Introduction
My engagement with Pakistan’s National Song and Dance Ensemble (PNSDE)Footnote 1 began during fieldwork in Karachi in the summer of 2009, when I attended a rare performance at the Karachi Arts Council. On the evening I arrived, the hall gradually filled to capacity, the stage set with a digitally printed backdrop of Mohenjodaro, camels, and the Indus River—a tableau evoking the deep antiquity of Sindh (see Figure 1). The show opened with a woman introducing the “Mohenjodaro dance,” accompanied by an announcement: “Five thousand years ago, an artist created the Mohenjodaro dance that has been rediscovered in the twentieth century. This dance is a combination of Kathak, Dasnatyam, and Odissi.” Performed against dim lighting, with a slow Sarangi and Tabla accompaniment and the soft ringing of the dancer’s anklets, the choreography drew on modern dance canons while invoking antiquity. Such evocation was striking in the context of Pakistan’s national culture, which has typically marked cultural distinction from India (Qureshi Reference Qureshi and Arnold2017) by foregrounding Islamic sonic traditions (Qureshi 1993) and civilisational myths related to the 10th century Arab conquest of Sindh by Mohammed bin Qasim (Asif Reference Asif2016, Paracha Reference Paracha2015).
Invitation Pass for Sindh Sangam, a cultural festival held in Karachi, Sindh, in 2009, reflecting the continued mobilisation of archaeological heritage within Pakistan’s national cultural imagination. From the author’s personal collection.
Figure 1. Long description
The top half of the pass is a white background with text and logos oriented upside down. Centered text reads Ministry of Culture and Pakistan National Council of the Arts. To the left is the State Emblem of Pakistan and to the right is a circular green seal. Above the text are four media partner logos: GEO, F M 101, THE NEWS, and a logo in Arabic script.
The bottom half features a vibrant collage under a geometric pattern of light blue and white crosses. At the center, the words Sindh Sangam are written in large red cursive script. Below this, the date 26 MAY TO 28 MAY 2009 is printed in a white sans-serif font. The background collage includes, from left to right: a bronze statue of the Dancing Girl from Mohenjo-daro, architectural ruins, a traditional domed building, and wooden boats on water with camels in the distance.
This encounter raised a set of questions: How did the creators of the PNSDE choreograph cultural difference from a past deeply shared with India, particularly through competing claims over the heritage of the Indus Valley? Which dance repertoires, aesthetic vocabularies, and regional histories were mobilised in producing such representations? And how did these choreographies engage with, contest, or reconfigure the state’s dominant narratives of national culture and identity?
While scholarship on South Asian dances during colonial and post-colonial modernity has shown how cultural revivalist projects canonised Indian dance through appeals to antiquity and bourgeois respectability, often marginalising hereditary performers (Allen Reference Allen1997; Qureshi Reference Qureshi, Feldman and Gordon2006; Walker Reference Walker2010; Soneji Reference Soneji2012), this cultural analysis has remained largely confined to post-colonial India, leaving relatively unexplored how Pakistan, formed through the same colonial rupture, engaged with these choreographic and revivalist currents after Partition.
Drawing on nearly a decade of ethnographic and archival research, I show that Pakistan did not stand outside the histories of cultural revivalism that led to the emergence of India’s so-called classical dances—particularly Kathak—or the cross-cultural Orientalist collaborations by Leila Sokhey (Kanhai Reference Kanhai, Schwaderer and Jonker2023) and Uday Shankar that shaped modern South Asian dance in the early twentieth century (Soneji Reference Soneji, Krishna and Lopez y Royo2008, Bhattacharjya Reference Bhattacharjya2011). By examining the formative choreographies of PNSDE, I argue that its choreographers repurposed revivalist and Orientalist forms inherited from the shared bourgeois milieu of colonial India while simultaneously incorporating socialist choreographic templates that emerged through Cold War cultural diplomacy with China. In doing so, they expanded the field of modern South Asian dance by producing “heteroglot” performances that brought Muslim, archaeological, regional, socialist, and canonised South Asian dance forms into relation. These performances generated internationally legible narratives of nationhood that articulated cultural distinction from India while asserting Islamic, Buddhist, Indus Valley, and Gandharan pasts as constitutive elements of Pakistan’s national identity.
Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia stems from the Russian word raznorechie (разноречие), literally meaning “varied speech” or “different speech,” and was developed as a theory of the modern novel. Heteroglossia refers to the internal stratification of language, encompassing social dialects, professional jargons, generic languages, generational speech, authoritative discourses, and languages serving specific sociopolitical purposes (Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981:262–263). In doing so, it foregrounds what Michael Holquist describes as an “alterity in language” (Reference Holquist and Holquist1981:xxi). For Bakhtin, language is constituted through the tension between centripetal forces that seek to unify discourse into authoritative and national forms and centrifugal forces that stratify it into diverse social, professional, generational, and ideological registers. Heteroglossia therefore foregrounds multiplicity rather than unity and draws attention to the coexistence of competing historical and social voices.
Extending this concept from literary discourse to embodied performance, I propose that processes of cultural revivalism and canonisation constitute centripetal forces that seek to stabilise dance traditions into authoritative forms, as exemplified by the institutionalisation of Kathak and other so-called “classical” dances, thereby rendering their heteroglot roots invisible. Siding with Walker’s (Reference Walker2010) critique of hybridity as an insufficient framework for understanding the multiple choreographic sources from which Kathak was constructed, I draw on Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia to account for the coexistence and interaction of competing historical, social, and aesthetic registers within these forms.
I further argue that modern “Indian ballet productions” (Banerji Reference Banerji1983) drawing on choreographic vocabularies associated with Kathak, Odissi, and Bharatanatyam may likewise be understood as heteroglot formations, constituted through the interaction of multiple choreographic languages, historical temporalities, and ideological projects rather than as singular or timeless traditions.Footnote 2 This is particularly evident in productions such as The Mohenjodaro Dance, which was presented not as a modern choreography but as the recovery of an ancient cultural form, thereby obscuring the modern and heterogeneous processes through which it was constituted.
Examining three Pakistani ballets—Sons of the River, The Mohenjodaro Dance, and Heer–Ranjha—I show how these productions make visible the heteroglossic processes that canonisation tends to conceal, bringing into relation choreographic vocabularies that combined colonial revival aesthetics associated with Uday Shankar and the canonized classical dance forms of Kathak, Odissi, and Bharatanatyam with socialist dance aesthetics and choreographic practices influenced by cultural exchanges with China. In doing so, these choreographies functioned as sites through which competing historical, aesthetic, and political genealogies were negotiated in shaping Pakistan’s national identity. They also position Pakistani choreographers as active participants in the cultural revivalist modernity that disenfranchised hereditary female performers to render dance legible, respectable, and nationally representative within middle-class frameworks.
In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on South Asian dance but also initiates ethnomusicological study of cultural diplomacy—defined as the “exchange of ideas, information, values, systems, traditions, beliefs, and other aspects of culture with the intention of fostering mutual understanding” (Cummings Reference Cummings2003:1)—by examining how music and dance became instruments of soft power (Nye Reference Nye, Cooper, Heine and Thakur2013) during the Cold War. It also offers an alternative cultural analysis of national culture formation in Pakistan by shifting attention from political and historiographic frameworks (Jalal Reference Jalal2000; Toor Reference Toor2005; Asif Reference Asif2016) to performing arts as a site in which national identity is actively produced, negotiated, and represented.
Writing dance histories: Ethnographic subjectivity and archival partiality
Informed by developments in dance historiography that examine how debates in macro-history shape the writing of dance history (Carter Reference Carter and Carter2013b), this study draws on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted most intensively between 2009 and 2014 in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, alongside a wide range of historical and archival sources, including interviews with key cultural figures and analysis of state publications, historical texts, newspaper reviews, photographic archives, and audiovisual materials, to examine the impact of the Cold War on dance history in Pakistan. Hayden White’s argument that historical writing is not a neutral recounting of “what actually happened” but a narrative practice shaped by interpretation, emplotment, and ideological framing (White Reference White1973:5), together with his critique of the Rankean ideal of wie es eigentlich gewesen (“to show what actually happened”) (White Reference White1987:26), provides a structuring logic for this analysis of the PNSDE. Rather than reconciling divergent accounts into a singular historical narrative, I treat historiography as a reconstruction assembled from multiple voices, archives, and material traces. Archival inconsistencies, oral testimonies, newspaper accounts, and institutional records are therefore approached as evidence of the diverse perspectives through which the PNSDE’s choreographies were produced, documented, and remembered, while acknowledging the gaps, absences, competing interpretations, and partial nature of historical knowledge (Carter Reference Carter and Carter2013a:3).
Tracing the ensemble’s visual and textual history reveals a fragmented yet richly layered archive assembled from personal collections of the ensemble’s leadership and lead dancers—including Naeem TahirFootnote 3 and Roshan Ara BokhariFootnote 4 (1931–2022) (see Figure 2), Zia Mohyeddin, Sohail Rana, and Nahid Siddiqui—as well as institutional records, and international media sources. Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia provides an analytical framework for situating these multiple voices and narratives while foregrounding the historical conditions of post-colonial modernity that shaped these choreographies.
Amy Minwala and Naeem Tahir being received during Pakistan’s cultural tour to China, 1965. Such moments of reception underscore the diplomatic function of the National Song and Dance Ensemble within early Sino–Pakistan cultural exchange. From the personal archive of Naeem Tahir, accessed by the author (2014). Reproduced with permission.
As a scholar from a minority Shi’ite Muslim community in Pakistan, I find that critical engagement with civil-military authority and national cultural production is shaped by asymmetries of voice and legitimacy (Hemani Reference Hemani2025). Forms of knowledge that complicate dominant national narratives are often dismissed, sidelined, or appropriated—particularly when articulated from minority positions (Hemani Reference Hemani and Joseph2017) and especially by minority women. The delayed publication of this work reflects these uneven conditions of articulation, in which silence, deferral, and timing become part of the politics of knowledge production.
The heteroglossia of cultural forms circulated during the Cold War
As the post-war years gave way into the Cold War, cultural diplomacy not only became a fundamental means of fostering goodwill and mutual understanding between nations, but also the performing arts played a vital role in supporting diplomatic relations through soft power rather than coercion (Goff Reference Goff, Cooper, Heine and Thakur2013). Because of the role of arts in “a spectrum of ideational approaches to diplomacy,” including soft power, nation branding, propaganda, and public diplomacy (Goff Reference Goff, Cooper, Heine and Thakur2013; Croft Reference Croft2015; Philips Reference Phillips2020), it began to receive a new level of support. The US, concerned by the cultural appeal of communism, also mobilised dance as a form of soft power (Prevots Reference Prevots1998:11). Congressional support through the President’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs enabled performance-based export initiatives, including the José Limón Company’s tour of Latin America (Prevots Reference Prevots1998:23), as well as tours by the Martha Graham Company (New York Public Library 1956) and Dizzy Gillespie (Library of Congress 1956) across Asia, which reached Pakistan’s cultural capital, Karachi, in 1956 (New York Public Library n.d.). While these tours introduced American artistic presence in Pakistan, they likewise did not lead to the formation of a national dance ensemble.
In the 1950s, Pakistan lacked cultural infrastructure, with its territories positioned at the margins of former colonial India. There were no formal performance venues such as opera halls, and visiting dance companies often performed on mobile stages. Under these conditions, there was no institutional basis for using performing arts for cultural diplomacy. Although Chinese dance troupes had toured Pakistan since the 1950s, often performing on temporary stages because of the country’s limited cultural infrastructure, cultural exchanges intensified following the 1965 Entente Cordiale between Pakistan and China (Garver Reference Garver1992:65). Naeem Tahir, who led the first Pakistani dance delegation to China in 1965 alongside the dancer and choreographer Amy Minwala (Figure 2), retrospectively described this moment as Pakistan’s first realisation of the importance of cultural diplomacy:
That was, in fact, the beginning of a serious realization about the importance of cultural relations between the two countries and the support that cultural assets and expressions provide to diplomacy. The creation of cultural relations between two people provides the necessary depth to cultural diplomacy. Because you see, an ambassador may change, another person may come in, but if there is goodwill in the community, say the Chinese community or the Turkish community with us, then that becomes the goodwill upon which the ambassador can build.
Prior to this moment, and before the ensemble’s repertoire came to incorporate socialist choreographies including Chinese revolutionary ballets, Chinese folk dances, and Moiseyev-style theme dances, early choreographers of the 1950s were largely working within revivalist and orientalist frameworks inherited from the shared bourgeois cultural milieu of colonial India. Azurie and Ghanshyams, who were commissioned by the state to create a repertoire of “Pakistani dances,” reveal that the foundations of Pakistan’s dance vocabulary were shaped through competing cultural and ideological imperatives aimed at producing cultural distinction from India. Invited into the cultural establishment initiated by the civil-military bureaucracy after coming under clerical attack, Azurie, a dancer of German Jewish descent and trained in Kathak, Manipuri, and Bharatanatyam, began developing “Pak Raks” (literally, “Pakistani dance”) as an alternative to India’s institutionalised classical traditions. The Civil and Military Gazette (1959) suggests that Azurie had been given the task to build the foundations of a “Pakistani ballet” by “changing the characteristics of Indian classical dance and [introducing] Muslim characteristics into them, with the help of Arab dances” (Azurie Reference Azurie and Nahid1995:17–19). Her writings reflect ideological pressures of the early years: “Before the establishment of Pakistan,” she wrote, “dancing was considered merely as a part of Hindu culture…First and foremost, we must realize that traditionally we are very different from the Hindus…We can restrengthen the dance with the spirit of Islam and flavour it with our culture” (Azurie Reference Azurie and Nahid1995:18). Azurie’s writings establish the discursive groundwork for PNSDE’s expressive field of articulating national identity. By linking regional dance forms to external influences—associating the Khattak dance of Pakhtunkhwa with “Russian structure,” Multani jhoomer with “Arab influence,” and Sindhi styles with “gypsy flair” (Azurie Reference Azurie and Nahid1995:19)—she asserts imagined cultural affinities that reposition regional dances strategically within broader geopolitical and cultural frameworks, mapping local practices onto the diplomatic alliances Pakistan was cultivating.
The Ghanshyams (a husband-and-wife duo), invited by Prime Minister Suhrawardy in 1956 (Saiyid Reference Saiyid and Cohen1998:62), approached the project of creating a repertoire of “Pakistani dances” from another genealogy. As Uday Shankar protégés, they inherited a choreographic lineage steeped in European Orientalism and Hindu mythological imagery. Shankar’s aesthetic—shaped by collaborations with Anna Pavlova and by ballet modernism—positioned Indian dance globally as Vedic and Hindu (Brenscheidt gen.Jost Reference Brenscheidt gen. Jost2011). Entering this terrain, the Ghanshyams sought to differentiate Pakistan by turning instead to the archaeological remains of Mohenjodaro and Gandhara. Their writings—emphasising the need to “evolve something called Pakistani dance” and take pride in “dancing artifacts from Sindh and Peshawar”—reveal an aesthetic strategy rooted in regional dance repertoire and Indus Valley antiquities.
These early experiments in creating a repertoire of “Pakistani dances” reproduced the formative impulse of Pakistan’s cultural nationalism, which sought to articulate difference from India by linking local dance forms to Middle Eastern and North African traditions on the one hand, and to competing civilisational genealogies on the other. Although these projects were situated in the broader heteroglot expressive field of modern South Asian dance, they sought to organise this plurality within a more centripetal ideological framework that privileged Muslim pasts as the primary source of cultural legitimacy while disavowing inheritances deemed “Hindu.”
Participation in Cold War cultural diplomacy generated the very conditions for the formation of a national dance ensemble, even in the absence of cultural infrastructure. In March 1965, during General Ayub Khan’s visit to Beijing, he promised, at the request of the Chinese leadership, to send a Pakistani dance troupe to China later that year. Significantly, no such troupe existed at the time. The promise itself thus preceded the institution, revealing the contingent and improvisational nature of Pakistan’s entry into Cold War cultural diplomacy, in which shifting geopolitical alignments and happenstance encounters generated new cultural forms and institutions. With preparations for a national tour undertaken jointly by the Punjab Arts Council under the direction of Naeem Tahir and the Bulbul Academy in East Pakistan, the 1965 tour of China by Pakistan’s first dance ensemble presented theme dances, such as Dawn to Dusk (Figures 3a,b) from West Pakistan; Tea Picker’s Dance from East Pakistan, alongside “participatory” dances (Nahachewsky Reference Nahachewsky1995:1) such as Jhoomer and Bhangra from Sindh. The ensemble not only performed twelve shows across Canton and Peking, presenting Pakistan’s regional and thematic dances, but also encountered socialist choreographies and Chinese folk forms, particularly the Red Silk Scarf Dance. According to lead dancer Roshan Ara Bokhari, these performances “brought the house down” and were met with “greatly appreciative and enthusiastic” audiences (Ministry of Culture [Pakistan] 2007:114).
Scenes from Dawn to Dusk, (a) a choreographed themed dance depicting a day in the life of a Punjabi village, (b) performed as part of the cultural delegation to China in 1965. From the personal archive of Naeem Tahir, provided to the author (2014). Reproduced with permission.
Figure 5. Long description
The clipping is dated 25th April, 1965. At the top left, the headline reads PAKISTANI DANCERS in bold capital letters. To the right of the headline, a small box contains text describing two dance scenes: TOP: IN THE TEA GARDENS and BOTTOM: DAWN TO DUSK.
Below the headline is a large rectangular sketch showing two female dancers in profile, moving toward the right. They wear traditional dresses and carry large rectangular baskets on their backs, secured by straps over their shoulders. Their hands are raised in expressive gestures.
Underneath this sketch, the article text is arranged in three columns. A sub-headline in a decorative scalloped border reads HOW A CHINESE ARTIST LOOKS AT THEM. The text mentions sketches by Li Ke-yu and poems by Yuan Ying, noting the dancers’ performance in Peking and a visit to Pakistan.
In the bottom right quadrant, a second sketch depicts three figures: a musician on the left playing a dholak drum, a central dancer with arms raised, and a musician on the right playing a flute-like instrument, possibly a bansuri. The style of the sketches is fluid and calligraphic, emphasizing movement and rhythm.
Roshan Ara Bokhari’s recollections as discussed in our interview (Reference Bokhari2015) further reveal that cultural diplomacy unfolded not only through staged performances but also through everyday embodied encounters. She recalled learning to ask for “cold water” because Chinese hosts would otherwise bring hot water, a seemingly mundane experience that underscored the negotiation of cultural difference at the level of everyday practice. Such memories point to the lived dimensions of Sino–Pakistani friendship, in which affinities were not simply proclaimed by states but were continually negotiated through embodied interactions. Tahir introduced the Soviet-derived aesthetic of a standardised costume—white shalwar and black sherwani—to present the dancers on their first trip to China in 1965 as a unified national body, a visual strategy that echoed socialist ideals of collective identity. Performers were also given ideological instruction through a book on the Chinese Revolution so that their comportment and expressive style aligned with the expectations of their hosts.
Chinese press reviews praised the dancers’ “national characteristics” and “vitality,” framing the repertoire as both culturally distinctive and diplomatically resonant. Artists such as Chang Chun of the Tung Fang Song and Dance Ensemble noted that Pakistani choreography offered valuable techniques for Chinese performers to study, while poets and critics produced celebratory verses linking the ensemble’s performances to a “new era” of Sino–Pakistan friendship (see Figure 4).
Pakistani dancers featured in Chinese newspaper coverage during their 1965 cultural tour, illustrating early Sino–Pakistan artistic exchange and reception. The performances, including works such as Dawn to Dusk and Tea Picker’s Dance from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), were described as possessing “national flavour” and vitality. From the personal archive of Naeem Tahir, provided to the author (2014). Reproduced with permission.
Figure 6. Long description
The photo captures a live performance on a stage.
* In the foreground on the left, a female dancer in a heavily embroidered traditional lehenga and jewelry is captured mid-motion with her arms raised.
* In the center, a male performer in a white shalwar kameez and a patterned vest stands with one arm raised, holding a microphone.
* To the right, two musicians sit on the floor. One plays a sitar and the other plays a flute. Both wear dark sherwanis and white trousers.
* Behind the musicians on the far right are three vertical panels displaying scenic photographs of Pakistani architecture and landscapes.
* In the background, a dark wall features a rectangular sign with the initialism P I A.
* A seated audience is visible in the dimly lit area behind the performers.
With time, not only did socialist and revolutionary choreographies, such as the Chinese ballet: The White-Haired Girl, enter the company’s repertoire (Ministry of Culture [Pakistan] 2007:16), but Chinese staging techniques, referred to as “Calisthenics,” were also incorporated. The circulation of aesthetic ideals within Sino–Pakistani relations further shaped how the PNSDE projected Pakistan on the international stage, positioning the country as culturally proximate to China. Significantly, in subsequent years, Euro-American observers likewise interpreted the ensemble through this Sino–Pakistani civilisational frame. For example, when the PNSDE appeared on the American anthology television series Camera Three on WCBS-TV in 1973, the host Faubion Bowers (Camera Three 1973) twice remarked upon the “influence of China” on the “ancient people” of Pakistan—first by associating Chinese porcelain bowls with the Pakistani musical instrument, the Jaltarang, and again by attributing the movements of the Kailash dance to Chinese origins. Such readings reveal that the ensemble’s performances did more than merely absorb Chinese choreographic influences; they also rendered Pakistan legible to international audiences through newly emerging cultural affinities with China. In a manner analogous to Bakhtin’s understanding of expressive forms as constituted through the interaction of multiple social languages and historical voices, the PNSDE brought into relation choreographic lineages inherited from South Asian dance revivalism in colonial India alongside socialist aesthetics acquired through Sino–Pakistani cultural diplomacy. The resulting repertoire juxtaposed colonial-revivalist south asian dance aesthetics with socialist, archaeological, Islamic, regional, and classical registers, producing heteroglot performances through which Pakistan articulated nationally distinctive yet internationally legible narratives of cultural identity.
A central challenge for the troupe was identifying what kind of institutional umbrella could sustain a dance ensemble that had emerged from Cold War cultural diplomacy efforts under General Ayub. In contrast to most states, where national dance companies were housed within formal ministries of culture, Pakistan—without such a ministry in the 1960s—left the ensemble on the verge of collapse without an institutional home. Their happenstance performance at “Pakistan Week” in Geneva in 1966 (see Figure 5) captivated Air Marshal Asghar Khan, Chairman of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), whose patronage led to the establishment of the PIA Arts Academy.Footnote 5 Consequently, the PNSDE’s global presence expanded alongside PIA’s expanding aviation network (see Figure 6), producing a distinctive, airline-mediated form of cultural diplomacy that employed heteroglossia as a choreographic strategy in navigating Pakistan’s alliances with Muslim-majority, U.S.-aligned, and Soviet-aligned countries.
Roshan Ara Bokhari performing with live musicians at the Pakistan Day convention in Geneva in 1966. The ensemble includes instruments such as sitar, alghoza, rubab, and bansuri, reflecting the incorporation of diverse regional and art musical traditions within Pakistan’s state-sponsored dance performances. From the personal archive of Roshan Ara Bokhari, accessed by the author (2014). Reproduced with permission.
Figure 5. Long description
The clipping is dated 25th April, 1965. At the top left, the headline reads PAKISTANI DANCERS in bold capital letters. To the right of the headline, a small box contains text describing two dance scenes: TOP: IN THE TEA GARDENS and BOTTOM: DAWN TO DUSK.
Below the headline is a large rectangular sketch showing two female dancers in profile, moving toward the right. They wear traditional dresses and carry large rectangular baskets on their backs, secured by straps over their shoulders. Their hands are raised in expressive gestures.
Underneath this sketch, the article text is arranged in three columns. A sub-headline in a decorative scalloped border reads HOW A CHINESE ARTIST LOOKS AT THEM. The text mentions sketches by Li Ke-yu and poems by Yuan Ying, noting the dancers’ performance in Peking and a visit to Pakistan.
In the bottom right quadrant, a second sketch depicts three figures: a musician on the left playing a dholak drum, a central dancer with arms raised, and a musician on the right playing a flute-like instrument, possibly a bansuri. The style of the sketches is fluid and calligraphic, emphasizing movement and rhythm.
Members of Pakistan’s national dance ensemble photographed with a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) aircraft, c. 1960s. The uniformity of dress, including black sherwanis worn by male dancers (right), reflects the formalisation of national identity, while PIA facilitated international tours as part of Pakistan’s cultural diplomacy. From the personal archive of Naeem Tahir, provided to the author (2014). Reproduced with permission.
Figure 6. Long description
The photo captures a live performance on a stage.
* In the foreground on the left, a female dancer in a heavily embroidered traditional lehenga and jewelry is captured mid-motion with her arms raised.
* In the center, a male performer in a white shalwar kameez and a patterned vest stands with one arm raised, holding a microphone.
* To the right, two musicians sit on the floor. One plays a sitar and the other plays a flute. Both wear dark sherwanis and white trousers.
* Behind the musicians on the far right are three vertical panels displaying scenic photographs of Pakistani architecture and landscapes.
* In the background, a dark wall features a rectangular sign with the initialism P I A.
* A seated audience is visible in the dimly lit area behind the performers.
Heteroglossia of PNSDE’s formative choreographies
PNSDE was not simply a product of historical emergence but operated through the strategic deployment of multiple choreographic registers—colonial-revivalist forms of South Asian ballet; colonial-revivalist canonization of South Asian dances; archaeological narratives of nationhood; Islamic codes of modesty; presentational adaptations of regional dances; and socialist revolutionary choreographies and calisthenics—that were variously combined and foregrounded across different productions. This section identifies six key registers that shaped PNSDE’s expressive field.
(i) Soviet Internationalism: Moiseyev’s “theme dance” as choreographic template
Established in the 1930s, the Moiseyev Dance Company in the USSR inspired a global movement to promote “the USSR’s direct political dominion of Eastern Europe and popularity and influence in other regions of the world” (2002:10). Igor Moiseyev (1906–2007), founder of the Ensemble of the Folk Dances of the USSR (est. 1937), transformed participatory folk practices—such as seasonal rituals, weddings, and work-life rituals—into staged “theme dances,” presenting everyday life as staged tableaux.Footnote 6 Rather than reproducing folk dances literally—for example, by bringing village performers onto the stage to perform dances as practised in their communities—Moiseyev rejected what he termed the “literal transplantation” of folk forms, instead developing stylised “character dances” that rendered vernacular movement presentational and legible on stage (Chudnovsky Reference Chudnovsky1959:28; Nahachewsky Reference Nahachewsky1995:1). This aesthetic, which depicted collective labour and festivity within a socialist imaginary, became central to the performance of “proletarian internationalism” (Shay Reference Shay2002a: 81; Walkowitz Reference Walkowitz2010).
The first wave of dance ensemble was in the 1950s and included countries such as Mexico and China. A second wave followed in the 1960s and 1970s in Muslim-majority states, including the Bakhor Dance Ensemble in Soviet Uzbekistan (founded in 1957), the Reda Troupe in Egypt (1959), the Iranian National Ballet Company (1967–68, dissolved after the 1979 Revolution), and the Turkish State Folk Dance Ensemble (1976) (Shay Reference Shay2002a:10). Although Pakistan shared diplomatic relations with these Muslim-majority states through the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), established in 1969, the formation of its national dance ensemble in 1965 followed a distinct trajectory and was closely tied to Pakistan’s cultural relationship with China.
Following the Moiseyev format, and drawing upon Azurie and Ghanshyam’s research on regional dances conducted during the 1950s, the PNSDE incorporated diverse local traditions into its national repertoire. The ensemble staged participatory regional dances such as Jhoomar, Dandia, and Dhamaal from Sindh; Luddi, Kikli, and Bhangra from Punjab; Leva, Do-Chapi, and Fishermen’s dances from Balochistan; Khattak and Atan dances from Pakhtun regions; as well as dances from Hunza and Kailash Valley. Together, these choreographies foregrounded Pakistan’s geographical, linguistic, and cultural plurality. Alongside these regional forms, the category of “traditional dances” included thematic productions such as Dawn to Dusk, depicting scenes from Punjabi village life; Cotton Picker’s Dance, celebrating agricultural labour and harvest; Candle Dance, in which women marked festive and marriage occasions while balancing candles in their palms; Pedlar’s Dance, centred on the figure of the itinerant storyteller and village clown; and Snake Charmer’s Dance, a form simultaneously rooted in local traditions and mediated through British Orientalist representations. Some productions involved substantial choreographic intervention. Peacock Dance, for example, attributed to Faqir Hussain Saga, stylised the movements of the peacock as it unfurls its plumage and dances to the rhythm of rain. Although Russian influences, particularly those associated with Moiseyev’s ensemble, were neither explicitly referenced by Tahir nor mentioned in PNSDE publications, this silence may partly reflect the geopolitical sensitivities of Pakistan’s close alliance with the United States during much of the Cold War.
(ii) Revolutionary affinities: Sino–Pakistani socialist aesthetics and mass drill
Alongside Moiseyev-styled theme dances, socialist bodily cultures also circulated during the Cold War, leading to the incorporation of Chinese calisthenics into Pakistan’s choreographic repertoire. Chinese radio calisthenics (guangbo ticao), first broadcast nationally in 1951, constituted a technology of socialist collectivity derived from Soviet mass physical culture and Japanese rajio taisō traditions (Zeng Reference Zeng2024). In Pakistan, these movement vocabularies became another register within the ensemble’s heteroglot repertoire, where they were reaccentuated through South Asian dance idioms and adapted for large-scale choreographic productions.
Naeem Tahir’s recollections further illuminate these processes of transnational borrowing. Having studied Chinese calisthenics through stage performances and video recordings, and drawing upon his theatre training in London, Tahir adapted these techniques to produce large-scale choreographies, including children’s field performances for the Asian Games and calisthenic spectacles for the National Horse and Cattle Show. As he recalled, “I had no teacher, but I discussed my concept with Rafi Anwar, and he converted my thoughts into dances. I also took help from Ashiq Hussain Samrat.” While Tahir introduced these socialist movement vocabularies, choreographers such as Rafi Anwar, trained in Kathak and Bharatnatyam, translated them into stageable dance dramas and ballets. These recollections reveal how successive generations of PNSDE dancers inherited movement vocabularies inflected by Sino-socialist aesthetics and rearticulated them through South Asian choreographic traditions.
(iii) Kathak, Kathak-Ballet, and South Asian Ballet as choreographic template
Pakistani choreographers continued the colonial Indian legacy of choreographing narrative dance dramas inspired by Uday Shankar’s choreographies (Brenscheidt gen. Jost Reference Brenscheidt gen. Jost2011) and “Kathak-ballets,” a term employed by Massey (Reference Massey1975b:88) in relation to productions such as Birju Maharaj’s Shan-e-Avadh, Phag Lila, Govardhan Lila, and Kumara Sambhava, as well as Madame Menaka’s Krishna Lila. These productions largely drew upon Hindu mythological themes, with occasional urban and historical subjects, as in Shan-e-Avadh.
In Pakistan, however, this genre developed along distinct trajectories through productions such as Aj Rang Hai, Heer–Ranjha, and Mohenjodaro Dance, which foregrounded Sufi, archaeological, and regional imaginaries. The aspiration to create a distinctly “Pakistani ballet” was already in circulation during the 1950s, as evidenced by the Civil and Military Gazette’s report on the choreographic task assigned to Madame Azurie (Ministry of Culture [Pakistan] 2007:236). Particularly striking is the fact that Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim choreographers and dancers all participated in this state-sponsored project of cultural reclamation. Madame Azurie’s The Sun Will Rise, a Kathak-Ballet featuring nearly 100 dancers (Ansari Reference Ansari and Nahid1995:33), together with PNSDE productions such as the Mohenjodaro Dance, Jab Jhelum Jeevā Thā, and Heer–Ranjha, emerged from choreographic templates inherited from the bourgeois dance milieu of colonial India and subsequently reaccentuated by choreographers such as Rafi Anwar, Mehr Nigar Masroor, and Nazir Ahmed. The PNSDE’s appearance on Camera Three in 1973 and Massey’s review of its London performance (1979a) also highlight the significance of Nahid Siddiqui’s solo Kathak performances. As Siddiqui recalled in a Reference Siddiqui2013 interview, she became the first dancer selected to accompany Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as part of his official entourage in 1976. The cultural troupe was led by her then-husband, Zia Mohyeddin, and her selection came despite prevailing social taboos surrounding her televised dance performances on Pakistan Television (PTV).
(iv) Archaeological imaginaries: Indus civilisation as choreographic resource
The PNSDE drew upon Orientalist frameworks of historical continuity and participated in the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger1993), using archaeological resources to construct narratives of a national past (Kohl Reference Kohl1998; Kohl and Clare Reference Kohl and Fawcett1995). In presenting Pakistan’s dance heritage, its cultural leaders and choreographers sought to decentre Hindu civilizational narratives associated with India’s so-called classical dances. These narratives, exemplified by Coomaraswamy’s The Dance of Śiva (Reference Coomaraswamy1918), had influenced Uday Shanker’s choreographic vision (Bhattacharjya Reference Bhattacharjya2011, 488–489) and contributed to representations of India as an “ancient civilization,” a construction critiqued by Walker (Reference Walker2010) and others. Yet Pakistan’s cultural reconstruction was not merely a response to India. Within the broader context of Cold War cultural diplomacy, claims to a primordial past also served as a means of asserting national legitimacy and cultural distinction on the international stage. Through the PNSDE, Pakistan similarly mobilized narratives of civilizational antiquity to present its dance heritage as rooted in a historical continuum that predated the modern nation-state.
The construction of a primordial national past also resonated with Soviet approaches to cultural representation. As Shay (Reference Shay1999:35) argues, the notion of “authenticity” was central to the representation of the nation through staged folk dance, whereby dances, music, and costumes were presumed to “originate in some primordial source of [a] nation’s values” and to be timeless expressions of a prehistoric cultural heritage. This conception of historical continuity can be considered alongside the Marxist–Leninist emphasis on appropriating and reinterpreting the cultural achievements of earlier historical periods. As Lenin argued, Marxism did not reject the cultural achievements of the past but instead “appropriated and assimilated all that was valuable in a tradition of human thought and human culture stretching back over 2000 years” (quoted in Lukács 1938:55; cited in Livingston Reference Lukács and Jameson1980:55). Although these perspectives differ, both illuminate how claims to cultural continuity could be mobilized in the construction of national heritage.
Within Cold War cultural diplomacy, the PNSDE similarly drew upon representations of an ancient past by linking the Indus Valley civilization and the Buddhist past to the sixteenth-century Mughal courts; the ensemble extended into dance the archaeological imagination articulated by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in Five Thousand Years of Pakistan (Reference Wheeler1950), which sought to demonstrate that Pakistan represented “a new phase in a long, continuous history and prehistory” rather than an arbitrary colonial creation (7). As noted by Naeem Tahir in our 2009 interview, Wheeler’s work became a key resource for projecting an ancient civilizational pedigree. Most visible in works such as Mohenjodaro Dance and Sons of the River, this archaeological register mobilized antiquity as an aesthetic resource, enabling the ensemble to articulate a deep historical continuity alongside other, at times competing, cultural narratives of Pakistan that foregrounded the Arab conquest of Sindh in the eighth century (Asif Reference Asif2016).
(v) Choreographing cultural difference with codes of Muslim modesty
While the South Asian ballet traditions emerging from the collaborations of Uday Shankar and Leila Sokhey with Anna Pavlova incorporated European ballet vocabularies more openly (Bhattacharjya Reference Bhattacharjya2011), Pakistani choreographers selectively borrowed from socialist and European ballet while adapting these movements to prevailing local moral and aesthetic norms. As Mehr Nigar Masroor explained, “we cannot borrow much of the movement from Western ballet because we cannot conceive our girls raising their legs as ballerinas do… these are two different worlds” (Zaman Reference Zaman1972). Masroor received her dance training at Tara Chowdhry’s School of Dance in colonial Lahore. A contemporary of Azurie, Chowdhry was locally celebrated as the “Pavlova of Punjab” (Minai Reference Minai2013) and was well-versed in Indian art-dance traditions. Mehr’s approach to choreographing ballets, however, was more experimental, as becomes particularly evident in the discussion of her ballets below. Rather than rejecting external influences outright, choreographers recalibrated them, producing forms that remained internationally legible while conforming to local expectations of Muslim femininity and modesty. Images of rehearsals for Sehra ke Phool (Figure 7), in which dancers approximate balletic lines through restrained extensions of the arms and legs, further illustrate this adaptation.
Scene from Sehra ke Phool, choreographed by Mehr Nigar Masroor, c. early 1970s. The off-centre body lines, floor work, and asymmetrical group formation reflect a departure from South Asian toward a more expressive, modern movement vocabulary within Pakistan’s state-sponsored dance practices. Photo published in Zaman (Reference Zaman1972). From the personal archive of Roshan Ara Bokhari, accessed and scanned by the author (2014). Reproduced with permission.
Figure 7. Long description
In the background, the tail of a Boeing 720 B aircraft dominates the upper frame, featuring the P I A logo and a row of stars. A boarding ramp is attached to the side of the plane. In the foreground, a large group of approximately thirty people is gathered on the tarmac. On the far left, men are dressed in Western-style suits and ties. Moving toward the center, the attire shifts to a mix of suits and traditional South Asian garments, including sherwanis and caps. Several women are positioned in the center and right of the group, wearing saris or shalwar kameez, some adorned with floral garlands. One man is crouched in the center foreground. The group is arranged in an asymmetrical formation, with some individuals looking toward the camera and others engaged in conversation. In the far background to the right, a small airport building and a flagpole are visible under a clear sky.
(vi) Rewriting the script of canonised dances
Kathak became increasingly canonised as a respectable art form in PNSDE, particularly in the 1970s, as Pakistani cultural producers circulated alternative genealogies that reframed it as a male dance of Central Asian origin introduced through the Mughal courts (Massey Reference Massey1975a:123). At the same time, PNSDE publications situated Kathak within a layered historical narrative encompassing Aryan, Buddhist, and Mughal pasts. Tracing its origins to the Aryan period, they noted that “the Kathak technique was used by bands of strolling players to illustrate various epic stories and legends of the Aryan gods.” With the advent of Prince Siddhartha and the spread of Buddhism, the arts were said to have shifted from priestly to royal patronage, and “psalms of praise for the Aryan gods were in due course of time used instead to praise the beauty of nature and earthly things.” The narrative then leapt to the sixteenth-century court of Akbar, described as inaugurating the “golden age” of Kathak under Mughal patronage. Significantly, the publications explicitly attributed contemporary Kathak costume to Mughal court dress, consisting of tight ankle-fitting trousers, swirling skirts, fitted bodices, embroidered boleros, and gauzy scarves (Ministry of Culture [Pakistan] 2007:98). This re-narration reflected broader efforts to reconcile inherited choreographic vocabularies with an emerging Muslim national identity, even as alternative historical genealogies continued to coexist within the ensemble’s heteroglot repertoire. Masroor articulated this counter-history vividly in a 1972 interview:
India was bent upon eradicating all memory of the Muslim era, while in Pakistan, people insisted on giving up so much in the realm of music and dance, declaring it as hatefully Hindu when it was superbly Muslim… When Muslim patrons discarded the rigid codification of Hindu dance, they replaced the Hindu god with man, introducing human sufferings and ecstasies into movement. (Zaman Reference Zaman1972)
Several early choreographers at the PIA Arts Academy—including Madame Azurie, Parveen Qasim, and Faqir Hussain Saga—were trained within Kathak lineages that traversed colonial India and later Pakistan. Their teacher, Ustad Aashiq Hussain, was a disciple of Pandit Gopal of the Benares gharana, who had relocated to Lahore in the early twentieth century. Similarly, Ustad Ghulam Hussain Kathak, a disciple of Acchan Maharaj of the Lucknow gharana, migrated after Partition and trained a generation of Pakistani dancers, including Nahid Siddiqui.
Reviews of the PNSDE abroad suggest that this rearticulation of Kathak was both legible and compelling to international audiences. In her 1973 review of the National Folk Ensemble of Pakistan, Anna Kisselgoff highlights Nahid Siddiqui’s Kathak performance as a central feature of the programme, describing her as “an artist of subtlety and impressive technique,” while also noting that Kathak—having developed under Muslim patronage—could be performed in both India and Pakistan (Kisselgoff Reference Kisselgoff1973). Such responses indicate that these rescripted forms retained their technical and historical intelligibility within a shared South Asian tradition, while also circulating effectively within the broader cultural circuits of Cold War diplomacy, where the ensemble’s layered choreographies were not only intelligible but well received internationally.
Pakistani choreographers continued the cultural revivalist projects inherited from colonial India, which had canonised Kathak as a distinct choreographic language and classical tradition while simultaneously marginalising hereditary female practitioners, particularly the tawaifs (Walker Reference Walker2010). Pakistan complicates these narratives of the disenfranchisement of hereditary performers advanced by Allen (Reference Allen1997), Soneji (Reference Soneji2012), Qureshi (Reference Qureshi, Feldman and Gordon2006), and Walker (Reference Walker2010), as Pakistan television, films, as well as the national dance ensemble, thrived as a result of tawaifs (Saeed Reference Saeed2002), whose identities were obscured by fame and success. In PSNDE, participation of figures in leadership roles such as Amy Minwalla—who has been associated in some accounts with hereditary performance lineages of tawaif—suggests that these exclusions were neither complete nor uncontested. Promotional booklets emphasised that “many of the dancers in the Academy were girls from good families, bright, talented and eager to see the world” (7), a formulation that simultaneously signals bourgeois notions of respectability and leaves open the question of who the remaining dancers were. Significantly, the emphasis on “many” rather than all leaves an ambiguity that becomes particularly meaningful in light of lead dancer Roshan Ara Bokhari’s recollection during my 2014 interview with her, in which she noted in passing that there were “prostitutes,” and she and the other girls intentionally kept their distance from them. Her choice of language reveals the enduring afterlives of anti-nautch reform and nationalist cultural revival projects, through which hereditary performers came to be understood primarily through the lens of moral stigma rather than artistic lineage. This recollection encapsulates one of the central paradoxes of PNSDE: while dance was rehabilitated as a marker of national culture, modernity, and cultural diplomacy, the communities that had historically sustained many of these traditions remained marginalised.
The heteroglossia of PNSDE’s formative choreographies: case study 1: Sons of the River
Sons of the River, choreographed by Mehr Nigar Masroor for the PNSDE, stages history through the juxtaposition of multiple coexisting cultural languages. The ballet narrates Porus’s resistance to Alexander in the fourth century B.C. (Aziz Reference Aziz2003), presenting the past as a historical palimpsest in which distinct aesthetic registers appear side by side. By selecting a regional, pre-Islamic story—one neither central to Arab-conquest historiography nor fully aligned with Indus-civilisational nationalism—the work foregrounds a Punjabi-centred historical imagination.
The ballet assembles its aesthetic world from disparate historical and cultural vocabularies. Interviews with Masroor (in Roshan Ara Bokhari’s archive) indicate that its choreography drew on Mughal miniature aesthetics, Punjabi folk forms, Pakhtun Khattak dance, and the sonic-kinesthetic textures of Shiʿite sīnā-zānī. These elements do not belong to the same historical moment; Mughal visual grammar introduces an Indo-Muslim courtly aesthetic, while sīnā-zānī maps a ritual idiom of mourning, involving beating of chests, onto a pre-Islamic battlefield. Khattak dance contributes a martial vocabulary associated with Pakhtun masculinity, while Gandharan-inspired costuming indexes archaeological antiquity (see Figure 8).
Scene from Sons of the River, choreographed by Mehr Nigar Masroor, depicting a celebration of the defeat of Alexander’s army. The costuming and stylised gestures draw on Gandharan visual idioms, evoking Greco-Buddhist aesthetics within Pakistan’s state-sponsored dance repertoire. Published in Zaman (Reference Zaman1972). From the personal archive of Roshan Ara Bokhari, accessed and scanned by the author (2014). Reproduced with permission.
Figure 8. Long description
The photo captures a choreographed scene with five performers. In the foreground, two dancers are seated on the floor. The dancer on the far left is in profile, wearing a draped head covering and looking toward the center. Next to them, another dancer sits facing right, wearing a patterned tunic.
In the mid-ground, two dancers stand in dynamic, lunging poses. The dancer in the center-right is the most prominent, leaning forward with arms extended in a diagonal line, one pointing down and the other up toward the top right corner. They wear a dark, patterned sleeveless dress with a sash. Behind them and slightly to the left, another standing dancer mirrors this lunging posture.
In the background on the far left, a fifth dancer is partially visible in a seated or crouching position. The backdrop consists of a wall with a repetitive square or tiled pattern, and the floor appears to be a dark, uniform stage surface. The lighting creates high contrast, emphasizing the angularity of the dancers’ limbs and the Greco-Buddhist aesthetic of their attire.
These layers do not coalesce into a unified style. Instead, they remain distinct, producing a choreography in which multiple genealogies are held in tension. Masroor’s engagement with Russian and Chinese dance further complicates this field: while she studied these traditions, certain elements—especially partnering techniques—were selectively adapted or rejected in accordance with Muslim modesty norms. What emerges is not synthesis but calibrated coexistence (“Pakistani Ballet a Big Success” 1966).
The musical score, composed by Samar Das and framed as “Pakistani,” similarly avoids devotional idioms associated with Indian canonised dances, emphasising a secular sonic environment. Across movement, costume, and music, the ballet operates through the coordination of divergent registers—archaeological, regional, ritual, and socialist—without collapsing them into a single aesthetic language (“Pakistani Ballet a Big Success” 1966).
Reception of the ballet underscores this multiplicity. Performed during President Ayub Khan’s 1966 visit to the United Kingdom, Sons of the River was presented to Queen Elizabeth II and widely praised by the British press. The Sun commended its “exemplary stage presentation,” while Dawn reported that critics noted its distinction from Indian dance, citing its secular orchestration and “completely different” movement vocabulary (“Pakistani Ballet a Big Success” 1966).
At home, the ballet circulated under the title Jab Jhelum Jeevā Thā (When the River Jhelum Was Alive), foregrounding its regional resonance. Its evocation of the Jhelum River and Punjabi resistance offered an affective register of belonging at a moment when provincial expression was politically constrained. Internationally, by contrast, Sons of the River functioned as a cosmopolitan cultural artefact aligned with Pakistan’s diplomatic efforts to distinguish itself from India. The two titles thus index different narrative frames: a vernacular, regionally embedded one and a transnational, nationally representative one (Zaman Reference Zaman1972).
Through this differentiated circulation and layered aesthetic, the ballet exemplifies how heteroglossia operated within Cold War cultural diplomacy—not as abstract plurality, but as the structured coexistence of distinct choreographic registers mobilised for different audiences. In doing so, it reveals how Pakistan’s cultural identity was negotiated at the intersection of competing models of national culture, integrating socialist notions of historical depth within an assimilationist state framework.
Case study 2: Staging The Heer–Ranjha Folk-Ballet
The Heer–Ranjha ballet draws on a canonical Punjabi romance, reworking it through multiple choreographic and narrative registers shared across Punjab on both sides of the border, and on the vernacular emotional world of rural Punjab. Waris Shah’s epic—steeped in Sufi poetics, pastoral imagery, and village life—had little place in the state’s early cultural policy. Its elevation to the diplomatic stage marked a shift toward incorporating regional narrative into national representation, shaped by the socialist cultural climate of the Z.A. Bhutto era. Bhutto’s populist ethos (rotī kaprā, makān) translated culturally into valuing the “arts of the people,” reversing earlier regimes that privileged the high culture of the Mughals or archaeological antiquity. After the secession of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, Pakistan faced mounting pressure to reconstruct its international image as reflected in Hameeduddin’s (Reference Hameeduddin and Dani1974) call at an international conference for a rearticulation of Pakistani culture abroad through its folk and Sufi traditions.
Zia Mohyeddin, the newly appointed director of the ensemble, played a central role in its production. Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he introduced a theatrical idiom that combined modern stagecraft with regional narrative forms, recruiting musicians from different regions of Pakistan, including Faiz Baloch, Khameesu Khan, Zarsanga, and several others (Ministry of Culture [Pakistan] 2007:74).
In our 2009 interview at the National Academy of Performing Arts office located at Hindu Gymkhana, Mohyeddin described his aim as building “a company that is always ready to perform,” modelled on the Royal Ballet yet rooted in Pakistan’s regional sound worlds (Mohyeddin, interview, Reference Mohyeddin2009). This convergence of folk music, Kathak, and theatrical staging produced an intrinsically distinct Kathak-Ballet, in which no single aesthetic register dominated. The musical composition by Sohail RanaFootnote 7 similarly balanced repetitive layers in folk tunes with orchestral variations (Rana, interview, Reference Rana2013).
In a 2013 phone interview from Edmonton, Sohail Rana, then based in Toronto, described his musical approach: “It is not Western music, it is Eastern, and it is folk… but it can sound monotonous. Since we had 15–16 musicians, I arranged it so it does not sound monotonous” (Rana, interview, Reference Rana2013). His comment suggests levels at which not only the dance movements but also the music were composed to differentiate Pakistan’s Kathak-Ballet from Hindustani art music traditions. Choreographed by Nazir Ahmed, with a long kameez and shalwar designed by modernist painter Laila Shahzada, the ballet unfolded in four movements (Ministry of Culture [Pakistan] 2007:74), translating Waris Shah’s Sufi-inflected romance into a theatrical performance. With Nahid Siddiqui in the role of Heer, the ballet was anchored by one of Pakistan’s foremost Kathak dancers.
Premiered in 1972 during the visit of a Canadian scientist (Ministry of Culture [Pakistan] 2007:8), Heer–Ranjha received enthusiastic responses both domestically and abroad. Its prominence grew to the point that, in November 1976, it was performed before Queen Elizabeth II and members of the British royal family at the Commonwealth Institute. This trajectory underscores how the PNSDE brought multiple choreographic registers—ethnic dances, Moiseyev-inspired theme dances, and Kathak-Ballet based on regional epics—into relation.
Case study 3: The Mohenjodaro Dance
The Mohenjodaro Dance mobilises archaeological antiquity as a choreographic resource, staging the Indus Valley civilisation through a layered aesthetic that brings multiple historical temporalities into relation. Its choreography emerges from an archaeological imagination grounded in two iconic Indus Valley figurines—the Priest-King and the Dancing Girl—which were divided between India and Pakistan at Partition (Tahir, interview, Reference Tahir2009). Inspired by Mortimer Wheeler’s Five Thousand Years of Pakistan (Reference Wheeler1950)—an exemplar of the political use of archaeology—the PNSDE choreographers fashioned a ballet that transformed these prehistoric fragments into a reconstructed pre-Vedic ritual world. Drawing on canonised vocabularies from Kathak, Bharatanatyam, and Odissi, the work articulated a primordial narrative older than both Islam and the Vedic era, asserting cultural difference from India.
The narrative, as described in the PNSDE publications, centres on the Priest-King, whose ritual authority stabilises the community amid elemental forces. His votaries compel him to emerge from trance, bless them, and witness their ritual dance. Archaeological motifs—the Dancing Girl, Mother Goddess, and Priest-King—are animated as living figures, producing a sacred landscape that traverses temporal and religious registers. In doing so, the ballet offers a counter-history to Islamic conquest narratives by situating Pakistan’s origins in a prehistorical, pre-Islamic past whose traces have often been marginalised in official discourse.
The Mohenjodaro Dance became the flagship work of Pakistan’s international cultural diplomacy and, during the 1976 tour to Britain, it was also performed before Queen Elizabeth II and praised. Abroad, this prehistoric narrative functioned as a marker of Pakistan’s antiquity, artistic sophistication, and civilisational depth. At home, however, its counter-historical claims remained muted, residing at the margins of national historiography. The version of the Mohenjodaro dance that I saw in Karachi in 2009 did not emphasise that it was depicting a pre-Vedic sacred ritual, and this lack of clarity may reflect a continuing switching of registers of historical, cultural, and ideological references between domestic and international audiences.
The ballet’s authorship further reveals the fluidity of its expressive field: a composite formation continually reassembled across diplomatic, educational, and artistic contexts. Official PNSDE booklets attribute the choreography to Rafi Anwar and performed by Mehr Nigar Masroor (see Figures 9 and 10), yet Odissi dancer Sheema Kermani (Reference Kermani2011) recalls that her teachers, the Ghanshyams, regularly taught versions of “Mohenjodaro” and “Gandhara,” indicating that the work circulated in the repertoire rather than as a fixed text. This multiplicity of origins does not undermine the ballet’s legitimacy; rather, it points to its open and adaptive structure. On the other hand, Naeem Tahir claimed authorship in my 2009 interview, describing how he drew on the understanding that one (figurine) was symbolising the roots of Kathak dance, and the generally better-known figurine with a bent knee symbolises the early Natyam, said to be “BHA RA TA Natyam,” adding that he used the steps from all three old dances, namely Kathak, Natyam, and Odissi (Tahir, interview, Reference Tahir2009).
Mohenjodaro dance performed by Mehr Nigar Masroor at the PIA Arts Academy, c. 1960s–70s. The choreography stages Indus Valley imagery through a stylised movement vocabulary developed within Pakistan’s state-sponsored dance practices. Photo published in Zaman (Reference Zaman1972). From the personal archive of Roshan Ara Bokhari, accessed and scanned by the author (2014). Reproduced with permission.
“Dancing Girl” bronze figurine from Mohenjo-daro, c. 2500 BCE. The figure has been widely interpreted as evidence of early performative culture in the Indus Valley and has informed modern choreographic reconstructions such as the “Mohenjodaro dance.” Image accessed via Wikimedia Commons (photograph by User: Marsyas). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Such accounts suggest that the Mohenjodaro Dance functioned less as a fixed choreography than as a conceptual framework—adapted, reinterpreted, and reassembled by dancers, teachers, and state cultural workers across contexts. Its iterative form allowed it to be repurposed to meet both local and diplomatic needs. Its prominence is reflected in its reception: in a widely praised performance by the PNSDE at the Commonwealth Institute Theatre in 1975, the British critic Reginald Massey identified Mohenjodaro Dance as the ensemble’s most compelling creative work (1975:123–126).
Taken together, these case studies demonstrate that heteroglossia in the PNSDE was not incidental, but structured through distinct choreographic registers that enabled the ensemble to navigate competing historical, cultural, and geopolitical frameworks.
Conclusion
Ethnomusicologists and dance scholars have often treated South Asian colonial and post-colonial dance modernity as primarily an Indian story, with Pakistan appearing largely at its margins. This article seeks to shift that narrative by demonstrating that Pakistan did not stand outside these histories but actively participated in, reconfigured, and extended the experimental currents that shaped modern South Asian dance revivalism. Extending Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia from literary discourse to embodied performance, I have shown how choreographers associated with PNSDE contributed to the evolution of the modern South Asian genre of cross-cultural ballet productions that first emerged in colonial India. By decentring the Hindu mythological themes emphasised in Anna Pavlova’s collaborations with Uday Shankar and Madame Menaka during the 1920s and 1930s, and instead foregrounding Indus civilisations, Sufi folklore, and prehistoric regional pasts, these choreographers reconfigured the thematic and ideological possibilities of South Asian ballet. Yet, rather than culminating in a singular and centripetal “Pakistani ballet,” their choreographic experiments remained within a centrifugal and decentred heteroglot field, one that negotiated among regional, religious, socialist, and post-colonial imaginaries without fully resolving them into a unified national aesthetic.
The heteroglossia of the formative choreographies of PNSDE discussed reveals how modern South Asian dance traditions were shaped not only through colonial and post-colonial encounters with Europe but also through intra-Asian exchanges, particularly those between Pakistan and China. These inter-choreographic dialogues generated new aesthetic possibilities and cultural imaginaries that cannot be fully understood within a Eurocentric framework. By tracing these multiple and overlapping histories of exchange of cultural forms such as the Moiseyev choreographic template of dances or socialist Calisthenics, this study extends Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia beyond the interlingual interactions of Europe to encompass the transnational and transcultural choreographic encounters that shaped modern dance in the twentieth century. Attending these layered histories of choreographic exchange ultimately provincialises Europe within histories of modern dance and repositions Cold War South–South encounters as central to the making of Asian modernity. Moreover, the circulation of socialist cultural forms within the communist world and their transfer to non-communist Pakistan allied with the US throughout the Cold War exposes a deeper heteroglossia of modern dance, one in which cultural forms were continually reaccentuated, translated, and transformed beyond European centres of influence.
This formulation opens new avenues for examining how heteroglossia operates not only across state-sponsored performance traditions in other geopolitical contexts but also within the so-called classical traditions, shifting the discussion beyond “hybridity” (Walker Reference Walker2010) toward recognising the multiple communities that shaped these forms. It also enables a reconsideration of the contributions of disenfranchised performers, including courtesans who once held social power and landed privilege (Qureshi Reference Qureshi, Feldman and Gordon2006), and calls for their inclusion within national histories in recognition of their cultural legacies and their continuing role in representing the state.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Naeem Tahir and the late Roshan Ara Bokhari for generously sharing archival materials and memories, and Nahid Siddiqui, Sohail Rana, and Zia Mohyeddin for their valuable insights. I am especially grateful to Regula Burckhardt Qureshi for her mentorship and intellectual guidance (2009-2017), which were instrumental in bringing this work to fruition. I also acknowledge the support of colleagues and institutions that contributed to this research, particularly Sean Luyk, music librarian at the University of Alberta, who located a CBS broadcast of the PNSDE from the early 1970s in 2013, an invaluable source for reconstructing the ensemble’s performance history. I extend special thanks to the late Dr Ghulam Ali Allana for facilitating access to the PNSDE’s cultural networks. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their thoughtful feedback, which significantly strengthened this article.
Funding statement
This research was supported by a Graduate Scholarship from the Institute of Ismaili Studies, University of Alberta’s FGSR travel award, and a bursary awarded by the Dance Studies Association (DSA) in 2024.
Ethics statement
Ethical approval for this research was granted by the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board.
