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.
Table of Contents
IntroductionAnurima Banerji and Prarthana Purkayastha Dancing Discourses 1. Philosophy/Indian/DanceSundar Sarukkai 2. Why the Adivasi Will Not Dance: Yoga, Bharatnatyam, Chhau and Process of ExpropriationPallabi Chakravorty 3. Dance as Community Knowledge: Traditional Epistemology versus Appropriative Constructions of the 'FolkUrmimala Sarkar Munsi 4. The Fragile Body: Ageing and Injury in Performance Practices in IndiaShanti Pillai 5. "What is Kali? You Are Kali." Creativity and Immersive States in Filipino Martial Arts and Bharata Natyam.Janet O'SheaDancing, Rasa, and Affect 6. Disgust, Pleasure and Social Power in Aesthetic Judgement: Dance and the Project of Good Taste in Postcolonial IndiaKalpana Ram7. The Performance of Slowness: Patinjapadam in KathakaliArya Madhavan 8. Sanitizing Shringara in Service of Brahminical Patriarchy: The Transformations of a Kuchipudi Dance DramaHarshita Mruthinti Kamath 9. Occupying the Space of the Erotic: Gender, Sexuality, and Caste in Bharatanatyam Padam PerformanceAnusha Kedhar Dancing Histories10. Entangled Pasts for Dance: Technique as Translating South Asian WorldsPallavi Sriram 11. Anomalous Spaces: Representations of Dance Performance in Colonial IndiaSwati Chattopadhyay 12. Towards Divergent Genealogies of Manipuri: Dance in the Colonial ArchivesDebanjali Biswas 13. Indelible Phantasms: Race, Orientalism and the Global Production of the DevadasiSitara Thobani 14. Seeing the Unseen: Indian Dance Encounters in La BayadèrePriya Srinivasan 15. Performing Her-Stories of the KalavantuluYashoda Thakore Dancing Critically I: Off Centre16. Decentering Choreography: Natya as an Approach to Performance-makingSandra Chatterjee and Cynthia Ling Lee 17. The Expressive and the Resistant: Choreography at the Interstices of DifferenceKaustavi 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 ThoughtsLionel Popkin Dancing Critically II: Institutional Politics20. Cultural Surround Sound: The Ambiguous Play of Nostalgia of KalakshetraNavtej Johar 21. The Ever-Expanding Horizons of the World of OdissiBijayini Satpathy 22. Inhabiting the In-BetweenVikram Iyengar 23. Making Dance Work TodayRanjana Dave Dancing and Activism24. Moving Bodies in Kashmir: Marking a Space of DissidenceGowhar Yaqoob 25. Surviving Through DanceSohini Chakraborty, Sreeja Debnath, Jhulan Mondal, and Mehraj Khatoon 26. Gestural (Im)Politics in Contemporary Indian DanceNandini Sikand 27. To Walk is to Dance, to Speak is to Sing: Akhra Ranchi's Filmic Representations of Adivasi Dance in JharkhandBiju Toppo and Aparna Sharma Dancing the Popular 28. Performing Shame: Naach as an Act of Humiliation in North and Eastern IndiaBrahma Prakash 29. Bidapat-NaachPhanishwar Nath Renu; translated from Hindi by Brahma Prakash30. The Woman "Folk" Performer: Representation, Corporeality and Respectability of the Female Kobiyal in KobigaanPriyanka Basu 31. Dancing Dirty in Sacral Theatre: The Cabaret Queen of CalcuttaAishika Chakraborty 32. Cultural Programs and the Impact of NGOs on Poor Communities in IndiaKabita Chakraborty 33. Dancing Queer Bollywood | Queering Bollywood DanceKareem Khubchandani Dancing Transversally34. Natyasastra, British Institutionalization of Indian Classical Dance in the ISTD and the Question of Dance ModernityAvanthi Meduri 35. What the Body Tells: Routes and Roots in the Transnational Migration to America of Indian Dance Pioneer Bhaskar Roy ChowdhuryArshiya Sethi 36. Rhizomatic Routes of Indian Dance: The Interconnected and the Subterranean in Anita Ratnam's A Million SitasKetu H. Katrak 37. Inner Space to Outer Space? Performing Contemporary Indian Dance in MalaysiaPremalatha Thiagarajan 38. Periperformative Perspectives: Movements between Bangladesh and IndiaMunjulika R. TarahIndex
