dr. ranjini nair

Ranjini is a scholar, writer, and dancer whose work explores the intersection of art and politics. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge, where her research focused on Indian dance and the politics of its aesthetics. Her academic and creative interests lie in understanding how art, particularly dance, shapes publics and mediates cultural discourse.

With a passion for writing about the arts, Ranjini has contributed to various media outlets in India. Her fiction writing, in contrast, emerges more intuitively and unexpectedly, developing gradually over time. As a practitioner, she has trained in Kuchipudi for over two decades and is now exploring her own performance vocabulary, pushing the boundaries of traditional form.

Ranjini enjoys facilitating dance and movement workshops in community settings and has collaborated with a range of organisations across India and the UK. She is committed to making both research and the arts accessible to diverse audiences, through digital platforms as well as in-person engagement.

Loitering as resistance? Undoing angashuddhi in Indian classical dance

In this practice-led paper, as an Indian classical dancer, I introduce loitering as a method that counters Indian classical dances' hegemonic function within a Hindu ethnonationalist state. Loitering intervenes and disrupts the imagination of India as solely a dominant caste, Hindu nation. Loitering as an “act of pleasure-seeking holds the possibility of . . . re-envisioning citizenship in more inclusive terms.” I ask first, how loitering can move towards an inclusive citizenship that rewards multiple ways of moving, and those doing the moving, and second, what it means to loiter in practice as an Indian classical dancer

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