Contribution short abstract:

I focus on embodied, contested, negotiated and other enduring dimensions of dance-making and dance-history in British territories while examining corporeal aesthetics and movements in film and photography archives between 1900 and 1945.

Contribution long abstract:

In this presentation I ask how performance cultures were recorded and documented across diverse geographies in colonial India. I focus on embodied, contested, negotiated and other enduring dimensions of dance-making and dance-history in British territories while examining corporeal aesthetics and movements in film and photography archives between 1900 and 1945. I draw my material from colonial films and private papers of colonial administrators now archived at the British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum, and India Office. In conjunction with my ethnographic research in Manipur and hinged around questions of epistemic rupture and aesthetic continuities, I examine how movements and dance continued to capture the imagination of ‘exotic Orient’. Analysing from feminist and post-colonial perspectives, this presentation offer questions, arguments, and methods for identifying and confronting archival absences and in the colonial reels.