This review of a book is an invitation to the Bharatanatyam dance fraternity to engage seriously with the history of this dance form. Doing so requires nuance, care and awareness of its complexity as it is woven with many different layers. On the one hand, some discourses place the origin of Bharatanatyam into an idealised ancient past of sacred dance, but on the other hand, almost all the repertoire that is eulogised as traditional originates in court practices, especially from the Thanjavur Maratha Kingdom. Yet, shortly after a social “reform” jeopardised the way of life of hereditary practitioners, an élite initiated a so-called aesthetic “revival” in the 1930s. These categories were wonderfully examined in an article published by Amrit Srinivasan in 1985, Reform and Revival - The Devadasi and Her Dance. Nowadays, some people are still using the trope of “degeneration” in order to legitimize a cultural appropriation.
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