Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharata Natyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka by Ahalya Satkunaratnam (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict: Practicing Bharata Natyam in Colombo, Sri Lanka by Ahalya Satkunaratnam
• Merritt Denman Popp

MOVING BODIES, NAVIGATING CONFLICT: PRACTICING BHARATA NATYAM IN COLOMBO, SRI LANKA. By Ahalya Satkunaratnam. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020. 171 pp. $22.95.

Ahalya Satkunaratnam’s work Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict explores the dance form of bharata natyam and its practice during the final years of the Sri Lankan civil war. Satkunaratnam examines the ways in which practitioners of the traditional dance form deployed the form to navigate the complex landscape created by the war. The text explores bharata natyam as a site of political and global conflict, and demonstrates the ways in which dance at this time affected and was affected by the war. Furthermore, the book highlights the lived experiences of dancers as it outlines the ways in which personal encounters with global political problems manifest through performance. Ultimately, in the author’s words, “[b]odies and their experiences are typically left out of discussions of conflict that focus on politics and policy. Both are interconnected here, and this text aims to make transparent the process of producing subjectivity through the acquiring and performing of disciplined movement” (p. 14). Satkunaratnam deftly handles this complex intersection of individual and political bodies and successfully uses bharata natyam to illuminate the ways in which political conflict and performance interact.

Satkunaratnam’s work is an ethnography which, in her own words, explores bharata natyam’s “hint-laced exchanges and nuanced aesthetics that mark a constant awareness of potential violence and everyday war” (p. 14). Her aim is to illustrate the quotidian ways in which the political seeps into the lives of performers and examine the effect that this process has on performance. As Satkunaratnam points out, the scope of her work is not limited to that which is overtly political. Instead, the book is interested in how war shapes even that which is not intentionally political. As Satkunaratnam puts it, “I am invested in reading how politics shapes what is performed and what is received as neutral yet is politically constructed” (p. 9). This is further emphasized by the personal experiences of the author, which are integral to the text.

Satkunaratnam explores the nuanced political landscape of the Sri Lankan civil war through dance as deployed by Sri Lankan women, many of whom the author spoke to or worked with herself. In this way, her project was itself shaped by the war, her topic shifting as the geopolitical landscape around her subject changed during the final tumultuous years of the conflict. Satkunaratnam places bharata natyam in conversation with another Sri Lankan form, the state-sponsored [End Page 232] Kandyan dance, identifying the ways in which each dance form is aligned with nationalistic cultural concepts and utilized for political purposes.

The Sri Lankan civil war was a conflict between a state controlled largely by those in the Sinhala ethnic group and the Tamil revolutionary group. Dance became a site of conflict when the Sinhala state deployed the Kandyan art form as a means of cultural warfare, placing it in opposition to bharata natyam. Satkunaratnam analyzes various performances that she and her subjects witnessed or were part of, giving a close reading of process and performance to examine how Sri Lankan women deployed dance as a means of disrupting these expectations and eliciting inquiry into assumptions about who did and did not “belong” in Sri Lanka.

The book is neatly divided into two sections of two chapters each. The first two chapters explore “the implications of hybridity and dance in the emerging postcolonial nation and the nation at war” (p. 15), while the second two chapters “consider choreographies and the processes of production . . . in Colombo” (p. 15). Satkunaratnam demonstrates how the Sinhala government deployed the terms “Indian,” “Oriental,” and “indigenous” to delineate bharata natyam as an outside dance form. The first section outlines the complex history of bharata natyam as a cultural Tamil practice, acknowledging its relationship to Indian culture, but delineating the ways in which the form is intimately linked to Tamil culture and markers of Sri Lankan national identity. This section demonstrates the ways in which the Sinhala government worked to distance...