Panelists: Parul Dave Mukherji, Brahma Prakash, Urmimala Sarkar
CSGS and the Visual Arts Department organized a symposium on ‘Revisiting the Nāyikā: Transformations Across Body, Form and Time’.
The term nāyikā comes from the Sanskrit root nī (“to lead”), denoting the leading lady or heroine. Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra, codifies her according to types and emotional states, laying the foundation for later tropological traditions that shaped poetics, visual art, and performance across centuries. This collaborative symposium revisited the trope of the nāyikā/heroine across Indian aesthetics while also playing on the many meanings and transgressive potentials of the word.
Presenters and students also asked how gestures, tropes, and aesthetic practices around the nāyikā have been embedded and adapted as cultural signifiers of gender, sexuality and desire. What transformations occur when these forms travel across visual art, cinema, performance, and literary studies?