CENTRE FOR WOMEN’S STUDIES, JNU
Invites you to a Seminar on
Out-caste-ing the Nation: Dismantling caste and patriarchy in Chandalika
by
Dr. Aishika Chakraborty
(Director, School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta)
Bio:- Dr. Aishika Chakraborty is currently Director of the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta. Her research on the journey of modern/contemporary dance in Bengal looks at its artistic legacies, pedagogic practices and feminist politics of performance. Her edited book, Ranjabati, A Dancer and Her World, brings out some pioneering reflections on contemporary dance movement by her fellow-dancer, Ranjabati Sircar. Her recent co-authored book, Moving Space: Women in Performance, (Primus, New Delhi) talks about varied journeys of women dancers at wide-ranging spaces of performance. She is also co-editing a book titled, Women Speak Nation (Taylor and Francis, Forthcoming) which takes on board the contemporary discourses on gender and nationalism, exploring the intersectionalities of caste, class and sexualities. She is presently engaged in Arts Research Documentation programme funded by Indian Foundation for Arts (IFA), Bangalore.
Abstract:- When a resurrected sanskritized classical sought textual sanction in sacrosanct Natyashastra and where dance icon-o-graphs seemed fossilized in temple sculptures, how did Rabindranath Tagore, an improbable dance-maker, fashion a transnational hybrid aesthetic subverting its unilinear canonical structure of dance contesting the claims of nationalism? Beyond the unbroken nationalist fable of dance, this paper charts out the alternative dance movement, triggered by Tagore, contextualizing his resistive kinesthetic within the overarching hegemonic frame of nationalism at a historic political moment of anti-colonial struggle. Did he transcribe resistance to the gendered repertoire of the Brahmanic classical, offering atypical and radical dancing bodies in flesh and blood in his subversive dance dramas of Chandalika, Chitrangada and Shyama? Rotating round the axes of gender, caste and nation, this paper reads Tagore’s Chandalika (The Untouchable Daughter) as a resistive tale/performance against the caste-gender politics of Brahmanic patriarchy. She juxtaposes two written texts of Tagore with the choreographic politics of contemporary dance-theater, Tomari Matir Kanya(Daughter of your Earth, 1985), created by the feminist dance maker, Manjusri Chaki-Sircar to see how they coalesced together with a new body politics contravening the socio-sexual politics of the new nation.
Date: 1st November 2017, Wednesday, Time: 2.30 PM to 4.30 PM
Venue: Committee Room No.402, Fourth Floor, SSS-I
All Are Welcome