Sattriya, and the dance that stayed in the monastery

The day in a sattra begins with a drum. Not with a rehearsal, and not with an audience arriving; the drum is one of the things the institution does at that hour, in the same way it lights lamps and reads from the book. The dance comes later in the sequence, and it comes because the calendar says it does.

This is the fact that makes Sattriya different from the other seven forms on India's classical list, and it is the reason it was the last one added. The others were, by the twentieth century, things performed for someone: at a court, in a temple courtyard for a festival crowd, in a theatre for a paying audience. Sattriya was performed as a duty inside an institution that housed, fed and employed the people performing it. Nobody bought a ticket. Nobody had to be attracted.

An institution built to hold a practice

The sattras are the creation of Srimanta Sankardeva, the sixteenth-century Assamese teacher whose Vaishnava movement reorganised religious life in the Brahmaputra valley around a network of residential monasteries and village prayer halls. The design was unusually deliberate. Sankardeva wrote the plays, composed the songs, specified the drum patterns, and then built institutions whose daily and seasonal routine would require all of it to be performed, correctly, by people who lived there.

That is a different way of preserving a practice than a court or a market. A court preserves what a patron likes; a market preserves what sells. A monastery preserves what the calendar requires, and the calendar does not get bored. Four centuries of that produced something the outside world would not see until the twentieth century: a performance tradition with an unbroken transmission, a fixed repertoire, a technical vocabulary, and no audience in the commercial sense at all.

The monks who performed it — bhokots — were celibate, lived on the institution's land and food, and entered as boys. Their training was not a course. It was the whole of their upbringing, and the teacher was the man ahead of them in the same hall. The women's roles in Chali, the group dance that is now the form's best-known piece, were danced by men.

The economics of this are worth stating plainly, because they explain the shape of the dance. The sattras were funded by land grants, and by the produce and labour of villages attached to them. The performer was not paid for a performance; he was maintained. What he received was food, shelter, standing and a place in a sequence. What the institution received was the correct performance of an obligation. No part of that transaction had a price, so no part of it could be renegotiated when the money changed.

When the land stopped paying

The money changed in the middle of the twentieth century. Land reform in Assam through the 1950s and after cut into the tenancy arrangements that had fed the sattras for four hundred years, and an institution that had supported a body of resident performers on agricultural income found itself supporting fewer. This is the same squeeze that hit temple endowments elsewhere in India, and it produced the same response: the practice had to find a second payer.

The second payer arrived in the form of the state and its cultural institutions. In the late 1950s the Sangeet Natak Akademi held a dance seminar in Assam at which sattra performers demonstrated outside the monastery for the first time to an audience of officials and scholars. Through the 1960s and 1970s a small number of dancers and scholars — Maheswar Neog's writing is the intellectual spine of this — argued that what the monasteries had was a classical system, not a regional folk form, and began the work of making it legible to a national framework: notation, a syllabus, a named repertoire, documented lineages.

In November 2000 the Akademi's dance committee added Sattriya to the list. It became the eighth classical dance form of India, thirty years after the argument had been won in print.

What had to be cut to fit

Extracting a ritual sequence into a stage item is not a neutral act, and the people who did it were open about the problem. A Chali in its institutional setting runs long because the rite runs long; on a stage it has to be twenty minutes because the programme has eight items. The order cannot be kept, because a stage programme has an opening and a climax and a closing, and a ritual sequence has none of those things — it has a beginning and then it continues. The audience has to be seated facing one direction, which the namghar does not require. And the criterion shifts: a monastery judges whether the thing was done correctly, and a stage judges whether it was good.

Those two criteria are not the same, and the gap between them is where most of the twentieth-century arguments about Indian classical dance actually happen. A performance can be correct and dull, or wrong and thrilling. Inside an institution that exists to do things correctly, dull is not a defect. In front of an audience that has paid, it is fatal.

The recognition in 2000 did not create this tension; it settled which side had won. After 2000 came the institutional apparatus that a classical form is expected to have: degree programmes at Assam's universities, graded examinations, a body of notation, workshops, festival slots, and a market for teachers. A dancer can now make a living teaching Sattriya in Guwahati without ever having lived in a sattra, and many do.

Two places, one name

The monasteries did not stop. On Majuli and in the sattras along the valley, the drum still starts the day, the roster still runs, and the performers are still men who entered as boys. What exists now is two versions of one practice, running in parallel, with different funders and different measures of success, and a shared vocabulary that lets each be described in the other's terms.

It is tempting to call the monastery version the real one. It is certainly the older arrangement, and it is the one that kept the technique alive through the centuries when nobody outside Assam was watching. But it was never a museum either: it changed when the land economy changed, it moved when the river took the bank, and it will change again. What the 2000 recognition dates is not the dance. It dates the moment the state agreed to pay for its reproduction — and that, more than any question of age, is what the word classical has usually meant.

This is entry 13 of Arts and Performance in About India. The pillar's argument — that the classical canon was assembled, dated and funded in the twentieth century — is set out on the pillar page.