Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T08:07:09.319Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

In Search of a Secular in Contemporary Indian Dance: A Continuing Journey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This essay is the result of a long and tortured preoccupation stemming from my personal history of growing up in Kolkata, India, with a strong tradition of leftist cultural forums; the current escalation of religious fundamentalisms globally; and my questions about the signifying potential of performing bodies in this context. While I have tried to untangle and understand the complicated issues in this search for the secular dancing body in the context of Indian performance, I have been able to arrive only at a series of questions, which, in riotous recoiling, have constantly spun new questions and interjections. I offer my journey through these questions as considerations in thinking through one of the directions of contemporary Indian dance.

While I had been trying to understand the secular traditions in Indian dance for a while, questions around it grew especially urgent with the growing power of Hindu fundamentalism in India, and in particular with the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, by an angry mob of “Hindus” on the grounds that the mosque had been built by Muslim ruler Babar in the sixteenth century, supposedly after destroying a Hindu temple dedicated to Rama which preexisted in that spot. This incident, followed by the Hindutva claim that a new temple dedicated to Rama be built on that spot, sparked offa horrifying spate of communal violence. That the Babri had been one of the last vestiges of the shaqri style of architecture in India was hardly raised. But the overwhelming of cultural icons by religious ideology as mobilized by fundamentalists was indubitable.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2004

References

Works Cited

Allen, Douglas. 1991. Communalism in India. Delhi: Manohar.Google Scholar
Bharucha, Rustom. 1998. In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Berger, Peter L. 1973. The Social Reality of Religion. London: Allen Lane.Google Scholar
Chandralekha Group. 1993. Program Notes, Bhinna Pravaha.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. 1996. Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture, and Power. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kothari, Rajni. 2002. “Remembering December 6.” In Competing Nationalisms in South Asia. Edited by Brass, Paul and Vanaik, Achin. Hyderabad: Orient Longman.Google Scholar
Mudgal, Shubha. 20032004. Personal communications with author.Google Scholar
Nandy, Ashish. 1998. “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance.” In Secularism and Its Critics. Edited by Bhargava, Rajeev. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar