Wesleyan University Press has recently published two important works on the dance form Bharata Natyam that use ethnography along with other methodologies to make critical interventions in the field of dance studies. The history of this South Indian classical dance form has been much discussed in scholarship that considers its religious roots, its embattled legal status, its role in Indian nation building, its shift from a hereditary community of female dancers to a middle-class Brahmin one, and the changes in repertoire and movement practice that went along with that reform movement. Hari Krishnan and Ahalya Satkunaratnam build on this substantial body of work in two previously understudied directions: the role of popular Tamil film in the creation of the modern dance and the signification of Bharata Natyam as a simultaneously national, global, and ethnically marked dance in Colombo, Sri Lanka. While there is overlap in the background history presented in the two books (especially concerning elite intellectual revivalists such as Rukmini Devi Arundale and E. Krishna Iyer) and both address issues of morality, gender, cultural identity, and embodied movement, they are rooted in different times and places and offer very different perspectives.

Krishnan's Celluloid Classicism clearly demonstrates that Bharata Natyam as we see it today is not a traditional form that has remained unchanged over the millennia or even that was reclaimed and restored to a former glory. Instead, modern Bharata Natyam was created between the 1930s and 1950s in part by the popular film industry. The “bourgeois classicization project” (p. 118), as Krishnan describes it, was dependent on the representation of the dance form in the cinema to project its version of nationalism to the extent that he argues “Bharata Natyam's claim to classicism can be understood only if we think of it as celluloid classicism” (p. 159). Krishnan widens the scope of the dance's creation to include film, Tamil drama, and print culture (songbooks, magazines, and literature), thinking about the production and consumption of Bharata Natyam as part of this broader cultural field.

Bharata Natyam during the late colonial and early postcolonial period in India was a rare entertainment genre whose audience crossed both gender and caste boundaries. By the 1950s, the aesthetic expectations of film and stage audiences had converged because of the way knowledge and technique were shared among stage, screen, and print. Krishnan gives examples of intersections between the different media as practitioners from both Brahmin and devadasi communities worked in multiple fields. As composers, choreographers, and dance teachers moved between film and stage, working with both devadasi and Brahmin students, choreographies moved from stage to screen and vice versa. Krishnan meticulously follows the circulation of Bharata Natyam practitioners, as well as repertoires, costumes, and movement practices to locate the “historical, aesthetic, political, and social” (p. 2) implications of the dance.

Using archival research, choreographic analysis, and ethnography, Krishnan has forever changed the way scholars will talk about Bharata Natyam and Indian classical dance more generally. His argument that the representation of Bharata Natyam on film was constructive in the creation of modern stage Bharata Natyam irrevocably blurs the division between the classical and the popular. He credits the “aesthetic standard for staged performances of Bharata Natyam in Madras” (p. 139) to Brahmin popular film and stage dancer Kamala rather than to Rukmini Devi Arundale. Kamala's athletic style was new in the 1940s and became synonymous with the dance for middle-class audiences.

Satkunaratnam's Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict looks at Bharata Natyam dance as it is practiced and coded in Colombo during wartime. Since Sri Lanka gained its independence in 1948, the government and the press have labeled the dance form as Oriental, Indian (and therefore foreign), indigenous to Sri Lanka and eligible for government funding and support, then as part of a global Tamil cultural identity (as distinguished from the Sinhala Kandyan dance). In this island nation off the coast of South India, the dance practice is heavily reliant on Rukmini Devi Arundale. The Indian cultural nationalist's dance school Kalakshetra was founded in 1936 and features a devotional, desexualized, and narrative style that had deep implications for ideas about the morality of the dance and its performers. Both Tamil and Sinhala dancers from Sri Lanka go there to study on a regular basis.

Satkunaratnam conducted fieldwork in Colombo in 2007, when the 2002 cease-fire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fell apart. She made a return visit in 2009, during the violent end of a twenty-six-year civil war that divided citizens based on language and ethnicity (Tamil, Sinhala), followed by another visit in 2012. Her ethnographic analysis of movement and bodily discipline both in and out of the dance studio in these critical moments in Sri Lankan history illuminates the ways (mostly female, Tamil) dancing bodies “maneuver through obstructions and hurdles” (p. 2). In 2007, she saw Tamils forcibly bussed out of Colombo, heard tale of frequent disappearances, and knew people who joined the 800,000-strong Tamil diaspora. The dance studios were mostly empty, and she was told that 90 percent of the ethnically Tamil teachers had vanished.

Both books address the politicization of Bharata Natyam dance and the community of dancers who perform and teach it. Krishnan's tracks the way the men from the hereditary dance community embraced a new, higher-caste and status identity as Icai Vellalars and became active in Dravidian politics (including the anti-nautch movement) and in Tamil films, creating “a permanent nexus between the political and the cinematic in modern Tamil Nadu” (Krishnan, p. 29). In Sri Lanka, Bharata Natyam became part of the country's mandatory aesthetics curriculum, implemented in 1972. While every school did not offer both Bharata Natyam and Kandyan dance, the government support created opportunities for Tamil women as teachers. Satkunaratnam argues that aesthetics served as a “type of development project for the postcolonial nation” (p. 53). The government could insert a narrative of cultural nationalism into requests for foreign aid as well as appease local insurgencies by the Tamil minority. During and after the war, this became perhaps even more important as the government used Tamil dancers and Bharata Natyam performances to demonstrate diversity and inclusion as they faced criticism both internally and from the United States, United Nations, and European Union for war crimes and violation of human rights. Satkunaratnam spoke with Tamil dancers who were afraid to turn down invitations from the government in case their allegiance was questioned, which would put them in danger. Because the dance was constructed as an “acceptable marker of Tamilness” (p. 65) these dancers have been regularly asked by the government as well as NGOs and diplomatic missions to perform as a sign of reconciliation and peace.

In different ways, these two books challenge received histories of Bharata Natyam dance performance, its origins, and its meaning for different communities of performers and audiences. The authors’ interventions tease out contradictions both glaring and subtle in the usual narratives, perhaps most importantly in the relationship of this “classical” dance with popular culture as seen in films and on television. Each author talks about a Tamil-language reality television show and the role that Bharata Natyam plays in it. These books complicate ideas about the connections this dance form has with terms such as “classical,” “Tamil,” “Hindu,” and “modest,” exposing what Krishnan calls “slippages” (p. 7) in mobility. This phrasing is broad enough to cover not only choreographic shifts in the discipline and physicality of dance movement, but also caste mobility, movement around the city of Colombo as a Tamil body during a time when these bodies were targeted, and mobility between the performance spaces of stage, television, and film.

The complexity of interpreting female performing bodies is another issue the two books share. For Krishnan, looking at the time period when the nation of India was formed, the cinema industry started making talkies, and the revival of Bharata Natyam took place, these bodies are those of devadasi women from the hereditary professional dancing community and middle-class Brahmin women, learning the form as a hobby to glorify the Indian nation. For Satkunaratnam, the bodies are those of Tamil and Sinhala women, who both perform Bharata Natyam although the dance is coded as Tamil. She analyzes a performance that involved one Tamil and one Sinhala woman and uses both of their languages to perform not only “hope and unity as a reaction to the circumstances of war but as a framework for the reaction that is part of the nation and nationalism” (p. 97).

I highly recommend both of these books. They share some of the same concerns, but have very different approaches and research questions. Celluloid Classicism is a longer book, and dense with archival material that it is exciting to see contextualized and reprinted here. Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict is an engaging read, full of personal stories about how the ethnographer's body, ethnicity, citizenship, and dance training influenced the ways she moved around the city and read performances that she both witnessed and participated in. Both include close readings of choreography interspersed with interviews of dancers and choreographers. Both books consider historical and political context, aesthetics, repertoire, and technique as they address their research questions and would be of interest to scholars in the fields of Asian studies, dance studies, performance studies, women's studies, and anthropology. Krishnan's book would also be great for film studies and history, while Satkunaratnam's would be of interest to those in trauma studies and political science.