Where Did The Kathak Dance Form Really Originate From?

Kathak is one of the eight major classical dance forms of India, and its history is a very fascinating one indeed. There have been several theories about its murky beginnings, and the few mentioned below have only begun to scratch the surface.

Oral Traditions:

According to legend, Kathak originated 4,000 years ago in the temples of ancient India. Groups of wandering performers called kathakars, or kathakas travelled performing stories from Hindu epics like the Mahabharata. The Natya Shastra, an ancient treatise of dance and music composed by Bharat Muni in the third century BCE is considered as the earliest source of the dance.

Kathak evolved in the Bhakti movement, incorporating stories of Radha-Krishna along with works of Mirabai and Surdas after finally receiving a new impetus in the courts of the Mughals. This story has been widely accepted in dance literature as well as in the minds of Indians at large, however new research on the movement and vocabulary of Kathak as well its ethnography and iconography has revealed startling truths about the origins of this classical dance form. 

Sculptures:

Scholar Kapila Vastyayan traces back the oldest references of Kathak like postures not in ancient sculptures, whose bent-knee forms are the opposite of Kathak’s characteristic straight legs, but to the miniatures and sculptures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was during this time that the costume of Kathak and its traditional accompanying instruments began to emerge, and contemporary texts like the Tuhfat al-Hind make references to performances that bear great similarity to Kathak, suggesting that Kathak as we know it today may instead have been birthed during this time. 

Courtesan Traditions:

Ethnomusicologist Margaret Walker offers another theory. According to her, the dance came into its recent shape 150 years ago in Awadh, from the repertoires of female courtesans- tawaifs, their male accompanists of the Kathak family as well as several desi and Persian traditions. 

Much of the Kathak repertoire of today, particularly those emphasizing swaying postures and body language can be traced back to the dances of female tawaifs. Tawaifs were highly educated, wealthy, and skilled not only in music and dance but poetry, politics, and refinement. However, with colonialism and Victorian morals came an “anti-nautch” movement which ostracized these women. The strong societal mobilization against dancing women led to their disappearance, and the scale of power shifted in favour of hereditary male practitioners of the Kathak caste. 

The strong associations of Kathak with decadence and loose morality made it unpopular among “respectable” families in the twentieth century. Thus, it was not women from lineages of dancers that took Kathak into the modern era, but those from non-dancing families such as Leila Sokhey and Nirmala Joshi. 

The Need To Claim A National Identity:

Walker also attributes the mythologisation of Kathak’s history to the narratives that emerged during the freedom movement which saw a “growing desire among Indians to identify and reclaim a quintessentially Indian cultural heritage.” Nationalists in their eagerness to connect with Vedic antiquity omitted analysis of the immediate past and marginalised many important players. Although the dance of the tawaifs lived on, the dancers themselves were forgotten, buried in the sands of time.

 

The history of Kathak is complex and it is difficult to differentiate between myth and reality. Kathak cannot be traced to a single source, instead today stands on the bedrock of the condensation of several folk-dance styles, Bhakti and Sufi aesthetics, Persian dance influences and the repertoires of the tawaifs along with the Kathaks. 

Written by: Devi Sankhla