Decolonising Indian classical dance? Projects of reform, classical to contemporary

ABSTRACT

Now contained under the rubric ‘classical’, several dance practices in India underwent significant ‘reconstruction’ in the heyday of twentieth-century anti-colonial politics reliant upon the nationalist claim of a cohesive cultural identity. Such restoration of prestige to a supposedly denigrated cultural practice offered a positive ‘artistic’ counterpoint to alleviate nationalist anxieties regarding the purity of the nation and the uniqueness of its identity. Within a few decades of this nationalist reconstruction, Indian classical dance forms were regarded as emblematic of Indian culture and tradition. This article builds on important critiques of the nationalist reconstruction of Indian classical dance in India to examine how this project is enacted in the transnational present. It argues that both diasporic and non-diasporic (British) dancers uphold the foundational assumptions of the reconstructive Indian nationalist movement even as they are located within, and identify with, a very different national and political context, namely multicultural Britain.

KEYWORDS:

• Indian classical dance
• Contemporary South Asian dance
• South Asian diaspora
• British multiculturalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sitara Thobani is an Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford, St. Antony's College. Her research interests focus on art and cultural production in South Asia and the diaspora; the construction of racial, religious and national identities; and representations of India from the 19th century to the present.

ORCID

Sitara Thobani http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8697-2753

Notes

1 In maintaining this point, it is not my intention to treat these various multicultural locations – from the UK to North America, elsewhere in Europe and Australia – as synonymous, for the multicultural policies and practices of each of these states are historically, socially and politically distinctive. Instead, tracing the similarities between different multicultural contexts draws attention to the transnational network in which Indian classical dance is presently practiced, and the extent to which it is impacted upon by various multicultural (racializing) narratives. In other words, the British context is shown to be part of the larger global circulation of Indian classical dance in the transnational present.

2 There are currently eight styles of Indian classical dance. While my research is focused on the three most common styles in the diaspora – Bharatanatyam, Kathak and Odissi – I am interested in how these distinct forms are together categorised under the umbrella term Indian classical dance. In treating as synonymous different forms of Indian classical dance, this term contributes to the construction of a uniform and coherent national-cultural identity.

3 Of course, as I will soon discuss, an individual dancer's articulation of what is ‘Contemporary’ must also be recognised as such by mainstream programmers, funders and audiences. Herein lies the crux.

4 The Anglicized form of the Hindustani word naach (dance), nautch operated as a catch-all category for those dance performances (and performers) that came to be viewed as debased by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These perspectives culminated in the anti-nautch movement, which targeted female performers associated with both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ institutions.

5 A similar production toured a year later when a Kathak Company presented a feature length performance that sought to explore the complexity of cultural identity as essentialized through the phenomenon of ‘ticking boxes’, referring to having to select one's ethnic identity on state census forms. In this production too, the only practitioner of Indian classical dance was the founder of the Company, who performed with three other dancers (two of whom were trained in Western Contemporary dance and one in b-boy/break dancing). Both performances, although powerful and engaging, were much more than performances of South Asian dance. Yet, by presenting them as South Asian-inspired (even if they were indeed South Asian-inspired), naturalised the connection between South Asian dance and anxieties of cultural identity.