Why The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Yoga, Bharatnatyam, Chhau, And Processes Of Expropriation

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2025

Published In

The Oxford Handbook Of Indian Dance

Abstract

In this chapter, the author argues that nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking undergirds the search for the origins of classical and contemporary Indian dances pioneered by iconic figures such as Rukmini Devi and Chandralekha. These searches yielded, in both instances, a penchant for a pure Vedic past that was foundational to the yogic philosophy of the transcendental body. As a result, an implicit hierarchy of bodies became entrenched in the categories of Indian dances, from “tribal” and “folk” to “classical” and “contemporary.” It continues in the way classical and contemporary dancers continue to incorporate yoga, spirituality, and energy/prana in their practice without historicizing yoga’s complicated past that encompasses various communities in India including possession cults and fakirs. The marginalization or erasure of Islamic and subaltern aesthetics from Indian dance narratives are an aspect of these ideological groundings. Here I show how Chhau, a new semi-classical genre, illustrates the politics of Sanskritization and the continuation of yogic assimilation for gaining national status for the so-called folk forms. While elite and upper-caste bodies perform classicism and contemporaneity on the concert stage today, caste- and class-oppressed folk and tribal bodies emerge as commercial, erotic, and inauthentic as they rapidly integrate with the market forces of globalization

Keywords

yoga, Brahmin, bharatnatyam, contemporary, Chaau, theosophy, evolutionary theory, Kathak, spirituality, folk

Published By

Oxford University Press

Editor(s)

A. Banerji and P. Purkayastha

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