This article analyses the intimate links between dance and the processes of national and postcolonial identity formation in India, particularly in Bengal, in the twentieth century. It examines alternative, non-classical artistic experiments in the realm of theatre dance spawned by twentieth century cultural nationalism in India, focusing on dancing bodies that actively engaged with, and wrote different meanings for, the socio-political space they inhabited. Dance-dramas written by Rabindranath Tagore in the 1930s are used as points of entry into a discourse on South Asian modernism and feminism, opening up a space in which the twentieth century representation of Indian women through bodily performance troubles notions of cultural purity and origin and offers instead ‘impure’ but nevertheless powerful cultural texts.
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