Capitalization in the English language is a device often used to mark words with special status. So I ask, what’s so special about bharatanatyam that so many people tend to capitalize the word? Other dance forms such as ballet, hip-hop, and samba are not capitalized, and so, bharatanatyam need not be treated differently. Grammatically speaking, it is not a proper noun. Just like saree, lengha, dosa, and chutney, which are widespread, familiar, everyday things, South Asian dance traditions such as bharatanatyam, kathak, garba, and bhangra are general common nouns. Simple.
My comments could end here, but my hunch is that grammar debates are not at the heart of why the “b” often appears uppercase.
I am suspicious of the largely subconscious motivations for commonly capitalizing the “b”. Capitalizing bharatanatyam feels to me largely like an act of othering or exoticizing the form. To capitalize it is to exclude it. This occurs in a world that still centers Western movement traditions as “dance” and peripheralizes other global forms as “other dance” or “ethnic dance”. This, I am not a fan of.
This othering especially seems the case when done in American or European spaces, but it is worthy of scrutiny even in South Asian contexts. After all, there is no such thing as lowercase or uppercase letters in the Sanskrit language’s Devanagari script. So how, why, and when do we decide to employ those distinctions when we communicate in English? For desi practitioners throughout the diaspora, our thoughtfulness around how we use and choose language to illuminate our practices is an important part of our cultural work. It is a small but significant opportunity to decolonize our minds and demand that conversations are not framed with an underlying assumption that we are somehow different, less than, or in need of a capital letter to project our legitimacy. Here is a chance to acknowledge how political dynamics and psychological needs are embedded in our language.
Of course, there are moments when capitalization will still occur - at the beginning of a sentence, in a title, when a specific style such as Kalakshetra bharatanatyam is described, or when the word takes on a commercial meaning such as in a business name. But these are the exceptions to what I believe should otherwise always be a lowercase “b” in bharatanatyam.
Capitalization is also a way of drawing attention to something, which means it can take attention away from something else. When we give so much formal importance to the name of the form, it can serve as a distraction from the depth of ideas that surround it. Is the name bharatanatyam so important, or is it the ideas, stories, and experiences that come to life through the medium? Capitalizing the “b” makes the word feel too precious, as if we are talking about something so specific, defined, finite, and fixed that it deserves proper noun status. To me, the form is dynamic, versatile, deep, broad, and fluid. It is a container or a vehicle for many possibilities. Instead of imbuing the word with so much seriousness, a lowercase “b” de-emphasizes the word bharatanatyam and elevates the meaningful, artistic moments that employ it.
And so, I do not capitalize the “b” in bharatanatyam.