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Over the centuries, the sensuous bodily form, female and male, human and divine, has been a dominant feature in the vast and varied canvas of the Indian artistic tradition. The human figurecomplete, elegant, adorned, and eye-catching-was, indeed, the leitmotif
Vidya Dehejia
Images of the body proliferate in the cultural landscape of Orissa, a state in eastern India. Lavishly depicted in painting and stone, poetry and song, in drama, flesh, and myth, the body as a motif is etched deeply in its aesthetic terrain. Ideations of the body are manifest in multiple milieus, such as temple architecture, sculpture, and ritual mahaú performance.1 Taken together, they propose a unique somatic archive and reveal concepts of the body embedded in Orissa's artistic heritage.
Mahari performance is aesthetically and ideologically linked to Odissi classical dance. For many, the mahari tradition is the source of an authentic Odissi, and the culture of the Jagannath temple and its presiding deity are equally prominent in the dance's history.2 To understand the formation of contemporary Odissi, then, we need to analyse its relationship to mahari ritual dance (among other forms). Here, my intention is to explore the discourses of embodiment and the hermeneutics of the corporeal subject subtending and surrounding mahari dance. To excavate the body of dance in this sense involves looking simultaneously at the spaces surrounding it, as well as viewing its relationship to divinity. With this in mind, I mine three layers of the body illuminated in Odissi's history: the body of the deity, the body of the temple, and the body of the dancer. I ask: What kind of body was proposed in mahari dance? Was there a singular ideal or expression? What were the regional philosophies of the body, and how were/are they revealed? What are the layers and genealogies of such corporealities? I pose these questions in the context of the ascent of mahari dancing at Puri's Jagannath temple by the twelfth century CE, and its continuity into the 1950s.
I explore the relationship between the bodies of dancers, the deity, and the architectures within which they were conceived, framed, and culturally comprehended, as well as reflecting on the ways in which concepts of the body are generated and perpetuated by spatial, sacred, and artistic forms...