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:
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."
