Performance, Modernity, Gender:

Paradigm Shift(s) in Indian Dance

AISHIKA CHAKRBAORTY
FOR

THEY DARED: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF PRITILATA WADDER

SIMONTI SEN ED. Gungcheel, Kolkata, 2011.

Introduction:

‘The inborn feminine tendency to show herself physically, combined with the natural feminine movements
that are the cornerstone of her dance vocabulary, is to me the golden key to feminine dance.’ Igor
Youskevitch.1

‘Generally in nrtta, the person fit to perform the dance movements is a female dancer.’(Sarngadeva,1976,
7.1224).
…. ‘No talent or skill can take dance to the highest levels of joy without the support of a beautiful body. …
identifying particularly such priceless feminine treasures as red lips and full breasts.’ (Nandikesvara
1957:23;Sarngadeva 1976,7.1226) 2

Dance, the most intangible and ephemeral of all art forms, living in and dying with the
body of the performer, is arguably more a physical than a cerebral exercise. A ‘female’
dancer, a spectacle, exuding expressions with her body, plausibly communicates with the
audience solely through her physicality. Enjoying a minority appeal among other
performing arts, dance’s inferiority complex is also rooted in the idea, argues Ann Daly,
that dancing is primarily a ‘feminine art’. 3 Even though a man performs dancing, it either
leads to his emasculation or effiminisation, or offers him a challenge to display his virile
image. ‘In the best dance-theatre’, Lincoln Kirstein ideally envisaged, ‘there is a polarity
of male and female on an equal see-saw of elegance and muscularity.’ ‘The power of the
male for leaps in the lateral conquest of space sets off the softness, fragility…of the
ballerina’s action on pointe. Male dancers make girls more feminine and vice versa.’ 4
Masculinity in dance is thus not a shallow display, reaffirmed Youskevitch; it ‘is the
strong jumper, the narrative’s driving force.’5 To be female is grace incarnate, strength/
action is the male’s sole domain.
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For a female dancer, dancing is nothing more than ‘displaying beautiful positions
and of becoming figurines agreeable to the eye,’ upholds Theophile Gautier, but ‘it was
beneath men’ (emphasis mine).6 Underscoring the physical appeal of ballerina, Janet
Wolff elaborates, ‘the bearing of the classical dancer …is characterized by compactness.
The thigh muscles are drawn up, the torso rests upon the legs like a bust upon its base. …
[H]er partner turns her slowly round upon the pivot of her straight point. She is shown to
the world with utmost love and grace.’7 It is her body. Is it also her dance?
Recent scholars question the ‘female difference/male dominance’ myth where
male and female—‘power’ and ‘fragility’–are ‘equal’ only in so far as they maintain the
asymmetrical equilibrium of patriarchy. The marginality best displayed by the femininity
of the ballerina, traps her in an illusion of complementarity where she becomes, as argued
Simone De Beauvoir, ‘the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary
to one another.’8 In this rhetoric, dance was choreographed along a rigidly ‘natural’
gender lines: female/male, display/action, delicate/strong etc. This idea of ‘inborn’,
‘natural’ gender differences, emblematic of ballet discourse as a whole, is celebrated
across the centuries as ‘unabashed hallmarks of Western classical, inscribing gender
difference as an aesthetic virtue’.9
A visible disparity plagued India’s cultural history as well where dancing, unlike
other performing arts, was portrayed as an art of the female body, a dynamic system that
captured the beauty in motion. In creating Natyashastra, Bharata might have a ‘unique
logic’. Since the other four Vedas are not to be used by the Sudras and especially by
women, Bharata created another Veda, the Pancham Veda, meant for all varnas, all
castes. In Natyashastra, the rule-book of gender behaviour of Indian dancer, points out
Mandakranta Bose, there was not one description of a dance performed by men. Bharata
may not have theoretically proscribed men to take up dancing, but it remained a fact of
social and public reality. The very word for a dancer, nartaki, denoted a female dancer,
whose performances were restricted for the god’s eyes and entertainment only. And not
just the art, Bose points out, but the profession of dancing was entirely gendered in its
division of labors. In classical dance, stage presenters were men, dance pedagogy and
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treatises were written by men, dance organization was solely a male domain. 10 All they
required was a female body.
Exploring the linkages between gender and performance, my paper tracks the
alternative trajectory of modern/contemporary dance movement in India that transgresses,
politically and aesthetically, the iconic classical, the ‘fossilized sampling of the exotic as
defined by the narrowly defined occidental gaze,… displayed in the museum-case
proscenia under the generic label “Indian dance”.’ 11 It attempts to unravel the classical
ideology that celebrated the flattering performance of the female body in archetypical
representations, frozen in timeless scriptures and sculptures. My focus is on the counter-
hegemonic agency of women dancers, who opened up ‘an other’ genre of bodily idiom
and a discursive space for a cultural and sexual politics stressing their own lived
experiences, signaling a feminist intervention in the dance map of India.
Delving into the three landmark breakthroughs from colonial to postcolonial
India, the paper proceeds to explore an alternative fourth. Mapping the ‘synthetic’, hybrid
dance experiments of Rabindranath Tagore, moving wider and deeper with Uday
Shankar’s ‘Oriental’ dance and Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association’s explorations of the
‘subaltern’ culture, the paper focuses on Navanritya (literally, new dance), pioneered by
Manjusri Chaki-Sircar and Ranjabati Sircar. Primarily a rejection of the gendered,
classical culture, this last intervention was marked by an iconoclastic defiance of the
hegemonic patriarchal representation and eroticization of female dancers. Embracing an
artistic principle that both respects and challenges tradition, this alternative genre rose
above the cultural specificity of the classical, inaugurating a new politics of performance.
Mapping the migration of body movements across cultural and spatial boundaries, the
new dance, I will argue, marks a paradigm shift in Indian dance, blurring the binary
between ‘oriental-classical’ and ‘western-contemporary’.

Classical versus Contemporary: The Tug of War

To unravel what is Contemporary, it is necessary to settle first what Classical is. The
existing discourses on India’s performative tradition are beset with the competing and
contesting pulls between—the classical and the contemporary. Dance historians hold in
accord that the term ‘classical’ gained acceptance in the first half of the twentieth century
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as a conscious borrowing from the Western art discourses to refer to the canon that was
being retrieved from the ‘sastras’. The re-discovery of the ‘classical’ in India, arguably a
cultural project of the Hindu, brahminic elite in its encounter with colonialism, was in
sync—between the romanticization of the Orient by the colonizer and its auto-
exocitization by the colonized. It coincided with the emergence of an Indian nation, a
new idea of Indianness, obsessed with a new Hindu identity. With a heightening
preoccupation with class, nationality and sexuality, the ‘revival’ also celebrated a reified
‘classical body’ of an ideal (Hindu) woman, who remained pivotal to this high-class,
modern, classical.12
The term ‘revival’, however, is a drastically reductive linguistic summary of a
complex process, argues Matthew Harp Allen; ‘a deliberate selection from among many
possibilities’, which cries out to be examined from more than one point of view. The
‘revival’ of (South) Indian dance was actually, Allen argues, a re-population (rather a re-
appropriation of an art form by the other), a re-naming (from nautch to bharata natyam),
a re-institution (from court, temple or salon to the public stage), and a re-storation
(creating a modern practice and inventing a historical one). 13 To legitimize the dance,
Avanthi Meduri also maintains, revivalists idealized sadir in the new name of
Bharatanatyam, referred the dance to the textual history of Natyashastra, affirmed the
devotional and spiritual aspect of dance (suppressed erotic desires of sringara), and
prioritized male teachers over and above devadasi dancers.14 The nationalist reinvention
that involved the act of ‘rescuing’ nation’s culture from oblivion desperately struggled to
dissociate the form from its social history. As sexuality became the culprit for the
degeneration of the dance form, Ranjabati Sircar rightly assumed, devadasis had to be
written out along with a whole system of exploitation that included the temple, the court,
and society at large.15
This became evident when in 1943, Rukmini Devi, the first Brahmin woman to
perform dance in modern South Indian history, declared that ‘I am happy ...I was able to
prove that we could do without them’. She said, ‘one great new thing that has come … is
the complete separation of our work from the traditional dance teachers.’ 16 By 1940, with
the notable exception of Bala Saraswati, most of the traditional dancers from the
Devadasi community stopped performing at the Madras Music Academy. The
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groundwork for this complex process of revival and other ‘re’s’, grounded in puritan
thoughts and Victorian morality, thus included a systematic ‘re’placement of ‘what was
crude and vulgar in the inherited traditions of dance’ with a refined, privileged,
classical.17
This also begs a question, raised by Alessandra Lopez, whether there was in fact a
‘classical’ dance before modern times.18 While the answer, to nationalist relief, would be
in the affirmative, Alessandra herself explained, ‘such traditions are neither as continuous
nor uninterrupted’, nor do they ‘necessarily follow a parabolic decline from a mythical
golden age’, only to be ‘rescued from oblivion by cultural heroes and heroines.’ 19 Figures
like Rukmini Devi, far from being mono-cultural social actors, were situated within the
hub, or rather the site, of ‘an absolutely feverish Oritantalist-internationalist theosophical
activity’. The ‘classical’ aesthetics imparted at Rukmini’s Kalakshetra was greatly
influenced by her training under Isadora Duncan’s student Eleanor Elder and Anna
Pavlova’s associate, Cleo Nordi.20 Is then our ‘classical’ a contemporaneous movement of
the ‘modern’, equally moulded by an alien, hybrid, aesthetic?
Whatever be the answer, in India, the classical is sacral, stemmed from an ancient
sacrosanct tradition, underscoring cultural authenticity, singularity and hegemony (and
not to forget its huge commercial marketability).The ‘modern’ is an upstart, a bastardized
offshoot, devoid of any history and tradition of its own. If the high-class classical is pure
and specific, the modern is heretic, iconoclastic and forthrightly hybrid. Recent studies,
however, bring to light that Indian ‘Modern’ is a not only simultaneous concurrence of
the ‘Classical’, but, in some cases, it is also placed further up in the ladder. In the early
1920s, when Rukmini was still nurturing the possibility of evolving a ‘classical’ style,
Uday Shankar, teamed with Anna Pavlova, rocked the world dance stage translating
Indian dance for the western audiences.
Hence, in a curious coincidence, while the south boasted of the revival of the
colonial classical, Bengal, the pacesetter of nineteenth century Renaissance, takes of the
credit for introducing the first modern dance movement in India, which was again fired
by various causes—political, aesthetic, moral, Orientalist—all related to the ‘cultural
affirmation’ of a ‘New India’. Unregimented by any classical tradition, the Bengal
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intervention was remarkable in its spread and popularity, which by the 1930s reached a
worldwide audience recruiting artists from all over India.

Distinct from the impetus that triggered modernism in Indian dance, the
intervention of the contemporary is, however, recent, beginning in the 1980s-1990s,
differing, both in idea and idiom, from its foregoing movements. Marked by the rise of
women directors-choreographers, the postcolonial and post-classical ‘contemporary’
drew randomly from classical and modern techniques as well as alternative or newer
philosophies of movements, representing an extremely fluid, nebulous language, that
often remains ‘very personal’, inscribing the emotional and cultural selves of the
performers.
‘If our so called traditions are largely superficial post-colonial inventions which
subsume genuine experience and accumulation of the past, with its treasure house of
complex and holistic concepts of body/energy/aesthetics,’ commented renowned
contemporary dancer Chandralekha, ‘then our so called modernity has turned out to be a
movement that privileged the bourgeois self, enabling an elite aesthetic to distort and de-
eroticise the real and liberating energies of the body.’21 In the two thousand years old
history of Indian dance, Sadanand Menon writes in the same vein, ‘a distinct divide
emerged between art and life’, between fantasy, devotion and exotic tradition with day-
to-day reality. However, there has been a counter lineage, ‘of some forty years vintage
now,’ Menon notes, running against ‘ancient, sublimated and hermetically sealed form’.
Though ‘qualitatively limited and scattered all around’, these attempts, nevertheless,
constituted a “modern” discourse of the body and movement in our context.’22
The key differences that distanced the classical from the contemporary were two-
fold, affirms Mandakranta Bose. Whereas in classical dance, women danced under male
tutelage and patronage, in contemporary, they were mostly in charge of their own art, as
dancers and choreographers. In classical dance, ‘the balance of artistic autonomy and
social agency was decisively titled against the women performer’ who was not the
guardian of her art but rather a ‘product’ of her master. This relationship remains fixed for
ages, Bose argues, with stylized movements, set repertoires, unchanged make up and
costumes, which were nonetheless scripturally fashioned.23 As a young contemporary
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dancer, Ranjabati Sircar observed back in the 1990s that the traditional training system of
classical dance, which came down to us as the guru-shishya parampara ‘is strictly
patriarchal: the system is authority, the body is object.’ The gender dichotomy was
evident where ‘the disciple is female, the guru male; the body feminine-receptive, the
system masculine-penetrative’. Whereas in classical dance, the dancer ‘embodies the
“burden” of tradition’, reinvented under colonialism, in contemporary dance, Ranjabati
asserted, ‘we are freed from the overwhelming ‘burden’ of inherited tradition’, not
through its rejection, but through its reclamation on our own terms, a tradition that has
been colonized by our own selves.24 The issue is not always ‘tradition’ versus
‘modernity’, asserts Chandralekha. Where tradition flows free in our contemporary life
dance becomes an inward journey into one’s self. 25
Contemporary dance, from the very beginning, remains an important
breakthrough for women. Dancers who came to reign supreme over the Indian post-
modern (contemporary) repertoire were mostly women with educated urban backgrounds.
Their choreographies were vital, argues Ananya Chatterjea, in remapping the alternative
movements, in de-/re-constructing the classical and inflecting it with non-classical.
Beyond the frame, they ‘nudged open spaces’ scripting new organizational principles,
new vocabularies, and choreographic innovations that were rooted in South Asian
practices and narratives.26 Thus, Bharatanatyam was deconstructed by Chandralekha, who
‘mercilessly stripped down’ Rukmini Devi’s temple-stage constellation with God and
guru.27 Kathak was modernized by Kumudini Lakhia and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar’s
‘chemical synthesis’, re-membering Tagorean eclecticism, blended varied disciplines like
Bharatanatyam, Kalari, Kandy, Odissi, Chhau, Manipuri, Thank-ta and so on.
A commitment to women’s stories and lives, coupled with their power to question
the construction of female body in culture, made contemporary dance transgressive and
subversive of the patriarchal status-quo. As in Europe, Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham
replaced fairies, swans, innocent village belle, ‘the strangely disembodied’ ballerinas with
‘living presence’ of flesh and blood women. In India too, the rise of feminism influenced
a new body politics, as dancers proposed feminist texts and practices, speaking woman’s
language in a new mode of performance. Drawing from Roger Copeland one can argue
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that, ‘modern and post modern dance are probably the only art forms in which various
stages of feminist thinking are literally embodied’.28
One outside factor that facilitated the rise of contemporary dance, observe many
scholars, was the growth of South Asian Diaspora that displaced Indian dance from its
place of origin. Though Diaspora culture defined Indian classical as a mark of one’s own
cultural identity, the transmigration of dancers enabled them to sweep across their
national and cultural borders to share it on a global platform with a new glocal
language.29 The concept of diaspora, argues Avtar Brah, is in itself problematic, as it
signals a process of ‘not simply away of home’, but in fact, having ‘many homes’ and
‘homes-in-between’, with multiple, fluid identities intersecting racial, gender and class
realities.30 Yet, when dance and the performative play a role in articulating self
perceptions of cultural identity in a diasporic context, dance discourses on classicism and
contemporaneous acquires added significance. Born in Africa, brought up in America and
straddling competing cultures all through her life, Ranjabati reflected on her diasporic
self, ‘it is this multi-layered, multi-faceted existence and an absence of closures that
generates’ the birth of contemporary dance. A cross-stylization of techniques, new dance
thus became a ‘psycho-physical’ exercise, exploring the kinesthetic, tactile and
philosophical possibilities of human body, argued Ranjabati.
While the influence of western modern is central in fashioning the new dance,
Manjusri who began her journey as a contemporary dancer in the early 1950s, affirmed
that the first underpinnings of contemporary dance had its roots in new Indian art, as its
aesthetic self-definitions, far from being imported, is intrinsic to every culture. The
resistive kinesthetic of Navanritya, is a way of thinking, a new way of approaching the
body. In an unorthodox fashion, she defined, since today’s ‘contemporary’ (samakalin)
would be tomorrow’s ‘outdated’ (gatakalin), the new dance ‘should be of all times’
(sarvakalin). Writing dance as a commentary on contemporary life, related to ‘now’, to
‘our time’, Manjusri believed that an artist must be primarily conditioned by the time
around her. Dance must capture the running moments in time; not in snapshots but in
continual change, in its flux and fluidity.

Beginnings: Tagore, Shankar and IPTA

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Contemporary dance, if it must be defined, is a genre of genrelesslness, said Ranjabati

Sircar. That cannot, however, write off the distinct genres of style, approach and
techniques of dance that crafted the contemporary tradition in India. Instead of being a
unilinear event, the itinerary is punctuated by three remarkable signposts, with sequential
and even, stylistic overlaps. The starting point is the cultural movement initiated by
Rabindranath Tagore who fashioned his own genre of dance drama triggering off a new
discourse on performance. Almost simultaneously, Uday Shankar pushed further the
Indian modern reversing the religious classical, defended by the Natyashastra. How far
has the Bengal intervention challenged the relationship of power, domination and varying
degrees of hegemony defended by South India classicism? Did it ‘shatter the prejudices
against an art which has been relegated to the status of entertainment of dubious
nature’?31 This section will explore these various stages in the development of modern
dance to see whether they altered the gendered identity of performers.
The journey of the first modern dance began in Bengal with Rabindranath Tagore
at the intersecting moment of Renaissance and revivalism. One of the last frontiers of his
creative experimentations, Tagore approached dance rather late in life. Here too, with
amazing audacity he overturned the established canonized tradition, counterbalanced the
hegemonic classicism upheld by scriptures, and modernized the so called ‘oriental’
performative tradition by pioneering the first modern dance dramas of India.
In reproducing his dance, Tagore, if not rejected, certainly reclaimed the content
of dance, determined by the brahminic, patriarchal culture. Aware of the limitations of the
classical that evolved out of several layers of power and sexual politics guarded by
institutionalised religion, he once wrote to Uday Shankar how, ‘dancing vitiates into a
catering for a diseased mind that has lost its normal appetites.’ 32 Deviating sharply from
this ‘diseased’ tradition, Tagore envisaged a new performative re-visioning the
formulation of roles, icons and the dancing stereotypes. Within a double discourse of the
performative and the pedagogic, his dance emerged as a kinesthetic medium to express
the metaphoric images of his literary compositions. Apart from an artistic pursuit, dance
was also cultivated as a mode of community celebration as Tagore inaugurated in
‘Viswabharati’ (literally World University) secular festivals like briksha ropon and
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basanta utsav. The first was the agenda of an artist and the second that of an educationist
and a propagandist.33
Following the second agenda one can argue that Tagore’s foremost contribution
was to provide the context for the emergence of ‘respectable’ middle class women in the
world of performing arts, the stamping ground of ‘unrespectable’ public women. In
nineteenth century Bengal, dance became a degenerate pursuit of rich zamindars and
Bengali baboos who patronized khemtas and nautches to entertain British officers. This
was the time when dancing dropped to the lowest level as a profession as an art of the
prostitutes which remained the moral logic behind British proscriptions against dancing
which not only sealed the fate of women dancers but also marginalized their ‘art forms’.
Dance was despised as a practice/trade of the chotoloks, reflecting on contemporary
social inhibitions Tagore himself noted, for the bhadraloks it was either a ‘matter of
shame’ or ‘a commodity for raunchy entertainment’.34
Tagore’s unremitting attempts to make dance accessible to this genteel urban
society attracted immediate flak as one scathing critic cracked, ‘it seems our poet in his
old age likes to have young girls frisking about him for entertainment’. 35 The old
poet, aware of these disparagements, showed much caution in introducing respectable
young girls into the ‘public’ stage ‘as objects of predatory gaze’. As the dancer’s body
became subject to social and cultural scrutiny, Tagorean dance style, under the influence
of Victorian morality and Brahmo Puritanism, remained in the beginning, more aesthetic
than self-assertive. While vigorous and virile movements of Kathakali was chosen for
male dancers, Manipuri lasya, the most ‘gentle’ and ‘non-threatening’ of classical styles,
was preferred for women dancers alongside a constant emphasis on free movements of
the natural body. Tagore’s own presence on stage as the narrator, performer, and an active
spectator were tacit moves to sanctify the performances of women dancers with social
endorsement. The costumes for the female dancers, designed by Pratima Devi, Tagore’s
daughter-in-law, and artists like Suren Kar and Nandalal Bose, had many sashes for the
upper torso, with scarves hanging from both shoulders, safeguarding the sexual modesty
of the body.36 The sartorial fashions of dancers underwent gradual changes in late 1930s,
and later remained restricted to the conventional Bengali sari, fastened and tautened by
sashes.
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Tagore’s experiments, I have argued elsewhere, were in line with the nationalist
construction of the new woman, bred within the middle class homes.37 The ‘new woman’
was allowed to acquire cultural refinements fashioned by the ‘new patriarchy’. Under the
nationalist ideology she was allowed to acquire selected grains of cultural ‘modernity’,
tampered by elements of ‘tradition’ as marks of her cultural identity. 38 The middle class
sexual morality prescribed decorum and modesty as the cornerstones of acceptable
behavioral paradigm for the respectable bhadramahila.39 As morally judgmental terms
these qualities also operated in a wider cultural economy to validate their location within
both the ‘private’ and ‘public’ without ‘jeopardizing’ their sexual modesty.
With all its limitations, this was the first modern dance with alternative, non-
classical artistic experiments, focusing on dancing bodies that wrote different meanings
for the socio-political space they inhabited. 40 Here, tradition evolved out of its own,
reflecting the modernism of Renaissance Bengal. Although Tagore took part in the
revivalist movement along with Vallathol Narayana Menon of Kerala Kalamandalam and
Rukmini Devi in reviving ‘dead’ forms from degeneration, Tagore’s stand differed from
the classicists. Tradition was used by him as a catalyst for moving towards an artistic
future. Drawing from classical to folk, from ‘Western’ to ‘Eastern’, his dance moved
through a process of absorption, integration and imaginative expansion.
While a number of scholars seek to concentrate on the use of Kathakali and
Manipuri in Viswabharati, Tagore’s search was not limited to any static forms. While he
invited Buddhimantra and Nabakumar Singh and Kelu Nayar to teach Manipuri and
Kathakali respectively, he simultaneously opened the door to folks and martial arts,
Gujrati Garba, Mayurbhanja Chau, Raibeshey and Srilankan Kandy in his
Viswabharati.41 Shantidev Ghosh was sent to Kerala, accompanied Tagore to Java and
Bali42 and acquired some training in Russian folk under Mrs. Timbers. Stepping further
ahead, Srimati Tagore went to Europe in 1927 to learn modern dance pioneered by
Laban, Jooss and Mary Wigman. Wigman who formulated the idea, ‘movement for
movement’s sake’, underscoring primacy of the movement, remained an important
influence on Srimati who later choreographed Tagore’s ‘Jhulan’ and ‘Esho Neepabane’ in
modern European style.43 During the Asia tour of Denishawn Ballet in 1925-26, Ruth St.
Denis was approached by Tagore at the backstage of New Empire to teach dance at
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Viswabharati.44 In the 1930s, Pratima Devi, influenced by classical ballet, seen at

Dartington Hall, choreographed a group dance based on collective synchronization. 45 In
its early years, Sangeet Bhavan dance faculty had regular teachers for Manipuri,
Kathakali, Mohiniattyam and Javanese, alongside occasional trainings in Indian Martial
arts, European modern, Hungarian and Russian folk dances.46 A ‘wayfarer of an endless
road’, Tagore crossed major distances and his dance like his other creations bore imprints
of transculturalism and transnationalism.
But this first eclectic, hybrid dance of Tagore found little appreciation in his
lifetime and, even many years after his death, an eminent intellectual of Viswabharati
‘was compelled to remark’ that ‘Tagore did not understand dance…whatever he left in the
name of dance is nothing but a curse’. Compared to his other works his dance legacy was
‘nothing’, barely a ‘hotchpotch’ of some classical styles. 47 But far from being a ‘pastiche’
of movements this modern dance was actually a merger of styles, of varied physical
traditions that fashioned our modern dance idiom. In a book called, Nritya (Dance)
written by Pratima Devi, a fellow traveler in the journey with her father-in-law, explained
that, the way Tagore composed his songs with a creative amalgam of diverse traditions of
classical and folk, integrating tappa, dhrupad, baul, kirtan and also the western, the way
a new universe of theatre was born with him, by bringing together Jatra, kathakata,
Kabigan, Panchali and also western Opera, similarly he envisaged a modern dance
evolving out of different body movements. The focus was on a ‘chemical synthesis’
(Rasayanik Sangmishran), an expression coined by Pratima Devi, that adhered to the
stylization of a variety of dances, but went on to tear them off their ‘original’ contexts. 48
In this modern dance, there was an emphasis on movement from the mind, from the soul
and from the gut.

Liberating dance from the set choreography of the classical, embedded in

Shiva/Krishna mythologies, Tagore also introduced modern dance dramas to balance out
his new form. The shift from his early ideas of Geeti-natya (musical dramas) like Balmiki
Pratibha and Mayar Khela to Nrtiyanatya (dance dramas) was a shift, many scholars
observed, from the lyrical to the theatrical, from poetic to dramatic, and in the latter,
dance emerged as an independent art.49 The Tagorean dance texts can be read as points of
entry into the discourse on modernism and feminism where he departed from the
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archetypical characterizations of women embedded in religious mysticism and borrowed

powerful even deviant imageries of women casting them in a new mould. Natir Puja
(1926), for instance, revolved round a court dancer, turned a Buddhist nun, Srimati, who
was forced to dance at the sacred shrine (stupa) before being killed by the order of Hindu
king, Ajatsatru. A landmark in Bengali theater, Tagore directed Natir Puja, as a dance
drama in Shantiniketan in 1927, taking it on a cross-country tour. In 1931-32, Tagore also
directed it as a film, under the banner of New Theaters Limited, himself appearing in a
cameo role.
Then came in a row the dance-dramas of the 1930s, Chitrangada, Chandalika and
Shyama, which foregrounding the theme of female desire, illustrate the feminist
inclinations that Tagore’s women portray.50 Chitrangada, the masculinized, warrior
princess takes up the task of winning Arjuna almost like a challenge, redefining the role
of a wife–‘neither goddess, nor ordinary woman’. Prakriti, the untouchable and desirous
woman sought to breach the boundaries of caste to reach out to a love proscribed,
fashioning a new life as a social rebel. Shyama, a court-dancer, took to immoral crimes to
save her beloved yet her love story was never fulfilled. The three women together tore
apart the images of ashtanayikas in classical theory. Drawing from mythology and
ancient texts, these ‘stories’ offered alternative imageries from ‘tradition’. These
representations of Indian women through bodily performance, simultaneously trouble
notions of cultural purity and offers instead ‘impure’ but powerful cultural texts.
Braving social orthodoxy and a hostile media, dance was slowly integrated into
the curriculum of the Viswabharati, as the first generation of Bengali dancers, recalled in
their autobiographies the act of stage performance as a unique cultural experience. 51
While not many Bengalis were ready to join Tagore in this ‘risky’ cultural enterprise,
Tagore might have exerted his influence on his personal acquaintances like Nandalal
Bose to allow his daughters, Gauri, Yamuna, and daughter-in-law, Nivedita, to join the
performing troupe. Amita Sen, daughter of renowned scholar, Kshitimohan Sen, was also
inducted in the group as a promising young dancer. But most of the leading dancers like
Mrinalini Swaminathan (Sarabhai), Asha Ojha, Ira Vakil and Srimati Hathi-Singh
(Tagore) who performed widely with Tagore came from outside Bengal.
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Unfortunately, this first modern dance of India remained entirely uncodified,

accompanied by a lack of formal training among dancers. Tagore died before a ‘style’
could emerge assimilating his scattered images, a form strong enough to stand against
classical dance and remain independent. For long, the Rabindrik dance among the general
populace remained a finishing school subject. While Tagore himself never hesitated to
absorb and integrate different traditions into his dance, his school at Shantiniketan came
to prefer ‘soulful expressions’ (bhab-nritya) to trained body movements, which
nonetheless led to technical degeneration of Rabindra nritya.52 The self-avowedly
amateur, stereotyped dancing that passed as ‘Rabindrik’ exemplified Tagorean dance in
its literalness—a gesture to translate every word. This may help explain why Tagore
dance has never gained acceptance in India as a serious art beyond the Bengali cultural
domain.53 Tagore failed, with all his sincere endeavours, to make dance acceptable as a
kinaesthetic performative and, more significantly, as a viable ‘profession’ among Indian
women.
However, by 1930s, in a parallel development, dance emerged as a highly rated
‘profession’ among both Indian men and women under the charismatic leadership of
Uday Shankar. If Tagore was the first to conceptualize modern dance, Shankar was the
first to popularize it. ‘The renaissance in Indian dance, which began in the late 1920s, and
flowered in the 1930s, is irretrievably part of Uday Shankar’s story’, observes Joan
Erdman. ‘He practically reinvented Indian dance single-handedly. He placed it on stage in
technically up-to-date settings, realizing an aesthetic which affirmed the spirituality
expected by western audiences and the Indianness claimed by Indians.’54 Hardly a
traditionalist himself, Uday Shankar popularized his tradition and prepared the western
audience for classical forms, derived from temple dancing, ‘translating’ it, redeploying it
in a modern way.
A representative of the brahminic elite, Erdman also identified Uday Shankar as
an ‘expatriate, a Europeanized Indian, a self-made artiste, a non-observant Hindu
Brahmin, and a handsome presence who loved women’. His major contributions in Indian
dance came during the last years of colonial rule ‘when Gandhi was meeting the British
in his dhoti in London’. Though Hindu mythologies, ‘religio-mythological ballets and
light folk-based divertissements’ remained his favourites, his thematic reach also included
 15

Gandhi’s social philosophy of unity and castelessness.’55 Hence, ‘nationalism and

colonialism are not mere external contexts, Erdmann continues, ‘for Shankar’s dance and
success’; ‘they are the context in the midst of which he performed… and created his
repertoire’,56 the most significant of which was his Kalpana. Released in 1948, the film
was made at a time which marks the transition from the era of ‘Raj’ to the emergence of
the new nation state. Urmimala Sarkar Munsi suggests that the film was an important
narrative of ideals, aspirations, imaginations for the new nation, embodying the artiste’s
subjective imagination; concurrently, it reflected the predominant Hindu cultural
statements made through the imaging of the new nation by its political planners.57
Shankar’s greatest contribution lay in making dance acceptable to respectable
women who were now integrated into the modern artistic venture experiencing new
disciplines in his Almora centre. Away of their homes, undertaking long voyages abroad
and participating in a wider performative space, female dancers like Simkie, Kanaklata,
Padmini, Ragini, Amala and Zohra joined his troupe. To Zohra Segal, a student of Mary
Wigman, went the credit of compiling the syllabus of the Centre.
However while male choreographers from Almora later rose to prominence for
their original approach to dancing; very few women emerged as independent
choreographers with distinct styles of their own. One criticism that can be raised against
Shankar was that his dance was centered upon himself, outshining other players in the
ballet. Centered on the male body, his dance was also a celebration of masculinity. The
iconic roles that he immortalized were Indra, Rudra, Kartikeya and Krishna where
women dancers, with all their technical finesse, ‘complimented’ him as heroines, cast in a
neo-classical mould.58 ‘Uday Shankar was no feminist’, admits Sarkar-Munsi. He was
rather ‘a typical product’ of a patriarchal upper class family. From 1930s-1950s, his
company, comprising both men and women, became the face of the Indian dance and it
successfully crafted ‘a public image of disciplined, skilled and respectable women
dancers’ as a ‘counter-image’ of nautch girls or devadasis, altering, ‘the patterned
thinking’ of the colonial audience both in India and abroad.59
In 1942, the Almora Centre was disbanded. The same year witnessed the birth of
Indian People’s Theatre Association in Bengal. Dancers like Narendra Sharma, Shanti
Vardhan and Sachin Shankar, breaking away from Almora, joined IPTA taking charge of
 16

its dance-squad. Primarily a cultural expression of the Communist Party of India, IPTA’s
aim was to create a folk-based mass art for the proletariat. In politicizing performance,
IPTA punctuated songs with anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois slogans and catchphrases.
They succeeded in drawing larger numbers of women into public participation, but left
undisturbed the politics of gender embedded in performance.
Songs, ballets and plays were all geared against the ‘injustices of society’s present
rulers’, remembered Zohra Segal who became the Vice President of IPTA. ‘At the time
India was in the last phase of her struggle for freedom,’ she recorded, ‘so obviously the
themes and IPTA’s songs and plays were radical in nature and left-oriented, inspiring and
uniting us for action’.60 The repertoire included Call of the Drum, Amar Bharat,
Ramleela and Voice of Bengal.61 While actors of IPTA included Damayanti Sahni, Dina
Gandhi, Uma Anand, Shaukat Kaifi to name just a few, among dancers it had Gul
Vardhan, Dina and Shanta Gandhi, Zohra Segal and Reba Ray. ‘In short’, said Segal,
‘every artist who lived in Bombay during 1940-1950 was connected with IPTA in one
capacity or the other’.62
During the 1960s, however, IPTA’s impact steadily declined which coincided with
the disintegration of Communist Party of India. Segal conjectured,

[A] number of artists acquired fame in Indian films and no longer

willing to slave away for nothing. Quiet a few felt that the organization
was influenced by the Communist Party of India and since they did not
share the same political affiliations they left. Moreover, the country was
now free, the Imperialists expelled, so there was no longer any cause
for complaint!!63

Meanwhile, IPTA in Calcutta was slowly losing its glamour and importance to
Bombay. Barring a few works like Shambhu Bhattacharya’s ‘Runner’, the inventive aura
that once set apart the Bengal dance grew conspicuous by its absence. It failed to capture
its time, proved unable to update itself, in technique, style or content.

The New Dance of the New Woman: The Birth of Navanritya

This was the time when a handful of contemporary dancers approached dance with a new
vision. The breakthrough was unfamiliar and shockingly aggressive. It bewildered the
audience, accustomed to the classical, semi-classical and pseudo-classical dance.
 17

Challenges before the new genre were, indeed, many and varied. How to understand
dance as a language in its own right, how to free it from tedious god/goddess narratives
and staged religiosity, how to demystify its content that reinforces nostalgia and
revivalism and how to identify the conjunctions between traditional forms and
contemporary concerns! 64
In Calcutta, the new drive that started in the 1950s found its formal realization in
the 1980s. The discourse of difference that Navanritya enunciated is also a reflection of
the personal journey of its inventor, Manjusri Chaki-Sircar. Born in Murshidabad
(Bengal) in August 1934, Manjusri moved to Pabna (now in Bangladesh), following an
official transfer of her father. The thirties were remarkable in many ways; it introduced
seminal changes in the lives of Hindu women, witnessing marriage reform, women’s
entry into respectable profession and their wider participation in public politics. It was
also the time when Rukmini Devi in the South appeared in ‘public’ concerts with a
revived classical while in Bengal women started performing ‘modern’ dance dramas all
over India. Manjusri was relocated to Calcutta when India won freedom at the expense of
partition. Partition, coming as a moment of both ‘trauma and triumph’, played a crucial
part in her life as the dichotomous borders between the ‘inside’/outside’ or
‘private’ /‘public’ started to collapse during these troubled times. 65 The exodus and
resettlement enabled some women to negotiate these boundaries and to make new
crossings towards new realms.
While Manjusri was one such dancer ready to make new crossings, the
performance politics of India was not ready to sanction ‘wayward’ experimentations. At
the state level, there was a conscious effort to integrate dance into the realm of art and
aesthetics as part of a ‘national’ culture. As a thriving cultural hub, Calcutta represented a
melting pot encountering cross-currents of dance traditions. The city got the first ever
opportunity to watch the Bolshoi Theatre from Soviet Russia and, in 1953, New Empire
staged Cave of the Heart, a signature piece by the American modern dancer, Martha
Graham. It was the best of times for classicists as well. Calcutta provided the ‘home’ for
many veteran classical dancers like Balakrishna Menon, Marutthappa Pillai, Bipin Singh
and Govindan Kutty who chose the city as their base for imparting classical training to
Bengali students. As a major incentive to classical culture, All India Music Conferences
 18

hosted classical dance performance and on Sunday mornings, New Empire staged a
unique assortment of classical music and dance.66 Under governmental initiative, dancers
undertook long trips abroad as the West was by now mesmerized by the exotic Indian.
A few Sunday mornings in New Empire witnessed experimental works by young
‘modern’ dancers of Calcutta. One such dancer was Manjusri Chaki, whose name now
appeared frequently in contemporary newspapers. Trained in three solid classical forms
she was unmatched among her contemporaries in her desperation to go beyond the
hidebound classical, the hegemonic Shankar gharana and the household Rabindrik,
fanatically defended by Shantiniketan. Manjusri’s desire to break shackles found support
in another maverick and pathfinder, Debabrata Biswas. Discarding the set confines of the
Rabindrik, Debabrata excelled in his baritone, incurring wrath from the purists, while
Manjusri dramatically choreographed songs of Tagore with innovative steps and
movements. Some newspapers waxed lyrical about ‘the fine artistry’ of their
performances while traditionalists rejected the experimental audacity outright.
By and large, this period was not a very happy moment for modern/contemporary
dance. Sangeet Natak Academy, the national institute of performing arts, decided that
Indian dance should be either classical or folk; no stage was open for any alternative.
Engaged in a battle on two fronts, contemporary dancers were simultaneously threatened
and marginalised by national and international markets, by official state policy and
dominant cultural constructs. This was the period when Manjusri was denied a place in
Uday Shankar Dance Company for being ‘too tall’ to join the chorus. To add to her
frustration, she was denied a fellowship from the Sangeet Natak Akademi for dancing
Tagore in an ‘unusual’ way.
However, her marriage in 1958 set her foot upon a new journey: She went to live
in Africa, setting up her first dance school with 19 African students. In 1966, when
Manjusri went on to New Paltz, America had become the world’s dance capital. Again,
this was the time when Indians and Indianness had become a part of the ‘cultural
landscape’ of America with an obsession on multiculturalism. Indian classical, reflecting
the experience of the Indian middle class, was preferred in an attempt to reify the
immigrant culture.67 The activity of becoming Indian in America at once highlights the
performativity of nationhood and ethnicity. Simultaneously it required the self-
 19

objectification of an ‘identity’ necessary for an individual who moves into a larger

structure where such constructs are threatened.68 Drawing from Partha Chatterjee’s
‘material/spiritual’ divide, Anita Kumar argues, it was the ‘spiritual’ realm of the Indian
that balanced out the ‘material’ acquisition of the West. Here, classical Indian dance came
to serve as ‘the quintessential rite of passage’ among the South Asian bourgeoisie,
particularly females, within the diaspora. ‘Through the dancer Indian identity is
preserved, and in her lies the responsibility of passing this identity, complete and
timeless, to subsequent generations’, argues Kumar.69
If the diasporic pattern followed a veneration of classical, Manjusri’s works
reflected a discourse of resistance. Though frequently asked by her sponsors to present
the ‘pure classical’, Manjusri’s intercession lay between the Indian classical and the
Western contemporary. While teaching Indian dance at New York State University and
Woodstock Art Gallery, she also started taking lessons under Merce Cunningham in
Modern American dance, wearing leotards beneath her saree.70 Hailing her free flowing
dance, unregimented by any ‘style’, New York’s Dance Magazine described her as the
‘Indian Isadora’.71
Indeed, in both dance and her life, Isadora rallied against the strictures placed
upon women. Dancing out her generation’s rebellion against Puritanism, she, like Loie
Fuller, danced in loose draperies, barefoot, barelegged, bare-armed and often with her
hair flowing. In both physical and metaphysical senses, as Helen Thomas argues, she
shed the corset in dance and also in life. 72 Her feminist transgression found a more radical
culmination in Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, who removed the smile from the
face, shoes from their feet and designed stark coloured costumes around the basic
leotard.73 Intrigued with the interplay of body, intellect and spirit, argues Judith L. Hanna,
female dancers now experimented with braless, corsetless, and barefoot dancing,
symbolizing physical freedom and a renewed and more diversified self-image.74
At the turn of the century modern dance emerged as a rebellion against male
domination in both dance and society. Modern dancers’ aggressiveness paralleled
women’s questioning of patriarchy, a change of attitude towards marriage, campaign for
higher education, women’s suffrage movement and entry into the labour market. The
fight was extended women’s right to gain control over their bodies. In a 1932 address, St.
 20

Denis said, ‘Today is woman’s hour. It is woman’s chance to offset what men may be
doing in the realm of politics and war.’75 Turning from fairy tales and romantic legends,
dancers took up social problems that beset their time. Black dancers, rejecting the ‘Lilly
White’ ballet, started dancing in black boots. Unrestricted by a limited vocabulary,
modern dance now discovered a range of possibilities in human movement.
From Tagore to Duncan, from Shankar to Pavlova, her worldwide travels enabled
Manjusri to broaden the horizon of her dance. Before setting up the Dancers’ Guild in
Calcutta, in 1983, she successfully staged two feminist productions, Meerabai
Nrityakatha (premiered in New York), based on the life the 16th century Bhakti
protagonist, Meerabai, and Sabala, an adaptation from Tagore’s poem. But, the
production that put her firmly on the contemporary dance map was Tomari Matir Kanya
(Daughter of the Earth), derived from Tagore’s Chandalika (the untouchable woman).
Her later choreographies like Kon Nutaner Daak, (previously Tasher Desh {Kingdom of
Cards}) went down as a social satire of the caste hierarchy of the patriarchal state. With
Ranjabati, she choreographed Aranya Amrita (Immortal Forest), highlighting the agency
of women in popular resistance against deforestation, while Yugasandhi (Turning Point)
experimented with non-linear and non-literal forms, making vast use of theatrical props
and masks in an elaborate manner.
The experiment with the new dance was a never a cakewalk. Manjusri attracted
vehement criticisms from the Bengali media for grafting an ‘alien’ modernity on an
Indian body, for introducing brash and bold movements offending the ‘feminine’ modesty
of Bengali dancers, for redesigning sartorial codes discarding the cylindrical saree, and
above all, for re-presenting Tagore in a non-Rabindrik way. Besides a few voices in her
favour, she had to brave strong resistance almost all through her life. Before her hasty
exit from the centre stage of contemporary dance, Manjusri, nonetheless, liberated her
dancers from the extraneous images of tinsel and flesh. She made them jump, fall, leap
and roll with a single command, ringing in their ears, ‘straighten your spine’! Navanritya
became not only new ways of dancing, but also new ways of thinking about the body, the
self—of a woman, holding aloft their delicate ‘spines’, which they often seek to hide and
are made to forget that they have such a ‘thing’ called a ‘spine’! 76
 21

Afterthought:
Today we are battered by a flurry of reality shows where dance is a prime time attraction
of television channels with high popularity markers. On a regular basis, both national and
regional channels telecast dance competitions like, Nach Baliye, Jhalak Dhikhla Ja,
Dance India/Bangla Dance, Dance Pe Chance (Boudimoni) to name only a few, while
the last one offers a chance to Bengali middle class housewives to ‘expose’ and
‘showcase’ their ‘talents’ before a nationwide audience. They experience a new range of
body movements, merging classical with western, Kathak with Flamenco, Bharatanatyam
with Hip-hop, exploring a variety of themes, from mythical to contemporary. Taking a
break from their routine chores, these little known, urban/semi-urban, married women
confidently make their moves on the dance floor, sharing their hopes and despairs,
applauding/complaining about their supportive/resistant families, jumping in excitement
or breaking into tears, speaking their ‘personal’ in the ‘public’ after every performance.
Celebrity judges whose gorgeous presence make these shows all the more popular
include the revered dance director, Saroj Khan, leading choreographers like Farha Khan,
Vaibhabi Merchant, eminent Bengali dancers-actresses like Tanushree Shankar, Raveena
Tandon, Rituparna Sengupta among others. Indeed, women as dancers, choreographers
and produces are at the helm of these entertainment shows, ruling supreme on and off the
floor!
But, do these women challenge the entertainment formula breaking away from the
acceptable market behaviour? Do they craft or publicize images of dancers disturbing the
male gaze? Or, do these trends lead to a further commodification of women dancers, as
objects of desires and subjects of gaze, under the control of reality shows? Do they
augment the marketing and advertising of stereotyped bodily images of women,
groomed, measured and judged by the constant scrutiny of a patriarchal audience? Are
girls no longer labeled as ‘bad’ because of the way they dance? Is the ‘art’ of dance
regarded as a respectable profession, even for the middle-class, married women? Does
the female dancer find both ‘power’ and ‘pleasure’ in such dancing through the control of
her own body? Does she find ways to speak her mind in her ‘own’ dance?
22
1
Youskevitch, Igor. (Winter, 1969) ‘The Male Image’, Dance Perspective, 16, Cited in Ann Daly. 2003, ‘Classical Ballet: A
Discourse of Difference’, Jane C. Desmond ed., Meaning in Motion, New Cultural Studies of Dance. Duke University Press,
Durham and London, 111.
2
Cited in Bose, Mandakranta. 2010. ‘The Ownership of Indian Classical Dancing and its Performance on the Global Stage’
in Pallabi Chakarvorty and Nilanjana Gupta ed., Dance Matters, Performing India, Routledge, New Delhi, 76-77.
3
Daly, 2003. ‘Classical Ballet’, 112.
4
Ibid, 114.
5
Ibid, 112.
6
The Romantic Ballet as seen by Theophile Gautier, trans. Beaumont, C.W. N.D. New York, Dance Horizons, 55, 57, Cited
in Daly, ibid, 113.
7
Cited in Wolff, Janet. 1997. Reprint 2003. ‘Reinstating Corporality: Feminism and Body Politics’, Meaning in Motion, 95.
8
Cited in Daly, ibid, 114-115.
9
Ibid, 113.
10
Bose, ‘The Ownership’, 76, 78.
11
Chakraborty, Aishika ed., 2008. Ranjabati, A Dancer and Her World, Selected Writings of Ranjabati Sircar, Thema,
Calcutta, 69.
12
Chakraborty, Aishika. 2010. ‘The Daring Within: Speaking Gender through Navanritya’, Dance Matters, 201.
13
Allen, Matthew Harp.2010. ‘Rewriting Script for South Asian Dance’ in Davesh Soneji ed. Bharatanatyam: A Reader,
Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 205-206.
14
Meduri, Avanthi. 2010. ‘Bharatanatyam as World Historical Form,’ Soneji ed., Bharatanatyam, 256.
15
Chakraborty, Ranjabati, 45.
16
Sarada, 1985:50, cited in Allen, 207.
17
Allen, ibid, 208.
18
Lopez y Royo, Allessandra. 2003. ‘Classicism, Post-classicism and Ranjabati Sircar’s Work: Re-defining the terms of
Indian Contemporary Dance Discourse’, South Asia Research, Vol. 23, no 2, 153-169.
19
Ibid.
20
Allen, 245; Meduri, 254; Lopez Royo, 156.
21
Downloaded at http://raahi.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/contemporary-dance-in-india-and-a-look-at-bangalores-dance-
scene/ accessed on 14.6. 2011.
22
Menon, Sadanand. 1993. ‘Tradition is her Spring-board’, The Economic Times, New Delhi, 21 August.
23
Bose, ‘The Ownership’, 76-77.
24
Within this framed tradition, women tended to get frozen in enticing stereotypes of abhisarika or darpanasundari as
plump extensions of the ‘nayika’ (heroine). Hence, Kathak evoked court patronage through salam catering sensual
indulgence to a male audience while Odissi and Bharatnatyam emphasized ‘strengths’ of her heavy pelvis, flexible torso,
supple neck and limbs, complimented by a thematic focus on amorous love. Women, the bodies that danced, displaced from
actual social context, were commodified as objects of desires. See, Chakraborty, Ranjabati, 44, 45-47, 49.
25
Chandralekha, ‘Reflections on New Directions in Indian Dance’, Bharatanatyam, 381.
26
Chatterjea, Anyana. 2011. ‘Why I am Committed to a Contemporary South Asian Aesthetic: Arguments about the Value of
‘Difference’ from the Perspective of Practice,’ in Urmimala Sarkar Munsi and Stephanie Burridge ed. Traversing
Traditions, Celebrating Dance in India, Routledge, New Delhi,100.
27
Meduri, ‘Bharatantyam’, 265.
28
Copeland, Roger. 1990, ‘Founding Mothers: Duncan, Graham, Rainer and Sexual Politics’, Dance Theatre Journal, 8,
no. 3, 29, cited in Susan Manning, ‘The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze: Feminist Critiques of Early Modern Dance’,
Meaning in Motion, 156.
29
Lopez y Royo, Alesssandra. 2005. ‘Dance in the British Asian Diaspora: Redefining Classicism’, available at
http:/pkp.ubc.ca/pocol/viewarticle.php? id=138; Bose, ‘The Ownership’, 74.
30
Cited in Lopez, ibid, 2.
31
Vatsyayan, Kapila. 2003. ‘Modern Dance: The Contribution of Uday Shankar and His Associates’, Kothari, Sunil. ed.,
New Directions in Indian Dance, Marg Publications, Mumbai, 20.
32
Cited in Khokar, Mohan. 1983. His Dance, His Life: A Portrait of Uday Shankar. Himalayan Books, New Delhi, 75.
33
This argument had been elaborately addressed by Ranjabati Sircar in several articles. Reproduced in Chakraborty,
Ranjabati, 78.
34
Ghosh, Shantidev. 1983. Gurudev Rabindranath O Adhunik Bharatiya Nritya. Ananda, Calcutta, 3-4.
35
See, Chakraborty, Ranjabati, 74.
36
Chaki-Sircar, Manjusri. 2003. ‘Tagore and Modernization of Dance’, New Directions, 37.
37
Chakraborty, ‘The Daring Within’, 192.
38
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments. Oxford University Press, New Delhi; Chattejee, Partha. 1989.
‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’, Kumkum Sangari and Sudsh Vaid ed., Recasting Women, Essays in
Colonial History, Kali for Women, New Delhi, 233-253.
39
Bannerji, Himani. 2001. Inventing Subjects, Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism. Tulika, New Delhi.
40
Purkayastha, Prarthana. 2009. ‘Warrior, Untouchable, Courtesan: Fringe Women in Tagore Dance Dramas’, South Asia
Research, Vol 29 (3), 255-273.
41
Ghosh, Gurudev Rabindranath, 62, 135; Devi, Pratima.1949. Reprint 1965. Nritya. Viswabharati, Calcutta.
42
Ghosh, Shantidev. 1952. Reprint 1994. Java O Balir Nrityageet, Viswabharati, Calcutta.
43
Ghosh. Gurudev Rabindranath, 52-53, 56.
44
Allen, ‘Rewriting the Script’, 239.
45
Ghosh, Shantidev. 1994. Jibaner Dhrubatara. Ananda, Calcutta. 136-152.
46
Chaki-Sircar, ‘Tagore and Modernization’, 34.
47
Cited in Ghosh, Gurudev Rabindranatah, ‘Introduction’.
48
Devi, Nritya, 20-21.
49
Sikdar, Ashrukumar. 1993. Rabindranatye Rupantar O Aikya, Ananda, Calcutta, 123.
50
Chaudhuri, Sutapa. ‘Dance Dramas of Tagore’, Muse India, available at http://www.museindia.com/focuscontent.asp?
issid=33&id=2151.
51
Sen, Amita. 2000. Sirisha, Bakula, Amer Mukul. Nabapatra Prakashan, Calcutta; Sen, Amita. 1977. Shantiniketane
Ashramkanya, Tagore Research Institute, Calcutta; see also Chakraborty, Rama. 2004. Pathe Chale Jetey Jetey, Ananda,
Calcutta.
52
Recently in a Workshop entitled, ‘Women in Rabindranritya and Rabindrasangeet’, organised by the Women’s Studies
Centre, Viswabharati, (21-23 March, 2011) a number of elderly dancers, formerly learning dance in Shantiniketan, voiced
against the recent trends that deviated from the established dance style of Tagore. Dismissive of the new fangled innovations
as ‘acrobatics’ and ‘gymnastics’ they stand firm against further experimentations on Tagorean dance narratives. The author,
however, found contrary voices as well, both among the first generations of dancers and the present performers of
Viswabharati who welcome innovations with a new ‘dance text’, imparting new movements beyond the hegemonic set
pattern.
53
Cited in Chakraborty, Ranjabati, 75.
54
Erdman, Joan L .1998. ‘Who Remembers Uday Shankar?’ Presented at the Annual Conference of the Society of Dance
History Scholars, New York, June 21, 1997, available from:
http://www.danceadvance.org/03archives/shankar/page4.html ,accessed on 29 August, 2007.
55
ibid.
56
Ibid.
57
Sarkar Munsi, Urmimala. 2011. ‘Imag(in)ing the Nation: Uday Shankar’ Kalpana’, Traversing Tradition, 134-135.
58
Chakraborty, Aishika. 2006. Navanritya: Her Body, Her Dance,” Sephis, e-magazine, Vol. 2, No. 2, January 2006,
9;Chakraborty, ‘The Daring Within’, 194.
59
Dutta, Bishnupriya and Urmimala Sarkar Munsi. 2010. Engendering Performance: Indian Women Performers in Search
of An Identity, Sage, New Delhi, 229-230.
60
Segal, Zohra, 2010. Close–Up, Memoirs of a Life on Stage and Screen, Women Unlimited, New Delhi, 114.
61
Ray Choudhury, Reba. 1999. Jeebaner Tane, Shilper Tane, Thema, Calcutta.
62
Segal, ibid, 114.
63
Ibid, 115.
64
Chandralekha, ‘New Directions’, 381-382.
65
Dutta, Madhushree, Flavia Agnes and Neera Adarkar ed, 1996. The Nation and the State, Indian Identity, Samya,
Calcutta, 21.
66
Personal communication, Samik Bandyopadhyay.
67
Ram, Kalpana. 2005. ‘Phantom Limbs: South Indian Dance and Immigrant Reifications of the Female Body’, Journal of
Intercultural Studies, Vol. 26, Nos. 1-2, February-May 2005, 121-137.
68
Kumar, Anita. 2010. ‘What’s the Matter? Shakti’s (Re) collection of Race, Nationhood and Gender’, Bharatantyam, 337-
338.
69
Ibid, 340.
70
Chaki-Sircar, Manjusri. 2000. Nrityarase Chittamama. Miranda, Calcutta, 32.
71
Dance Magazine, December, 1969.
72
Thomas, Helen.1995. Dance, Modernity and Culture, Explorations in the Sociology of Dance, Routledge, London and
New York, 61.
73
Ibid, 65.
74
Hanna, Judith Lynne. 1988. Dance, Sex and Gender, Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance and Desire, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 133.
75
Ibid, 131-134.
76
Chakraborty. ‘Daring Within’, 187.