maybe for girls made of snow, love was worth the melt. but she was made of stolen bones and sleek fur, grave dirt and strange blood — her heart wasn’t even hers to give. her soul was all she had, and no love was worth losing it.
✦@booksociety’s Fantasy by Authors of Colour: The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi Everywhere he looked, he was surrounded by gilded wolves. And for whatever reason, it made him feel perfectly at home.
in “the gilded wolves” by @roshanichokshi, laila is made to don the cover of a nautch dancer as part of a job. she’s a skilled bharatanatyam dancer & performs stunningly, but is still bothered by the cultural inaccuracies of the outfit she must wear: the fact that her hair is left unbound, the way her midriff & chest are exposed, her hands lacking henna, etc. so grew the need to draw her in traditional attire.
from the state of tamil nadu, bnat is one of the oldest indian classical dances. like many of these dances, it has strong ties to religion (i.e. the depiction of hindu epics) but can convey more secular themes as well. alta or henna on the hands & feet emphasize movement. bold makeup accentuates expressions, particularly the 9 navarasa: love/shringara, laughter/hasya, sadness/karuna, anger/roudra, courage/veera, fear/bhaayanaka, disgust/bheebhatsya, surprise/adbhutha) & peace/shaantha. mudras (gestures) are used to illustrate many ideas; for example, there are symbols for bird, water, breeze, etc.
bharatanatyam is actually a fairly new term; among other names, the dance was once known as sadir. first a temple tradition, it was practiced by devadasi women “married” to lives of religious worship & service, as well as the arts. with the arrival of colonial rule, many traditional dances were outright banned & temples destroyed. dancers went from to being among the most respected to being sexualized & deemed prostitutes by british occupiers. the profession of nautch dancers arose for the entertainment of colonizers & the mughal elite. slowly, it became so that even the term “devadasi” was offensive & to be considered one was damning. attempting to separate the dance from the stigma attached to the devadasi community, rukmini devi arundale is credited with refining bnat in a way that was considered suitable for the upper class & a larger global audience.
though intertwined with politics & casteism, bnat is still a beautiful, revered art form practiced widely in south asia & the diaspora.
laila belongs to roshani chokshi pleasedo not repost or remove description dofind me on instagram!
