I was in my mid 20s when I became initiated in Odissi. Initiated. The use of the word is intentional, given that my initiation into a highly codified form was also, (in more ways than one), an initiation in reverence. Complete, unequivocal reverence to my Guru, to their Guru, and to the many rules of the form. Over years of contorting my stubborn Caribbean 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 regimented in the classroom to arrest critical thought as opposed to deepening it.
I was one body in a lineage of bodies, and Odissi was inscribed in me as a complete and perfect vocabulary. Untouched and unburdened by the histories and collateral damage it so carefully obscured. It would be at least eight years until I discover Odissi did not emerge intact from a perfect antiquity. 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. Inside the classroom I was an almost-perfect, obedient student. Outside I was grappling with the qualms of being a consumer-perpetrator of an art form I’d grown to love.
I do want to be clear here: I do not question the brilliance of any Guru. 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 extracted and rebranded with orthodoxies on who may dance and how. As a former subservient student, my experience has been that innovation in Odissi was permitted at the moment of its founding, but later generations of dancers are expected only to preserve. In this sense, expansion of the form is allowed only if it does not disturb its clear, aesthetic structure already declared perfected. There is much to take from this— but chief among it, we are encouraged to refine rather than reimagine, and to engage contemporary ideas only so long as nothing structural is visibly changed.
I can’t help but feel a resistance to this particular kind of sanctioned “innovation” that expects new thematic inquiries to emerge inside of frozen statues. To insist that “authentic”, “”normative” Odissi bodies are untouchable as if 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 really been frozen. Gurus have changed, refined, disposed of, and reassembled choreographic material across generations. And yet, dancers today are expected to internalize a supposedly fixed grammar, regardless of their diasporic realities or the mechanics and capacities of their bodies.
What has Odissi taught us 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, negotiated and surveilled according to class, lineage, geography, and racialized expectations of the body. Western classical forms are (somewhat) permitted to become contemporary through reinvention, while Indian classical forms are required to perform continuity and moral fidelity, even as they are perpetually reshaped in the lived body. We readily acknowledge that ancient traditions change visibly, materially, and structurally over time. Yet Odissi is 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 dancing bodies as though the body were a neutral vessel rather than an active site of evolving political intelligences.
All art forms were once contemporary. They emerged in response to forces and conditions of their moment. What we call “modern” today might be called “classical” tomorrow if it survives long enough to be stabilized. We can learn from Maharis whose abhinaya was expressed relationally, responsive to the moment as opposed to within the confines of a treatise.
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; be it my breath, awareness, sensations or relationship to time. Our bodies are constantly responding to time. These changes may seem subtle, but they are certainly not insignificant. They are the conditions of performance itself. My argument here is simply movement is married to timing moving through us even when technique appears stable. To suggest then, that Odissi can be repeated without alteration is to imagine a body untouched by time, history, or context.
That body does not exist.
What is often mistaken for preservation is, as previously stated, 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 witnessed, yet remain profoundly real to the body dancing.
My claim that Odissi is contemporary is not because it adopts new themes or contexts. It is contemporary because it is alive in the way tradition truthfully persists: not through perfect repetition, but through ongoing relation.
This phase of my research confronts how “the contemporary” functions less as a descriptor of time and more as a structure of permission. More specifically, it is anchored in the understanding of Odissi as a living technique that breathes into relationship with the bodies that practice it. I do not feel like a stranger outside of the form. In fact, I feel like for the first time in twenty+ years, I am finally giving myself permission to live inside of it. In doing so, contemporaneity, is not something I add to Odissi but rather, it emerges as residue of my relationship to the form.
Questions of legitimacy—what we are allowed or not allowed to do—muddies the minds of most— if not all dancers of the ‘classical’. I am interested in what happens when we retrograde toward questions of responsibility, and power. Who gets to define what counts as contemporary practice, and under what conditions? Which bodies are authorized to innovate, and which are tasked with preservation? Why?
To be in relation to Odissi (and by extension tradition) 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 is a dynamic, imperfect living force, and does that not require the Odissi body to disappear. Instead it asks for embodied listening while accepting that bodies relate their worlds differently.
We know this, because ritual has never survived through compliance.
Our ancestors’ practices taught us they did not need policing to endure.
They only required presence.