Siva as Nataraja in Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s essay The Dance of Śiva

This brief note intends to take a re-look at Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s celebrated essay, The Dance of Shiva, from his collection of essays of the same name, totry and locate his focus on the Ananda-tandava form as a bearer of meaning within the various dance postures representing the god in Indian sculptural tradition. As a cursory exercise in reviewing literature pertinent to the essay in question, this note traces divergent responses to the Dance of Shiva from scathing criticism to relative empathy of perspective. Taking cue from a remark within Coomaraswamy’s essay, the present note terminates with an index towards the possibility of ‘reading’ the sculptural rendition of the Anandatandava beyond the philosophical-religious connotations and extending into more fundamental metaphors across geographical boundaries, where science and visual arts might appear to share territory, as it seems evident through the celebration of the Nataraja image at CERN, and the equally celebrated eulogy from the French sculptor August Rodin on the Ananda-tandava form in bronze images from southern India.