The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance

The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance is a volume of original essays that consolidates novel research and contemporary analytical approaches to critical Indian dance studies from across the world. It explores new frontiers of scholarship suggested by its contributing authors, and calls attention to urgent agendas that are central to the current field of Indian dance studies. The volume highlights key social and political dimensions of Indian dance and intersecting concerns such as ability, caste, class, gender, nationhood, race, region, religion, and sexuality.

The essays are organized around six core conceptual areas - dance discourses; rasa and affect; dance history; practice as research; dance activism; dancing the popular; and dancing across borders. Together they represent the voices of scholars and artists spread over four continents. Far from indicating pure stability, the volume foregrounds the manifold movements of Indian dance, its capacity for both positive social change and untold violence, its function as both democratic and hegemonic art form, its robust transnational past and present, its rhizomatic itineraries and shapeshifting. The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance offers an invaluable resource on Indian dance production, processes, pedagogies, performance, and perceptions.

Anurima Banerji is Associate Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the critical historicization of Indian dance and its relationship to the state. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State (2019) and co-editor with Violaine Roussel of How to Do Politics with Art (2017).

Prarthana Purkayastha is Reader in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway University of London. Her interdisciplinary research draws on dance studies, performance studies and critical race, feminist and post/de/colonial theories. She is the author of Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism (2014) and the Principal Investigator of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded ’South Asian Dance Equity’/SADE project (2023-2025).