Dr. Davesh Soneji
Chennai has been a major site for performative constructions of Indian and particularly Hindu heritage, a place where the gestures of every dancer seem loaded with political significance. Bharatanāṭyam, certainly one of India’s most cherished cultural exports, was created in Madras, and this city continues to be considered the capital of “Indian classical dance.” The practice and politics of Bharatanaāṭyam in today’s Chennai make palpable both realist and utopian visions of class, nation, religion, and aesthetics. The invention of South Indian “heritage” is both told and seen through Bharatanāṭyam. Indeed, embodied heritage, represented by Karnāṭak music and Bharatanāṭyam dance, is at the heart of South India’s urban, middle-class aspirations. In cities like Chennai, dance powerfully mediates the tensions between strangeness and familiarity, tradition and modernity, past and present.
One evening in December 2008, I arrived at an auditorium in Thyagaraya Nagar, Chennai, to attend a dance performance. …The dancer performed a “modern” Bharatanāṭyam varṇam. …Her varṇam was about the epic heroine Sītā. … The dancer, as it turns out, was an “NRI” Tamil Brahmin, visiting her hometown of Chennai for the music and dance season. This was her last show of the “season” before catching a flight back to California where, with the support of her engineer husband, she runs a dance school that admits over one hundred students.
This anecdote illustrates many aspects of the transnational middle-class morality and cultural economy in which Bharatanāṭyam lives as an art form today. It dramatizes, for example, the ways in which the Tamil Brahmin middle class valorizes bourgeois constructions of art that are clearly rooted in an ethos of orthodox, domestic roles for women. More- over, organizations like THAMBRAAS nurture Brahmin custodianship over the arts in public culture; they mobilize ideological connections between Brahmin heritage, the arts as cultural capital, and radical assertions of Hindutva in Tamil Nadu.
Brahmin propriety over Bharatanāṭyam has resulted in a reorientation of the aesthetic parameters of dance. These symbolic and somatic shifts have been documented at length by scholars. Religious and mythological themes — such as the interpretation of epic narratives seen in the example above — are key elements that self-consciously mark modern Bharatanāṭyam as distinct from courtesan dance. As Matthew Allen has noted, figures like Rukmini Arundale made no qualms about the repopulation of the dance world by Brahmins (Allen 1997), and certainly as M. S. S. Pandian has eloquently pointed out, Brahmin power in the material and cultural domain has been a signpost of Tamil modernity since the nineteenth century (Pandian 2007, 67–76). Today, Brahmin virtuosity in the arts is read as a sign of moral and cultural eminence. It has given rise to an aesthetic standard for dance that draws heavily from cinema, particularly religious cinema, and is, to be sure, highly innovative. “Brahmin taste,” to borrow to Kristen Rudisill’s term, is universalized through Chennai’s global, neoliberal economy. Young Americans and Europeans, for example, flock to Chennai’s music and dance season alongside “NRIs” and locals to participate in a moral and aesthetic “tradition” molded by an upper-caste consumer gaze.
Brahmin custodianship of the performing arts, however, does not completely disparage the guru of the devadāsī. Today, some of Chennai’s cultural elites — for the most part Brahmins associated with dance and music — have attempted to recuperate histories of certain devadāsīs whom they consider central to their enterprises of cultural production in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. The art world in modern Chennai thus commemorates a handful of twentieth-century devadāsī artists. These women have been strategically coopted into the scripts of cultural history precisely because they demonstrate “exceptional” qualities for women “of their background.” These carefully selected devadāsī artists, appropriated and authorized by the world of Chennai’s elites as representatives of tradition and heritage in the nationalist imagination, have come to occupy places in the history of arts that other devadāsīs could not.
As Indira Peterson and I have argued elsewhere, the nationalist reinvention of the arts cannot be read as the totalizing project of cultural modernity in South India (2008); however, the language of nationalist cultural modernity was clearly the only viable medium through which these “exceptional” devadāsīs were able to craft and stage their subjectivities. Thus, photographs of the dancer T. Balasaraswati (1918–1984) have made it into most coffee table books about “Indian classical dance,” tagged with captions like “Queen of Abhinaya,” even though modern performers of Bharatanāṭyam usually mock her dancing as sloppy and unfinished. The vocalist M. S. Subbulakshmi (1916–2004) married prominent Brahmin T. Sadasivam and rose to the cultural front ranks as a domestic icon for Karnāṭak music in its new twentieth-century form (Weidman 2006). Bangalore Nagarathnam (1878–1952) built a memorial (samādhi) for the poet-saint Tyāgarāja in 1925, and thus is remembered as an exceptionally pious devotee of the poet-saint himself. Mylapore Gauri Ammal (1892–1971) is commemorated as the first teacher of Rukmini Arundale and was “attached” to the Kapālīśvara temple in Mylapore, the preeminent site of smārta Brahmin cultural nostalgia in the heart of the city.
These token gestures toward the devadāsī community in the cultural life of modern Chennai are always accompanied by narrative maneuvres — what Maciszewski (2007) has called “mainstream gossip” about courtesans — that reify Brahmin claims over devadāsī performance practices. Mainstream gossip about these iconic devadāsīs includes, for example, stories that T. Balasaraswati did not want to teach her art or that Rukmini Arundale had to pay for the penniless Gauri’s funeral expenses. The strategic deployment of these narratives, whether they are true or not, allow middle-class practitioners to step into this history almost as “rescuers” who repopulate the degenerate arts world and revivify a lost cultural heritage.
Similarly, spaces associated with dance in the city, from the halls of corporate-sponsored cultural organizations (sabhās) to Kalakshetra, the state-sponsored arts institution established by Rukmini Arundale in 1936, belong to the realm of neo-traditional public memory. Visitors to these sites encounter the nation and its modernity through gender- and caste-inflected sociomoral discourses encoded in the performances they present. Bharatanāṭyam, as recollected in public memory, celebrates the marriage of capitalism and heritage that is at the core of South India’s neoliberal metropolis, described eloquently by Mary Hancock in her new work The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai (2008). Sites such as Chennai’s sabhā halls and Kalakshetra (true “lieux de memoire,” to return to Pierre Nora) are preservative in nature: they seek to memorialize authenticating traditions.
For the urban elite, there simply are no more “real” devadāsīs in the city, and thus the commemoration of a few “acceptable” devadāsī women becomes a viable, and certainly pro table, enterprise in the neoliberal economy of urban South India. Ultimately this renewed urban nostalgia about devadāsīs only reifies middle-class Brahmin claims to the retrieval and stewardship of devadāsī dance and music in the twentieth century. It disseminates historical, moral, and aesthetic pronouncements about devadāsī communities in a new cultural market, and inevitably dwells on the perceived successes of devadāsī reform. The lingering, undesirable differentness of stigma, however, systemically excludes devadāsīs from participating in these larger metropolitan and global flows of culture. (Excerpt from his Unfinished Gestures. Devadāsīs, Memory, and Modernity in South India — 2012. 222–225.)
(Dr. Davesh Soneji is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests lie at the intersections of social and cultural history, religion, and anthropology. For the past two decades, he has produced research that focuses primarily on religion and the performing arts in South India, but also includes work on gender, class, caste, and colonialism. He is best known for his work on the social history of professional female artists in Tamil and Telugu-speaking South India and is author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadāsīs, Memory, and Modernity in South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize from The Association for Asian Studies (AAS).
