Celestial Dancers

Manipur, a state in northeastern India, holds that its people trace their origins to the gandharvas, celestial musicians and dancers. In this tradition, dance and music are a divine gift. For a long time, the symbol-rich Hindu dances of Manipur, performed in their original religious settings, were almost entirely unknown beyond India. That changed in the 1950s, when the Australian impresario Louise Lightfoot presented them on the stage.

Lightfoot experimented with the form and worked closely with the dancers Rajkumar Priyagopal Singh and Ibetombi Devi. Their collaboration reshaped Manipuri dance for audiences around the world and moved it out of the temple and into a formal stage art performed abroad.

Amit Sarwal traces how this process unfolded and compares it with the rise of other major Indian classical dance forms and their performers, showing how Manipuri dance and its artists gained international recognition. The book suits readers interested in Hindu temple dance, Manipuri dance, cross-cultural collaboration, and the spread of Indian classical dance across the world. It offers a thorough account of how a distinctive Hindu dance tradition took shape on the global stage.