Odissi holds iconic status as one of the eight classical dance forms recognized and promoted by the Indian government. This book traces the dance’s transformation from its historical role as a regional artistic practice to its modern incarnation as transnational spectacle, with a focus on the state’s regulation of the dance form and the performances of gender embedded within it. Using an interdisciplinary approach that brings together social history, political theory, and dance and performance studies, the book explores three original themes: the idea of the state as a choreographic agent; the performance of “extraordinary genders,” or those identities and acts that lie outside everyday norms; and the original concept of the “paratopia”-a space of alterity produced by performance. Through an investigation of these themes, the author explores how Odissi has shown the potential to challenge dominant cultural imperatives in India.
This book traces the transformation of Odissi, a South Asian classical dance style, from its historical role as a regional practice to its modern incarnation as national spectacle, with a focus on the state's regulation of the dance and performances of gender embedded in it. It constructs new histories of Odissi by analysing the wide spectrum of discourses to which it has been affiliated, both normative and transgressive. Specifically, it considers the arc of Odissi's chronologies by highlighting its engagements with the state in the ancient, medieval, colonial and postcolonial periods of South Asian history. It suggests that, throughout Odissi's changing pasts, two threads have remained constant: one, the subversive potential of the dance in creating distinct visions for extraordinary performances of gender and sexuality which transcend quotidian social norms; and two, the idea of the state not only as a prohibitive agent that regulates bodily practice but also as a choreographic agent that generates and prescribes idealized movements of the body and social relations, both inside and outside the zone of dance. Tying these threads together, I will call for an identification of Odissi as a 'paratopic performance'-a practice that creates a space of alterity for reimagining orthodoxies of gender against the normalizing mandates of the state and what is scripted in social law.
Commonly perceived as the oldest classical dance in India, Odissi originated in the eastern state of Odisha. Presented as a traditional style in discourses of Indian art, Odissi is in fact the mod ern appellation for an amalgam of Odishan forms. The earliest. known signs of Odissi's antecedents can be traced to ancient India (around the first century BCE) in the dance style known as Odra Magadhi, a form of professional entertainment, interweaving dimensions of the secular and the sacred. In the eleventh century CE, Mahari Naach (dance of the maharis or female ritual specialists) was introduced as a devotional practice in Odisha, performed to honour the Hindu divine," and this temple style is conventionally considered the authentic progenitor of contemporary Odissi. Denounced by British imperialists and indigenous elites, allegedly for its ties to prostitution, Mahari Naach was forced underground during the British Raj.
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