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The Sanskritized Body1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Uttara Asha Coorlawala
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Abstract

As Bharatanatyam dancers across the world talk about what they do through listservs, websites, and performance publicity—in academia's world dance courses and amidst international cultural diplomats—I keep re-encountering the Orientalist representation of a “pan Indian transhistorical” devadāsī. Her history is a linear deterioration of aesthetic quality and personal agency, from temple to courts and from courts to streets and to (deserved) abandonment from where the dancer and the dance must be rescued (see Hanna 1993; Banerji 1983).

The lifestyle of the sadir dancers of the early twentieth century was extensively researched by Amrit Srinivasan (1979–81) and documented in her ethnographic dissertation at Cambridge University 1984 and in subsequent articles.2 The devadāsī was selected for her talent. She was highly trained in dance, texts, and music, and she performed temple rituals. Her freedom from household responsibilities (grhastya) was made possible by the largesse of a patron, and bhakti theology legitimized “both the housewife and god's wife as parallel life-possibilities” both for women and for those men who could afford to support both kinds of liaisons. Temples frequently reimbursed devadāsī-s with bourses and land donations.

Dancers today persist in maintaining that dancers had no “technique” since they danced only for God, that they knew nothing of music or theory, performed in a vulgar manner, and that contemporary dancers are much more beautiful, intelligent, and better trained.

Type
Research Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , Winter 2004 , pp. 50 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2004

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Footnotes

1.

This article is a revised updated version of a paper presented at November 1996 Congress on Research in Dance, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and in the Proceedings of the same conference. It also contains information from my Ph.D. dissertation (1994).

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