Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State by Anurima Banerji (review)

Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State by Anurima Banerji is the first critical book-length inquiry of the eastern Indian classical dance form called Odissi. It is an ambitious genealogical project tracing the plurality of stories and histories of the development of Odissi in ancient, medieval, colonial, and postcolonial periods. Showing Odissi's extraordinary scope in transcending quotidian norms in gender and sexuality, Banerji argues that the state functions as a choreographic agent "that generates and prescribes idealized movements of the body and social relations" (3). While describing the performativity of Odissi, the author coins the term "paratopic performance," which she defines as a practice that creates a space of alterity that reimagines social norms and orthodoxies of gender and sexuality. Using historical, ethnographic, discursive, and choreographic analysis, Banerji recreates a somatic history of the past critically re-membering class, religion, caste, region, sexuality, and gender. She presents a genealogy of history while attending to the possibility of the performative—a kinetic and social manufacturing of space. She focuses on the subversive potential of the dancing body to prescribe and exceed the systemic choreographies of the state. Attending to ballet's universalist pretense of classicism, Banerji shows the ritual, devotional, and sastric (Hindu) sanction of Odissi and untethers the form from its exclusive link with the sacred, contesting the prestige-drive mystique sanctioned by Hindu religiosity. Banerji's impressive theoretical and historical exegesis revolves around two scholarly constellations associated with Odissi—one that precludes the possibility of deconstructing the religious sanction and another that views it as a political project deploying heritage politics to legitimize the form's emblematic status.

Dancing Odissi presents a rigorous methodological approach that is culturally situated in the praxis of Odissi while presenting an alternative to existing dance-history models. Positioning herself as an insider, Banerji challenges the dominant narratives of Odissi via insights drawn from fieldwork, material culture, and dance repertoire. Banerji's approach reveals Odissi's deployment of a hermeneutic strategy; her own practice is supplemented by literary, online, screen-based, photographic, musical, sculptural, material, and ritualistic mediations of the form. The maneuver of asserting the agency of the dancing body as opposed to an individuated dancer is particularly compelling. Odissi unfurls through a collective, social process across history. Banerji theorizes the distributed historical body of dance across embodied performance, ritual, philosophy, aesthetics, architecture, and material objects. Reading historical evidence anew shows the indelible connections between dance and the political, wherein the state deploys and depends on dance. Rightfully recognizing a gap in the field, Banerji dedicates a chapter-length inquiry to a rigorous analysis of ancient inscriptions and sculptures belonging to the Jain era. This prob-lematizes the perceived exclusivity of Hindu religiosity as weaponized by right-wing Hindu fundamentalists for toxic, sociocultural engineering. By demonstrating Odissi's undifferentiated reverence for inscription, embodied motion, and material remains, Banerji provides an alternative to the Eurocentric dance history model.

As indicated above, Banerji locates a paratopic potential within Odissi: some practitioners, for example, are known to have transgressed gender norms. Historically, Odissi has been practiced by Maharis, ritual specialists appointed in the temple as brides of the male Hindu deity, and Gotipuas, young male dancers dressed as females. Maharis enjoyed divine status by virtue of her association with Jagannath, the Odishan male deity presiding over Odissi. The Gotipua act was also replete with divinity, since the performance took place as an integral manifestation of the Bhakti cult in which the devotee seeks the devoted as a feminine entity. The transgender dancer, then, becomes an act constituted only in practice of embodying femininity to honor the divine. As within the Japanese performance genre Kabuki, where adult men perform as women, an indication of virtuosity in Gotipua lies in the ability to embody the feminine. While the Gotipiia escaped colonial scrutiny, Banerji shows how the Mahans were subjected to the discursive violence of colonial...