In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora by Ketu H. Katrak
  • Uttara Asha Coorlawala
Contemporary Indian Dance: New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora by Ketu H. Katrak. 2011. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. xxxviii + 255 pp., photographs, notes, bibliography, glossary. $85.00 cloth.

Ketu Katrak's book, which analyzes recent Indian dances in India, North America, and Britain, sympathetically delineates the career trajectories of artists, their personal struggles in breaking from their traditional training, their negotiations with cultural stereotypes, and their choreographic intentions and aspirations. Katrak examines dance techniques, choices of narrative, expressivity, and abstraction to distinguish a continuum of choreographic innovations from within the boundaries of traditional forms such as kathak and bharatanatyam. Through specific chapters, she groups artists as creative, emerging, hybrid, and diasporic while acknowledging that many of these artists' trajectories and creative works move across categories.

Katrak is a well-known postcolonial writer who heads the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California-Irvine. Originally from Mumbai, India, she trained in bharatanatyam in Los Angeles for twenty years with Medha Yodh (xxii).

In her introduction, Katrak finds useful links between the various dance discourses of India and recent American dance theories, particularly Diedre Sklar's work on body-mind practices and the somatic organization of knowledge, Susan Leigh Foster's notions of performative writing and of reading dancing, and Randy Martin's work on the ways that the dance resists representation (22). She analyzes how various performative elements work in combination to produce the emotional resonances that audiences will experience or "taste" as rasa. Katrak draws from the historic arguments on rasa that occurred between the scholars of the Natya Shastra in Abhinavagupta's tenth century commentary and subsequent translations. She traces the problem of how emotion transfers from performers to observers, and from text to reader (21).

In her first chapter, Katrak recounts the contested and now obligatory narrative of nineteenth and early twentieth century anticolonial and gender struggles as a background or prelude to the current scene. Here, devadasis, narthakis, and modern pioneers such as Uday Shankar and Chandralekha are woven together. The contestations between Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi Arundale having to do with the recovery/ reconstruction of bharatanatyam have always been deeply troubling to dancers, who line up along one or the other side of this narrative.1 Katrak succinctly weaves together the arguments of both sides into an updated summary of the twentieth-century history of bharatanatyam in particular.

What is interesting here is that a generation of scholars and dancers seems to have arrived that is removed enough to acknowledge the positive and painful aspects of each story. In the 1980s, a puzzling blanket of resistant silence cloaked the narratives of these dance ancestresses. Katrak's writing made me consider what has changed between the 1980s and the [End Page 137] present time. For one thing, a profusion of piecemeal responses and theorized articles has been filling in information, actively honing our sensitivities to the subjectivity of overwritten bodies. Scholars outside India, protected by their geographic and disciplinary distance, have remapped the narrative. These stories have spawned counter-narratives from dancers within India who feel overly implicated or marginalized by the homogenized narrating styles. Each rewrite has added nuances and historical details, and shown a diversity of narratives from the various regions within the subcontinent.

What I have since come to realize is that perhaps those who wrote in the twentieth century maintained their silence out of either respect for the privacy of women living under the shadow of moral and cultural upheaval, or because they did not wish to be associated publicly with such passionately contested concerns. Time has eroded the institutions and discourses that objectified, repressed, and protected devadasis, rajadasis, natchwalis, baijis, maharis, etc., and time has also distanced us enough to revisit and excavate those social and politicized networks along with their bodily consequences. An additional factor in bringing discussion into the open were an abundance of newspaper and magazine articles in India in the 1980s and 1990s that highlighted women's issues and a feminist perspective.

In her second chapter, Katrak examines current veterans of trans-local Indian...

pdf

Share