Indian dancing

MANIPURI

bration putting the demons to flight, and a rich harvest being their reward.

Manipuri dances are usually performed at springtime during the Vasanta-utsava and Holi festivals. Ho// is noted as the Festival of Colours, when the people spray one another’s clothes with varying dyes, celebrating the dawn of spring with its yield of luscious fruit and scarlet flower, its incitement of the passions of the young.

In course of time 4o// became sublimated through the efforts of the adherents of the Vaishnavite cult into a ritual that had none of the ribaldry of the original celebration. Thus was inaugurated the Ras-Lee/a dance, perpetuating the earthly life of Lord Krishna. The story goes that, in the early eighteenth century, Maharaj Jai Singh, the ruler of Manipur, had a vision wherein Vishnu appeared before him and exhorted him to have his godly figure carved from the trunk of a certain tree. The event was marked by a feast that is celebrated every year at springtime.

The Ras-Lee/a dance shows Krishna and the gopis of Vtaja frolicking in the garden of Brindaban on a moonlit night. In the scented groves humming with insects, redolent with the perfume of mallika flowets, the murli, or flute, of Krishna, the cowherd, sounds on the gentle breeze, blowing softly from the river Jumna. Krishna, his headdress decked with a peacock feather, his neck garlanded with flowers, stands under the Aadamba tree, playing his divine melody.

Lord Krishna symbolizes the Eternal Lover. ‘He danced and danced,’ explains a verse, ‘and so quick was he that each maiden found him by her side, each imagining him to be her wooer. He was here, there, everywhere; between every two of them there was a Krishna. They all danced and sang, for the Lord was in their midst. As they danced, the little bells in their anklets gave forth a jingling, honeyed sound. Thus they sported under the Kadamba tree, near the flowing Jumna, among the humming bees and fragrant flowers, under the silver canopy of the moon-flooded sky.’

The Ras-Lee/a has been a popular theme with attists, particularly those of the Kangara School. The story is told in theit lovely, delicately tinted miniatures. Singers and saints, such as Govindas and Bhakta Surdas, have also thapsodized over it.

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