Founder

Nirav Sachan

Founder, Relearning the Nautch 

Relearning the Nautch emerged from a moment of curiosity rather than a formal research plan.

While preparing for a Kathak class, founder Nirav Sachan overheard a discussion about the Anti-Nautch Movement and the period often described as the decline of dance culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, the conversation seemed incidental. Yet the phrase remained with him, prompting questions that would eventually shape the direction of the project. What was the Anti-Nautch Movement? Why did it emerge? Who were the performers it sought to regulate, reform, or marginalize? What happened to the communities whose artistic practices occupied courts, salons, ritual spaces, and urban cultural life across South Asia? The search for answers began gradually. 

Through scattered readings and recurring inquiries, Nirav found himself drawn toward the histories of courtesans, hereditary performers, dance communities, and the wider worlds of South Asian performance culture. One of the earliest academic works that influenced this journey was a research article on the Devadasi system. From that point onward, a sustained engagement with dance history, cultural memory, performance studies, and cultural history began to take shape. Over time, these interests expanded beyond reading and research. Archival exploration led to interviews, conversations with artists and scholars, and a growing engagement with questions surrounding Kathak, courtesan culture, and the colonial category of the Nautch. What had begun as personal curiosity gradually developed into an ongoing effort to document and examine the histories of performance in South Asia. 

As a student of Kathak, Nirav increasingly came to view dance not only as an artistic practice but also as a mode of inquiry. Kathak became a lens through which questions of embodiment, memory, gender, patronage, colonialism, and cultural change could be explored. Rather than treating performance merely as an aesthetic object, this perspective encouraged an understanding of dance as a repository of historical knowledge and lived experience. Relearning the Nautch was founded as a result of this process. The project seeks to bring together archival research, interviews, essays, source notes, and public scholarship in order to explore Kathak, courtesan culture, dance history, music history, performance traditions, and cultural memory across South Asia. It is both an archive and an ongoing inquiry into the people, practices, and histories that have shaped artistic life in the region. The title reflects the project's central aspiration. To relearn is not simply to recover forgotten histories, but to revisit familiar narratives with new questions, to challenge inherited assumptions, and to remain attentive to complexity. 

Relearning the Nautch is therefore an invitation to engage critically with the histories of performance and to participate in the continual process of questioning, unlearning, and relearning.

— Relearning the Nautch