My mentor, Ananya Chatterjea recently asked me: what in Odissi do I want to move away from, and what do I want to keep?
It is a deceptively simple question. At first, I attempted to answer it through a simple sorting process: keep what feels liberating, discard what feels limiting. But the longer I sat with that question, the more I realized that my relationship to Odissi can’t be organized so neatly. What I want to leave behind and what I remain attached to are not easily separated, but rather on the contrary, quite entangled. Some of the very aspects of Odissi that trouble me are also those that continue to challenge me, and at times give me great pleasure.
My earlier musings explored whether a traditional art-form like Odissi can be understood as contemporary. That question was and still is important to me because it pushed against the tendency to locate Indian ‘classical’ dance solely in the past, as if it were exempt from the present tense and the politics of now. But this reflection starts elsewhere. I am thinking about not only what Odissi is in relation to the present, but how Odissi behaves inside the body. What kinds of discipline, desire, legitimacy and affect does it activate? What forms of attachment does it cultivate? And what happens when a diasporic body does not inhabit those demands seamlessly?
This has been on my mind through the idea of institutional embodiment. By this I do not mean that the body is itself an institution in any straightforward sense. But rather, I mean that institutions become durable by settling into bodies. They become lived postures, moving beyond the pages of treatises and walls of buildings into intimacy through the body.
This matters because Odissi is not only a dance practice but a reconstructed form built on particular field of ideals about “high art”, respectability, refinement, femininity, devotion, and beauty. Therefore traditional training teaches you not only how to dance, but how to be legible as ‘classical’.
And yet my body does not enter the vocabulary of Odissi as an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the ideals of classicism. It arrives already coloured by other inheritances: ancestral memory, plantation afterlives, Caribbean sensoriums, and embodied knowledges shaped by the convergences and frictions of diasporic life. My relationship to Odissi was never going to be straightforward transmission. It is, and has always been an embodied negotiation because the body that learns Odissi is never outside of power, yet nor is it fully captured by any single history, aesthetic, or regime of meaning.
Disobedience is my methodology for thinking through what happens when my body does not reproduce Odissi in accordance with the aesthetic and disciplinary ideals that have come to regulate the form. However, I am aware that disobedience cannot be the whole story to my artistic signature. If I only talk about defiance I risk casting myself as Odissi’s critic which is not true. I am also its student, and in many ways its lover.
This is what makes the present question more unsettling and more honest. I do not only want to ask what I resist in Odissi. I want to ask what I remain attached to, and why.
Some of my attachments are sensorial. There are aspects of Odissi that feel dynamically alive in my body. Certain rules sharpen my attention and generate an experience of clarity and groundedness. Certain phrases create pleasure through intricacy, tension, suspension or release. Other attachments are more difficult to name. I suspect that part of what I enjoy is the satisfaction of mastering something incredibly difficult. There is a deep emotional charge in working towards precision, in attending to the shifting temporalities that emerge through repetition, in becoming capable of what once felt unreachable. Mastering technique for me has its own kinaesthetic and psychic pleasure.
I do not think that pleasure should be dismissed too quickly. There is value in rigour. There is dignity in craft. There is something profoundly meaningful about entering a practice that asks patience, strength, discipline and sustained attention of the body. In an era that often rewards speed, instant legibility and shallow expressivity, difficulty can itself be a counter-practice. Yet neither do I think that the pleasure of discipline is politically innocent. So here is where the question becomes sharper.
What exactly am I enjoying when I enjoy the discipline of Odissi? Is it the sensorial intelligence of the practice? The physical challenge? The deepening of capacity? Or is it also the promise of legitimacy that comes with mastery? The satisfaction of being able to do something recognized as difficult, refined and valuable within an already sanctioned aesthetic order? These are not mutually exclusive possibilities. They may coexist. But they are definitely not the same thing.
This is where institutional embodiment becomes a useful frame. It allows me to ask how the body becomes attached to discipline not only through coercion, but through accomplishment, pleasure, notions of beauty and recognition. It asks me to consider that power is not only what limits the body from outside, but what the body may come to desire from within. A technique can nourish the body and regulate it at the same time. It can deepen sensitivity while also demanding compliance. It can offer pleasure while reproducing norms. These contradictions do not simply cancel each other out, so how can we hold them together?
I am less interested in a clean narrative of liberation than in a politics of discernment. The question for me is not simply which parts of Odissi are oppressive and which are free. The question is far more intimate: what in the form enlarges me, what contracts me, what sustains me, what disciplines me, what I love because it feels alive, and what I love because I have been trained to value it. The uncomfortable truth is that power is not only coercive; it is also seductive, pleasurable, and generative. The body can submit to discipline but it can also become invested in its rewards. It is in that tension — between sensorial joy and the satisfactions of legitimacy — that the real inquiry provokes.
There are aspects of Odissi I find myself wanting to move away from. Some feel overdetermined by an aesthetic logic that doesn’t quite fit my body. Other aspects ask for a kind of containment that restricts what I can fully sense and feel. Sometimes I can feel confined to the pressure of legibility too strongly. But there are also things I don’t want to let go of. Not out of an uncritical attachment to the form, but because they genuinely give my mind, spirit and body something valuable.
What I am trying to resist, then, is a false choice between total rejection and romantic fidelity. I do not want to remain in the form innocently, as though its history of oppression does not matter. But neither do I want to abandon everything that has shaped me simply because it is implicated in power. That would be another kind of simplification. My task, as I understand it now, is to learn how to distinguish between what the form offers my body as craft, depth and sensorial intelligence, and what it asks my body to internalize as obedience, legitimacy or self-policing.
There are aspects of the Odissi I wish to keep because they expand and deepen me. There are aspects I wish to loosen because they no longer sit truthfully in my body. And there are aspects I still love but do not yet fully understand — attachments I need to interrogate more carefully. All of these have implications for my practice. Every time I dance I am reminded that disobedience is not only dissidence in a spectacular sense. Disobedience is also be the quieter, more difficult work of discerning my own attachments. It may lie in refusing to reproduce what no longer feels livable, while also refusing the performance of easy denunciation. It may mean staying with contradiction long enough to ask why certain disciplines continue to seduce us, what kinds of subjects they ask us to become, and what remains worth carrying even within compromised inheritances.
What hinges me to my practice is what happens when a Caribbean body inhabits a ‘classical’ form with full awareness of what that form carries and what it costs. Dancing inside of this friction is where my practice lives.
If the body is one of the places where institutions become intimate, then it is also one of the places where they can begin to come unravel. Although, they do not unravel through certainty alone. Sometimes they unravel through a more searching kind of honesty: by admitting what we still love, and asking what that love is made of.