Aishika Chakraborty is the Director and Associate Professor at the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Trained in Kathak and Bharatnatyam, she joined Dancer’s Guild, Calcutta in 1987. As student of Manjusri Chaki Sircar and Ranjabati Sircar, she has performed widely all over India and abroad as part of the Guild from 1990 to 1997. From 2000 onwards she has worked as a choreographer/collaborator in all the major productions with the Guild. She visited United Kingdom on the invitation of Tagore Center, London to participate in several cultural programmes held in Oxford, Edinburgh, Greenwich, Glasgow, New Castle, Sturbridge and London. Apart from numerous national and international publications, Aishika has co-edited a book titled ‘Moving Space: Women in Performance’, Primus Publishing, New Delhi. She has also edited a book titled ‘Ranjabati: A Dancer and Her World’, published by Thema, Calcutta in 2008.

This grant will enable Aishika to explore the history of contemporary dance in Bengal seen through the perspectives of two remarkable women dancers, Manjusri Chaki Sircar and Ranjabati Sircar, who have given the dance landscape of the region intellectual richness and stylistic colour. Focussing on the socio-political and personal histories of the dancers, Aishika will explore their interventions in the practice as they drew from medieval inheritances, colonial legacies and postcolonial promises to create new languages for dance. Set against the backdrop of existing discourses on the history of performing arts in India, this project seeks to explore the prolix debates between the Contemporary and the Classical, re-invented at the crossroads of colonialism and post colonialism, tracing issues of gender, class and the idea of the nation.

Highlighting the splendid heterogeneity of their ideology and technique, Aishika will map distinct journeys of Manjusri and Ranjabati underlining their resemblance and difference in their personal-political choreographic statements. She will also explore the common legacies and distinctions between these two dance makers and other stalwarts like Chadralekha and Mallika Sarabhai. Aishika’s objective in this project is also to deprioritise the hegemonic, patriarchal cultural politics that has formulated and fashioned a linear, sacrality drawn from the Natyashastra, and impersonated in the classical body of the ‘Indian dancer’ as signifiers of the Hindu nationalist tradition. She also intends to offset the set repertoire of the ‘commercial’ classical to bring to the fore the resistive choreographies of the twentieth century that voiced the concerns of feminism within their practice on stage.

Aishika insists on the Dancers’ Guild as a case study for two reasons: first, it is the most recent and fairly well documented of movements in contemporary practice; and second, her own deep association with the Guild and its artist legacy. As a performer in almost all of Manjusri’s productions for fifteen years, she will bring her personal memories of practice to recall Manjusri’s processes and unique methodology of training that pushed the dancers against their grain. As a context and background for studying the work of Manjusri and Ranjabati, Aishika will also look at the creation of Indian Dance by Tagore and Uday Shankar through the details of their conceptual frameworks, techniques, styles, training processes, pedagogy and presentation. This will give her the foundation for building her case for contemporary dance as imagined and practiced by Manjusri and Ranjabati making their indelible mark in the history of performing arts.

Aishika will interview her fellow dancers at the Dancers’ Guild as well as those that currently belong to the group to understand the connections between their lives and the art of dance. While the work done on Navanritya by Manjusri and Ranjabati will be treated as primary material for the project, she will also look at other materials byAmala Shankar on the work of Uday Shankar, Amita Sen and Rama Chakraborty on the dance of Tagore and Reba Raychaudhury on IPTA. She will read autobiographies, travelogues, diaries, dance notes, directors’ notes, sketches photographs, pictures, brochures and posters that she finds across archives and personal collections. For this Aishika will travel to Delhi, Ahmedabad, Shantiniketan, and Chennai to consult archival resources at the National Archives of India, Nehru Museum Library, Sangeet Natak Akademi, and the Central Production Doordarshan. She will also interview scholars who are working in the field of performing arts in India.

Sadanand Menon, who was one of the panelists for evaluation of the Arts Research programme this year, strongly recommended this project for a grant by pointing out the paucity of discourse on contemporary dance in India. He also stressed the need for support since after the demise of leading performers who run artist groups; there is a tendency for the groups to become increasingly like a rudder-less ship defenseless in the face of increasing commercialisation. Unable to cope with this, they often vanish together with their legacies and history. The outcome of this project will be a monograph. As deliverables, Aishika will submit the documentation of the project and the monograph to IFA. The budget is commensurate with the proposal.

This description is part of the institutional records created by IFA at the onset of the grant. The project may have changed in due course as reflected in the deliverables from the Grantee.