Introduction

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-12-18

Abstract This introductory chapter charts the lineages and issues central to ideations of Indian dance in a transnational context. It maps the abundant literature and discourses on Indian movement forms and locates the emergence of critical Indian dance studies as an academic enterprise. Through an overview of historical developments and multiple performance genres, the chapter notes how dance has been an important part of the social fabric for plural constituencies in the Indian subcontinent, and its diasporas worldwide. Reflections on this volume’s contributions cover the concerns, concepts, and challenges that are at the forefront of current scholarship. The chapter also sets out a framework for considering Indian dance aesthetics in relation to social and political spheres.

The award-wapsi controversy in India and the politics of dance

2024-05-31

In 2015, a coalition of artists in India launched a protest against the ruling establishment, returning their awards to the government in response to a series of attacks on minorities and dissident thinkers that had remained unacknowledged or insufficiently condemned by the state. Known as “Award Wapsi” (award return’ in Hindi), this was notably the first artist action of its kind in independent India, with artmakers from diverse domains participating in it. However, dancers were notably missing from the scene of this historic non-violent action. Those artists most invested in the idea of movement abandoned the protest movement. Moreover, this controversy elicited a fierce backlash, with a group of pro-government artists coordinating a counter-protest against their rebelling peers, with dancers represented among the ranks of those supporting the state. This paper considers the absence of dancers from oppositional organizing, and the presence of dancers in movements allied with the ruling regime, to think about the changing perceptions of political activism and the place of the artist in contemporary Indian society.

The epistemic politics of Indian classical dance

Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 4 citations

• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Philosophy

Classical dance is an important heritage practice that is often mobilized to articulate the cultural identity of the Indian state and diasporic communities. In this chapter, Banerji examines how the category of “classical dance” was invented, predicated on the romantic link with Indian antiquity. From a performance studies angle, she explores what the discursive idea of “classical dance” does, how it is deployed and the politics of its production. She defines, historicizes and critiques the concept of Indian dance classicism, situating its construction and institutionalization as a legacy of the modern colonial apparatus, later enshrined by postcolonial Indian authorities as an official artistic genre alongside the “tribal,” the “folk” and the “contemporary” designations in national cultural policy. Today, the government recognizes eight dance forms as classical: Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Manipuri, Odissi, Kathakali, Mohiniyattam, Kuchipudi and Sattriya. Rather than attending to any single species of dance, however, Banerji looks at the production of a whole system of knowledge production tied to classicism in the dance arena, promulgated by regimes of state power.

Dimensions and Dynamics of Sharing Dance in India

transcript Verlag eBooks · 2022-09-20

Dimensions and Dynamics of Sharing Dance in India

transcript Verlag eBooks · 2022-09-17

The award-wapsi controversy in India and the politics of dance

South Asian History and Culture · 2022 · 5 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Sociology

In 2015, a coalition of artists in India launched a protest against the ruling establishment, returning their awards to the government in response to a series of attacks on minorities and dissident thinkers that had remained unacknowledged or insufficiently condemned by the state. Known as “Award Wapsi” (award return’ in Hindi), this was notably the first artist action of its kind in independent India, with artmakers from diverse domains participating in it. However, dancers were notably missing from the scene of this historic non-violent action. Those artists most invested in the idea of movement abandoned the protest movement. Moreover, this controversy elicited a fierce backlash, with a group of pro-government artists coordinating a counter-protest against their rebelling peers, with dancers represented among the ranks of those supporting the state. This paper considers the absence of dancers from oppositional organizing, and the presence of dancers in movements allied with the ruling regime, to think about the changing perceptions of political activism and the place of the artist in contemporary Indian society.

The Laws of Movement: The <i>Natyashastra</i> as Archive for Indian Classical Dance

Contemporary Theatre Review · 2021 · 13 citations

• Political Science
• Art
• Visual arts

It is well known that the Natyashastra is considered a master archive for Indian performance, and that its principles and tenets organize much of the movement patterns and expressive codes of the c...

Chandraleka (1928–2006)

2018-09-10

Chandralekha Prabhudas Patel, known by the mononym Chandralekha, was a pioneering choreographer, dancer, writer, graphic designer, and social activist based in Chennai, India. Best known as an innovator of dance, she originated an open-ended, layered movement style that has been variously labeled ‘‘modern,’’ ‘‘postmodern,’’ ‘‘avant-garde,’’ ‘‘Western-influenced,’’ and ‘‘experimental,’’ although she resolutely rejected all of these categorizations. Initially trained in the classical dance Bharatanatyam, Chandralekha rebelled against the strictures of Indian concert performance by fusing the traditional lexicon with the structures and vocabulary of yoga, quotidian gestures, and Kalarippayattu—a South Indian martial art—to create a novel dance language devoted to the exploration of body politics in a contemporary frame. In the arc of her artistic career, which spanned half a century from the 1950s to 2006, the period between 1985 and 1995 is often cited as the time when she crystallized her choreographic technique and vision. Regarded as an iconoclast, Chandralekha is also considered a controversial figure in the field of Indian performance for her radical approach to art and politics, domains that she saw as indivisible from each other. She pursued her creative commitments up to the time of her death from cervical cancer in 2006. A significant force in the history of Indian dance, Chandralekha continues to serve as an influential figure for many artists working at the intersection of a number of indigenous and transnational South Asian forms.

Dance and the Distributed Body

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017-12-06 · 1 citations

This chapter considers the links between contemporary Odissi dance and one of its antecedents, mahari naach, the dance of female ritual specialists associated with the Jagannath temple in Puri, a center of pilgrimage in Odisha, India. The author argues that mahari naach produced a notion of the “distributed body” by engaging in an intersubjective relationship with the animated figure of the deity and the personified architectural space that served as the venue for dance practice. Combining ethnographic, historical, and philosophical sources, this interdisciplinary analysis critically examines the ideations of embodiment in Odisha’s religious culture to understand how a distinct notion of corporeality emerges in ritual activity—and considers the failure of the modern concert form to fully reenact it, despite its desire to appropriate past performance.

Postcolonial Pedagogies: Recasting the Guru–Shishya Parampara

Theatre topics · 2017-01-01 · 5 citations

Postcolonial Pedagogies:Recasting the Guru–Shishya Parampara Anurima Banerji (bio), Anusha Kedhar (bio), Royona Mitra (bio), Janet O'Shea (bio), and Shanti Pillai (bio) The presentations below took place at a roundtable organized for the Congress on Research in Dance and Society of Dance History Scholars Joint Conference on November 5, 2016. Five faculty from four institutions in the United States and United Kingdom—Brunel University London, Colorado College, California State University at Long Beach, and UCLA—discussed the pedagogical strategies used to teach South Asian performance concepts and techniques in the classroom, in relation to the conference's structuring theme, "Beyond Authenticity and Appropriation." The principal question guiding the conversation was: How do we engage the common inheritance of the guru–shishya parampara, or the teacher–disciple mentorship model?—the context for collective training in various South Asian movement forms. Given the specific histories and premises of the guru–shishya parampara, how are elements of this educational system adapted, preserved, or repurposed in the Western classroom? This note from the field covers the participants' training experiences, reflects on the values and limits of guru–shishya instruction, and presents approaches to creating new teaching methods. In the process the participants share strategies for developing performance pedagogies in a transnational frame.1 Anurima Banerji Ideas of authenticity and appropriation often structure the discourses and debates around representation in South Asian performance forms, especially the established styles (in classical, folk, and contemporary idioms) that bear the symbolic value of metonymically standing in for a given cultural constituency, its imagined attachments, its dominant values, and its heritage. While questions of authenticity/appropriation are generally foregrounded in discussions about the production and reception of performance content and form, in this forum we instead turn our attention to the negotiation of these terms in spaces of performance training. We focus on the pedagogical paradigm of "guru–shishya parampara," or "teacher–disciple tradition"—a distinctively Asian model of knowledge transmission and the primary method through which the values and techniques of the styles that we collectively cite are imparted (fig. 1). The eminent dance scholar Kapila Vatsyayan has noted that the guru–shishya parampara was once the basic instructional model for a range of artistic practices, but that today it retains special force and resilience only in the world of classical performance (Vatsyayan et al.). I will add that despite the diversity and particularity of the traditions that we talk about, this training method appears to be remarkably stable across classical dance, theatre, and music genres. Here, I also want to acknowledge the work of Ananya Chatterjea, Aastha Gandhi, and Stacey Prickett, who have each closely examined the politics of the guru–shishya encounter. Traditionally, the preceptor in this arrangement exerted extraordinary power over the student by taking on the responsibility of serving as the disciple's aesthetic and moral mentor. While in ancient India the guru–shishya relationship was fostered in an immersive environment—often, but not always, in a residental system known as the gurukul, or teacher's abode—where the student served the teacher and in return received specialized knowledge in the arts, the situation has changed [End Page 221] in the contemporary world, where the relationship is more professionalized and transactional, with students paying fees to their gurus for access to dance training, performance platforms, and the social respect conferred when one belongs to a noted artistic lineage or community. Yet, while the economic terms of the relationship have shifted, certain values of the prior system residually remain: namely, the assumptions that the student must ideally perform unquestioning obedience while the guru exercises total authority. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. The Hindu deity Shiva with two ascetic disciples in his abode, Mount Kailash. Shiva is mentioned as the first dance guru in the Natyashastra, an ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance. Stone sculpture from Nepal, Licchavi dynasty, circa ninth or tenth century ce. (Source: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.) Thus as disciples of performance we may need to contend with the elements of the paradigm that remain problematic in these training circumstances, given that the guru–shishya parampara functions as an implicit social contract...