Uday Shankar and the Performance of Alterity in Indian Dance

Abstract

In 1933, sitting in Uttarayan (one of his Shantiniketan homes), Rabindranath Tagore wrote a letter, within which he clearly expressed the need to revive dance in India without being ‘burdened by the narrow conventions of provincialism’ (Tagore 1933).¹ Tagore’s letter suggests that he favoured moving beyond recognisable (and oppositional) understandings of embodied experience, stating that:

[t] here are no bounds to the depth or to the expansion of any art which like dancing is the expression of life’s urge. We must never shut it within the bounds of a stagnant ideal, nor define it as either Indian or oriental or occidental, for such finality only robs it of life’s privilege which is freedom.