Keralee-Nritham or Mohini Attam

When Mata Hari, the Red Dancer and War Spy, was questioned about her antecedents, she is reported to have said that Malabar was her birthplace and she was trained as a temple dancer in one of the subterranean shrines there.

This was, of course, a pure fabrication, but it will be interesting to speculate why she concocted this story: whether she was in the know of things or whether it was just a shrewd guess.

Whatever may be the truth behind this, Mata Hari’s intuition or artistic instinct did not play her false, for she must have somehow felt–or did anybody tell her?–that Malabar was not only a land of magic anti medicine but also of dance arts.

This narrow strip of land between the ghats and the sea is very intriguing indeed, especially to students of art and anthropology. Here you find quaint customs, strange usuages and singular social laws, differing from those of the rest of India.

Women here, legally at any rate, enjoy greater freedom than women of other provinces. The racial type is slightly different from the neighbouring Tamils or the Karnatakas. Its magic and modes of living have some resemblance to those of the island races.

Here you meet the remnants of the oldest Jews, the most ancient Christians, the earliest Arab settlers, and also some of the oldest dance and dramatic arts of India. Though these dance arts can be traced to one common source, they distinctly bear the stamp of its special genius.

Mohini Attam is a dance of that character. It is ‘Bharata Natyam’ as evolved and perfected in Kerala, and though it follows closely the science and art of Bharata, it has its own style and technique, its peculiar idioms and expressions, coloured considerably by Kathakali and other allied arts of Malabar.

This dance is usually performed by women, even as Kathakali is usually performed by men only. That is the traditional method, but it is possible to introduce the male element in this dance, in the interpretation of stories like the Geeta Govinda, as it is possible to introduce women dancers in Kathakali as Ragini Devi and Gopinath or Menaka and Gopal Pillay have successfully done.

The origin of Keralee-Nritham is traced to a Prince of Travancore who lived a hundred years , but that is only a popular belief. It is likely that this art was greatly patronised by that prince even as ‘Kuravanchi Koothu’ was patronised by the Tanjore king, Sarfoji, and that poets of those periods composed songs for the dances under the royal command. It was a fashion among certain princes of ancient India to appropriate the authorship of plays and poems created by artists of their courts.

There are interesting similarities between these two dances. They are both lasya type of dances, both deal mainly with love themes and are therefore of sensuous character. Mohini Attam is richer in its gesture vocabulary while Kuravanchi has more complex foot-work and rhythmic movements. Being of a lasya nature they are extremely graceful and appeal more to the senses than to the soul. It is true that there are a lot of repetitions both in gestures and movements, but that is inevitable as the art is highly conventionalised and tradition-bound as the dasi attam of South India.

There is, however, this difference between the Tanjore Nautch and the Malabar Mohini dance; the dancer in the latter sings the whole time as she dances, and the chorists do not lead but follow the dancer in singing. The musical accompaniments are about the same, and the ‘Nattuvan’, or the teacher of the dancer, does not accompany the artist.

The songs are mostly descriptive and are set to both classical and popular tunes. They generally describe the love pangs of a maiden or the disappointment of a lover, the agony of separation or the joy of union, and all these are cleverly conveyed by suggestive facial expressions and significant gestures.

Every emotion has its appropriate rhythm and movement, and as the result of long training and practice, they are displayed with an ease and a mastery that is amazing. The art, highly formalised as it is, is nevertheless full of freshness and charm; and, of course, the personality of the artist counts much in such arts.

Mohini Attam is one of the forgotten arts in Kerala today. It was practised by an appreciable number of women even as late as the beginning of this century, but today it is practically unknown and is seldom seen in its homeland.

There is no special caste, like the Devadasis, to preserve the art or its traditions. Even the few who have learnt it from the old teachers are not eager to show their art and fight shy of the public.

Thanks to the efforts of the Kerala Kalamandalam, one of them has now come forward to dance before the public and also to teach young aspirants. Kalyani Amma is not a professional dancer, in the sense Devadasis are, and she is today a keen and enthusiastic exponent of this art.

At the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore she went recently to Santiniketan to train some of the students there, and her work was greatly appreciated by the Poet and his pupils. In fact, the leading dancer in the Tagore troupe, Mr. Ghosh, was trained for sometime in the Kalamandalam and since then another student from there, Mr. Sinha, had also training in Kathakali. India’s foremost dancers like Menaka, Shrimati, Jamuna, Nandini, Uday Shankar, have all sought inspiration in this direction, and such mutual appreciation and understanding is one of the hopeful signs for the future of dancing in this country.

Of all the dance and dramatic arts of Kerala, such as Kummi, Kaikottikali, Thullal, Chakiarkoothu, Kathakali, Mohini Attam has a better chance of being appreciated in other parts of India and being learnt by a larger number of dancers, and both the Kalamandalam and Kalyani Amma will be only too happy to welcome students from all over India and Ceylon and train them in a form of dance art that is purely Indian and assuredly classic.