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Ballroom & Indian Culture

Dancing Girl, Mohenjo-Daro The Indus Valley Civilization [2500 BC - 1500 BC]

The dances included in the dance sport, are a western culture, or at least the belief is as such.

This is really puzzling. Since India is the only country where the music and dance first got standardised. And the same pattern is followed even as on today with the bare minimal modifications. We call it the classical art and we are very proud of it. Since these arts had reached its peak quite some time back, so some form of today's ballroom and Latin dances were definitely prevalent during those times.

The character of the music given by the percussion instruments, for the ten major dances included in the Dance-Sport, have almost an equivalent in terms of the "TAAL" in the Indian music. Again these "taals" were formulated more than a thousand years back. And since the dance and music go hand in hand, there should have definitely existed ballroom dances to the respective "taals".

This explains the reasons for having a lot of old sculptures and paintings that still survive as on today, depicting the Dance-Sport kind of dances. The characters in these surviving arts are the Gods, Goddesses and the heavenly figures, highlighting the sacredness and purity of these dances.

These dances of the dance-sport were developed form the folk dance. In India we have many folk dances, mainly tribal in nature that remained relatively unchanged with the passage of time, that have dance wherein men and women dance holding each other by the hands, or by the waist, or by the shoulders. An example is the "Warli" tribe in the north-west part of the state of Maharashtra in India.

In certain areas wherein the touch part is lacking in a dance, some festival has compensated it. For example the festival of colours "Holi" where the seemingly type of a hug is involved with many people irrespective of the either sex.

So the Ballroom and Latin American dances are also the part of Indian culture.