From the 2012 doctoral thesis of Feriyal Amal Aslam about Indu Mitha. Indu Mitha seems to have slowly transformed a Radha krishna story to one of eve-teasing and more. Below is the beginning:
"Today Indu continues to present this work to select audiences in Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan, where she has been teaching it for more than a decade at her institute Mazmun-e-Shauq. Indu is of Bengali lineage and, like many other of her generation, had been an “Indian” for the first fifteen or more years of her life before deciding to join the Muslim army captain with whom she fell in love in 1947 to relocate to the newly born nation state of Pakistan. In India she came from a highly educated and connected Christian family. Her father was a philosopher with close links to Gandhi and Rudrah, and her mother was from a Singhas family. But as a young woman she chose Hindu temple dance as her preoccupation. She learned this dance in Delhi and Madras, but being more secular and culturally oriented; she translated the Sanskrit content into Urdu and also took the Hindu God stories and choreographed them as stories of everyday life of people regardless of their religious belief. Indu learned the dance titled sareega tunguu in Telegu from her dance teacher Lalita Shastri in South India. Later she translated it into Urdu for her new Pakistani context changing the content accordingly to saaRii sunaihrii (golden sari). Like most of Indu’s repertoire, saaRii sunaihrii interrogates changes and continuities in the dance form and the body as it moves across the borders of time from pre-Partition to present day Pakistan. Bharata natyam was implicated in the Indian nationalist movement of the 1920s and ‘30s as a consequence of a myriad of identity, nationalist, and religious politics, which has been well written about in its Indian context. saaRii sunaihrii helps ask the unheard question firstly of the current place of bharata natyam in Pakistan and the meaning of the dance in its present context, and on the broader societal level raises questions of continuity of Pakistan’s occluded Indic past and the tough cultural policy question of its place in the “Islamic” Pakistani nation."
There is also another teacher activist who taught bharatanatyam and Odissi, Sheema Kermani who figured in earlier posts.
"Today Indu continues to present this work to select audiences in Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan, where she has been teaching it for more than a decade at her institute Mazmun-e-Shauq. Indu is of Bengali lineage and, like many other of her generation, had been an “Indian” for the first fifteen or more years of her life before deciding to join the Muslim army captain with whom she fell in love in 1947 to relocate to the newly born nation state of Pakistan. In India she came from a highly educated and connected Christian family. Her father was a philosopher with close links to Gandhi and Rudrah, and her mother was from a Singhas family. But as a young woman she chose Hindu temple dance as her preoccupation. She learned this dance in Delhi and Madras, but being more secular and culturally oriented; she translated the Sanskrit content into Urdu and also took the Hindu God stories and choreographed them as stories of everyday life of people regardless of their religious belief. Indu learned the dance titled sareega tunguu in Telegu from her dance teacher Lalita Shastri in South India. Later she translated it into Urdu for her new Pakistani context changing the content accordingly to saaRii sunaihrii (golden sari). Like most of Indu’s repertoire, saaRii sunaihrii interrogates changes and continuities in the dance form and the body as it moves across the borders of time from pre-Partition to present day Pakistan. Bharata natyam was implicated in the Indian nationalist movement of the 1920s and ‘30s as a consequence of a myriad of identity, nationalist, and religious politics, which has been well written about in its Indian context. saaRii sunaihrii helps ask the unheard question firstly of the current place of bharata natyam in Pakistan and the meaning of the dance in its present context, and on the broader societal level raises questions of continuity of Pakistan’s occluded Indic past and the tough cultural policy question of its place in the “Islamic” Pakistani nation."
There is also another teacher activist who taught bharatanatyam and Odissi, Sheema Kermani who figured in earlier posts.
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