Dancing through life

Sukanya Rahman, of Orr’s Island, has penned a book that spans continents and generations

By Amrita Narayanan Bruce

Dancing in The Family is available through indiaclub.com or directly through the publisher, HarperCollins Publishers India, whom you can contact via mail at HarperCollins Publishers India Pvt. Ltd., 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi, 110 002, India.

GLITTERATI: Rahman with the legendary Ravi Shankar (right).

An American woman, obsessed with Indian dance, convinces everyone, including the press, that she is Indian in origin. She moves to India where she raises her daughter, who becomes a dancer and model in her own right and is crowned Miss India. Years later, her granddaughter comes full circle, returns to the United States to study dance with Martha Graham, eventually marries an American, and settles down on Orr’s Island, Maine.

Where does such a family call home? Well, identity and a sense of place are minor preoccupations for the two major women characters of Dancing in the Family: An Unconventional Memoir of Three Women. The prise de conscience of family and personal identity falls upon the aforementioned granddaughter and author of the book — Maine-based artist Sukanya Rahman. Rahman juxtaposes past and present with cultural exchange and confusion as she tells the story of a family driven by dance. Alternating between first and third person, the narrative traces the movement of these women — in dance, relationships, and between India and the United States.

Stories of immigrants who forge a new American identity are commonplace, but it is more unusual to hear of Americans who reinvent themselves as members of another ethnic and cultural group. The curious story begins in 1893, in America, where Rahman’s grandmother, Esther Luella Sherman, was born. Growing up in Minneapolis in a conventional and close-knit family, Sherman studies ballet and art, while developing a fascination with all things foreign and exotic. After a brief flirtation with Russian folk dance, she discovers the small community of Indian expatriates at the University of Minnesota and plunges herself into their culture. From there, it is a whirlwind re-education as Sherman feverishly studies Indian books and music and creates her own “Indian” dance movements. Sherman’s transformation is swift, complete, and well documented by “before” (all American) and “after” (traditional Indian) photographs. Supported by the Orientalist movement of the 1920s, a hastily acquired Indian husband, and her own conviction that she was Hindu in a previous incarnation, Sherman takes on the name “Ragini Devi” and becomes hugely successful as an Indian dancer.

What is interesting is that no one questions her claim. Nowhere does the book discuss the potential psychopathology of her actions. Neither does the American public. Ragini Devi tells the press that she is “a girl of Kashmir, a high-caste Brahmin who had spent much of her childhood in the secret sanctuaries of India and Tibet.” By the late 1920s, she is considered to be an authority on Indian dance and music both in America and India. Her first book receives acclaim from the New York Times dance critic and brings her huge popularity. At this time, she leaves her husband for an Indian artist and political activist who promises to take her away to India. On the way, Ragini becomes separated from her lover and she finds herself alone and pregnant on the long sea passage to India.

How do Ragini and her baby daughter Indrani manage the emotional and financial upheaval of the move to India? It’s not really an issue. Questions of identity and personal adjustment are dwarfed by Ragini’s drive to revive the reputation of Indian dance, under siege from puritanical British colonialists. She studies and performs dance, convincing even the locals that she is “a high-caste Hindu lady,” and earning acclaim from art critics. Rahman does her best to capture the Indian dance ethos of the time, offering photos of Ragini, press clippings, and explanations of the political issues surrounding Indian dance. While she does this admirably, unfortunately, Ragini’s thoughts and feelings about her immigration are eclipsed by details of dance lessons, t®urs, and involved storylines of her dance/drama performances. The photos and insinuations leave the reader longing to know more about how her hectic life affects her psyche.

Perhaps it is this lack of dialogue about thoughts and feelings that contributes to the rift between Ragini and her daughter. Indrani relates to her mother primarily through dance. “She had caught on at an early age that the only way to get sympathy, admiration, and attention from her mother was to shine as a dancer.” Naturally, this does not contribute to the most emotionally stable of relationships. Neither does the constant movement. By the time Indrani is in her teens, dance has taken Ragini across India and to London before she relocates to New York to set up a school of dance. Fifteen-year-old Indrani “longed to return to India to the artists who had raised and cared for her.” Although she craves stability and a place to call home, “more than that she was resolute in her ambition to have a great career as a dancer.”

The ambition to dance is what dominates. When Indrani marries and returns to India with her Indian Muslim husband she finds only more chaos. Her daughter, Sukanya Rahman, is born in post-independence India in the middle of violent Hindu-Muslim riots.

Like her mother, Indrani also finds an anchor in dance. She studies an impressive variety of Indian dance forms including Kathak, Manipuri, Bhratanatayam, and Odessi. She wins the very first Miss India contest and her face is plastered across billboards, magazines, and candy boxes. Meanwhile, her daughter Sukanya (Rahman) spends a significant portion of her time with her beloved Ayah (Nanny). Amidst frenetic rehearsals, rowdy dinner parties, and post-dinner Martha Graham imitations, the young Rahman finds it “wisest to dissolve into the background . . .”

As Indrani’s fame grows her audiences include the likes of John F. Kennedy, Chou-en Lai, Haile Selassie, and Indian president Jawaharlal Nehru. Once again, in the long list of luminaries, we lose the moral and ethical dilemmas one would expect from Indrani — considering she should now have some significant insight on the complexity of being a performance artist and a mother.

Rahman makes up for this lack of information when her own narrative picks up towards the end of the book. While Ragini and Indrani come through as being too obsessed with dance to contemplate issues of identity, cultural adjustment, and motherhood, happily for the reader, Rahman herself shows more balance.

As an art student in Paris she offers several glimpses into the mind of a thoughtful émigré. She vividly describes frugal meals eaten in the safety of her hotel room to escape the displays of raw meat at Parisian butcher shops and the embarrassment of ordering meals in broken French. She struggles with the dilemma of politely discouraging the advances of helpful French men. She makes money by taking on odd jobs requiring an Indian woman in a Sari. She constantly reconciles issues of personal identity and performance art. On one occasion, she flees a dance booking in “Le Club Solitaire” a few minutes before show time, when she discovers it is a singles club, “because the Indian gods would never forgive [her] for performing sacred dances in a sleazy night club.”

It is here that Rahman finally gives the reader some context with which to understand the psychological and emotional experiences of a female artist who has just moved from one country to another. Ragini Devi had no such struggle, feeling no qualms about giving up her American heritage. Rahman demonstrates her own evolution by taking time to face up to these critical issues of her mixed American and Indian identity.

Ironically perhaps, Rahman is first attracted to a western dance form. In America, she says “Martha Graham made me aware of my center.” She goes on to embrace Indian dance. On the issue of migration and identity she writes thoughtfully: “It had never been my intention to leave India permanently. But insidiously little roots had taken hold. I felt like a spreading banyan tree with a portion of my roots in India and a portion in America.”

For Rahman’s mother and grandmother, the cognition that typically accompanies such a cultural transition is either absent or somewhat lost in a deluge of rapid success, awed art critics, and notable dance venues and audiences. Thus, when Rahman says toward the end of the book that she has “come full circle,” this rings true of her dance career as well as her personal growth, evidenced by the insight (see sidebar) she has on dance, migration, and identity.

It’s not necessary to meet Sukanya Rahman to appreciate Dancing in the Family. This ambitious first book succeeds both as a documentary of her family’s contribution to Indian dance and as a personal memoir of her own evolution. While it could use a glossary of Indian dance terms, the amusing photographs and frank prose allow Dancing in the Family to fulfill its promise of being “unconventional.”

Amrita Bruce can be reached at amritabruce@yahoo.com.

Rahman's insight Phoenix: Maine is pretty far from India culturally. Can you talk a little about how you decided to live here? Rahman: Well it happened gradually. We were first living in NYC and touring dance and raising children at the same time. I first came to teach dance Bharatanatayam [Indian dance] in Bar Harbor, my husband worked at a summer-theater program in Brunswick. We just fell love with Maine. At first we never thought of moving to Maine but we just kept spending more and more time here. It became our base and we found it was much easier to raise kids here. Both our sons were born in Maine in the summertime and that also gave us a very special tie to the state. I thrive on the seclusion here. I find it very conducive to creativity. At the same time I also need the city. Here I am able to dream. Maine has been a jumping off point for us. We do the creative part and rehearsals here and then we take it out into the world. And I travel back to India often for inspiration.   Q: A large focus of your book is your mother and grandmother’s interactions with the glitterati of the world, not to mention famous names in performance art. Do you feel isolated from all that fame here in Maine? A: Not really. Isolation is a choice and we don’t isolate ourselves. A lot of the people we’ve known have ended up here, and we have met interesting people in Maine. So many people from other places are drawn to Maine. So the excitement hasn’t ended, it has just become more Maine. I’m no longer a professional dancer touring the world but Ravi Shankar, Allarah Khan, writer friends from New York . . . all find their way into our [Orr’s Island] kitchen. Also, we’ve developed the “Dance in Maine Foundation” partly because of the resurgence of interest in the contributions of my mother and grandmother to dance. The foundation also helps us to tour, and reach out, outside of Maine.   Q: Are you an American citizen? How does that inform your identity? A: Yes I am an American citizen but I grew up in India. I didn’t leave India till I was 18 or so and my identity was already formed by then. I will always feel Indian. It was a difficult decision to give up my Indian citizenship but I did it for reasons of convenience. [Citizenship status] doesn’t really change you, it’s just a piece of paper. What it comes down to is I just feel comfortable wherever I am.   Q: Many immigrants struggle with the culture clash that ensues when raising children in the United States. Can you talk about your experience? A: It wasn’t a problem for me. I think my sons identify much more with America than India. But they are free to be who they want to be. I have certain values and things, which I have passed on to them. I think we have tried to give them a sense of freedom and independence as well as these values.   Q: What are you working on these days? A: I’m mostly doing artwork these days. My art is a little mad. Mostly multi-media constructions, inspired by the street art of India. So it’s the ethos of Indian Bazaars, movie posters, and calendar art and mixed with my own American background here. And a lot of popular art. I was in a show in Delhi last spring called Kich Kitsch hotha hai [Translated as “Whatever may happen” with a play on Kich (Hindi for “what”) and Kitsch (“popular art”)]. —AB