Traditional Folk Dances of India (Photostat)

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The author has taken into consideration the most important folk dances of India. The folk dances have been arranged province wise. These provinces are not treated according to their political boundaries but are divided from the point of view of dance. The very existence of folk dance implies a certain complexity of development in the social order. In a primitive community the whole body of persons comprising it, is the 'folk' and in the best sense of the world it might be applied to the entire population, of any community. In its common application, however, in such compounds as "folk-lore', 'folk-music', etc., it is narrowed down to include only those who are mainly outside the current of urban culture and systematic education, the unlettered or little-lettered inhabitants of village and countryside.

An exhaustive work on this subject is absolutely impossible, for the very simple reason that there are always changes in the form of any particular dance from one village to another, and India being a vast country and having innumerable folk-dances, one life- time is insufficient to record them. But this book will be a guide, stimulus and a stepping-stone from which others may work on the subject. One may either take one province and try to explore all its regions for this precious art of folk-dancing; or one may start with just one district. In this way there is a possibility of bringing to light material of great ethnological interest.

I have deliberately taken into consideration the most important folk-dances of India and have discarded the insignificant ones, not wishing to make the book un- necessarily lengthy by incorporating every detail.

The very existence of folk-dance implies a certain complexity of development in the social order; and also even by its name, implies a distinction based more or less roughly on this complexity, whereby the ruder arts of the less cultured members of society are distinguished from the more sophisticated arts of the educated classes. In a primitive community the whole body of persons comprising it, is the 'folk' and in the best sense of the word it might be applied to the entire popula- tion of any community. In its common application, however, in such compounds as 'folk-lore', 'folk-music', etc., it is narrowed down to include only those who are mainly outside the current of urban culture and systematic education, the unlettered or little-lettered inhabitants of village and countryside.

In a simple community, where all dancing is of the folk, this distinction between the art of the poor peasant and his more educated brethren only arises when, with social progress, art-forms split away, developing a self- conscious technique and becoming the province of a profession, and of the cultured. We may say that folk-dancing is that dancing which has developed among the peasantry, and is maintained by them in a fluid tradition without the aid of the professional dancer, teacher or artist; and is not, at least in its particular form, observed and practised in towns on the stage, or in the ballroom.