“Do not treat us like mindless dupes or victimized agents of reform!”: Mahari Songs as Shared Expressions of Resistance and Acts of Interdependence

By: Sinjini Chatterjee, PhD. Candidate, Department of Dance Studies, Honorable Mention, Barricelli Memorial Award for Interdisciplinary Dissertation Research

This talk brings together poetic-texts composed by maharis (female ritual specialists of Jagannath Temple India) and Sharmila Biswas’s (an Odissi dancer-choreographer) choreographic works Sampoorna (1998), Chalo Natha (2003), and Vilasini (2023) on them. It asks, how do oral poetic-texts, choreography, and dancing bodies, come together as embodied forms of resistance to gendered violence, fetishization, cultural and political nationalism? How do they, in combination, offer a nuanced view of nationalist and imperialist hegemonies, and illustrate the defiance of those subjected to it?