I should begin expressing my motivation for joining the Course by saying that I was born and went to ‘Government’ ‘Girls’ Higher Secondary School with instructions in Hindi for 16 initial years of my life in the village of Banera in the South-East of Rajasthan in India. This is not to begin from the original location in chronological order and claim any indigeneity but rather to mark this point of departure as a constitutive condition of my journey with dance and my practice. I participated in complex dances in my village such as Ghoomar, Terah Tali in innumerable festivals in the village, marriage celebrations, state celebrations of Independence Day and Republic Day at the school. I navigated them through a sense of movement and formations, community and space before I came to recognize them as ‘folk dances of Rajasthan’. It was also quite later on that I came to see being raised in a middle-class joint family of 16 people - the obstructions to my requests to dance, creation of hostile conditions towards my desire of expression through my movements, constant demand of duty and care, making it clear to me in no fuzzy terms my role in society - the iron curtain of ‘Girls don’t go out’ as continued violence of a paternalist society.
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