Hindustan Times
Fanspan of the Flower and Willow World
With all that talk about apsaras I’m pining to see some good dance and can’t find any this week in this wretched heat except for a ’sushi platter’ of a two-day dancefest, each day featuring ten-ten dancers in a big medley. You can’t really register anything in the whirl and I’m not going.
Instead, I thought I’d share this stored-in-sandalwood experience from August 2002 when I got to briefly enter the nuanced world of the Japanese geisha, courtesy the Government of Japan that gave me a fabulous two-week whirl all by myself in their country when I was Arts Editor, The Indian Express.
They asked me for my wish list of activities and in between the Noh, Kabuki, Shinto and Zen, a stay at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn, futon on the floor), a great ride on the shinkansen (bullet train) between Tokyo and Hiroshima, lunch with fashion designer Hanae Mori, a visit to the Haiku Society and tea with a scholar on the Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji (that I’d borrowed to read in English translation from my friend Iqbal Malhotra), I was also taken to beautiful Kyoto to meet a geisha. My only unfulfilled wish was a meeting with modern Japanese writer, Banana Yoshimoto, whose books I liked very much, in English translation.
It was American writer Arthur Golden who began the geisha wave in 1997 with his fictional work, Memoirs of a Geisha (called Sayuri in its flop Japanese avatar). Lisa Dalby, really the first with ‘Geisha’ in 1983, came back to the theme with a new preface in Twenty-four Years Later, 1998. And yet another American, Lesley Downer, wrote Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World in 2000, also issued as Women of the Pleasure Quarters.
These Western scholars of Japanese classics were certainly not writing for the anglophone Indian. They wrote for their own audiences, essentially white Christians. They acknowledged their shock at the values of the “flower and willow world” as the hanamachi, or pleasure quarters, are known. The stereotypes we Indians inherited through the English language, then, were these: Geisha are prostitutes who sell themselves to the highest bidder; geisha perform tea ceremonies and sleep with customers after a fan dance or two.
These American researcher-writers wrote earnestly about the truth. Geisha are “not exactly” prostitutes. They are not wives meant to bear children, cook, clean and run the house. They are “counter culture”, providing a chill zone for rich, powerful men. Their aim is to find a rich patron and be his unwed wife, whose job is recreational, not reproductive.
In the old days, poor girls were sold to the hanamachi by their families. The Meiji Era rulers put a stop to the selling but did not abolish geisha like the devadasis of India were abolished. It became a voluntary profession, which some Japanese women preferred to sitting all day at a computer in some vast corporation.
But this case for respectability is spoilt by the geisha ritual of mizuage, her ‘deflowering’ by a rich man who pays for the ‘privilege’ of bedding a virgin. Only then can a maiko (trainee) become a geiko/ geisha (artiste)!
The Indian reader absorbs the Western judgments that lie under the skin of even these adepts. One, that monogamy within marriage is the only correct option. Two, that geisha charge for every moment of their time. Three, that they are rude to gaijin (foreigners). Four, that they are interested only in their own tight world, closed to most Japanese, except for an inner circle.
Reality for this Indian woman was rather different. I was taken to meet a Kyoto geisha called Koito-san, the only one to host a website. Downer had described her as “a Cockney sparrow” and “plain”. So nothing prepared me for her exquisite complexion or her gentle, womanly bearing.
“Indian dance came to Kyoto and I very much wanted to learn it,” said Koito-san, who’d holidayed in Hawaii and hoped to see India one day. “Let me tell you, a geiko is an artiste who must spend years learning traditional music and dance. She holds up her kimono with her left hand. The wife holds it with her right, which lifts the flap easily for a man’s hand to intrude. You tell me, who is more modest?”
Good heavens, I thought, startled. The patriarchy’s unblinking leer down the centuries made me so mad with fury that I almost gagged on the sake I was carefully sipping from a shot glass-sized porcelain cup. However, ironclad Indian adakkam (restraint) saved me from a rude display of my feelings and I nodded politely as if discussing matcha (green tea).
Koito-san and I showed each other dance mudras. Her elegance with a fan in conveying states of love instantly connected with an Indian taught to portray various states of that emotion in Bharata Natyam. She led me upstairs to watch her maiko, Ko-sen (Little Fan) being dressed for a party by a trendy young otokosu (kimono dresser). He looked like a young pirate in his striped tee, scarf, ear-ring and little beard, and I learned that he had gone to live in the US but came back because he missed the world of the hanamachi too much. When he tied the obi (sash) tight around Ko-sen, he put his bare foot against her spine, braced his back and tugged mightily at both ends of the long, heavy sash with his hands, so it would sit tight on her waist.
Ko-sen had a shamisen (stringed lute) lesson before she set out to a nearby teahouse. Her teacher was a bit annoyed because she wasn’t getting it right. “Plink-plink-PLINK!” he’d demonstrate and each time, Ko-sen went “Plink-plink-PLUNK!” instead. The tune they played had quite a pahari lilt to it, very noticeable to Indian ears. “Unreal!” whispered my Japanese interpreter, a smart Tokyo girl, who’d never have seen these sights normally.
Our allotted hour stretched to three-and-a-half. Koito-san refused her fees, even money for the customary drink and offered another round. “I’m a Buddhist,” she told my interpreter. “She has brought me a gift from the land of the Buddha. That is enough.”
It was a dainty bud vase with pure, sinuous lines, made of smooth white marble from the quarries of Makrana, carefully wrapped because someone had told me that the Japanese appreciated nicely wrapped gifts. I had spent quite one hour at my regular book shop in Delhi, where the boys had gotten most enthusiastic about helping me wrap all the little gifts, not their normal line of work. But, India se Japan jaa raha hai, kuch achcha karke dikhayenge! they’d said and achieved tidy, pretty parcels just the way I wanted, with ‘mother-of-pearl’-look wrapping paper and elegant strips of silver gauze ribbon. Koito-san’s gracious reaction seemed like a blessing for all the good energy they had put into her gift.
I rather thought that Sakyamuni would have liked it and wished very much that Asians could talk to each other directly instead of always through the filter of English.
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
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I have really enjoyed reading about the moment when two cultures, bound centuries ago by the sakyamini’s gentle teachings, touched each other in this manner at a different age.
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renuka Reply:
May 22nd, 2009 at 10:41 am
Thanks…as you see, I had to reconcile some contradictory feelings…the basic slavishness of the geisha situation is very upsetting for a modern woman. I can’t romanticise it. Yet there are some important graces worth learning from them to soften the human contact, worth learning for all cultures. As an Asian, I responded with instinctive appreciation to their beautiful movements in just the way they invite you to sit or pour you a drink or put a bowl of boiled soya beans nearer to you. And within the agency permitted to them, some geisha are reportedly superb artistes, like our devadasis used to be.. Their manners are very, very polite, in fact it reminded me then of rural Tamil Nadu, Madurai particularly, when I had roamed around on a temple tour of TN at sixteen with my aunt and cousins and just the way the flowersellers at some wayside temple handed you a string of jasmine was so polite and mannerly, or the way the ticket-collector on a TN state bus spoke to you, with such courtesy.
Writing this, I suddenly recall my first visit to Lucknow, and the taxi driver who told me that in the old days when the dustman greeted the nawab, the nawab would bow even lower in response, the manners of that city were so exquisite. Well, ‘Asian manners’ is a template that runs right thru the Sharq (East) from Turkey to Japan, and I think India had her share, we can remember and revive some good things about ourselves, even in these days of road rage and push coming inevitably to shove.
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watching these chinese ballet where would you classify them. Apsaras and Gandharvas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnLVRQCjh8c
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Thanks for sharing this, Anil, it is very touching and beautiful to watch.
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A friend called today about not finding Koito-san’s website. But I and my colleague Merren in the HT Net dept couldn’t find it either, or we’d have put in the link when this post was uploaded. Just found a reference in an Australian post. Perhaps she’s discontinued it…Sorry!
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Dear Renuka,
A very interesting story. Reminded me of couple of books I read about the life of Japanese women. The way girl children had their little feet tied up since small feet are considered beautiful and also how the women led cloistered lives. There was also one story of a Japanese woman who married an American soldier and how she could not cope in the new environment.
Though I feel the Devdasi system and the Geishas are exploitative of women. Prostitutes are considered bad but what about the men who visit them ? Their morals are never questioned. What is bad the system or the people who are responsible for making the system. The female equivalent of God is Shakti/Mahamaya the all powerful one , but in Bhaja Govindam Shankaracharya asks men to be wary of the seductive powers of women. Why are we women bad mouthed, in most shlokas. Instead men could be asked to control their instincts instead of treating women as ” seductive apsaras”.
We should have had some more female sages so that our shlokas were in better perspective
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K Reply:
May 24th, 2009 at 7:41 am
What’s bad about prostitution ……….or about those who prefer the company of ‘escorts’ ? If men are warned about seductive power of women, does it make women bad ? Is it wrong or somehow degrading to have seductive powers ?
Neither Shankaracharya nor shlokas are static – instead of complaining lets formulate some shlokas that warn women about seductive powers of men – that should make things even. In fact, in the 2009 environment of political correctness, lets warn women about seductive powers of both men and women (to account for lesbians !). Not to forget – warning men about the seductive powers of men (to make sure Karan Johar is counted for ! )
)
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Ayyo, I’m laughing too much to be able to answer…how absurd it all seems! I take refuge in Housman:
…And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew. ..
From ‘Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff’
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K Reply:
May 24th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Yup, let me add to this stupidity -
Latha, please help me understand your statement – “Why are we women bad mouthed, in most shlokas”. Can you please list ‘most shlokas’ ? If yes, please point to those that degrade women.
Please, refer to the orignial scriptures and not commentaries from so-called ’scholars’.
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renuka Reply:
May 24th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Hey Latha, give it to K! He’s being nice and provoking, but there’s truth in what he says. You absolutely have a point that both systems are exploitative. And binding the feet of Chinese women was seriously sicko. You have to read Jung Chang’s beautiful book ‘Wild Swans’ to get the picture of 3 gen of Chinese women. She came to Delhi five-six years ago just before she finished her book on Mao and I enjoyed interviewing her. She told me this amazing story that you may like…
When Pt Nehru went on a state visit to China way back, Chairman Mao greeted him with an ornate verse in classical Chinese. But Mao’s interpreter didn’t know how to translate it. He didn’t understand the classical Chinese.
After an awkward pause, Nehru’s translator quietly supplied the meaning.
It was one Mr Paranjpai, he retired to Pune, but he was still in Delhi then and I hunted him out at the bar of the India International Centre and asked him about it. He turned out to be a learned person with a nice, droll sense of humour and the most delightful twinkle in his eye.
He told me the poet, the verse and its meaning and how embarrassed he felt that he knew the classical Chinese while the other man did not. But the conversation had to go on, so he manfully did his bit to cross that particular bridge, that was his job. I thought later that it was as though he had laid himself down as a bamboo bridge on which the two giants – China and India! – could walk.
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ma’am i’m a bit confused. i had read wild swans a long time back but 1 thing i remember is that JC’s grandmother was initially a concubine to some general. she fled that’s a different story.
what i really want to know is that were geishas also for the same purpose for rich men???????
Also this mizuage thing reminded me of indian courtseans.
they initially were a respected lot but over the years they were degraded to the level of escorts.
another Q for u Was mizuage originally a part of the custom to bcum a geisha or was it introduced by societal changes???????????
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That’s right, JC’s gran wasn’t a geisha but a concubine to a Manchurian warlord, if I recall right. I think Latha mentioned the Chinese foot-binding as another example of exploiting and oppressing women in Asia. You’re right, geisha were/are a service sector created by men for men in Japanese society. Mizuage, as I recall reading about it, was long a part of geisha culture. And why just Indian courtesans, what about the premium on virgin wives in trad societies? Ownership issues, inheritance issues, because a person, unless circumstances mystify it, can always claim his mother, so it’s fathers who need to know their sons are their sons in patrilineal, patriarchal societies. Biology was made into destiny because of….you guessed it, property and the need to pass it on, as demanded by typical social organisation. These things go centuries deep, so it’s not easy to even say half this stuff.
But credit where credit is due: I thank the past generations of enlightened Indian men for my present freedom, they had to win it for their daughters by challenging their own orthodoxies and pushing for reform. But there’s still miles of prejudice, so we have to keep looking at things, no, and not let the insecure guys who want to go back to the Golden Age of Control Freakery take it away again?
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thanks ma’am. Are there any similarities between devdasis and geishas?????????
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u mentioned that geishas were for recreational and not for reproductive purpose so are they like our very own apsaras?????
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renuka Reply:
May 29th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Yeah, that they had to be highly skilled dancers and singers and know lots of graces. There were 64 arts prescribed for courtesans in ancient India by old Vatsyayana, some of them quite absurd, like teaching parrots and mynahs to talk!
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