For centuries the performing body was watched, exoticized, desired, regulated, and condemned

—yet rarely understood. 

Across the courts, streets, salons, temples, and ritual spaces of South Asia, generations of performers shaped cultural life through movement, music, gesture, and presence. Dancers, musicians, courtesans, hereditary artists, ritual specialists, and gender-variant communities contributed to the rich histories of South Asian performance traditions. Yet these performers have often remained marginal within conventional histories of dance, music, and culture.

Relearning the Nautch is a digital research institute and archive dedicated to the study of Kathak, courtesan culture, dance history, music history, performance traditions, and cultural memory in South Asia. Through archival research, interviews, essays, source notes, and public scholarship, the project seeks to document and critically examine the histories of performance that shaped the cultural worlds of the subcontinent.

Through close attention to archival sources, photographs, manuscripts, newspapers, films, recordings, oral histories, and performer genealogies, Relearning the Nautch seeks to recover histories that are frequently overlooked or fragmented. The archive reads texts and images not only for what they explicitly state, but also for what remains unspoken: the fleeting description of a glance, the brief mention of a performance, the subtle choreography of a performer engaging an audience. The institute's work is guided by the belief that the performing body is never merely aesthetic. It is also social, political, and historical. Questions of caste, gender, labor, morality, patronage, authority, and cultural heritage are often inscribed within performance itself. To study dance history, music history, and performance traditions is therefore to study broader processes of social and cultural change. 

Through its Archive, Interviews, and The Repertoire publication series, Relearning the Nautch contributes to the growing fields of performance studies, dance studies, cultural history, musicology, and South Asian studies. The project aims to create an accessible resource for researchers, students, artists, and anyone interested in Kathak, tawaif history, Indian classical dance, courtesan culture, and the wider histories of South Asian performance.

This archive invites readers to move slowly and attentively through the traces of performance, to read the margins, listen to silences, and linger over the gestures through which performers once animated entire worlds.

In returning to these histories, we begin the work of relearning.

Explore the Archive 

Selected materials from the archive. 

Join the Conversation

RTN welcomes scholars, artists, researchers, archivists, and students interested in South Asian performance traditions.