Nrithya Pillai’s lecture-performance is part of Disrupting Protected Ignorance, a co-curated anti-caste resistive gathering, held in the context of  Bwa Kayiman—Tout Moun se Moun. Through movement, storytelling, and sonic archives, Pillai reclaims the dance form of Bharatanatyam, foregrounding the legacy of her ancestors from whom it was stolen by Brahminical powers.

At the height of the Indian freedom struggle, Bharatanatyam was repositioned as a Hindu nationalist ‘classical’ dance, severed from its roots as a dance performed in royal courts and temples. Performances by women from dancing castes were especially criminalized and these legal interventions were reified into law after independence. These women were branded as immoral, which continues to inflict irrevocable harm and stigma. This appropriation by Brahminical hegemony denied Sudra caste communities access to the dance despite originating from them, including that of the artist. However, male teachers from these communities continued to teach dominant caste dancers. As a consequence to this discrimination, Pillai herself was never able to directly learn the dance from her grandfather Swamimalai Rajarathnam Pillai, an acclaimed dance instructor and musician. As a sustained research practice, she has gathered audio recordings from dominant caste students of her grandfather, which function as harsh reminders of this ruptured past, available to her now only in fragments.

Alongside drawing attention to oppressor caste violences, Pillai is focused on illuminating the legacy of her skilled ancestors, their histories, accomplishments, and contributions to the Indian cultural landscape. Her performance-lecture features a rich archive of this lineage, including images and oral histories of practitioners from her community, which she also powerfully reclaims as her rightful inheritance by dancing to her grandfather’s music. Pillai reflects on this practice as an opportunity to ‘acknowledge the loss of so much—aesthetics, musical repertoire, intellectual contributions, and particularly the lack of access and acknowledgment for women like me in our caste location. Moreover, I share with you the ways in which this form exists for me, in my body and in my intellect, a dance that I receive through mediated pasts.’

The performance-lecture is part of Disrupting Protected Ignorance, a constellation of anti-caste activations, co-curated by Sajan Vazhakaparambil Kolavan Kalyanikutty Mani with Shaunak Mahbubani.