The Body I Return To
The traits that define me – brown skin, a long dark braid, the faint scent of coconut oil that lingered no matter how much I tried to wash it out – have always betrayed me. I could never escape what I was, no matter how hard I tried to bury it.
Growing up Indian American, you become fluent in translation – not just between languages, but between selves. You learn to soften the edges of your “Indian-ness” so that you don’t make people uncomfortable. You mispronounce your own name. You stop eating the food you love. You smile at the microaggressions: “Oh, you don’t sound Indian,” “You’re pretty for an Indian girl,” “But where are you really from?” Each phrase is meant as a compliment, yet slices away a layer of identity. It is a quiet, constant violence: a reminder that whiteness is the baseline, and everything else is deviation.
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Boys have never liked me. I have always craved the quiet, simple proof of being wanted – the glance that lingers, the compliment that feels as though it belongs to me, but growing up, that proof was never mine. I was too dark, had too much arm hair, and was too much of myself to fit into the narrow visions of beauty I saw celebrated around me. I wanted to be recognized, to be loved, to feel that the world saw me as something beyond a deviation from its ideals.
The gaze – the way we are made to see ourselves through the perception of others, internalizes their judgment as truth. Every glance that skirted past me, every whispered remark about my skin or body, became a mirror I could not escape, reflecting an image I did not choose. Desire is never about affection; it is a subtle mechanism of power, of inclusion and exclusion. It measures who deserves attention and love, and who does not. As a child, I understood that the world had already chosen who was worthy of being seen.
In America, I am too brown, too Indian, too present in ways that make others uncomfortable. In India, I am too loud, too assertive, too unwilling to shrink into the quiet, deferential version of womanhood society expects. My whole life, I have been stretched thin across cultures, gazes, and expectations that will never fully recognize me, my very being measured against ideals I can’t meet, and yet, I am expected to inhabit both worlds flawlessly.
And so, for years, I performed belonging. I tucked my heritage behind me and measured myself through the eyes of others, molding myself into what they found palatable. Slowly, I began to lose the rhythm of myself. My body, too, learned to shrink – to sit smaller, to take up less space, to move less boldly; and in shrinking, I forgot how to inhabit myself fully.
Then Bharatanatyam found me. The very thing I once wanted to distance myself from became the way I found that rhythm again.
When I dance, something in me softens. For a long time, I loathed my body for everything it could not be, but when I dance, under the weight of rhythm and breath, I start to forgive it. The same skin I once wished away holds power here; the same features I tried to hide become part of the story. While dance doesn’t fix the ache of not belonging, it gives it shape, it allows me to carry pain differently. That is what healing is – not erasing the hurt, but moving through it with grace. Bharatanatyam is more than a dance form; it is a language – a language of devotion, discipline, and storytelling, older than colonization, older than the shame I once carried.
Bharatanatyam embodies what it means to grow up between worlds: to carry ancient rhythm in a modern body, to speak two languages and feel like neither fits completely, to carry a culture that is celebrated and erased, revered and exoticized, all at once. Dance is resistance; it became my method of inhabiting my body fully, of reclaiming the dimensions of self that had been deemed unacceptable, and of moving in harmony with centuries of feminine knowledge that refuse to be erased. I was taught to listen to a body that I spent years resenting. I moved through the world wanting to be softer, smaller – something easier for others to look at, easier to love; but dance, it doesn’t let you hide. It forces you to meet yourself where it hurts.
I used to look at my body in parts. Too much of this, not enough of that. Dance forces you to see it as a single, coherent instrument. You cannot execute the rhythm if your mind is at war with your limbs. I realized that dance forms a truce; it is a practical negotiation. My body offers its strength, and I, in return, stop trying to betray it. You learn the one thing you always needed to know: that this body, exactly as it is, is capable of creating something beautiful and powerful. The proof? The proof is not in a compliment or a glance, but in the movement itself.
Now, I understand that assimilation is the slowest kind of forgetting, and reclaiming what you are is the boldest act of resistance. When I dance, I grieve the girl who thought she had to earn softness, who thought beauty was something she had to chase. And yet, even as grief seeps through my muscles and the marrow of my bones, there is a strange tenderness in remembering, a kind of fragile redemption.
Even now, there are days when I feel caught between two worlds, when I worry that my American life has diluted my Indian roots, or that my “Indianness” will always mark me as an outsider. Dance does not ask me to choose. It teaches me that I can be both, fully, that my body can be a bridge, my gestures a dialogue, my movement a reclamation.
I’ve learned that culture is not static; it breathes, adapts, and survives through us. The more I embrace it, the more I realize it is not separate from me. It lives in my movement, my voice, my hands.
This body, after everything, still chooses to move. Bharatanatyam is not just something I do. It is something I return to. A rhythm that began long before me and will outlive me. It is a home that does not need to be found – it has been under my feet all along, carrying me, teaching me, reminding me of who I am, and where I come from.