Over the previous few days, the Indian classical dance fraternity has voiced outrage over actor Ananya Panday’s dance within the film, Chand Mera Dil. Panday has drawn the ire of the Bharatanatyam world for performing a melange of hip-hop, popping (a avenue dance type involving stiff, jerky actions) and what’s alleged to be Bharatanatyam. A number of well-known practitioners of the dance type, aside from peculiar social media customers, have aired their criticism of the therapy meted out to the classical dance. A viral meme goes, “Bharatanatyam was based in 200 BCE and ended with Ananya Panday in 2026.” Panday’s dance has been disparagingly termed “nepo-natyam”, invoking the notion that nepotism has allowed mediocrity to be rewarded.
The criticism is centred on lack of approach, ignorance of centuries-old traditions of the dance type, use of Nataraja (the dancing Shiva) within the background for such a bit, and so forth. Social media is rife with feedback evaluating the dance with Hollywood’s therapy of ballet, evaluating Panday with actresses comparable to Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit and their engagement with classical dance kinds, saying actresses who don’t know a specific type shouldn’t try it. None of that is new. Such feedback observe when performers with little to no formal coaching in a “classical” artwork type carry out it on display.
These protestations remind considered one of an older, extra pressing protest. A century in the past, hereditary dance practitioners had been edged out, their lifestyle deemed disrespectful, and a wholly new class and caste of dancers changed them. Whole repertoires had been deemed unsuitable, motion patterns reworked, even the stage itself shifted from temples and saloons to the proscenium of theatres. As they watched their life’s work rework so radically, the place may hereditary dancers voice their discomfort? Did they ever come throughout their dance — altered and tailor-made for a brand new physique, a brand new aesthetic, a brand new nation — and rage the identical means?
Hereditary dancers wrote letters protesting the reform invoice of 1928 launched by Muthulakshmi Reddy, for example. Bharatanatyam doyenne Thanjavur Balasaraswati, who was from the hereditary group, critiqued the puritanism of the newly reformed and Brahminised Bharatanatyam. Hereditary dancers struggled with the speedy de-familiarisation of their type, the addition of stage accoutrements that had by no means been thought-about mandatory, in addition to their ousting from their inventive follow. However their caste and sophistication standing rendered any protest largely ineffective in halting the trajectory of the “fashionable” rendering of their dance.
These sympathetic to this “reform” would possibly say that it was mandatory for the survival of the dance. So why resist the identical logic immediately? Dancers more and more use social media as their main platform, adapting their actions for shorter consideration spans and vertical frames. On this panorama, dance is altering quickly, and films replicate this shift. This stage calls for the “re-forming” of dance and its aesthetics, and is primed for virality. And prefer it or not, “nepo-natyam” achieves this.
Learn on this mild, the allegations of disrespect levelled at Panday and the choreographer who has valiantly tried to defend her, appear out of proportion. Is Bollywood doing something so vastly totally different from what a extra socially and economically advantaged group compelled on one other a 100 years in the past? The starkest distinction is barely how the caste and sophistication standing of immediately’s dancers affords them better visibility and stakes within the demand for respect.
Ranjini Nair is a dancer and dance researcher with a PhD from the College of Cambridge. The views expressed are private
