Odissi

The temple of Jagannath at Puri maintained a body of women called maharis, dedicated to the deity and performing dance as part of the daily temple service, in front of the image and out of public sight. Their service was ritual employment rather than performance for an audience, and it was governed by the temple. Alongside them, from around the sixteenth century, ran the gotipua tradition: boys trained to dance in female dress, performing outside the sanctuary and in public, in an environment shaped by the Vaishnava devotional movements of Odisha.

The mahari institution declined through the colonial period and was ended, in common with comparable temple dedication systems elsewhere in India, by reform campaigns and by legislation directed at them. The history is not a simple one and the atlas does not present it as either a rescue or a destruction: the campaigns responded to real exploitation, and they also removed a hereditary professional standing from the women concerned and left many of them destitute. Both are documented and both belong in the record. What survived in practice was the gotipua line, in which many of the twentieth century teachers of Odissi had trained as boys.

Odissi is built on the tribhanga, a triple bend of the body at the neck, the waist and the knee, and on the chauka, a square wide legged stance associated with Jagannath himself. Both are visible in the sculpture of the Odishan temples, and that is not a coincidence in either direction: the carvings record dance postures, and the modern reconstruction of the dance used the carvings as evidence. The Natyashastra and the later Odishan treatise the Abhinaya Chandrika supplied technical vocabulary, and the temple walls supplied the shapes.

The devotional repertoire rests on the Gita Govinda, the twelfth century Sanskrit poem of Jayadeva on the love of Krishna and Radha, which is sung daily at Puri and which the maharis are recorded as having danced. An Odissi recital moves through a fixed sequence: an invocation, a pure dance movement in which the body works to rhythm without narrative, an expressive item in which a text is danced out, and a closing piece.

The form performed today was assembled in the 1950s by teachers including Kelucharan Mohapatra, Pankaj Charan Das and Deba Prasad Das, working from what they had learned as gotipuas, from sculpture, from the treatises and from surviving mahari knowledge. It was recognised as a classical dance of India in 1964. The atlas records it as a modern reconstruction of an old tradition, which is what its own makers said it was.