The Dancing Body

This book, with its focus on the dancing body, is the first of its kind within the context of dance in India. It brings together emerging discourses around dance and the body that have become central in the Indian nation-state. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Urmimala Sarkar Munsi is Professor and Dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics in Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her research overlaps the intersection between dance, gender and lived experience; practice /theory interface; documenting performance; and the politics of identity and regional performances. Her recent publications are Uday Shankar and his Transcultural Experimentations: Dancing Modernity (2022), Alice Boner Across Arts and Geographies: Shaping the Dance Art of Uday Shankar (2021), Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India (2024), Marg Dance Readings (co- edited with Anita Cherian, 2023). Aishika Chakraborty is Professor and Director of the School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. A gender historian, her current research thrives at the interface of class, patriarchy and performance of the labouring bodies in Indian contemporary and popular dance. She is the author of Widows of Colonial Bengal: Gender, Morality and Cultural Representation (2023) Kolkatar Nach: Samakalin Nagarnritya (2019) and Kolkatar Cabaret: Bangali, Younata ebang Miss Shefali (2020). She is currently working on a co-edited volume titled Gendered Bodies, Social Exclusions: Contemporary Issues in Women's Studies (Routledge).

Preface Introduction: The dancing body: labour, livelihood and leisure 1. Becoming a body 2. Artistic labour in dance and painting: revisiting the theory-practice debate via mimesis (Anukrti) and the abject body 3. Folk dance/vulgar dance: erotic lavani and the hereditary performance labour 4. Calcutta cabaret: dance of pleasure or perversion? 5. The erotic power of the dancer: labour of the erotic and the bodies of the sensory in the Arkestra of North India 6. The phantom of history: figurations of the dancing body and the 'Sitara Devi problem' of Indian cinema 7. Disco flamboyance, performative masculinities and dancer heroes of Bengali cinema 8. Choreographing the queer: Visual and textual stimuli in Mandeep Raikhy's dance-making process 9. The body and the contagion: a symbiosis of yoga, dance, health and spirituality 10. The award-wapsi controversy in India and the politics of dance