ABSTRACT
Can the female body furnish a discursive site for a radical cultural politics? Is it possible to use dance, a celebratory art of the female body, to contest the dominant constructions of femininity? How can a female dancer find ways to speak her mind in a non-verbal medium? This essay seeks to answer many such questions as it raises a few more in delving into the idea and idiom of a new dance called Navanritya. Taking the dancer’s body as an object of discourse, Navanritya spells out a new body politics, stressing its social, historical, and ideological constructions.
