Dancing Without the Gods
Unsettling Indian Classical Dance as an Act of Radical Reimagination
As an interfaith, multilingual practitioner born in Gujarat to a Zoroastrian mother and Muslim father, whose relationship to the “classical” has never been straightforward or untroubled, my work emerges from a space of tension, inheritance, and inquiry—a space where the classical collides with the contemporary, where ritual meets rupture, and where questions of identity, belonging, and history are never far from the dancing body. I work with Indian temple dances not as a devotional practice, nor as an inherited tradition, but as a movement language—a kinetic lexicon capable of holding multiple truths, multiple lineages, and multiple contradictions.
In many ways, my practice is a sustained attempt to make sense of that position. Since the rapid rise of Hindutva in this country, I ask: What does it mean for someone like me to dance Bharatanatyam—a form that has been both appropriated and sanctified, erased and celebrated, vilified and elevated? What happens when a body like mine, formed by cross-cultural influences and shaped by what I like to call the minority experience, enters a space historically shaped by caste privilege, ritual orthodoxy, and nationalist aesthetics? Is it even possible for me to perform Bharatanatyam without confronting its past—and if so, how do I do it with integrity?
These are not just philosophical questions. They are urgent political ones.
In context of the ongoing, necessary and long overdue reckonings in South Asian dance, my work seeks not only to critique but to reimagine it. I do not offer Bharatanatyam as a sacred inheritance to be preserved; I offer it as a space to be troubled, questioned, and reconfigured. I approach it not as a fixed form but as a movement vocabulary—one that can hold lived experience, difference, doubt, and dissonance.
A central inquiry in my work is the question: Can or should Indian temple dances be secular?
This is not a provocation for its own sake. It is an investigation into the possibilities of form and the ethics of belonging. Bharatanatyam, as it is most widely practiced today, is often tethered to a specific religious iconography—rooted in Hindu mythology, replete with gestural storytelling drawn from Hindu epics. For someone like me, who does not share those theological affiliations, what does it mean to dance these stories? Can the form be separated from its content? And if so, what remains?
I am not interested in iconoclasm for spectacle. Rather, I seek to unburden Bharatanatyam of its exclusivist frameworks—to dance “without the gods,” not as a rejection, but as a reorientation. In doing so, I center absence over presence, suggestion over declaration, breath over invocation. My performances often take place in minimalist, non-proscenium spaces. There is only the body, its memory, its pulse. In this emptiness, I find new possibilities.
This approach aligns with a concept, that I was introduced to during my training in Kathak, that anchors my practice: Thehraav. Thehraav is a deliberate deceleration of time in the body—a refusal to comply with the virtuosic tempo and ornate spectacle that often defines classical performance. Thehraav is not slowness for aesthetic effect; it is slowness as resistance. It is an invitation to stay with the discomfort, to witness without consumption, to move without the need to dazzle.
In a cultural economy that demands speed, polish, and constant innovation, Thehraav is a subversive act. It invites both dancer and viewer into a space of reflection, vulnerability, and stillness. It draws attention to the micro-movements of the body, to the spaces between gestures, to the breath before the action. It asks: What if the performance is not about narrative at all, but about presence? What if the story is about the act of witnessing itself?
My practice is also deeply influenced by language—spoken, sonic, and architectural. Each site of performance carries its own texture, rhythm, and resonance. A mosque’s echo changes the way I hear a footfall. A Zoroastrian hymn disrupts the cadence of an adi talam —and in that awkwardness, new vocabularies emerge.
I work with what I call “sonic dissonance”—placing unfamiliar languages and rhythms into the Bharatanatyam and Kathak framework to challenge its narrative logic. Similarly, I let architectural spaces guide my movement. I have performed in abandoned dargahs, playgrounds, conference rooms, galleries, and museums. The absence of the stage is not a lack—it is a fertile ground for reimagining form. Each shift in space and sound alters the dancing body’s relationship to memory, power, and lineage.
Secularism, for me, is not to erase the sacred, but to reposition it so it no longer excludes. The sacred becomes one of many entry points, not the only one. For me, secularism is not a negation of the sacred, but a space of radical multiplicity.
Is my work secular? I am not sure. I would say it is post-devotional. It does not reject the sacred, but it refuses its exclusivity. It acknowledges the political valence of the sacred—how it has been weaponized to exclude, sanctify, and silence. My practice lives in the in-between—between the sacred and the secular, between dancer and viewer, between belonging and exile.
This in-betweenness is not a failure of definition. It is a stance. A radical act.
As a non-Hindu dancing a historically Hindu temple form, I hold this ambiguity with care. I recognize the risk of appropriation, but also the urgency of reclamation. I do not perform the classical as tradition—I offer it as a site of plural, shifting, embodied knowledge. A body that holds multiple lineages, religions, languages, and silences must also find a form that can reflect that plurality.
My practice is deeply indebted to the critical interventions of scholars and artists who have challenged the very foundations of South Asian dance studies. Their work compels me to ask not just how we dance, but who gets to define what dance is, who gets to be seen, and whose stories are being told.
I believe we must move beyond tokenistic inclusion and toward structural reimagining. The classical cannot be a preserve of the privileged. It must be a space of collective reckoning, radical hospitality, and imaginative freedom. If we are to dismantle oppressive hierarchies in the arts, we must begin by reexamining the very forms we claim to cherish.
My work does not resolve these tensions. It dances within them.
And in that unresolved space, something new becomes possible.
The article title is inspired from an exploration with Mandeep Raikhy, as a part of his The Secular Project (2020).
This article was a part of a roundtable conference “Dancing on Violent Ground: Unsettling the State of South Asian Dance Studies” curated by Prof. Anurima Banerji (UCLA, US), Prof. Anusha Kedhar (University of California, Riverside, US), and Prof. Royona Mitra (Brunel University, UK).
Abstract: In recent years, South Asian dance studies has been forced to confront historical and ongoing inequities in the field, especially with regards to caste and its intersections with class, gender, religion, indigeneity, and nationhood, among other analytics. These challenges to the field have unsettled the state of South Asian dance ecologies in important and necessary ways. Inspired by the critical work of Dalit and Bahujan anti-caste scholars, artists, and activists such as Shailaja Paik, Nrithya Pillai, Brahma Prakash, and Thenmozhi Soundararajan, and thinking with dance scholar Arabella Stanger’s concept of “critical negativity”, this roundtable of intergenerational, interdisciplinary, international, interfaith, and intercaste scholars will examine the “violent ground” on which South Asian dance studies has been built. How does (caste) power operate in both overt and covert ways? What constitutes “dance” in our discipline and who gets to define it? Whose bodies and voices are missing from the scene? What other aspects of South Asian dance praxis still need to be unsettled? This roundtable gathering will bring together tenured and untenured faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars to reflect not only on the current state of South Asian dance studies, but also how we might annihilate caste and other oppressive structures in our field, towards more equitable futures.