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From Interculturalism to Historicism: Reflections on Classical Indian Dance

At the MTV awards show in September 1998, Madonna performed a spiritual song in a transparent white T-shirt with three Indian Odissi dancers in their classical regalia. Within two days of this event a representative of a Hindu religious sect, the Vaisnavs, condemned Madonna for debasing Hinduism and Indian women. A significant intercultural event, which had been generating pride for some sections of the Indian-American community, had once again exposed the lack of context and historicity in interculturalism. Odissi is not merely an aesthetically pleasing dance form from eastern India; its history is embedded in various ancient fertility cults tied to ritualistic Hindu temple worship by women dancers known as “mahari(s).” The dance was also performed by young male dancers known as “gotipua(s),” who performed outside the temple. Frederique Marglin traces Odissi to the powerful cult of Chaitanya (a Vaisnavite saint reformer) in the sixteenth century (1985). She explains that, like many indigenous dance forms, it was simply called nacha before its revival in the 1950s by dance scholars and male teachers. Thus, the dance is a product of a complex mix of Hindu nationalism, regional chauvinism, and national revivalism and is embedded in patriarchal views of the role and function of women in society. Madonna's commercial interculturalism failed to take note of this: By trying to glamorize an exotic tradition she, unsurprisingly, offended the self-appointed bearers of that tradition.