A performing arts historian whose congenial demeanour betrays none of the angst he feels at the way the dominant discourse takes us away from the reality of the performing arts. He questions the fault lines in the traditional arts in India, starting with music and then dance. He is troubled by the way some communities usurped the domain of dance and defined it with a superficiality that excludes the real roots of the essential aesthetics.

“I believe there is a disconnect between the idealised aesthetic world, based on the ‘shastric’, and the real world. The world that musicians and dancers live in is insular, inward-looking, some kind of a bubble. A majority of even professional dancers are disconnected from the everyday realities that people live,” he says.

Now, Associate Professor of South Asian Religions in the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Dr Davesh Soneji started asking questions at an early age. Born into a middle-class Gujarat family in Canada, he was drawn early to Carnatic music and trained for 14 years when he started exploring dance. “Even as a child I had many questions about the invisibility of traditional female performers but I was told not to dare to ask such questions.”

As an adolescent Soneji met Kittappa Pillai, the famous Nattuvar and the scion of the Tanjore Quarter and was invited to Tanjore. The visit was an eye-opener for him as it was the first time he was exposed to non-Brahmin dancers and gurus and other artiste, otherwise known as the Isai Velalar community. “That was when my interest in the subject grew.

As I met women in that community and talked to them about their experiences, I realised that there was a lot more to Bharatanatyam than what was written in books.” And he slowly began to read what was not written in the history books and about people who do not make it to the dominant histories of these art forms.