Artist, Activist, RATNA ROY
Priyanka Joshi

The eyes of Olympia, Wash.-based artist and political activist Ratna Roy dance around the room as she talks about her pet topic, “Racial and Sexual Inequality,” and how she is using Odissi dance as a weapon to fight it. You notice her large, expressive eyes, full of tenderness and just a little bit of pain. Pain she suffered first-hand as the only dark-complexioned child in an Anglo-Indian school near Ranchi, Bihar.

Pain she endured trapped in a loveless marriage for 20 years. Pain she saw unarticulated in the African American community in the ‘60s. Pain that she channelized into a forceful expression of her identity.

Dr. Ratna Roy, a Fulbright scholar, has been teaching dance at Evergreen State College since 1988. She is intense yet soft-spoken, and formidably talented. She is also very controversial and articulates emotions that few dare to approach.
The only child of affluent physician parents in Bihar, Roy has had a special connection with the African American community of the Pacific Northwest. She is probably the only Indian to have worked for the frighteningly vitriolic Black Panthers group in the 1960s. Roy was their secret conduit for sending messages to others in the group, and often had her phones tapped by the police. She now laughs at how she would speak for hours in her native Bangla to give the police something to investigate.

But then again, Roy is nothing if not spunky. She believes in taking a stand and beating her detractors at their own game. She recalls how she got back at her smug Anglo-Indian classmates in Ranchi who were forever trying to make her feel small because she wasn’t fair enough. They always said that England was their ‘real’ home and how they were one day going to go there forever.

So, one day, having had enough, Roy told her father she wanted to go to England before them. He said he would send her if she were grown up enough to get her passport all by herself. Roy agreed and was put on a train to Calcutta with a servant. She came back in a few hours with a passport and all the paperwork needed to get to England. She was only 11 years old. Later that year, she did visit England for three weeks; no one bothered her at school after that.

Roy has carried that spirit with her to Seattle where she has persuasively tackled the hypocrisy and materialism sometimes so evident in Indian American society. She talks about the “whiteness, maleness and morality of wealth” and finds many of the affluent Indians living in the “rich ghettos” in America, where socially they remain very much on the fringes of “white society” and, hence, egotistically feel compelled to show off their wealth at any given time.

Roy painfully recounts an incident where she choreographed a piece for the local 5th Ave theater and was refused entry by the gatekeeper on the eve of the performance. Only when her Caucasian husband David intervened was she allowed to enter. She questions how many Indian Americans have experienced something like this and wonders how long it will be before they will take a stand so that “white” America will learn to respect them as equals.

A disciple of the late Pandit Pankaj Charan Das, Roy has been teaching the mahari style of Odissi dance to her students, most of whom are African American and Caucasian. Her dance dramas on the lives of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and Malcolm X have all been very well received. Her “Rosa Parks and the Bus Boycott” has toured schools all over Puget Sound. And her spectacular dance drama on the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., based on his “I have a dream” speech, was performed at the Washington governor’s residence in 2004.

It was short notice, she recalls, but she taught her students how to emote in Odissi and then gave them artistic freedom to devise their own dance steps. The protagonist has just one line in the entire drama, “I have a dream,” which he repeats like a broken record to highlight a racially unequal society. Roy says Malcolm X was assassinated just as he and King were coming close to uniting their energies, by people who didn’t want these two giants of the civil rights movement to work together.

Roy, now 60, has also seen the tumultuous feminist movement come into its own in America. She calls herself a “womanist,” not a feminist, because she felt that feminism was overwhelmingly white and came with “white privileges.” She sees herself as a woman of color in America. She calls herself a “hybrid,” a product of Indian values and American no-nonsense experimentation.

Roy has taken Odissi to the farthest corners of the globe, from Sudan to the Philippines, using it as a rehabilitating therapy for rape victims, the “comfort women” of the Japanese Imperial Army, victims of sexual tourism in the Philippines, and people with other emotional problems and disabilities. She asks you to imagine how rape might affect the security and self-esteem of a woman, and then she tells you how Odissi has brought them in touch with their own physicality and once again made them comfortable in their own skins.

Roy herself knows how challenging it is to start from scratch in a new country. Impetuous and fiercely independent, she married an Indian who she thought would be the love of her life at 18 years. Then began a cycle of emotional abuse, she says, where she was forbidden to dance or act or to even speak English. When she finally divorced after 20 years of marriage, in the 1980s, she was promptly ostracized by the Indian community.

Roy remembers that her self-esteem was at its lowest at that time, when she met David Capers, who changed the direction of her life. Capers is a towering man, gentle, genial and rather protective of his diminutive wife. A professional video filmmaker, he often stays up all night long just to get the perfect edit for one of Roy’s many dance dramas. Roy says it’s a little surprising that she never felt so close to her Indian husband but feels so empowered by David’s love although he has a background so different from hers.

Roy is also popular on the Evergreen State College campus. She has loved and been loved right back by the local African American community. She talks, in her tinkling voice, about their initial hesitation at opening up to her but how warm and giving they turned out to be after they realized her genuine regard for them. She often takes her students in for weeks at a time. It is very common for a student to come over and say, “Ratna, I am feeling very lonely, can I come to your place?” Unfailingly, they are treated to an evening of warm pampering.

Well-known in the local art circuit, Roy has often been suggested to make a move to the more “connected” East Coast, and hence be on the cutting edge of dance and drama. But she says she has been pleasantly surprised by the powerhouse support she has got from Evergreen State College. She has been internationally acknowledged as the inheritor of Guru Pankaj Charan Das’ tradition and says dance must not be only for the elites and sophisticates. It should flow smoothly and not be flawed by awkward movements.

Roy likes to recount an incident where once she was having difficulty in getting the famous Kelucharan Mohapatra to accept her as a student. She happened to divulge this to her friend, the legendary Protima Bedi, who told her how Kelu babu had forbidden her to invite any other guru from entering the Nrityagram in Bangalore, and encouraged her to retain the purity and depth of the mahari style.

Roy, in 2000, went back to teach at Nrityagram and was featured on Doordarshan’s “Good Morning India.” She performed at the Konark Festival in 2001 after being invited by Sonal Mansingh, has performed at the World Conference of Women in China, and presented alternative Odissi traditions at Columbia University in New York.

Ever the activist, Roy is also passionate about the environment and ecology and has choreographed dances based on the Chipko Movement.

Her “Seeds of Liberation” is based on noted environmentalist Vandana Shiva’s work on biopiracy. She has also touched on nuclear physics in “Dance of Atoms” and raised political eyebrows in “Female Dancer in India: Goddess or Prostitute?”

Roy wants to break what she calls the traditional “ballet hang-up” in society. She says the dance should come to the dancer and not vice versa, and the choreography should preserve the essence of movement. She is encouraging people to support other, more ancient and holistic dance traditions from around the world, and would like to see this reflected in higher donations to Evergreen State College for Odissi.

She often feels disappointed at people’s lack of honest introspection or contemplation on correcting our social ills, but stays optimistic in her efforts. After all, it is a bit difficult to ignore the gigantic mirror Roy is holding up to society.