I will be presenting a paper entitled “Homeland as Beloved: Translating Viraha for (Post)colonial Contexts,” at the World Dance Alliance Asia-Pacific Conference at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore, from October 16-18, 2015.

photo: Jorge Vismara

photo: Jorge Vismara

photo: Jorge Vismara

Abstract: This paper discusses how two contemporary performance works, Pallabi Chakravorty’s Asunder (2014) and Cynthia Ling Lee’s fish hook tongue (2007), intervene in the nationalist discourse surrounding classical Indian dance by translating the classical aesthetic concept of viraha for politicized (post)colonial contexts. Viraha, or love-in-separation, is typified by a bittersweet longing for union with one’s Beloved, who is usually imagined as a human or divine lover.  In kathak, the classical dance-form in which Chakravorty and Lee are trained, viraha has traditionally been evoked through emotional interpretations of songs and poetry (abhinaya) emerging from secular Indo-Persian courts and the syncretic mystical traditions of Hindu bhakti and Sufism.  However, in current-day kathak as practiced in India and its diaspora, these multiple contested influences have largely been muted in favor of a nationalist image of respectable Hindu femininity imbued with the Orientalist weight of timeless, immutable “tradition.”

Asunder and fish hook tongue depart from classical practice and Indian nationalist representations by replacing the traditional Beloved of kathak abhinaya with a new love object: the troubled, (post)colonial homeland.  Grounded in critical histories rather than timeless myth, the two works reimagine viraha as the longing of a diasporic subject for union with a broken homeland.  Asunder addresses the Partition of India, departing from Hindu nationalist narratives by evoking longing for an undivided India whose cultural fabric weaves together Muslim and Hindu influences.  fish hook tongue departs from Indian nationalist representations by addressing Taiwan’s history of linguistic colonization, reterritorializing and reconfiguring viraha as the visceral longing to speak one’s mother tongue of Taiwanese against the silencing forces of Japanese colonization, Kuomintang martial law, and US assimilation.