Send message to Contributor

Contribution long abstract

Engaging the DSA2026 focus on grassroots agency and alternative futures, this paper examines how a classical women’s performance tradition becomes a site of bottom-up ecological resistance. It analyses Prakruti, an experimental Nangiarkoothu performance by Kalamandalam Sangeetha, created in response to the environmental and public-health crises caused by the Ossein factory at Kathikudam, Thrissur, Kerala, India. Rooted in Nangiarkoothu, an ancient women-performed Sanskrit dance-drama tradition, Prakruti mobilises embodied knowledge, local ecological memory, and affective labour to articulate community concerns that remain marginal within formal development discourse.

Challenging views of tradition as culturally static or politically inert, the paper argues that Prakruti functions as an informal grassroots intervention that contests top-down development paradigms privileging industrial growth over ecological sustainability and bodily well-being. By foregrounding polluted landscapes, gendered labour, and corporeal vulnerability, the performance reframes “development” through lived experience rather than economic metrics. The paper also examines the ambivalent reception of such experiments, which are often tolerated only when disavowed as legitimate Nangiarkoothu, revealing the limits imposed on gendered and community agency within classical cultural frameworks.

Situating Prakruti at the intersection of environmental justice, cultural practice, and informal activism, the paper demonstrates how embodied performance can contribute to alternative futures already being imagined and enacted at the grassroots. In doing so, it expands how development, agency, and resistance may be understood beyond policy-oriented and economistic models.