When I was initiated into Odissi, I was also initiated into a discipline of reverence. Complete, unquestioning, unequivocal reverence to my Guru, to their Guru, to the discipline, and to the sacred codes and rules of the form. Over years of contorting my unruly, stubborn diasporic body into an almost perfect tightly wound technique under my Guru’s gaze, I began to feel increasingly weary with how reverence operates within Odissi discourse. In particular, I became annoyed by how “sacred authority” was often mobilized in the classroom to arrest critical thought rather than deepen it.
Odissi was presented to me as a complete and perfect vocabulary, where the historical conditions and collateral damage of such perfection were carefully obscured. Yet Odissi did not emerge intact from an uninterrupted past. It was reconstructed through selective revival, post-Independence nationalist goals, caste respectability, and the erasure of indigenous female (Mahari) technologies. And this invisible history is rarely foregrounded in how the form is taught or discussed. In fact, this was absent from my foundational Odissi training altogether.
I want to be clear here: I do not question the brilliance of any Guru. Their knowledge, artistry, labour, and devotion to the form are undeniable. What I question is how the authority of the Guru is often used to smooth over histories of appropriation where certain bodies, practices, and ways of knowing were absorbed and rebranded while simultaneously proclaiming who may move, speak, or change the form today. My experience as a once subservient student has been that innovation in Odissi was permitted at the moment of its founding, but later generations of dancers are expected only to preserve. Expansion of the form is allowed only if it does not disturb its aesthetic structure already declared perfected. We are encouraged to refine rather than reimagine, and to engage contemporary ideas only so long as nothing structural is altered.
I can’t help but feel a deep, embodied resistance to this particular kind of sanctioned “innovation” that expects new themes to emerge inside of frozen bodies. To insist that “authentic” Odissi bodies are untouchable is to assume that meaning can shift without the body shifting, as if dance were not fundamentally relational to the bodies that bring it to life. Demands of respectability and purity ask Odissi dancers to freeze technique in time, despite the fact that technique has actually never been frozen. Gurus have altered, refined, discarded, and reassembled material across generations. Yet dancers today are expected to internalize a supposedly fixed grammar, regardless of their diasporic realities, lived histories, or the mechanics and limits of their bodies.
What has Odissi been taught to recognize as dancing? And: Who pays the cost of that recognition regime?
My thoughts return to the time I spent exploring Odissi with a remarkable group of people living with the effects of stroke or brain injury, through Rosetta Life, during my MA residency in London in 2025. If Odissi is understood as untouchable technique rather than relational practice, what bodies are quietly rendered incapable of dancing if at all? Within dominant logics of Odissi, bodies altered by disability are rarely recognized as dancing bodies at all, but are quietly positioned as having fallen outside Odissi altogether.
There is a revealing contradiction between Indian and Western contemporary logics. In both worlds, contemporaneity is not evenly distributed, but rather, granted, negotiated and surveilled according to lineage, geography, and racialized expectations of the body. Western classical forms are permitted to become contemporary through reinvention, while Indian classical forms are required to perform continuity, preservation, and moral fidelity, even as they are continually reshaped in practice. We readily acknowledge that ancient traditions change visibly, materially, and structurally over time. Yet Odissi is repeatedly declared complete and held outside of transformation, as if evolution itself would constitute a stark betrayal. In turn, the burden of preservation is placed not on institutions or historiography, but on individual bodies as though the body were a neutral vessel rather than an active site of evolving intelligences.
All art forms were once contemporary. They emerged in response to forces and conditions of their moment. What we later call “classical” is often simply what survived long enough to be stabilized, named, and preserved. I think here of Mahari technologies created in temples, where abhinaya unfolded slowly, relationally, perhaps even without the demand for spectacle or the audience’s gaze.
In my dancing body, Odissi is never performed the same way twice, even when that difference is invisible to the naked eye. Something in the soma always shifts: breath, weight, attention, memory. Our bodies are constantly responding to time, fatigue, space, to who is watching and who is absent. These changes may seem subtle, but they are certainly not insignificant. They are the conditions of performance itself. Movement is shaped by the fact that time moves through us even when technique appears stable. To suggest that Odissi can be repeated without alteration is to imagine a body untouched by time, history, or context.
That body does not exist.
Therefore, what is often mistaken for preservation is, in fact, an insistence on visual sameness. A desire for form to appear unchanged, even as the conditions that produce it inevitably are. But sameness of appearance does not equal sameness of experience. The dance continues to change at levels that cannot always be codified or seen, yet remain profoundly real.
In this sense, Odissi is not contemporary because it adopts new themes or contexts. It is contemporary because it is alive, because it unfolds in time, and because it is carried by bodies that breathe, age, remember, and respond. To acknowledge this contemporaneity is not to abandon tradition, but to recognize how tradition actually persists: not through perfect repetition, but through ongoing relation.
This phase of my research has led me to confront how “the contemporary” functions less as a descriptor of time and more as a structure of permission.
Through this exploration, I have come to understand Odissi not as a static inheritance but as a living technique that enters into relationship with the bodies that practice it. My Caribbean diasporic body does not stand outside this form, nor does it merely innovate upon it. It reveals how Odissi is always already contemporary, continually negotiated through time, place, sensation, and social context. Each performance is contingent, situated, and irreproducible, even when it adheres to codified form. Contemporaneity is not something I add to Odissi but rather, it emerges through its ongoing relation with lived experience.
This realization has shifted my attention away from questions of legitimacy—what I am allowed or not allowed to do—and toward questions of responsibility, and power. Who gets to define what counts as contemporary practice, and under what conditions? Which bodies are authorized to carry change, and which are tasked with preservation?
These questions reframe my relationship to the Odissi body, not as a temple statue to be entombed, but as a living site of encounter where multiple temporalities and ancestral lineages coexist without needing to resolve into purity. To be in relation to Odissi (and by extension art, tradition, spirituality, or ritual) is not the same as being policed by it. Relation implies an exchange of movement. It requires responsiveness, allowing both the dancer and the dance to be affected. When people ask me what emancipatory pedagogy might look like in practice I say, “The dancer’s body is free to speak back.”
Tradition, when held as a vibrant, dynamic, imperfect living force, does not require the Odissi body to disappear. Instead, it asks for attention, listening, and care, while accepting that bodies breathe differently, arrive differently, and carry time differently. To be in relation is to allow this difference to matter.
Policing enters when tradition is treated as fixed law rather than ongoing encounter. When form is protected from the very bodies that give life to it. When integrity is measured by visual sameness rather than lived attentiveness. In such frameworks, the dancer is asked to submit rather than respond and to preserve rather than participate.
Ritual has never survived through compliance.
The practices of our ancestors taught us that art, ritual, tradition, and sacredness do not require policing to endure.
But, they do require presence.