Folk Dances of India

Dance has been a function of man's life, even from the primitive to the most cultured community. Perhaps before man began to speak and to paint, he began to dance. While the primitive man combined reality with deity, the cultured dance for pleasure and for the expression of art.

India, with its vast variety of races and conditions has been a veritable treasure house of dance forms for untold centuries. Most of the prevailing systems of Indian classical dancing which are governed by elaborate techniques and shown high degree of refinement, have had their origin in the dances of the common people, which still survive in as virile state as ever in tribal hamlets and peasant huts. The Indian folk dance is simple without being naive, for behind its simplicity lie both profoundity of conception and a directness of expression which are of great artistic value. The concept of portraying emotion is generally speaking foreign to folk dance and what is expressed is natural and original. What is mportant here is not the grace of the individual dancer or the virtuosity of the isolated prose, but the total effect of the overwhelming buoyancy of spirit, and the eloquent, effortless ease with which it is expressed.

The Folk, tribal and ritual dance in India is a world which found its own roots, moorings, nourishment, growth, flowering and maturity. It has yielded generation after generation of performers. Much of what represents the Indian folk, tribal and ritual dance tradition can be said to belong not to today, but to yesterday. It has intimate relationship with functions of daily life; food-gathering, harvesting, rites, rituals and beliefs. It has the capacity for ever renewing and rejuvenating themselves while maintaining a continuity with antiquity and tradition.

The staggering multiplicity of races, of linguistic and ethnic groups, of religions, and of social organisation and structuring in India, account for an incomparable richness of folk music and dance forms. Here forms have survived, whose origins can be traced back to pre-historic times; new forms have grown up in other places and have continued in spite of many historical and sociological changes.

The tribal belt, which runs through all parts of India, are creators of the Tribal Dances of India. Dance is an integral part of their life, daily and annual, historical and contemporary. Secondly, there is peasant or village India and these agricultural communities are the creators of the Folk dances, ritualistic, agricultural and seasonal. A third special group, who are part of the village community, but also close to the townships, served as craftsmen, entertainers, musicians and dancers, have been the chief repositories of the oral tradition. Thus folk comprises the common people, both inhabiting in the urban and the rural areas, and the folk art is common man's art.

So they dance, the folk and the tribals; in the villages and forests. They are everywhere. The rhythm of the dance brings them together. Not trained and not professional, and not dancers by design, they continue to dance, as they have done for centuries.

Generally people nourish a wrong notion as to the word 'folk' and mean folk art is village art. But folk comprises the common people, both inhabiting in the urban and the rural areas, and so folk art is common man's art.

Classical Dance Forms of India
Bharatnatyam - Tamil Nadu	Kathak - Uttar Pradesh
Kathakali - Kerala	Kuchipudi - Andhra Pradesh
Manipuri - Manipur	Mohiniyattam - Kerala
Odissi - Orissa	Thiruvathirakkali - Kerala
Chhau - Bihar	Goti Pua - Orissa
Natraj - Maharashtra	Temple Panel - Orissa
Performing Arts of Kerala

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