ANOTHER STAGE IN THE LIFE OP THE NATION: SADIR, BHARATANATYAM, FEMINIST THEORY A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES SRIV1DYA NATARAJAN FEBRUARY, 1997 CERTIFICATE This is to certify that Ms. Srividya Natarajan worked under my supervision for the Ph.D. Degree in English. Her thesis entitled "Another Stage in the Life of the Nation: Sadir. Bharatanatyam. Feminist Theory" represents her own independent work at the University of Hyderabad. This work has not been submitted to any other institution for the award of any degree. Hyderabad Tejaswini Niranjana Date: 14-02-1997 Department of English School of Humanities University of Hyderabad Hyderabad February 12, 1997 This is to certify that I, Srividya Natarajan, have carried out the research embodied in the present thesis for the full period prescribed under Ph.D. ordinances of the University. I declare to the best of my knowledge that no part of this thesis was earlier submitted for the award of research degree of any University. To those special teachers from whose lives I have learnt more than from all my other education put together: Kittappa Vadhyar, Paati, Thatha, Paddu, Mythili, Nigel. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the course of five years of work on this thesis, I have piled up more debts than I can acknowledge in due measure. A fellowship from the University Grants Commission gave me leisure for full-time research; some of this time was spent among the stacks of the Tamil Nadu Archives, the Madras University Library, the Music Academy Library, the Adyar Library, the T.T. Krishnamachari Library, The Madras Literary Society, the Kalakshetra Library, the U.V. Swaminatha Iyer Library, all in Madras. I also, of course, used the Indira Gandhi Memorial Library at the University of Hyderabad, the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad, and, most pleasantly, the Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies, Hyderabad. I want to thank: Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, my supervisor, for unfailingly constructive criticism, for a six year old friendship, and for the use of her libra../; Mr. Murthi, Mr. Raja, and Mr. Narasaiah whom everyone will admit to be the busiest people in the English Department, but who always found time to help students with paperwork, typing and other obligations; Dr. Viswanathan, Dr. Susie Tharu, Dr. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Dr. Kulkarni, Dr. Probal Dasgupta and Dr. Narayana Chandran, for the pleasure of encounters with exemplary scholarship and for occasional stimulating discussions; Guru K.P. Kittappa Pillai, for the incalculable pleasures and privileges of an association that has ripened over some sixteen years; for discussions about and practical knowledge of the isai vellalar tradition of dance; and for glimpses of the riches of an old and forgotten culture; Various people who helped with ideas, facts, documents and references: Dr. S. Anandhi, Sarada Natarajan, Dr. Subbulakshmy Natarajan, Dr. M.S.S. Pandian, Ms. Pritham, Dr. Kalpana Ram, Ms. Anandi Ramachandran, Dr. Gowri Ramnarayan; and, especially, S. Ravindran, whom I pestered unconscionably, and whose help was offered with a rare generosity. Dr. Vivek Dhareshwar, for, as always, making guest appearances in Hyderabad in the role of Socratic eiron; G. Rajasekhar and Maheth for initiating me into some of the more esoteric mysteries of computer languages. I have been exceptionally fortunate in my friends, and want to register my gratitude to all of them here, for both concrete and ineffable expressions of help and support: Mythili Nayar and Usha Anthony, always, for me, inseparable from my first and best experiences of growing up in Madras; Uma and Mohan, friends who now stand in for Hyderabad in my map of affects; Sam Joseph, who has the most discriminating ear I know; Snehasudha, Dr. Surinder Jodka and Sohail, Sushma, Dr. Raviranjan and young Tanmay, who have given me a sense of having a family here; D. Vasanta, K. Lalita, Sajaya, Shailaja and Usha, who represent for me the warmth and energy of the Anveshi Research Centre; Bindu, Jayashree and Poroma, who may be counted upon to do the most unexpected and exotic things and make me feel mature by contrast; K. Satyanarayana, S.V. Srinivas, Anita Cherian, Rekha Pappu, K. Srilata, Chaitanya, Murali, Keshava Kumar, Prasad and Tarakeshwar, for helpful discussions and for solidarity in the toil of research. I have much to thank my family for; my grandparents, my parents, Paddu and Sarada, have given me a home in Madras, and an obscure sense of having fixed points in my somewhat unregulated life. Nigel's contributions to this thesis include every imaginable thing, from conceptual help to proofing to minding the baby; it is in large measure owing to him that I finished it at all. What else I owe him and Richard, is beyond any vocabulary that I am master of. iii CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Contents iii Preface iv Notes on Devadasi, Sadir, and Bharatanatyam vii Chapter 1 1 Introduction Chapter 2 74 'A Most Objectionable Class of People': Nation Building and the Disintegration of the Devadasi Community Chapter 3 166 A Respectable Aesthetic: The Making of Bharatanatyam Chapter 4 245 Studying Culture, Performing Dance: Engagements with Feminism and Post-structuralism In Lieu of a Conclusion 323 Appendix: A Selective Chronology 339 A Select Bibliography, Including All 342 References Cited iv PREFACE I have, in the first chapter of this thesis, offered what I hope are fairly respectable reasons for researching bharatanatyam in an English department. In the extra-mural space of this preface, it may be freely confessed that I also had an intensely personal reason for doing this: merely the fact that I have been involved with bharatanatyam as student, performer, teacher and now researcher, for some twenty years, and that is more than two thirds of my life. Dance has always claimed my primary loyalty, and if I have thought of myself as 'belonging' in any community, it has been in the community of traditional performers. This is a sense of location rather than a full identity; what with English education and a certain commitment to a 'modern,' non-hierarchical lifestyle, I was already too alienated a subject to feel entirely at home in the world my dance master inhabits. This world has always offered serious temptations, however, largely because of the kind of person my master is. Thanjavur K.P. Kittappa Pillai has studied, written about and taught dance for most of his eighty five years. Kittappa is no naif. no one- dimensional figure who expresses the sweet simplicity of a pre- modern pastoral existence. He is, for example, as familiar with the interiors of international jet aircraft as the most up-to- date high-flying academic, his last two tours abroad being in Canada and Greece. But he can take 'modernity' or leave it; on the whole, he prefers to leave it. About eight years ago, his students spent the night around a radio set, waiting for the announcement of the names of those aboard the Kanishka from Canada that had crashed into the sea, because we knew he had been booked on that flight. It turned out that the mridangam vidwan had got lost on his way to the airport at the Canada end: Kittappa ruled out the idea of travelling without him, because it was discourteous ("we went as a group, we must come back as a group") and because the mridangist was particularly incapable of coping on his own with L.e protocols of internatithal travel. At the expense of convenience, time and money, Kittappa's troupe had been rebooked on the next flight. V That is not a moral story. Its significance, for the purposes of explaining this thesis, is that Kittappa has been resolutely recalcitrant from the point of view of all those who have tried to modernize him: the government, the bureaucratic networks of art-promoters, dance 'connoisseurs,' dancers who wanted a quick six-month bharatanatyam fix. But modernity's minions invariably misread his serene (and frequently, his ferociously witty) evasion of their demands. I have cooperated in an entirely grudging way with the efforts of 'senior' brahmin dancers, appointed by some government institution on a gross salary, to wring his knowledge out of him under duress, or to capture his five-century old familial heritage on some spools of tape. The barely disguised contempt these dancers—some of them his own students--displayed towards Kittappa was inexplicable to me then; now, with a better sense of the history of the brahmin encounter with the isai vellalar community, I know that contempt for what it is: a product of the merging of a poisonous upper caste bigotry and a distinctly modern bureaucratic rationality. So my Ph.D. project had its origin in one of the many fits of outrage I felt on Kittappa's behalf, and on behalf of other isai vellalar teachers I knew and respected: the late T. Brinda, who taught me music for some years; T. Balasaraswati , whose student Shyamala taught me abhinayam. It also tapped into my feeling that the vitality of the dance was being choked out of it by the conventions and silly affectations that marked it as a brahmin practice. My project was sustained by a faith in the efficacy of theory: perhaps if I could understand what was wrong with the present practice of the dance, and why it was wrong, I might be able to connect up, through filaments of recovered history, with the richer and infinitely more interesting practices of the dancers of the past. I am sure there will be those who still do not feel that all this adds up to a convincing reason for researching dance in an English department.