Prarthana Purkayastha – författare

The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance is a volume of original essays that consolidates novel research and contemporary analytical approaches to critical Indian dance studies from across the world. It explores new frontiers of scholarship suggested by its contributing authors, and calls attention to urgent agendas that are central to the current field of Indian dance studies. The volume highlights key social and political dimensions of Indian dance and intersecting concerns such as ability, caste, class, gender, nationhood, race, region, religion, and sexuality. The essays are organized around six core conceptual areas - dance discourses; rasa and affect; dance history; practice as research; dance activism; dancing the popular; and dancing across borders. Together they represent the voices of scholars and artists spread over four continents. Far from indicating pure stability, the volume foregrounds the manifold movements of Indian dance, its capacity for both positive social change and untold violence, its function as both democratic and hegemonic art form, its robust transnational past and present, its rhizomatic itineraries and shapeshifting. The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance offers an invaluable resource on Indian dance production, processes, pedagogies, performance, and perceptions.

In a time of colonial subjugation, subaltern, illicit and courtesan dancers in India radically disturbed racist, casteist and patriarchal regimes of thought. The criminalized 'nautch' dancer, vilified by both British colonialism and Indian nationalism, appears in this book across multiple locations, materials and timelines: from colonial human exhibits in London to open-air concerts in Kolkata, from heritage Bengali bazaar art to cheap matchbox labels and frayed scrapbooks, and from the late nineteenth century to our world today. Combining historiography and archival research, close reading of dancing bodies in visual culture, analysis of gestures absent and present, and performative writing, Prarthana Purkayastha brings to light rare materials on nautch women, real and fictional outlawed dancers, courtesans and sex-workers from India. Simultaneously, she decolonises existing ontologies of dance and performance as disappearance and advocates for the restless remains of nautch in animating urgent debates on race, caste, gender and sexuality today.

This book examines modern dance as a form of embodied resistance to political and cultural nationalism in India through the works of five selected modern dance makers: Rabindranath Tagore, Uday Shankar, Shanti Bardhan, Manjusri Chaki Sircar and Ranjabati Sircar.