I said I would post some pictures. Here's a nice clear image for you to get started with......it was taken about two weeks ago in a street just near where I live. This was during Navratri - which is a uniquely Gujarati religious celebration which involves lots of dancing, and the dancing involves lots of people twirling around in circles, with some basic or not so basic steps. I guess a kind of guju Ceilidh.
I took the picture whilst sitting on the side of a normally busy road which was closed off in the evenings during the nine nights.
I really tried to make the most of the 9 nights; there were loads of different venues and I sensed different atmostpheres in each and noticed different responses in myself to these atmospheres.
The picture is from a garba that was being held just on the street side by a small township that has grown up in the space between three main roads. It was similar in flavour to the nights I was in Vastrapur and Thaltej - two villages that have been absorbed into Ahmedabad city. On all three nights it was very localised communities who had gathered together in the biggest open space available near their various homes to celebrate mataji (divine mother). In the first, it was a street that was appropriated for the nights and a tape player hooked up to an loudspeaker shouted out garba tunes; in Vastrapur the village square was dressed up and used as the venue for the thousand or so vilagers. And in a tight gully in Thaltej village, 20 of us danced for 2 hours around 3 young lads beating out a rhythm with their drums; the night was finished off by a snack of gathia and chai for all at 2am.
In all three of these places, the steps that women and men were dancing were quite simple; enough that even a novice or a young kid could join in. There were no 'tickets' to get and we danced on the dusty, spat-upon and uneven floors for all the world to come see (if they so cared).
These nights were quite different from two other nights that I experienced. Both of these other nights were ticketed events. People had gathered together from various communities and parts of Ahmedabad and were there, I guess not so much because of where they lived but who they were, or perhaps, who they were connected to.
One night I was invited to a dance at the National Institute of Design (NID) - the most highly regarded design school in the country. Here I was introduced to a twelve-step and to a 14-step garba on a large lawn in the leafy campus right by the Sabarmati river which bisects Ahmedabad. The steps being performed were a bit more complicated than the simple steps that I had known before.
Because the tempo started off slow and there were some willing guides, I slowly manage to get the hang of the twelve-step and had a quite unbelievable 45 minutes of twirling around in one of a series of concentric rings with perhaps 400 fashionable, mobile and up and coming Indians all spinning, circling and clapping to the three beats together with the same 12 step rhythm. After the tempo had risen to a delerious crescendo and then stopped, I stood still and realised that I had absolutely no sense of space, time and self.
Another ticketed night I went 30 minutes drive out of town to a 'party plot' and danced on a lush, cool green lawn with car-owning youngsters from all over the city. There was a huge band up on stage and specially invited professional dancers. That night the pattern was different with little sub-groups formed. In the group who invited us, people seemed to take turns to 'propose' a step to follow and quickly others in the group would follow the step; and then within a few moments someone else would propose some other variation or different step. I found the experience irritating and found after a while that I was making rather nasty and uninformed judgements about the people who kept confusing and throwing me with their continual innovating. In contrast to my experience at NID, I was quite conscious of space, time and self and extremely aware of the others around me.
I experienced this constant reinvitenting style and and my own angry judgementalism on another night. This time the dancing was on the ground floor space at the bottom of a block of some quite plush apartments in the posh part of town where I was staying at the time. Many apartment blocks here are set up as societies and quite a few of these will organise their own navratri celebrations with only those who live in the compound of the apartment and their guests invited. There was a mix of age ranges present here as people from the whole block had made their way to the ground floor; those who were dancing were the younger people and whilst I was encourged to join in by the elders I didn't feel the same invitation from those who were dancing. The youngsters carried on dancing in their small group and after making some efforts at joining in the circle I quietly slopped away after five minutes, feeling hurt and angered by these well-to-do but unwelcoming bunch of kids. As I listened to the music from my open window and drifted off to sleep, I was unable to comprehend where my angered judgements about the group came from and felt utterly alienated from the world and myself.
I don't quite know how to finish this blog; indeed my feelings about those nine days are just as clear as the picture at the top of the page, so I'll just leave it up to you to notice who you decide to dance with.
yours twirling,
rupesh
