ABSTRACT
Kathak, the classical dance of North India, is a twentieth-century dance with roots reaching back to at least the thirteenth century. It is a syncretic genre that emerged from the hybrid context of colonialism and achieved legitimacy as a national dance at the same time as India itself achieved independence. It is impossible to pinpoint exactly when and how the Kathaks emerged, but as there is no sign of them in mid-eighteenth-century documentation yet they are present in travelogues from the early nineteenth century, one can hypothesize that the shift took place through the second half of the eighteenth century. The development of the dance that would be called kathak comes into more focus in the last decades of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century.
