The return of Nāṭya

Art, Memory, and the Long Rhythm of a Civilisation

- Rohit Viswanath
e-mail: natyashastra.gurukulam@gmail.com

April 10, 2026

At the great temple of Bṛhadiśvara in Thanjavur, the stone speaks in an administrative voice. It records land grants, duties, and allocations [1]. Among these, it notes the presence of hundreds of women attached to the temple, trained in music and dance, and sustained through a carefully organised system of patronage. They are not incidental figures. They belong to the structure of the place.

Further north, at the Virūpākṣa temple at Hampi, inscriptions from the Vijayanagara period record similar arrangements, including endowments for dancers, musicians, and ritual specialists [2]. The language is consistent across centuries. Performance is accounted for, maintained, and institutionalised.

From a modern vantage, these records can appear as remnants of a lost world, evidence of a tradition that flourished, declined, and was later revived. But this reading carries a familiar assumption that history moves in a straight line.

Nāṭya does not quite follow that line. Its movement is cyclical, recursive, and responsive to shifts in the conditions that sustain it.

Nāṭya as a way of knowing
In the classical imagination, nāṭya was never merely performance. It was a structured mode of knowing, in which movement, music, language, and gesture were brought into precise relation to produce a particular kind of experience.

Through the interplay of bhāva and abhinaya, the spectator arrives at rasa, a heightened state in which emotion is no longer private but shared, distilled, and expanded.

As Bharatamuni formulates, vibhāvānubhāva-vyabhicāri-saṁyogād rasa-niṣpattiḥ, rasa arises through the conjunction of determinants, expression, and transient states [3].

The Nāṭyaśāstra, often understood as a pañcama-veda, a fifth Veda accessible through performance, frames this as a systematic process [4]. The Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, in his commentary Abhinavabhāratī on the Nāṭyaśāstra, describes this process as sādhāraṇīkaraṇa, the universalisation of feeling into a field of awareness that is at once intimate and impersonal [5].

In this formulation, nāṭya becomes more than art. It becomes a disciplined means through which experience is refined and made intelligible.

Nāṭya is not neutral in its orientation. The Nāṭyaśāstra situates it as a reflection of dharma, not in the sense of instruction, but of attunement. Through representation, it brings into visibility the tensions that underlie human action, allowing them to be experienced, examined, and at times resolved. The world that produced nāṭya did not separate aesthetics from knowledge or performance from philosophy. It understood representation itself as a way of orienting perception toward right action in lived experience.

In this sense, nāṭya may also be understood as a space in which the puruṣārthas, namely dharma, artha, kāma, and mokṣa, are not abstractly stated but experientially explored. Desire, action, consequence, and transcendence unfold within the aesthetic field, allowing the spectator to encounter these dimensions in a distilled and reflective form. Nāṭya thus becomes not only a representation of life, but a means of apprehending its underlying order.

Obscuration without disappearance
And yet, something changed.
The institutional worlds that sustained nāṭya, including temples, courts, and hereditary lineages, were gradually reconfigured under political upheaval and later colonial intervention. Practices that had once been embedded in stable ecosystems became exposed, displaced, and in some cases stigmatised.

The devadāsī tradition, central to the transmission of dance, underwent one of the most visible transformations [6]. In earlier contexts, the devadāsī was located within a sacral and institutional order, where artistic practice, ritual function, and economic support were integrated. As these structures weakened, the same role was recast under altered conditions. Patronage fragmented, institutional anchoring thinned, and external moral frameworks reinterpreted the practice in reductive terms. Under colonial scrutiny and reform movements, performance traditions were increasingly recast as socially suspect, contributing to their marginalisation within emerging public norms.

What changed was not the form alone, but the field within which it was embedded.
Nāṭya did not disappear. It became partially obscured, its techniques intact, its deeper integrative logic less visibly sustained.

Articulation, Obscuration, Reconstitution
What appears at first as a series of disruptions reveals, over a longer arc, a recurring pattern: articulation, obscuration, and reconstitution.

Nāṭya was first articulated as an integrated system, formal, experiential, and philosophical. It then entered a phase in which its institutional supports fragmented and its conceptual unity became less explicit, even as practice continued. The modern period marks not a simple revival, but a set of attempts at reconstitution under altered conditions.

These phases are not only historical. They find expression in modern responses to the tradition.

An interior rearticulation: Rabindranath Tagore
One of the most distinctive rearticulations emerges in the work of Rabindranath Tagore, within the intellectual and cultural milieu of the Bengal Renaissance in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal, centred in Calcutta and Santiniketan [7].

Tagore does not seek to reconstruct nāṭya in its classical completeness. He approaches it through experience, through the inward life of feeling and reflection. His approach also resists the emerging tendency to formalise dance into fixed classical categories, allowing movement to remain fluid, adaptive, and responsive to mood rather than rule. Later explorations, such as those of Padma Subrahmanyam, including her work on Sukhalāsyam, suggest that this search for fluidity within structure continued in distinct and consciously theorised forms. In Tagore's dance-dramas, including Chitrāṅgadā, Śyāmā, and Chaṇḍālikā, movement, music, and speech are interwoven without rigid adherence to codified form [8].

What matters here is experiential coherence. Gesture is restrained and suggestive. External expression recedes, allowing inner states to come to the fore. In this sense, Tagore may be seen as privileging the interior dimension of performance, where emotion is not displayed but disclosed.

This shift carries forward the classical idea of rasa, but in altered form. Rather than emerging through a fully codified system of representation, aesthetic experience becomes inward and immediate, inviting the spectator into a space of reflection in which feeling ripens into awareness [9]. In this shift, the emphasis moves away from formal completeness toward immediacy of experience, where meaning is shaped less by adherence to structure than by the intensity of lived feeling.

Dramatic conflict, in this setting, rarely turns on plot alone. It unfolds as ethical tension, between desire and responsibility, freedom and consequence. The resolution is not victory, but alignment with a deeper moral order. In Śyāmā, for instance, the narrative does not merely culminate in tragedy. It interrogates the cost of desire and the limits of justice, leaving the spectator within an unresolved ethical field.

Across these works, one can discern an implicit continuity with older frameworks. Questions of duty, desire, consequence, and transcendence remain present, though no longer formalised as doctrine. They are experienced rather than stated, lived rather than resolved.

At Santiniketan, this vision acquires institutional form. Yet this very openness also resists consolidation into a stable pedagogical system, remaining closely tied to context and interpretation. Art is not isolated as a discipline, but integrated into a broader educational environment. Nāṭya returns here, in altered form, as a way of inhabiting experience, shaping perception from within rather than prescribing it from without.

A structural rearticulation: Rukmini Devi Arundale
A different response unfolds in the work of Rukmini Devi Arundale [10].
Where Rabindranath Tagore turns inward, Rukmini Devi turns to structure. Confronted with an art form that had lost social legitimacy, she undertakes its reconstruction through deliberate institutional effort.

She learns from hereditary practitioners, re-establishing lines of transmission that had been marginalised. These lineages, including the Paṇḍanallūr bāṇī, already embodied a high degree of technical refinement and aesthetic sophistication [11]. But her work does not stop at preservation. It involves selection, refinement, and re-articulation. Repertoire is reshaped, themes are reordered, and performance is re-contextualised for a new public.

In 1936, she founded the Kalakshetra Foundation, creating not only a school, but a disciplined environment in which practice, pedagogy, and aesthetic values are brought into alignment. Nāṭya here becomes teachable again, not as inheritance alone, but as a structured pathway.

This reconstruction operates at multiple levels. At the level of form, it recontextualises an already sophisticated tradition, drawing on established lineages such as the Paṇḍanallūr bāṇī, while reorganising technique, gesture, and repertoire within a newly institutionalised framework. At the level of perception, it repositions the art within a moral and cultural framework that renders it legible and legitimate in modern society. And at the level of transmission, it reorganises a largely embodied and lineage-based system into one that can be systematically taught, reproduced, and sustained.

Her work may be understood as a form of civilisational translation: the rendering of a traditional knowledge system into forms capable of surviving under altered historical conditions, rather than the reconstruction of a form that had lost its internal coherence. It also aligns with a broader twentieth-century movement to stabilise and reclassify dance as 'classical,' giving it cultural legitimacy within a modern public sphere [12].

Yet translation also transforms. Elements of presentation, staging, and pedagogy also reflect selective adaptation, including influences external to the traditional framework. In stabilising the external structure of the art, emphasis necessarily falls on what can be codified, taught, and performed. The interior dimensions, in which nāṭya functions as a direct discipline of perception and awareness, become less explicit.

If Tagore internalises nāṭya, Rukmini Devi externalises it. She gives it visible form, institutional continuity, and social legitimacy. In doing so, she ensures its survival, even if the deeper integration of form and consciousness remains only partially recovered. Her achievement is therefore not a completion, but a re-foundation, a necessary condition for any further reintegration.

Between interiorisation and structure
Taken together, these trajectories reveal that the modern recovery of nāṭya unfolds along two complementary axes: interiorisation and reconstruction.

Tagore restores depth without insisting on form. Rukmini Devi restores form without fully reinstating depth. Each responds to a different absence. This produces a creative tension between depth and form, between interiority and structure.

Without structure, experience disperses. Without experience, structure hardens into formality.

Nāṭya, in its present condition, carries both inheritances, sometimes in alignment, often in subtle dissonance.

The shape of time
The difficulty, perhaps, lies in how such histories are narrated.

Modern accounts favour linear movement, rise, fall, and revival. Within the symbolic universe from which nāṭya emerges, time is not linear. In the image of Naṭarāja, creation and dissolution are simultaneous movements within a larger rhythm [13].

Classical thought gives this rhythm a language in the shifting predominance of tamas, rajas, and sattva [14]. These are not moral categories, but modes of configuration, ways in which inertia, activity, and clarity organise experience.

Seen in this light, the history of nāṭya does not describe a fall from purity into corruption. It reflects changes in the conditions under which the art is practiced and understood. What appears as loss in one frame may be transformation in another.

What it means to return
Today, nāṭya has acquired institutions, global audiences, and a renewed legitimacy.
Across India and beyond, nāṭya is once again visible in multiple and tangible forms. Classical dance traditions are flourishing not only within India but across the global diaspora, where practitioners from North America to Australia, including those outside Indian cultural lineages, are engaging deeply with these forms. What was once regionally anchored now circulates across a civilisational and global field.

Transmission, too, has regained continuity. Across many institutions and lineages, one observes the re-emergence of a threefold generational structure, parama guru, guru, and śiṣya, sustained through both women and men, and increasingly supported through hybrid modes of pedagogy that combine face-to-face training with digital instruction.

At the level of form, there has been a renewed recognition of regional traditions. Dance forms such as Sattriya in Assam and Chhau across eastern and central India have gained visibility and institutional support, reflecting a broader recovery of diversity within the nāṭya landscape [15]. This is complemented by expanding cultural infrastructure: auditoria in large cities as well as smaller towns have multiplied, creating new spaces for performance and transmission.

Public interest and patronage have correspondingly increased. Nāṭya now finds a place within university curricula, and its presence has expanded across television and digital platforms such as YouTube, reaching audiences far beyond traditional settings. Festivals, sabhās, and independent initiatives further contribute to a widening ecosystem in which practice is not only preserved but actively produced. Taken together, these developments suggest not merely survival, but a visible and widespread return.

And yet, visibility is not the same as integration.

The conditions of an incomplete return
The return of nāṭya, while visible, remains structurally incomplete. What appears today is a field that is vibrant, dispersed, and unevenly connected to its deeper conceptual foundations. Practice persists, often with high levels of technical refinement, but the underlying frameworks of śāstra, rasa, and puruṣārtha are not always coherently transmitted alongside it. Expression flourishes, but its relation to discipline, knowledge, and ethical orientation remains inconsistently articulated.

If this return is both visible and incomplete, the conditions within which it unfolds must be more closely examined. Cultural forms now circulate within a globalised field, where distinct traditions risk being flattened into spectacle. The conceptual frameworks that once sustained practice, including śāstra, rasa, and puruṣārtha, are no longer widely shared and must often be relearned rather than inherited.

At the same time, the tempo of life has accelerated. Attention fragments more easily, and sustained immersion becomes harder to cultivate. Experience is increasingly mediated through technological platforms, altering the immediacy and relational depth of performance. The ethical landscape has grown more complex, marked by institutional uncertainty and shifting social norms.

Under such conditions, expression alone cannot sustain transmission. Forms of intuitive and liberated practice that were sufficient to renew nāṭya in an earlier moment are no longer adequate to sustain its depth in the present. The recovery of nāṭya now requires coherence, forms of practice in which discipline, knowledge, and ethical orientation are consciously reconnected.

If the past century has been one of reconstitution, the present may be a moment of reintegration, though under more fragmented conditions. What is required is not a return to an earlier state, which cannot be recovered, but a re-alignment of what has been separated. Form and awareness, discipline and experience, art and knowledge must once again be brought into relation.

If the present moment is marked by a visible but incomplete return, the question that follows is how such a field may be brought into coherence. This would require more than preservation or expansion. It would require forms of practice in which technique, knowledge, and inner cultivation are once again brought into relation, allowing nāṭya to function not only as performance, but as a disciplined mode of knowing.

Nāṭya is not a relic that has survived, nor a form that has been revived. It is a continuing process, moving, as it has before, through articulation, obscuration, and reconstitution.
The dance, as ever, is unfinished.

References
1. George Michell, The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
2. Burton Stein, Vijayanagara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
3. Bharata Muni, The Nāṭyaśāstra, trans. Manomohan Ghosh (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1951), chap. 6.
4. Ibid.
5. Abhinavagupta, Abhinavabhāratī, in The Nāṭyaśāstra, trans. Manomohan Ghosh
6. Amrit Srinivasan, “Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance,” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 44 (1985): 1869–1876
7. Ketu H. Katrak, “The Dance Movement of Bengal: Rabindranath Tagore and His Dance-Dramas,” Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, no. 29 (2024)
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid
10. Avanthi Meduri, “Rukmini Devi Arundale and the Construction of Bharatanatyam,” Dance Research Journal 36, no. 2 (2004): 11–29.
11. Janet O’Shea, At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007).
12. Matthew Harp Allen, “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance,” The Drama Review 41, no. 3 (1997): 63–100.
13. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Śiva (New York: Noonday Press, 1957).
14. Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922).
15. Kapila Vatsyayan, Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1977).

Rohit Viswanath works at the intersection of classical arts, institutional design, and civilisational thought. He is associated with the Nāṭyaśāstra Gurukulam and engages with questions of cultural sustainability and governance within the performing arts ecosystem.

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