A slender, doe-eyed young man, elaborately bejewelled and standing against an intricately patterned curtain, is striking a pose for the camera. His hands are in "hasta mudras" and a range of emotions flit across his face, from flirtatiousness to sorrow. The black and white photograph, taken in 1938, looks almost like a majestic monochromatic painting, and is of Ram Gopal, an Indian classical dancer who performed kathak, kathakali and Bharatanatyam with equal grace, and expertise.
A pioneer in popularizing Indian classical dance forms to a global audience and also a contemporary of the more popular dancer Uday Shankar, Gopal’s legacy is, today, a largely forgotten one. However, an art historian’s chance encounter with a cache of the dancer’s previously unpublished photographs taken by an American photographer in a New York library archive, is rekindling conversations around him, and how significant acts of cultural exchanges often stay under the radar.
Ajay Sinha, a professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, US, chanced upon the collection of Gopal’s photographs taken by Carl Van Vechten in the spring of 1938 in the latter’s Upper Westside apartment in Manhattan, while attending a conference on South Asian Photography at Yale University in 2015.
Sinha was so struck by the “visually stunning” photographs of this “beautiful young man wearing fantastical costumes and gold ornaments, taking on a variety of dance poses against a range of fabric backgrounds” that an “archaeological dig” into them was inevitable.
An encounter
“No one at the Yale conference, including the organizers, knew about the existence of the set. None of us had even heard about the photographer or his model,” says Sinha. A recent illustrated talk by the professor at the India International Centre delved into this set of 111 photographs which are now published in Photo-Attractions (Rutgers University Press, 2022), a book that is the result of Sinha’s extensive research on them.
The book is subtitled “An Indian Dancer, An American Photographer and a German Camera”, and weaves a narrative around how the collaboration of the two individuals and the Leica camera they used was a significant cultural event. It also offers a close examination of a period in Gopal’s life that proved to be pivotal in his success as a representative of Indian classical dance in the West.
Mix & break of traditions
Born to a Burmese mother and a Rajput father in Bengaluru, Gopal, as an artiste, was a confluence of classical dance forms from across the country. Dance critic Cyril Beaumont wrote about his performances, “what impresses one most about Ram Gopal’s dancing is the manner in which he is able to assimilate the characteristics of the four schools of technique [Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Kathak and Manipuri] so completely different in style, costume and mood.” This fusion, which came easy to Gopal, is evident in the set of photographs, where he dons costumes of different dance traditions, and makes poses, almost as if for the photographer to study. There are several close ups of only his hands, legs or face, during a dance.
What Gopal was presenting was actually his own versions or interpretations of the costumes and choreography. The photographs point towards Gopal as an iconoclast, in his own right, where he is breaking away from traditions, in more ways than one, in the apartment in New York. “In India, classical dance forms were, and still are, considered almost sacred. Stages would have icons of gods and performances would begin with invocations. Many practitioners of it were uncomfortable with performing in front of cameras, as it was considered a sleazy medium which disrupts the performances that were too dignified for it. Gopal moved beyond these early notions of purity, and hence was successful in bringing the performances to an international audience,” says Sinha.
A curious collaboration
The late thirties was also a period of widespread experimentation in the arts. Vechten, a White man who was reputed as a writer and a vocal advocate for the Harlem Renaissance, the African American cultural revival, was, in fact, only an amateur photographer. “The photo shoot of 1938, which took place over three days, was an instance of two significant cultural practitioners from different corners of the world collaborating,” Sinha says.
The curiosity, for Sinha, lies in the fact that the photographs were never published, nor is there any mention of the particular shoot, in which hundreds of photographs were taken, in any of the works on or by both the individuals. A speculation is that as time went by, their “private experiments” did not fit with their “public personas”. But Sinha likes to leave it an open-ended question.