Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

For this paper, I am looking at dancer-choreographers Mandeep Raikhy’s ongoing work, The Secular Project (2021) which aims to question how secularism is embodied and performed both in private and public spaces by its citizens in contemporary India. I argue that the piece questions the Indian body’s relationship to its nation-state. I ask: What role does the body’s religious affiliation, gender, sexuality, caste, and class play in sustaining this relation, especially in an authoritarian and Hindu fundamentalist climate. In my research over social media platforms, like Instagram and Wordpress, during the pandemic, I observe how Raikhy’s body moved through streets, cities, villages, urban/rural markets, inhabiting spaces such as palaces, religious monuments, mountain tops, ocean shores, grass-fields, riverside with a ‘Secular India’ banner. Everywhere he visited, he collaborated with artists in spontaneous and improvisatory manner, redefining established notions of artistry, production, and performance. I argue that the dancing body is the site of resistance, dissent, a reminder and an embodiment of the Indian constitutional value of secularism. It is urgent to theorize the vitality of the performing body in realizing equitable futures, resistive collectivities and solidarities from the global south in resistance to hegemonic (capitalist and religious fundamentalist) conceptions of time, spectacle, experience, and agency. How can the body resist anti-dissent, anti-coalition, and anti-muslim, and anti-native policies? To resist authoritarianism, can we heighten our somatic and kinesthetic awareness, can we use the sensation of touch to craft alternative modes of collective agency, corporeal resistance, and a trans-caste/region mobility?