Full Description
The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance is a volume of original essays that consolidates novel research and contemporary analytical approaches to critical Indian dance studies from across the world. It explores new frontiers of scholarship suggested by its contributing authors, and calls attention to urgent agendas that are central to the current field of Indian dance studies. The volume highlights key social and political dimensions of Indian dance and intersecting concerns such as ability, caste, class, gender, nationhood, race, region, religion, and sexuality.
The essays are organized around six core conceptual areas - dance discourses; rasa and affect; dance history; practice as research; dance activism; dancing the popular; and dancing across borders. Together they represent the voices of scholars and artists spread over four continents. Far from indicating pure stability, the volume foregrounds the manifold movements of Indian dance, its capacity for both positive social change and untold violence, its function as both democratic and hegemonic art form, its robust transnational past and present, its rhizomatic itineraries and shapeshifting. The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance offers an invaluable resource on Indian dance production, processes, pedagogies, performance, and perceptions.
Contents
Introduction
Anurima Banerji and Prarthana Purkayastha
Dancing Discourses
1. Philosophy/Indian/Dance
Sundar Sarukkai
2. Why the Adivasi Will Not Dance: Yoga, Bharatnatyam, Chhau and Process of Expropriation
Pallabi Chakravorty
3. Dance as Community Knowledge: Traditional Epistemology versus Appropriative Constructions of the 'Folk
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi
4. The Fragile Body: Ageing and Injury in Performance Practices in India
Shanti Pillai
5. "What is Kali? You Are Kali." Creativity and Immersive States in Filipino Martial Arts and Bharata Natyam.
Janet O'Shea
Dancing, Rasa, and Affect
6. Disgust, Pleasure and Social Power in Aesthetic Judgement: Dance and the Project of Good Taste in Postcolonial India
Kalpana Ram
7. The Performance of Slowness: Patinjapadam in Kathakali
Arya Madhavan
8. Sanitizing Shringara in Service of Brahminical Patriarchy: The Transformations of a Kuchipudi Dance Drama
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
9. Occupying the Space of the Erotic: Gender, Sexuality, and Caste in Bharatanatyam Padam Performance
Anusha Kedhar
Dancing Histories
10. Entangled Pasts for Dance: Technique as Translating South Asian Worlds
Pallavi Sriram
11. Anomalous Spaces: Representations of Dance Performance in Colonial India
Swati Chattopadhyay
12. Towards Divergent Genealogies of Manipuri: Dance in the Colonial Archives
Debanjali Biswas
13. Indelible Phantasms: Race, Orientalism and the Global Production of the Devadasi
Sitara Thobani
14. Seeing the Unseen: Indian Dance Encounters in La Bayadère
Priya Srinivasan
15. Performing Her-Stories of the Kalavantulu
Yashoda Thakore
Dancing Critically I: Off Centre
16. Decentering Choreography: Natya as an Approach to Performance-making
Sandra Chatterjee and Cynthia Ling Lee
17. The Expressive and the Resistant: Choreography at the Interstices of Difference
Kaustavi Sarkar
18. Kathak is Always Already Queer: Jaivant Patel Dance and I Am Your Skin (2021)
Jaivant Patel and Royona Mitra
19. On the Edges of Diaspora: Second-Generational Mixed Thoughts
Lionel Popkin
Dancing Critically II: Institutional Politics
20. Cultural Surround Sound: The Ambiguous Play of Nostalgia of Kalakshetra
Navtej Johar
21. The Ever-Expanding Horizons of the World of Odissi
Bijayini Satpathy
22. Inhabiting the In-Between
Vikram Iyengar
23. Making Dance Work Today
Ranjana Dave
Dancing and Activism
24. Moving Bodies in Kashmir: Marking a Space of Dissidence
Gowhar Yaqoob
25. Surviving Through Dance
Sohini Chakraborty, Sreeja Debnath, Jhulan Mondal, and Mehraj Khatoon
26. Gestural (Im)Politics in Contemporary Indian Dance
Nandini Sikand
27. To Walk is to Dance, to Speak is to Sing: Akhra Ranchi's Filmic Representations of Adivasi Dance in Jharkhand
Biju Toppo and Aparna Sharma
Dancing the Popular
28. Performing Shame: Naach as an Act of Humiliation in North and Eastern India
Brahma Prakash
29. Bidapat-Naach
Phanishwar Nath Renu; translated from Hindi by Brahma Prakash
30. The Woman "Folk" Performer: Representation, Corporeality and Respectability of the Female Kobiyal in Kobigaan
Priyanka Basu
31. Dancing Dirty in Sacral Theatre: The Cabaret Queen of Calcutta
Aishika Chakraborty
32. Cultural Programs and the Impact of NGOs on Poor Communities in India
Kabita Chakraborty
33. Dancing Queer Bollywood | Queering Bollywood Dance
Kareem Khubchandani
Dancing Transversally
34. Natyasastra, British Institutionalization of Indian Classical Dance in the ISTD and the Question of Dance Modernity
Avanthi Meduri
35. What the Body Tells: Routes and Roots in the Transnational Migration to America of Indian Dance Pioneer Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury
Arshiya Sethi
36. Rhizomatic Routes of Indian Dance: The Interconnected and the Subterranean in Anita Ratnam's A Million Sitas
Ketu H. Katrak
37. Inner Space to Outer Space? Performing Contemporary Indian Dance in Malaysia
Premalatha Thiagarajan
38. Periperformative Perspectives: Movements between Bangladesh and India
Munjulika R. Tarah
Index
