New Book on Bharatanatyam
A book on Bharatanatyam titled 'Bharatanatyam: A Reader' edited by Davesh Soneji is to be released on 3rd December at Amethyst, 14, Padmavathi Road, Gopalapuram, Chennai at 7 p.m.
In Bharatanatyam: A Reader, Davesh Soneji brings together some of the most important writings related to Bharatanatyam in English, highlighting the heterogeneous – and sometimes contradictory – voices in Bharatanatyam as it has evolved over the last two centuries. The primary sources range from writings by colonial anthropologists and Orientalists, to legendary dancers such as T. Balasaraswati, to contemporary artists such as Chandralekha.
The sharp and theoretically insightful secondary sources draw from the fields of history, dance studies, anthropology, women's studies, religious studies, and ethnomusicology. The volume includes the earliest essay published on the subject in 1806 while also giving space to the voices of some contemporary dance-scholars, providing a window on the historical provenance, aesthetic and political debates, and personal journeys that have shaped this vital and ever-shifting art.
Davesh Soneji will read from one of his contributions to the volume, a piece entitled “Salon to Cinema: The Distinctly Modern Life of the Telugu Javali.” The javali is a musical and literary form that likely has its origins in the nineteenth-century court of Mysore, South India, under the patronage of Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (1799-1868) and Chamaraja Wodeyar IX (1881-1894).
Composed in Telugu and Kannada, these distinctively modern songs are modeled on the older Telugu padam genre, from which they derive their structure and narrative situation. In late nineteenth and early twentieth century Madras, javalis become the most popular compositions performed by devadasi-courtesans during salon performances patronised by elite Brahmin and landowning communities.
Unlike the apotheosized padam poets Annamayya and Kshetrayya, the majority of javali composers (javalikartas) worked in the civic heart of the colonial city, employed as taluk clerks or post office workers. As poems, they are sites for multiple experiments in syncretism with regard to language and music. They are incorporated into Parsi-theatre inspired Tamil plays, sometimes written in hybrid language combining Telugu and English, and subject to Orientalist analyses.
Located between the demise of courtly musical forms of the colonial period on the one hand, and the emergent modern forms of the mid-twentieth century on the other, javalis elude obvious categories. The life of the javali, however, is short-lived.
The genre loses its popular status in light of social reform movements directed toward courtesans in the region that begin around the same time the form emerges, and the last flashes of the javali’s presence are captured in dance sequences by women from courtesan communities in early Telugu cinema.
This illustrated talk maps the multiple historical and affective registers through which the texts and performances of javalis are understood and performed in modern South India.
Davesh Soneji is Associate Professor of South Asian Religions at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
He is also co-editor, with Indira Viswanathan Peterson, of Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India (Oxford University Press, 2008).
He has just completed a book on professional dancing women in the Tamil and Telugu-speaking regions of South India that integrates archival, literary and ethnographic data, entitled Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India. This book is forthcoming in the “South Asia Across the Disciplines” series jointly published by the Columbia University Press, The University of Chicago Press, and The University of California Press.
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About December Season
Fringe Events
Classical dancer
Swapanasundari
released her book
Vilasini Natyam -
Bharatam of Telugu
Temple and court
dancers on December 21
at Asharaa store,
Abhirampuram.
Kutcheris in the Park. Chamber kutcheris.
And now, garden concerts!
