At a time when the field of Indian dance studies is grappling to find new grounds that reflect the shifts in Indian dance practices, Anurima Banerji provides a much-needed interrogative approach towards body, dance, gender and state in her first major treatise on Odissi, a well-known traditional Indian dance form. Banerji's monograph challenges the notion of a unilateral progression of Odissi by expanding the territories of its dancing bodies from their physical practice to the social and political, suggesting the possibilities of alternative dance histories that are not limited to the linear perspective of the sculpture/mahari (temple dancer)/dancer triad. Applying Foucault's genealogical approach, she investigates the discontinuities and gaps to question the unbroken continuity of the historical trajectory as assumed by other Indian dance scholars such as Sunil Kothari and Kapila Vatsyayan.
Banerji articulates the multiple complexities and intersubjectivities across bodies, objects, spaces and sexualities, overlaid with the idea of the sacred and auspicious in a traditional Indian dance practice. She also posits the history of the feminine through the evolving dance form. In its origins in the mahari order, she sees an alternative model of femininity with differing social roles from the normative patriarchal structures. The book examines how not just the dance, but also the sexuality of dancers, is later brought under the regulation and control of the state by the British Raj. In addition, Banerji challenges the strong Hindu bias in Indian dance scholarship, which draws a line between sexuality and spirituality. She questions the conservative Hindu historiographies of cultural production in India, which is inadvertently also centred around an anti-Muslim thesis towards Indian cultural practices (pp. 160–86).
The metaphorical relationship between state and choreography and their concern with disciplining the body form a significant parallel narrative in her discourse. Banerji locates Odissi's multiple configurations through the analogical value and structural correspondences generated between the state and choreography through different historical periods. As culture becomes an object of law, law becomes one of the instruments to define and control the dance and the dancing body. Amidst the many intersections of the state and choreographing the body, she finds that Odissi retains its paratopic power, where both ‘dance and state become sites of scripted, embodied performance’ (p. 32) and the dancer becomes the cultural producer in the sociopolitical system.
Approaching and identifying the dance form as a paratopic force is a unique concept developed by Banerji. She locates the paratopic force of Odissi within the very traditions that can be rendered transgressive, embodying the performance with a state which is beyond the norm; the paratopia is not necessarily resistive of, but distinct from, the dominant (pp. 28–9). Socially and sexually marginalized mahari and gotipua dancers (young boys performing traditional dance), through their state of otherness, provoke the dominant discourse of gender and power in their sexed identities. Underlying their alterity is the potential and the possibility of embodying a proliferation of genders, which she has extensively explored. Banerji's idea of paratopic Odissi body is further conditioned by José Gil's ‘paradoxical body’ and Henri Lefebvre's work on corporeality and spatial politics (pp. 24–5).
A distinguishing intervention is Banerji's explication of queer in ritual performance. Through the exalted figures of gotipua dancers she provides a fresh approach to reading the contradictions of the queer in a South Asian context, where transgender performance is ‘proposed as an act and not an identity’ (p. 194), and the ‘queer’ is ‘not marginalized but venerated’ (p. 193).
The book is divided into six chapters covering each of the historical periods chronologically from pre-colonial to post-colonial. Voices of both participants and observers through the decades inform the research. Oral histories and anecdotes narrated by gurus and dancers are relevant sources for knowledge production on dance, including the accounts of critics, historians and dance scholars.
Not limiting the history to individual performers, their process and practice, the book focuses on laying the historiography through dance communities, the sociopolitical relations and social processes, which produce dance and the dancing body. The book is an important resource not only for dancers and dance scholars, but also for those invested in the interdisciplinary studies of history, ethnography, cultural practices, gender, performance, state, law and body.
