Speaking of Dance: The Indian Critique

Mandakranta Bose is Director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where she also teaches in the Department of Near Eastern, Classical and Religious Studies. She began her Sanskrit studies in Calcutta and continued with them for her doctorate in Oxford. Her research covers the classical performing arts of India, Sanskrit literature, and the representation of women and the arts and literatures of India. Among her many publications are Movement and Mimesis, (1991), The Dance Vocabulary of Classical India (1995), and an edited volume, Faces of the feminine in Classical, Medieval and Modern India (2000).

About the Book:

Indian classical dance is a 'high art'. In ancient India, it was even venerated as a 'sacred' act. Ever since Bharata wrote his seminal Natyasastra (c. 200 CE), it has been one of the central elements of scholarly discourse, generating a whole host of learned treatises. Mandakranta Bose here takes s close look at this vast Sanskritic textual corpus attempting not only to reconstruct India's two-millennia-long dance tradition, but also to dispel the historical and aesthetic misconceptions woven around it.

With a fresh, critical appraisal of the key concepts surfacing from the Natyasastra of Bharata Muni and some of the other landmark treatises, like Abhinayadarpana, Sangitaratnakara, and Nartanairnaya, the book tries to highlight how these time-honoured writings have contributed to the evolution of classical dancing in India. And, yet more significantly perhaps, the author ventures into a comparatively uncharted terrain seeking to explore the status of performing arts (including dance) in early Jaina tradition. Focussing on the position of dancing in the contemporary cultural life of India, Mandakranta Bose shows how classical dance in India today of tradition and modernity, leading to a vigorous revival of a great heritage, a part of the larger effort towards 'nationalist rediscovery'.

Supporting the text with visual material to correlate the theory and practice of dancing in India, the book offers perceptions that will appeal to everyone involved with performing arts.