Ananya Panday's viral Chand Mera Dil controversy is the living embodiment of a tragedy that laments the death of a sacred art form - with Bollywood just staging the execution to create an uproar all around. Panday's viral "fusion" dance was labeled a "catastrophic misunderstanding" of Bharatanatyam by eminent dancer Anita R. Ratnam. Even committed performers all over the world and critics have watched Panday's performance and watched aghast at a centuries-old spiritual discipline being reduced to aggressive, soulless modern gymnastics. Panday's team defended the act as a "creative experiment," proving the point that today you have systems that prioritize cheap entertainment over cultural guardianship.
Today's artistes view themselves merely as entertainers rather than guardians of a sacred heritage. Fearing the verdict of a profit-driven industry where artistic compromise is the price of survival, few dare to champion the true system. We watch with quiet grief as pure folk and classical traditions are butchered on the altar of reality television, reduced to mere instruments of shock value. Manmade monstrosities like "Disco Dandiya" are paraded about, stripping away the spiritual sanctity of our roots.
Please type your name along with your comment. Anonymous and derogatory comments are likely to be removed.
So true ...It feels so sad that our rich traditions fading away to the so called 'modernization '...well written Akka
ReplyDeleteWhen Grief Becomes Argument: A Response to "The Silent Cry of the Gungroo"
ReplyDeleteDr. Lata Surendra's essay, published on June 8, 2026, arrives with genuine feeling. The grief is real. The concern — that classical Indian dance is being hollowed out by commercialisation, that depth is being traded for visibility, that the guru-shishya parampara is eroding under market pressure — is one that many serious practitioners share. I share parts of it myself.
But grief, however sincere, is not analysis. And when grief is dressed as argument without doing argument's work, it risks doing the very thing it laments: reducing something complex to something consumable.
The essay opens with the Ananya Panday controversy and Dr. Anita Ratnam's reported response, using a celebrity flashpoint as evidence of civilisational decline. This is a rhetorical move, not a critical one. The relationship between classical form and popular culture has never been clean. It has always been negotiated, contested, and — this is the part the essay quietly erases — mutually constitutive. The same Bollywood that is cast here as executioner was, for much of the twentieth century, the primary vehicle through which classical forms reached mass audiences. The essay then invokes Kamala, Padmini, Vyjayantimala, and Birju Maharaj as exemplars of an uncorrupted classical tradition. These were film dancers. Birju Maharaj choreographed for commercial Hindi cinema. The essay holds up as paragons the very bridge it claims to mourn. That contradiction is not minor — it is structural.
The section on gym conditioning and biomechanical tools makes a point worth taking seriously: that adavus are a self-contained conditioning system, that the form's physical demands are intrinsic to the form, not separable from it. This is a legitimate pedagogical argument. But the essay doesn't make it as an argument — it makes it as an accusation. It asserts that resistance bands and conditioning workshops are "fundamentally altering" classical training without demonstrating this, without engaging with the documented injury rates among classical dancers trained without cross-conditioning, and without distinguishing between practitioners who use supplemental tools carelessly and those who use them thoughtfully. Dismissing injury prevention as monetisation in disguise is not rigorous. It is suspicion dressed as insight.
(Part 1 of 2)
What troubles me most, however, is the essay's relationship to history. The "purity" being mourned was never a stable, uninterrupted inheritance. The twentieth-century revival of Bharatanatyam — to take the most obvious example — involved significant reconstruction, institutionalisation, and in places, reinvention. What we now call tradition was itself the outcome of negotiation, of choices made by people who were also navigating changing times. To speak of a pre-commercial golden age is to speak of something that is, at best, partial memory and, at worst, mythology. Nostalgia is not evidence.
ReplyDeleteNone of this means the concerns are wrong. The velocity-over-depth problem is real. The flattening of rigorous, years-long practice into marketable modules is real. The pressure on young practitioners to perform accessibility before they have built interiority is real and worth serious attention. These deserve more precise diagnosis than they receive here.
The essay ends with a gesture toward balance — "innovation is not the enemy of tradition, but its very breath" — that sits uneasily after pages of lamentation in which almost every form of change is figured as corruption. If that final line is true, and I think it is, then the essay needed to do the harder work: not just mourning what is being lost, but asking where the line is. What distinguishes adaptation from erasure? What does legitimate innovation look like, and who gets to determine it? These are the questions the tradition actually needs its practitioners and thinkers to wrestle with — carefully, with evidence, without retreating into elegy.
Grief for what is genuinely precious is worth honouring. But the art form deserves more than grief. It deserves rigour.