It is little wonder that Anurima Banerji’s Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State is the recipient of the Dance Studies Association’s 2020 de la Torre Bueno prize. The book offers what is to‐date the most comprehensive view of the history of this Indian dance form across ancient, medieval, colonial, and postcolonial periods. Moreover, it proposes new frameworks from which dance studies can impact other fields. Postulating the state as a “choreographic agent” both of the dancing body and the social corpus, Banerji demonstrates that dance offers insights for studies of law and governance. In her proposal that Odissi enacts “extraordinary genders,” she exposes the Eurocentric notions that typically animate notions of queerness. Her perspective is enriched by her own past training in the dance.

Banerji converses with two streams of scholarship: one group of scholars has argued for Odissi’s linear progression from temple to concert stage, thereby emphasizing its tie with ancient Hindu forms of practice, while other thinkers project the contemporary contours of the dance as a product of modern nationalism. Banerji does not set out to debunk one view over the other so much as to excavate alternative narratives that exist alongside the concept of Odissi as a temple dance and fill in the gaps in standardized versions of the dance’s history. In tracing the dance’s transformation from regional to national spectacle, she argues that the dancing body “propagated a kinetic knowledge that defied appropriations of the traditional, the modern and the national; it choreographed an identity that existed parallel to dominant discourses and values; and it acted as a somatic repository of a past which held importance for the artistic and cultural communities it represented” (9).

In conversation with José Gil’s assertion that dance has the power to create space (Reference Gil and Lepecki2006), Banerji discusses Odissi’s capacity for the enactment of multiple gender identities in relation to her original analytic, “the paratopic.” This concept, which weaves its way from the start to the end of the book, refers to “a practice that creates a space of alterity for reimagining orthodoxies of gender against the normalizing mandates of the state and what is scripted in social law” (3). Odissi’s theatricalization of gender is “extraordinary” in its auspicious distinction from everyday life but not in ways that are directly contradictory to hegemonic values or inherently transgressive. This politics of difference cannot be equated with notions of queerness that are responses to Western notions of deviant and stigmatized sexualities and are associated with liberation.

Banerji examines a wide range of media (literature, websites, films, costumes, etc.) as well as primary sources that include ethnographic interviews in four languages, archaeological evidence, archival documents, and concert attendance in demonstrating that “Odissi is less a discrete practice than a deep repository of ancillary Odishan traditions and forms” (56). In refusing to privilege any of the dance’s antecedents as more authentic than another, Banerji expands the definition of what Odissi is. She identifies it as a sacred and secular practice across platforms of entertainment, religious ritual, and assertions of governmental power.

Her historicization begins with the Udayagiri monuments built in the 1st century BCE by the Jain king Kharavela. These reliefs are the earliest representation of a dance form connected to the region of Odisha and provide evidence of both the dance’s non‐Hindu influences as well as its worldly connection to the state. From here Banerji introduces the reader to a hereditary community of devadasis (female dance specialists), known as maharis, whose practices were institutionalized in temples in the 12th century. She explores discourses of embodiment, building on anthropologist Alfred Gell’s idea of “distributed personhood” (Reference Gell1998) to link the dancer, the temple at Puri, and its deity, Jagannath, in “divining” a ritual subject who defied modern ideas of liberal subjectivity.

Moving forward to look at gotipua, a practice that features young boys who embody feminine archetypes, Banerji works against the view that its emergence is related to the role of Islam in the demise of temple culture. She interrogates Indian historiographies that fail to account for the diversity of Muslim monarchs’ ideologies and styles of governance. She locates gotipua’s origins in the Bhakti movement that democratized religion around the sixth century CE.

Although there is a wide body of scholarship about devadasis in the colonial period, comparatively little focuses on the maharis. Banerji identifies how British legal codes and moral reform efforts spawned a discourse about “temple dancing” that conflated the dancer with the prostitute and affirmed the unique role Odisha played in the Western imaginary as a terrain of extreme barbarism “used to illustrate India’s absolute difference from Western civilization” (228). Odissi escapes associations with savagery in the post‐Independence period with its metamorphosis into a “classical dance.” Banerji traces this process in light of the state’s role in cultural affairs, regional theatrical forms, noteworthy performances, and influential advocates. She examines the emergence of the dance’s distinct styles and codified repertoire, exploring the limiting effects of a classical status. In the end, however, she affirms Odissi’s “ontological flexibility” (355).

The book is organized into three parts named in correspondence with the progression of repertory items featured in an Odissi performance. Figures of artworks and photos amply accompany the discussion. The appendices, index, and bibliography are testimony to a detailed research methodology and exhaustive engagement with academic literature. The author’s voice alternates between close empirical examinations, grounded theoretical discussions, and poetic evocations of the dance and its representations. Scholars, dancers, and students will find both critical knowledge and pleasure in the invitation to approach history from an impassioned, rational perspective, on the one hand, and a sense of informed wonder, on the other. This book sets a gold standard for dance historiography and will be a seminal text in South Asian studies for years to come.