Dancing Bodies of Devotion: Fluid Gestures in Bharata Natyam

In this thoughtful and finely crafted work, Katherine Zubko accomplishes a feat that few in the field of religious studies have managed to do: she keeps dance centre stage from beginning to end of her book, and not just as an object to analyse but as a practice capable of generating complex theoretical ideas. In so doing, Zubko levels a sturdy blow against a bulwark of the colonial era that continues to produce affects in the field of religious studies and beyond: a refusal to acknowledge ‘dance’ as ‘religion’. The dance at the heart of Zubko’s book is Bharata Natyam, arguably the most popular and well known form of Indian ‘classical’ dance, emblem of Indian (mostly Hindu) unity, whose own history is indelibly marked by the colonial project. As Zubko relates, nationalists and reformers in midtwentieth century India sought to resurrect and codify the dance traditions of the devadasis, who had been cast out of Hindu temples by British rulers. The reformers invented the name ‘Bharata Natyam’ for the technique they (re)constructed as a way to affirm its direct line to authoritative texts in the Hindu tradition, most notably, Bharata’s second century Nāṭyaśāstra. Zubko does not linger on this history. As she notes, it has been ably told by others. Instead, she focuses on a hand-picked group of contemporary practitioners of Bharata Natyam who use the term bhakti rasa to hold open a space for what many scholars claim was lost in the transition of the