It is for all practitioners now not to differentiate between practitioners and scholars: Dr. Arshiya Sethi on SADI

A novel might be just a story till literary analysis refracts it to reveal its influences, context and interpretative potential. Similarly, scholarship in dance can turn its beautiful practice from an aesthetic discipline into an exploration of our world - its geography, history, culture and even its politics. Hence, even though it is not required, it might be beneficial for practitioners to write about their discipline academically, to plan analyses, research their perspectives and use rigorous academic requirements to develop the habit of scholarship.

SADI (South Asian Dance Intersections) is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal housed at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, USA, that provides a space for recognized academic writing on dance by anyone in South Asia, in any South Asian language. Its acronym is also a Punjabi word that means 'ours'. Its editorial board, which also includes its founders, consists of Dr. Rohini Acharya, Oberlin College, Ohio; Dr. Anurima Banerji, University of California, Los Angeles; Dr. Pallabi Chakravorty, Swarthmore College; Dr. Ananya Chatterjea, University of Minnesota; Sheema Kirmani, independent activist-scholar from Pakistan; Lubna Marium, A Center for Advancement of South Asian Culture; Dr. Sarah Morelli, University of Denver; Dr. Rumya Putcha, University of Georgia; Dr. Urmimala Sarkar, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Dr. Kaustavi Sarkar, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Dr. Yashoda Thakore, guest faculty, Dance University of Silicon Andhra, California; Dr. Aishika Chakraborty, director, Women's Studies, Jadavpur University.

Dr. Arshiya Sethi has been its founder-editor since its inception in 2021, and I spoke to her some time ago about her last year as editor and her experience over the past four years. Sethi had a self-imposed restriction on the number of years she would be editor, and she has recently announced the online launch of the fourth edition of the journal on 18 January 2026, her last edition as editor, after which she will continue on the editorial board.

As her tenure comes to an end and SADI prepares to be led by a new voice, Sethi recounts how it began, why, and how it is intended to continue. In a passionate interview, Sethi stresses the need for such a journal, for academic recognition and for freeing dance writing from both western academic constructs and a purely Indian base.

Dr. Arshiya Sethi (pic: Innee Singh)

When and how was the journal founded?

During the COVID pandemic, everyone started to think creatively, laterally, and we were all reduced to being on the internet. We were a group of friends and dance scholars and we were in touch with each other. Kaustavi Sarkar, who was a professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, initiated a reading group, which would discuss books and issues. I did one lecture with her, and she rang me back and said, "Arshiya didi, I want to do something more permanent." So, we started thinking of this permanent thing as a journal. But what would make us different from the other journals that existed? Firstly, it was specific to South Asian dance. In that choice of words, we were including many countries, it was not about just India - Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka at a minimum. We are open to the diaspora anywhere in the world.

And we included the aspect called intersections. Personally, I love working on intersections; it's so fascinating, working on economy and dance, politics and dance, even fabrics and dance. So, we put it in its name, SADI. We knew we were going to meet international standards of academic rigour, so that no one could shut us up.

Thirdly, we were wanting very much to foreground South Asian ideas, identity, voice . . . uniquenesses of ours. We knew we had different ways of writing. We don't write necessarily in the western way only. We could write in the western way as well, but we wrote in other ways. Especially when dancers wrote in the first person about their practice, it often was autobiographical. We were encouraging writing even in vernaculars. To make our voice matter, we were willing to do mentorship, we were willing to do workshops, we were willing to do trainings, and in the five years, we did all of this.

Why suddenly this focus? The main international forum for dance scholarship is called Dance Studies Association (DSA). And for two years before that, 2019 and 2020, there were panels at DSA about de-westernizing dance, particularly in places like South Asia. This is at an international forum. Between the first year, 2019, and 2020, you'll be surprised - the number of people for this session was the highest. Wherever it was, the room was bursting - Northwestern University, Chicago . . . Wherever the conference was being held, there was a lot of interest in the subject. So we thought that maybe the time is right now. There was too much western control on dance scholarship before that. And when we looked at our group, we knew we never had a better chance than this. Because all of us were fearless, all of us were good, and all of us wanted to achieve this. Ek dhakka hamne mara or marte gaye marte gaye (we gave one mighty push and kept pushing) till SADI actually happened.

We were lucky, we got a university supporting us - that doesn't mean money, in real terms, but the facilities of a university. Their technical team creates the journal, mounts the journal and maintains it on the site along with the other journals. Today, universities have printed journals and online journals. The advantage of an online version is that it can carry many more photographs, films, voice interviews - podcasts, dance films, dance videos.

So now we had to decide who would be the editor. Hum sab hoshiyar hain aur kar sakte the yeh kaam (we are all competent and could do this job) . . . We had set up a board of all the brilliant scholars who were in positions of leadership everywhere, and they looked at me and said, "You are the one person who doesn't have a university job, so you don't have checking and examinations and all that." I said I'm happy to do it, but I'll do it only for five years. Because after five years, new blood must come in - a new way of looking, a new generation. Many people begin to think they are entitled to this. If you put them in a position, they refuse to leave it. Legacy planning is part of institution building. I said, I'll be honoured to take on the founder-editor's role, because that's quite difficult, I'm very good at that. I made Habitat out of nothing, Delhi International Arts Festival out of nothing. So I said I will do this. But after five years, I will remain only on the board. They agreed. And now, at the end of this year, I will have brought out four issues and had one year for planning. After me, we have a plan of how we are going to transfer to the new editor. We're taking our time, we're doing a guest editor's issue, and by that time we will have done interviews globally of who we want.

On our board we have not only brown people but also white people, but they are sensitized, not people who will talk down to us. We don't want anyone who talks down to us. We leave no possibility for anyone to talk down to us - we follow very strict selection processes and a double-blind peer-reviewed journal. Twice it is reviewed. That is why I am happy to take out only one edition a year. We do not want to dilute the quality. We can expand somewhat - there were six stories earlier; we can increase the number of stories in an issue to nine. But we do not want to dilute the quality in the rush to publish. We want to encourage critical thinking on the part of our authors. And we do not want to be rapped on our knuckles for abandoning critical thinking in our rush to get two issues out each year.

Now that we get a lot more submissions, we have decided that we may go into newer fields and again, I'm happy to offer my services for the new project. And one of the new fields we're thinking of going into is once a year, on a significant conference, we will bring out all the papers as part of SADI's special edition. It will be a second edition but it will emerge out of a workshop or conference.

We are also open to the idea of podcasts since we recognize that the younger generation of people are not so much into reading as they are into listening. I have already written a concept note and it is being circulated in the SADI board. In our next meeting, we will discuss how to go about it. You need a lot of technical support for things like this, which is expensive. But India is not so expensive - there are well-entrenched systems. And I offered to do it here. So I said let's start with this; once we have a rough design ready, then you can take it to greater heights. Dhakka maar ke gadi shuru karni hoti hai, woh main kar sakti hoon (I can give things the initial push). Editing is possible from anywhere in the world. A podcast cannot be done from anywhere. For a podcast, I will have to develop a system so that it can be done even when I am away. I am sure that I will be able to do it. Visualizing the potential of an empty space and then realizing it is my strength, so I'm happy to do that.

Unique aspects of SADI - I mentioned them before and I'll highlight them for you. One, we accept submissions in any South Asian language. You can give it to us in Assamese, we will have it translated, we will then work with the scholar if we feel that citations are few and not meaty enough. That is before we put it into the double-blind peer review process. The board takes on mentorship and helps the author before we put it up for double-blind peer review. And still, if the reviewer says it is not ready and needs more work, we discuss with the author and say here are the people on the board, and this person we feel should be mentored through the next year. And the submission is then carried with pride in the next year, despite the fact that the theme is different the coming year, because we have enriched the scholar, we have made them more capable through our mentoring process. And we can carry pieces that are not from our theme - that the editorial has to manage intelligently. Right now I am writing it, next year some other editor will write it and I'm sure will do a brilliant job.

The second unique aspect of SADI is this mentoring thing. We mentor for a year and if the material is not ready even then, we continue the next year as well. But this time, it is man to man marking. Like if somebody is writing on North-East art forms or something like that, I will be the person who will do it because that's my area. If someone is writing on Odissi, then they will have Kaustavi or Anjana, anybody writing on dance on TV will have Kannadi mentoring him or her since she has completed a book on dance reality shows. And these are scholars that are invited to give keynote addresses and all that - they are scholars of great eminence and prominence and all of us are working together. There are no lines drawn on who is doing what. Because we recognize that this is the moment we have to change the narrative, (and we can) if we push hard enough.

Sometimes we are disappointed. From some countries, like Nepal, we are not getting any contribution. So I had a discussion with scholars, general scholars, from Nepal, online on Zoom. They said there is nobody who teaches dance studies. There is a lot of regressive scholarship. They said, come and conduct a workshop, so we are trying to hold a workshop there. As a test study, we had a writing workshop in Kolkata, and it was a thumping success. There is demand for a more intensive workshop and we are happy to do it online because actually, that helps us. For example, Bangladesh - they ask us, but they cannot talk to us about anything concrete. Why? We don't know. So I could be taking a session with one of the scholars from Bangladesh about what is the problem? One of the solutions could be that one of their scholars come and work with us for one year - we will find a scholar who is not in a job and can go there and work. If we can get even five scholars to come and work with us, it will be a big win. We are not looking at preparing twenty scholars. If we get two pieces from there, it will be an achievement. Bangladesh has started making a mark.

We are trying our best and we never say die. We are very clear that we are not here for ourselves but for future generations. Hamara to ho gaya jo hona tha (we have already done what we could). All of us are well-known scholars in our own disciplines. Many of us have come from practice backgrounds. One of the things that SADI does is attempt to bridge the gap between scholars and practitioners. Sometimes the practitioners feel they are not capable of academic writing - we can't quote footnotes, they say. So we show them how. We encourage them to write, and we clean it and show them how to write footnotes. We edit their writing, no problem, but they should write at least. In the first edition, we got a very powerful, personal, autobiographical piece by Yashoda Thakore. It had videos and photographs. Being an online journal, there was no restriction of videos or photographs, or how many pages we could give to the writer. We tell them to put their film on YouTube and give their URL. You can see the film on YouTube and then read the journal. We have tried to be as progressive as possible.

And that is why the podcast is a priority area for us and that will be the next challenge. In this year's editorial, I not only say my farewell, but I will announce the podcast future as well. We hand-hold each other. When my arm broke and I was unable to do any of the hardcore editing work, everybody took on one paper each. My hands were hurting and I could not lift a book also. But I was working on the editorial; I could type with one hand and turn the page slowly with other. My nurse would turn my pages and help me out.

We have a mission to accomplish, and it starts with those panels on decolonization at the DSA - the immense popularity they had, the numbers that came for those sessions. It was the right time, we were the right mass, we were the right people in leadership, I felt, and we were not driven by egos and ahankara. I'm sorry to say, but many of the scholars in the past were driven by ego and ahankara. There were very few scholars and maybe they thought there could not be anyone better than themselves. But we are not like this anymore. We do believe that everybody has a strength. We will support their strength and not dismiss based on their weaknesses.

The poster for the online launch of SADI 4.0 on 18 January 2026

We have expanded the board to have it more equitably represented geographically. Now we have a scholar from Sri Lanka as well (SADI's fourth edition online launch, announced recently, includes 'Dance Studies in Sri Lanka' curated by Sri Lankan Sudesh Mantillake, who has also joined the journal's board, and 'Dance in India and Bangladesh: Trapped in Two Discursive Fractures', a keynote by Prof. Syed Jamil Ahmed, Dhaka University).

For instance, the head of the department of dance at University of North Carolina, Charlotte (Professor Gretchen Alterowitz, who is on the journal's advisory board) is not a South Asian dance specialist, but she was supportive in this. In 2023, I went to North Carolina and I wrote the editorial sitting in Charlotte because I was to do a lecture. They called a meeting immediately after the lecture and she said, "Why are you not coming and teaching a course here?" I said, Fulbright has one teaching fellowship. I can think of writing and applying for it and she said, please do. We created a course. She was so enthusiastic about it! And then I fell down the next year, and I was in so much pain, by the time the Fulbright application went out, I was screaming in pain. That's where the matter remained, but there was so much support.

Kaustavi is a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina. She got tenure after SADI started and I would want to believe that it is so exceptional to start an academic journal like this, the initiative she took was recognized by the university. There are so many professors who are not even able to write their books. Kaustavi spearheaded a whole journal. It was exceptional; she was bound to be confirmed. She is also a practicing Odissi dancer and a journal manager. We divided our responsibilities very smartly. There's no point me or any of the other board members saying - however distinguished they were - we can coordinate with the University of North Carolina). We simply can't. We are sitting in different countries and have a significant time difference. But Kaustavi is there; if anything blows up, she can just rush down.

I work hard to put together a list of scholars, write to them, encourage and motivate them. It is the work of a pioneering team, to work harder than the others. Chalti hui gadi chalana bahut aasan hota hai (keeping a moving vehicle moving is easy).

How many papers have you received in vernacular languages?

None so far. But I hope we will get it soon and probably from Bengal, because there are many scholars who are Bengali who work in the vernacular language and Bengal is very particular about Bengali. Bengalis take a lot of pride in their language. And we need to be open to all languages - Tamil, Telugu, Urdu. We are ready to translate them. Whenever I get a chance to give a lecture in a university, I encourage people to contribute to SADI. I try to generate a buzz around SADI. We have unearthed many new scholars in this way. I went to IIT Guwahati and other places and we got contributions from there. I keep reading new writers and encourage them to write to SADI, to generate interest and a buzz around SADI. When we started, we had nothing to start with, just a dream. For the second edition, we had the first one to show - 'this is what SADI is all about'. People asked us questions like if we had the ISBN number for publications. We had everything, we are on point. It helps people to publish in a recognized journal. Why should anybody labour otherwise, if they receive no benefit (from publishing)? We don't pay because we don't have funds. If we ever get any we can think of paying, but so far, we have no money.

But still we got maybe sixteen articles this year, which is spectacular. It is open access to the journal now. You do not have to register, you do not have to pay, there is no paywall, you just have to click and you can read. SADI is starting to be quoted in citations, which is a big achievement.

Dr. Arshiya Sethi (pic: Instagram/@arshiya.sethi.520)

In 2017, I read a paper at the Dance Studies Association conference, and on my panel was Tani Sebro. She is a political science professor and she wrote an article on the Shan people, who used to live in Myanmar, from where they were exiled. Now they are in Thailand and while they do not have political significance, since they could not vote and did not have citizenship, they were happy there because they could express their cultural entity. These people are the same people who in India are the Ahom. We were talking to each other about how I have written about these people who have come to India and she has written about the same people who migrated in the other direction, to Thailand. And we started talking about how, when you are not part of the nation, how your dance gets affected. You could be in exile, a migrant or like a second-class citizen in your own country. What happens to the arts and the dance in these communities? So we decided to put in a proposal internationally for a work called 'Dance Under the Shadow of the Nation'. We brought out a global anthology of essays on how dance and performance become important projects of the nation. That was the first time I got noticed as an international dance scholar. It came out in 2019 and the very next edition was the 'Decolonization Edition' in 2020, which Anurima (Banerji) and Prarthana (Purkayastha) brought out. When we were talking, I told them, you are using the word 'decolonization' in the western sense, but in India this word 'decolonization' is being used to refer to 1000 years ago - as if natural life was a Hindu life only. So, make it clear and be very careful. They brought out that edition on decolonization and everybody remarked on the usage of that word, and that they would have to qualify that word which they were using in a particular manner. And they later wrote an apology - that scholar Dr. Arshiya Sethi had pointed it out and we didn't understand the significance of what she said but subsequently, we hereby qualify what we mean by the word decolonization. So that was another incident that brought me some recognition internationally.

When I worked on 'Dance Under the Shadow of the Nation', it was my first international publication, and I was 58 years old. So, I thought that no one should have to wait that long to publish their work in an international publication. We will create a forum for international publication so that younger scholars can be published early enough in their life and it'll make a difference to their career spectrum. And we have done it.

Today, there are scholars who are 28 to 40 whose work is getting published internationally, thanks to SADI. It was my wish that nobody should have to wait that long. The others were all teachers and scholars in academics; it was their job to publish. Mine was just a wish that I wanted to publish my research, and I had no standing to do so - till I published this. And hats off to the Dance Studies Association that they agreed to this unusual combination of a political science professor and a dance studies non-teaching scholar joining hands and editing a book. It's called 'Conversation Across the Field of Dance', it was a series, and our edition is called 'Dance Under the Shadow of a Nation'. One of its opening lines was 'The umbra and penumbra of the nation'. And this has begun to be quoted widely. You may not have any standing in a geography, you may be a second-class citizen without the right to vote. Variations of this are being objected to throughout the world, because it creates second class citizens.

In my second Fulbright, I did at least twenty lectures internationally over a period of thirty months. That also got me a certain high visibility internationally. I would not fear, I would meet the best of scholars and have animated conversations. There is no need for aggression; if I could not defend a point, I'd say this is a point that needs deeper thought. That's when all these scholars really noticed me and realized I was an equal. And then the SADI process began. It was then that I could carry forth some of my own personal vision.

Does scholarly work like SADI reach the grassroots?

No, it does not reach the grassroots level. But if someone is doing any thinking on dance, then you should know the debates and issues in dance. For five years I have also been doing a lot of work in law and the arts, as you know - copyrights, plagiarism, sexual harassment. Even today, there are many dancers who say to me 'Sure, we will pick something up from YouTube'. I almost faint at that. You can't pick things up like that, this is intellectual theft. But many people don't understand this, some do. But when problems crop up, they are big ones. And as time passes and the law becomes clearer, we will not be able to avoid these issues.

Times have changed - it's not wise for dancers to say we only dance, we are not concerned with worldly things. Do you not file taxes? Do you not file applications for grants? Do you not issue utilization certificates later? These are also worldly things. If you follow one set of laws, you will also have to follow all other laws. Sexual harassment also will not slide now. Those offending gurus who have not been punished, who have gotten away with it - this will not happen now. Upcoming gurus should know times have changed - if they have even the slightest bit of brains, won't make this mistake.

And students - those times are also gone when you could pick things up from YouTube, when you danced in auditoriums and no one knew 2000km away that you have used some musician's work. Now it all comes out on social media and when it comes out on social media, a certain algorithm comes into play . . . the algorithm is unforgiving. It doesn't care who you are. My advice to young musicians and dancers today is, please keep reading. That's how you will be updated.

I know it's not popular reading, it's not Chetan Bhagat, but it is a valuable contribution and it is for all practitioners now not to differentiate between practitioners and scholars. We are all servitors of the same domain of dance and need to stand together, and preferably speak the same language. This is what we are trying to do via SADI also.

Note: This interview first appeared in narthaki.com