Tradition, in the context of hereditary dance and its music, is riddled with more questions than answers. We grapple with its present day contextualisation, much of the time in spurts of emotional zeal and laced with an undercurrent of guilt and a sense of loss. In recent years there has been an increasingly clamouring of voices, demanding that these suffocating traditions of nearly a century have their rightful space amongst mainstream interpretations of Bharatanatyam.
Though I come from a tradition of dancers and musicians myself, there are many times when feeling lost amongst the clamouring, name calling and jeering that has riddled social media today. I write not to enumerate further the social uphill and trauma of what many hereditary families have experienced. No one can deny that my family and others are a living example of how tradition can survive and thrive in the 21st century.
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