Ketu Katrak's book, which analyzes recent Indian dances in India, North America, and Britain, sympathetically delineates the career trajectories of artists, their personal struggles in breaking from their traditional training, their negotiations with cultural stereotypes, and their choreographic intentions and aspirations. Katrak examines dance techniques, choices of narrative, expressivity, and abstraction to distinguish a continuum of choreographic innovations from within the boundaries of traditional forms such as kathak and bharatanatyam. Through specific chapters, she groups artists as creative, emerging, hybrid, and diasporic while acknowledging that many of these artists' trajectories and creative works move across categories.

Katrak is a well-known postcolonial writer who heads the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California–Irvine. Originally from Mumbai, India, she trained in bharatanatyam in Los Angeles for twenty years with Medha Yodh (xxii).

In her introduction, Katrak finds useful links between the various dance discourses of India and recent American dance theories, particularly Diedre Sklar's work on body-mind practices and the somatic organization of knowledge, Susan Leigh Foster's notions of performative writing and of reading dancing, and Randy Martin's work on the ways that the dance resists representation (22). She analyzes how various performative elements work in combination to produce the emotional resonances that audiences will experience or “taste” as rasa. Katrak draws from the historic arguments on rasa that occurred between the scholars of the Natya Shastra in Abhinavagupta's tenth century commentary and subsequent translations. She traces the problem of how emotion transfers from performers to observers, and from text to reader (21).

In her first chapter, Katrak recounts the contested and now obligatory narrative of nineteenth and early twentieth century anticolonial and gender struggles as a background or prelude to the current scene. Here, devadasis, narthakis, and modern pioneers such as Uday Shankar and Chandralekha are woven together. The contestations between Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi Arundale having to do with the recovery/reconstruction of bharatanatyam have always been deeply troubling to dancers, who line up along one or the other side of this narrative.Footnote ¹ Katrak succinctly weaves together the arguments of both sides into an updated summary of the twentieth-century history of bharatanatyam in particular.

What is interesting here is that a generation of scholars and dancers seems to have arrived that is removed enough to acknowledge the positive and painful aspects of each story. In the 1980s, a puzzling blanket of resistant silence cloaked the narratives of these dance ancestresses. Katrak's writing made me consider what has changed between the 1980s and the present time. For one thing, a profusion of piecemeal responses and theorized articles has been filling in information, actively honing our sensitivities to the subjectivity of overwritten bodies. Scholars outside India, protected by their geographic and disciplinary distance, have remapped the narrative. These stories have spawned counter-narratives from dancers within India who feel overly implicated or marginalized by the homogenized narrating styles. Each rewrite has added nuances and historical details, and shown a diversity of narratives from the various regions within the subcontinent.

What I have since come to realize is that perhaps those who wrote in the twentieth century maintained their silence out of either respect for the privacy of women living under the shadow of moral and cultural upheaval, or because they did not wish to be associated publicly with such passionately contested concerns. Time has eroded the institutions and discourses that objectified, repressed, and protected devadasis, rajadasis, natchwalis, baijis, maharis, etc., and time has also distanced us enough to revisit and excavate those social and politicized networks along with their bodily consequences. An additional factor in bringing discussion into the open were an abundance of newspaper and magazine articles in India in the 1980s and 1990s that highlighted women's issues and a feminist perspective.

In her second chapter, Katrak examines current veterans of trans-local Indian dance with established histories of dancing their times: Astad Deboo (post-1970s Mumbai and the world) and Shobhana Jeyasingh (post-1980s UK). They have very different trajectories linked only by the ways in which their dances were initially received, that is to say, as forays into the territory of American modern dance or into the British arts scene. Katrak shows how Deboo's generosity of spirit and continuous absorption in his work over the course of more than forty years have overcome these perceptions. Deboo's dances, once perceived as excessive, are now admired for their investment in “mood and emotion” (Venkataraman Reference Venkataraman2002, 56). Meanwhile, since the 1980s, the verbally and choreographically articulate Jeyasingh has consistently negotiated her place in London with brilliant strategies of protesting and transforming perceptions of difference and Orientalized images of Indian-ness. One of Jeyasingh's strategies, which Katrak notes, is to reposition the notion of rasa as kinesthetic response (that is, when we in the audience derive pleasure from movement, we experience rasa).

Rasa is a long and complex discourse, repeatedly discussed in the past in Sanskrit, and more recently addressed in several European and Indian languages. Many dancers in India insist on ascribing fifteenth-century concepts (e.g., bhakti rasa) and tenth-century writings (e.g., shānta rasa) to the Nātyashāstra (200 BC–200 AD). In my opinion, this kind of conflating of different historical perspectives erases individual contributions, change, and the progressive layerings of time. Katrak, for the most part distinguishes between the chronologically written texts and a kind of Foucauldian archive of transforming methodologies that are useful for performers. However, she seems unaware that there are only eight rasa in the Nātyashāstra, and that the notion of bhakti rasa has to do with a much later discourse of emotions.

Katrak next discusses works anchored in traditional forms, such as kathak and bharatanatyam. The artists she discusses include Madhu Natraj, Aditi Mangaldas, Daksha Sheth, Mallika Sarabhai, Lata Pada, and Navtej Johar. Although Padmini Chettur is included in this section, Katrak is careful to present her as exploring abstract, post-minimal principles of isolation, manipulation, etc. Katrak shows how the geocultural locations of these artists influence their danced dialogues with the politics of regionalism, nationalism, and interculturalism. It is interesting to notice here the persistence of past dialogues that were initiated by local predecessors and post-Independence mentors, such as Kumudini Lakhia, Mrnalini Sarabhai, Chandralekha, Rukmini Devi Arundale, et al.

In the section titled “Hybrid Artists and Transnational Collaboration,” Katrak discusses the work of Anita Ratnam, Hari Krishnan, and Ramli Ibrahim. Whereas Ratnam views her work as “neo-bharatam,” Krishnan considers his “vintage bharatanatyam.” Nevertheless, these two artists collaborate with each other in India, the U.S., Canada, and the UK. Here Katrak references Homi Bhabha's postcolonial hybrid whose very existence calls into question the dominant ideologies even while mimicking them (Katrak 142). This is particularly apt for Hari Krishnan's subtle mimicry, which highlights the constructedness of gender difference. Katrak evokes the notion of metissage, a layering of identities from light to dark (157). Recent scholars on Indian culture have been reluctant to map racial discourses onto Indian social practices because of the differences in colonialism in various parts of the world. I understand Katrak as ascribing metissage to choreography-as-text, as a mapping of the interplay of the unmarked and “traditional” in the dances, rather than of race.

Katrak explores dual consciousness and hybridity in the works of Post-Natyam, a collective of dancers emerging from UCLA's dance program. Katrak describes the group's multiple movement disciplines, vocal techniques, and thoughtful probing of personal and social issues through their juxtaposed stories, imagery, use of projections, and cyberspace. She notes the contributions of multiple first-generation immigrants from India whose work in the United States continues to translate and transmit tradition.

The intimacy of the writer–diaspora–artist relationship is evidenced in Katrak's discussion of diaspora dancers such as Ratnam and the Post-Natyam group. Here, the writing is richly layered with attention to detail and intention. When writing of artists in India, Katrak, empathetic as always, documents their career trajectories and current perceptions of their recent work, but it is almost as if their inclusion serves as a contextual background for her focus on the diasporic condition. In fairness to the writer, Katrak has already reflexively warned us about what attracts her interest as a writer:

To read Katrak's book is to come away with a sense of delight in how far dance writing has come in capturing layered and multiple activities, perceptions, and knowledge. Like continuous stages of departure, the trends she describes seem to circle around in synchronous dialogue with each other and with global trends.