never mind Bharatanatyam, contemporary seems the way to go in dance now. Why not? The obvious reason: The audience will like it. The philosophical reason: I create, therefore I am. Why repeat the same adavus you have been learning all your life in class? The specific reason: Nobody will count whether you're doing 8 or 16 dhi-dhi-tai, or whether your tirmanam is 1-2-1 or 3-2-1-0, but if you simply walk across the stage, people will understand what you're doing. The petty reason: In contemporary dance, you won't have your teacher reminding you to give a big smile even when you know damn well you are not enjoying the dance.

Seriously, if you do dance only thinking of it as a form of puja or whatever, fine. However, if you think of dance as a form of expression, surely there can be other possibilities of communicating with the audience in this 21st century, beyond the navarasa and the 50 or 60 mudras. That doesn't mean you have to deny your cultural traditions completely and start from nothing. The old Chandralekha is one good example, she would incorporate yoga movements into dance, or she would assimilate traditional movements differently to express something like a lotus flower in a more abstract manner. One of her former dancers, Padmini Chettur, performed in Singapore some time back, where she did quite a bit of slow movements like yoga, but also something kind of like a tat-thi-mu-tu, with a similar sense of rhythmic precision like Bharatanatyam, though the physical forms were entirely different. I must say, however, that Bharatanatyam is probably not as easy to lend itself to a new language of modern dance as, say, Kathak. UK-based Akram Khan (of Bangladeshi parentage) has made quite a name for himself doing such fusion stuff using Kathak. It's like he would do turns of the wrist (like dram-the) and sweeping of the arms (like the-tha-the) from possible positions in all possible directions, even with the body in low positions close to the floor. One or two years ago, he was invited to stage a world premiere of a show at the Singapore Arts Festival, his dance company was paid lots of money and he was staying in a 6-star hotel, and the show had quite a bit of that. A documentary of this performance called Ma was shown on television just the other day. He was also doing something like standing like a Kathak dancer but saying rhythmic syllables with mridangam as accompaniment, going ta-ke-dhi-mi ta-ke-je-nu and so on, mixing conventions of north and south. Of course to the western or non-Indian audience it would not make any difference. But it does raise some questions as to how traditional elements are being used in this context. Is it rebelling against traditions without a cause? Or with the cello being predominant in the music of the performance, do those confused snatches of traditional music serve to reflect a feeling of alienation for an emigrant? Or is there simply no need to justify any experiment in this postmodern age?

For me, the main problem if you want to do 'contemporary Indian dance' is the choice of music. If you use something like western piano or string music, does it mean you have to abandon the rhythmic style of Indian dance? Or if you take a techno remix of a kriti, will it end up nothing more than Bharatanatyam with disco lights? Maybe the problem is there is not enough good 'contemporary Indian music' available, so you may have to make do with whatever fusion music available.