By T.N. Ashok
The controversy erupted in seconds. Actress Ananya Panday’s dance sequence in her latest film — all electronic bass lines, abbreviated silk, and a Bharatanatyam mudra executed with the precision of a TikTok tutorial — detonated across Indian social media with the force of a cultural grenade. Hashtags demanding respect for Bharatanatyam trended within hours. Senior classical dancers posted furious video critiques. A venerable Bharatanatyam guru from Chennai reportedly wept.
But anyone who watched the outrage and felt only surprise has not been paying attention. The moment Panday committed to camera was not an aberration. It was a destination — the logical end point of a 40-year erosion of one of Indian cinema’s most quietly beautiful traditions: its long, uneven, occasionally magnificent relationship with the subcontinent’s classical dance forms.
For three decades, from roughly the 1950s through the late 1970s, Bollywood was something remarkable: an unlikely custodian of Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kuchipudi, Odissi, and Mohiniyattam. It brought these ancient forms — rooted in temple ritual, Sanskrit aesthetics, and centuries of guru-shishya transmission — into the living rooms and single-screen cinemas of hundreds of millions of Indians who might never have encountered them otherwise. It did so imperfectly, inevitably with cinematic liberties, but with enough reverence that the soul of each tradition survived the translation.
That era is now so distant it feels almost mythological. “It is no longer about rasa — the emotional essence that is the entire philosophical purpose of classical dance. It is about clicks, reels, and what travels on Instagram at midnight.”— Senior Kathak guru, speaking on condition of anonymity
When Stars Were Students First: The golden generation of Hindi film actresses were, above all else, trained dancers before they were stars. This distinction — impossible to overstate — separated their relationship with classical forms from everything that followed.
Vyjayanthimala, born in Madras in 1936, had studied Bharatanatyam from childhood under the Pandanallur school, one of the form’s most demanding lineages. When she arrived in Bollywood in the early 1950s, she carried with her not merely technique but an understanding of abhinaya — the ancient science of emotional expression — that transformed her performances into something approaching art.
Her dances in Amrapali, Sangam, and Madhumati were not Bharatanatyam transplanted wholesale into cinema; they were Bharatanatyam in conversation with cinema, the grammar intact even as the setting shifted. Her mudras were anatomically precise. Her footwork was rooted in genuine tala cycles. Even audiences unfamiliar with the form understood, instinctively, that they were in the presence of something serious.
Padmini — one of three celebrated sisters from Kerala — brought a similar authority. Trained in Bharatanatyam and deeply versed in Mohiniyattam, she embodied in film the kind of spiritual gravity that classical dance, at its highest, is designed to convey. Her 1961 performance in Kannadasan remains a benchmark of what cinema can do when a trained classical artist works within a sympathetic framework.
The custodians — dancers who brought classical integrity to Hindi cinema–Vyjayanthi Mala Bharatanatyam (Panda Nallur school) • Padmini Bharatanatyam & Mohiniyattam • Waheeda Rehman Bharatanatyam • Hema Malini Bharatanatyam (continued stage performance at career’s peak) • Asha Parekh Kathak & classical styles
Waheeda Rehman, discovered by filmmaker Guru Dutt after he saw her dance in a Telugu film, brought Bharatanatyam’s characteristic restraint — its preference for stillness over display — into a Hindi cinema increasingly drawn toward spectacle. Her movements in Guide and Pyaasa possessed emotional architecture rare in any cinema. She did not dance to be watched. She danced to mean something.
Hema Malini, perhaps the most durably famous of this cohort, sustained the classical inheritance deepest into the commercial era. A serious Bharatanatyam practitioner who continued stage performances even at the peak of her stardom, she insisted — in interview after interviewing across decades — that the form was not a skill to be deployed but a discipline to be honored. “You cannot take a mudra and strip it of its meaning and call it dance,” she said in a 1978 interview. “You are left with just shape. And the shape is nothing.”
The erosion came gradually, then catastrophically. The late 1970s brought disco to India; the 1980s brought synthesizers, satellite television, and the MTV aesthetic. Choreography hybridized rapidly. A Bharatanatyam mudra here; a Kathak spin there; Kuchipudi footwork fused with aerobics. The sacred vocabulary of these forms became cinematic shorthand for “Indian-ness” — a visual grammar of exotica — while the philosophical depth that gave that vocabulary meaning quietly disappeared.
The liberalization of the 1990s intensified the shift in ways that proved irreversible. Satellite channels brought global popular culture into every Indian home.
The item number — a discrete, narratively disconnected dance sequence designed for pure titillation — displaced the integrated classical sequence as the dominant choreographic form. Midriffs replaced mudras. Suggestion replaced expression. And the classical forms, when they appeared at all, were cannibalized for aesthetic signifiers — the costume, the jewelry, the set design — while their interior logic was abandoned entirely.
Madhuri Dixit, who emerged in the late 1980s and dominated the 1990s, represents the most poignant inflection point in this story. A trained Kathak dancer of genuine ability, she brought to her peak commercial work — Devdas, Dil To Pagal Hai, the iconic “Dhak Dhak” — something that her successors would largely lack: a technical foundation that gave even her most commercial choreography a structural integrity.
Her kathak-inflected spins were not random; her footwork was grounded in actual rhythm cycles. But even she operated in a cinema increasingly indifferent to those distinctions.
“Madhuri understood the difference between performance and performance. Today’s stars are performing the idea of classical dance as seen in older films. They are copies of copies — the original is three generations removed.” – Dr. Leela Samson, Bharatanatyam exponent and former Chairperson, Sangeet Natak Akademi
The Algorithm Generation: The current cohort of Bollywood actresses — Alia Bhatt, Kriti Sanon, Tripti Dimri, Nora Fatehi — entered an industry that had already completed the transition. They are not, in the main, classical dancers who became film stars. They are film stars who perform choreography. The distinction is categorical.
This is not entirely their failure. The system that produced Vyjayanthi Mala — in which classical training was understood as a prerequisite for serious screen performance — has been dismantled. No studio today requires its leading women to spend years in a dance school before facing the camera. Gym-trained glamour, fashion-world visibility, and social media fluency are the new prerequisites.
Nora Fatehi, a Canadian dancer of Moroccan origin whose skill in hip-hop, belly dance, and contemporary styles is genuine and considerable, has been repeatedly deployed by Bollywood choreographers in sequences marketed as classical fusion. The marketing reveals the problem: the “classical” element is entirely ornamental, a garnish of exotic signifiers over a choreographic base that has nothing to do with any Indian tradition.
Fatehi is not the problem. She is a skilled dancer performing the choreography she has been given. The problem is an industry that conflates surfaces with substance.
Triptii Dimri’s breakout performance in Animal required no classical training; Kriti Sanon’s dance numbers, technically proficient in a contemporary commercial sense, exist entirely outside the vocabulary of any classical form. Alia Bhatt, the most critically regarded actress of her generation, has spoken publicly about her admiration for classical dance while performing none of it in any technical sense on screen.
The Ananya Panday controversy, then, is not an anomaly. It is a revelation — a moment in which the cultural gap between what Bollywood advertises and what it delivers became too wide to ignore.
What Was Lost, and Why It Matters: The stakes are higher than cinema. India’s classical dance traditions are not merely performance arts. They are repositories of philosophy, theology, history, and language — encoded in the grammar of movement that took centuries to develop and cannot be reconstructed from Instagram videos.
Bharatanatyam preserves within its compositions an entire theory of emotion derived from the ancient Sanskrit text, the Natya Shastra. Kathak carries within its footwork, and storytelling cycles the syncretic history of Mughal-era north India. Kuchipudi encodes mythological narratives in a physical language as precisely as written text.
When Bollywood borrows the external aesthetics of these forms while discarding their interior logic, it does not merely produce bad dance. It teaches hundreds of millions of viewers — most of whom will never attend a classical recital — that what they are seeing is what these traditions are. Caricature becomes reality. The copy displaces the original in the cultural imagination of the very country that produced it.
“When a young person sees what Bollywood presents as Bharatanatyam and then encounters the real thing, they often call the real thing boring. We have trained an entire generation to misrecognize their own heritage.”— Alarmel Valli, Bharatanatyam exponent, Padma Bhushan awardee
The losses compound. Classical dance schools in India report declining enrolment. The guru-shishya system — in which a student studies under a single master for a decade or more, absorbing not merely technique but cosmology — is fracturing under economic pressure and cultural indifference. Many of India’s greatest classical performers teach to small, ageing audiences while Bollywood item numbers accumulate billions of YouTube views.
Is There a Way Back? The picture is not entirely bleak. Sanjay Leela Bhansali continues to incorporate Kathak-influenced grandeur into his period dramas with genuine seriousness.
Certain South Indian productions — operating closer to the living traditions of Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi — still treat classical dance with structural integrity.
Dance reality television, for all its compromises, has introduced younger Indians to forms they might otherwise never have encountered. And a growing cohort of young classical dancers, trained in the traditional system, are building substantial followings on the very digital platforms that critics blame for the crisis.
But Bollywood, specifically, shows few signs of the structural self-examination that genuine restoration would require. The industry is not equipped — culturally, economically, or temperamentally — to slow down long enough to retrain. The economics of streaming demand constant production. The attention economy rewards speed and sensation over depth and discipline.
What the industry could do, at minimum, is honest labelling. Call fusion choreography what it is. Stop marketing sequences such as Bharatanatyam or Kathak when they contain nothing of the form beyond a costume. Stop deploying the languages of sacred traditions as marketing vocabulary while systematically emptying them of content.
The outrage over Ananya Panday will fade, as such outrage always does. She will move to her next project; the hashtags will archive themselves; the classical dancers will return to their recitals and their students. But the underlying question — whether an industry as powerful and as culturally influential as Bollywood has a responsibility to the traditions it borrows from — will not resolve itself quietly.
When Vyjayanthimala performed Bharatanatyam on screen seventy years ago, audiences sensed centuries behind every gesture. They sensed it because centuries were there. The tradition was present in the body of the dancer, transmitted through years of disciplined study from master to student in an unbroken chain reaching back to the temples of Tamil Nadu.
That chain is not yet broken. But it has never been more fragile. And no algorithm, however sophisticated, can tell you what you lose when it snaps. (IPA Service)
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