In Search of a Secular in Contemporary Indian Dance: A Continuing Journey

Abstract

This essay is the result of a long and tortured preoccupation stemming from my personal history of growing up in Kolkata, India, with a strong tradition of leftist cultural forums; the current escalation of religious fundamentalisms globally; and my questions about the signifying potential of performing bodies in this context. While I have tried to untangle and understand the complicated issues in this search for the secular dancing body in the context of Indian performance, I have been able to arrive only at a series of questions, which, in riotous recoiling, have constantly spun new questions and interjections. I offer my journey through these questions as considerations in thinking through one of the directions of contemporary Indian dance. While I had been trying to understand the secular traditions in Indian dance for a while, questions around it grew especially urgent with the growing power of Hindu fundamentalism in India, and in particular with the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, by an angry mob of “Hindus” on the grounds that the mosque had been built by Muslim ruler Babar in the sixteenth century, supposedly after destroying a Hindu temple dedicated to Rama which preexisted in that spot. This incident, followed by the Hindutva claim that a new temple dedicated to Rama be built on that spot, sparked offa horrifying spate of communal violence. That the Babri had been one of the last vestiges of the shaqri style of architecture in India was hardly raised. But the overwhelming of cultural icons by religious ideology as mobilized by fundamentalists was indubitable.

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