Dance and Hinduism

Dance is a central practice in Hinduism across a variety of contexts, mythological narratives, and time periods. Gods such as Śiva and Kṛṣṇa are dancers, and humans also dance, often embodying these gods as part of bhakti, or devotion. Dance is a rich area for exploring the ways categories are created and negotiated: classical and folk, local and global, male and female, East and West, text and practice, colonial and postcolonial, and India and its diaspora. Coursing through these dynamic categories are questions of identity: gender, nationality, politics, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and immigrant experience—all experienced through the embodiment of devotional dance forms that continue to undergo many iterations as new populations, venues, and intentions emerge. This bibliography provides resources for the history and practices of dances that range from folk/ritual to classical. Folk dance forms are devotional and cultural, such as popular garba and raas dancing. Other ritual dances invite a god to be embodied in the devotee through possession or depicted theatrically in solos and dance-dramas. The emphasis of the majority of the scholarship is weighted toward the formation and practice of eight classical dance forms. These have been constructed out of a hybridization of preexisting regional temple, court, and folk styles in collaboration with the ancient textual authority of the Nāṭyaśāstra, “Science of Dance-Drama,” during the early 20th century. This Sanskrit compendium infused technical vocabulary, movement grammars, a sacred origin story, and rasa, an audience-receptivity theory of aesthetic mood experienced by audience members as created by dancers through their physical expressions, or bhāvas. In the early 1900s, social welfare movements converged on an opportunity to respond to the ills of society and build an awareness of arts that could support an emerging nationalism. “Reformers” and “revivalists” claimed to undo systems of oppression of women, such as preventing dedication of devadāsīs who danced in Hindu temples, and “rescue” dances with ties to ancient and religious origins from the hands of these hereditary dancers, whose loss of patronage and misunderstood social systems led to them being labeled prostitutes under the British Raj. One of the first ongoing waves of critical scholarship reveals the erased histories and consequences of these changes. A second strand seeks to situate dance within transnational Hindu contexts. A third trajectory validates contemporary experiments that reframe the interpretive possibilities of religious and gendered themes across hybridized movement grammars within the bodies of dancers and across diasporic geographies.