I was invited to moderate and speak at two panel discussions that were part of the Arpana Dance Festival that celebrated Jothi Raghavan’s 25th anniversary as dance teacher.

“The Invisible Thread,” panels addressed how the arts have acted as an invisible thread binding the Indo-American community, and discussed the part they play in “issues surrounding Indian identity and the role of the arts in creating and shaping that identity.” In my talk I focused on my own personal perspective, which is that our bicultural sensibility must work towards evolving a composite national identity in which India’s arts and culture form an integral part of every young American’s (or, as in my case, Canadian’s) education. How do we move towards this goal while holding on to the authenticity of an art such as Bharata Natyam?

In one of the panels, Jothi echoed the same sentiments that I, citing Robert Frost, say to my creative students: first master the rules, and then you can break them. Once you master the basics of a dance form, you can be innovative and experimental. Jothi tolerates no half measures, and every one of her students is well grounded in the basics of Bharata Natyam.

Students’ responses about their dance training were very positive - they spoke of how their dance school provided them with their own cultural space, an extended family as it were, a sense of togetherness with other brown people, and valuable knowledge of their heritage culture that they could share with their non-IndoAmerican friends.

The active participants in the Festival are indeed a very talented crowd - just about every senior dancer of the school seemed to be an A+ student at Ivy School institutions (this might be somewhat sweeping a statement) and are talented and hardworking at both studies and fine arts (and this is not a sweeping generalization.)

The most challenging question came from an adult, herself a professional dance teacher, who, she said, often had trouble making ends meet. She asked, How many parents would encourage their son or daughter to be a professional artist? The responses to this question from others were predictably politically correct - parents said they would certainly support their children’s decision to follow the arts full time, if they so wished. However, could it be that parental influence among the affluent upper middle class (who form the overwhelming majority of parents of most Bharata Natyam students in north America) weave their own invisible thread of values and expectations around their offspring, so that an overwhelming majority of their children do opt for a career in the usual professions of the Indian Diaspora - medicine, engineering, information technology, accounting etc. all of which lead to fairly lucrative jobs. These expectations, to be sure, come from genuine parental concern for their offsprings’ future, and to be sure, most parents accept (I would not say “encourage”) the decision, just as most parents accept any person their son or daughter decides to marry.

But the question brought to my mind another question - in our pursuit of perpetuating India’s arts, do we not owe something to those who choose it as their profession? William Blake said that a society that does not listen to its poets is morally bankrupt. So let me put in my plug: If you want to support Indian culture in America, support artists - dancers, musicians, writers, magazine publishers - who live here in north America. Artists from India are the icing on the cake, but our first support has to be for diasporic artistes who earn their daily bread being professional artistes here in North America.

The panels were interactive, with the audience participating with enthusiasm. The parents were clear as to why they enrolled their children in various classes - language, religion, dance, and music. One expressed how perplexed she was that one of her children loved this culture-education and the other intensely disliked it. Another said that she spent as much time taking her children to ballet and opera as she did taking them to dance classes.

I expected young people to be more controversial about being force-fed Indian culture by being enrolled in ethno cultural classes. This, especially because I had taken part in a creative-writing group session just outside Boston a few days earlier where young writers spilled skilful satire on their parents’ generation that aspired to white leather sofas in their living rooms and a constant supply of rasagollas and Indian curries in their refrigerator. But at this Festival, no one had anything negative to say about our diasporic culture or about how we tend to ghettoize ourselves by immersing in little Indias except for the few hours at our workplace.