December 11, 2003 at 7pm Prakriti Foundation presented "Some Issues in Global Scholarship on Rukmini Devi and Bharatanatyam", a talk by Dr. Avanthi Meduri Venue: Sundar Mahal, Padmavathy Road, Jeypore Colony, Chennai
Avanthi Meduri is a scholar, actress, dancer, playwright and professor of Performance Studies and South Asian Transnational Cultural and Diaspora Studies. She received her Ph D. from the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, held visiting Assistant Professorship appointments in the World Arts and Cultures Department at UCLA and in the Department of Performance Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Recipient of several national and international awards, Meduri curated Rukmini Devi's photo archive in 2001, creating a traveling exhibition, presented it in New Delhi, Calcutta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Colombo, London, Tokyo, and Melbourne. Meduri's book on Rukmini Devi, including a play dealing with her life, is forthcoming. She is a Ford Scholar and the Acting Academic Director of the newly founded Center for Contemporary Culture, New Delhi. This paper will focus attention on the main themes that characterize international scholarship on Rukmini Devi and discuss how the three key interpretive terms including the 'national revival,' the 'traditional' and the 'classical,' used in contemporary dance scholarship of Bharatanatyam, are deployed in international discourse on Bharatanatyam.
Avanti says, "I will juxtapose the international scholarship with the 'indigenous' and elaborate on the difference between the two forms of scholarship. I was alerted to the differences in the two forms of scholarship when I began teaching South Asian history, culture and the performing arts in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, Illinois. Yet it is only after returning to India, and working as curator on the Rukmini Devi photo archive, that I grasped the full import of these differences as I learned to examine the global discourses from the point of view of the local. This paper endeavors, in a very preliminary way, to historicize key words used in local and global scholarship in order to urge historical, context sensitive studies of Rukmini Devi's legacy, prevailing in the contemporary local and global practices of Bharatanatyam."
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