“Instances of woman behavior are not unknown that a feeble ‘no’ may mean a ‘yes’. If the parties are strangers, the same theory may not be applied…But same would not be the situation when parties are known to each other, are persons of letters and are intellectually/academically proficient, and if, in the past, there have been physical contacts. In such cases, it would be really difficult to decipher whether little or no resistance and a feeble ‘no’, was actually a denial of consent.” Delhi High Court Judge Ashutosh Kumar

 The padam 'Indendu vaccitivira' by Kshetrayya, a poet of the seventeenth century, starts with the woman saying to her lover, 'Why have you come here? Go away.' The conceit is that the man must have arrived at her house by mistake, somehow, as his mistress sarcastically points out, losing his way in the bright moonlight.

In the little world of this dance, 'the parties are not strangers' and 'are persons of letters and are intellectually/academically proficient' and 'in the past there have been physical contacts'.

When bharata natyam dancers perform it today, they mime the 'go away' in a myriad different ways: 'don't touch me', 'let go of my hand', 'I'm not listening', 'don't pull at my sari', 'take your hand off my shoulder'. Usually the dance ends with the dancer pushing the imaginary insistent lover out and latching the door behind him.

But that's not where the poem ends. The last verse that Kshetrayya wrote has the lover making love to her, in A.K. Ramanujan's translation, 'with twice the fury'.

Some who write about Indian dance take the editing out of the last verse to be a puritanical 'cleaning up' of the repertoire, and blame the Brits, or the Brahmins, or the bourgeois sentimentality of bharata natyam dancers, not the most radical group of women.

I take it to be a recognition that despite the beauty of the poem and the intentions of the poet, the emotion conveyed by the earlier verses wouldn't ring true with the last verse added. So while the Delhi High Court judge is stuck within a 17th century paradigm of male desire and female consent, a couple of generations of young women want to be clear that 'no' does in fact mean 'no'.


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