Feb 11, 4:30 pm. It was time for the second R&D lecture of the semester. After savouring some evening snacks and tea, the audience settled themselves in HSB 356 and Prof. Jyotirmaya Tripathi welcomed the speaker, Prof. Lakshmi Bandlamudi, the Professor of Psychology at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. The topic of the lecture was ‘Aesthetic Vision and Carnival Experience: Why We Need Each Other in an Open-ended Dialogic World’. Ranjani Srinivasan presented the detailed research profile of Prof. Lakshmi. She works within the Bakhtinian framework to explore questions about Dialogic Consciousness and Socio-historical epistemology and places it in proximity with Indian philosophy, culture and history. The gist of her work is best summarised in her own words in the fifth chapter of her recent work on Bakhtin and performing arts, ‘Dancing in the Sky of Consciousness: Architectonics and Answerability in the Aesthetic Vision of Malavika Sarukkai’:
I want to seek insights from Indian philosophies on Cosmic Dance/Cosmic Dancer and performing arts to understand the inherent dialogic relations between entities in aesthetic activity and complement them with principles of dialogue, architectonics, and answerability in aesthetic activity as expounded by Mikhail Bakhtin before finally weaving them with reflections on artistic activity offered by the renowned practitioner of art, the Bharatanatyam dancer, Malavika Sarukkai.
Chapter 5, Dancing in the ‘Sky of Consciousness’: Architectonics and Answerability in the Aesthetic Vision of Malavika Sarukkai, by Dr. Lakshmi Bandlamudi
Professor Lakshmi’s key argument is that aesthetic vision and carnival experience are two sides of the same coin, i.e., of dialogic consciousness. She employs texts like The Mahabharata and classical performing traditions and folklore to substantiate this. She identifies interpretive categories offered by Bakhtin as fitting well in the context of Indian society as well. Her first frame of reference for this study was the epic, Mahabharata.
Multiple histories including the individual history, history of individual’s engagement with the epic text, history of the epic text itself and history of mode of understanding intersect in any interpretive act. Any epic text brings with it, its own interpretive categories as well, which in turn, have their own histories. Prof. Lakshmi further goes on to explain the chapter containing her interview with the Bharatanatyam exponent, Malavika Sarukkai. Dance is studied as a form of language – an open ended system in terms of the interpretive horizons it offers.
On the one hand, we comprehend ‘aesthetic vision’ as exotic, refined, ornamental and mentally elevating, and on the other, there is folklore with a ‘carnival’ space (in Bakhtinian terms) which we usually associate with coarse language, boisterous laughter and profanities. She also defines aesthetic vision as ‘consciousness of consciousness’ or a ‘meta-awareness’. Prof Lakshmi argues that aesthetic vision and carnival space are not exactly opposite categories as they seem to be. One is the epistemological necessity of the other, similar to the relationship between the ‘self’ and ‘other’. In fact, carnival space and time act as a catalyst for the regeneration of the act of interpretation itself. Every text is located within its own time (a historical category), and space (a cultural category). In the Indian literary tradition, with its stories of Tenali Rama, Akbar-Birbal and other folktales, laughter is an in-built culture, says Professor Lakshmi. She made references to Bakhtin’s work Art and Answerability while stating that art, whether literary or performance-based, has to interact with lived reality and the historical. In other words, art cannot be built upon floating abstract ideas because interpretive acts are essentially grounded in space and time – the two categories of interpretation. The Western world seems to perceive them as mathematical categories. However, within the Indian scenario, they are cultural categories. Time, as conceived by the Indian world, stretches in multiple directions. The dialogic world, Prof. Lakshmi reiterates throughout, is a space in which seemingly opposite categories like past and present, self and other and distinct cultures converge.
In the Mahabharata, we can discover two levels of stories – one, its usual mundane storyline and the other, a conflict between good and evil. We can also explore questions of what is aesthetically and ethically valid in the story. In the case of dance (a ‘complete art form’, as Prof. Lakshmi puts it), and particularly forms such as Bharatanatyam, the art form itself necessitates the presence of an ‘other’ for the performer to visualise the art, unlike a painter or a musician.
She further moves on to remind us about Bakhtin’s concept of a ‘transcendent super addressee’ (such as History and God) present in any dialogue, besides the addresser and the immediate addressee. She shared with the audience her insights from local performance traditions of Mahabharata in which the all-inclusive space of carnival laughter was effectively employed to normalise heavy and forbidden truths and make them digestible. She reinforces the need to revive the fading ‘carnival laughter’ .i.e. an overall ‘carnivalisation of consciousness’ to help open-minded societies to cull out and eliminate hypocrisies and misunderstandings.
For brief explanations of some basic Bakhtinian terms used in the article, check this out: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Bakhtin-MainTheory.html
You can access the chapter discussed – Chapter 5 of ‘Dancing in the sky of consciousness: Architectonics and Answerability in the Aesthetic vision of Malavika Sarukkai’ at http://www.svabhinava.org/HinduCivilization/LakshmiBandlamudi/MalvikaSarukkai_BakhtinInIndia.pdf
Report by Aswathy Venugopal
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