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Dancing Against the Nation? Revisiting Tagore’s Politics of Performance

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Tagore and Nationalism

Abstract

Set against the historical backdrop of the late-nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century Bengal, this paper explores the dance journey of Rabindranath Tagore entwining the kinesthetic experiment with a broader politics of gender, nation and spectatorship. It finally illustrates how Tagore has paved the way for choreographing a new dance text by drawing, quoting, subverting and manipulating with wide and varied dance lexicons. Through an unceasing experimentation with different physical traditions (Rasayanik Sangmishran), his search thus ended in the evolution of a syncretic, hybrid kinesthetic, subverting both the Eurocentric modern and canonized Indian classical.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All translations from this volume are mine.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

    Aishika Chakraborty

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  1. Aishika Chakraborty
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Correspondence to Aishika Chakraborty .

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  1. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India

    K. L. Tuteja

  2. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India

    Kaustav Chakraborty

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Chakraborty, A. (2017). Dancing Against the Nation? Revisiting Tagore’s Politics of Performance. In: Tuteja, K., Chakraborty, K. (eds) Tagore and Nationalism. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3696-2_24

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