Indian classical dance and its textual tradition
"I had been learning dance for years but it was only in my teens that I was expected to faithfully recite tongue-twisting Sanskrit verses, naming and describing positions and movements of body parts. I also began to imagine that a text might exist whence the verses came to my teacher, and that it might be a slim book, at best. Then my mother handed me an epiphany in the form of a fat, fabric-bound, hard cover book: it was the Natyasastra, translated into English twenty years earlier by Manmohan Ghosh. The Natyasastra ‘s antiquity, the unexpected expanse of subject matter that it considered relevant to performance, as well as its detail of classification and categorisation, were mind blowing then and remain astonishing today. Importantly it was the first among a long lineage of texts recovered, transliterated and translated into several languages, and brought to the attention of a nationalist post-colonial India…The texts recognised the role of training and technique , and the competence of professional actors, dancers and other performers; the texts admitted self doubt and discussion" (Sundaram 2005, 1).
Thus begins the editorial by bharatanatyam dancer Chitra Sundaram, writing in the 2005 spring issue of pulse (1). The issue carries an article by renowned Sanskrit scholar Mandakranta Bose, exploring the uniqueness of the Indian textual tradition on the performing arts, a literary and textual tradition which constitutes a specific and unparalleled discourse about dance. Significantly, Bose makes the point that the antiquity of dance and dance literature in India is often invoked to valorise contemporary practices, through claiming a misconceived purity and authenticity and “ citing an ancient and ‘unchanged’ lineage” for this purpose (Bose 2005,14). This chapter will examine the relationship of Indian classical dance to this textual tradition, and the visualisation of the textual codifications in the sculptures of the Southern Indian temples, foregrounding the work of reconstruction and construction of a quintessentially modern dance form such as bharatanatyam, and its variant bharatanrithyam (this being the spelling chosen by its creator, Padma Subrahmanyam).
Photo: Chitra Sundaram (Satyajit)
bharatanatyam, Chitra Sundaram in Alarippu.mp4
*MP4 File 2.0mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
Let us begin with the archetypal Natyasastra. This is a Sanskrit work on drama, dance and music of uncertain date, which has acquired the status of Ur-text of Indian classical dance. Dates ranging from the 2nd century BCE to the 6th century CE have been variedly suggested, and there is some consensus on a date falling between 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE (Vatsyayan 1996, 28; Bose 1991; 2005). Some scholars believe that the text has various layers and was composed at different times, by different authors, incorporating Vedic material; whereas other scholars have argued for a unity of purpose, unity of composition and a single authorship (by the mythical Bharata), which remains to be proven. From around the 7th century CE the Natyasastra was the object of exegesis by a line of Kashmiri scholars; we have no record of earlier scholastic engagement, if any, with the text. Among the commentators there was the 11th century Saivite philosopher Abhinavagupta, author of the Abhinavabharati which has unfortunately only come down to us with several lacunae (Vatsyayan 1996, 137-161).
The history of the Natyasastra manuscript is much more recent, with the earliest manuscripts belonging to the period between the 12th and the 18th century (Vatsyayan 1996, 28-46). Western scholars discovered the Natyasastra in the later part of the 18th century, with a first mention of Bharata in Sir William Jones’ preface to his Sacontala; in the following two centuries there was much effort on the part of Sanskrit philologists, in India and in the West, to study the Natyasastra as a text of dramaturgy, leading to a number of critical editions (Rocher 1981, 107-130). It was in the 20th century, through the modernisation process of bharatanatyam, that the Natyasastra and its related texts came to be regarded as setting out the grammar of Indian dance classicism (Coorlawala 1994; O’Shea 2001), in an attempt to exercise control over multiple praxes, by invoking textual authority, the ‘theory’. As noted by O’Shea ‘theory’ in Indian dance research, unlike its Euro-American counterpart, is understood to mean an exposition of the general principles governing the practice of dance, a set of rules, rather than an engagement with social theory (O’Shea 2000, 86).
Chapter 4 of the Natyasastra deals specifically with dance, here separated from acting, although in the text the dancing and the acting body are conceived as one, for the natya actor is also a dancer. The chapter describes the 108 dance units or karanas of the tandava dance of Siva and their combinations, short dance phrases named angaharas (NS 4, vv.1-245). This particular chapter of the Natyasastra has attracted special attention since Naidu, Naidu and Pantulu published its translation into English entitled Tandavalaksanam, in 1936. Since then there have been other translations of the Natyasastra among which the two volumes by Manmohan Ghosh, in 1951 and 1956 respectively, and different interpretations of the karanas of chapter 4 have been put forward. These textual readings and interpretations have drawn on the iconography of the 108 karanas, as found on the walls of the temples at Thanjavur (Brhadisvara)(2) , Kumbakonam (Sarangapani) and Chidambaram (Nataraja) in Tamilnadu, southern India. The karana reliefs at Kumbakonam and Chidambaram in particular have been identified by inscriptions, found on each karana slab, giving the Sanskrit name of the karana as recorded in the Natyasastra(3). The Chidambaram reliefs were first noticed and reported by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1913, and a number of drawings were subsequently made, indicating their exact position on the temple gopura walls.
Photo: Kumbakonam, karana at Sarangapani temple
Photo: Chidambaram, karana at Nataraja temple
It was dance scholar Kapila Vatsyayan who pointed out that these karanas were ‘cadences of movement’ culminating in a pose (Vatsyayan 1968,98). Prior to Vatsyayan’s work, the 108 karanas had been regarded as still poses because of the static nature of sculpture (and painting), the medium of their representation (4). To a great extent the misconception of karanas as static poses has continued into contemporary times, perpetuated by textual readings of the Natyasastra by Sanskrit scholars unacquainted with dance and by art historians and archaeologists who have described visual representations of the 108 karanas as poses, without relating them to the textual descriptions of the actions involved in their performance.
The interest in the 108 karanas of the Natyasastra on the part of Indian dance scholars and dance artists over the past half a century has resulted in overlapping narratives of recovery, underpinned by different agendas. It should be noted here that the attempt to engage in this recovery of the karanas came almost entirely from the bharatanatyam dance world. The reason for this renewed interest can be linked with the process of Sanskritisation of bharatanatyam, as effected by its 20th century reformers, whereby the re-engagement with the Sanskrit textual material also stimulated research into lesser known aspects of the performance practices described in the Sanskrit texts.
Thus there is a narrative of restoration of an ancient dance past, understood to be the golden age of Indian dance. In this narrative the karanas are presented as elements of an obsolete, lost dance form, and there is almost a ‘moral obligation’ to bring them back to life. This is, for example, the view put forward with great conviction, by performer-researcher Padma Subrahmanyam, who proposed throughout the late 1960s and 1970s a practice-based reconstruction of the karanas, achieved through textual and iconographic research (Subrahmanyam 1978; 1979), with the karanas interpreted as dance movements.
A variant of this narrative is found in the recovery of the 108 karanas, identified as elements of a lost dance with acrobatic poses, an exclusive body knowledge claimed to have been passed on through parampara, lineage, and practice alone, only subsequently ‘rediscovered’ by the practitioners as a codification in the Natyasatra text. It is interesting to note here that in Tamil the word ‘karanam’ has among its meanings that of ‘tumbling heels over head’(Winslow’s Dictionary 1981, 245), thus denoting an acrobatic somersault.
Tamil dancer K. Swarnamukhi , trained by her own father, a bharatanatyam dance master, popularised this interpretation of the karanas as acrobatic poses, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some critics were totally unimpressed and dismissed her as a circus contortionist, a harsh judgement underpinned by a perceived hierarchical differentiation between bharatanatyam, an elite art, and acrobatics, clearly regarded as a lesser form (5). Similarly, Kuchipudi Guru C.R. Acharya also favoured an acrobatic interpretation and culled the 108 karana from the tradition of the Bhagavata Mela Natakam theatre, refined with the aid of additional textual sources besides the Natyasastra, especially the Abhinavabharati, and the treatise authored by Somanathkavi (Sarabhai and Acharya 1992, 83).
Acrobatic dancing has been part of Indian performing arts for as long as can be remembered, with spectacular examples recorded in almost every region of the subcontinent (for example , dollu kunitha of Karnataka, bandha nrutya and danda nata of Orissa, some of the Manipuri dances and so on). It represents a more popular, village based performance strand, often linked with ritual and/or asceticism, sometimes converging with hatha yoga, sometimes overlapping with circus style practices. The attempt to associate village acrobatics with the karanas of the Natyasastra points to a valorization strategy aimed at classicizing these more popular forms, reabsorbing them into a pan-Indian reinvented tradition, thus providing them with a higher status. The inclusion of a handful of yogic movements, such as cakramandala, a (back) bend with both legs brought forward over the shoulders to enable rolling over, among the 108 karanas codified by the Natyasastra was seized upon to support this validation.
Gotipuas.mov Gotipuas performing bandha nrutya
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ReConstructing karanas and the discourse of purity and authenticity
The Natyasastra defines a karana as a movement of the upper limbs (hasta), movement of the lower limbs (cari) and a stance (sthana). Thus a karana is a small dance unit, rather than a pose. In Natyasastra terminology a limb (anga) is a body part. A karana, being a dance unit, can be subdivided into smaller segments involving the lower and upper limbs, stance and even tinier segments, such as the different parts of the upper and lower body, denoted as primary and secondary limbs (including shoulders, chest, sides of the torso, waist etc) in the textual codifications. A karana also categorises the level in which the movement takes place (lower, middle or upper).
Though there is no real limit to the number of possible karanas and their variations, only a set number of 108 is listed as being elements of the tandava. The 108 karanas are given in numerical ascending order, perhaps reflecting a routine of practice, followed by a list of 32 set angaharas. These are combinations of karanas, dance phrases made up of three or more karanas, based on the principle of permutation. Each one of the 108 karanas has a name either derived from that of the characteristic smaller movements involved in its execution or is an imaginative and poetic evocation of a specific movement idea. The name of each unit often suggests its movement path: for example all the units which have the name ‘scorpion’ (vrscika) in some combination involve an upward extension of the leg at the back, resembling the curve of the tail of a scorpion. The ‘scorpion’ movement is the basic dynamic pattern: all the different karanas exhibiting this movement are based on permutations of movements of the arms, legs and sides of the torso, giving rise to several variants.
The contemporary interpretation of the karanas in the work of performer-researcher Padma Subrahmanyam is an instantiation of the reconstruction’s inscription in a discourse of purity and authenticity, understanding the Natyasastra karanas as a lost, authentically classical, dance technique which has to be retrieved to revitalise current dance practice and imbibe it with timeless values. This karana based dance is posited as the true marga, the pan-Indian classical dance, from which all the other forms, the desi, are derived, all underpinned by the same laws and principles: “ the apparent diversity may be because…each region manages to remember and maintain just a few aspects of a common Natya Veda” (Subrahmanyam 1997, 176). This contradicts bharatanatyam’s claims to a marga status, as it suddenly places it among the desi forms (6).
Subrahmanyam began to engage with the karana sculptures of the Thanjavur temple, when assisting in the mid 1960s, as a postgraduate student, archaeologist and Sanskrit scholar Professor T. N. Ramachandran. It is also of note that Subrahmanyam’s engagement with the karanas occurred at the same time as the dance form odissi was undergoing systematisation and was being projected as the most ancient of the Indian classical forms and the closest to Indian sculpture; all these activities can be seen as being looped in a continuum.
From the outset her aim was "to reintroduce the lost karanas" in the practice of bharatanatyam . In her recently published doctoral thesis, originally submitted to Annamalai University in 1978, she claims that “the aim of (the) study is to revive a lost dance technique.” (Subrahmanyam 2003, iii). Padma Subrahmanyam reinterpreted the 108 karanas through a dancer’s body, rather than through philological textual analysis, and further nuanced their interpretation through her choreographic imagination. But she did this succumbing to the rhetoric of ‘Heritage and Tradition’. She has actively participated in creating the narrative of a golden age of pan-Asian Hindu Dharmic culture (7), a contemporary reformulation of the Greater India theories of pre-independence India. The notion of Greater India implied a unified culture based on dharmic law, with India as the beacon of Asian civilizations (8).
Subrahmanyam sought out authentication and validation of her efforts by invoking the religious authority of the late Mahaswami Sankaracarya of Kanchi Math and purporting to have gained his stamp of approval, in ways that uncharitable commentators have regarded as being somewhat exploitative of the genuine affection the majority of Hindus felt, and continue to feel, for the late ‘sage of Kanchi’. Her writings are littered with references to His Holiness (9), announcing that through his blessings she was ordained to reveal “the common cultural ethos of Bharata Varsa” (Subrahmanyam 1997, Preface) and demonstrating a strong, nationalist thrust, at times resounding with anti-Islamic sentiments. Her search for authenticity led her to participate in sponsoring and fund- raising for the construction of a new temple at Satara, in Maharastra, dedicated to Siva Nataraja, for which she designed, apparently following a request from the Mahaswami, a whole set of new 108 karana reliefs based on her reconstruction. She recounts the experience as follows:
The Mahaswami graciously commanded me to design the sculptures based on “Marga” and adhere to pre-13th century concepts. It took one year for me to design the figures. After making the rough drawings on my own from memory, I modelled for making the final sketches. Prof. Tirugnanam prepared those diagrams in Cola style in accordance with “Talamana” and “Pramana” (proportions). I have used the twin figures (about 12” height) to bring out the animation of the respective movements. Parvati’s figures show the beginning or an earlier part of the movements. The secondary hands of Siva indicate either the course of action or the end of the Karana. Every line drawing was taken to Sri Periyaval {the Mahaswami} for his approval…Sri Muthiah Sthapati {the sculptor} took keen interest and we have spent hours and days together to make the sculptures as authentic and beautiful as possible (Subrahmanyam 2003, 210-211).
Thus the 108 karana sculptures on the Satara temple, immortalize this late 20th century reconstruction.
Subrahmanyam’s ideological stance, however unappealing, should not prevent us from engaging, critically, with her performance and research work. Stripped of its mystique and conservatism, her work offers new insights into the construction of dance knowledge, as she addresses issues of practice-based research, using her research interactively with her dance practice, as she says, “self-experiencing …the theories delineated in the Sastra” (Subrahmanyam 1997, 177) . Her reconstitution of the 108 karana dance units involves the dancer as subject. Thus Padma Subrahmanyam is a pioneer of dance archaeology, even though her intervention lacks the theoretical underpinnings through which it can become a reflexive and critical interpretation of the past, an interpretation in which the past is not merely invoked to guarantee a conservative present.
As many karanas, so many bharatanatyam variants
The re-assemblage of the karanas does not occur on neutral territory. An adult body is scripted upon by a variety of markers, including gender, class, race, culture and biological markers such as age, illness etc. An adult dancing body is, in addition, marked by its previous dance training (or lack of it). The body of a dancer of today considerably differs from that of an 11th or 14th century dancer, especially one known only from temple sculptures. However, the sculptural representations of karanas can tell us a great deal about bodies of the past through the performativity of the frozen, segmented movements themselves. Some of these movements are not at all part of the bharatanatyam dance movement vocabulary or at least they were not back in the 1960s, when Subrahmanyam began her research – in particular one can think here of leg extensions and aerial movements (Subrahmanyam 2003, viii).
Drawing: by Tirujnanam of Padma Subrahmanyam's reconstruction of karana 58, involving an aerial movement
Even allowing for idealisations, such as an imagined flexibility which might not correspond to practical ability, depictions of dancers in temple iconography do tend to reflect the dance and body aesthetics of their period (Lopez y Royo 2003). 2003; Lopez y Royo n.d). Thus approximating that dance body aesthetics involves retraining the contemporary body. This intersects with other problems pertaining to the re-embodiment process: the style of and the gendering of the movement. Through execution, gender is materialised, and movement is stylistically made ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ regardless of the performer’s gender: a performer can choose the style or qualities to be given to a pre-existing movement pattern and this may include characterising the movement as feminine or masculine (10). This issue of gendering movement will be taken up again in chapter 5.
Here it will suffice to say that in re-contextualising past dance movements as dance in the present, the karana units are overlayered with the traces of the dancers’ previous body training and aesthetic sensibility. Subrahmanyam, for example, reabsorbed the 108 karanas in her bharatanatyam and gave them a quality which she consciously decided should be ‘soft’ and ‘fluid’, in keeping with her particular bharatanatyam lineage, the Vazhuvur school (11).
Shanks and Tilley (1992), Taruskin (1989) and Naerebout (1997) have all discussed the problem of authenticity in reconstruction, ranging from reconstruction of artefacts to reconstruction of performance, pointing out that authenticity is itself a construct and is characterised by relativity. The idea of authenticity draws on the romantic notion of a quality of aura (Benjamin 1989, 223) which the artefact of the past exhibits,
but the objects only represent or indicate the past. The past is the referent signified by the object…the objects embody this play of difference which is tied down by the rhetorical agency of interpretation…Meaning is produced in the material practice of reasoning in the present, which is , of course, in no way identical with the past (Shanks and Tilley 1992,75-76).
Thus it is the present day bharatanatyam spatio-temporal context which authenticates the style of Subrahmanyam’s reconstituted 108 dance units: their stylistic quality is consciously adapted from the contemporary practice of bharatanatyam. What I am trying to say is that the stylistic quality of the karanas is not a given and it does not exist prior to re-embodiment. It remains an interpretive choice. The 108 karanas, in other words, are endowed with an intrinsic interpretive diversity: it is the interpreter who works out qualitative transitions into and out of each karana and its segments. Such qualities are usually passed on, in living dance practices, through bodily discursive interaction – of dance teacher and dance pupil - and through imitation; here they have to be supplied by the interpreter, and thus vary according to aesthetic visions and intertexts.
This process is very clearly seen when the Natyasastra’s descriptions of the karanas are interpreted without trying to relate them to any historic sculptural rendering, but merely relying on the individual movement sensibility of the dancer/reconstructor. Back in 2000, I worked with Labanotator and movement analyst Jean Johnson Jones, from the University of Surrey and bharatanatyam-trained dancer Vena Ramphal (12) on a project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Arts and Humanities Research Council), involving a re-constitution of a selection of the 108 karanas of the Natyasastra, experimenting with the process of embodiment in the context of documentation and recording of dance movements. Ramphal’s understanding of the Natyasastra’s material significantly broke away from Subrahmanyam’s reconstruction, utilising a very different set of references and resulting in a new set of movements, even though she had previously trained with Padma Subrahmanyam and was aware of her interpretation. Similarly, US based dancer and choreographer Uttara Asha Coorlawala, whose training was in both bharatanatyam and modern dance (Graham technique) has experimented with reinterpreting the karanas of the texts in keeping with her dance sensibility and her movement interpretation does not coincide with that of Subrahmanyam.
Photo: karana project, August 2000, University of Surrey
Bharatanatyam remains a key word in this reconstruction process: far from rejecting it, Subrahmanyam has continued to use the technique of bharatanatyam with its adavus and tirmanas, rooted in the rhythms of Carnatic music. In the course of her research she augmented her bharatanatyam with the reconstituted 108 karanas and chose to rename her style bharatanrithya(m) to differentiate it from other bharatanatyam schools. However, the differentiation is specious and, outside the bharatanatyam circuit, it is hardly noted. Bharatanrithya remains, to all effects, firmly within the bharatanatyam fold and it does not undermine the supremacy of bharatanatyam as a direct heir to the marga practices, in a sense defeating Subrahmanyam’s purpose.
Subrahmanyam has aimed at turning her reconstruction into a pan-Indian phenomenon, to create awareness “of the common sub-stratum of Indian culture” (Subrahmanyam 1997, 33), and has done so especially through the documentary Bharatiya Natyasastra, directed by her brother V. Balakrishnan, with music, choreography and a script authored by her. The documentary, in thirteen episodes, was broadcast by Doordarshan, the Indian national broadcasting corporation, in 1992. Enacted in a style vaguely reminiscent of a Bollywood movie, with a matching dialogue, the serial tries to find commonalities, glossing over differences, among all Indian dance styles and genres. It posits the Natyasastra as a common source of origin, using a ‘mother dance’ metaphor and urging Indian dance practitioners to familiarise themselves with Subrahmanyam’s reconstruction of the karanas and her overall interpretation of the Natyasastra text and use it to ‘revitalise’ their desi forms – there is here an implicit charge of a late 20th century degeneration of these desi forms.
The 108 karanas as reconstructed by Subrahmanyam are exclusively used, together with bharatanatyam adavus, by Subrahmanyam herself and her students; however, it would be wrong to assume that in India knowledge of these karanas is confined to a very small circle of dancers and scholars. Awareness of the Natyasastra as an important historical dance text ; Padma Subrahmanyam’s own popularity as one of the most successful performers in India and her celebrity status, which attracts imitators; and more generally, the emphasis given in the Indian aesthetic discourse on the closeness of dance and sculpture: all this has made the concept of karana, especially, but not exclusively, in the sense of 'dance pose', well known to all Indian dancers, even though the details of Subrahmanyam’s reconstruction may not have wide currency.
Bharatanatyam dancers (13) – though not exclusively practitioners of this form - use karanas liberally in their choreography. They may either use them as ‘poses’, or as freely reinterpreted movements, adapted from iconographic representations or from their own readings of the classical texts, or sometimes inspired by Subrahmanyam’s choreography, without engaging with Subrahmanyam’s reconstruction and her methods and without concerning themselves with specious issues of authenticity. The ‘poses’ are known from the copious temple sculptures but also from other practitioners’ work and as such they are in the public domain, thus a source of inspiration and/or imitation. The late Manjushri Chaki Sircar, for example, incorporated a number of movements derived from her observation of Indian sculpture and from the Ajanta frescoes in her navanritya, a methodology and dance technique she elaborated in the 1980s and taught at the Dancers' Guild in Kolkota, West Bengal (Sircar 2003,40; Lopez y Royo 2003) (14). Kuchipudi dancer Raja Reddy has created several dance pieces of a breathtaking sculpturesque quality, underpinned by his fascination with temple iconography, whereas the dance form odissi is deeply marked by the inspiration the odissi gurus have derived from Orissan temple sculpture.
DG.mp4 Dancers'Guild:the Ajanta inspired flying apsara movement explained to students *MP4 File 1.0mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
The foregoing discussion has shown how the representation of the dance past is deeply political and wholly entangled in slippery negotiations of what constitutes history and tradition. Subrahmanyam reconstituted the 108 karanas of the Natyasastra as movements and fully adopted the movement classificatory system of the Natyasastra as a pedagogy in her practice and her teaching of bharatanatyam. The use of the Natyasastra classificatory system, as known from later compendia such as Abhinaya Darpana, is more generally part of contemporary Indian classical dance training : all dancers are aware of the division of the body into angas, pratyangas and upangas (major and minor limbs); commit to memory the names of the hastas (hand gestures); are aware of karanas and angaharas as elements of an ancient form of dancing, no longer practised; are aware of the marga and desi distinction and are knowledgeable about the rules given in the Sanskrit treatises for abhinaya, ‘acting’. This is especially true of bharatanatyam dancers, who acquire such a knowledge routinely through their training in ‘theory’ and understand bharatanatyam to be a direct heir to the marga tradition of the Sanskrit texts.
A question arises at this juncture, as there seems to be some confusion over terminology. Do the reconstructed and re-embodied 108 karanas constitute a dance technique (using here the term technique in the same way as in the Euro-American dance discourse one acknowledges a ballet or a modern dance technique)? Is there a karana dance technique as a result of this work of reconstruction? The use of the term ‘technique’ in relation to Indian classical dance can be ambiguous; here ‘technique’ is taken to refer to the fundamentals of a dance and its practical training methods, applied to achieve a skilful performance.
By this token, the reconstructed karanas can only be described as elements of a dance technique or, better still, of different dance techniques. As Subrahmayam herself says “ the Karana is only a basic unit of dance. A performance of an isolated Karana is of too short a duration to give it the status of Nritta” (Subrahmanyam 2003,91) (15). This means one needs to use strings of karanas - angaharas- to make up a dance. However, no Indian dancer of today, to my knowledge, relies exclusively on reconstructed karanas and reconstructed angaharas to make dances, without fusing or integrating them with other movements, known from more established and more mature forms – such as bharatanatyam (but see the note sent to me by Dominique Delorme, in the Conclusion).
Bharatanrithya, the bharatanatyam variant created by Padma Subrahmanyam through her research into the Natyasastra, can be described as a dance technique, but it would be misleading to refer to the 108 karanas themselves as a dance technique of its own. At best one could call reconstructed karanas a new dance technique in the making and wait for it to be further developed. It is however to be expected that several karana based techniques should simultaneously be fashioned, in which the 108 karanas are used as movement, as still poses, and as a choreographic technique, imaginatively reinterpreted to suit contemporary dancers’ needs.
Photo: bharatanrithyam dancer Dominique Delorme (Jean Gros-Abadie)
- An earlier version of this chapter (in combination with portions of chapter 4) has appeared as “Issues in dance reconstruction: karanas as dance texts in a cross-cultural context” Dance Research Journal, CORD, New York , 36/2, pp. 64-79.
Forward to: 3. Odissi, temple rituals and temple sculptures
Return to: 1. Introduction. The dance/archaeology conjunction
