Dance of the Temples: Postcolonial Reimaginations and [Re]turns at Khajuraho, India

This essay examines how the Khajuraho Dance Festival reconfigures cultural heritage at the UNESCO-listed temple complex in postcolonial India. Despite the lack of archival evidence of temple dance at Khajuraho, the contemporary festival choreographs an apparent continuity between medieval temple architecture and present-day festival performances. The essay, however, contends that it is precisely the historical and spatial distance from earlier temple-dance formations that enables new postcolonial reimaginings to emerge. Through festival discourses such as nritya-seva, dance is recast as national service, rehabilitating once-stigmatized erotic imagery of Khajuraho as venerable antiquity while obscuring the displacement of hereditary performers formerly tied to temple rituals in other parts of India. By analyzing choreographic strategies, promotional media, and the broader festival ecology, the essay demonstrates how absence, nostalgia, and invention together produce Khajuraho as a dynamic and contested site of heritage.