TheDaak review

Kanika Gupta, The Cursed Land of Lustful Women and The Power of Storytelling (Performance Text with Notes), New Delhi, India, Kaveri Books, 2023, 90 pages, 2.2 x 18 x 2 cm, ISBN: 9386463237, INR 695/-

By Namrata

Introduction

Dr. Kanika Gupta’s The Cursed Land of Lustful Women and The Power of Storytelling: Performance Text with Notes (2023) presents an unusual and significant intervention in the study of Indian cultural history and performance. Emerging from a devised performance created during an art residency, the book operates simultaneously as a performance text, a commentary on myth and ecology, and a methodological reflection on the possibilities of storytelling. Gupta, an art historian, dancer, and filmmaker, has previously worked on the anonymity of ancient sculptors (Lupadakhe: Unknown Master Sculptors of Ancient India, 2019). In this later work, however, she departs from art-historical formalism to engage with performance as a living archive where ancient voices, silenced subjectivities, and ecological imaginaries are re-animated for contemporary audiences.

The book’s strength lies in its hybridity: it is neither a conventional script, nor purely ethnographic, nor strictly academic. Instead, it invites the reader into a dialogic space where myth, performance, and commentary intersect. The text thereby contributes to ongoing debates in performance studies, ecofeminism, and postcolonial historiography by proposing that the act of storytelling can itself be a critical method of inquiry.

Structure and Content

The volume is divided into two interdependent parts: the devised performance text itself, and the accompanying “notes” by the artist, which function both as contextual apparatus and reflective commentary. The performance text is composed of interwoven narratives drawn from ancient Indian literary sources, particularly the Jātaka tales and the Gāthāsaptasati, as well as myths of trees, forests, and their presiding deities.

Gupta foregrounds motifs that have historically been overlooked or dismissed: the intimate relationship between women and trees, the sacrality of forests, and the sensual, often ambiguous agency of nature spirits such as yakṣīs and yakṣiṇīs. These

 stories, revoiced through devised performance, foreground perspectives rarely acknowledged in the classical canon, particularly the voices of women and forest communities, who remain marginal in literary and historical sources.

The accompanying notes expand on these fragments, situating them in broader discourses of mythology, environmental history, and feminist critique. Gupta’s reflections acknowledge the aesthetic splendour with which forests and rivers were described in ancient texts, while also recogniszing how much of this has been eclipsed in the modern imagination by notions of progress and luxury. The notes, therefore, frame the devised text as both an act of recovery and of resistance: recovery of silenced cosmologies, and resistance against anthropocentric narratives that dominate contemporary ecological thought.

Storytelling as Methodology

A central contribution of the book is its theoriszation of storytelling not merely as content but as methodology. Gupta argues that storytelling enables a multidimensional engagement with the past, one that is neither bound by linear chronology nor by disciplinary boundaries. In this sense, the book resonates with Richard Schechner’s argument that performance is restored behaviour, an iterative process where past actions are re-enacted and transformed in the present (Schechner, 2002). Gupta’s text demonstrates this principle by re-staging ancient tales not as historical artefacts but as living, performative encounters that speak to today’s environmental crisis.

The inclusion of notes alongside the performance text also recalls Kapila Vatsyayan’s insistence that Indian aesthetic traditions cannot be divorced from their performative enactments. Vatsyayan (1997) repeatedly emphasiszed the layered simultaneity of Indian art forms — textual, visual, and performative — a principle that Gupta’s hybrid text enacts by fusing narration with commentary.

Ecocritical and Feminist Dimensions

The ecological stakes of Gupta’s work are particularly urgent. By foregrounding trees, rivers, and forests as active presences in myth, the book challenges anthropocentric paradigms and aligns with recent trends in ecocriticism that emphasisze the agency of nonhuman actors (Haraway, 2016; Chakrabarty, 2009). Gupta’s invocation of ancient motifs is not nostalgic but strategic: it highlights ways in which premodern cultures conceptualized human-nature relationships as reciprocal, sensuous, and sacred, in contrast to modern exploitative frameworks. Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (1988) similarly foregrounds the symbiotic relationship between women and nature in Indian contexts, a framework that Gupta implicitly continues through performance rather than policy critique.

The feminist dimension of the work is equally significant. The title itself, The Cursed Land of Lustful Women, recalls the long history of associating female desire with danger and excess. Gupta subverts this trope by reframing women not as cursed figures but as custodians of ecological wisdom, often entwined with trees and rivers in ways that challenge binaries of purity and pollution, sacred and profane. This resonates not only with global feminist critiques (Mohanty, 2003) but also with A.K. Ramanujan’s explorations of folk tales, where women’s voices often disrupt patriarchal norms through wit, desire, and subversion (Ramanujan, 1991).

Contribution to Scholarship

Gupta’s book contributes to multiple fields simultaneously. For performance studies, it expands the archive of devised performance in India by demonstrating how myth can be staged not simply as folklore but as a mode of critical intervention. For art history and mythology, it demonstrates the methodological potential of combining textual analysis with performative practice. For ecocritical scholarship, it provides a non-Western genealogy of ecological thought that foregrounds reciprocity, sensuality, and divinity in human-nature relations.

At the same time, the book raises important questions for further research. How might devised performances such as Gupta’s be archived and transmitted beyond the page? To what extent can mythological material be mobilized for contemporary ecological advocacy without essentialiszing or romanticiszing the past? And how might performance texts engage more explicitly with the communities whose oral traditions inspire them? These questions do not diminish the book’s value but rather highlight its generative potential for future scholarship.

Conclusion

The Cursed Land of Lustful Women and The Power of Storytelling: Performance Text with Notes is a bold, hybrid work that defies easy categoriszation. It is at once a performance script, a scholarly reflection, and a manifesto for ecological and feminist re-imagination. By weaving together myth, performance, and commentary, Dr. Kanika Gupta demonstrates how storytelling can serve as both archive and method, enabling us to confront the present ecological crisis through the wisdom of the past.

For scholars of performance, art history, mythology, and ecocriticism, this book offers not only rich material but also a methodological provocation: that scholarship itself might learn from the performative, the fragmentary, and the storied. It is a text that rewards both close reading and imaginative engagement, and it deserves to be recogniszed as a significant contribution to contemporary debates on myth, gender, and ecology.

References

• Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197–222.
• Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Ramanujan, A. K. (1991). Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-two Languages. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Schechner, R. (2002). Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
• Shiva, V. (1988). Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books.
• Vatsyayan, K. (1997). The Square and the Circle of Indian Arts. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications.

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