Unfinished Gestures

Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India

Davesh Soneji

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780226768106, 9780226768090
• eBook ISBN: 9780226768113
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hinduism
• Index: Social Sciences

 

Unfinished Gestures presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India who are generally called devadasis, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in devadasis communities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Adroitly combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, Davesh Soneji provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and the political efficacy of social reform in their communities.

 

Poignantly narrating the history of these women, Soneji argues for the recognition of aesthetics and performance as a key form of subaltern self-presentation and self-consciousness. Ranging over courtly and private salon performances of music and dance by devadasis in the nineteenth century, the political mobilization of devadasis identity in the twentieth century, and the post-reform lives of women in these communities today, Unfinished Gestures charts the historical fissures that lie beneath cultural modernity in South India.

CHAPTER ONE

Producing Dance in Colonial Tanjore

Tanjore possesses the distinction of being the original home of the Indian Nautch, born in the shadow of the great Pagoda, and still blending the religious associations of the mystic past with the passionate imagery of love, sorrow, and despair, woven into a thousand forms by the symbolical poetry of motion. The Nautch girls of Tanjore stand at the head of their profession, and no important function of the native Courts is considered complete without the presence of these ideal dancers, clad in filmy muslins and golden tissues clasped with jewels and roped with pearls, the costly tribute paid to their irresistible charms.

—Anonymous British writer, 1894¹

You know why I can dance like this? My father’s teacher was Kumarasvami Nattuvanar of Tanjore!

—R. Muttukkannammal, Viralimalai

The relationship between dance and colonial Tanjore looms large in both the European and Indian imagination. In European contexts, dancing in Tanjore has been commented upon since at least 1661, when the Icelandic sailor-soldier Jon Olafsson arrived at the city and wrote about devadāsīs and naṭṭuvaṉārs (Tamil for “dance masters”) during the rule of King Raghunātha Nāyaka (r. 1612–1634) in his memoirs.² Since then, professional dancing women from Tanjore have almost universally been understood in European writings as the most accomplished “nautch girls” of South India. Contemporary devadāsīs living as far away as coastal Andhra remember salām-daruvus (songs of “salutation”) dedicated to the Marāṭhākings of Tanjore such as Pratāpasiṃha, Tuḷajā, and Serfoji.³ Devadāsīs in Pudukkottai, a nearby Tamil-speaking region, nostalgically celebrate the achievements of their teachers who were trained by masters from Tanjore. Both groups attribute the complexity and rigor of their training and repertoire to the development of the dance under the patronage of the Marāṭhākings at Tanjore, and inevitably commit to memory aesthetic genealogies that reach back into the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Unfinished Gestures begins, therefore, with a discussion of dance in colonial Tanjore. In nearly all writing on devadāsīs—from colonial accounts to contemporary nationalist historiographies—this location emerges as the cultural epicenter of South India. Although contemporary dance historians and historiographers privilege Tanjore’s centrality in their narratives, and several scholarly works have addressed the issues raised by its music (Seetha 1981; L. Subramanian 2006; Weidman 2006), a critical examination of its courtly dance practices is almost entirely lacking.⁴ This chapter thus attempts to unpack the complexities of performance at the nineteenth-century Tanjore court. It winds through the social and aesthetic topography of Tanjore performance culture, mapping the domain using court records and literary sources.

Motivated by ethnographic encounters in which Tanjore is imagined as a site of remembrance, I turn to the archive to assess what kinds of identities and subjectivities colonial Tanjore made available to devadāsīs. What emerges in this chapter is a picture of professional dancing women embedded in complex political and aesthetic economies. “Devadāsī” proves not to be as stable a category of identity as scholars have thoughṭIndeed, the word does not appear anywhere in the Marathi court records themselves. Instead, we can discern considerable slippage between a number of social categories—dancing woman, concubine, and court servant, for example—a fact that emphasizes the contentious status of women in nonconjugal roles. In terms of aesthetics, identifying consistent practices for devadāsīs (in terms of genre, language, musical style and occasion) is even more difficult, given the radical eclecticism of art produced in Tanjore. Such eclecticism, and the accelerated cultural production to which it gave rise, become the mark of modernity in this context. This unique moment in the history of Indian dance was in many ways made possible by a unique Tanjorean cosmopolitanism directed by the distinctly modern figure King Serfoji II (1798–1832). As Indira Peterson has noted, Serfoji cultivated a “personal style” of kingship deploying improvisational strategies that enabled multiple modes of representation and historical agency (1998b; 2002).

The court produced a peculiar, syncretic culture that integrated aspects of indigenous Tamil and Telugu literary material, the new Mughalstyle Marāṭhā courtly practices from Maharashtra, and the modernity of the European Enlightenment. Serfoji II and his heir Śivājī II (r. 1832–1855) deployed courtesan dancers in their rituals of display, casting themselves as rulers who, though incrementally divested of political authority by the British, were nevertheless effective, modern patrons of culture. The Tanjore court thus exemplifies the ways in which devadāsīs were instrumentalized as emblems of cultural capital in the context of an emergent colonial modernity. The presence of a Western-style band, North Indian (Hindustāni) musicians of a high caliber, and the integration of Western music into the dance repertoire, distinguished Serfoji’s court as an early theater of cultural experimentation.

It is significant, however, that Tanjore was different from other princely states in several regards. As Peterson (2010) has pointed out, Tanjore had a distinct relationship with the colonial state, and as Serfoji’s own career indicates, Tanjore was also among the earliest states to improvise a culture of what Manu Bhagavan has called “princely modernity” (2003). The interventions made by rulers in the better-known princely states of Mysore and Baroda follow those forged by Serfoji and Śivājī II in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Tanjore. Peterson points out that Tanjore’s relationship with the colonial state and with the emergent culture of nationalism was quite different than that of the other princely states. Peterson has demonstrated in more than one instance how Serfoji’s very individualistic improvisations on cultural patronage and bureaucracy “underscore the importance of attending to the multiplicity of discourses and conversations among diverse agendas embodied in the construction of princely modernity” (Peterson 2010, 5).

Devadāsī dance, as we understand it, emerges in this already-modern milieu. In the early nineteenth century, the dance is already participating in global circuits of culture. The moment celebrated by nationalist historians as the “golden age” of dance at Tanjore—usually the time of the famed dance masters known as the “Tanjore Quartet” (1802–1864)—is contemporaneous with the transnational movement of dancers across imperial axes. In 1838, a troupe of devadāsīs from Tiruvendipuram, just outside Pondicherry, was brought to Europe by French impresario E. C. Tardivel (Bor 2007). As the celebrated naṭṭuvaṉārs and devadāsīs of Serfoji’s court are shaping their illustrious dances, other devadāsīs are billed as “Hindoo slaves of the gods” on elite stages in London, Brighton, Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, and Vienna.

DANCE IN PRE-MARĀṬHĀ TANJORE

Indologists and nationalist historiographers advance the claim that today’s Bharatanāṭyam, as a descendant of devadāsī dance, has its origins in the Tamil Canṇkam age (c. 300 BCE to 300 CE). A critical reading of courtesan dance, however, can only begin with the Telugu-speaking Nāyaka courts at Tanjore and Madurai in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To be sure, professional dancing women, courtesans, prostitutes, and temple women are found throughout South India’s literary, epigraphic, and oral histories. The female bards (viṟali) of the ancient Tamil Canṅkam poems, the courtesan Mātavi of the Tamil epic Cilappatikāram, the temple woman Paravaiyār of the Tamil Śaiva bhakti tradition, the four hundred “women of the temple quarter” (taliccēri peṅṭukaḷ) mentioned in King Rājarāja Cōla’s famous eleventh-century inscription at the Bṛhadīśvara temple in Tanjore—these could all be construed as predecessors of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century devadāsī-courtesans.⁵ For our purposes, however, it is important that these scattered and fragmentary references to temple women, court dancers, and other “public women” only coalesce in the Nāyaka period, when these hitherto independent roles are fully collapsed and the identity of the “devadāsī,” as I see it—with simultaneous investments in temple, courtly, and public cultures, complex dance and music practices, and matrifocal kinship structures—emerges (Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 1992, 187). In the Nāyaka period, the devadāsī-courtesan appears as a distinct cultural presence, inextricably linked to sophisticated articulations of courtly eroticism. Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam characterize the culture of the Nāyaka court as directed toward the telos of bhoga, or enjoyment (57). This culture of bhoga, of erotic longing and fulfillment, is one in which the boundaries between courtesans (bhoga-strī, veśyā) and temple women have become indistinguishable. Their new role as artists who performed at both temple and court allowed these women to be imaged as mistresses, wives, or even queens at the Nāyaka court (187).

The Nāyaka court at Tanjore also supported creative writing by courtesans; works by Rāmabhadrāmba and Raṅgājamma, for example, are considered among the crowning literary pieces from this period.⁶ This is also the period when the erotic poems (padams) of Kṣetrayya were composed, perhaps partially under the patronage of King Vijayarāghava Nāyaka (r. 1634–1673). The padams of Kṣetrayya, which continue to survive in the repertoire of the Telugu devadāsī community today, reflect innovative images of womanhood and a unique world of fully eroticized aesthetic practices. Many of these songs express female desire and are completely unabashed in their representations of the corporeality of sexual experience. It is against this backdrop that we find the names of a number of professional dancing women at the Nāyaka darbār in Tanjore.⁷ Most significantly, however, the substance of the surviving aesthetic practices of devadāsīs—the lyric genre of padam, a lineage of hereditary male dance masters (naṭṭuvaṉārs), and musical genres such as śabdam (usually in praise of royal patrons or localized deities)—can only be traced as far back as the Nāyaka period.

MARĀṬHĀ-PERIOD TANJORE AND THE TANJORE MOḌI RECORDS

Marāṭhā rule in South India succeeded that of the Nāyakas. On January 12, 1676, Veṅkojī Bhosale, the half-brother of Chatrapati Śivājī (1627–1680), ascended the throne of Tanjore. Veṅkojī was succeeded by his sons, Śāhajī (r. 1684–1712); Śarabhojī [Serfoji] I (r. 1712–1728); Tuḷajā I (r. 1728–1736), and later by Veṅkojī II (also known as Bāvā Sāheb, r. 1736–1739), son of Tuḷajā I. By the time Pratāpasiṃha (1739–1763), another son of Tuḷajā, came to power, Tanjore found itself slipping into fiscal decline, under pressure from both the Nawab of Arcot and the East India Company, a development that has been meticulously mapped by Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2001). Following Pratāpasiṃha’s death in 1763, his son Tuḷajā II (r. 1763–1787) ascended the throne. Tuḷajā ruled until 1787 when, on his deathbed, he adopted a young boy, Serfoji II. Upon the death of Tuḷajā II, however, a controversy arose regarding the legitimacy of the adopted boy-prince Serfoji’s right to rule Tanjore....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On Historical, Social, and Aesthetic Borderlands
• 1. Producing Dance in Colonial Tanjore
• 2. Whatever Happened to the South Indian Nautch? Toward a Cultural History of Salon Dance in Madras
• 3. Subterfuges of “Respectable” Citizenship: Marriage and Masculinity in the Discourse of Devadāsī Reform
• 4. Historical Traces and Unfinished Subjectivity: Remembering Devadāsī Dance at Viralimalai
• 5. Performing Untenable Pasts: Aesthetics and Selfhood in Coastal Andhra Pradesh
• Coda: Gesturing to Devadāsī Pasts in Today’s Chennai
• Appendix 1: Selected Documents from the Files of Muthulakshmi Reddy
• Appendix 2: The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947
• Notes
• References
• Index