A spatial history of local dance and the dancing girls in the Swat Valley of Pakistan

This paper contributes to the dance scholarship in South Asia by exploring a local variety of the practitioners of folk dance. It does so by looking into the spatial history of dance and dancing girls in the Pakhtun society of the Swat Valley of Pakistan. I offer an understanding of dance as an art form in the Pakhtun society and its spatial reconfiguration in Swat. This understanding goes beyond the politically embedded local literature and international literature on dancing girls, embedded in the statist and neoliberal concerns in the post-Taliban Swat. To demonstrate this, I draw on anthropological, historical and archaeological literatures on Swat, along with interviews conducted with dancing girls, singers, poets, cultural activists and audiences of dance who lived in the Swati state before its merger into Pakistan and at the time of Taliban's violence in 2007-9.