When A Dancer Bridged Philosophy Music & Dance.docx

Chitrolekha Journal on Art and Design

This paper is a study of the progress of Kathak from the erstwhile courtesan culture to the contemporary classroom, structured practice. It aims to highlight the works of contributors like Nirmala Joshi and Sumitra Charat Ram as the pioneers of institutional Kathak that completely divorced its cultural past in the Mughal courts. Amidst all this cleansisng of Kathak history, Madame Menaka, one of the first female Kathak dancers to perform on the proscenium stage and to legitimise her presence by her association with insitutions of Kathak stands out. Madame Menaka truly deserves more attention in dance history and this paper aims to celebrate her life and works in Kathak. These artists and art entrepreneurs have never come together on the same platform for their contributions in the field of art and culture as they do in this paper. Their works lie scattered in biographies and articles that perform a discrete study on each of them. This paper is therefore an attempt to draw a linear d...

The article aims to examine the extent to which the present day mobility of dance professionals and global, cultural flows hybridize Kathak art and practice in India. It focuses on innovative approaches and cross-cultural productions of selected Indian artists, highlighting the significance of their entanglement in the global networks of dance professionals and cultural markets as key factors of refashioning Kathak tradition. I shall explore the emerging pursuit of these artists toward pluralistic aesthetics, juxtaposing it with the phenomenon of the colonial mimicry (Bhabha 2004). I intend to address the following questions: What motivates the choreographers to use the hybrid language of dance? Is this language a strategy of innovation, consciously and willingly chosen by the artists, or rather the inheritance of colonial past, nowadays unwittingly reproduced through globalization? Does the cultural hybridity facilitates liberation of the dance from Orientalist and colonial discourses? What is its potential to reproduce national identity and to raise intercultural dialogues through the dance? Are these two objectives irreconcilable? This essay is based on fi eldwork conducted primarily in Kolkata in 2015. Among several leading metropolitan centers of Kathak development, that I have researched (New Delhi, Mumbai, Kol-kata, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Bangalore), Kolkata appears to provide an environment particularly susceptible to the infl ux of concepts, techniques and practices from other cultures. This is apparent in the stage productions of Padatik, Rhythmosaic Dance Company, and Anurekha Ghosh Company, which will be discussed here as examples illustrating the dynamics of cultural hybridization and contextualized against changing, socio-cultural and economic conditions. Over the last two decades, one could observe an increasing number of cross-cultural dance productions, in which the various dance forms, categorized as " ethnic " or " national dances " are being fused with each other. Such practices seem to become more and more popular in the world of South Asian dance, taking variety of trajec-tories: from deliberate remixing of diff erent dance techniques to the more concealed forms of transculturation within dance traditions.

My PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2004.

Dance Matters: Performing India. Eds. Pallabi Chakravorty and Nilanjana Gupta , 2010

Dance Research Journal, 2006

MUSICultures, 2010

Although Euro-American musical revivals are usually connected to folk music, the postcolonial Indian revival privileged “classical” music and dance as objects of priceless national heritage. Yet, the revival in India was not a straightforward process of cultural recovery in the wake of occupation. Issues of authority, authenticity and appropriation are woven into the process of reclamation. Through a comparison of this period in Indian dance history with themes in current theories of revival, this article moves towards a model of “revival” as a global phenomenon seeking to broaden our understanding of cultural continuity and change.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), 2015

Through a phenomenological account of apprenticeship in the North Indian dance form of kathak, I show how skills are adapted and changed through the ingenuity and innovation required in teaching to new generations of students. The traditional pedagogical model for learning in the Indian arts, the guru-shishya parampara (master-disciple relationship), has historically been based on imitative and repetitive pedagogies. Yet close examination reveals less conspicuous forms of creativity at work in the process of reproducing the tradition with fidelity; this improvisational work is further heightened in the demands of teaching in the diaspora. As teachers create opportunities for experiential learning, a spectrum of pedagogical tactics, scaffolding strategies, and coaching competencies are developed and accumulate as this tradition is passed on from one generation to the next. The pedagogical work in crafting fidelity can, in fact, produce its own kind of knowledge, which, ironically, can add new elements to the tradition in unexpected ways. In one unique case – the example of ‘kathak yoga’ – the pedagogical adaptations of kathak artist Pandit Chitresh Das elicited a creative response, a new scaffolding technique that would eventually be incorporated into the repertoire as a skill in itself. Pedagogical process, in this sense, was creative process.

Anthropological Notebooks, 2010

Kathak, a classical dance form from northern India, characterised by rhythmically sophisticated footwork, quick turns and storytelling, is traditionally passed down from teacher to student through a close relationship known as the guru-shishya parampara (teacher-disciple tradition). This article examines the shifts in teaching and dance techniques over three generations of gurus and shishyas within one gharānā (stylistic school) of Kathak. Both the culture of training and dance materials have been adapted to changing socio-historical realities, from the decline of the courtesan culture and the growing independence movement in northern India in the early 20 th century to the dance's transplantation in North America in the latter part of the century. This close study of one dance lineage illuminates the impact that changing historical realities and individual proclivities have played in kathak's stylistic development. It demonstrates that even the basic elements of this style of kathak have been subject to change; furthermore, this flexibility has been a vital part of the teaching of this solo performance tradition since at least the mid-twentieth century. Dance finely tunes sensibilities, helping to shape the practices, behaviours, beliefs and ideas of people's lives. At the same time, the multiplicity of ethnographic realities shapes the unique and historical occasion of any dance. All this raises questions about the transmission and transformation of dance from one cultural setting to another, as well as from one historical period to another (Bull 1997: 285).

The paper explores the ambivalent nature of poems that are part and parcel of the kathak dance repertoire in the context of a changing system of dance patronage during the 19th and 20th centuries in North India. Through a textual analysis of selected ṭhumrī songs, the author investigates the use of śṛṅgāra rasa (erotic sentiment) in this poetic genre in relation to its original, secular function and its interpretation in religious idioms. The comparison of traditional ṭhumrī s with the compositions prevalent on the modern, classical dance stage shall underline a shift in the character of kathak performance (from romantic, sensual and intimate to devotional and impersonal). The attempts to locate ṭhumrī in the shastric framework and to 'purify' the content of these poems from the imprints of its lineage with tawā'if s culture is examined as part of the process of reinventing kathak in response to the tastes of a new class of patrons and performers and matching this art to the vision of Indian cultural heritage, propagated by nationalists.