Precious histories of South Asian dance have remained hidden and ignored

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30-04-2025

Even the fading sepia tint cannot dull the fire of the image – a dancer air-borne in a leap, like a flying apsara, with improbably long arms and legs stretched in elegant lines and angles. It is a photo that goes back to a time when Sri Lanka was still Ceylon and Vajira Chitrasena was beginning to captivate audiences across the globe.
Vajira made a historic contribution to Kandyan dance, once a little-known ritual form of Sri Lanka's central highlands that became a performance art in the 1950s. It was her pioneering effort in building the pedagogy and choreographies of Kandyan dance that crystallised the work begun by her partner, Chitrasena.
Across the ocean and past the expanse of India is another dancer of whom we know too little. Indu Mitha, now 96, took Bharatanatyam from Kalakshetra to Lahore in the 1950s and nurtured it through years of turbulence to give it a local flavour.
In India itself, there are hundreds of such stories that do not get the attention they deserve. What for example do we know of the Telugu chronicles of a 17th-century Nayaka king's daily life enacted and danced as a means of preserving history in the people's mind? Or the outstanding Bharatanatyam dancers who brought a cinematic version of the style to Tamil and even Hindi movies but were never celebrated enough?
These dance histories of South Asia are less known but no less riveting because they hold a wealth of meaning for us today. They foreground for us the raging contemporary debates in dance – on questions of hierarchy, politics, caste, religion, censorship and gender. But to plumb these stories and their meanings, there was nowhere you could go as a dance community, scholar or arts lover.
Until 2022, the year when the pandemic turned less deadly.
That is when a group of dancers, scholars and arts enthusiasts got together to float an online journal where the cultural, political and historical issues facing South Asian dance could be discussed by regional voices. It was named SADI.
Scholar and activist Arshiya Sethi, who has edited the three annual issues of the journal so far, chuckles about its name. SADI expands to a mouthful – South Asian Dance Intersections – but it is also Punjabi for ours, a word that befits the journal. Because what SADI does is amplify the research of scholars and dancers from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan working in their own regions.
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, a scholar of theatre and performance studies, believes that SADI sets right the skew in writings on South Asian dance, which have tilted disproportionately to West-based scholarship. 'There is a certain neo-colonialism in how foreign journals regulate the writings of non-English speaking scholars,' she said. 'So vernacular scholarship, no matter how good, is less seen. Unless you go to an American university and have the language, courage, networks and encouragement, you are unlikely to find a platform that will publish and publicise your work on dance. We at SADI believe in the need for inclusion of these voices who are less known, do not have that edge, but who have unbelievably rich, rare material. SADI is an important assertion of their right to be heard.'
But this pushback, the editorial team maintains, is not just against the monopoly of West-based scholarship, it is also aimed against the hierarchies and privileges entrenched within South Asian cultures and societies.
In its pages, for instance, you will find a close look by Sheema Kermani into Pakistan's male Kathak dancers and their struggle with social bias and the disapproval of both the clergy and the state. Elsewhere, there is Kuchipudi dancer Yashoda Thakore's journey of discovery where she stumbles on the bloodlines that link her to Amany, the Devadasi who swept Europe like a storm in 1838 at age 17 and was an ancestor of her guru. In one essay, Lubna Marium explains why a folk form in rural Bangladesh is vilified as 'wicked', and in another, Malaysian Odissi dancer Ramli Ibrahim looks back at how the form found a home in his country over the last four decades.
Although SADI is an academic journal – it is hosted on the website of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte – and its essays are blind and peer reviewed, it allows space for varied kinds and styles of writings. There are straight historiographies, interviews, photo and video essays, sharp political analyses and reflective personal essays. And the essayists include dance practitioners, academics as well as those who straddle both worlds. What this diverse harvest of ideas also yields along the way, Sethi says, are unexpected archives and small histories.
Erasing divides
Exactly what is South Asian dance? Theoretically, it includes all dance forms – classical, folk, popular and ritual – from the South Asian nations of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bhutan. But so high is the perch occupied by Indian classical dances in the hierarchy, especially by Odissi, Kathak and Bharatanatyam, that they overshadow all else, says Munsi.
Indian classical dances acquired the South Asian tag only in the 1980s, argues dance scholar Avanthi Meduri in her essay Labels, Histories, Politics: Indian/South Asian Dance on the Global Stage. The shift happened first in the United Kingdom, where state and institutional support for the Indian forms necessitated a more global profile, she says. There is also the undeniable fact that the UK – and the world at large – is now a free space for the creative intermingling of the South Asian diaspora and its arts. You could, for instance, be a Sri Lankan trained in Bharatanatyam, which informs your contemporary work, or a Pakistani or Bangladeshi dancer trained in Kathak and teaching an Indian student.
One of the best illustrations of these linkages is in the work of young Kathak dancer Sushant Gaurav, who specialises in the rarely seen Lahore Lucknow gharana. In an interview tracking the style in SADI, he speaks of his London-based guru Fasih ur Rehman, who was tutored by the Lahore-based Ghulam Hussain Kathak, himself a student of the legendary Achhan Maharaj. Their ultra slow (ati vilambit) and very unusual Kathak with flowing curves and bends has now traversed several cities, nations and continents to come into its own.
Another remarkably nuanced essay comes from Odissi dancer and scholar Aadya Kaktikar, who argues that the principles of traditional dance forms can coexist with modern notions of egalitarianism. 'Hard boundaries like these serve neither the art nor the artiste – either that all that is classical is rubbish or that all that is not sacred should be thrown out,' she said. 'Odissi is the form my body knows and gives it joy so I don't want to step out of its grammar. But I also have a cognitive understanding of the history and politics of dance. I have to negotiate my own way past any kind of gatekeeping by tradition or modern thinking.'
Kaktikar's arguments hark back to the creative struggles her guru faced in the 1950s, when Odissi was still evolving. The old was dead and the new was still invisible. 'My guru's work is considered canonical in Odissi but as a young man he had to negotiate with the unequal modernity of his time, new audiences and forms of patronage,' she said.
SADI and its attempts at 'decolonising dance writing' in a way is an ideal platform for scholars like Kaktikar, especially since it invites both worldviews – of performers and scholars. 'Academic writing on Indian dance is mostly cornered by scholars at American and European universities,' she pointed out. 'But living, working and writing here needs a different kind of tenor. The problem here is that we have a sharp divide between performance and scholarship that you don't see anywhere else. The written word ignores the oral tradition and the reverse too. Dancers have set the discourse around dance in India but they never talk of its troubled history; and scholars have to initiate any and all critical discourse.'
SADI, in that sense, is a fledgling attempt at erasing these divides. Interestingly, a part of the effort is mentorship of writers who may not have the necessary academic tools or language. 'We are not looking at papers with a regulatory mechanism or that 'I can destroy you' approach,' said Munsi. 'If you need help, we are here to offer it.'