Shruti Maria Datar

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA, seeks to translate and interpret the stories, traditions, and everyday lives of Mumbai’s East Indian community through the language of choreography. Drawing on engagement with elders, archival research, and oral histories, movement and dance will serve as a medium for embodying and reinterpreting their evolving heritage amidst urbanisation. By translating archival and field research into movement, sound, and visual form, the project will position the body as a living, interpretive archive. Shruti Maria Datar is the Coordinator of this project.

Shruti Maria Datar is a Mumbai-based contemporary dancer, choreographer, and arts educator whose work explores embodied memory, gender, and power through movement. Her practice bridges performance, research, and community-building, creating artist-centred spaces for dialogue, reflection, and resistance. Given her ability to bridge performance, research, and pedagogy, she is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Mumbai is home to numerous indigenous Bombay East Indian enclaves known as
Gaothans, that lie wedged between dense high-rise buildings, while others, like East Indian Koliwadas (fishing villages), cling precariously to the city’s coastline. Having grown up in an East Indian gaothan and experienced firsthand the continual erasure of the community’s histories and cultural practices under the pressures of gentrification has partly inspired the idea for this project. By positioning dance as a living archive, the artist proposes an alternative mode of inquiry and preservation, one that foregrounds embodiment, affect, and lived experience. It seeks to generate new conversations about heritage, belonging, and power while expanding contemporary dance practice through decolonial, community-rooted, and interdisciplinary research.

This choreographic inquiry will be shaped by archival research, interviews, and embodied explorations of East Indian artefacts, textiles (notably the Lugra), language, and ritualistic gestures. The aim is to translate research into a movement language rooted in the collective memory of the community, while also pushing the boundaries of contemporary dance.

The outcome of this project will be a multimedia presentation comprising contemporary dance that foregrounds the cultural, historical, and social narratives of Mumbai’s East Indian community, interpreting and re-articulating community practices of oral histories, rituals, daily rhythms, and everyday gestures - positioning the body as a living, interpretive archive. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA, along with the final reports, will be audio-visual documentation of the presentation, archival material, interviews, along with field documentation. 

This project aligns with the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme by approaching embodied practice as a mode of inquiry, where movement becomes a way of listening, thinking, and arriving at knowledge. Through the translation of oral histories, everyday labour, textile practices, and dialect into choreography, the research centres somatic, non-verbal, and intergenerational ways of knowing that are often absent from formal archives. In doing so, it broadens the scope of arts research in the country, positioning the body as a living, place-based archive and a critical research tool.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

The Project is part-supported by BNP Paribas India.