Anna’s Taandava

 The wave of recent popular uprisings, including our very own, are reminiscent of an ancient cathartic tradition. Some will remember it as the Dancing Mania

The Anna circus makes three disparate memories combine with the happy felicity of a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table.

The first memory is family lore. My grandfather, a polyglot bibliophile, kept what was called a ‘scorpion machine.’ It was a small condenser that delivered galvanic shocks to victims of scorpion bites, and allegedly saved their lives. He carried it with him while travelling as a circuit judge in Malabar in the 1930s. Our family saw it in action when he set it up in the garage back home in Madras. Did it work? It must have. “Why else would they have queued up?” asked my mother. Also, he didn’t call it scorpion bite; he called it tarantism.

The second memory is seventeen years old. I was in a suburb of Utrecht, crossing an old stone bridge. “This is where those children danced to their death,” stated my Dutch friend. The story was that 300 children had died dancing on this bridge when it collapsed under their exertions. Why were they dancing on the bridge? How long ago did this happen?

My friend was vague about this. “12th, maybe 13th century,” she said. She was certain only about one fact. The children had danced out of their homes, deaf to the pleas of their elders. Unable to stop themselves, they had danced out of the village—and eventually into this river. I wondered if the Pied Piper of Hamelin was based on this curious tale.

The third memory was from a concert by the Italian musicologist Francesca Cassio. After three enthralling arias, she sang something that sent the audience wild. Perhaps it was the castanets she used as accompaniment, but the rhythm was compelling, it had us dancing in our seats. It was vaguely familiar—reminiscent of the wedding song in The Godfather. It was, she explained, a tarantella, used in Italy to cure the bite of the tarantula—or as my grandfather preferred to call it, tarantism.

It took the phenomenon of Anna’s fast to make these three memories cohere. Not Anna himself, but his supporters made the picture emerge. Who were they? Where had they come from? What did they want? Nobody bothered to ask, because nobody wanted to know. 

It was enough that they were there. 

What had brought them here? Why did they feel compelled to follow this uncharismatic man?

If he had inspired them, they should all have been fasting too—only a few volunteered. This was no revolution. They had no plan.

Of course, the nation knows people have fasted before, and, for reasons that stir us even at this remove in time.

But Anna Hazare was only fasting for more paperwork. Don’t we already have Lokayuktas? He just wants more of them, and not necessarily better ones.

Now that his fast is over, we shall have more bureaucrats to watch other bureaucrats who will give us more windows to queue at, more forms to fill, and more peons to bribe. Anna’s fast fed into the system; it did not oppose it.

“We support Anna because we are against corruption,” a couple of college kids wearing Anna caps told me. 

Were they, really? 

Their parents had paid tuition fees to make them study what they should have learnt at school, they paid people to do their homework, they paid capitation fees to get them into college, and these eighteen year olds were against corruption? 

“What will you do next?” I asked. 

They looked surprised. 

“We won!” they told me. “It’s over now. But we just had to fight this fight.” 

Naturally, the fight had meant a week off from college. 

Like these kids, thousands of others who hadn’t been moved by genocide or starvation or homelessness or any of the other recent crimes of government, had abandoned their lives for an entire week to make it—if not to the Ramlila ground—to its local counterpart in their own cities. And there they had stayed, keeping vigil over a man fasting to death.

Was this India’s Tahrir Square? Not quite. No such agenda for personal freedom and justice drew the hordes to Ramlila. And yet, the two events were not dissimilar. 

There have been mass movements in many nations of late. It’s definitely catching.

Some of these, most of them peaceful, are immediately evident as freedom movements because of the torment of the populace. Others, with escalating violence, as in the British riots, have been read as symptoms of economic discontent. 

But if you consider the longer view, as I do, the pattern is an ancient one. And because the historic precedent has been universal, it requires re-examination.

The three memories I cited have their roots in an ancient phenomenon generally remembered by its most recent name: ‘the dancing mania.’ You’ll find it dated to the 16th century on most sites you Google, but it is much older than that. Also, it has nothing to do with dancing, and, it’s not a mania. Most cultures have a memory of this phenomenon. So peculiar is its manifestation that it is invariably read as either divine or supernatural. And so widespread is its contagion that it becomes the norm and defines the times.

Though we too have a memory of such an event, let’s start with the one best documented, in European memory. As the first surge of the pestilence called the Black Death began to retreat in the 14th century, a bizarre illness broke out in Germany. Victims sprang up convulsing, frothing at the mouth, leaping and screaming—and, most inexplicably, anybody who watched their suffering became similarly afflicted. Entire villages were affected and the victims ‘danced’ out, leaving their homes. 

It appeared first in July 1374 in Aix-la-Chapelle. In the next few months it spread to Cologne and Metz, and soon across the Netherlands. Yet, when it reached Utrecht, that city already had a memory of this strange malady.

A hundred years earlier, on the 17th of June 1278, two hundred children had danced over the bridge at Utrecht. It collapsed, and they were all drowned. (This memory was still strong seven hundred years later, when my friend recalled it in 1994. Was it the same bridge, rebuilt? I’m not sure.)

There are earlier memories too—1027, 1237. In fact there wasn’t anything about the dancing malady that was strange to the medieval mind. It was almost the expected response to a period of intense stress.

What was most peculiar, the victims (or celebrants) were often a generation younger than those who had suffered or witnessed that stress. These bouts were almost like replays of an evolutionary memory—migrations being acted out. For when migrations occur, historically those who begin the migration seldom live to see the promised land. It is their children who inherit it.

In Italy, the memory was even older. The tarantula responsible for the triggering bite was not the spider we know by that name. It was probably Laudakia stellia, the star lizard, considered venomous by the ancient Romans, and to which they ascribed this malady, already well known to Greek physicians as enthusiasmus. In medieval Italy these dancing epidemics of tarantism were set off by certain colours, and sometimes by certain musical instruments, the flute, the pipe. But it was always calmed by music. The special music used to quiet the frenzied dance was what I had heard that evening as a tarantella. Paradoxically, it set the audience dancing.

My grandfather, savant of the recherché, had evidently read these histories, and recognised among his own people symptoms of tarantism, which, by the late 19th century, was confidently diagnosed as hysteria, and just as confidently treated with mild electric shocks.

We Indians also recognise this pattern from myth. Like the women of Apulia, the Gopis of Vrindavan too left their homes at the distant call of the flute. The raasleela was probably a mass response to the aftermath of stress.

Who can forget Woodstock? Surely that was dancing mania at its most wildly disinhibited?

Is it happening again? 

Modern medicine elevated these epidemics to a nervous disorder by confusing them with a very organic neurological illness which still goes by the ancient Greek name that began it all—khoreia.

And it is in the dramatic use of this word that we must seek the true meaning of the dancing mania, which has begun its contagion again. The Greek khoros was a dramatic device to define and comment on the action unfolding on the stage. Chorea, as the dancing mania was correctly named by Paracelsus in the 16th century, is the body’s comment on the times.

Flight is an important element of psychosis. We flee fears that are still dormant within us, to escape monsters we do not yet see.

Anna’s circus may be just one act. We may not have joined him, but we’re still in the play.

Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan write together as Kalpish Ratna. Their novel, The Quarantine Papers, was published by HarperCollinsIndia in January 2010

About The Author

Kalpish Ratna

Kalpish Ratna is the author of The Secret Life of Zika Virus (2017) and Synapse (2019)