Dancing the rainbow nation as it bleeds: the Surialanga Dance Company in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the work of the Surialanga Dance Company of Durban, South Africa, which debuted at Nelson Mandela's inauguration in 1994. Inspired by Mandela's vision of intercultural harmony and created through sustained engagement with Zulu culture, Surialanga created a uniquely South African version of Indian classical Bharatanatyam that threatens colonial and apartheid constructs of “pure” Indian identity. But the company's powerful decolonial message has become less resonant in a post-apartheid context that continues to be structured by what Ndlovu-Gatsheni has called the “colonial matrix of power,” a legacy of colonialism and apartheid that results in a narrow focus on ethnic and racial identities. Drawing both from direct participation and interviews with the director and company members (2001–2008; 2018), this article traces the history of Surialanga's decolonising praxis from Mandela's inauguration to the present, arguing for the continued salience of Surialanga's dance, even in the face of particularism and violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural
• South Africa
• decolonial
• Indian
• race relations
• post-apartheid
• dance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Smitha Radhakrishnan is Associate Professor of Sociology and LuElla LaMer Slaner Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College. She is author of the book, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class (Duke 2011), as well as numerous articles related to her research on gender, globalisation and development. Outside academic life, she is a lifelong Bharatanatyam practitioner, who currently teaches and performs in Natick, Massachusetts.

ORCID

Smitha Radhakrishnan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1456-1293

Notes

1 Bharatanatyam is a classical dance form of India that has come to represent Indianness around the world and was a key form of artistic production in the Indian nationalist movement.

2 I borrow this usage of the term ‘enunciation’ from Gaztambide-Fernandez's interview with Walter Mignolo, to be explored in greater depth in the next section (Gaztambide-Fernández 2014, 201).

3 Bharatanatyam itself has a contested history, embedded as it is in both colonial rule and in anti-colonial nationalist projects. A thorough explanation of these dynamics lies outside the scope of this paper, but my consideration of Surialanga's work is deeply informed by this understanding (Chakravorty 1998, Thobani 2017).

4 For a discussion of other contexts where this has been true, as well as how this orientation shapes dance and the study of dance cultures, see Reed 1998.

5 This orientation also emerges from a contradictory history of Zulu-Indian relationships in the province of Natal and later, Kwa-Zulu-Natal (Xaba 2001).

6 See Itano 2002. Govender did later convince Ngema to include Zulu men in Bharatanatyam silks at an official event.