Weaving together history, literature, ethnography, and ethnomusicology, Davesh Soneji's impressive work, Unfinished Gestures, showcases the heterogeneity, hybridity, and ingenue of India's devadasi artists in the colonial period and beyond.
This book examines the colonial and postcolonial history of devadasis—creative and often contentious figures who have worked as temple dancers, courtesans, entertainers, and key participants in social rituals, political campaigns, and diplomatic events in South Asia. Soneji diverges from the traditional scholarly preoccupation with devadasi temple performance, turning instead to the colonial Tanjore courts and urban salons of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chennai to explore the diverse lives, performance aesthetics, and performance genres of these artists. Devadasis inhabited innovative, cosmopolitan, and secular frameworks of performance, cultivating hybrid embodied aesthetics and linguistic and lyrical interpretation as a part of their evolving art. Soneji chronicles the rise of moral discourses and “reform” programs focused on these women, leading to the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947. These measures had repercussions across all strata of society—not only negatively impacting the devadasi women's performance traditions and their access to legal and social support previously afforded to them, but also catalyzing the meteoric rise of devadasi community men in South Indian politics, even as the women of these communities were being relegated to lives of shame, poverty, and prostitution.
The book's final chapters feature ethnography of devadasi women from the South Indian villages of Viralimalai, Tamil Nadu, and Peddapuram, Andhra Pradesh, who today experience different types of hardship, stigma, and disenfranchisement, though they maintain some performance practices in the private sphere as a means of sharing personal memory, narratives, and moral knowledge.
Soneji juxtaposes these women's worlds to the now-bustling urban Chennai classical music and dance scene, which has been constructed as a utopian, nationalist, upper-middle-class Brahmin vision of what Hindu culture has always been since time immemorial, through its careful valorization of only select devadasi artists (e.g., T. Balasaraswati, M. S. Subbulakshmi) among its mostly Brahmin pantheon of artistic pioneers. The ethnographic in this particular volume is brief, leaving the reader curious for further stories from these surviving artists of the courtly era; Soneji has presented much of this in prior publications. Here, Soneji's painstaking archival data, music excerpts, and fluid linguistic engagement with Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, and European-language materials make this book's narration of devadasis' history vivid and compelling.
Existing scholarship on devadasis has primarily focused on dancers' ritual significance, notions of ritual auspiciousness, and rasa (Indic theories of aesthetics) in Tamil-speaking South India. The noteworthy contributions of Unfinished Gestures include, firstly, attendance to the devadasis of Telugu-speaking areas, whereas other literature has focused on Tamil-language contexts of devadasis. Secondly, this volume explores the hybridity and heterogeneity of devadasis as actors in highly political spheres and cultural agents beyond the temple environs; Soneji examines devadasis' secular, cosmopolitan, and politically enmeshed worlds as servant-girls, entertainers, artists, lovers, queens, and businesswomen, among other identities. Devadasis drew from folk art forms, the emergent musical forms of Carnatic and Hindusthani music, Western compositions, Persian drama, and other performance genres to create a new and hybrid performative repertoire in a rapidly shifting cultural environment.
Soneji's focused study on devadasis also offers a broader picture of class, socioeconomic, and gender disparity in India in the postcolonial era. He demonstrates the cultural relevance of devadasis outside of their position as temple dancers during the courtly and colonial periods, which in turn further elucidates the grave disparity between the fate of living devadasis today and their contemporary counterparts in the popular Chennai music and dance scene who are upheld as bearers of Hindu dance and music culture. Unfinished Gestures calls attention to the liminality, ambiguity, and diversity of sexual relationships and gender roles that characterized devadasi communities prior to the moral discourses of the twentieth century, which sought to press devadasis into normative gender roles and the traditional conjugal boundaries of marriage.
Additionally, the book attends to another area of gaping disparity—that of gender disparities within devadasi communities themselves and the new, contemporary caste categories to which they have given rise: the icai velalar and suryabalija groups of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, respectively. Even as renowned and accomplished female artists from these groups were divested of their social and artistic prominence because of disparaging, moralistic discourse about devadasis' deceit and licentiousness, males from these communities, invoking their devadasi family lineages (vis-à-vis these new caste identities), began to claim legal rights and land inheritances—and have risen to unprecedented political heights, controlling contemporary South Indian politics for the most part. Political figures such as DMK leaders C. N. Annadurai and Muthuvel Karunanidhi hail from devadasi backgrounds. The power, wealth, and prestige afforded to these powerful political figures exist in stark contrast to the lives that present-day devadasis and their female descendants experience every day—lives characterized by abject poverty, stigma, brothel-style prostitution, or subsumption of mainstream caste and gender lifestyles, at the expense of their formerly valued artistry, legal rights to property, and social position.
This work benefits any scholar interested in the complex cultural matrices that informed South Indian society in the colonial era, and continue to shape today's global expansion of South Indian classical music and dance practice.
