Monographies en anglais et bilingues

Nyota Inyoka created around 50 compositions combining Theatre, Dance and Music relating to India, between 1921 and her final performances in the 1950s. 

From the very beginning of her career,  she performed in the most prestigious theatres of the time, mainly in France, in Europe and in America. She was compared by Irving Schwerke to the greatest artists of her era: “La Argentina of the East, the Pavlova of India”. 

Nyota Inyoka was a pioneer in many respects. She was the first Franco-Indian woman artist in Indian modern dance, but was no doubt overshadowed by the first modern Indian dancer Uday Shankar. Nyota Inyoka was the first feminist Indian dancer to draw inspiration from Hinduism, as her innovation came through the medium of figures of goddesses, particularly her dance of Tara as well as her dance of Kali, resonating with Tagore’s poems on this goddess who had come to symbolize the rise of Hindu nationalism in Bengal. 

Historians have largely ignored this pioneer, certainly due to the fact that she is unclassifiable. Her work was shut into the category of oriental dance, with its presumptions related to the history and imaginary of colonialism, which press coverage of her performances was eager to highlight. Yet Nyota Inyoka was extremely close to the India of her time.

But the exceptional nature of Nyota Inyoka’s work goes even further. She was the first in France to interpretate on a western stage the difficult portion of the most ancient Sanskrit dance treatise, encompassing the 108 karaṇa, an alphabet of poses and steps, for which so many Indian dance styles offer an interpretation. She did this particularly at the time of the reinvention of temple dances of southern India starting in the 1930s. 

Starting in 2018 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, a symposium with a research-creation next to Inyoka’s archives, include an interpretation of Nyota Inyoka’ Dances by contemporary women artists and researchers, which is related is this book. It shows the transculturality of her compositions, to reconsider the complex history of modern dance and classical Indian dance together with artists and researchers from India and elsewhere. 

In this respect, Nyota Inyoka is no different from classical and contemporary Indian dancers interested in this original source, and the artist researchers of our performance at the BnF specialized in Indian dance theatre. By creating this resonance between artists from four different historical periods (colonial, pre- and post-colonial, contemporary), we can see that they are all concerned with the question of both Hindu texts and cultural hybridity.