University of California, Riverside: Department of Comparative Literature and Languages

By: Sinjini Chatterjee, PhD. Candidate, Department of Dance Studies

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?