Namrata
Kanika Gupta’s book announces itself as a double movement in a single score: a devised performance text that conjures forests, trees, and their deities, and an accompanying apparatus of notes that reflects on storytelling as method. Read together, they form a unified argument, that myth, performance, and environmental memory can be reactivated for the present and a unified practice, where the repertoire of story meets the reflective discipline of scholarship.
Form and Intent
Conceived in the context of an art residency, the performance portion stages tales of groves and guardians from the artist’s point of view. The Jātaka corpus, the Gāthāsaptasati, and the enduring Indian motif of the woman-and-tree are Gupta’s choice of sources. They are not ornamental citations but compositional. These materials are recomposed into scenes and monologues that imagine how nature once spoke through feminine forms and how those forms, now muted, might be heard again. The accompanying “Power of Storytelling” notes render the book pedagogically legible. They show the scaffolding, of sources consulted, choices made, and the ethics of retelling. The book is therefore not just what the performance says; it is also how the performance thinks.
Revoicing the Erased Archive
Gupta begins from a historical contradiction. Classical literature overflows with lush forests and sensuous rivers, yet the voices of forest communities and women are scantly inscribed in the canonical record. Her devised text steps into that absence without pretending to fill it with authenticity, instead, it re-sounds the archive, offering a contemporary voicing that acknowledges its own mediation. The effect is not reconstruction but re-enchantment. Readers encounter scenes where trees are protagonists, guardians, judges, and kin.
The title’s provocation, “Lustful Women,” is deliberate. Rather than reproduce a trope, Gupta turns it. Desire here is not a moral failing to be disciplined. It is life-force, a reminder that the feminine and the arboreal share an unruly vitality. In temple sculpture this energy appears as the śālabhañjikā or yakṣiṇī, a hand raised to bend a bough at the threshold between human and divine. In Gupta’s staging, that visual code becomes ethic and epistemology: “The woman-with-tree is a figure of reciprocity, not domination; intimacy with nature, not its extraction.”
Ecological Critique without Didacticism
The book’s environmental intervention is a felt argument. An artist’s note remarks that much of the world’s beauty has been traded for an artificial idea of luxury. The performance dramatizes this observation by moving between sensuous descriptions and the blunt facts of loss. Still, the text resists despair. Its wager is that to recover enchantment is to recover care: if the forest is again a site of story, rite, and relation, it cannot be so easily converted into commodity. By placing the problem of climate change within older cosmologies of kinship like that of tree spirits, river goddesses, and sentient landscapes, the book insists that sustainability is spiritual, technical, and cultural.
The Story as Method
What distinguishes this volume is the second movement, that of the “Performance Text with Notes.” Here Gupta unpacks her craft with uncommon clarity. The notes do three things at once:
Source-mapping: They anchor images and scenes to textual or iconographic lineages (Jātaka episodes, Gāthāsaptasati poetics, sculptural motifs), letting readers trace inheritance without confusing inspiration with citation.
Methodological reflection: They demonstrate how a devised process works—how fragments become scenes; how gesture, rhythm, and point of view are chosen; how silence (what cannot be responsibly voiced) is handled.
Ethical framing: They make explicit the politics of retelling myths involving women and communities historically spoken-for. This transparency is not ancillary; it is the book’s critical conscience.
In a field where performance is often presented without its thinking, and scholarship without its body, Gupta’s decision to knit story and notes together is exemplary. The book models practice-as-research for readers across disciplines—art history, performance studies, environmental humanities—without sacrificing readability.
Intertextual Energies: Jātaka and Gāthāsaptasati
Two intertexts animate the performance. From the Jātakas, Gupta inherits a pedagogy of example, moral worlds where animals speak, trees counsel, and human action has ecological consequence. From the Prakrit lyric of the Gāthāsaptasati, she takes a poetics of compression: brief, sensuous, and charged. The book does not mimic those forms but converts their energies: the didactic becomes embodied scene, the epigram becomes stage image. This conversion is key. It allows ancient materials to live again without being trapped in historicist display.
Contribution and Stakes
The volume’s most important contribution is conceptual. It refuses the separation of myth from the present, of environment from aesthetics, of scholarship from performance. The claim is straightforward yet profound: “If stories once taught a way of living with forests, they can do so again, not as nostalgia, but as renewed practice.”In this sense, the book travels alongside contemporary eco-criticism while insisting on South Asian vocabularies of relation that predate modern categories.
As a public-facing object, the book is also useful. Teachers can assign the performance text and then invite students into the notes to discuss adaptation, ethics, and method. Artists can mine the apparatus for strategies of devised work grounded in research. Curators and museum educators will recognize a model for interpretive transparency, how to show audiences the paths by which narrative is made.
A Note on Limits
Because the work embraces re-voicing, some readers may long for more explicit transcription of primary sources or fuller ethnographic context around forest communities. Gupta’s choice to privilege performance intelligence over philological density is a principled one, and the notes do much to mitigate possible gaps. Still, the book implicitly invites further companion pieces, perhaps a reader of source excerpts, or a visual dossier of the sculptural motifs that the performance animates.
The Cursed Land of Lustful Women and The Power of Storytelling (Performance Text with Notes) is a coherent, capacious book: a forest of scenes and a clearing of thought. Its wager is that telling a story, carefully, responsibly, with attention to the old gods of bark and river, can change what we notice, what we honor, what we refuse to destroy. By binding devised performance to an ethics of annotation, Kanika Gupta does more than memorialize a show; she offers a method for making meaning in a time of ecological precarity. The result is a work that is at once sensuous and rigorous, timely and timeless, an invitation to listen, again, for the voices in the trees.
The book can be purchased here.
Namrata is a literary critic and columnist whose work focuses on the intersections of gender, literature, and media.
