Unfinished Gestures South Asia Across the Disciplines
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unfinished gestures South Asia Across the Disciplines A series edited by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sheldon Pollock, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly pub- lished by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press. The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place by Carla Bellamy (California) Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration by Yigal Bronner (Columbia) Secularizing Islamists? Jama‘at-e-Islami and Jama‘at-ud Da‘wa Pakistan by Humeira Iqtidar (Chicago) The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab by Farina Mir (California) Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History by Andrew J. Nicholson (Columbia) Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia by Ronit Ricci (Chicago) South Asia across the Disciplines is a series devoted to publishing fi rst books across a wide range of South Asian studies, including art, history, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences. Series authors all share the goal of opening up new archives and suggesting new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian schol- arship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal. unfinished gestures Devada¯sı¯s, Memory, and Modernity in South India davesh soneji the university of chicago press chicago and london Davesh Soneji is associate professor of South Asian religions at McGill University. He is coeditor of Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India and editor of Bharatanatyam: A Reader. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-76809-0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-76810-6 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-76809-0 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-76810-4 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Soneji, Devesh. Unfi nished gestures : devadasis, memory, and modernity in South India / Davesh Soneji. p. cm. — (South Asia across the disciplines) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-76809-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-76809-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-76810-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-76810-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Devadasis—India, South. 2. Devadasis—India, South—Social conditions. 3. Dance—Social aspects—India, South. 4. Prostitution—India, South. 5. Social change—India, South. I. Title. II. Series: South Asia across the disciplines. bl1237.58.d48s66 2011 306.6’94538082—dc23 2011020833 A portion of chapter 2 is a slightly altered version of an essay published in Davesh Soneji, ed., Bharatanatyam: A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press India, New Delhi. This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). for my family, muttukkannammal, and hymavathi AKKA contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: On Historical, Social, and Aesthetic 1 Borderlands 1. Producing Dance in Colonial Tanjore 27 2. Whatever Happened to the South Indian Nautch? Toward a Cultural History of Salon Dance in Madras 70 3. Subterfuges of “Respectable” Citizenship: Marriage and Masculinity in the Discourse of Devada¯sı¯ Reform 112 4. Historical Traces and Unfi nished Subjectivity: Remembering Devada¯sı¯ Dance at Viralimalai 161 5. Performing Untenable Pasts: Aesthetics and Selfhood in Coastal Andhra Pradesh 189 Coda: Gesturing to Devada¯sı¯ Pasts in Today’s Chennai 222 Appendix 1: Selected Documents from the Files of Muthulakshmi Reddy 227 Appendix 2: The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947 235 Notes 237 References 271 Index 297 vii introduction On Historical, Social, and Aesthetic Borderlands “REMEMBER ME AS I WAS” n December 2006, I traveled to the town of Thiruvidaimarudur in the IThanjavur district of Tamil Nadu. Across from the severely dilapi- dated palace of the Mara¯t.ha¯ king Amarasim. ha of Tanjore, I was told, lived Thiruvidaimarudur Nagalakshmi, a woman who was an active dancer in the 1930s–1940s. I knocked on the wooden door, but there was no answer. “A m ma¯?” I inquired. “Va¯ (Come),” replied a faint voice from inside the house. I gently pushed open the door, and there, in the middle of the house, seated on a chair in near-darkness, was eighty-year-old Nagalakshmi. As soon as I introduced myself and told her about my interest in her life, Na- galakshmi invited me to pull up a chair. She apologized that she could not offer me anything to eat or drink, because, quite frankly, she had noth- ing, she said, gesturing to the emptiness of the house. After an hour-long conversation in which she told me about the Tamil padam songs she used to perform, I asked if I could take a photograph of her. “Ve¯n. t.a¯m, pa¯ (No thanks)” she said, handing me a dusty old laminated photo (fi g. 0.1). “Take a photo of this photo,” she said. “Remember me as I was, not as I am. What would people think if they saw me in this state? This is not how I want to be remembered.” Nagalakshmi comes from a Tamil-speaking devada¯sı¯ community. Trained in dance by Kuppaiya Nattuvanar (1887–1981), she performed throughout the Thanjavur region in the 1930s—1940s and also toured Ceylon with her troupe. In the 1940s, however, her teacher moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) to teach dance in its reinvented avatar as middle- class, “classical” Bharatana¯t.yam, and Nagalakshmi’s own opportunities to dance were severely diminished, although she continued to perform 1 2 introduction 0.1 Tiruvidaimarudur Nagalakshmi, dressed to perform in the Carape¯ntira Pu¯pa¯la Kuravañci in Thanjavur, c. 1940. ˉ occasionally at weddings and local festivals. She successfully arranged the marriages of her three daughters, none of whom had anything to do with dance or music, and they, together with her grandchildren, continue to pro- vide for her, although she lives alone in Thiruvidaimarudur. Nagalakshmi is not alone in wanting to be remembered for who she was rather than who she is. Hundreds of unintegrated individuals, mainly women, from On Historical, Social, and Aesthetic Borderlands 3 devada¯sı¯ backgrounds in the Tamil- and Telugu-speaking regions of South India contend with this same disenfranchisement. Threaded through this book is an account of this peculiar social, civic, and aesthetic ambiguity, marked by encounters with modernity and voiced through memory. In this book, I approach the topic of devada¯sı¯s over the past two hun- dred years through slippages, fi ssures, and movement— Foucauldian “dis- continuities that offer history” (1969, 10). This history, like the lives of contemporary women in these communities, is always “in process,” per- vaded by a profound sense of incompleteness. Despite being the subject of a diverse range of political investments and competing agendas, this history remains critically unfi nished. The loose ends of the moralizing projects of colonial and postcolonial modernity, a dance aesthetic that has lost its value, and incipient possibilities of citizenship for devada¯sı¯s are all emblems of the unfi nished pasts of devada¯sı¯s in South India. Attentive to the historical fi ssures and uneven movements that underwrite the proj- ect of cultural modernity in South India, this study of devada¯sı¯s critically foregrounds the interface between politics, aesthetics, and sexuality. From the late sixteenth-century Na¯yaka period onward, devada¯sı¯s have functioned as courtesans, secular dance artists organized in guilds called me¯l.ams, and temple workers, some of whom performed in the pub- lic spaces of certain Hindu temples. However, these communities have al- ways occupied an ambiguous status in South Indian society. On the one hand, devada¯sı¯s possessed a degree of social agency in that they were not re- stricted by the norms of patrifocal kinship. They lived in quasi-matrilineal communities, had nonconjugal sexual relationships with upper-caste men, and were literate when most South Indian women were not. On the other hand, records from centers of political power such as the court at Tan- jore in Tamil Nadu document the fact that 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 In- dian elites, they were implicated in a larger world of servitude focused on the fulfi llment 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 perfor- mance practices. Over the next hundred years, their lifestyles were crimi- nalized 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. While the emphasis on the religious lives of devada¯sı¯s in some schol- 4 introduction arly works has provided a “redemptive” narrative for devada¯sı¯ history, it has also fi xed devada¯sı¯s in the past, and in idealizing their practices has shifted attention away from women in contemporary devada¯sı¯ communi- ties. Arguably, scholarly work on devada¯sı¯s in South India has tended to focus on three major issues: (1) the precolonial past, usually a medieval past that focuses almost exclusively on the temple as a center of power (see, for example, Orr 2000; Parasher and Naik 1986; Prasad 1990; Sadasi- van 1981, 1993; and others); (2) the period of devada¯sı¯ reform and its legal interventions (Anandhi 1991, 1997a; Hubel 2005; Jordan 1993, 2003; Kan- nabiran 1995; Kannabiran and Kannabiran 2003; J.