Founder

Nirav Sachan

Founder, Relearning the Nautch (RTN)

Relearning the Nautch began as a research question: how are art forms transformed when history determines which bodies are deemed respectable and which are marginalized? Nirav Sachan is a humanities student and Kathak practitioner whose engagement with dance extends beyond technique into historical, social, and performative analysis. Through this work, he became aware that Kathak, like many South Asian performance traditions, has a fragmented history shaped by colonial regulation, moral reform movements, selective memory, and institutional silences. The nautch was not merely renamed or refined; its pedagogy, practitioners, and embodied knowledge were systematically re-scripted.

RTN emerged to investigate what was lost, altered, or excluded in the construction of “classical” respectability. The initiative combines archival research, oral histories, legislative documentation, and practitioner testimonies to critically examine these transformations. It functions as a learning platform at the intersection of history, performance studies, anthropology, and lived practice, prioritizing analytical rigor over nostalgia.

As founder, Nirav curates cross-boundary dialogues: between dancers and scholars, archives and embodied practice, and institutional histories and informal performance worlds. The project documents performance economies, pedagogy, labor, gender, caste, and migration, and hosts reflective interviews that foreground both historical and contemporary experience. His research interests focus on memory, identity, counter-canon formation, and performance as a form of knowledge.

RTN is student-led, non-commercial, and deliberately methodical. It is designed to document before asserting authority, listen before interpreting, and contribute to scholarly discourse while remaining open-ended. The project is not an endpoint but a continually evolving archive and dialogue that interrogates how art survives regulation, how bodies retain knowledge institutions overlook, and how learning itself can function as ethical inquiry.