HISTORY OF THE DANCE IN INDIA Vedic Dances.—Ritualistic dances are mentioned in the Vedas. Thus, in the Mahavrata ceremony, women celebrate to the sound of the lute the patrons of the ceremony ; maidens dance round the fire with water-pitchers while the Stotra is being performed. They pour water on the fire, an act of sympathetic magic intended to produce rain, and the song shows that they desire richness in milk, as well as water for the cows. At the close of the Horse Sacrifice also girls dance round the Marjaliya fire with water pots on their heads, beating the ground with their feet and singing "This is honey." They are said to endow the sacrificers with might. Again, four or eight women dance at the house of the bride, at a wedding.
The word iyati in the Black Yajur Veda refers to the accom paniment of recitation by pantomimic gesture: the Nata Sutras mentioned by Panini must have been handbooks of gesture, analo gous to the later works on abhinaya.
In the Buddhist and Epic periods, dancing is well known as a normal court function and as a means of paying honour to a king or distinguished guest. Thus the festival of the gods takes place in Indra's city ; he is host, and the other gods come and take their seats in due order as spec tators of the dance of the Gandharvas and Apsarases. The gods themselves may sing and dance in honour of a human saint, but the dancers and musicians proper are the Gandharvas and Apsa rases. The latter are beautiful girls, often employed by the gods to seduce the great saints from their meditations, for which there is a parallel in the Buddha legend in the attempted seduction of Gautama by the three daughters of Mara, who dance before him. More often the Apsarases are simply the dancers in heaven, by whom the gods are entertained and honoured. Equally character istic was the keeping of troupes of dancers at royal courts on earth. Whatever the social status of professional dancers may always have been, and despite the fact that the art, like others, is an almost purely professional vocation, it is certain that dancing in the Gupta and mediaeval periods was also an aristocratic accom plishment, affording in this respect a parallel to the state of painting at the same time.
Dancing and music as a royal accomplishment may be illustrated by the following ex amples: In the Divyavaddna (Cowell and Neill, p. 544 et seq.) King Rudrayana plays the lute (vine") while his wife Candravati dances ; the Gupta emperor, Samudragupta, had coins struck in which he is represented as seated and playing on the lyre or lute, while an inscription of the same great monarch at Allahnbad records his skill in music. Kalidgsa represents King Agnivarman as competing with actors in their art. In Devendra's Uttare"dhya yana-tika (Meyer, Hindu Tales, p. i o5) King Udgyana plays on the lute while his wife dances, but drops the plectrum of the lute, at which the queen is angered and asks "Why have you spoilt the dance?" In the Mahavaihsa, ch. lxiii. v. 82, 83, Parqkrama Bahu I. (of Ceylon) is said to have built a theatre beside his palace "that so he might listen to the . . . singers, and witness the delightful dance," while his queen Rupavati, who was young and beautiful, and an embodiment of all the traditional virtues of a Hindu wife "was skilled in dancing and was richly endowed with a mind as keen as the point of a blade of grass." These instances will suffice to show that the modern prejudice against dancing as an art to be studied by persons of honourable social status has no foundation in classic tradition.
Still more interesting is the ritual service of dancing in temples. The proper occasions of dancing are festivals, celebrations, processions of men or gods, marriages, reunion of friends, first occupation of towns or houses, the birth of children and similar auspicious events. The dance is essentially an honour paid to the chief guest, and particularly to kings. Now the daily ritual or service performed at the shrine of a deity is essentially the same as the daily service of a king, and it is therefore only natural that dancing before the shrine should form a part of the regular morning and evening offices. At wealthy shrines a considerable number of Devadasis ("women servants of the deity") are permanently attached to the temple, both to perform this office and to take part in the dramas which are presented in the temple on certain holidays. This practice has survived in southern India to the present day, but we have earlier records of it on a more lavish scale (N. M. Penzer, The Ocean of Story). Inscriptions of Rajaraja and other of the Cola kings (in the Tanjore district, at the beginning of the i ith century) refer to theatres and the establishment of large numbers of dancers in connection with temples, and for this purpose we find that pri vate as well as royal endowments were made. Thus the assembly or town council of Sattanur gave lands for the maintenance of Sanskrit plays; Rajaraja brought from other temples and settled at Tanjore as many as 40o dancing girls; Kulottunga III. ap pointed an additional dancing-master in the temple who had to dance with gestures. The entertainment of the god enshrined is modelled upon that of a god in his heaven, and that of a king on earth.
