Dancing Krishna in the suburbs: Kinaesthetics in the South Asian American diaspora

This article explores kinaesthesia as a central aspect of religious pedagogy in a transnational Hindu community, through ethnographic observation of American practitioners of Bharatanatyam (classical Indian dance).1 The Natyanjali School of Dance (Andover, Massachusetts, United States) is a small, multigenerational community, comprised of dance teacher Jeyanthi Ghatraju, a group of South Indian first-generation immigrant IT professionals, and their American-born children. Through Bharatanatyam, pedagogical practices of physical training, repetition and constructions of body comportment, students learn South Asian languages, culture and Hindu religious narratives. Additionally, they absorb practices of social organization and moral knowledge through interactions with their teacher, elders and peers. Although studies of kinaesthesia attend to the physical body and its faculties of movement, sense, socialization and cognitive knowledge, the processes by which kinaesthetics inform the construction of religious experience, value, belief and identity remain relatively unexplored. This article examines the construction of Hindu and Indian identity, personal religiosity and morality, through the kinaesthetic pedagogies of basic step (adavu) repetition, the embodied and discursive pedagogies of dramatic gestural narration of sacred stories (natya), and the interpretive and devotional conjuring of expression (abhinaya) inherent in Bharatanatyam.