Found: Vyjayanthimala's Devadasi Dance in Piya Milan (Choreographed by V.S. Muthuswami Pillai)

Huge thanks are due to Mr. Naidu for uploading Vyjayanthimala's dance in the 1958 Hindi film Piya Milan (a dub of the 1956 Tamil film Marma Veeran) which was choreographed by the hereditary nattuvanar V.S. Muthuswami Pillai.  I had speculated in my recent post (part one) on Muthuswami's film choreographies that this dance would be as fabulous as his direction of Vyjayanthimala in Chittoor Rani Padmini—and how true that turned out to be!  But what stunned me most about the dance is that it appears to be a preserved example of the "Sadir" devadasi dance of yore known today as Bharatanatyam. It wasn't only the court setting and the costume but also the actual choreography and body language that signified this identification and caught my attention.

As I first watched the dance I could tell that something was different, and by the end I was struck by my reaction and the way I connected with the dance.  I couldn't quite articulate why I thought it was an example of devadasi choreography or what it was that made the viewing experience so different from watching Vyjayanthimala's Bharathanatyam in Chittoor Rani Padmini.  The dance had a certain je ne sais quoi that was unlike anything I'd seen before.  When I first covered the topic of Devadasi-Like Dances in Classic South Indian Films, I focused more on the trappings of the dance like the time period, physical setting, camera work, and patron-focus.  But I didn't have the knowledge to comment much on the actual movements and choreography.  Blogger RameshRam had helped me form a very general view of what made devadasi dance different from its reworked Bharathanatyam form—essentially a wider berth given to internalized skill/spontaneity/grace versus strict classicism/statuesqueness/set parameters.  But when I saw Vyjayanthimala's dance in Piya Milan, I knew that the subject was begging for further analysis and nuance.  None of the devadasi film dances I'd seen so far had charmed me in such an intense way! What was it that made two dance choreographies designed by the same talented nattuvanar feel so different?

In conversation with blogger RameshRam, I learned that he not only felt the same charm in viewing the dance but also articulated the differences instantly and provided a fascinating analysis.  Ramesh doesn't formally write much about dance, but he has a wealth of knowledge about Bharathanatyam and devadasi dance.  I invited Ramesh to share his views which I have edited slightly and provided screencaps for. Read on below to watch the two dances and read Ramesh's excellent piece and thought-provoking conclusion.

Continue Reading >>>

15 comments Bharatanatyam, Devadasis, Muthuswami Pillai, Vyjayanthimala

Adventures in Date-ing the BritishPathe Devadasi Dance and Video

Since I last posted about the amazing video find of two South Indian devadasis dancing in Baroda around the 1930s, I have been obsessed with finding proof of two things: the identities of the devadasis, and the true date the video footage was filmed.

BritishPathe has no documentation for the video (only noting it "appears to be some kind of celebration") and through personal communication with me confirmed that the "1930-35" date estimate was based only on other films found in the same canister.  I'm excited to reveal my research on this incredible footage of not only pre-revival "Bharatanatyam" but also royal activities in a princely state before Indian independence!  While the identity question is still being investigated, I feel like I can make an educated guess about the date: mid to late 1920s, most likely 1926!  This is based on the youthful appearance of Pratapsingrao in the video and the fact that a BritishPathe film crew was present and would likely have only done so for especially large events, most likely the 1926 Golden Jubilee.

Why is the Date Important?

Beyond being able to give a date estimate for a rare video with no documentation, I find the date determination important because if it was really filmed around 1926, the dance segment is an example of "Bharatanatyam" dance before most of the significant legal events and reconstruction activities towards the devadasi lifestyle and dance occurred in India and before the "dance revival" of the 1930s.  In the Madras Presidency, Muthulakshmi Reddy didn't make her recommendation to the Legislative Assembly to criminalize temple dedication until 1927, the Music Academy of Madras was not even founded until 1928-29, E. Krishna Iyer presented the first dancers from the traditional community at the annual conference starting in 1931, and it was years later before Rukmini Devi Arundale presented her arangetram in the dance form and created the institution Kalakshetra.  Closer home to Baroda, the neighboring Bombay Presidency did not enact its anti-devadasi legislation until 1934 [7].  While anti-devadasi sentiment and actions had been in place across the subcontinent since the mid 1800s, the fact that the video appears to have been filmed in a princely state before the most fervent formalization of the sentiment makes it especially important to the historical record.

But what has also been fascinating is that getting to my 1926 estimate resulted in a rich yield of research and rare photos about the princely state of Baroda (presently Vadodara) which I'm excited to share here.  I've been able to identify a few people in the video as well as nearly all the filming locations!

Identifying the Royal Family

Continue Reading >>>

8 comments Devadasis, Rare Find, Research

The Devadasi Video Mystery Solved! Gujarat and its Bharatanatyam Legacy

(Update: Make sure to also read a follow-up post I made in June 2013, "Adventures in Date-ing the BritishPathe Devadasi Dance and Video.")

Back in July, I discussed a stunningly-rare video clip (Update: Replaced link with better quality version after BritishPathe transferred its videos to YouTube!) I had found at BritishPathe.com featuring two South Indian devadasis dancing some clear Sadir/Bharatanatyam along with their musical ensemble filmed allegedly between 1930 and 1935. I initially was perplexed as to why South Indian devadasis would be performing at a royal function in Baroda, a city now known as Vadodara in the northwest state of Gujarat which is over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away from Tamil Nadu state. Then I remembered a picture of two devadasis (left) who looked eerily similar from Ashish Mohan Khokar’s “Century of Indian Dance" exhibition catalog, and the picture’s description noted how Tanjore devadasis were sent to Baroda with the dowry of the Tanjore princess Chimnabai when she married the Maharaja of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III, in 1883.  Were the dancers in that photo the same as the video?  And if so (which is a RARE FIND!), who were they?

Devadasis appear 8:07

The big break in figuring out their identity came when dance enthusiast Ragothaman (a contributor at the blog Bharatanatyam and the Worldwide Web) sent me some excellent material he had found that identified the dowry dancers said to be sent in the early 1880s as Gauri and Kanthimathi (also spelled other ways, Gawri, Gaura, Kantimati, etc.). The only problem was sources say Gauri was born in 1871 and Kanthimati in 1872, which would mean they were around age 60 when the video was filmed in the 1930s.  The video dancers certainly don't look 60!  Another possibility was that BritishPathe identified the video incorrectly and it was really filmed much earlier, but given the photos and dates below this is highly unlikely.  I think it's safe to say that the video dancers are not the famous Gauri and Kanthimathi. At first I was really disappointed by this news, but then a bit more logic and research revealed a fascinating history!

Gauri and Kanthimathi's Replacement Dancers

While the video dancers are not Gauri and Kanthimathi (more on them later), I'm convinced they are the court dancers who officially replaced Gauri and Kanthimathi after their retirement. There is a discrepancy among sources (Kothari, Sundaram) regarding exactly when they retired from court services, but the more plausible citation is that they served for 32 and 35 years respectively, putting their retirement date sometime in the 1910s or early 1920s. The video was filmed sometime in the 1930s, about 10-20 years after the point when Gauri and Kanthimathi retired and the new replacement dancers would have came to Baroda.  The appearance of the video dancers backs this up; I've been told they look like they are in their 30s, so rewinding 10-20 years would mean they were pre-teens or teens when they were brought to Baroda which is as expected. Their service ended in 1950 when the royal family stopped maintaining court dancers.

Continue Reading >>>

27 comments Devadasis, Rare Real-Life Footage, Research

Kalavantulu/Devadasi Dances in the films Muddu Bidda and Periyar (An Ode to Davesh Soneji's Latest Book)

I've been posting a bit less frequently lately because I've been completely distracted by the discovery of a decent amount of fascinating scholarly research and writing on the subjects of the history of India's "classical" dance forms and "devadasi" women, the movements in the early to mid-twentieth century to "revive" these dance forms and mark traditional practitioners as degenerated and debased, and the history of early cinema and sound recording in South India. 

One of my favorites among the scholars writing on these subjects is Davesh Soneji whose most recent work has greatly inspired me and fueled the fire for this post.  Soneji has worked on two very fascinating compilations, first as the co-editor for Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India and second as the editor for Bharatanatyam: A Reader.  The former has some enlightening essays, and includes the excellent piece "Memory and the Recovery of Identity: Living Histories and the Kalavantulu of Coastal Andhra Pradesh" by Soneji himself that I linked to full-text in my post on devadasi-like dances in South Indian films.  The latter work I found particularly valuable in the way that it provides an excellent overview of the varied and complicated history of what we today call Bharatanatyam. 

But it's Soneji's latest work, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (click the link to preview at Google Books), that astounded me by presenting perspectives and bits of information that I've hardly seen in most other scholarly writing on the subject. For this post, I initially wanted to simply present videos I tracked down of two "devadasi" film dances Soneji discusses in the book and highlight the intriguing details he unearths.  But it's flowered into a fuller, but still brief, overview of the "secular" aspects of devadasi dance in South India that Soneji highlights. Or rather, this post is basically a long string of quotes from Soneji's book because I cannot possibly say it better than he does. :)

For those that may not be as familiar with the history of "devadasis" in South India, I thought Soneji's overview was worth quoting in full:

"From the late sixteenth-century Nayaka period onward, devadasis have functioned as courtesans, secular dance artists organized in guilds called melams, and temple workers, some of whom performed in the public spaces of certain Hindu temples.  However, these communities have always occupied an ambiguous status in South Indian society.  On the one hand, devadasis possessed a degree of social agency in that they were not restricted by the norms of patrifocal kinship.  They lived in quasi-matrilineal communities, had nonconjugal sexual relations with upper-caste men, and were literate when most South Indian women were not.  On the other hand...courtesans were commodities regularly bought and sold through the intercession of the court.  In other contexts, as the concubines, mistresses, or "second wives" of South Indian elites, they were implicated in a larger world of servitude focused on the fulfillment of male desire.  Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, vociferous social reform movements in South India aimed to dislodge communities of professional dancing women from their hereditary performance practices.  Over the next hundred years, their lifestyles were criminalized on the basis of their nonconjugal sexuality, which was understood as prostitution.  The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act, implemented in 1947, officially outlawed the social, ritual, and aesthetic practices of these women." 

Continue Reading >>>

9 comments Devadasis, Krishnajyoti, Scholarly

Rare Video Clips of Devadasis, Uday Shankar & Simkie, Ram Gopal, and More

What a stunning find!  The wonderful commenter Gaddeswarup recently sent me a video from the site BritishPathé.com, and I'm grateful he did because when I explored the site further I found it houses some priceless footage of Indian dance.

British Pathé, a former film and newsreel company that "documented almost every aspect of everyday life in Britain and around the world in the 20th century" (BBC), has digitised its extensive archive ("90,000 videos from 1897-1970") online with free and full-length viewing for any visitor.  Given that Britain ruled the Indian subcontinent until 1947, the archive has a substantial number of clips of Indian events and every day life from the first half of the 20th century: independence, visits from British royalty, disorder and protests, ceremonies and weddings, festivals, politicians, dances, and much more.  Much of the older footage has a strong Orientalist tone; pictured on the left is a nice dance-related example from Indian Peeps (1930).

All of the videos can be purchased and downloaded, but since the listed duration of the videos for purchase are the same as their previews, I don't see any incentive to purchase them at exorbitant prices (30 Euros for a one-minute clip!).  What's most entertaining about the site is the descriptions; the catalogers given the job of dutifully describing each scene in every video must have gotten tired at some point because some of their phrasings are hilarious!  But I'm glad they went to that trouble because it allows the video events to be text searchable.

Unfortunately, none of the videos can be embedded, so you'll have to click on the lovely preview images to link to the video. Update: Now that BritishPathe transferred all its videos to YouTube, I've embedded them all below. Enjoy!

Devadasi Footage from the 1930s

The most important find has been a silent clip titled "Maharanee of Baroda" circa 1930-1935.  Starting at 8:06, two devadasi dancers perform in front of their musical ensemble.  The footage is stunning - the dancers are dressed exactly like those in old archival photos from this time period and before; it's as if the old photos have come to life!  They begin by dancing what looks like the alarippu portion of a Sadir/present-day Bharatanatyam performance, then move onto a more free-flowing, folksy dance style, and then return to Sadir/Bharatanatyam around 11:30.  The musicians and their instruments are fascinating; I've read accounts of how bagpipes used to be part of Sadir performances before the dance form was recreated as Bharatanatyam- I wonder if the musician on the right is an example of what is meant by "bagpipe."  Last, we must of course remember that this was a staged performance for the camera, but its historical value is immense.

Dancers appear 8:07

Continue Reading >>>

18 comments Bulbul Chowdhury, Devadasis, Male Dance, Ram Gopal, Rare Real-Life Footage, Simkie, Uday Shankar

Devadasi-Like Dances in Classic South Indian Films

While browsing the website of the National Film Archive of India, I was excited to find that films in the catalog (which can be found through the search) have an extensive cast and crew list that in many cases identifies the choreographer!  [Update: This information no longer appears to be part of the search results that I could see.] The archives have quite a few South Indian titles back to the early 1930s and the majority of them have a choreographer identified, amazingly.  Armed with this information, I did some web searching and found that quite a few dances from 1940s South Indian films immediately struck me as looking like Devadasi dances.

Continue Reading >>>

33 comments Balasaraswati, Devadasis, Research, TR Rajakumari, Vyjayanthimala