The promise of critical liberation that postcolonial and transnational perspectives offer by urging us to think the complex imbrication of the global in the local remains an unfulfilled promise in South Asian dance scholarship. I will elaborate this point by describing the global thrust of Rukmini Devi's art and education movement, which could not be recuperated within the territorializing intellectual framework of Indian nationalism, and explain why she, in fact, manifests herself as a discursive failure in standard scholarly accounts of Bharatanatyam in the United States.

Part I: Bharatanatyam manifests itself as a world form today, quite like Ballet, albeit with a different genealogy. It is researched in western academic institutions in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, as well as in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. Practitioners and dance scholars organize international conferences focused on Bharatanatyam all over the world today, and the Dance Studies Program at Roehampton, supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), has assumed a leadership role in providing a new, global profile for the dance.

Ballipadu is a small village in the West Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh, South India. One of the most prominent markers in the village landscape is the Madanagopālasvāmi temple (Fig. 1). Pemmaraju Konayamatya constructed the temple sometime in the late eighteenth century (exact dates unknown). The central image in the temple is that of Kṛṣṇa as Madanagopālasvāmi, The Cowherd Beautiful as the God of Desire (Fig. 2). From the time of its consecration, the Ballipadu Madanagopālasvāmi temple had supported over fifteen devadāsīs (women artists who served in temples and/or courts) by providing them with tax-free land, money, and a platform to present their art. In return, some of the women performed ritual tasks such as the waving of the fiveflames (pañca-hārati) and the pot lamp (kumbha-hārati), as ritual duties in the temple. In 1948, at the end of a long struggle with the discursive contours of social reform, five women—Manikyam, Anusuya, Varahalu, Seshachalam and Maithili—were expelled from the temple. These five women from Ballipadu subsequently moved to the small town of Duwa, where they maintain a small matrifocal home, adhering to their traditional patterns of kinship as devadāsīs. They do not ostensibly retain any markers of devadāsī identity: they no longer sing or dance in public, have any ritual duties in temples, receive tax-free land (mãnyãlu) from temples or feudal kingdoms (zamīndāri samasthānas), and bless homes during auspicious occasions. Yet, they insist on referring to themselves as devadāsīs, despite the extreme social stigma attached to this identity.

As Bharatanatyam dancers across the world talk about what they do through listservs, websites, and performance publicity—in academia's world dance courses and amidst international cultural diplomats—I keep re-encountering the Orientalist representation of a “pan Indian transhistorical” devadāsī. Her history is a linear deterioration of aesthetic quality and personal agency, from temple to courts and from courts to streets and to (deserved) abandonment from where the dancer and the dance must be rescued (see Hanna 1993; Banerji 1983).

The lifestyle of the sadir dancers of the early twentieth century was extensively researched by Amrit Srinivasan (1979–81) and documented in her ethnographic dissertation at Cambridge University 1984 and in subsequent articles.2 The devadāsī was selected for her talent. She was highly trained in dance, texts, and music, and she performed temple rituals. Her freedom from household responsibilities (grhastya) was made possible by the largesse of a patron, and bhakti theology legitimized “both the housewife and god's wife as parallel life-possibilities” both for women and for those men who could afford to support both kinds of liaisons. Temples frequently reimbursed devadāsī-s with bourses and land donations.

Dancers today persist in maintaining that dancers had no “technique” since they danced only for God, that they knew nothing of music or theory, performed in a vulgar manner, and that contemporary dancers are much more beautiful, intelligent, and better trained.

The Nāṭyaśāstra is a Sanskrit work on drama, dance, and music of uncertain date, which has acquired the status of Ur-text of Indian classical dance. It was in the twentieth century, through the modernization process of bharatanatyam, that the Nāṭyaśāstra and its related texts came to be regarded as setting out the grammar of Indian dance classicism (Coorlawala 1994; Meduri 1996; O'Shea 2001).

Chapter 4 of the Nāṭyaśāstra deals specifically with dance, here distinct from acting, and describes the 108 dance units—Karaṇas—of the tāṇḍava dance of Śiva and their combinations, dance phrases named aṇgahāras (NS 1988–89, 4, w. 1–245). This particular chapter of the Nāṭyaśāstra has attracted attention ever since Naidu, Naidu, and Pantulu published its translation into English, Tānḍavalakṇaṣam, in 1936. Since then there have been other translations of the Nāṭyaśāstra, among which the two volumes by Manmohan Ghosh, in 1951 and 1956 respectively, and different interpretations of the Karaṇas of chapter 4. Readings have drawn on the iconography of the Karaṇas as found at the temples at Thanjavur, Kumbakonam, and Chidambaram in southern India. The karana reliefs on the walls of Kumbakonam and Chidambaram have been identified by inscriptions found on each karaṇa slab, that give the Sanskrit name of the karaṇa as recorded in the Nāṭyaśāstra.

In the first few moments of Parallel Passions, the program devised for Mavin Khoo Dance and toured extensively around Britain in the fall of 2003, the halflight atmosphere creates difficulties in distinguishing among dancers (Fig. 1). Bodies, genders, technical backgrounds, and ethnicity become subsumed for a few short moments to a greater purpose that is unconcerned with the trappings of identity, and the viewer begins to wonder optimistically how this will evolve. The effect is not sustained, however, and another evening of worthy crosscultural experiments in dance forms unfolds. Being momentarily surprised in this way helped to develop some interesting ideas. What remains in memory are those extraordinary moments where the project of Modern Britain seemed suddenly to have shape and be given expression. The eclectic mix of the dancers and their heritages, cultural and professional, was abandoned as a preoccupation. This allowed, albeit momentarily, a protean practice to peep through the layers of cultural ritual. The embrace of ballet and bharatanatyam cited in the promotional literature became momentarily irrelevant. But then, as if recalling the essence of the project and its obligation to teach lessons about sympathy and tolerance through the arts, a touring show financed by six different funding sources remembered itself and resorted to comparing and contrasting, later abandoning seriousness altogether for a light-hearted jazzbased club number. During a ponderous second half the dancers looked to be willing a connection that would not come, and then it was over.

Today, Bollywood dance has become a term used by film professionals, amateur performers, and audiences to refer to dances choreographed to Hindi film songs. The question of what Bollywood dance is, however, remains debated in both movement and text. In classes, Bollywood dance movement varies in quality and style from song to song, instructor to instructor, and choreographer to choreographer. Costume choices, facial expressions, gestures (as interpretations of sung lyrics), “jhatkas and matkas” (percussive “emphasizing] … pelvic movement”) (Kabir 2001, 189), wrist whirls, and turns, all set to film music could be identified as essential ingredients of “Bollywood dance.” Yet, this definition only begins to skim the surface of what constitutes Indian film dance, as Hindi films make up approximately one-third out of the more than eight hundred films produced in India every year (Nandy 1995). Popular films produced by language-specific regional cinemas include song and dances that often retain a degree of regional specificity. While it is important to recognize the similarities shared by these dance traditions, it is also necessary to acknowledge the definitional slippage underlying the collo quial use of the term “Bollywood Dance.” For the sake of clarity, I limit the term “Bollywood dance” to a description of choreography inspired by Hindi films. This includes combinations taught in dance classes and performed on stages. I use “Hindi film dance” to refer to song and dance sequences contained in the films themselves.

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.

Barnard College, Columbia University, hosted the 2004 Barbara Stoler Miller Conference in New York City, February 20–22, 2004. Called “Contesting Pasts, Performing Futures: Nationalism, Globalization, and the performing arts in Modern South Asia,” the conference recognized the growing scholarship in the field of South Asian performing arts. Since “performing arts” as a scholastic field of inquiry arrests little attention within the complex enormity of Asian Studies conferences, and diminishingly so, South Asian performing arts occupy just as little space within performing arts conferences (Association for Theater in Higher Education, Society for Ethnomusicology, American Anthropological Association, Society of Dance History Scholars, Congress on Research in Dance, and others), the 2004 Barbara Stoler Miller Conference certainly provided one of the few opportunities open to South Asian performance artists and scholars to discuss their most contemporary research works, to demonstrate and perform, and to get to know each other.

Barbara Stoler Miller, a Milbank Professor at Barnard, was a distinguished Sanskritist with strong interests in art history. She died of cancer at age fifty-two in April 1993. Among the corpus of the Sanskrit literature translations she published is Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva's Gitagovinda (Columbia 1977), a text that has been for centuries close to the hearts of many Indian dancers, and another edited by her, Theatre of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa (Columbia 1984), presented a topic that has earned significant popularity in Euro-American academia.

Total Masala Slammer/Heartbreak no. 5, conceived and directed by Belgian director Michel Laub and visual artist Marina Abramovic, has been described as a European American Indian multimedia theater project combining dance, theater, video projection, art installation, and music. Laub and Abramovic draw on vastly mixed references to deal with themes of race and multiculturalism. A recurrent theme is women and their abuse in different cultural perspectives. Laub and Abramovic are fascinated by two extremes of Indian culture: on the one side the purity of classical Indian dance and art, kathak; on the other, the triviality of soap operas and kitschy TV serials produced by Bollywood (Archa Theatre 2001). Laub's theater is said to play with the conventions of theatrical representation, constantly bringing the rehearsal process onto the stage. Less interested in trained actors than in forceful personalities, Laub looks for a fusion of the autobiographical details of his performers with fictional situations. So, what happens when Michel Laub, a postmodernist with a tendency to parody order, system, and signification, collaborates with Kumudini Lakhia, a traditional reformist for whom art is about poetry, wonder, simplicity, and dignity?

In Total Masala Slammer, unrequited love is “performed” in different performance traditions of kathak and bharatanatyam, Bollywood soap opera, and German theater. Actors, sometimes wearing period costumes, read out excerpts from a book with exaggerated melodrama or affected irreverence. Audition videos are screened, and there is much dancing—contemporary dance, cabaret, kathak, and bharatanatyam. It has a deliberately fragmented piece-by-piece approach with actors seated on stage, taking turns to perform their acts.

This short talk, written over a decade ago, was originally presented at Seema Haria's arangetram in Cleveland, Ohio on July 31, 1993. At that performative event, Seema's dancing was showcased for an audience of over 200 friends and family. Although over the years I have lost contact with Seema, I have continued to be involved with different aspects of Classical Indian Dance, both in the United States and abroad. I have also taught dance (including Contact Improvisation) in India, and I find myself engaging with the concept of rasa that I present here in various aspects of my life.

The exchange of ideas across cultures is a strange and wondrous phenomenon. Real concerns about cultural appropriation and the unequal access to the power of representation mean that we must learn to tread carefully across regional and ethnic differences. Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century I am more convinced than ever that these exchanges, when consciously initiated, can be extraordinarily fruitful. There is something compelling for me about Classical Indian Dance, and as I engage with various forms and their histories, I am inspired to share in the dancing—intellectually, physically, and spiritually. Please join me.