XYZ is an emotion

Everybody in the world is out to touch the oldest part of you; this is what stories, brands, regimes, toxic partners set out to do

I find it intriguing when I hear this catchphrase circulating so often on social media: “xyz is an emotion” (replace xyz with any object of fascination, from dal to sari to Taylor Swift). It’s a phrase that’s said with some amount of awe, a vague kind of appreciation, and a total nod at how mysterious that particular thing is. Complex is cool, allegedly.

From “why’re you being so emotional” in my last post to “xyz is an emotion”, we’ve come a long way in about three quick leaps.  

But when I scrape just under the surface, “xyz is an emotion” is also the greatest taboo. It’s like saying: this is potent, alluring, and dangerous. So don’t open the Pandora’s box.

When did we become a culture that has learned to live this frustrating paradox? We’re scared of our own emotions, their unseen power, and the body that holds them. We’d rather allude to them with what can be seen explicitly, like a line typed on the page.

How did we learn to undermine feeling and underline thinking in this way?

At the heart of the matter, I find: the word. Not language, mind you, for emotion is a language too. Words and language are two completely different things.

I see today, a worship of words: we extoll them as the most effective method of communication because they can be the opposite of overwhelming emotions. Words are reliable, emotions can’t be trusted. Just as the mind is superior, the body is not.

Amidst the crush of calligraphed quotes, hours-long podcasts and Tweet screenshots, I see this: we privilege a language that carefully contains emotions. We think of communication as a rational being, a superior creature, one in control, one that can permeate everything and eliminate all unpredictability. The more unpredictable our world seems – war, stock market crashes, pandemics, climate changes, recessions, mental health epidemics – the more we seek to control our world through our rational choices in actions and in words. We colonise ourselves daily this way.

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Dear reader, to understand this predicament, let me turn to myself as a case study. I have been here before; you see, I was a writer before I became a dancer. And therein lay my conundrum with emotions.

As a writer, I learned to privilege words. Because they held a promise. The promise of perfection made possible: words are perfect containers of emotions. Big, strong, wide, wiggly, trickster undependable emotions can be contained in wonderful coffee spoons called words. Arrange them on the page, and you can create the possibility of control, of being heard, of perfect communication. When I chose to be a writer, I chose this balm for my sorrows; sorrows that began in childhood and never ended really; sorrows that we masked in snobbish jest by saying, “no one really understands me”. In the written word, I found an ideal, a promise, a utopia; I chose it like my life depended on it.

“You will not speak,” my guru said to me in the early days of Odissi class. “Except with your body.”

But the poetry I’m dancing to is lovely, the tune is haunting, I said. Can’t I sing along silently? I promise I won’t do it onstage.

“Not even lip sync, not even humming,” she was clear. “Speak only with your face and your body.”

Imagine the torment. A writer, mute in the face of beautiful words. Someone with an invisible voice, and a highly visible body. 

What this construed inversion did however, over the years, was free me of the language of words, order, rational deduction, and the peculiar ways we borrow personal labels from history. I realised, gobsmacked, that people who watched me communicate this way understood me better than ever before in my writerly life. It was as if I had peeled back the preambles and small talk, and found a way to give the kernel of what I had to share. The audience didn’t understand what my eccentric hand gestures meant, but they knew what I meant. They didn’t always get the details, but they got the heart of the matter. We have all felt emotions; this strange, eccentric ancient language worked better than any other.

Having truly felt my emotions in dance, I also realised this: none of our important decisions are ever rational. You might think that even the brand of phone you read my words on is a choice determined by rational parameters, but actually you chose it in a moment of great irrationality, governed by emotion so deep, you are disconnected from it in order to stay sane. Under the layer of rational language, we actually communicate on the basis of belief. And belief is always an irrational choice. It’s something innate, like the sleeping giant my Guru told me resides in the body. My rational analytical thought is merely a layer of skin that contains it, a scab that protects the fluids within.

An ancient language can also give a very different understanding of Time. The more I learn about emotions, the more I see this: Emotions are as old as memory. They are the oldest part of you. Your nervous system, which regulates these powerhouses, has evolved over millennia. The amygdala, a pea-sized part of your brain, the seed of strong emotions, is the most primitive part of us. It cannot be controlled, only regulated by the hippocampus, which is the youngest part of the brain.

The thing about language of words, however, is that it is relatively new. The language I’m typing in is only a few thousand years old.

Evolution is slow, it unfolds over millennia. History is rapid, it unspools quickly. Technology is even faster, like lightning; it alters history faster than we can record it. But we cannot out-evolve ourselves. At this intersection of evolution, history and technology, we must find all the more reason to feel our feelings, and ask again and again to peel back the layers of what is visible on the surface: “what has power over me?”

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Everybody in the world is out to touch the oldest part of you; this is what stories, brands, regimes, toxic partners set out to do. Whatever touches your emotions in a primal way, will hold sway over you. It will make you a believer, a fundamentalist, or an agnostic.

So can I really influence the innately irrational by using a medium that is rational? Can I change you at the very deepest core, using my reason, my carefully curated words? I’d rather kid myself not. Traditional Indian art forms have understood this irony.

Here is classical Indian dance, an entire language of communication – that has survived somehow, in some form, over centuries – that prefers to communicate only through emotions. Not oratory, not didactism, not reason. It works with emotional states, because they are the reason any language was ever born: if we did not feel emotions or express them, we would have no need to communicate.

Emotional health --- which the world is discovering as essential in this post-covid world --- has always been of prime importance in traditional Indian worldview. Emotional regulation has even been a political tool, a very important component of good governance --- which is why every temple had a nat mandap, why kings and royalty built theatres and patronised generations of artists. It has also been at the centre of the most day-to-day cellular level of functioning, which is why even Ayurveda records that if you are experiencing an extreme of any emotion – be it grief or anger – you will not be able to digest your food in an optimal manner. When our emotions are in balance, or regulated, we are healthy. We are good citizens. We don’t get in our own way; ironically, this is also how it becomes easier to receive rational messages. Emotions keep reason healthy.    

This is why my answer to the oft-repeated question from rational people - “why don’t you address social causes in classical dance choreographies?” – is always a smile and nothing else. I don’t want to influence the rational mind or your opinions (which I have come to believe, as Bill Bullard said, is “the lowest form of intelligence”). My burning issue lies elsewhere (see above). Through story, poetry, music, gesture, body, I’d rather first wake the sleeping giants and let them speak their ancient language.

In Indian classical dance, which is a tradition I am lucky to belong to, we understand that emotions or bhaav is the brickwork of storytelling. Emotions are a means of integration: of food and the body, man and nature, individual and society, self and the universe. This is how we bring colour, word, mood, rhythm, seasons, festivals, rituals and food to a fluid intersection. This is how we learn to be more than dualities of this or that.

To stay in this rainbow zone, use your body. Enjoy it without words. Don’t be afraid of it. Trust the primal instincts. Become a child again, unafraid and curious, ignorant of language. Let the big waves of feelings go through you. Dance with abandon and let the thinking mind rest.