17 – Performance and Gender After Empire

October 2, 2025
8:30 am
H07
In the last seventy years, research on caste and gender in South Asia has evolved into a rich field of study. In the humanities and social sciences, scholars and practitioners of music, dance, theater, and film in India, the U.K., the E.U., Australia, and the United States, positioned in various disciplines like sociology, anthropology, dance, theater and performance studies, religious studies, history, and ethnomusicology have examined how performance cultures uniquely reveal the braided legacies of European (especially British) colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, and caste apartheid in social life. In this interdisciplinary panel, scholars and performers interrogate the continuities of imperialism in the Indian nation-state. Specifically, they focus on practices and knowledge projects of empire, methodological trends and innovations, and the epistemic legacies that emerge from various academic settings and access points. This panel seeks to conceptualize the wide range of historical actors and communities, whose contributions to performance cultures have been selectively undervalued across national and international contexts. Guiding questions for this panel are: how have statist formations shaped performance cultures as well as the study of performance? How do such formations emerge and extend from previous forms of colonial governmentality? How have imperial gender politics influenced the usage of the body in neo-classical dances? How do archival and ethnographic methods converge and diverge in research on performance? What are the limits of such methods, especially in research on gender, sexuality, and performance? What might be some alternative paths for interrogating occluded narratives of music and dance in the historical record?

Convenor

Putcha Rumya

Presentations

From Badhai to Miss Transqueen India: Celebrating the Hijra Body as a Socio-cultural Text
Das Rupali - Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar, India
Education for Identity
Thakore Yashoda - The University of Silicon Andhra, Aria University, San Jose, United States
Performing Resistance: Gender, Radicalism, and the Politics of Theatre in London and Calcutta, 1930–1950
Singh Twisha - Institute of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, McGill, Montreal, Canada
Indian Classical Dance on Global Stages? The Case of Madame Menaka
Schwaderer Dr. Isabella - Department of Religious Studies, Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany
The Memory of Ritual: Tawaif Practices and Their Legacy
Sahay Divyanshu - Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, NA, Guwahati, India
Mokashi-Punekar Rohini - Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, NA, Guwahati, India
Exploring Historical Disruptions in the Quotidian Practices of Mahari Temple Dancers in Postcolonial Odisha, while Juxtaposed with Oral Testimonies from the Community
Patnaik Shriya - The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva, Switzerland
Where are the female Qawwals? Gendered perspectives on Qawwali in contemporary Pakistan
Naqvi Wajiha - King's College London, University of London, London, United Kingdom
Crooners, divas and cabaret: Anglophone entertainment in postcolonial Calcutta
Chakraborty Arka - School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, United Kingdom