Scripting Dance in Contemporary India

As stories of Indian dance's renaissance span almost a full century, there has emerged a globally dispersed community of Indian dancers, scholars and audiences who are deeply committed to keeping these traditions alive and experimenting with traditional dance languages to grapple with contemporary themes and issues. Scripting Dance in Contemporary India is an edited volume that contributes to this field of Indian dance studies. The book engages with multiple dance forms of India and their representations. The contributions are eclectic, including writings by both scholars and performers who share their experiential knowledge. There are four sections in the book - section I titled, "Representations' has three chapters that deal with textual representations and illustrations of dance and dancers, and the significance of those representations in the present. Section II titled, "Histories in Process" consists of two chapters that engage with the historiographies of dance forms and suggest that histories are narratives that are continually created. In the third section, "Negotiations", the four chapters address the different ways in which dance is embedded in society, and the different ways in which the aesthetics of a form has to negotiate with social, economic and political imperatives. The final section, "Other Voices/ Other Bodies" brings voices which are outside the mainstream of dance as 'serious' art.

Mythili Anoop teaches at Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management University.
Varun Gulati teaches English literature at the University of Delhi.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Mythili Anoop and Varun Gulati
IRepresentations
The Sacred and the ProfaneC R Rajendran
The Indian Dancing Girl in Early Colonial Travel WritingRuchika Sharma
IIHistories in Process
Unraveling Mohiniyattam's OutlawJustine Lemos
Building a NatyashastraAnandi Salinas
East and West, Araimandi and Arabesque: The Emergence of Indian Dance in the American Performing Arts SceneKelli Ling and Sushmita Arunkumar
IIINegotiations
Working Through the 'Difficult Whole': Analyzing Ananya Chatterjea's Mohona: Estuaries of DesireKaustvi Sarkar
Changing Landscape of Dance in South India - Effect of Economic Liberalization on Dance Practices and PatronageVeena Basavarajaiah
Dancing Narratives: Performing Mythology in Globalized Spaces Mythili Anoop
Picturing DanceDivya Venkatesh
IVOther Presences
Thidambu Nrittham: A Practitioner's PerspectivePuthumana Govindan Namboodiri
Listening to 'Women of God': A Report on a Journey from real to ReelMelvin Pinto S J
About the Contributors
Index