It is my pleasure and honor here to introduce three articles by prominent scholars and practitioners of Indian dance to celebrate a set of profound, meticulous acts of devotion—the writings of Kapila Vatsyayan. These essays, originally presented at an honorary panel for Kapila Vatsyayan at the 1998 CORD Conference, offer diverse perspectives and conceptual frames that significantly enrich our appreciation of Vatsyayan's outstanding contribution to dance scholarship. The first frame, that of Janet O'shea, focuses on the interactions between body, subjectivity, a system of dancing, and their combined implications for dance studies. Joan Erdman's frame draws attention to the ways in which Vatsyayan's vision of dance interacts with Indian culture and becomes expressed as thought, art, architecture, and poetry. Mohd Anis Nor considers the impact of Vatsyayan's scholarship on the works of East Asian scholars. Finally, Vatsyayan herself speaks in an informal interview about formative influences on her writings. Her spontaneous responses reflect and confirm issues that the set of papers have raised concerning her postcolonial experience of scholarly research.

Janet O'shea, a performer of Bharatanatyam, explores how Vatsyayan's understanding of the bodily experience of dancing informs her organization of the components of dance structures. She observes that Vatsyayan's concept of dance demonstrates how the various Indian dance forms groom the body to reflect the concepts of body-shape, posture, and of articulation of movement that are listed in the theoretical texts. O'shea notes that “this methodological framework situates dance as an active cultural participant in relation to other systems of thought” and offers a model for exploring dance as a system.

As a scholar and practitioner of Bharatanatyam I would like, foremost, to express my gratitude to Kapila Vatsyayan for her comprehensive, in-depth studies of Indian classical dance forms. Her work includes attention to both distant and recent epochs in the history of Indian dance as well as to current practice. Her analysis of many divergent sources has laid the groundwork for any academic study of classical Indian dance. She not only provides an exhaustive account of Indian dance in the past and present but also interprets the relationship among aesthetic theory texts, historical dance practice, and contemporary, classical Indian choreography in a nuanced and sophisticated manner.

Because the strengths of Vatsyayan's research are manifold, I restrict my consideration here to a narrow focus. Specifically, this discussion focuses on her concept of dance technique as an integral part of her analytical framework. This essay also addresses the ramifications of her methodology for current and future work in the field of dance studies. In particular, I consider how Vatsyayan's understanding of the bodily subject offers an important paradigm for current writings within dance scholarship, especially those that interpret dance praxis in relation to social theory (1). Moreover, I limit my attention to two of Vatsyayan's major works: Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts and Indian Classical Dance.

When I first came to the University of Chicago in 1973 to study South Asian anthropology and history, and to write about North India's musicians, I was asked whether I would be studying the ancient texts such as Natyashastra and Abhinayadarpana. “No,” I said. “I am interested in today's arts and artists, and their recent history in the courts of Rajasthan, not in ancient texts.”

Eventually I found the writings of Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, and recognized enduring connections between ancient and modern, great and little traditions, and the importance of all arts for understanding any one of them. This realization arose from her 1968 book on India's performing arts, Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts. In his foreword Rai Krishnadasa, Honorary Director of Bharat Kala Bhavan at Benares, noted that since Indian Independence in 1947, many books dealing with its arts had been published, often “hastily written and often full of errors and even misinformation” (Vatsyayan 1968, xix). Vatsyayan's book, however, was “a breath of fresh air, clear, incisive and invigorating” (xix). She had studied historical and ancient dance texts, researched and analyzed the dance, and long practiced with dance gurus. In doing so, her book merged two traditions of learning: living “repositories of tradition,” and analysis of the “ancestry of dance movement–so integral a part of the evolution of modern dance abroad” (xix). So texts and commentaries, on the one hand, and praxis, on the other, were essential to understanding India's dance and dance traditions, and to reconstructing their history. This combination informs all her publications as well as her significant contributions to the patronage of India's dance culture. For me, it opened the pathway to a merger of text and practice, context and aesthetic process.

Beyond the Indian subcontinent Kapila Vatsyayan has become a legend. Although far from the center of the great Indian tradition, Southeast Asian dance scholars emulate Vatsyayan's work and have attempted similar studies of the classical dances within the Indie tradition in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Many of us in Southeast Asia only hope that we can measure up to the strength of her scholarship. For us, the notion of the “great” and “small” traditions is both real and overwhelming.

Thirty years ago scholarship in Asian dance attained new heights with the publication of Vatsyayan's celebrated Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts, the first exploration by an indigenous scholar of the relationship between classical Indian dance, literature, and sculpture. In particular, Vatsyayan opened new frontiers in the understanding of rasa theory beyond its convention as mood and evocation. She explicated the notion of rasa as a state of being and aesthetic theories of dance along with the study of literature, sculpture, painting, music and theater. Her work demonstrated an implicit understanding of performance theory and of deconstruction and reconstruction processes, by which I essentially mean emic attempts to construe or interpret dance. Deconstruction involves the dismantling of a dance form, genre, or repertory into the smallest units of contrasted movements recognized by people of a given dance tradition, while reconstruction refers to the ways these movements are structured within a larger movement system (1).