Bharata natyam, a classical South Asian storytelling dance, exemplifies a mostly elite representation of Indian culture on stages throughout the world today. Beginning in the 1930s, the traditionally Hindu art form and its hereditary exponents were caught up in a complex “crisis of representation” of Indian nationalist causes and values espoused by Western social and religious organizations, as the dance shifted from one performed by professional, hereditary artists to a predominantly institutionalized “pure, ancient, textually-based reconstruction” (p. 104). While explicitly not a history of bharata natyam (p. xviii), Balasarawati: Her Art and Life offers a compelling and accessible historical biography of a key figure at the center of an ongoing debate centered on the question of who represents bharata natyam. While this book serves as an important corrective to the absence of a complete narrative of the most famous hereditary dancer to perform during the twentieth century, Knight deftly offers...

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