By Aditya Raj
In a gender studies class, Tanushree Nagaveni encountered the idea that gender can also be ‘performed’. The word immediately caught her attention.
She had spent years performing Bharatanatyam. On stage, she was accustomed to moving between characters, sometimes portraying a man and sometimes a woman, using gait, stance, gesture, expression and movement to tell the audience who that character was.
But she had rarely stopped to ask what those choices themselves communicated about gender.
“When I portray a male character, what am I changing in my body to communicate masculinity? When I portray a woman, what ideas about femininity am I reproducing?” she recalls wondering.
The questions eventually took her back to Choodare, a Kshetrayya padam she had learnt and performed.
What interested Tanushree was the position of the nayika at the centre of Choodare. Much of what the audience learns about the woman comes not directly from her, but through the observations, gossip and judgement of other women around her.
The question therefore became larger than how the composition ought to be performed: who has the power to define the woman being portrayed?
“I began to see gossip as a form of social surveillance through which a woman’s desire and behaviour are observed and regulated,” she says.
Her study, Analysing Gender in Bharatanatyam Padams: An Exploration of Choodare, began as an assessment during her BMS programme in Finance with a minor in Economics at Vidyashilp University. It later developed into a lecture-demonstration presented at Vidyashilp University, while a research paper based on the work was subsequently presented at FLAME University.
The research did not give her one definitive interpretation of the composition. Instead, it made her more conscious of the choices involved in performing it.
For Tanushree, who has trained under Vid. G.S. Nagesh and Dr Sriranjitha Nagesh, this intersection between academic inquiry and performance was not part of a plan to combine disparate subjects. It emerged because something encountered in one classroom changed the questions she asked elsewhere.
Following a Question
Tanushree does not believe that economics, Sanskrit, classical literature and Bharatanatyam necessarily belong together.
“I do not think every discipline has to connect with every other discipline,” she says. “For me, interdisciplinarity is more about having the freedom to follow a question wherever it genuinely leads.”
Sometimes those questions have led her from economics to classical literature.
The journey began much before university, when she was introduced to economics in Class 11. Curious about how people in the past lived, what they produced, consumed and exchanged, she began looking for economic questions in the world described in the Mahabharata.
That exploration eventually became a book, Jayārthashastra: Microeconomics through the Lens of an Epic, published in 2022.
Among the questions she examined was an apparently simple one: what if Yudhishthira had refused to play the game of dice?
Yudhishthira knows the risks. Vidura warns him. He knows Shakuni is an exceptionally skilled gambler. Yet he accepts the challenge.
Tanushree modelled the episode as a strategic interaction. Yudhishthira could gamble or refrain from gambling; Shakuni, if the game occurred, could play honestly or employ deceit.
Within the model, refraining was Yudhishthira’s better strategy regardless of Shakuni’s choice.
And yet he plays.
The limits of the model in explaining the character’s decision became, for Tanushree, as interesting as what it could explain.
“Rather than trying to make economics explain the Mahabharata, placing the two alongside each other helped me see what an economic model can illuminate and what can remain outside it,” she says.
From Derivatives to Kautilya
At university, similar questions continued to surface in unexpected places.
A class on the history of economic thought prompted Tanushree to examine ideas of wealth, taxation, credit, trade, welfare and governance across Indian texts and intellectual traditions.
She subsequently developed a student lecture, Artha and Itihāsa: The Evolution of Economic Thought in India, drawing on texts including the Vedas, Dharmashastras, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and Kautilya’s Arthashastra.
A derivatives class produced a different question.
While learning about forward contracts and their historical development, she began wondering how far back economic arrangements resembling such contracts could be traced. She returned to the Arthashastra to examine whether arrangements described there could be considered alongside the modern financial concept.
An epistemology course opened another direction. Questions about how knowledge is created and transmitted led her to examine the karanas of the Natyashastra as embodied knowledge: something that cannot be understood only intellectually, but must also be learnt through the body and practice.
For Tanushree, these experiences gradually changed what a classroom could mean.
“A course could give me a concept or a question, and I could take that question somewhere I had not anticipated,” she says.
Different Ways of Knowing
Moving between finance, classical texts and dance has also made her conscious that different disciplines demand different habits of mind.
Economics taught her to break a problem into parts, examine assumptions and work through models. Sanskrit and classical texts demanded patience with language, interpretation and context.
Her engagement with Bharatanatyam continues alongside her academic work. She is a B Grade Bharatanatyam artist with Doordarshan and secured the highest marks in the Sangeet Alankar examination in Dance conducted across the Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal’s centres in India and overseas.
She now hopes to pursue doctoral research, particularly around interdisciplinary questions involving economics, strategy, history and Indian intellectual traditions, while continuing to train and perform.
The disciplines may not always intersect.
For Tanushree, that is precisely the point.
Interdisciplinary learning, she says, is not about finding connections everywhere. It is about recognising when another way of thinking can deepen a question and knowing when it cannot.
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