Bharatanatyam as a Global Dance: Some Issues in Research, Teaching, and Practice

Abstract

promise of critical liberation that postcolonial and transnational perspectives offer by urging us to think the complex imbrication of the global in the local remains an unfulfilled promise in South Asian dance scholarship. I will elaborate this point by describing the global thrust of Rukmini Devi's art and education movement, which could not be recuperated within the territorializing intellectual framework of Indian nationalism, and explain why she, in fact, manifests herself as a discursive failure in standard scholarly accounts of Bharatanatyam in the United States. Parti Bharatanatyam manifests itself as a world form today, quite like Ballet, albeit with a different genealogy. It is researched in western academic institutions in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, as well as in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. Practitioners and dance scholars organize international conferences focused on Bharatanatyam all over the world today, and the Dance Studies Program at Roehampton, supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), has assumed a leadership role in providing a new, global profile for the dance. 1 But the globality of Bharatanatyam, intricately linked with the global discourses of colonial modernity is still, in my opinion, not on the research and curricular agendas of dance departments in the United States. This initiative was deferred because the small

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