The Kandy-floss Tea-Dance, or Walk like an Elephant

by Laleen Jayamanne

The Lankan ‘Tea-dance’ is a consciously-willed confection of a so-called ‘folk dance,’ attributed to the Malaiyaha women who work on the tea estates. Therefore, it is a frozen form with no basis in a living culture. Here I take ‘Kandy’ as a synonym for the hill-country, ‘Kande udarata,’ and also to describe the aesthetic quality of the artificial Tea-dance as candy, much like Bombai Motai (pink candy-floss woven of sugar and air).

Dr Sudesh Mantillake, the dance scholar and trained Kandyan dancer himself, has stated (in an original research paper) that the Tea-dance was invented in the 70s as part of a move by the state to invent folk dance traditions for the country, in the post-colonial Sinhala nationalist cultural revival, linked to various patterns and gestures associated with rural work. I am grateful to him for having formulated this field of research from a postcolonial theoretical perspective.

So, for the Sinhala girls, the kalagedi dance’ and the ‘harvesting of paddy dance’ were invented. I have photos of myself and friends doing both in primary school, wearing a cloth and choli jacket with small pots on our head. The Tamil girls in our school did Bharathanatyam, and some, irrespective of ethnicity did Manipuri, Ballet, Kandyan and even Spanish dancing at our school run by Irish Catholic nuns. According to Mantillake, distinguished Sinhala dancers and dance educators such as Pani Bharatha (with a resonant Indian name), Sri Jayana and colleagues invented the folk dances including the Tea-dance. It appears that the Tea-dance was made mostly for foreign consumption, without any engagement with the Malaiyaha communities, to popularise Ceylon Tea and also entertain the Lankan diaspora nostalgically celebrating Lankan festivals and National events. There are such shows in LA, Paris and New Zealand (I learn on YouTube), some done even by little girls of about five or six. The dancers are all girls, while usually there is a young boy as a Kangani with a cane in hand, supervising and flirting with them and creating bits of silly comedy. I discovered that the original Tea-dance was in fact British social dancing done by the colonial folk in Asia to liven up afternoon gatherings for tea-sipping and such. So, the name of the colonial masters’ dance was branded on the Malaiyaha community by the Lankan state, to sell tea.

The Tea-dance consists largely of gestures plucked from the act of breaking tender tea leaves, crudely combined with those copied from Indian films. The baskets, some small plastic ones, were tied to their back to make dancing easy, and the colourful costumes were also confected out of the transnational Bollywood film repertoire and dance moves. None of this of course had even a faint ‘ethnographic authenticity’.

The baskets the Malaiyaha women carried to work were not tied to their back (as the song in Sinhala says), but rather, were held with a long band strung across their heads which carry the weight, compressing the spine, as the neck is constantly bent to find the exact tender tea leaf. A Malaiyaha woman would only get a full days’ union award wage if they filled the large baskets with 16 kilos of tea per day!

Now, it’s this container, carrying the weight of their heavy labour, that is flung around like a light pot high in the air just for fun by the Sinhala girls rounded up to dance and prance around on a stage amidst admiring parents and a few whites. They hitch their skirts and provocatively shake and stick their hips out and carry on like some Bollywood dancers, producing pure kitsch. None of this is edifying in terms of gender stereotypes for these youngsters inculcated into ‘Lankan folk traditions.’

Mantillake cites Tamil names of a variety of folk-dance forms practised by the Malaiyaha folk and makes the point that the Tea-dance does not draw material from any of them. And in Sumathy Sivamohan’s feature film of the Malaiyaha, Ingirunthu (2013), there is a Hindu festival at the local Kovil with an extraordinary range of dancing by the devotees, both children and adults, as part of religious festivity. Some of the dancers show how their own folk-dance forms have evolved among them to include transsexual, transmedia dance gestures seen in many other parts of the world, including Indian films. I also noticed one transsexual dancer dressed as such figures did when they popped up from time to time in some early Sinhala films, such Pitisara Kella (Village Lass). Such figures were always found on urban streets, dancing for money, dressed in long twirling skirts. In those days, the name for them was napunsakaya, neither male nor female. This hybrid mixture of moves, gestures and rhythms, internalised and absorbed by the dancers at the festival, was an actual ethnographic event (of the people, by the people and for the people), filmed respectfully by Sivamohan’s camera and clearly of value to the Malaiyaha community gathered at the festival ritual to celebrate their gods.

So, the dancing of the folk at these religious festivals is not a mummified museum category among Hindu communities on the tea estates, but is, rather, open to the transnational flow of contemporary media images as well. It’s this living syncretic tradition of collective dance that sustains them spiritually and emotionally and lifts them up from their daily arduous physical drudgery. For the Hindus, dance is an integral part of the metaphysics of their religion because within its cosmology the world comes into being, and is also dissolved, by the Dance of Shiva Nataraja, the king of dance. However, the three great Middle Eastern Religions of The Book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, focus on The Word, proscribing the primordial body in dance. And sadly, according to the bible story of Genesis, the human body is fallen, sinful, banished from paradise.

When dance is invented according to the imperatives of state patronage, without some integral local connection to the lives of people whose emotional expression it is, the result is a highly artificial dance, a parody and an insult to the folk it supposedly represents. No other South Asian country would stoop so low as to sell their own, say Darjeeling tea for instance, with such a gimmick.

Fabricated dances

These fabricated dances also run the risk of sanitisation of folk traditions of their own. When this ideology determines the school and university curricula one has a perfect recipe for recreating mediocrity, through inbreeding. Mantillake, as an educator himself, is especially critical of the deleterious effects of such a dance curriculum on schoolchildren, in promulgating ethnic stereotypes of minorities. Lankans could have studied how India revived and nurtured their vast repertoire of traditions during decolonisation under Nehru’s modern cultural policies, from song to dance, from weaving to painting and sculpture. They had lost some of their dance forms but they had the theoretical texts (shasthriya) and the temple sculpture from which scholar-dancers were able to derive the mudras and poses, create anew the Indian traditions and train the young.

This was possible also because Indian classical forms reach towards the principle of the pose of dynamic equilibrium. Just imagine Siva Nataraja poised on one leg, balancing on a tortoise while dancing with his many arms, beating the hour-glass drum. It’s a life-size bronze icon of Shiva Nataraja that the Government of India gifted to CERN, the centre for the study of quantum phenomena such as the Higgs Boson, in Switzerland. Shiva Nataraja now dances there communing with the quantum energy of the universe.

We can move from the classical to the simplest of Indian folk instruments, the bata-nalava, the bamboo flute of both Krishna and the cow-herd, to understand the richness of Indian performance modes. There is an annual folk festival of flutes of a hundred and one varieties, and folk-group dances of both men and women, who dance for days, with startling Dionysian intensity and joy. Kumar Shahani’s film of this festival is on YouTube, called The Bamboo Flute (2000). In the same film he also has Pandith Hariprasad Chaurasia play his classical flute seated on the floor of his middle-class flat in Mumbai. Perhaps, the British didn’t reach the village folk playing the flute and therefore the unbroken evolution of the form, from the folk (Deshiya), to the most sophisticated of classical forms (Margiya), was possible and is perceptible and audible to this day. This was one of Ananda Coomaraswamy’s key ideas based on his meticulous research.

Perhaps, in the first instance, the dance forms of the folk were very few in Sinhala Buddhist villages (except in rituals of exorcism), regulated by the ethos of the Temple based on the precepts of Theravadha Buddhism, with its emphasis on calming the body and mind in meditation and chanting. Is this why many Buddhists are drawn to Katharagama (a Hindu shrine devoted to the brother of Ganesh, Skanda), and the trance dancing there?). Is this also why Asoka Handagama had an extended sequence of older Dalith men and women dancing together seriously, self-forgetfully, in a secular open air space, after work, on their pay-day, in his film Alborada (2021)? I hesitate though to call it an orientalising moment in the Sinhala cinema because the dancing was given a certain respectful attention. The director’s and Neruda’s fascination with the dancing is quite mutual and rather appealing.

Whatever the case, what appears to happen in the ‘nationalised folk-dance forms’ is that girls especially have become, in my opinion, more and more narcissistic as performers, incited to be ‘sexy’, elaborating a very limited set of gestures and movements, some of which are directly inflected by provocative Indian film dance moves, pure fluff. The Popular Indian film music and dance were originally derived from the four or five classical forms, according to Paul Willemen, who co-wrote the 2-volume Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema. His argument was that the film music and songs created a new 5th form initially, a hybrid, very outward looking one, aware also of Hollywood musicals from the 1940s. They were performed by highly trained professionals. Now, after globalisation and the internet and social media, the speedy hybridisation cannot any longer be quantified, and doesn’t even need to be for purposes of legitimisation of that once critically maligned popular cinema, because of its transnational reach, domestic social and political power.

Dance Therapy

A Kuchupudi dance teacher in Sydney decided to go back to Kerala, where she was from, and opened a dance studio which I visited once. She was about to start a workshop for a small group of young girls and told me that she was doing dance movements based on different kinds of walking rhythms. She told me to sit and observe but that I could also join in if I felt like it. My friend’s formal training was in Odissi, a classical form but she was dissatisfied with formal rigour and wanted to work as a dance therapist in a looser way, exploring movements, and had thought the many forms of walking in Indian dance would be good to start with.

Some of these are: walking like an elephant, walking like a deer, walking like a floating swan, walking on lotus flowers etc. I had previously seen these in Kumar Shahani’s films on dance, The Bamboo Flute (2000), and Bhavantaran (Immanence, 1991), a tribute to Guru Kelucharan Mahapathra, exponent of Odissi. At the opening of The Bamboo Flute, Alarmel Valli danced a magnificent invocation to Ganapathi (Ganesh), in the open air, near a temple beside a lake. There, this slim dancer also walked, swaying majestically like an elephant, with flute music in the air.

My friend’s workshop on walking was for young girls who were feeling low, withdrawn and depressed. She was interested in rhythmic walking to the beat of drums as a way of activating their feel for walking as such and generate a little energy in their body. She told me that many middle-class Indian mothers now instructed their daughters not to walk with swinging arms, but to keep them still, held beside the body as they walked. That was a code, she said, for restraining the female body of the young girls from using their pelvis in walking, the ‘pelvic walk’ being one associated with sex workers on the streets.

Triviality of Tea dance

When thinking of the triviality of the Tea-dance, these thoughts about dance therapy kept coming to me and I remembered that I found myself joining the girls, walking to the rhythms of the drums and then I found myself crying uncontrollably while still walking to the irresistible drum beats. I remembered that I was neither depressed nor unhappy then and discussed what happened to me with my friend after the class, over a cup of tea. She said that certain drum beats play directly on the nervous system and can touch one deeply, that they are primal vibrations. In Hindu metaphysics, in the beginning was sound. Whereas, according to the Bible, in the beginning was the word.

Trained Indian dancers and ordinary folk across the ages, in villages, towns and cities, have developed dance forms and rhythms, for many occasions and innumerable festivals, with immense intuition and craft skill, which connect deeply with other life worlds. All human communities are known to have danced from the beginning of time. According to anthropologists, two of the most ancient forms of dance are of people moving rhythmically in unison in undulating serpentine lines which become circular. Instead of training young girls to seduce an audience from the early age of six and boys to control them with a stick, even in jest, as in the mindless Sinhala Tea-dance, the Lankan Sinhala Buddhist cultural elite could be a little more mindful in trying to sell Ceylon tea. However, there is now a polished-up version of the Tea-dance (on YouTube, without the kangani), advertised as entertainment for local corporate events, by “Students of State Cultural Centers, Presented by the Ministry of Buddhasasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs.” (To be continued)

Michelle Jayasinghe in her book A Study of the Evolution of Lord Ganesh in Sri Lankan Culture, says that the Hindu Theru Festival was practiced all over Lanka but that the one in Matale at the Arulmigu Shri Muttumariyamman Kovil was special, in that Buddhists also actively participated in it with the Hindu devotees. She adds that it is commonly known that Muslims and Christians also contribute to and participate in it. She also indicates that this festival is of vital importance to the Malaiyaha people of the tea estates, especially given that they have lived and worked in the hill country for nearly two centuries.

“The land was originally part of a paddy field and was gifted by the owner in 1852. The current temple was built in 1874 funded by many devotees. The temple was originally a small statue under a tree prayed by the Hindu people and has been developed by the people in Matale” (The Sunday Observer, 25 February, 2018).

The thought I get from having read Jayasinghe’s cultural study is that there is a rather urgent need to undertake anthropologically based ethnographic field-research, so as to understand how folk from different ethno-religious groups have come together to celebrate five Hindu gods (Shiva, Mahadevi, Ganesh, Skanda, Chandeshvara), by building elaborately decorated chariots for each of them to be paraded through the city, as the major highlight of this festival. Here, the future researchers could also focus on whether the Malaiyaha folk have a unique relationship to this festival, as suggested by Jayasinghe, and if and how the different genders respond to it in their active participation in therapeutic dancing as well.

There is a YouTube film of the Theru festival in Matale where a young woman moves and shakes vigorously in a trance state, while an older man and a woman attend to her with care. This is clearly a therapeutic folk practice (dance) focusing on one single individual, which can’t be commodified. The Kovil itself was also ‘severely damaged’ in the 83 anti-Tamil pogrom. With such a complex history (where ethnicity, politics and religion are enmeshed in desire), the collective festive acts of healing perceptible in the Theru festival in Matale, makes it an iconic multi-ethnic event.

The unusual coexistence of feelings, sensations and emotions, of relaxation and extreme intensity (hanging on hooks, firewalking, trance states), and a continuum of moods between them helps one to observe (on YouTube again) how cultural syncretism comes into life when people mingle in an open way in a fully embodied, mindful, intimate and respectful manner, as in the Matale Theru festive milieu and atmosphere charged with incense, and song.

As Pandith Amaradeva once said, Lanka didn’t have melodic instruments to produce songs (melodies) until they were imported from India. Similarly, in the case of dance, we didn’t have a courtly or a temple tradition to generate classical dance idioms as in the case of Hindu Devadasi and the Persianised Islamic traditions of Moghul India. What we did have were the powerful therapeutic modes, the Kohomba Kankariya ritual, the 18 Sanniyas and daemon masks and the chanting, kavi and drumming. We also didn’t have a martial arts tradition as in Kerala, which contemporary Indian female choreographers have been drawing from in creating modern dance moves, empowering girls and women in India to learn to walk proudly, and defend themselves and enjoy it all as elephants do.

As I was concluding this I saw (on my friend Priyantha Fonseka’s Facebook) some of his clips of the recent Mihindu parade in Kandy celebrating the arrival of Buddhism in Lanka. He also wrote an entry describing the difference between the one he just saw with his children (going past his house) and the ones he remembered from his own childhood. He said, in the past the small perahara started from the temple school where children did kalagedi and lee-keli dances to the sound of drums. The centre piece was a float with statues of Mihindu Thero (son of Asoka), and Thisse as a boy poised to shoot a deer. Such is the parabolic scene of the introduction of avihimsa (non-violence) at the heart of the enlightening religion of Buddhism, to Lanka.

While this same float was there in the contemporary parade, Tisse was played by a real child. But marking a radical change, now there were transvestite and perhaps also transexual drummers and men in sarong and bandanas, drumming bright yellow metallic drums, setting the pace for an irresistible rhythmic walk. The last group were Kavadi dancers, both men and women, clad in red accompanied by a small orchestra of instruments including drums, cymbals, a small horn and even a saxophone (once an instrument prohibited on Radio Ceylon!). The women in bright red saris were balancing very high floral head dresses with ease as they danced. Priyantha concluded with a delightful anecdote. He said that two female spectators nearby began to move restlessly, one seated on her chair having let down her hair and other (having being invited), shooting right into the parade itself, dancing.

As a scholar of theatre, at Peradeniya University, interested in ‘audience participation,’ Priyantha observed that these two women were in their own way undoing the various defence mechanisms and taboos they (the Sinhala folk with their exclusivist ethno-religious identity) had created for themselves, to exclude ‘ethnic others’. It appears then that some of the finest manifestations, actions, of the Aragalaya have sent fresh shoots through the Lankan body politic as a cosmos-polis. Also, perhaps, the folk in Kandy, no doubt long familiar with the Matale Theru festival ethos, were well rehearsed emotionally to make such moves.