Kapila Vatsyayana
Six decades of scholarship on the philosophy underlying every Indian art form - dance, architecture, painting, sculpture - Vatsyayana built the most comprehensive modern account of how Hindu arts form a unified system of knowledge, not a collection of disciplines.
Kapila Vatsyayana was a behemoth on Indian scene of culture and art in 20th and 21st century. In a decade encompassing almost six decades of continuous work she commented upon some of the most fundamental aspects of Hindu arts and focused on the quintessence of every discipline of arts and fine arts that she chose to lay her eyes upon. Explaining some of the most important metaphors and ideas about Hindu arts she has explained an entire tradition to the contemporary generation.
Select Works
- Indian Classical Dance (1992) – Authoritative introduction to Bharatanatyam, Kathak, etc.
- The Square and the Circle of the Indian Arts (1997) – Geometric principles underlying Indian aesthetics.
- Bharata: The Natyasastra (1996) – Scholarly study of India’s foundational treatise on performance.
- Concepts of Space: Ancient and Modern (1991) – Comparative analysis of spatial theory in Indian and Western thought.
- Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts (2007) – Interdisciplinary study of dance’s cultural expressions.
- Asian Dance: Multiple Levels (2011) – Pan-Asian perspective on dance as cultural practice.
