About Book
Alice Boner 1889 – 1981, the Swiss painter, sculptor and art historian, is well
known for her intense interest in Indian art and culture. She visited India for
the first time in 1930, accompanying the Indian dancer Uday Shankar (1900 –
1977) for a year-long trip. The records of Alice Boner’s photographs, sculpture
and sketches of Uday Shankar remain a part of her legacy. As a
researcher/dancer trained at the Uday Shankar India Culture Centre, Kolkata, I
see a deep connection between Alice Boner’s artistic portrayal of the
kinaesthetic principles in Indian sculptures and Uday Shankar choreographic
representation of India’s iconography. The exciting exploration – made
possible by the Alice Boner Institute Varanasi and Museum Rietberg Zurich
has shaped the photo-essay – linking the journey of Alice Boner, the artist-
scholar, to that of Uday Shankar, the artist-dancer, as an inter-artistic
conversation.
About Author
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi is an Associate Professor at the School of Arts and
Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, specializing in Critical
Dance Studies, Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic research. She is a
dancer/choreographer trained in Kathakali, Manipuri, and Uday Shankar’s style
of Creative Dance. Her current work is on changing landscapes of dance in
India; sex-trafficking and designing of survival processes for survivors; and the
politics of performance. Sarkar Munsi is currently the President of World
Dance Alliance Asia Pacific. Her book, Dancing Modernity: Uday Shankar and
his Transcultural Experimentations, is in the process of being published by
Palgrave and is expected to be available in 2022. Sarkar Munsi’s essay “Being
Rama: Playing a God in the Changing Times” is an autoethnography and is
published in Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha edited, Performing the
Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, 2021.