Making a statement with the dance dress

From beautiful but heavy attires to flowy lines and fabrics that breathe, here’s how Bharatanatyam costume has changed with the times

“Wearing costumes specially designed for you is part of your journey as a soloist,” says senior dancer Priyadarsini Govind. “Like we select compositions and plan our repertoire, wearing colours and textures you are comfortable with is equally important. It contributes to your persona as an artiste.”

The Bharatanatyam costume, like the dance, has become an important personal statement. But perhaps it always was.

During the independence movement and in a newly freed nation, educated Indians redefined their image of India. The glorious past was one of the inspirations, a past beyond the more accessible history tainted by wars, falling monarchies and centuries of colonial rule. This was also when Bharatanatyam gained popularity among prosperous communities that had never considered dance before. A combination of social stigma and legislation removed it from the temples, and in the process, also from the hands of the hereditary artistes.

Thus, in the early 20th century, when Rukmini Devi Arundale made waves as the first woman from a privileged background to perform Bharatanatyam and established her institution Kalakshetra — actions whose ripples across history have earned her devotees and detractors in equal measure — she designed costumes that took her audiences out of their present and into a time before time, as it were. Her designs were rooted in a cultivated aesthetic sensibility and a firm concept of how to interpret Indian thought for modern times.

Veteran Bharatanatyam guru Sarada Hoffman, who as a child watched Rukmini Devi’s first performance (and soon joined Kalakshetra, learning Bharatanatyam initially from Chokkalingam Pillai), notes that Rukmini Devi based her designs on Chola bronzes. Naturally, she appeared like a goddess to audiences.

Kamalini Dutt, former director, Doordarshan Archives, while noting the “apsara-like blouses with little wings on the shoulders,” also associates those costumes with the ‘deepa kanyas’ of temples, particularly Thiruvananthapuram’s Padmanabhaswamy temple. She describes the statue with legs sculpted as if wound closely with fabric, and with pleats falling from waist to knees like the now common Bharatanatyam fan.

In a similar vein, veteran dancer and researcher Padma Subrahmanyam says of her costume for the title role in her production ‘Meenakshi Kalyanam’, “I copied the design from the famous panel in the Madurai temple. I copied the hairstyle too.”