This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Purkayastha, P. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Warrior, Untouchable, Courtesan

Fringe Women in Tagore’s Dance Dramas

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK [e-mail: ppurkayastha{at}dmu.ac.uk]

This article analyses the intimate links between dance and the processes of national and postcolonial identity formation in India, particularly in Bengal, in the twentieth century. It examines alternative, non-classical artistic experiments in the realm of theatre dance spawned by twentieth century cultural nationalism in India, focusing on dancing bodies that actively engaged with, and wrote different meanings for, the socio-political space they inhabited. Dance-dramas written by Rabindranath Tagore in the 1930s are used as points of entry into a discourse on South Asian modernism and feminism, opening up a space in which the twentieth century representation of Indian women through bodily performance troubles notions of cultural purity and origin and offers instead ‘impure’ but nevertheless powerful cultural texts.

Key Words: Bengal • classical dance • culture • dance • feminism • identity • modernism • nationalism • postcolonial theory • Tagore • texts

South Asia Research, Vol. 29, No. 3, 255-273 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/026272800902900304


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?