At home in the world: bharata natyam on the global stage

Abstract

This book fills a gap in South Asian and dance studies as it provides a critical study of the bharata natyam revival and its implications for late twentieth century and present day dance practice. The only other monograph that examines the bharata natyam revival is Gaston (1996). My book differs from this one by considering the following research issues: 1) attending not only to the politics of representation articulated in dance training and performance, 2) examining how these politics articulated themselves in specific choreographic examples, and 3) situating these changes within a global context by considering present-day bharata natyam as engaging with discourses of modernism, the ballet revival, and the transnational circulation of Indian dance forms upon the classical dance practice. This project relies upon earlier inquiries that dealt with the bharata natyam revival (Allen 1998, Coorlawala 1996, Meduri 1996, Srinivasan 1983, 1985). However, most of these studies focused on the impact of large-scale political discourses, especially nationalism and gendered reform on the demographics of performance and on discursive representations of the form. I have extended these inquiries by looking not only at national and gender identities but also the impact of regional affiliations, urbanisation and local identities, and diasporic migration. In order to contend with such a complex subject matter, this project relied upon research methods from ethnography, history, and choreographic analysis, drawing on interviews with dancers in India, the UK, and North America, archival research, my own practice of the dance form, and the analysis of live performance.