Greater India

Abstract

A publicity image of Ram Gopal reproduced in his London Times obituary shows the ‘Indian’ dancer circa 1939 in the Dance of King Klana.¹ In The Times, as elsewhere, no mention is made that this dance, and the costume Gopal wears, originate in Java (Figure 14). Historical riddles present themselves, biographical and cultural. How might a 1930s Indian dancer come to include a Javanese dance in his repertoire? Why would Gopal, or his publicists, not distinguish a Javanese piece from dances based on kathak and kathakali techniques? The personal circumstances that brought Gopal into contact with Javanese performance — his Kunstkring-sponsored tour of the island with Texas-born dancer La Meri in 1937; studies of Javanese dance in Batavia with Suharsono, a former court dancer turned medical student; Gopal’s collaboration with the Indonesian-born dancer Retna Mohini starting in Paris in 1938 — are all particular to him (cf. Gopal 1957; Hughes 1977: 113–6; Helmi 1997). But his amalgamation of Java and India instances a larger movement incorporating many of India’s twentieth-century dance pioneers.

I love fully only if the Other loves me, not because I need the recognition of the Other, but because my voluptuosity delights in his voluptuosity, and because in this unparalleled conjuncture of identification, in this trans-substantiation, the same and the other are not united but precisely — beyond every possible project, beyond every meaningful and intelligent power — engender the child.

Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 2007: 266