Precious histories of South Asian dance have remained hidden and ignored – until now

Even the fading sepia tint cannot dull the fire of the image – a dancer air-borne in a leap, like a flying apsara, with improbably long arms and legs stretched in elegant lines and angles. It is a photo that goes back to a time when Sri Lanka was still Ceylon and Vajira Chitrasena was beginning to captivate audiences across the globe.

Vajira made a historic contribution to Kandyan dance, once a little-known ritual form of Sri Lanka’s central highlands that became a performance art in the 1950s. It was her pioneering effort in building the pedagogy and choreographies of Kandyan dance that crystallised the work begun by her partner, Chitrasena.

Across the ocean and past the expanse of India is another dancer of whom we know too little. Indu Mitha, now 96, took Bharatanatyam from Kalakshetra to Lahore in the 1950s and nurtured it through years of turbulence to give it a local flavour.

In India itself, there are hundreds of such stories that do not get the attention they deserve. What for example do we know of the Telugu chronicles of a 17th-century Nayaka king’s daily life enacted and danced as a means of preserving history in the people’s mind? Or the outstanding Bharatanatyam...

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