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The expression of bhāva, feelings and emotions, for worship and spiritual endearment through dance has had a long tradition even before the 7th century, much earlier than the construction of the great temples of southern India. The devotional songs and dances of Nayanmars like Appar in Tamil Nadu, and of bhaktas like Mira, Chaitanya, Vidyapati, Chandidas, Vallabha, Jayadeva and Kabir in north India, are exquisite testimonies to dance as the most primary expression of joy. For Appar, 'the whole world seemed to dance and sing and play. For Kabir, 'Dance, my heart! Dance today with joy. Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythms of this music. The hills and the sea and the earth dance....'14
This kind of mystical poetry, emerging out of bhakti tradition in India became the source of inspiration for all arts - music, painting, dance, drama. Within the framework of their own aesthetic constructs, artists in all these forms expressed and interpreted the same spiritual ideas and feelings.15 This intimate connection between the arts extended over many centuries and over a vast geographical region. It was guided by spiritual experience, thought, and myth, and it was a remarkable cultural phenomenon and artistic achievement. Until this century, as arts, both music and dance have been ephemeral; we know of them only through secondary references, in paintings, sculpture or poetry. In India, these have been indeed rich sources for our understanding of the ubiquitous presence of dance in Indian life, secular and spiritual alike. With Indian gods dancing the dances of love and joy, fury and seduction, and triumph and invocation, the sanctity of dance, not only as a form of art but as a way of life, is established again and again. The Krşņa līla — the cosmic story of Kșşņa, speaks of 'the union of love and renunciation in life, and the secret of limitless life in this world' through every possible art form and expression. 16
In all these expressions there is a sense of celebration of life in its myriad forms; there is no hint of any life-denying art or spirituality, or of such stultifying elitism that creates 'artificial productions, written in the closet by learned men for learned men ....they (the bhakti poets) have remained living voices in the people's hearts, because they appealed to the sense of the true and the beautiful. '17
What makes these works of art so extraordinary is their capacity to invoke the beauty and the splendour of the world of senses as well as the drama of the spirit within. The dance of Siva, we are reminded again and again, is being performed eternally in our own hearts and souls: "The Holy Land is the land of our own experience. All is in all: and if beauty is not apparent to us in the well-known, we shall not find it in things that are strange and far away."18
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