The Laws of Movement: The Natyashastra as Archive for Indian Classical Dance

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Notes

1. Bharatmuni, Natyashastra, transl. Adya Rangacharya (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996). Rangacharya states that the Natyashastra ‘remains the origin of our dramatic tradition’ (xxi). Natya is denoted in the text as the synthesis of multiple mediums, like music, acting, movement, and in a staged concert; this confluence is often described as ‘total theatre’ or cited as ‘performance’ in English. It should be noted that none of the disciplines incorporated in natya was understood to exist autonomously, since in practice, they folded into each other; however, they are sometimes analytically separated as specific points of discussion in the Natyashastra. See also Bharatmuni, Natyashastra, Ascribed to Bharata-Muni (A Treatise on Ancient India Dramaturgy and Histrionics), vols. I–IV, transl. Manmohan Ghosh (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, [1967] 2007); Kapila Vatsyayan, ‘The Theory and Technique of Classical Indian Dancing’, Artibus Asiae 29, nos. 2/3 (1967): 229–238, and Bharata: The Natyasastra (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996); and G..H. Tarlekar, The Natyasastra, with Special Reference to the Sanskrit Drama in Performance, 2nd rev. ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991). Most scholars agree the original Sanskrit treatise was likely composed sometime between the 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE, although its exact date is still unknown. Bharat Gupt speculates it may have emerged even earlier, in the 5th century BCE, in ‘The Date of the Natyashastra’, in Natyasastra – Revisited, ed. Bharat Gupt (New Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 2016), 25–26.

2. The four ancient Vedas are regarded as the foundational sacred texts in mainstream Hinduism. Brahmin patriarchal authorities served as custodians of this esoteric Sanskrit opus, according to orthodox caste hierarchies. The Natyashastra drew elements from the quartet of texts and was documented in the simpler Prakrit language, making it the ‘fifth Veda’ available to the masses – apparently superseding caste, class, gender, and other social restrictions of the time determining access to elite knowledge. Vatsyayan, Bharata, 21.

3. Radha Vallabh Tripathi, Lectures on the Natyasastra (Pune: Center of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, University of Poona, 1991); Radhavallabh Tripathi, ed., Natyasastra in the Modern World (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2014); Vatsyayan, Bharata; Mandakranta Bose, Speaking of Dance: The Indian Critique (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2001); Amrit Srinivasan, ed., Knowledge Tradition Text: Approaches to Bharata’s Natyasastra (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 2007); and Sreenath Nair, ed., The Natyasastra and the Body in Performance: Essays on Indian Theories of Dance and Drama (Jefferson: Macfarland and Co., 2015).

4. The article is her succinct and erudite summary of movement principles outlined in major aesthetic texts, including the Natyashastra (henceforth NS), the Sangitaratnakara, and Abhinaya Darpanam: ‘The nrtta technique of the Indian dance as discussed in the treatises has to be understood as the laws and methodology of human movement’. Vatsyayan, Theory and Technique, 232. The NS divides stylized movement into two types: nrtta, or formalist explorations of ‘pure dance’, and abhinaya, or affective enactments of poetry or narrative. Vatsyayan, a towering figure in the world of arts and letters, left this world on September 16, 2020. See Anuj Kumar, ‘Kapila Vatsyayan, grand matriarch of cultural research, passes away’, The Hindu, September 16, 2020, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kapila-vatsyayan-passes-away/article32617951.ece (accessed January 25, 2020).

5. Vatsyayan, Kapila, ‘The Theory and Technique of Classical Indian Dancing’, Artibus Asiae 29, nos. 2/3 (1967): 229–38 (230).

6. Anita Ratnam Ranjaraj, Natya Brahman – Theatric Universe: A Concept of Ancient Indian Theatre. Madras: Society for Archaeological, Historical and Epigraphical Research, 1979), ii; Urmimala Sarkar Munsi and Bishnupriya Dutt, Engendering Performance: Indian Women Performers in Search of an Identity (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2010), 166. See also M. Krzysztof Byrski, Concept of Ancient Indian Theater (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1974); Pramod Kale, The Theatric Universe: A Study of the Natyasastra (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974); Sudhakar Pandey and V.N. Jha, eds., Glimpses of Ancient Indian Poetics from Bharata to Jagannatha, 1st ed. (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1993); Elisa Ganser, ‘Thinking Dance Literature from Bharata to Bharatanatyam’, Rivista degli studi oriental, Nuova Serie, 84, Fasc. 1/4 (2011): 145–161; Bharat Gupt, Dramatic Concepts Greek & Indian: A Study of the Poetics of the Natyasastra (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 1994); and Gupt, ed., Natyashastra Revisited.

7. While the movement patterns listed in the text are framed in generalist terms, wholly applicable to human bodies at large, the geographical and social world conjured in the NS is limited to the ancient contours of the subcontinent – creating a complex reading of the material in the text as both universalist and provincialized.

8. Following the arguments of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979); and Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), the law in this analysis functions as a broad spectrum concept, covering the social and customary to the governmental and aesthetic realms.

9. Gaston Roberge, ‘Natyasastra – A Precious Legacy’, in Natyasastra – Revisited, ed. Bharat Gupt, 215–24.

10. Anupa Pande is an exception, and offers a sociological description of the world in which the text is situated, in Historical and Cultural Study of the Natyasastra (Jodhpur: Kusumanjali Prakashan,1992) and The Natyashastra Tradition and Ancient Indian Society (Jodhpur: Kusumanjali Prakashan, 1993). See especially Ch. 5, ‘Aspects of Social Life: Institutions, Structure, and Value’ in the former, and Ch. 10, ‘Some Socially Depressed Classes – The Candalas’, in the latter. Kapila Vatsyayan does briefly address the question of social stratification in Bharata, 21–24. Urmimala Sarkar Munsi and Brahma Prakash, whose work I discuss later, provide the deepest analyses of inequities in the text. Sarkar Munsi and Dutt, Engendering Performance; and Brahma Prakash, Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the ‘Folk Performance’ in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).

11. See on this Tripathi, Lectures; Srinivasan, Knowledge Tradition Text; and Gupt, ed., Natyashastra – Revisited.

12. Kapila Vastsyayan and D.P. Chattopadhyay, eds., Aesthetic Theories and Forms in Indian Tradition (New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2008), 77.

13. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–8; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970); James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001).

14. Christine Lynn Garlough, ‘On the Political Uses of Folklore: Performance and Grassroots Feminist Activism in India’, Journal of American Folklore 121, no. 480 (Spring, 2008): 170.

15. Another way the NS articulates the theory-practice relationship is through a discussion of the concepts of margi (general axioms) and desi (empirical, regional variations). See Bharatmuni/Rangacharya, Natyashastra and Bharatmuni/Ghosh, Natyashastra.

16. Artists have long negotiated the principles embedded in the text in complex ways. Some validate it as the originary source for classical dance and attempt to faithfully mimic its contents; see, for instance, Padma Subrahmanyam’s work in the area of Bharata Nritya, modelled on the Natyashastra, in Bharatiya Natyashastra, vols. 1 and 2 (12 episodes), DVD, 2010 at Doordarshan archives, New Delhi, India, https://archive.org/details/dli.pb.natyashastra.1 (accessed January 25, 2020). Some see the NS is an intriguing source of movement information and play with select ideas while repudiating others they find objectionable – like the Odissi dancer Bijayini Satpathy, who has fruitfully expanded the repertoire of the form by building on nritta elements from the text. See Banerji, ‘Nrityagram’, 2017.  See also Sandra Chatterjee and Cynthia Ling Lee, ‘Remixing Natya: Revanta Sarabhai’s LDR and Post Natyam Collective’s Super Ruwaxi: Origins,’ in Dance Matters Too: Markets,Memories, Identities, eds. Pallabi Chakravorty and Nilanjana Gupta (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2018), 202-224. Some have explicitly discarded it as a source after initially training according to its tenets, like the late Chandralekha, who was a classical exponent of Bharatnatyam before delving into contemporary choreography (see Ananya Chatterjea, Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Unlike Vatsyayan and related thinkers, Chandralekha saw the historical source of Indian dance residing in the movement and martial arts traditions of village-based communities. Chandralekha, ‘The Militant Origins of Indian Dance’, Social Scientist 9, no. 2/3 (September-October, 1980): 80–5. See also the late choreographer Ranjabati Sircar’s critique of classical dance: ‘Contemporary Indian Dance’, in Rasa: The Indian Performing Arts in the Last Twenty-Five Years, Vol. I – Music and Dance, eds. Bimal Mukherjee and Sunil Kothari (Calcutta: Anamika Kala Sangam, 1995), 255–60.

17. For instance, see Tarlekar, The Natyasastra; Matthew Harp Allen, ‘Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance’, TDR 41, no. 3 (1997): 63–100; Kapila Vatsyayan, Indian Classical Dance, 3rd ed. (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1997); Avanthi Meduri, ed., Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–1986): A Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2005); and Nair, ed., The Natyasastra and the Body.

18. Methodologically, I am indebted to the insights of Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Romila Thapar, and Susan Foster, who have studied how aesthetic practices like writing and dance are part of a whole social, cultural, and historical process, and circulate as bearers of ideology – far from the fantasy that they might exist in some sequestered sphere of neutrality where art is governed entirely by formalist concerns, devoid of political consideration. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); and The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Romila Thapar, ‘Epic and History: Tradition, Dissent and Politics in India’, Past and Present, no. 125 (November, 1989): 3–26; Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2000); and Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Susan Foster, Choreographing Empathy (New York: Routledge, 2011). See also Elizabeth Anker and Bernadette Meyler, eds., New Directions in Law and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) for an interdisciplinary approach to studying the legal and artistic domains of writing.

19. Various scholars chanced upon parts of the NS manuscript and published them – Fitzedward Hall in 1861–65; Heymann in 1874; Paul Regnaud in 1884. and J. Grosset in 1898. Pandit Sivadatta and Kashinaath Pandurang Parab issued the complete Sanskrit text in 1894. Manavalli Ramakrishna Kavi made available a critical edition from Gaekwad in 1926. A 1929 publication edited by Batuknath Sharma and Baladev Upadhyaya provided the basis for the 1956 English translation prepared by Manmohan Ghosh. For details of the manuscript history, see Bharatmuni/Rangacharya, Natyashastra; Bharatmuni/Ghosh, Natyashastra; and K.D. Tripathi, ‘Natyashastra – Two Divergent Views of the Text’, in Natyasastra – Revisited, ed. Bharat Gupt, 75–86.

20. Vatsyayan, Bharata.

21. Sheldon Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 7.

22. Pollock, A Rasa Reader, xi.

23. Tripathi, Lectures, 11.

24. The NS comprises 36 chapters in total, and references to movement permeate much of the text, as evinced by the following list. Chapter I is about the origins of drama. Chapters 4, 5, 8, and 9–13 cover materials related to body stances and gestures. Chapters 6 and 7 concern rasa-bhava. Chapter 14 deals with local performance types. Chapters 22 is about dramatic styles. Chapter 23 is about makeup and costumes. Chapter 27 outlines factors for a successful performance. Chapters 24–26, 34, and 35 describe character types, roles, and representational conventions. Prem Lata Sharma notes that dance holds ‘prime importance’ as one of the ‘integral constituents’ of performance in the NS. See his essay ‘Is Music and Dance an Integral Part of Natya?’ in Knowledge Tradition Text, ed. Amrit Srinivasan, 112–113. For details on the NS, see Bharatmuni/Rangacharya, Natyashastra and Bharatmuni/Ghosh, Natyashastra.

25. Abhinavagupta, Abhinavabharti, trans. Anupa Pande (Allahabad: Raka Prakashan, 1997); Nandikesvara, Abhinayadarpanam, 3rd ed., trans. Manmohan Ghosh (Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya, 1975); and Sarangadeva, Sangitratnakara of Sarangadeva, vols. I and II, trans. R. K. Shringy and Premlata Sharma (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2018).

26. Given its connections to Vedic sources, the Natyashastra is often cited by Indian classical dance communities as evidence that performance has a primarily religious orientation, although this is a point of deep debate. David Mason provides an aligning analysis in The Performative Ground of Religion and Theater (New York: Routledge, 2019) that underscores the sacred status of the Natyashastra, arguing religion and theatre are often imbricated, and uses the text as an exemplary purveyor of this relationship. Pramod Kale, on the other hand, discusses the divine and worldly elements that converge to produce the ‘theatric universe’ of the Natyashastra in his eponymous book.

27. See Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002) on the politics of interpreting the Indian past according to Hindutva perspectives.

28. The anti-nautch campaigns began in the 1880s and extended into the 1930s, culminating in a total ban on the dedication of dancers to temples in 1947. See Amrit Srinivasan, ‘Reform or Conformity? Temple “Prostitution” and the Community in the Madras Presidency’, in Structures of Patriarchy, ed. Bina Agarwal (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1988), 175–98; Pallabi Chakravorty, ‘From Interculturalism to Historicism: Reflections on Classical Indian Dance’, Dance Research Journal 32, no. 2 (Winter, 2000/01): 100–11; and Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

29. Kunal Parker, ‘”A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes”: Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls, 1800–1914’, Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 3 (1998): 559–633; Kay Jordan, From Sacred Servant to Profane Prostitute: A Study of the Changing Legal Status of the Devadasis, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2003); Soneji, Unfinished Gestures; and Anurima Banerji, Dancing Odissi : Paratopic Performances of Gender and State (Kolkata and Chicago: Seagull Books/University of ChicagoPress, 2019).

30. Narayanan Menon, Akilesh Mital, and Kapila Vatsyayan, Guru-Shishya Parampara: The Master-Disciple Tradition in Classical Indian Dance and Music (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1982).

31. Many classical dance forms find their roots in multiple textual, visual, musical, sculptural sources, alongside ritual and stage practices. For instance, Odissi locates its aesthetic formation in temple sculptures, ritual performances, local visual art traditions, literary sources like the Geeta Govinda, and theatre. Natyashastra principles were actively integrated into its vocabulary in the 1950s to formalize its study and practice as a classical concert dance. Kuchipudi’s key references are practices of Yakshagana and traditions of the hereditary courtesan communities. Kathak is an amalgam of court, salon, and devotional dances. Each style is influenced by the Natyashastra in conjunction with the imprints of other major rudiments.

32. Meduri, ed., Rukmini Devi Arundale; Sunil Kothari, ‘A Dance Historian’s Note on How the Natyashastra was Mastered’, Asian Age, May 9, 2019, https://www.asianage.com/india/all-india/090519/a-dance-historians-notes-on-how-the-natyashastra-was-mastered.html (accessed January 25, 2020).

33. Uttara Asha Coorlawala, ‘The Birth of Bharatanatyam and the Sanskritized Body’, in Meduri, ed., Rukmini Devi Arundale, 173–194.

34. See on this Janet O’Shea, At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2007); Pallabi Chakravorty, Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2008); Davesh Soneji, Bharatanatyam: A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Unfinished Gestures; Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, ‘A Century of Negotiations: The Changing Sphere of the Woman Dancer in India’, in Beyond the Private World: Indian Women in the Public Sphere, ed. Subrata Bagchi (Delhi: Primus Books, 2014), 293–312; and Anurima Banerji, Dancing Odissi.

35. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14; D.N. Patnaik, Odissi Dance, 3rd ed. (Bhubaneswar: Orissa Sangeet Natak Akademi, 2006); and K.K. Gopalakrishnan, Kathakali Dance-Theatre: A Visual Narrative of Indian Sacred Mime (Niyogi Books, 2016).

36. Classical dance is a category officially recognized by the Indian state, along with ‘folk’, ‘tribal’, and ‘contemporary’ genres. Currently eight dance forms are endorsed as classical – Bharatnatyam, Kathak, Manipuri, Kathakali, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Mohiniattam, and Sattriya.

37. Richard Schechner, ‘Rasaesthetics’, TDR 45, no. 3 (Fall, 2001, T171): 27–49; and Pollock, A Rasa Reader.

38. There may be a valid reasoning for this, in that the Natyashastra first offered a sustained theory of affect in the space of performance, allowing for later expansions and contemplations of rasa as a general theory of aesthetic experience (see on this Pollock, A Rasa Reader). Still, the elision of the Abhinavabharati in the training process, given its fine commentaries and elaborations of the Natyashastra, its introduction of a devotional dimension into aesthetics through the configuration of the new rasa, and its broad and lasting influence on subcontinental aesthetic philosophy and practice, presents a major issue.

39. Ananya Chatterjea, ‘Contestations’, in Rethinking Dance History, ed. Alexandra Carter London: Routledge, 2004), 143–56.

40. Patnaik, Odissi Dance.

41. This roughly corresponded to the Natyashastra pattern of suturing karanas (literally ‘doing’; a full-body movement) into matrikas and angaharas (phrases), coupled with recakas (movement of a body part, but separate from karana). Bharatmuni/Ghosh, Natyashastra, vol. 1, Ch. IV, nos. 13–264.

42. Patnaik, Odissi Dance; Vatsyayan, ‘Theory and Technique’; Kalicharan Patnaik, ‘Odissi Dance’, Sangeet Natak, Papers from the First Dance Seminar 47, nos. 1–4 ([1958] 2013): 202–14.

43. Patnaik, Odissi Dance; Vatsyayan, ‘Theory and Technique’; and Vatsyayan, Indian Classical Dance.

44. Foucault, Discipline and Punish

45. While the descriptions here are limited to my experience, they intersect with the perspectives of many other Indian classical dance students, based on information I gleaned from my ethnographic research and discourse analysis methods when studying the topic of classical dance training. I should stress that there are many schools of Odissi with their own pedagogical models. I rely on my fieldwork in the dance community to suggest that these are dominant tendencies, and do not cover the wide variation in teaching approaches that exist across different institutions. Anurima Banerji, ‘Nrityagram: Tradition and the Aesthetics of Transgression’, in How to Do Politics with Art, eds. Violane Roussel and Anurima Banerji (New York: Routledge 2017), 88–114, and Dancing Odissi. Also see the insightful discussions by Ananya Chatterjea, ‘Training in Indian Classical Dance: A Case Study’, Asian Theatre Journal 13, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 68–91; and Nandini Sikand, ‘Beyond Tradition: The Practice of Sadhana in Odissi Dance’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 4, no. 2 (2012): 233–47.

46. The phrase ‘will to archive’ is from André Lepecki’s ‘The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances’, Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (Winter, 2010): 28–48. On the larger point, see Bose, Speaking of Dance; Tarlekar, The Natyasastra; Ganser, ‘Thinking Dance Literature’; Nair, ed., The Natyasastra and the Body; Gupt, Dramatic Concepts; and Gupt, ed., Natyasastra – Revisited.

47. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

48. Susan Foster, Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

49. Jacqueline Shea Murphy, ‘Mobilizing (in) the Archive: Santee Smith’s Kaha:wi’, in Worlding Dance, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 32–52; and Lepecki, ‘Body as Archive’.

50. Sally Ann Ness, ‘The Inscription of Gesture: Inward Migrations in Dance’, in Migrations of Gesture, eds. Sally Ann Ness and Carrie Noland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1–30 .

51. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011).

52. Menon et. al., Guru Shishya Parampara; Vatsyayan, Bharata; and Bose, Speaking of Dance.

53. Vatsyayan, Bharata, 80, 89; Bharatmuni/Ghosh, Natyashastra, vol. 1, Ch. XXI, nos. 120–124, Ch. XXVI, nos. 124–125.

54. Vatsyayan, Bharata, 74–80. Vatsyayana reveals that in describing the dramatic structure, the NS pointedly draws on analogies with human anatomical structures, identifying different aspects of the plot and themes through bodily metaphors, like purusa (human figuration), mukha (mouth), garbha (womb), sandhi (joints) and upanga (limbs). The NS as text also develops along the lines of describing individuated movement units that build on each other and integrate into a complete and coherent ‘body’ of performance knowledge. The extraordinary preoccupation with the anatomy, senses, internal and externalized emotions, relationality, and mind-body links addressed in the NS, along with the liberal use of physical metaphors, suggest the engagement with corporeality goes well beyond surface concerns of documenting aesthetic expression. The phrase ‘vibrant matter’ is from Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

55. Anjali Arondekar, ‘Subject to Sex: A Small History of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj’, in South Asian Feminisms, eds. Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 244–263. Additionally, see Anjali Arondekar, ‘In the Absence of Reliable Ghosts: Sexuality, Historiography, South Asia,’ Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 25, no. 3 (2015): 98-121 and Abundance: Sexuality, Historiography, Geopolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

56. Arondekar, ‘Subject to Sex’, 247.

57. Also see Kapila Vatsyayan, Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts, 3rd ed. (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 2007).

58. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and ‘The Force of Law’, trans. Richard Terdiman, Hastings Law Journal 38 (July, 1987): 805–53; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2003); and Butler, Bodies that Matter.

59. Often these aesthetic laws are enforced at the level of practice within the guru-shishya parampara, or the traditional dance training system, and by cultural institutions like the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA), India’s national agency for performing arts. Within the norms of the Indian dance world, adherence to the NS is usually considered at least an implicit factor in adjudicating whether a dance is properly ‘classical’ or not; choreographic approaches that are out of line with typical shastric codes may be disqualified as classical. The SNA, for example, is charged with the task of parsing the classical dance from other types. In 2012, it granted an award for ‘creative and experimental dance’ rather than the ‘classical’ distinction to Kathak choreographer Aditi Mangaldas, who very much claims an identity as classical artist and declined the honour on these grounds. The SNA saw her work as departing from Kathak norms while Mangaldas stated she was working within the boundaries of the tradition. Her impression of the SNA approach: ‘If you expand the vocabulary of Kathak, if you try to de-structure it a bit like in my contemporary work … sorry we won’t consider you as Kathak’. See Anjana Rajan, ‘A Contemporary Punch’, The Hindu, January 25, 2013, https://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/dance/a-contemporary-punch/article4344533.ece#! (accessed January 25, 2020). See also Royona Mitra’s excellent discussion of how Mangaldas’ departure from ‘authoritarian decrees’ like the NS rules on aharya, or costuming, also troubled perceptions of her position as a classical artist. A letter to her from the gurus of Kathak Kendra specified: ‘As senior dancers we say that Kathak dance has a classical dress code like all other dance forms […] You identify any dance form through the costume first and that is the essential part of it, classically called “Aaharya” […] we feel surprised that you want yourself to be considered in the category of Kathak awardees but on the other hand you are refusing the basic traditional attire of it’. Royona Mitra, ‘Costuming Brownnesses in British South Asian Dance’, in Futures of Dance Studies, eds. Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 478.

60. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971); Susan Foster, ‘Dancing Bodies’, in Meaning in Motion, ed. Jane Desmond, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 235–57. For explorations of law and performance as a critical pairing, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), Joshua Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire.

61. Williams, Marxism and Literature.

62. Rawls, Theory of Justice.

63. Alan Hunt, ‘The Theory of Critical Legal Studies’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 6, no. 1 (1986): 1–45; Ratna Kapur, Erotic Justice: Postcolonialism, Law, Sexuality (London: Glasshouse Press, 2004); Costas Douzinas and Colin Perrin, eds., Critical Legal Theory, vols. 1–4 (London: Routledge, 2011); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 

64. Sarkar Munsi, Engendering Performance, 181, 172.

65. Ibid., 183; my emphasis.

66. Caste in ancient Hindu society, as described through the varnashrama dharma system, divided people into four categories by descending rank: Brahmin (priests), Kshatriya (aristocrats and warriors), Vaishya (merchants, traders, landowners) and Sudra (artisans, peasants, and labourers serving other castes). The Sudra group can include both workers within the caste system and so-called ‘untouchables’ outside of it. Besides organizing these groups hierarchically, caste was also a mode of monitoring social relations, with rules of purity and pollution regulating permitted or forbidden contact between caste communities and determining ritual privileges and exclusions. Yet caste also enabled the formation of group identifications, genealogies, occupations, and political organizing. The matter of whether caste was originally assigned by birth, hereditary profession, or character and comportment is a subject of much debate in the historical scholarship, as is the question of whether caste was a complex system that changed over time, or whether it was a crude social matrix consolidated in the modern colonial period. While a history of the nuances of caste formation are outside the scope of this discussion, it is clear that caste continues to function as a key signifier of social status and oppression in South Asian communities. Some Sudra subjects have claimed a new identity as Bahujan or Dalit to indicate their politically subjugated condition and for activist mobilizations. For more on this topic, see the informative discussions by Uma Chakravarti, ‘Towards a Historical Sociology of Stratification in Ancient India: Evidence from Buddhist Sources’, Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 9 (March 2, 1985): 356–60, and ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism, and a Script for the Past’, in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 27–87; Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Susan Bayly, Caste, Society, and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)l Dipankar Gupta, ed., Caste in Question: Identity or Hierarchy? (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007), Patrick Olivelle, Dharmasutras: The Law Codes of Ancient India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Law Code of Manu (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); B.R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste (London: Verso, 2016); and Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).

67. Prakash, Cultural Labour, 19.

68. Ibid., 23.

69. Ibid., 24.

70. Ibid., 160.

71. Bharatmuni/Ghosh, Natyashastra, vol. I, Ch. XIII, no. 150.

72. Pande, A Historical and Cultural Study and The Natyashastra Tradition.

73. Bharatmuni/Rangacharya, Natyashastra, Ch. 1, nos. 1–20.

74. Vatsyayan, Bharata, 21. See also Anita Singh, ‘Dramatising Democracy/Democratising Drama: A Cross-Sectional Analysis’, The Criterion: An International Journal in English I, no. III (December, 2010): 1–18.

75. Vatsyayan, ‘Theory and Technique’, 232.

76. Bharatmuni/Ghosh, Natyashastra, vol. I, Ch. IV, nos. 253–254, 272, 309–310, 319–320.

77. Ibid., Ch. IV, 68, fn. 272.

78. See Bharatmuni/Ghosh 2007 vol. II: 94, Ch. IV and Ch. XXXI, 390–391.

79. Vatsyayan, Theory and Technique, 232.

80. See, for instance, Bharatmuni/Ghosh, Natyashastra, vol. I, Ch. XIII, nos. 183–184 and 188–189.

81. Ibid., Ch. IX, no. 156.

82. Ibid., Ch. XXVI, nos. 121–129.

83. For a rich discussion of this phenomenon, see Uttara Asha Coorlawala, ‘Darshan and Abhinaya: An Alternative to the Male Gaze’, Dance Research Journal, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 19–27.

84. Bharatmuni/Rangacharya, Natyashastra, vol. I, Ch. XIII, nos. 120–147, 108.

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid., nos. 120–147, 148–155 (108, 109).

87. Bharatmuni/Ghosh, Natyashastra, vol. II, Ch. XXXV, nos. 50–52.

88. Bharatmuni/Rangacharya, Natyashastra, Ch. XXII, nos. 25–37, 48–54, 171.

89. Ibid., Ch. XXV, esp. nos. 12–29, 30–39, 186–187.

90. William Forsythe in Mark Franko, ‘Dance and the Political: States of Exception’, in Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, eds. Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera (London: Routledge, 2007), 17.