Dancing The Past Into Life

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore the significant place that Indian ‘classical’ dance has held, both in postcolonial Indian nationalism, and in the middle-class Indian diaspora's efforts to transmit the cultural past. While arguing that this orientation towards culture as a set of representations signals a fundamental breakdown in a more primary relation to the past, the paper turns to Indian dance and music for a language with which to appreciate both the full magical force of representations and the persistence of a level of embodied experience which is coherent and meaningful without being representational. If the past were available to us only in the form of express recollections, we should be continually tempted to recall it in order to verify its existence, and thus resemble the patient mentioned by Scheler, who was constantly turning round in order to reassure himself that things were really there—whereas in fact we feel it behind us as an incontestable acquisition. (Merleau-Ponty, 1986:418). Show more