By Ashwathi Menon, Bioinformatics & Public Health Major, Student Staff Member
The first thing that comes into play is performance.
The jewelry. The eyeliner so sharp that it can be seen from the last row. The well-rehearsed smile remains unshaken under the lights of the stage. My South Asian heritage comes into our lives through performance—through the vibrancy and color of the thematic films, through dance, and through the celebrated aesthetics.
However, for us, in the South Asian diaspora, culture goes beyond performance.
It is memory. It is an inheritance. It is a translation. It is survival.
During APIDA Heritage Month, there is one question that loops me more than others: how often does culture become something to consume before it is even understood as something normative to society? How can people be impressed by the beauty of South Asian culture without understanding much of the life, struggle, and history that lies beneath it?
Sometimes, being a South Asian woman raised in a Western society means negotiating these two things every day.
Bharatanatyam is a classical dance from Southern India, characterized by storytelling using the language of dance, rhythm, and expression. The hand gestures, called mudras, form an entire language on their own. A single movement can symbolize a flower, rain, heartbreak, prayer, or power. The eyes shift deliberately. The posture remains grounded and strong through aramandi, the half-seated position that forms the foundation of the dance. The face carries emotion just as much as the body does.
In Bharatanatyam, you do not simply dance. You communicate.
The drishti bhedas, the controlled eye movements, require directness. The mudras ask your hands to speak confidently before your voice ever does. The entire form teaches you to take up space physically and emotionally without apologizing for it.
I think that mattered to me long before I had the words to explain why.
The nature of diasporic communities is inherently complex. You were raised with a profound understanding of your homeland, knowing that it exists and yet feeling distant from it. Your traditions have been taught to you secondhand, filtered through generations of parents, language, culture, and customs.
Some days, I feel deeply rooted in my culture. Other days, I feel like I am constantly trying to prove my authenticity, not only to others but also to myself.
Too American in some spaces. Too Indian in others.
I imagine many APIDA students understand this feeling all too well: the struggle of protecting your culture while constantly adapting- the exhaustion of translating yourself so others can comprehend better. It’s a feeling that’s familiar in your day-to-day environments, from classes to leadership positions to informal social gatherings.
Growing up, I’ve repeatedly seen people perceive South Asian women as their projections until they actually get to know us, the studious model minority. The accomplishments are noticed before we are. But life, and especially identity, is far more complicated than this.
Dancing was one of the few things where I ceased to feel pressure. Not because it solved all the conflicts inside me, but because it let me exist amidst them. Bharatanatyam made me realize that strength and grace did not negate each other, that rigor and emotion could coexist, that being visible could be both vulnerable and invigorating.
And perhaps that is why dancing holds such personal significance for me.
Not because of the act of performance itself, but for everything else it represents: continuation, preservation, the refusal to silently vanish.
Especially now, in APIDA Heritage Month, I consider how many children of immigrants go through life translating themselves for everyone else. Softening names. Bringing light to cultural practices. Adapting oneself to be easy to comprehend, bringing centuries’ worth of history into spaces never designed to accommodate it.
But with dance, there is no need for translation. My body just gets it.
Under vivid stage lights, my hands move instinctively through mudras, reflections of the younger version of myself who practiced relentlessly for years. My eyes meet the audience with confidence.
I am finally whole.