Bharatanatyam and Buddhist diplomacy: inter-Asia significations in Santha Bhaskar’s Anweshana: The Search for Nalanda

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper considers a work of the Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam performed as a vehicle for inter-Asian soft-diplomatic ventures in Singapore. Widely practiced by Singapore’s ethnic Tamil-Hindu minority, Bharatanatyam took a brief “Buddhist turn” in the early 2010s. In stark contrast to Bharatanatyam’s standard recourse to Hindu mythology, several high-profile stage productions including Anweshana (2011), have featured Buddhist themes, iconography and narratives. I put forward a conceptual model of choreographic reassembly that centers on the choreographer’s efforts at negotiating the regulatory regimes that contour Singaporean cultural production. As Buddhist themes in Bharatanatyam render Indianness as fungible within Buddhist and Hindu religious paradigms, dance becomes a vital site to read how Singapore’s racial minority subjects position themselves in relation to shifting narratives of ethnicity, religion and national identity.