A defiant dancer has shifted the spotlight to the margins of the kathak world

“My job as a nurse is taking up too much of my time. There is very little time left for my dance after the relentless schedule I follow as a nurse. Then I have responsibilities to my own parents and to my in-laws. There is hardly any time to eat regular meals sometimes. In spite of that, I teach a couple of students. I am slowly giving up my dream of opening a big dance school where I live.”

Most dancers in Pallabi Chakravorty’s writings on kathak are like Sutapa, unknown names living on the margins of the rarefied world of high art. They do not have the privileges of class, caste or gender. They are middle-class and working-class women who land up unfailingly for kathak classes defying quotidian odds, they are teachers in mofussil dance schools, they are Bollywood’s item girls and reality show aspirants.

They are what Chakravorty, a kathak dancer and anthropologist, calls “everyday dancers”.

Chakravorty’s pioneering work, Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India, published in 2008, was the first work of scholarship to question biased narratives around kathak – its history, its feudal establishments and its ideas about classical purity. The book flagged, for the first time, the skewed dominance...

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