Navigating the Menaka-Archive : An interdisciplinary platform on entangled histories of modern dance across India and Europe

The Menaka-Archive (www.menaka-archive.org) is a digital meta-archive which houses and links documents on the Indian dancer and choreographer Leila Roy-Sokhey, alias Madame Menaka. The focus of the digital collection is on material from the context of the three-year tour that Leila Roy undertook with her Indian ballet through Europe and especially through Germany from 1936–38. In this paper, we describe the structure of the digital Menaka-Archive and some of the methodological approaches we have been exploring in researching, indexing, describing, and contextualizing its collection.