Melā! An Indian Fair (Washington, D.C., 1985)

[On 15 January, I published a post on the Natyasastra, the ancient Indian text on theater.  Looking through my archive of theater reports, I found this one on an Indian folk festival presented in Washington, D.C.; I wrote it in September 1985, almost 34 years ago.  Not all Indian folk performances are derived from the Natyasastra, but many are (or have been “sanskritized” during the modern era to align with the teachings of the treatise).  If you’ve read “The Natyasastra,” you may recognize some of the practices I described in that article in some of the performances I report on below.]

What do Louisiana and India have in common?  Well, probably not much—except in Washington, D.C., between 26 June and 7 July [1985].  [Note that I wrote this report decades before anyone ever heard of Bobby Jindal, an American of Indian heritage who was Governor of Louisiana from 2008 to 2016. Indeed, Jindal was barely 14 when I wrote this.  ~Rick]  Those were the dates of the 1985 Festival of American Folklife on the Mall, which this year included a Louisiana Program and “Melā! An Indian Fair.”  Exactly how an Indian melā qualifies as American folklife is not clear, but the celebration of Indian art, culture, and life has been all over Washington recently as part of the nationwide Festival of India.    

Besides the food and crafts of India’s many cultures and regions, much of the melā is given over to Indian dancing, singing, music, and theatre.  This combination of eating, selling, and performing is not strange; India’s traditional performances are frequently part of fairs and celebrations that go on all day for several days, or even weeks.  People come and go, eat, and sell or buy while the performances are going on all around them.  Spectators choose when they want to watch and when they want to do something else, much the way we do at a carnival sideshow.  The noise, smells, and competing sights and sounds are all part of the event. 

Many of the performances are rituals, with religious significance implicit in the very doing.  Others are rooted in ritual, but have lost the connotation of worship over the centuries.  This, too, is not strange: Indian fairs are often connected to religious celebrations.  Even so, commercialism is not alien to their religious purpose.  Unlike the money-changers in the temple, Indian merchants and worshippers belong together. 

The performances at the festival were presumably authentic in the sense that they are performed the same way back in the villages and towns of Gujarat, Punjab, or Bengal; however, the importation to America and the cultural mélange in which they were presented means we probably saw altered versions.  No matter, though: the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds all around still fooled us for a short time.  We were in India at a melā!

The performers appearing on the small stage at one end of the fairground or wandering among the booths included devotional singers, folk actors, folksingers and folk dancers, percussionists, puppeteers, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, and two bahrupiyas wandering about teasing the visitors with impersonations of one or another of 52 gods.  They came from West Bengal, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Andhra, Uttar, Haryana—and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Across Madison Drive, in the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, more Indian life was on view.  A child’s perspective of the cycle of village life was exhibited at “Aditi—A Celebration of Life” through July 28.  Aditi is the Aryan goddess identified with the source of life; it is also Sanskrit for the creative power that sustains the universe.

Visitors to Aditi started at the section depicting coming of age and traveled through the cycle of life from courtship through marriage and birth, and a child’s learning to participate in community life, to maturity when the cycle begins again.  Passing through each section, visitors saw village artisans and craftsmen plying their trades, and performers of many kinds displaying their talents for our amusement.  Here, too, were magicians, jugglers, puppeteers, singers, musicians, dancers, and the ubiquitous wandering “impersonators.” 

One of these last came down a corridor clanging tiny cymbals to attract our attention.  It looked like one man carrying another “piggy-back.”  Then it looked like a man with a stuffed dummy on his back.  Then, impossibly, it looked like a dummy with a man on its back.  Finally, when he was close enough to be seen clearly, it turned out to be a man with a stuffed dummy on his front so it looked like the dummy was carrying him.  The crowd broke into peals of delighted laughter when we realized how we had been fooled.

In a section resembling the courtyard of a house, a Rajasthani family performed a traditional “play horse” dance that is a ceremonial part of the Hindu wedding celebration.  It symbolizes the groom riding off to pick up his bride, with his whole family in attendance.  Formerly, there was an actual procession, with the groom riding a horse to the bride’s home; today, the members of the groom’s family perform this dance with a hobbyhorse.  It is whimsical and fun, as the “horseman” gallops, rears up, chases women and children, dances with the spectators, and swishes the horse’s tail.

In a curious performance, at the very entrance to the exhibit, a man danced to the beat of a drum.  Made up as a woman, he had a long veil hiding half his face.  With a flip of his head, the dancer shifted the veil to the other side of his face, revealing that it was made up as an old man.  The continuous switching—the ultimate in sex-role blurring—was so fascinating, it was hard to pull away to the rest of the exhibit.

Among the performances, traditional crafts people were making pottery, glass paintings, woven baskets, story scrolls—all the arts of Indian villages.  Displayed along with the modern products were their older—in some cases even ancient—counterparts.  Though there were differences in the artists’ styles, and contemporary influences were sometimes visible, the basic craft and product were unchanged.  These were not revived crafts such as we might see at Plymouth or Williamsburg—they were living traditions with roots thousands of years deep.  The same, one imagines, must be true of the performance traditions.

Beyond the village arts, Washington—and later New York—will also be treated to a sampling of India’s classical performing arts.  In September, the Kennedy Center will house the “India Festival of Music and Dance” with folksongs, Bharata Natyam [lit., “Indian dance”] and Kathak dance [an Indian classical dance form], and Kathakali and Kuchipudi theater [classical Indian dramatic forms] performed by some of India’s most famous artists.

Along with the Indian painting and sculpture on exhibit at many of Washington’s galleries and museums, the capital is being treated to a colorful and fascinating display of the living arts of India.  The Festival of India in Washington even occupies such unlikely sites as the National Zoo.  Unquestionably, “Aditi is all that has been born and shall be” (from “Hymn to the Gods,” Rig Veda, 1500-1200 B.C.E.).