Inspired by the co-optation of religious mythological characters by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in India to mobilize support for their political agenda, Birth of a Hindu Nation: Representing Nation, Caste, and Race Through Mythology in Transnational Bharatanatyam Performance examines how Bharatanatyam performance in the South Asian diaspora engages with Hindu nationalism by using myth. How does Bharatanatyam both bolster and subvert Hindu nationalism through representations of the nation, caste, and race in mythological performances? I describe how epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana are “mythicized”, along with particular moments in South Asian history, to serve the Hindu nationalist project. Going beyond literary mythologies, I examine the mythicization of the Hindu nation and the model minority myth, arguing that the performance of mythology contributes to its political mobilization based on hegemonic representations of the Indian nation, race, and caste. I use ethnography and performance analysis to understand the reciprocal relationship between Bharatanatyam and Hindu nationalism. Drawing on the concept of “critical negativity,” I argue that Transnational Bharatanatyam practice can perpetuate Hindu nationalism through its insistence on Hindu supremacy in its repertoire, its exclusion of caste-oppressed people, and its propagation of South Asian anti-Blackness and caste-based gender norms. This project also seeks to find possibilities for Bharatanatyam interpretations of myth to subvert dominant expressions of gender, caste, nation, and race to create more inclusive spaces.

This Indigenous-driven and decolonial research, titled “Figuring Dárawatan, Dancing With the Tumándok,” looks at how Indigenous expressive culture is shared by an Indigenous community and how folk dance companies learn Indigenous expressive culture primarily for the nurturance and propagation of Filipino culture through Philippine Folk Dance performance, but also for teaching, for entertainment, and for advocacy work. Focusing on the Panay Bukidnons, a Visayan Indigenous community, and their participation in a local government-sponsored festival; Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group (ROFG), a state-sponsored Filipino folk dance company, engaging with the Indigenous research archive of its founder and a celebrated National Artist, Ramon Arevalo; and Parangal Dance Company, a volunteer-run, US-based diasporic folk dance group conducting immersive research with a Mindanao-based Indigenous community, I ask how national and diasporic Filipino folk dance companies research and learn Indigenous “folk” dances for audiences in the Philippines and the U.S. In particular, I look at how Panay Bukidnons, Parangal, and ROFG negotiate presumptive questions of indigeneity, cultural appropriation, and representation in and through this process. How do Panay Bukidnons, in particular, experience dárawatan, or the circulation of Indigenous expressive culture? How do Parangal and ROFG engage with their respective dárawatan? I forward dárawatan as a decolonial praxis of sighting, citing, and site-ing of and by the tumándok. This multisited and multilingual research pursuit includes dance ethnography, Indigenous storytelling, and archival research as methods focusing on the experiences of my interlocutors with their respective non-Indigenous and Indigenous collaborators just prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. I contend that it is vital to illuminate the way that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups experience the sharing of Indigenous performance practices to shed light on and beyond the pressing questions of indigeneity, authenticity, and relationality among Filipino dancing bodies. By foregrounding Filipino Indigenous peoples’ voices, their participation, and their ‘presence’ through dárawatan, we can better understand the role of indigeneity in the sharing and learning of Philippine folk dance in the homeland and the diaspora.

In this dissertation, I study the politics of corporeal dissent and liberation in the work of three contemporary dance artists from India: Mandeep Raikhy (New Delhi), Padmini Chettur (Chennai), and Surjit Nongmeikapam (Imphal). I argue that, seen through the lens of dissent, their choreographic practices can be interpreted as a form of activism that questions, disagrees with, and resists an array of power structures—commercialized Indian classical dance, religious fundamentalism, western capitalism, and the ethnonationalist state. Political dissent is what brings these three choreographers together, but how they choose to exercise it sets them apart. In chapter one, situated in New Delhi, Raikhy’s focus on proposing the body as an agent of dissent to majoritarian ethnonationalism pushes viewers to question what secularism is, why we should value it, and what its limitations are in the Indian context. In chapter two, set in Chennai, Chettur’s fracturing of the formal principles informing the Indian classical dance bharatanatyam is an effort to structure a relational dialogue with the dance form, a process which I refer to as liberatory deconstruction. In chapter three, against the backdrop of Imphal in India’s northeast, Nongmeikapam’s resistive hybridity—both a strategy and a tactic to utilize the processes of assimilation and to disrupt it—allows for an empowering negotiation between national and regional culture in hopes of destabilizing the hierarchy between the two. This dissertation contributes a new perspective on the interconnections between the global, (trans)national, and local politics of contemporaneity in India. In bringing together choreographers from distinct urban sectors in the country, this project, based on ethnographic field research in five major cities in India—the three mentioned earlier, along with Bangalore and Kolkata—gives a broad overview of shifting power dynamics within Indian contemporary dance, at the same time maintaining a microanalytical focus on cultural and regional influences. By doing so, this dissertation challenges any notions of a monolithic, homogeneous category of “Indian contemporary dance” and instead demonstrates the role dissent plays in the manifestation of contemporary dance aesthetics in India—enabling choreographers to articulate how bodies move through, question, and create culture.