New 1950s Footage at Net-Film: Vazhuvoor Ramaiah Pillai, E.V. Saroja, Chitrasena, Vajira, and Padma Subrahmanyam!

Today I thought, "I wonder if Net-Film has digitized any new videos featuring South Asian dance since I last visited," and they most certainly HAVE—including nattuvangam/training footage of Vazhuvoor Ramaiah Pillai, Bharatanatyam by E.V. Saroja, and Kandyan creative dance by Chitrasena and Vajira!

I had discovered the online Russian digital film/newsreel archive Net-Film back in 2013 when I posted about discovering rare video of the dancers Tara Chaudhri, Guru Gopinath, and Indrani Rahman at the site. Net-Film seems to have since expanded its collection beyond just Russia's Central Studio of Documentary Films, the "oldest and largest film studio in the former Soviet Union," to also include many other studios equaling storage of "about 50,000 films" that are being regularly digitized. Since Net-Film is aimed at providing paid licensing for its content, all the video clips are small, full-length "previews" which have the running timestamp prominently and annoyingly displayed at the bottom to aid requests for exact footage segments. Net-Film also seems to have updated the backend technology and usability of the site and it is no longer glitchy.

The Morning in India (1956, Russian)

This documentary film "about the history of India, struggle for independence, and present of the country" has the rare finds in reels 6 and 7 which focus on Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.

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5 comments Bharatanatyam, Chitrasena Dance Company, EV Saroja, Kandyan, Padma Subrahmanyam, Rabindra Nritya, Rare Real-Life Footage, Sinhala, Vazhuvoor Ramaiah Pillai

Bharatanatyam in Sri Lankan Sinhalese Films and in Sri Lanka

While on a zealous search to see what kinds of dance could be found in the cinema of Sri Lanka, India's island neighbor to the south, I was completely perplexed when I stumbled onto this Bharatanatyam-based dance in the 1965 Sinhala film Hathara Maha Nidhanaya:

Starts :53

My cursory understanding of the history of the ethnic Sinhala-Tamil conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka made the dance unfathomable to me! The film is in Sinhala, the language of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka, and the staging of the dance is clearly referencing national pride given the image of the Sri Lankan island and national flags (different from today's style) placed prominently in the background and acknowledged by the dancer (and very reminiscent of many Indian film dances in front of the image of India, such as Vyjayanthimala in Penn). The audience of young, mixed-gender school children indicates a respectable, common setting, and the dancer's clothing is very Sinhalese in style (according to a Sinhalese acquaintance).

Despite all of this, the dancer is performing choreography inspired by Bharatanatyam, the dance associated with the minority Tamils, along with what appears to be some Kuchipudi influence such as the backwards anchitam movement of the feet on the heels! And to add to the confusion, the jewelry she wears with her Sinhalese dress is the traditional Hindu temple jewelry of a Bharatanatyam dancer (edit: I've since learned that the headdress is not exclusive to Tamil culture in Sri Lanka). I would have expected to see Bharatanatyam dance in the less-developed Tamil-language cinema of Sri Lanka, but I certainly would have never imagined seeing it in a Sinhala film and especially not in a scene depicting national pride which by that time was apparently well-equated with the majority Sinhalese Buddhist culture and Kandyan dance. Browsing through the rest of the film, the dancer only seemed to appear in this song and there was no indication she had any context in the film that would explain her dance and its stylistic choices.

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8 comments Bharatanatyam, Kandyan, Padmini Dahanayake Ariyadasa, Research, Sinhala, Sri Lanka