Dr Ann David
CRONEM conference
June 2007
National and transnational identities? Dance and movement practices and
the politics of ethnicity in British Hindu communities
The tension and intersection of global and local influences plays a significant part
in the complex construction of identity and place-making within diaspora groups.
Ann Cvetkovich and Douglas Kellner (1997:12) remind us that ‘tradition, religion
and nationalism’ remain contemporary forces in the construction of both personal
and national life, and it is these forces of tradition, religion and nationalism that
have considerable impact on dance and movement practices and ethnic identity
in British Hindu communities.
Within today’s cities, a sense of rootlessness and displacement is apparent,
particularly amongst minority groups. Features of the metropolis such as the
fragmented, dislocated life of an urban area, the struggle to maintain coherence
of community, the pressures of time, work and survival and the creation of
unfamiliar living conditions do impact on the lives of any community and are often
revealed in their cultural practices or the lack of them. Sanjoy Roy, in his
analysis of ‘otherness’ in contemporary Indian dance in the western city,
describes the urban milieu as ‘a place where a profusion of peoples, goods,
histories and languages circulate, intermingle and interfere. A multiplicity of
nationalities and ethnicities inhabit and traverse it’ (1997:69). Yet of course,
place and space are never neutral. They are multi-layered, multivalent, and often
contested - full of memories, meanings, familiarities and narratives of the people
who occupy them.
This paper seeks to question the adaptive strategies for preservation,
modification and the sustaining of ethnicity seen in British Hindu communities
that are fuelled by pressures internally within the communities and external
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forces that are local, transnational and global. The confident growth of new
temples and their adaptation to British Hindu worship, the increase in classical
dance transmission and performance, the appearance of trance dance in local
Hindu festivals, for example, all evidences a new performance of ethnicity in local
diasporic communities and reveals, too, how significant global trajectories are an
essential factor in this expansion. This sense of ‘globalized localism’ as Joanne
Waghorne (2004) has termed it raises many questions. Are these new spaces
for worship contested in any way? How has the space been appropriated? How
do the bodies perform in these sacred spaces both within and outside the
temple? What of the increased visibility created by bodily practices including
movement and dance? And what of the global, transnational and national
influences on local ritual bodily practices?
If we look for a moment at a particular area of East London, in the borough of
Newham, where a large number of Sri Lankan Tamils are settled, there is
evidence of a certain ethnic nationalism, shown in a new place-making, centred
around the temples, that draws upon dance and movement practices alongside a
growth in religious ritual and prominent outward display at religious festivals. We
can see how place is transformed through religious practice, indicating as Bente
Nikolaisen, in her work on Mevlevi dervishes has argued, that ‘place is as much
about doing as it is about being’ (2004:98).
[SHOW SLIDES EAST HAM AND WIMBLEDON: 1-8]
[SHOW DVD CLIP OF TAI PUSAM]
The strength of transnational ties and geographical flow between members of the
British Asian diaspora creates, as Mario Rutten and Pravin Patel have stated, a
‘two-way flow of people, capital and ideas’ (2004:244), and a new breed of ‘world
citizens’ (ibid:253), such as the many Gujarati elders who travel regularly from
their village homes in India, to take up several months residence with their
offspring in the UK, the USA or even East Africa (ibid: 2004). Think too of the
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regular visits to Sri Lanka and India by members of Tamil groups here, despite
the continuing violence of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and numerous other
examples of such global flows. These transnational networks reveal a movement
of people, money, material goods, and religious and cultural practices. Gerry
Farrell’s study of South Asian music in Britain argues that ‘British South Asian
musicians and producers now play a central role in creating music that is later
consumed both in India and Britain’ (Farrell et al 2005:109), emphasising the
complexity of the relationship between the local and the transnational in relation
to British South Asian music. Research into British Bhangra music and the
transnational new Asian dance music (Sharma et al 1996, Dudrah 2002a) has
examined the contested locations of South Asian identity in urban Britain and
noted how these layered identities are articulated through the medium of music in
a trajectory similar to that of dance. Rehan Hyder comments that music, like
dance, is ‘a site of cultural negotiation and change, where identities are
performed and transformed’ (2004:5), suggesting this is evidence of a more
hybrid, fluid notion of cultural and ethnic identity.
In recent years, the accessibility and lower costs of international travel have
enabled the dancers I interviewed in Leicester and London to travel frequently to
India to purchase new dance costumes, record fresh music tapes or have extra
lessons with their original dance gurus. Thus the global and transnational flow of
travel informs, supports and makes possible the local manifestations, in this
instance, of South Asian dance performance and dance transmission in Britain.
Gujarati performances at Hindu festival occasions in Leicester and London are
regularly sponsored and filmed by Sony TV Asia and Zee TV-Europei and
broadcast back to audiences in Gujarat, again indicating how global and local
forces can not only coexist but can intersect to produce new syntheses of cultural
productions and identities.
These examples indicate how diaspora issues (including cultural expressions
such as dance and music) are at a significant juncture, influenced by global,
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transnational factors, such as film and Asian TV channels, as well as local
issues, such as caste groups retaining their own folk dance practices at the
religious festival of Navratri to the exclusion of other castes. This attitudinal
change is beginning to dictate how and which cultural forms are transmitted and
to whom and by whom. How an ethnic identity is constructed in a post-colonial,
re-located diasporic milieu and what part dance and movement practices play in
transmitting, representing or reworking these socio-cultural and religious
categories of identity have formed the central findings of my research, which has
confirmed the essential nature of dance praxis in ethnic identity formation in
British Tamil and Gujarati groups. As Arjun Appadurai states, it is ‘the tension
between global and local that drives cultural reproduction today’ (1996:63) as the
communities’ diasporic position necessitates the intentional reproduction of
cultural symbols that are no longer implicit.
In the local Tamil community in London, the dance scene is a somewhat different
one. The classical style of Bharatanatyam, noted by Andrée Grau in the SADiB
report (2002:7) as the most privileged classical Indian dance form in Britain, is
generally recognised as a transnational and global form, yet in the predominately
Sri Lankan Tamil temples and Tamil weekend schools, the teaching remains
dominated by local modalities. The students are neither encouraged to attend
international performances of South Asian dance nor are made aware of the
work of well-known performers in London and the UK. Most syllabi used are
written in Tamil and the dance classes taught in Tamil, even though the secondgeneration students are more familiar and more at ease with English.
[SHOW SLIDES OF TAMIL DANCE STUDENTS AT BOTH TEMPLES 9 -14]
[SHOW BHARATANATYAM CLIP IN TEMPLE]
The local geographical environs provide the catchment area of these dance
students and despite the influences of London as a major global city (Eade
1997:11), it is these local factors that influence the Tamil community. The more
inward-looking and somewhat wary nature of the Sri Lankan Tamils and their
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more recent immigration and settlement patterns are factors at work here. The
global and transnational influences of, for example, Bollywood dance styles sit
uneasily with the first-generation’s adherence to their traditional cultural and
religious beliefs and there remains a tension between the struggle to maintain
local (and Tamil) cultural traditions against these perceived eroding forces of
globalisation. This ‘production of locality’ (Appadurai 1996:180), seen in these
terms, demands constant and hard work to be sustained under the pressures of
diasporic living. Appadurai notes here how in terms of local cultural reproduction,
‘space and time are themselves socialized and localized through complex and
deliberate practices of performance, representation and action’ (ibid), thus
creating names, properties, values and meanings for the local community
through their specific cultural symbols.
Despite the sense of locality that dominates the Tamil dance environment, there
is evidence too that Tamil community dance events are involved in the
production of both national and transnational elements in relation to Sri Lanka
and the wider Tamil diaspora. This is a kind of ethnic nationalism, certainly an
imagined nation-state, that is defined in exclusive terms on the basis of common
descent, language and culture. In March 2005, the Sri Lankan Tamil community
in south London hosted a programme of music and dance to raise funds for a
new charity, Tamil Aid. This organisation was set up to help with the
rehabilitation of victims of the Tsunami disaster (December 2004) in the north
and east of Sri Lanka. The performers and audience were local Tamil children
who study music and dance at the Surbiton Tamil temple in south-west London,
and who were supported by their families and guests from the Sri Lankan
community as audience, but the event was filmed by Cee ITV, a global digital
Tamil channel, and broadcast to Tamils in the UK and elsewhere across the
diaspora. The Sri Lankans’ political awareness and cultural ties to their homeland
are major factors in their diasporic situation, in the sense of a displaced people
whose political and financial support is devoted to rebuilding and supporting their
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homeland. Tamil globalisation is for the Sri Lankans an adherence to an
articulation of Tamil nationalism.
We see here an ongoing persistence of local cultures in the face of powerful
globalised and transnational forces. These local practices perhaps sit at times
uneasily alongside global culture, maintaining a ‘living’ place and space in
community life, and yet at other times, appearing to be an essential part of
national and transnational trajectories. The notion of national and local, as both
a cultural and theoretical construct, is at once both binary and singular,
embracing the local within the national, but also creating contested and political
pathways. This intersection of local issues with national and transnational
processes stretches across the class divide with both the well-off and, as John
Eade argues, ‘the comparatively poor (materially) labour migrants in London
[being] highly adept at negotiating landscapes and constructing imagined worlds
which cross local and national boundaries’ (2002:129).
Younger generations are beginning to emerge who appear to have no strong ties
to the homeland (whether India, Sri Lanka or East Africa), and who see
themselves as British, British Hindu or British Asian, straddling both cultures and
bound by neitherii. There is a growing sense among the young of participating in
a ‘global youth culture’ (Saldanha 2002: 340) and of having a ‘global identity’
(ibid: 345) rather than simply being individuals bound to their own or their
ancestors’ maternal homes. They are resisting perhaps ‘the existing categories
of ethnicity and identity…and articulating a multi-accented sense of self and
belonging’ (Hyder 2004:10), a highly variable notion of selfhood that ranges
widely from conservative and devout religious affiliation to a comprehensive
rejection of ethnic religious practice. For some, global or transnational identity
has meaning as a religious identity; for others, identity embraces a more
complex, fragmented and shifting sense of selfhood. But there is no doubt that
the forces of the local, national, transnational and global elements continue to
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effect a transformation on the lives of British Asians and their sense of ethnicity
and their cultural practices.
Zee TV-Europe is a ‘non-terrestrial television channel that caters for viewers of the South Asian Diaspora
found across Western Europe’ (Dudrah 2002b:163) and started broadcasting in 1995 after taking over from
the TV Asia channel. There are two other channels in South Asia – Zee Cinema and Zee India that form
part of its network.
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Ballard (1994: 31) speaks in such contexts of ‘skilled cultural navigators’.
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