Background

Across India’s vast cultural landscape, many classical, folk, and community-based dance traditions remain structurally marginalized. They are underrepresented in mainstream culture, grossly underfunded and ill-supported, and increasingly inaccessible to the country’s younger generations and swathes of emerging talent. These challenges are compounded by gendered barriers within the social landscape of the subcontinent: girls from socio-economically underserved backgrounds often face limited access to formal arts education, performance spaces, and mentorship, despite the central role women have historically played in sustaining India’s rich history of performance traditions.

Scholarly and cultural research has repeatedly underscored the importance of Indian dance forms—for their artistic and technical merit, of course, but also as repositories and living representations of social history, inter-community and caste relations, gender norms, and regional identities Still, institutional support is partial to benefiting only a narrow canon of classical forms, leaving many traditions, practitioners, and communities without platforms for visibility or sustained livelihood.

Addressing this imbalance demands participatory education, direct engagement with practitioners, and the creation of accessible platforms that will connect young learners with cultural traditions, irrespective of their socio-economic backgrounds, to ensure that the rich textures of our cultural heritage continue to thrive with vitality. Forgotten Footsteps is an actionable answer to this imbalance by attempting to spotlight India’s rich history of performance traditions and amplifying minoritized voices within these traditions.