For most ballet audiences, La Bayadère is a classic. A temple dancer. A forbidden romance. A dream sequence with rows of ballerinas in white. It has been staged for generations, often treated like a jewel of European ballet tradition.
But Dr Priya Srinivasan, a Tamil Australian scholar and artist, says there’s another story running underneath the glitter—one that rarely gets told.
Priya points out how narrow our colonial lens can be. “We tend to focus, from an Indian perspective, just on the British… and we don’t look at what happened before the British.”
Her new project, reimagining La Bayadère in collaboration Kalpana Raghuraman (Tamil Dutch choreographer and Associate Artist) and with the Het National Ballet (Dutch National Ballet), begins in that “before”—in the Dutch presence on India’s southeastern coast, and in the many European powers who arrived long before the British came to dominate the narrative.
She points to a piece of largely forgotten history: in 1838, a group of hereditary dancers and musicians from South India, including the Pondicherry region, travelled to Paris and performed widely across Europe.
Priya says their work was seen by influential people in European performing arts world at the time—and their movement, rhythm, and presence left traces. She also says that while Europeans reduced the dancers to just being temple dancers she says there are much more diverse practices that have also lost visibility. The new production of the ballet aims to highlight and make visible some of these diverse practices from Tamil Nadu through a collaboration with Tenma (from the casteless collective).
What makes this history painful, she says, is that these dancers later “disappear” from the archive. “We have fragments in the forms of newspaper mentions, lithographs, scattered references, but not the full record. At the same time, back in India, hereditary dance communities were being pushed into silence through social reform movements, colonial pressure, and caste politics. Whole worlds of knowledge were being erased or “cleaned up” into something more acceptable,” she reflects.
At the same time, Priya says, the original La Bayadère became a long-running paradox. It is a ballet where “everybody in this story is Indian,” yet for much of its history it has been “done by white or non Indian bodies, primarily, performing Indians.”
She describes how dancers have been “painted… brown,” dressed in orientalist fantasy costumes, and placed inside a stage-India built from ornament, stereotype, and spectacle.
The problem is not only who is dancing, but how certain bodies and histories are treated as disposable. Priya says there are racist depictions in the traditional productions including characters made to behave “like monkeys” or “evil characters” and how those images have been excused for years because La Bayadère remains, in her words, “a jewel in their crown.”
What she wants, first, is for people to see the deeper cost of that jewel. She says the lineages of these hereditary dancers were disrupted, erased, or pushed out of the public record—and how that erasure can happen twice: once in India, and again in Europe, where their influence is hidden behind the label of “classical” genius.
And yet, she is not calling for deletion. Her position is firm: “I don’t think you should cancel the ballet,” she says. “The dance is beautiful… What’s problematic is… the storyline… and… the sets and the costumes.
We don’t want to delete your ballet, because then our ancestors, who are inside the ballet, will also disappear.”
Coming up: (Part 2): How Priya followed the trail—from archives to a Dutch fort in Tamil Nadu—and rebuilt the story from the ground up.
The Dutch National Ballet reimagines La Bayadère through a decolonial lens, with the premiere set for 25 March in Amsterdam.
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