Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India

This book provides a critical understanding of dance studies in India, bringing together various embodied practices identified loosely as dance. It suggests an alternative reading of the history of patronage, policies, and institutionalized understanding of categories such as classical, folk, modern, popular, and Bollywood that hierarchizes some dances as 'more' dance than others. It is of great interest to scholars looking at performing arts such as dance as a tool for identity assertions. It offers diverse possibilities of understanding dance through its inherent sociopolitical possibilities as a participatory or presentational tool for communication. The multidisciplinary approach brings together perspectives from critical dance studies, anthropology, history, and gender studies to connect embodied archives of different communities to create an intersectional methodology of studying dance in India as a powerful but marginal expressive art practice. Accessible at multiple levels, thecontent is relevant for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers across dance, dance education, theatre, and performance studies.


Urmimala Sarkar Munsi is a social anthropologist specialized in dance studies and a dancer/choreographer. She is A PROFESSOR AND THE CURRENT DEAN, TEACHING critical dance studies and research methodology in performance studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She is the president of World Dance Alliance Asia Pacific. Her latest books are Uday Shankar and his Transcultural Experimentations: Dancing Modernity, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2022, and Alice Boner Across Arts and Geographies: Shaping the Dance Art of Uday Shankar, published by the Alice Boner Institute, Varanasi in 2021. She has co-edited the MARG 75th year Readings on Dance in 2022. Her ongoing research on survival strategies for women survivors of sexual violence has yielded many writings, among which the recent most is 'Towards a Pedagogic Analysis of Dance and Movement Therapy' in The Routledge Companion to AppliedPerformance, 2021. Her essay 'Being Rama: Playing a God in the Changing Times' (published in Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha edited Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, 2021) came out of her involvement in the Global Humanities Institute and Melon Foundation funded project 'Crisis of Democracy' in 2018-2019.