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New Directions In Indian Dance

Illustrated with stunning photographs which brilliantly capture the dynamism of the act of dancing, this volume is not only a delight for the eye, it is also intellectually stimulating. This is a book which marks a seminal moment in the historiography of Indian dance. Written for a non-specialist readership, it takes stock, examines, and celebrates, for the first time, the exciting work, increasingly known as modern/contemporary dance to differentiate it from the classical tradition, created by Indian performers throughout the twentieth century. Most of the essays have been written by practitioners reflecting on their experience but there are also contributions by non-practitioners, such as an essay on the pioneering choreographer Uday Shankar by Kapila Vatsyayan, a most influential Indian writer and scholar who has been instrumental in initiating critical debate within Indian dance, and other essays written by dance critics such as Kothari himself, Arundhati Subrahmanyam, and Sanjoy Roy, a journalist based in the United Kingdom. After a measured introduction by Kothari, the reader is taken on a historical journey, beginning with a section entitled Early Experiments. Here one encounters a reprint of Vatsyayan's 1974 essay on Shankar and his associates, covering work from the 1930s to the early 1970s. The essay is augmented with an "Afterthought" authored by Vatsyayan in 2002, in which she reiterates the difficulty of attempting to "chalk out" any "linear graph" concerning developments, emphasising that classical and contemporary are not mutually exclusive and experimentation occurs across the board. What is lacking, says Vatsyayan, is a critical discourse within the Indian context which matches "the proliferation and eclecticism in performance" (31). This is indeed a gap which should be filled and this volume makes a first move in this direction. The next essay is by the late Manjushri Chaki Sircar, founder of the Dancers' Guild in Calcutta, where a new methodology, later turned into a full-fledged dance technique, known as navanritya, was fashioned by her and her daughter Ranjabati, whose essay on navanritya appears in the following section. Chaki Sircar writes about Tagore and the modernisation of dance, foregrounding the great Bengali poet's cosmopolitanism which led him to embrace western and Southeast Asian influences. He was also inspired by traditional Indian forms such as Kathakali and Manipuri, distilling his own concept of dance and his own idiom out of this interesting amalgam. Chaki Sircar