The Unfrozen Form: Indian Classical Dance Beyond Exoticism, Devotion, and Obedience

Indian classical dance is often spoken about as devotion, as prayer, as something sacred that must be protected through reverence and obedience. I was trained inside this framing, but I have never fully belonged to it. Over time, I have come to understand that when devotion is treated as a requirement rather than a choice, Indian classical dance becomes inaccessible, not just aesthetically, but socially, politically, and structurally.

I want to be clear, my issue is not with devotion itself. It is with how devotion is weaponized. When Indian classical dance is framed primarily as bhakti, artistic legitimacy becomes conditional. It privileges those who can perform a particular kind of Hindu religiosity, often upper-caste, sanitized, and ideologically safe, while quietly excluding those who are secular, questioning, atheist, interfaith, queer, or politically critical. In these spaces, devotion is no longer personal belief, it is cultural compliance.

This did not happen by accident. What we now call Indian classical dance was consolidated during the late colonial and early postcolonial period through Brahmanical reform projects. It is also important to name that these forms stand on borrowed ground. Indian classical dance draws deeply from Indigenous, regional, and folk movement practices that were never credited as such. Rhythms, stances, footwork, musical structures, and narrative strategies were absorbed from Adivasi, Bahujan, rural, and community-based traditions, then rebranded as classical, refined, and elite. What was once lived knowledge became curated heritage.

This process is part of what sociologists describe as the Sanskritization of art. Regional, folk, and syncretic practices were rewritten, ritualized, and codified to align with upper-caste norms, giving them a veneer of purity and sanctity. The very forms we celebrate as timeless are, in many ways, the result of selective cultural rewriting. At the same time, Indian culture has always been syncretic. Even the forms that were Sanskritized carry traces of Muslim courts, regional devotional movements, tribal practices, and local musical and theatrical traditions. The tension between this syncretic reality and the Brahmanical canon is central to how the dance operates today.

I locate my body and my work squarely inside this history. Brahmanical caste privilege continues to shape who is allowed proximity to “authentic” tradition. The demand for visible devotion, invocations, obeisance, mythological fidelity, functions as both aesthetic expectation and ideological test.

As someone who approaches Bharatanatyam and Kathak through a secular lens, I know the rigidity and retaliation that follow. I have been told, directly and indirectly, that without faith I cannot access rasa, depth, or truth. That questioning is disrespect. That experimentation is dilution. That a non-religious body cannot carry lineage. They collapse artistic inquiry into religious obedience and foreclose the possibility that meaning can be produced outside piety.

My response has never been to reject the forms. It has been to insist on their complexity. I approach Indian classical dance as a highly sophisticated movement technology, rooted in rhythm, geometry, gesture, and spatial intelligence. Mythology, in my work, is one archive among many, not a compulsory script. Gesture can speak to labor, migration, desire, grief, violence, and resistance just as powerfully as it speaks to gods. Rhythm can hold dissent as clearly as devotion.

What frustrates me is that this kind of inquiry is celebrated in Western concert dance and treated as betrayal in Indian classical dance. Ballet, once bound to courtly power and hierarchy, has been dismantled and reimagined through modern, postmodern, and contemporary practices. Narrative was questioned. Virtuosity was destabilized. The body became political. These shifts are framed as evolution.

Yet Indian dance has already done this work. Nearly a century ago. Uday Shankar refused rigid classical boundaries and imagined a modern Indian movement language untethered from temple or court. Chandralekha radically reworked Bharatanatyam through feminist and political frameworks, centering the body as a site of power rather than devotion. Astad Deboo embraced abstraction, interiority, and cross-cultural exchange, rejecting religious obligation altogether. These are just some of the stalwarts whose work has opened pathways for critical, secular, and expansive engagements with Indian classical dance. I understand my practice as being in conversation with this lineage, not as an exception, but as a continuation. I am also in dialogue with choreographers of my own and adjacent generations who have continued to push against containment.

My practice is shaped not only by critique, but by community. I have spent years working with bodies that are rarely centered in Indian classical dance spaces, bodies shaped by different racial, cultural, religious, gendered, and political contexts. I work with dancers who come to these forms without cultural inheritance, without religious alignment, without the desire to perform reverence as proof of legitimacy. What consistently emerges is not dilution, but rigor, an attentiveness to rhythm, weight, articulation, and presence that demands care rather than compliance.

Approaching Indian classical dance through a secular and expansive lens does not mean abandoning its rigor. On the contrary, my respect for these forms is rooted in their discipline, precision, and structural intelligence. I take the grammar seriously. I take the training seriously. I reject the idea that reverence is the only pathway to rigor. Discipline does not require devotion. Integrity does not require mysticism.

This is also why I am deeply resistant to the language of fusion. Too often, fusion is a euphemism for shallow juxtaposition, an unexamined layering of aesthetics without accountability to history, power, or process. When done without intentionality, fusion becomes obnoxious spectacle, Indian movement pasted next to Western contemporary form, stripped of context and framed as novelty. What I am interested in instead is dialogue, friction, and responsibility, work that understands what is being held, what is being transformed, and what is being risked.

This matters because Indian classical dance does not exist outside global power dynamics. Indians have learned to exoticize ourselves, often in anticipation of Western consumption. We lean into mysticism, spirituality, and aesthetic purity because that is what circulates easily, what is legible, fundable, and palatable. The Western gaze wants the sacred, the ancient, the otherworldly. And too often, we comply. We perform timelessness. We perform devotion. We perform cultural depth as spectacle.

I am not interested in performing mysticism. I am interested in honesty. I am interested in what happens when Indian classical dance is allowed to be worldly, contemporary, political, and grounded in lived experience. When the body is not a vessel for transcendence, but a site of labor, history, contradiction, and agency.

Working across contexts has made one thing clear to me: Indian classical dance does not need to be protected from inquiry. It needs to be released from containment. Respecting the form does not mean freezing it in a devotional past or packaging it for global consumption. It means trusting its capacity to evolve without spectacle, without apology, and without asking dancers to perform belief in order to be taken seriously.

My secular approach is not neutral. It is political. It insists that Indian classical dance can be rigorous without being religious, rooted without being rigid, and respectful without being submissive. It asserts that tradition is not sacred property to be guarded by a few, but living knowledge shaped by power, choice, and context.