University of Hawai'i Press

The Transfiguration of Indian/Asian Dance in the United Kingdom: Contemporary
"Bharatanatyam" in Global Contexts

Author(s): Avanthi Meduri
Source: Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), pp. 298-328
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27568455
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The Transfiguration of Indian/Asian
Dance in the United Kingdom:
Contemporary Bharatanatyam
in Global Contexts
Avanthi Meduri
in Great Britain is currently as a South Asian dance. This

Bharatanatyam identified
art as a transnational genre of a geolocal area contrasts with the
understanding of the
Indian perspective as an Indian art state. This
of theform national of the nation paper
traces the term ''South Asian"
development of the in U.S. academic practice in the post
World War II era and notes the adoption of the term in the British academy and by dance
practitioners in the United Kingdom. The South Asian label was transformative in that
it transnationalized and hybridized the historical identity of Indian bharatanatyam
in the 1980s. This was realized not the juxtapositing
transformation just through of
terms but through the establishment institutions. The history
local/global of local/global
and implications are detailed.
of the borrowing
is a reader in the dance programs convener
and new interdis
Avanthi Meduri of the
MA/PGDIP in South Asian dance studies
the at
University
ciplinary of Roehampton,
London. She received her PhD from theDepartment Studies, Tisch School
of Performance
of the Arts, New York University, in 1996; has published widely; and is the editor of
Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1986) :
A Architect of Indian Culture
Visionary
and the Performing Arts (2005). Trained in bharatanatyam and kuchipudi since
childhood, her recent dance-theatre a theatre performance
choreography featured feminist
the double title Birds of the Banyan and
of Rukmini Devi's biography, with Tree,
What is in a Name? Productions were
staged in India, the United States, and the
United Kingdom in 2004-2005.
Classical dance forms, including bharatanatyam and kathak,

were as Indian national forms in the international cultural
displayed
exchange programs that India negotiated with the West in the 1960s.
Almost these same dance forms were as
twenty years later, re-presented
emblematic Indian classical forms and traditions in the large-scale Fes
Asian TheatreJournal, vol. 25, no. 2 (Fall 2008). ? 2008 byUniversity of Hawai'i Press.All rights reserved.
The Transfiguration of Indian/Asian Dance 299
tival of India celebrations that the Indian

nation-state sponsored with
great fanfare in the 1980s

(Singh 1998: 52-58). T. Balasaraswati (1918
1984), who belonged to the hereditary traditions of temple and court
dancing, and Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1986), the celebrated

revivalist of twentieth-century were alle
nonhereditary bharatanatyam,
gorized
as the foremost dancers, feted with numerous national awards,
and presented as and traditional dancers
hereditary nonhereditary
on the international stage of the 1960s (Meduri 2004: 11-29; O'Shea
2007). Malavika Sarukkai and Alarmel Valli, two eminent dancer-cho
reographers, emerging from the post-1960s generation, replaced their

and were as international artists in the Festival of
predecessors profiled
India celebrations.
the younger
While dancers innovated within the parameters of
the receivedclassical tradition as elaborated both T. Balasaraswati
by
and Rukmini Devi Arundale, were different from their elders in
they
terms of the youthful energy and ?lan with which they
cosmopolitan
on the world stage. Taking the international dance world
performed
by storm, these two dancers a new generation of bharatanatyam
inspired
dancers and constituted new networks of communication
local/global
and exchange between India and the West in the 1980s.
Staged in various
prestigious art venues in France, Italy, Lon
don, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, the India Festivals were
momentous in that they built on already existing international net
works of communication, forged not just between India and the West
but also between India and its diaspora living in Britain and the United
States since the 1960s (Singh 1998: 52-58). Anthony Giddens explains,
"Globalization can be defined as the intensification of worldwide social
relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happen
are
ings shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice-versa"
(Giddens 1990: 64).
What is interesting, however, is that it was in the late twentieth
century moment of emergent when India as a

globalization emerged
Third World power that Indian
forms, dance
including bharatanatyam,
kathak, odissi, and kathakali, were casually sundered from the protec
tionist custody of the Indian nation-state and hastily renamed as South
Asian dance genres in the United Kingdom. Arts officers working in
the employ of the British Arts Council, academics, venue
well-meaning
managers, and funding were all in the momentous
agencies implicated
of Indian forms as South Asian forms. "South Asia," as
rechristening
is well known, does not refer to a or nation-state but
single country
is used as a generic to name and a block of Asian
descriptor identify
nations including the nation-states of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal,
Maldives, and so on.
Bangladesh,
300 Meduri
After the 1980s

renaming, Indian dance forms were known by
two official names, one
local (Indian) and the other global (South
Asian). Although the South Asian label manifested itself as a nascent,
emerging funding category in the 1980s, it was rapidly normalized and

transformed into a dominant institutional label in the 1990s, specifi
cally when major dance organizations, including Akademi,1 Kadam,2
to use this
and Sampad,3 funded by the Arts Council of Britain began
institutional label to promote bharatanatyam in the United Kingdom. In
1998, the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dance (ISTD), in collabora
tion with Akademi: South Asian Dance UK, a
cutting-edge, progressive
arts organization about which say more
I shall later, devised a new syl
labus for bharatanatyam and kathak. Both genres were institutionalized
not as Indian but as South Asian dance forms.4
The South Asian label was similarly institutionalized in British
academia when the Leverhulme Trust awarded a substantial grant to
dance scholar Andr?e Grau to undertake research on a called
project
South Asian Dance in Britain (SADiB) in 1999 (Grau 2002). In 2002, the
Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) was awarded ?865,000
over a to fund research in cross-cultural Asian music
five-year period
and dance. This was a joint venture shared between School of Oriental
Studies (SOAS), Roehampton University, and the University of Surrey
(Lopez y Royo 2002). As part of the Leverhulme award, Roehampton

dance launched a new master of arts degree in South Asian
faculty
dance studies, and I was as convener of the new program
appointed
in 2004, about which I will say more later. The South Asian label has
achieved wide currency in the United Kingdom today. Itmanifests itself
as a category and is used to refer to the dances, literatures,
hegemonic
theatres, folk forms, cultures, cuisines, film, and music of the people
of South Asia.
The
public culture and academic institutionalization of bharata
natyam under the new label of South Asian dance was beneficial from a
British South Asian diasporic perspective because it enlarged the Indian
label and made visible the diverse dance, performance, and theatre
practices of the Indian/Asian diaspora living in Britain since the 1960s.

Yet the spatialization can be seen to be
problematic, albeit from a local
Indian as it dislodged bharatanatyam from its sociohistori
standpoint,
cal moorings in Indian culture, history, and politics and relocated the
form within a broader, category known as South Asia.
homogenizing
Two national labels, one Indian and the other British (South
Asian), were to bharatanatyam
affixed in quite the same manner as pass
are national
with stamps or as brand names are
ports stamped pinned
to items of clothing dispatched to the far corners of the globe. The
was consequential because a double
relabeling bharatanatyam acquired
Figure 1:Mira Kaushik receiving her Order of the British Empire from Secre
tary of State for Culture, Tessa Jowell. (Photo: Geoff Wilson)
global/local identity after the renaming. One historical representation,

displayed within two national labels: this I believe is the historical the
matic that structures the production and circulation of bharatanatyam
in the United Kingdom today.
The in the double Indian/South Asian label was
ambiguity
to the fore on the historic occasion when
Kaushik,Mira
brought
the director of Akademi,5 received an Order of the British
honorary
Empire (OBE) from culture secretary Tessa Jowell for her contribution
to dance in the United Kingdom (Figure 1). At the award ceremony,
held on 8 March 2007, Jowell praised Kaushik's work in this way: "Mira
Kaushik has done a amount to Indian dance to the United
huge bring
Kingdom's attention. Her vision for Akademi has delighted sell-out
audiences with fantastic shows and her programmes are edu
coaching
a whole new of (italics mine; Akademi
cating generation performers"
2007). It is important to note the slippage in descriptive terms: Jowell
refers to South Asian dance as Indian dance!
In her acceptance speech, Kaushik said, "I am delighted to
receive this award. It's due to the passion and hard work of thousands
of audiences, hundreds of South Asian dancers, dozens of Akademi's
302 Meduri
team members and a handful of patrons. I am very, very excited to be
doing what I am doing" (italics mine; Akademi 2007). Without refuting

Jowell's representation, Kaushik carefully repositioned her work within
the larger South Asian dance category!
By reinscribing Indian dance within the South Asian label,
Kaushik did something quite provocative. She claimed that although
Indian dance
might look Indian, it is South Asian dance in the United
Kingdom because it is performed not just by dancers from

immigrant
India but by "hundreds of South Asian dancers" to the dif
belonging
ferent nations of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, and
Africa. Her explanation is challenging because it urges scholars and
spectators alike to think outside the box and identify the "same, but
not differences between Indian and South Asian dance. Kaushik
quite"
does more in that she urges us to undertake this critical examination
from within the institutional of the South Asian label as it was
history
enunciated in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
History in the South Asian Label

If the terms "Indian" and "South Asian," to bharata
appended
natyam, were random there would be little need to dwell on
categories,
the significance of the two identity markers. What needs to be noted,
however, is that both were historical labels inscribed in imperial his
tory dating back to British colonialism in the nineteenth century. They
as doubled or historical in the charged
reemerged yoked categories
historical context of British decolonization and Cold War of
politics
the 1940s. Not only was Pakistan from India in 1947, but it was
split
also here in this moment of the transfer of British colonial power to
independent India that the United States

emerged as new
hegemonic
power, and stepped into the historicalspace vacated by Great Brit
ain. Assuming the "white man's burden," the US State Department
remapped the Asian/Oriental world, split South Asia from its other
Asian neighbours, and designated post-partition India and its neigh
countries as "South Asia."
boring
Sunil Khilani, author of the celebrated book The Idea of India
(Khilani 1998), avers that the "South Asia" born out of modern geo
politics, specifically the strange cartography of the US State Depart
ment in the early years of the Cold War, is a flat term?a bureaucrat's
phrase lacking the poetry of, say, "Europe," or, indeed, "India." He
explains that India and Europe are both names that contain poetry,
that embody stories, and that trail behind
them often self-contradictory
myths of origin (Khilani 2004). "South Asia," by contrast, is a spatial

term of supreme and refers to an Asian bloc of the world,
artificiality
struggling to embrace the ideals of Western modernity and democracy.
According to Khilani, "South Asia names an

experiment, in part unin
tended, in part conscious. That experiment has been based on the rec
ognition, and the necessary acknowledgment, of the immense diversity

and variety posed by the 'diverse peoples' of the region, and the differ
ing extents to which this has been given expression" (Khilani 2004).
Academics and intellectuals in the United States endeavored to
capture the rich variety and diversity in the South Asian region in what
came to be designated as area studies programs of research, the most
famous being the Center for South Asian Studies, established at the
University of Chicago in the 1950s.6 Milton Singer, the distinguished
anthropologist, pioneered studies of cultural

Indian performances
including dance and music in his groundbreaking book entitled When
a Great Tradition Modernizes 1972). Unlike in the United
(Singer King
dom, the South Asian label remained an elitist, academic category
because Indian dance and music forms were neither nor
homogenized
institutionalized as such in the United States.
When we track the genealogy of the South Asian label in the
British context, we find that South Asia is an alien term because it did
not have any currency during British rule in India. Derived from the
United States, the South Asia label was
adapted and institutionalized
in British academia, specifically, the Centre for South Asia Studies,
founded within SOAS, in 1966.7 Why did Britain accept US social sci
ence and in the 1960s? Did South Asia rep
labeling funding categories
resent a catch-all phrase to forget the trauma of partition created by
Britain? Or did the migration of people from different nations, includ
ing Bangladesh, Pakistan, West Africa, and Sri Lanka, to the United
Kingdom in the late 1960s necessitate the enlargement of the "Indian"
category?
Edward Said does not addressany of these questions revolving
around postcolonial nation formations and migration in his magiste
rial account, Orientalism (1978). He argues instead that Anglo-Ameri
can area studies programs were in Orientalist construction
implicated
of India and Asia. Both narratives deployed the
trope of the Asian/
Indian/Pakistani to construct and essentialize East/West epistemologi
cal differences though the long period of British rule in India, and
continuing into Cold War politics of the 1950s.

Since the South Asian label was inscribed in Western imperial
we can a local Indian and question British/
history, adopt perspective
American Orientalism, the casual ease with which Brit
specifically
ish/American institutions of patronage disembedded Indian dance
forms and relocated them within a known as South
spatial category
Asia. Or, we could take a post-Orientalist diasporic perspective and cel
ebrate British Orientalism in the manner proposed by British dance
304 Meduri
scholar Andr?e Grau. essay titled "A Sheltering

In her Sky? Negotiat
ing Identity through South Asian Dance," Grau suggests provocatively
"that within a context, one could argue that the South Asian
diasporic
label was more neutral than the Indian one as the former removes the
dance from any notion lineage and a nostalgic
of a clear-cut notion of
lost heritage" (Grau 2004). She explains that decontextualizing dance
forms in this way might be useful as it could encourage a
conceivably
discourse about dance forms such as bharatanatyam as less rooted in cul
ture and ethnicity and more in technique, thus rendering the form(s)
transnational (Grau 2004).
Transformation of Indian/Asian Dance

in the United Kingdom
Iwant to move beyond the local/global critiques of Orientalism
and suggest that the juxtapositiong of local Indian and global South
Asian labels was transformative in that the South Asian term transnation
alized and hybridized the historical identity of Indian bharatanatyam in
the 1980s. This transformation was realized not the
just through juxta
positing of local/global terms but through the establishment of local/
institutions as
such which its
global Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, opened
UK wing in 1972.8 As one institution was insufficient to
accomplish the
huge task of internationalizing Indian dance in the United Kingdom,

Tara Rajkumar, a well-known dancer and choreographer, arrived from
India in the late 1970s and founded a second institution
local/global
known as the National for Indian Dance (NAID) in 1979.
Academy
NAID its name to Akademi: South Asian Dance in
Although changed
the UK in the late 1990s, about which I will say more presently, it was
this second international institution, itself inscribed in a double name
and history, that hybridized and transnationalized the historical iden
tity of Indian bharatanatyam in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. While

Bhavan's was to for posterity the tradition of Indian art
goal "preserve
and culture" in the United Kingdom (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, UK
Centre n.d.), NAID/Akademi desired to enlarge received aesthetic
definitions of the "traditional" and "classical" through strategic acts of
cultural translation and situate Indian dance on the multicultural map
of Great Britain.
Roland Robertson suggests that intercultural institutions such
as Bhavan and NAID/Akademi, formed and
by "telescoping global
local to make a blend," best be described from within a new discursive
category known as "glocalization" (Robertson 1995: 28). He argues that

this term is useful to document empirical processes of globalization
without resorting to easy polarizations that pitch the local against the
global and vice-versa (29).
Plate 1. Cristina Formaggia performing Panji with Sekaa Gambuh Desa Adat Batuan at Bali
Arts Festival 2006. (Photo: Catherine Diamond)
Plate 2. Luh Luwih practicing kecak at Desak Nyoman Suarti's seaside home in Ketewel in
2004. (Photo: Catherine Diamond)
, ''
*&*
''&*$
Plate 3. Surface Tension (2000) choreographed by Shobana Jeyasingh with dancers Chitra
Srishailan and mixes dance and South Asian movement influ
Sowmya Gopalan postmodern
ences. (Photo: Chris Nash)
Plate 4. Akademi's Bells was performed at the Trafalgar Square Festival 2007 as part of India
Now. (Photo: Hybridlab)
Plate 5. Baris Dancers descend to perform as the female pedana (Emiko Susilo) makes an
offering. (Photo: Jorge Vismara)
Plate 6. The lion-like barong flanked by the two standing legong dancers with other members
of the Cudamani ensemble kneeling. (Photo: Jorge Vismara)
Yet itwas Rajkumar who was

able to take advantage of the glocal,
historical opening created
by Bhavan. She began her work in the United
by collaborating with Bhavan, then founded her own second

Kingdom
institution, known as NAID, where she developed her own individual
ized, multicultural vision to integrate Indian dance into mainstream
British culture. Pushkala Gopal, another famous dancer from India,
was yet pursued a different artistic She
inspired by Rajkumar trajectory.
too collaborated with Bhavan and with NAID, but also with her dancer
teachers, the renowned Dhananjayans living in India, and positioned
the production of Indian dance within local/global networks. In the
early 1980s, Gopal performed bharatanatyam duets with male dancer

P. Unnikrishnan, himself a renowned student of the Dhananjayans, and
professionalized the presentational format of her recitals. She assumed

the directorship of NAID in the late 1980s and founded her own dance
company along with Unnikrishnan.
Sundaram, another established dancer from India, arrived in
London in 1981 via the Middle East and Europe. She too taught dance
in the Bhavan, worked collaboratively with NAID, and performed
"chic" bharatanatyam recitals with provocative titles, such as
English Of
Gods and Kings and Ordinary Men, at various mainstream venues, includ
ing London's Saddlers Wells theatre. Sundaram's professional dance
career in the United was brief; she left for the United States
Kingdom
and returned
only to take of the of the UK-based
charge
editorship
dance magazine known as Pulse: South Asian Dance in the UK, now part
of the legacy of South Asian Dance in Britain.
The renowned Jeyasingh, trained in Indian bharatanatyam, also
enabled the goals of Bhavan and NAID in the early 1980s but founded
the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company in the late 1980s. She re
as a contemporary South Asian
emerged dramatically dancer-choreog
rapher and took British contemporary dance world storm
by (Figure
2). Jeyasingh articulated a new, aesthetic vision for "contemporary"
South Asian dance in Britain by deconstructing bharatanatyam dance
vocabulary and urbanized the classical form by combining it with West
ern movement genres. We see this theme of
postmodern hybridization
and urbanization inscribed in her landmark choreographies Duets with
Automobiles (1993) and Making ofMaps (1992-1993), discussed provoca
tively by Valerie Briginshaw (2001: 97-109).
All four intercultural dancers mentioned above, belonging to
different linguistic had one in common. all
backgrounds, thing They
recognized the importance of institutionalization and thus collabo
rated with British and Indian/British institutions. All four dancers were
bilingual, postcolonial subjects, fluent in English, having studied Shake

speare and Shelly in their countries of national origin, whether it be
Figure 2. Exit No Exit (2006) was choreographed by Shobana Jeyasingh and
danced by Kamala Devam. (Photo: Chris Nash)
India or Sri Lanka. thus translated Indian dance forms inscribed

They
in multilingual vernacular histories into new English-language intel
lectual frameworks proposed by the former empire, hybridized the
of Indian dance, and constituted new, multilingual visions
production
for Indian/South Asian dance in the United Kingdom. Homi Bhabha
(1994) celebrates as intercultural brokers working
diasporic hybrids
in the interstices of nation and empire, producing counternarratives
from the nation's margins to the totalizing boundaries of the nation.
is defined as the ways in which "forms become
Hybridization separated
from existing and recombine with new forms in new prac
practices
tices" (Rowe and Schelling 1991: 231).
Instead of tracking the intercultural artistic careers of the four
pioneer dancers, I shall describe how NAID/Akademi enlarged the

Indian prefix and institutionalized Indian bharatanatyam creatively in
what I encapsulate as the emergent, consolidation, and arrival stages
of its development between 1979 and 2007. My main interest here is
not to detail the pioneering work of NAID/Akademi. I wish merely to
describe how NAID emerged as an intercultural institution in the 1970s;
transformed itself into Akademi9, a institution in the late
postcolonial
1990s; and rearticulated itself as a transnational
diasporic institution
at the turn of the
twenty-first century. In this time span, encompass
years, NAID/Akademi articulated a British for
ing twenty-eight identity
Indian/South Asian dance in the United Kingdom.
Parti
NAID's Emergence as Intercultural Institution

in the United Kingdom (1979-1988)
I began my research on Indian/South Asian dance in the United
Kingdom by interviewing Mira Kaushik, the director of Akademi.10

She was most generous and
freely talked about dance and work in the
United so I asked Kaushik if she could the name of
Kingdom, divulge
the person who renamed Indian dance as South Asian dance in the
United Kingdom. Amused by my curiosity and perplexed that I was
this question after so much work had been achieved under the
asking
South Asian label, Kaushik advised me
to speak with the indomitable
Simon Dove, a great friend of India who worked as dance officer for
the British Arts Council in the 1980s.11 Thus I sought out Dove; met
him in Bergen, Norway, in 2004; and questioned him eagerly about the
new South Asian label.
But Dove shook his head and explained patiently that although
he had used the South Asian term in his Vivarta: Contemporary South
Asian Performance Festival, the label was not new and was, in fact, circu
308 Meduri
lating in the British social imaginary and also in the corridors of the
Arts Council in the 1980s. He spoke about the pioneering work of Nas
eem Khan. She had served as the head of diversity in the Arts Council
and authored her justly famous work titled The Art Britain Ignores: The
Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain (1976). This document, published by
the Arts Council, provided the first real challenge to funding bodies.
Following the success of her book, which went into numerous reprints,
Khan founded the Minorities Arts Advisory Service in 1976 and became
in the multicultural as it to minority
involved policy debate pertained
arts in Britain.12 Dove explained that after publication of Khan's book,
it became apparent to Arts Council officers that a less essentializing
term than "ethnic" and a more generic label than "Indian" was needed
to the rich heterogeneity and diversity of contemporary
encapsulate
Indian, Asian, Pakistani, Chinese, and African dance forms present in
the British diaspora.
We sat down in a noisy bar in Bergen and took a trip down mem
ory lane. Dove recalled the East-West Dance conference held in Mum
bai in 1984, which is when I first met him, and spoke at length about
the spread of the contemporary Indian dance movement to the United
in the 1980s. He then told me the well-known story of the
Kingdom
brave Indian dancer Tara Rajkumar, mentioned above. A renowned
bharatanatyam and kathakali dancer, Rajkumar arrived in London in the

1970s and pioneered a new, multicultural arts movement in the United
Her path was not strewn with roses, but she in
Kingdom.13 persisted
true pioneer a small grant from the Commission for
spirit, reaped
Racial Equality, and established the first National Academy of Indian
Dance in London in 1979 (NAID).
Khan joined forces She served as a founding
with Rajkumar.
member of NAID and helped Rajkumar realize her ambitious, multi
cultural vision for dance.13 Dove likewise was associated with NAID in its
early days because of his broader interest in Indian and contemporary

dance practice. on support from both figures and from many
Drawing
Tania Rose, an officer of the Commission for Racial
others?including
Equality, and Robin Howard, then director of the London School of
Contemporary Dance?Rajkumar organized two conferences: The

Contribution of Indian Dance to British Culture (1982) and The Place of
Indian Dance in British Culture (1983). As part of the conferences, NAID
conducted an education on the exhibi
workshop Ramayana, including
tions and performances: "School after school brought children to learn
about Indian dance concepts. A booklet was and slide series
published
on the illustrating the art of storytelling through
Ramayana produced,
dance" (Rajkumar 2006). In this way, NAID endeavored to integrate
Indian dance into mainstream British culture and as early as

society
the 1970s.14
The Vision of Two Women and a Man
Two women and a man?Naseem Khan, Tara Rajkumar, and

Simon Dove?were implicated in the momentous expansion of Indian
dance into South Asian dance in the 1980s. If Dove located Indian
dance within the South Asian label, Khan positioned Indian dance
within the category of ethnic arts and cultural diversity, and Rajkumar
nestled Indian dance within the broader discourses of British multi
culturalism. While the trio did not conceive the South Asian label, the
label having emerged with the British decolonization of India discussed
must be seen as formative to
above, they figures who desired enlarge
the Indian category if only to enable the mainstreaming of Indian/
Asian/ethnic dance in Britain. To realize their vision, the trio collabo
rated with the British Arts Council and other national organizations,
on behalf of Indian/Asian/ethnic arts forms, and
spoke persuasively
created a new, intercultural for Indian/Asian dance in the
openings
United Kingdom.
on Williams's theorization of culture, Imark
Drawing Raymond
this formative stage when Indian dance emerged under the triple label
of Indian/South Asian/ethnic dance as the first emer
representing
gent phase in the institutionalization of Indian dance in the United
Kingdom. Williams explains that historical and analytical studies of cul

ture must include an of what he calls "formations," which are
analysis
as conscious movements and tendencies
recognizable (literary, artistic,
or scientific). In his own words: "Often when we look
philosophical,
further, we find that these are articulations of much wider effective
formations, which can no means be identified with formal
by easily
institutions, or their formal or values and which can even
meanings
be positively contrasted with them. This factor is of the greatest impor
tance for what is habitually as intellectual and artistic for
specialized
mations" (Williams 1977: 119) It is important for dance scholars inter
ested in historicizing the of Indian/Asian
institutionalization dance in
the United Kingdom to focus on NAID's emergence as an intercultural
institution because the organization brought to the fore a specialized
class of professional interlocutors, whom I would describe as intercul
tural arts administrators. These experts did not merely professionalize
the production of Indian/Asian arts in the United Kingdom, but also
could on behalf of the performing arts and restage
speak persuasively
them within new, socially relevant theatrical and intellectual frames
of reference. as intercultural and translators, this
Serving interpreters
310 Meduri
new group of traveling cosmopolitan arts administrators international

ized and cosmopolitanized the production of Indian/Asian arts in the
United Kingdom in the 1980s.
Thus, when and Dove left the United Kingdom to
Rajkumar
settle in Australia and the Netherlands, respectively, Khan and Gopal
served as
joint directors of NAID andstepped in as new local/global
arts administrators. handed over the reins of this pioneering
They
intercultural institution to Mira Kaushik in 1988. Although Rajkumar
refers to the fledgling institution as NAID,
she founded it needs to be
noted that the term "national" was to it after Rajkumar left
appended
for Australia, when Khan and Gopal took over the directorship of the
institution.
NAID's Transformation into Akademi,

a Postcolonial Institution in the
United Kingdom (1988-2000)
In 1988, Kaushik was director of NAID and took
appointed
charge of the institution by deleting the term "National" from the
institutionalhistory of NAID. Kaushik that the term was too
explained
a of grandeur untrue to the realities
''grand and created deception
of a small struggling charity."15 In 1997, Kaushik dropped the term
"Indian" and changed the spelling of "Academy" to Akademi: Academy
thus became Akademi: South Asian Dance in the UK.16 By dropping
the Indian label and respelling Academy Kaushik did something quite
She her institution not as an "Indian national
exceptional. presented
Academy" but rather as a hybrid, postcolonial "Akademi" defined itself
within the double history of Indian and European nationalisms alike.
Briefly, after the declaration of Indian independence in 1947,

the Indian nation-state established Indian national Akademies to fos
ter the development and dissemination of Indian performing arts on
a national scale. The Indian Akademies for the arts are based on the
Western concept of governmentpatronage provided through acad
emies, the most explicit model
being the French Academy (Erdman
1984: 77-98). The French name, however, was to be inappro
thought
priate in the Indian context and thus was deliberately misspelled
to
read as Akademi and not Academy.17 Krishna Kripalani criticized the
Indian government for coming up with such a hybrid name that had
no legitimate genealogy?borrowed first from Plato's Academy, then
from French Academy the Royal Academy
and also from of Arts?and
noted his objections in this way: "Why then was the name borrowed,
and what ismore, why was it uglicized as Akademi for no better reason
than the Greek word had been adapted in Arabic and through Arabic
into Urdu. Inscrutable are the ways of authority, be it divine, or earthly"
(Kripalani 1985: 168).

It was this hybrid term, disdained for its uglicized hybridity, that
Kaushik picked up from the dustbin of postcolonial history and reused
with seriousness in 1997. Yet she proffered an for the
grave explanation
name that had little or nothing to do with India or the postco
change
lonial Indian nation-state, but had everything to do with Akademi's dia
sporic work in Britain in the 1990s. Akademi explained that since the
was with a of educational establish
organization working large number
ments and local boroughs around London that were ethnically diverse,
the two terms "national" and "Indian" were found to be limiting and
restrictive. By excising both the national and Indian labels, Akademi
presented itself as a hybrid
postcolonial organization that was neither
Indian nor European, but something emerging from within the double
two master names.
historical legacy of the
But why did Akademi accept the South Asian dance label in
1997? This is a question to which there is no satisfactory answer because
Kaushik herself, alas, did not seem to have much choice in the matter.
As explained in her interview with me, the South Asian label was already
in mainstream circulation in the 1980s, before she took up her post in
1988. Kaushik then really had two options: she could either accept or
refuse the South Asian label. She accepted the term because she wanted
Indian arts forms to find a home in mainstream British society and also
because postcoloniality is not born and nurtured in a panoptic distance
from that "[t]he postcolonial exists as
history. Gyan Prakash explains
an after, after worked over colonialism. Criticism formed in
being by
this process of the enunciation of discourses of domination a
occupies
space that is neither inside nor outside the history of western domina
tion but in a tangential relationship
to it" (Prakash 1992: 8).
After the renaming, Akademi enlarged the category by Indian
transnationalizing the vision of the institution. Akademi built partner
ships with London-based organizations in this time, but also created
separate and complementary departments of education, community,

dance training, and dance development. Its dance training research
led to the creation of a South Asian at the Imperial
dance faculty Soci
ety of Teachers of Dancing and the development of internationally
recognized syllabi for classical bharatanatyam and kathak. At the same

time, Akademi created the opportunity to specialize in South Asian
dance at the London Dance School and envisioned a
Contemporary
new bachelor of arts degree (honours) in contemporary South Asian
dance (Akademi 2006).
I mark this moment of the self-conscious enlargement of the
312 Meduri
Indian label to embrace the South Asian category as representing what

Williams has described as the dominant in the history of the
phase
institution. Williams that dominant cultures are articulated
explains
through "the incorporation of the actively residual?by reinterpreta
tion, dilution, projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion"
(Williams 1977: 122). By incorporating the intercultural vision of NAID
into Akademi and on both, Akademi was able to enlarge
elaborating
and particularize, homogenize and heterogenize its activities in ways
not imagined by NAID.18 Bhabha remarks on the creative leadership
provided by Akademi in this way:
Akademi beautifully bridges the classical and the contemporary. It

turns dance into a social that reflects the best cre
greater performance
ative traditions and tensions of living in a multicultural metropolis, in
a world where tradition and innovation a transnational
require stage.
In this adventure of the body and the spirit, Akademi takes a lead by
showing us that it is only through acts of cultural translation that we
can both our cultural differences and share in a wider solidar
display
ity of historic and cultural commitment. (Bhabha 2006)
Akademi's Arrival as a Transnational, Diasporic

Institution in the United Kingdom (2000-2007)
In 2000, Akademi arrived on the London scene
by spectacal
izing Indian dance as South Asian dance and enlarged its impact on
British audiences. In this third stage, Akademi sponsored large-scale,
site-specific productions, which were staged in South Bank, Somerset
House, and Akademi
Trafalgar Square. produced Coming of Age (2000),
which took place on the walkways of the Royal Festival Hall in London.
More than seventy dancers performed Indian classical, fusion contem
porary, and folk to packed audiences. This was followed
dancing by
Escapade (2002), which transformed the placid exterior of the South
Bank Centre and celebrated South Asian dance in a storm of color.
Waterscapes (2004) took the splendor of the Mughal Court to the foun
tain courtyard of Somerset House, and Sapnay-Dreams (2005) banished
from Trafalgar a swirl of diverse dance
pigeons Square with styles shift
ing seamlessly one to the other:
Akademi's extravaganzas the of Indian/South Asian

changed profile
dance and dance forms neither as traditional ritual nor cul
projected
tural forms, but rather as evocations comb
protean, interdisciplinary,
ing folk with Bollywood style dancing, and classical with the contempo
rary. The new interdisciplinary vision, sponsored by Akademi, inspired
dancers and to work with dance vocabularies
choreographers freely
and envision site works.
specific
Figure 3. Akademi's Coming Of Age was performed outdoors on London's
South Bank in 2000. (Photo: Ali Zaidi)
Figure 4. Akademi's Spanay-Dreams was performed at the Traflagar Square

Festival in 2005. (Photo: Pete Schiazza)
314 Meduri
Because of Akademi's institutionalization, British danc

multi-pronged
ers and work in mainstream contexts
choreographers multiple today:
some themselves as classical dancers, others work as neo-clas
project
sical and dancers. Still others a career in com
contemporary pursue
dance, teach and dance in schools, and
munity perform prisons, youth
centres and hospitals. (Akademi 2006)19
Tourists London are astonished the

visiting by bewildering
heterogeneity in dance in the United as
production Kingdom, they
can see contemporary and classical
kathak, bharatanatyam, bhangra,
or in different mainstream venues in the city.
Bollywood performed
These forms are "Indian" because British dance-makers
recognizably
continue to work with Indian dance vocabularies and techniques. Yet
British prefer to describe these as South Asian dance
choreographers
Do British dance makers use the South Asian label
choreographies.
because it is politically to do so in the United or
contingent Kingdom,
because Akademi institutionalized Indian dance under that category?
What exactly is the relationship between the Indian and South Asian
labels? Is South Asianness just Indianness in disguise? These ques
tions cannot be answered because the dialectical tension
satisfactorily
between the Indian and South Asian labels is not in the
polemicized
practice, but maintained ambivalently and negotiated creatively both
by British arts administrators and dance makers alike.
Part II
Negotiating the South Asian Label in the

United Kingdom
Responding to Grau's essay (2001a), Uttara Coorlawala, a US

based dance scholar, has recently questioned British-based dance
scholars for taking on the South Asian label and replicating hegemonic
structures of power domination (2002). Coorlawala argues that the
South Asian label functions as a term and enables
policing funding
agencies to control, shape, and domesticate the historical and cultural
identity of Indian dance forms:
The term includes but often over and

glosses geo-cultural temporal
distinctions between the aesthetic visions and of
perspectives diaspora
Indians (persons living in Pacific Asia, Africa, West Indies, the United
States, Australia, and in innumerable on earth) and
Europe, places
dancers in or from India. . . .From the "South
my perspective, phrase
Asian Dance" is embedded within a discourse of and
repeatedly pain
a discourse that whiteness, and a
anger, interrogates negotiates place
for itself in a white driven structure. . . .

power Self-determination,
the need to oneself, is the source of my
represent precisely personal
discomfort with the term South Asian Dance.... character
Identifying
istics and criteria at first seem like a harmless aesthetic exercise,
might
but these have a of into criteria for allocations.
way cementing funding
Policies of allocating funds, even responsive and flexible policies,
determine what forms of creative will be more visible than
expression
others. (2003: 30-33)
Coorlawala thus puts out a call for action by urging British dance schol
ars to step outside structures of domination and critique the South
Asian label from the perspective of locational politics. While Coorl
awala's is insightful, she over
the important fact that
critique glosses
the South Asian label, in the moment of its articulation in the 1980s,
functioned as an inclusive and in the United
democratizing category
Kingdom and made visible the dance forms of Indian/Asian minority
communities living in Britain. Coorlawala also fails to recognize the
uniquely individual manner in which British dancer/chorographers
negotiate with the South Asian label both in everyday dance training
and public performance.
It is true that, because of the large-scale culture and aca
public
demic institutionalization and professionalization of Indian dance
as South Asian dance since the 1980s, dance scholars working in the
United Kingdom today cannot about Indian dance on its own
speak
terms as it is now into or into the of South
incorporated yoked category
Asian dance. The South Asian label, in other words, is hegemonic in
pedagogical and textual representation because it supplemented the
Indian term and asserted its dominion over the it.
Yet the hegemony of the South Asian label is called into question
by British Asian dancers and choreographers who willingly take on the
objectivizing and abstracting label but subjectivize and particularize it

in public performance. Gopal explained that while she uses the South
Asian label to speak and write about dance in the United she
Kingdom,
resolutely teaches as an Indian form. Sundaram likewise
bharatanatyam
uses the South Asian label While she does not use the South
selectively.
Asian label in her
public performances and refers to bharatanatyam by
its name, as editor of Pulse she uses the South Asian label to make dis
tinctions between British and Indian bharatanatyam.
If the South Asian term refers to Asian dance forms
broadly
performed in the United
Kingdom, the label is actually ethnicized
by Sri Lankan and Indian bharatanatyam dancers who drag the South
Asian label into their dance studios and imbue it with regional histo
ries, memories, and sounds. After ethnicizing and particularizing the
316 Meduri
abstract South Asian label in this way, British Asian dancers hail Indian
or Sri Lankan as South Asian dance.
bharatanatyam bharatanatyam
Imark this doubling moment, when the Sri Lankan bharatanatyam
dancer transforms herself on stage into a South Asian
theatrically
dancer, as because it is here in this place of mistransla
being significant
tion that the dancer splits her identity, privatizes her cultural heritage,
and her persona as a South Asian dancer, which was
projects public
to her the British nation-state. In "Dissemination: Time, Nar
given by
rative and the Margins of the Modern Nation" Bhabha explains that
the pedagogical of the nation-state treats "a people" as
representation
a timeless and essential the nation is concep
object. Simultaneously,
tualized as a reiterative process of signification,
constantly in flux as it
is enacted in the present?the performative. This double narrative is
what Bhabha refers to as the "splitting of the national subject" (Bhabha
1994: 145-146), characterized movement between a time
by perpetual
of the past (the pedagogical) and the present (the performative).
In the case of the British bharatanatyam dancer, the pedagogical
is evoked in the South Asian label, which the dancer takes on willingly
Figure 5. Exit No Exit (2006) by Shobana Jeyasingh with dancers Deveraj

Thimmaiah and Yamuna Devi. (Photo: Chris Nash)
as a national label, and the performative is evoked in her selective, cam

of Sri Lankan or Indian as South
ouflaged performance bharatanatyam
Asian dance. Jeyasingh aptly describes the lack of fit or disjuncture in
the South Asian label in this way (Figure 5). She explains that when
the Arts Council used the South Asian label to describe her work in
the 1980s, she thought it to be "less contentious" to "ethnic
(compared
as it did arms of How
arts"), resting "safely in the objective geography."
ever, being down" within such a rubric was discomfiting for
"pinned
to "wriggle" creatively, an exercise she identified
Jeyasingh, causing her
as a "supremely diasporic ritual" (Pinto 2004: 4).
is uncomfortable and finds herself wriggling because
Jeyasingh
she is working within the folds of the South Asian label, which does
not speak to her identity either as Indian or Sri Lankan. Born in India,
she grew up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia and migrated to the United
in the late 1970s. "A Christian in India, a Tamil in Sri Lanka,
Kingdom
an Indian in East Malaysia, and an Indian in Britain," she is, in fact, a
dancer-choreographer with multiple origins and labels. She thus com
plicates her migrant history in this way:
For me my heritage is a mix of David Bowie, Purcell, Shelly and Anna

Pavlova, and it has been mixed so as a somosa has mixed itself
subtly
into the English cuisine in the last ten years or so: impossible to sepa
rate. But it is surprising how to many people my heritage could only
be Indian. . . . So, for me Purcell, like Shelly like David Bowie, is not
"the other,"?it is part of my And in dance terms, Rukmini
heritage.
Devi and Merce Cunningham are also part of my heritage. (Jeyasingh
1998: 48)
While the South Asian label is too broad for Sundaram and
Gopal, the term is too narrow for Jeyasingh. Yet all dancers and chore
in the United seem to be negotiating with
ographers working Kingdom
the South Asian label, particularizing the label in their practice and
yet disavowing the private negotiation in public perfor

performance,
mance. In "A Sheltering Sky? Negotiating Identity through South Asian
Dance" (2004), Grau queries the South Asian label, yet concludes by
that the label does a "sheltering sky" for South Asian
arguing provide
dancers in Britain.
I want to extend Grau's
critique by suggesting that the South
Asian label manifests itself both as a and as an "alienating
"sheltering"
in the United The term is alien
sky" for South Asian dancers Kingdom.
because it functions as a disembedding term and does not refer
ating
to any one country of origin. Neither is the term inscribed in poetic
or as is the case with India and Sri Lanka. Yet the "South
history legend,
Asian can be theorized as functioning like an "enabling, alienating
sky"
318 Meduri
metaphor" because it impels dancers and choreographers to embrace

not "real" but "imaginary homelands" and gives them permission to
invent multiple theatrical personae in performance.
Part III
South Asian Dance Pedagogy at Roehampton
I inherited the historical legacy of the South Asian label when I

became Convener of the new master of arts degree in South Asian dance
studies at University in 2004. It is worth mentioning that
Roehampton
it is only recently that I took on my new identity as South Asian dance
scholar at Roehampton. For a long time before that, I was teaching in
the World Arts and Cultures Program at UCLA and in the Department
of Performance Studies at Northwestern Known as an
University.20
Indian/South Asian dance and performance studies scholar, I endeav
ored even in the United States to develop a transnational Indian/South
Asian pedagogy for bharatanatyam while also locating this form within
the history of Asian-American dance migration and diasporic forma
tion. Before that, I was in India and was hailed there as classi
living
cal dancer or dancer. In the United
bharatanatyam/kuchipudi Kingdom
in 2004, I had to reconceptualize dance in the
scholarship developed
United States and make it relevant to the South Asian dance conceptu
alization as it was in the United
Kingdom.
But the South Asian label was problematized immediately after
we launched the South Asian dance master of arts program in 2005.
Prospective Indian students interested in enrolling in the new South

Asian dance studies
program began to ask probing questions about the
name: is Indian hailed as South Asian
ubiquitous Why bharatanatyam
Dance in the United Kingdom? What is South Asian about Indian
or Indian kathak, or Indian odissi ? I hear the
bharatanatyam, indigna
tion in their questions and dodge its ethnocentric charge by urging
students to think about the Indian and South Asian labels attached to
bharatanatyam as historical or brand names that help us think

prefixes
the different institutionalization of dance forms in the world at large.
It is true that bharatanatyam visually encapsulates the "idea of
India" with its links to antiquity and history, which iswhy itwas declared
as the "national dance par-excellence" after the formation of the post
colonial Indian state in the 1950s (Meduri 2007). Yet the national rep
resentation exceeded the boundaries of the nation-state when dancers
traveled with the representation through the global dance migrations
of the 1960s and 1980s. Like ballet, bharatanatyam manifests itself as a
bound and unbound, national and transnational form today, and it
is performed both within and beyond national borders. Contempo

rary bharatanatyam dancers travel on the historical pathways created by
dance migration, hold dual
passports and work permits, and shuttle
back and forth between India, Asia, America, and Britain.
At Roehampton, we study the of Indian/South Asian
dispersal
dance culture in the world at large through the key heuristic frames
of travel, translation, and transformation. For us, South Asia is not
a but a historical, and theatri
just geographical region, metaphoric,
cal space dispersing people of Indian/South Asian heritage and their
dance forms into the global world of diasporas. Marked as an unstable,
dangerous space on the world map, South Asia, in our perspective, is

a site for cultural Asian dancers
experimentation, inspiring immigrant
to accept the inadequate South Asian census label given to them as pri
mary identity marker in the United Kingdom and to plot the different
routes and travel trajectories though which
migratory they arrive here,
whether it be via Africa, the Caribbean, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangla
desh, the United States, or Canada.
In the South Asian dance studies MA program, students are
required to take two modules, titled Global Modernities and Global

In these modules, we take as exemplar case
Diasporas. study Rukmini
Devi Arundale's world-renowned Kalakshetra institution and describe
how she
self-consciously constituted an intercultural world vision for
bharatanatyam in the 1930s and reconfigured that vision in the Cold War
years to constitute a and pan-Asian worldview
postcolonial, pan-Indian,
for Indian performing arts.
Briefly, Rukmini Devi Arundale, wife of Englishman George

Arundale, who served as the third of the Theosophi
Sydney president
cal Society, whose international headquarters is in India, was not just
a but also an institution builder. One year after
dancer-choreographer
her historic debut as a dancer in 1935, Rukmini Devi
bharatanatyam
Arundale founded the
International Academy of Arts (later renamed
Kalakshetra) to enable the revival of bharatanatyam (Meduri 2005a: 4
23). She yoked the art revival with the educational goals of the Besant
Memorial School, which she founded along with Arundale in 1934.21 In
the 1940s, Rukmini Devi established three other institutions, including
the Crafts and Weaving Centre, the Dr. U.V. Swaminatha Iyer (Tamil)
Library, and the Arundale Montessori Teachers Training College. All
five institutions were housed in different of the estate prop
wings huge
erty of the Theosophical Society in Adyar. Rukmini Devi worked within
the domain of her five institutions and developed a art and
pioneering
education movement that was both "local" and transnational simulta
neously (Meduri 2005b: 4-23).
320 Meduri
To realize her art and education vision, Rukmini Devi invited

international educators and hereditary dance and music teachers to
teach in the different institutions. She collaborated with both and
a and world for bharatanatyam
developed multilingual cosmopolitan
that exceeded standard anthropological definitions of the local and
the "national" as as the 1940s.22 has that
early Anthony King explained
"[t]he first substantial encounter between Europe and non-Europe,
between capitalist, and pre-capitalist, between white and non-white
peoples took place in what were to become the colonies, not the metro
these encounters were constructed under the very specific con
pole";
ditions of colonialism and were largely products of the specific social
and spatial conditions of colonial cities (King 1997: 8).
Rukmini Devi's intercultural vision was displaced by the promul
of what came to be known as the
gation Theosophical Society's policy
of disassociation in 1950 (Meduri 2004: 11-15). The policy stipulated
that Rukmini Devi remove her five institutions from the grounds of
the society. Undaunted, Rukmini Devi a hundred
of acres
purchased
land in Tiruvanmaiyur, adjoining the Adyar estate of the Theosophical
Society, and rehoused her five institutions in this new location in the
1960s. In this moment of displacement, Rukmini Devi denied the his
toric rupture with the society and preserved the transnational history of
the Theosophical Society, albeit in the new
performatively postmodern
habitus that she re-created for Kalakshetra in the 1960s.
Students from all parts of India
and Asia, including Tibet, Sri
Lanka, Nepal, Burma, Malaysia, and came to
Singapore, Japan, study
in Rukmini Devi's Kalakshetra in the 1960s. They were joined by inter
national students from Europe, Australia, America, Germany, and Eng
land. Completing their education, hundreds of Kalakshetra students
certified as dancer-teachers (a new discursive category that she articu
lated in the 1940s) returned to their respective "homes" in the global
world andtaught and performed Kalakshetra-bharatanatyam in the
world at large. Suffice to say here that the South Asian dance faculty
in London, called upon to devise a South Asian ISTD syllabus in 1999,
drew upon the technique-based theoretical pedagogy that Rukmini
Devi had envisioned for Kalakshetra-bharatanatyam in the 1960s.
Rukmini Devi maintained Kalakshetra as a transcul
Although
tural institution until her demise in 1986, the center came under the
of the Indian nation-state and was declared an
protectionist custody
institution of national importance an act of parliament in 1993.
by
Dance scholars have described Kalakshetra from within anthropologi
cal models of the local, the regional, and/or the national. But few have
gone beyond this to grasp the translocal vision of Kalakshetra.
During my postdoctoral research in India between 2001 and

2003 (Meduri 2005a: 4-23),23 I developed a translocal to
perspective
transcultural institutions such as Kalakshetra. I find the notion
study
of the translocal useful as it to the challenge of providing an
"speaks
analysis of a global system of social relations without over-generaliz
or hierarchies in which some sites are more or
ing establishing global
more than others. Translocal the links
important analysis understands
between different locations to be and rather
unpredictablecontingent
than representative of a single transnational or national
condition iden
and Kellner 1997: Such enable us
tity" (Cvetkrovich 25). perspectives
to examine cultural production not just in terms of the Indian national
struggle but also in transcultural terms and us to historicize the

help
different institutionalization of bharatanatyam both in the Western and
the Asian worlds.
Conclusion
I have been interested in names and labels attached to dance

forms since I began
my studies in the United States in the
1980s. late
It is, in fact, by examining the politics and poetics of the renaming
of sadir, the dance of the devadasi, as that I was able to
bharatanatyam
historicize the twentieth-century national institutionalization of Indian
bharatanatyam. My own dance theatre work has similarly focused on

acts of naming and unnaming.24 While I recognize the power struc
tures implicit in acts of naming and the complex ways in which labels
structure I have also learned to understand the
meaning, provisional
ity of all labels, which are of capturing the dynamism of live
incapable
performance.
Thus, for better or
ill, I did not cling stubbornly to the Indian
label attached to I traveled instead in the tracks of Indian
bharatanatyam.
dance migration and saw how the dance was institutionalized differently
in India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. my work
Through
in three countries?I hold an Indian passport, an American green card
or permanent and British work learned that the
residency, permit?I
South Asian label manifests itself as a spatial, hegemonic category in
both the United States
and the United Kingdom. But I too learned, like
the four dancers described above, to wriggle with the Indian/South
Asian label and use it selectively to both mask and unmask its hege
mony in each and every act of private and public utterance. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak explains that "the deconstructive, philosophical
position (or postcolonial criticism) consists in saying an impossible no
to a structure which one yet inhabits The
critiques, intimately. everyday
here and now of postcoloniality is a case of it" (Spivak 1990: 794).
322 Meduri
NOTES
1. For a full account of what Akademi does and its historical develop
ment see http://www.akademi.co.uk/ (Akademi 2006).
2. Kadam (n.d.) is based in Greater Manchester and is a
key organiza
tion for South Asian dance in the United Kingdom. See http://www.kadam
.org.uk/static.php?option=history.
3. Sampad (n.d.) is a South Asian dance organization based in Bir
For a account of what it does see
mingham. complete http://www.sampad
.org.uk/.
4. For a comprehensive account of how ISTD developed syllabi for
bharatanatyam and kathak see http://www.istd.org/dancestyles.html (Imperial
of Teachers of n.d.).
Society Dancing
5. Akademi (2006) works to enhance the practice, appreciation, and
understanding of South Asian dance across the United Kingdom. Its work is
modern and holistic, informed by the traditions and rich heritage of South
Asian dance, and driven by the needs of South Asian dance artists in the
United Kingdom. See http://www.akademi.co.uk/.
6. The University of Chicago ranks among the world's leading centers
for South Asian studies and was founded in the 1950s. See http://southasia
(South Asia at n.d.).
.uchicago.edu/about.htm Chicago
7. In 1966, the Centre of South Asia Studies was established to coor
dinate the research of the South Asian specialists spread widely throughout
SOAS. More than one hundred courses on South Asia are taught at SOAS,
and others contain a South Asian All
many significant component. languages,
and other South Asian courses, are also available as one unit within the
many
master of arts in South Asian area studies or within the master of arts
program
program in South Asian cultural studies. See http://www.soas.ac.uk/ (School

of Oriental and African Studies n.d.).
8. A pan-Indian institute, Bhavan was founded in India in 1938 and
has more than one hundred branches in India. From its the insti
early days,
tute teachers from India and offered summer courses
imported residency
in dance, music, and yoga. The late Krishnaveni Lakshmanan,
languages,
alumna of Rukmini Devi Arundale's Kalakshetra institution, offered numer
ous residencies in the Bhavan. Two hundred of the eight hundred students
dance and music in the institution receive examination
presently studying
based diploma and post-diploma certifications (Aubin-Parvu 2007: 18-19).
Recently Bhavan received a grant of ?522,537 from the Millennium Commis
sion and the Arts Council to renovate its building facilities, including a mod
ern art rooms, classrooms, and the Mountbatten Performance
gallery, guest
Auditorium, housed within the premises of the Bhavan (Aubin-Parvu 2007:
18-19). Some one hundred are each in the Mount
performances given year
batten Auditorium, and I, living in India in the 1980s, was invited to perform
kuchipudi dance recitals in the Bhavan in 1981-1982. Bhavan, in other words,
is a vibrant intercultural centre networks of cultural
fostering local/global
exchange and communication between India and the United Kingdom. (See
Bhavan, UK Centre n.d.).
Bharatiya Vidya
9. Akademi (2006) works to enhance the practice, appreciation, and
of South Asian dance across the United Kingdom. Its work is
understanding
modern and holistic, informed by the traditions and rich heritage of South
Asian dance and driven by the needs of South Asian dance artists in the United
Kingdom.
10. I interviewed Kaushik in 2004 at her office premises in London.
Akademi is currently funded by the Association of London Government, Lon
don Borough of Camden, Sony Entertainment Television Asia, the Paul Ham
lyn Foundation, the European Union, and Arts Council England.
11.1 interviewed Simon Dove in October 2004, when Imet him at the
international conference on dance held in Dove told
contemporary Bergen.
me that he was living in London in the 1980s and held leadership positions
at the Arts Council of Great Britain, Tara Arts Centre, and the Bhavan. An
artistic leader, he combined a with inter
experienced passionate engagement
national arts with a
contemporary practice, juxtaposed visionary approach
to and education. Most Dove
commissioning, programming, importantly,
founded and directed the Vivarta Contemporary South Asian Performance
Festival and created a forum for contemporary Indian dance in the United
as as the 1980s. In 1998, Dove took over as artistic and
Kingdom early general
director of Springdance, the international contemporary dance festival held
in Utrecht, Netherlands. In 2007, Dove left his home in the Netherlands to
join the Herberger College Dance faculty as chair (Dove 2007).
12. Naseem Khan was until a senior adviser for the Arts
recently policy
Council and is as a consultant and She set
currently working journalist. up
the black community newspaper the Hustler with friends; worked for the New
Statesman, the Guardian, and Time Out; and in 1976 founded the Minorities
Arts Advisory Service.
13. Rajkumar narrates her story in this way: "After arriving in London
in the 1970s, fresh out of college from India, the first few years were rather
bleak. Many were the miles I trudged performing and many were the days
when I felt I was facing an unyielding wall. But being an eternal optimist, I
focused on what lay beyond" (Rajkumar 2006). (Also see Akademi 2006 for its
website and Salidaa n.d.).
retrospective
14. Grau describes in some detail the physical premises in which NAID
was working in its early days (see 2004).
15. See the narrative account titled the Akademi" for
"Restructuring
a more for the name at (Salidaa n.d.)
complete explanation change http://
www.salidaa.org.uk/salidaa/docrep/docs/projects/essays/dance/Akademi/
docm_render.html.
16. See Grau 2004 for a different discussion about the implications of
Akademi's name
change.
17. A about the of a colo
huge controversy appropriateness choosing
nial name and then it was raised as a as as the
indigenizing problem early
324 Meduri
1950s, and the debate continues to this day. Yet nothing has been done to
the name, and it is still used as such in India.
change
18. As such, 1988 to the early 1990s was a period of consolidation for
Akademi. This was executed through establishing partnerships with other
arts and dance which transformed Akademi into a more main
organizations,
stream, London-focused
professional organization.
19. From its as a of classes to its transforma
early days provider evening
tion into a touring company in the mid to late 1980s, Akademi was focused on
an enthusiasm for the art form, a in service
cultivating filling gap provision,
and building audiences for South Asian dance.
20. See Meduri 2004, in which Imention some of the modules I devel
oped to teach Indian dance in the Department of Performance Studies at
Northwestern University.
21. Rukmini Devi combined the visions of the two centers and articu
lated a transnational art and education movement known as "Education with
out Fear, and Art without Vulgarity" that exceeded standard definitions of the
local as early as the 1940s (Nachiappan 2001: 18). C. Nachiappan, who worked
with Rukmini Devi from 1940 until her demise in 1986, describes the transna
tional art education movement in this way. "Arts were an of the
integral part
school system and enabled great experiments in education, like introducing
the Dolton system of education in which children learnt by themselves without
too much interference from teachers. It is here that Dr. Montessori conducted
her first Indian Montessori course and experimented with the advanced Mon
tessori Method for 6-12 year old children" (2001: 18).
22. By the 1940s, Kalakshetra became famous for the galaxy of tradi
tional teachers that Rukmini Devi gathered in her institution (Ramani 2003).
Since the traditional teachers recruited in the institution were well versed in
such diverse fields as dance, music, Sanskrit lan

painting, weaving, painting,
guage, drama, and folk arts, Rukmini Devi urged them to teach from within
their fields of expertise and specialization. She thus envisioned a multidisci
plinary, cosmopolitan institution of the kind unknown in South India in the
1940s: one in which education, crafts, music, dance, and research
painting,
coexisted.
23. This research was supported by the Ford Foundation. As part of

the Ford Foundation Fellowship, I curated Rukmini Devi's photo archive and
presented it in New Delhi, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Tokyo, Melbourne,
and London. I also scripted and staged Rukmini Devi's biography as dance
theatre. Titled Birds the Banyan Tree, the theatre was
of performance presented
in India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. (Meduri 2005a).
24. As part of my doctoral research in the United States, I developed
a for classical and focused on
postcolonial historiography bharatanatyam
the name I described how was into
question. sadir-bharatanatyam collapsed
in the 1950s and as such in the cultural
bharatanatyam exported exchanges
that India negotiated with the United States and United Kingdom in the 1960s
(see Meduri 1988, 1996, 2007). After completing my doctoral thesis, I adapted
my thesis into a postcolonial play and described how the Indian historical
dancer, known as devadasi, was translated and transnationalized in the

temple
nineteenth century practices of British colonialism. Titled God Has Changed
His Name, the bilingual play was premiered in India in 1997 and was presented
in cities across India in mainstream theatre venues, schools, and
twenty-four
colleges. See Seagull Theatre Quarterly (1999: 29-51) for a discussion about the
play and issues raised in the performance. Also see Spear and Meduri 2004 for
a discussion on the and transnationalization of devadasi dance
hybridization
practices.
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The Transfiguration of Indian/Asian Dance in the United Kingdom: Contemporary

"Bharatanatyam" in Global Contexts

in Great Britain is currently as a South Asian dance. This

Classical dance forms, including bharatanatyam and kathak,

tival of India celebrations that the Indian

great fanfare in the 1980s

dancing, and Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1986), the celebrated

reographers, emerging from the post-1960s generation, replaced their

century moment of emergent when India as a

After the 1980s

emerging funding category in the 1980s, it was rapidly normalized and

(Lopez y Royo 2002). As part of the Leverhulme award, Roehampton

practices of the Indian/Asian diaspora living in Britain since the 1960s.

global/local identity after the renaming. One historical representation,

team members and a handful of patrons. I am very, very excited to be

doing what I am doing" (italics mine; Akademi 2007). Without refuting

Kingdom because it is performed not just by dancers from

History in the South Asian Label

independent India that the United States

myths of origin (Khilani 2004). "South Asia," by contrast, is a spatial

According to Khilani, "South Asia names an

ognition, and the necessary acknowledgment, of the immense diversity

University of Chicago in the 1950s.6 Milton Singer, the distinguished

anthropologist, pioneered studies of cultural

Kingdom in the late 1960s necessitate the enlargement of the "Indian"

continuing into Cold War politics of the 1950s.

scholar Andr?e Grau. essay titled "A Sheltering

Transformation of Indian/Asian Dance

huge task of internationalizing Indian dance in the United Kingdom,

tity of Indian bharatanatyam in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. While

category known as "glocalization" (Robertson 1995: 28). He argues that

global and vice-versa (29).

Yet itwas Rajkumar who was

by collaborating with Bhavan, then founded her own second

early 1980s, Gopal performed bharatanatyam duets with male dancer

professionalized the presentational format of her recitals. She assumed

bilingual, postcolonial subjects, fluent in English, having studied Shake

India or Sri Lanka. thus translated Indian dance forms inscribed

pioneer dancers, I shall describe how NAID/Akademi enlarged the

NAID's Emergence as Intercultural Institution

Kingdom by interviewing Mira Kaushik, the director of Akademi.10

bharatanatyam and kathakali dancer, Rajkumar arrived in London in the

early days because of his broader interest in Indian and contemporary

Contemporary Dance?Rajkumar organized two conferences: The

Indian dance into mainstream British culture and as early as

The Vision of Two Women and a Man

Two women and a man?Naseem Khan, Tara Rajkumar, and

Kingdom. Williams explains that historical and analytical studies of cul

new group of traveling cosmopolitan arts administrators international

NAID's Transformation into Akademi,

Briefly, after the declaration of Indian independence in 1947,

into Urdu. Inscrutable are the ways of authority, be it divine, or earthly"

(Kripalani 1985: 168).

transnationalizing the vision of the institution. Akademi built partner

ships with London-based organizations in this time, but also created

separate and complementary departments of education, community,

ety of Teachers of Dancing and the development of internationally

recognized syllabi for classical bharatanatyam and kathak. At the same

Indian label to embrace the South Asian category as representing what

Akademi beautifully bridges the classical and the contemporary. It

Akademi's Arrival as a Transnational, Diasporic

Akademi's extravaganzas the of Indian/South Asian