Pallabi Chakravorty

By Sachi Anjunkar

Pallabi Chakravorty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music and Dance and also Director of Dance at Swarthmore College, USA as of July 2023. According to her university profile, her academic research is located at the intersections of visual and performing arts, history and anthropology, film and media studies, gender and postcolonial studies, religion, and bodies.

According to her bio, she has published no books, papers or research pertaining to Hindus, the rights of Hindus, the impact of or relationship between Islam and Hinduism / Hindutva, or the Indian Government.

In 2021, she along with Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban co-signed a letter supporting the "Dismantling Global Hindutva" Conference, as an academic and scholar and made the allegation:

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Publications related to India

Books related to Music and Dance in India

1. Chakravorty, Pallabi, and Nilanjana Gupta, editors. Dance Matters: Performing India. Routledge, 2009.
2. Chakravorty, Pallabi. Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women, and Modernity in India. Seagull/University of Chicago, 2008.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

1. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Moved to Dance: Bhakti, Commodity, and a New India." Visual Anthropology, vol. 22, no. 2, 2009, pp. 211-228.
2. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Dancing Into Modernity: The Multiple Narratives of India’s Kathak Dance." Dance Research Journal, vol. 38, nos. 1-2, 2007, pp. 115-36.
3. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Dance, Pleasure, and Indian Women as Multisensorial Subjects." Visual Anthropology, vol. 17, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1-17.
4. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Dance Symposium on South Asia." Sruti, no. 215, August 2002, pp. 33-35.
5. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "From Interculturalism to Historicism: Reflections on Classical Indian Dance." Dance Research Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, Winter 2000/2001, pp. 108-119.
6. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Dance, Hegemony, and Nation: The Construction of Classical Dance in India." South Asia, vol. 21, 1998, pp. 107-120.

Book Chapters

1. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Kathak in Calcutta: A Story of Tradition and Change." Culture Studies: An Introduction for Indian Readers, edited by Nilanjana Gupta, Worldview Press, 2004, pp. 187-214.
2. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Remixed Practice: Bollywood Dance and the Global Indian." Dance Matters, edited by Pallabi Chakravorty and Nilanjana Gupta, Routledge, 2009, pp. 169-181.
3. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Global Dancing In Kolkata." A Companion to the Anthropology of India, edited by Isabelle Clark-Deces, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 137-53.
4. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Why the Adivasi Will Not Dance: Yoga, Bharatnatyam, Chhau and Processes of Expropriation." Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance, edited by A Sengupta and P. Purkayastha, Oxford University Press, 2020. Submitted.
5. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Dance Off, or a Battle for the Future: Dance Reality Shows in India." Oxford Handbook on Dance Competition, edited by Sherril Dodds, Oxford University Press, 2018.
6. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Cosmopolitan Then and Cosmopolitan Now: Rabindranrtiya Meets Dance Reality Shows." Dance Matters Too: Markets, Memories, and Identities, edited by Pallabi Chakravorty and Nilanjana Gupta, Routledge, 2018.
7. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "The Tawaif and the Item girl: A Struggle for Identity." Moving Space, edited by Urmimala Munshi and Aishika Chakraborty, Primus Books, 2018.
8. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Sensory Screens, Digitized Desires: Dancing Rasa from Bombay Cinema to Reality TV." Oxford Handbook of Screen Dance Studies, edited by Douglas Rosenburg, Oxford University Press, 2016.
9. Chakravorty, Pallabi. "Intercultural Synthesis, Radical Humanism, and Rabindranritya: A Reevaluation of Tagore’s Dance Legacy." South Asia Research, vol. 33, 2013, pp. 245-260.

Contributors to this article

Deval Sancheti, Krishna Maheshwari, Sachi Anjunkar

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