#sanskritization

The notion of purification attached with the process of the classicalization of Indian dance forms has been sanctioned and backed by the cultural bureaucracy and brought into practice by the urban high caste/class elite practitioners, whose principle agenda was to create and establish forms which projected an ‘acceptable’ image of a clean, aesthetically appealing body, which needed its distance in history and in actual projection from the impure nautch or the dance for private patrons that it came to be associated with in the nineteenth century. If these cleansed forms of dance, aptly mentioned as ‘neo-classical’ by Kapila Vatsyayan, which were the newly created reconstructed identity of the representative forms of different states like Orissa (Odissi), Tamil Nadu (Bharatanatyam), Kerala (Kathakali, Mohini Attam), Uttar Pradesh (Kathak), Andhra Pradesh (Kuchipudi), etc. had to survive, they had to be purified, i.e., all reference or evidence of overt references to sexuality and sensuality had to be consciously removed, or at least re-worked. Sringar (erotic and sensual sentiments) as a dominant expression of communication had to be reinterpreted as Bhakti or devotional expression of communication towards the divine almighty.