The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance

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.

Anurima Banerji is Associate Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the critical historicization of Indian dance and its relationship to the state. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State (2019) and co-editor with Violaine Roussel of How to Do Politics with Art (2017).

Prarthana Purkayastha is Reader in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway University of London. Her interdisciplinary research draws on dance studies, performance studies and critical race, feminist and post/de/colonial theories. She is the author of Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism (2014) and the Principal Investigator of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded 'South Asian Dance Equity'/SADE project (2023-2025).

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