Chennai: Reform is hardly a term one links with appropriation, criminalisation or violence. Yet, the reform of Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music meant exactly these for women practitioners of the traditional performing communities.
While history books reaffirm the significance of Bharatanatyam as India’s cultural pride that was “reinvented by reformers”, such accounts are being questioned by evidence-based histories and lived experiences.
Chennai-based dancer-scholar Nrithya Pillai mounts resistance against the dominant narratives surrounding the classical arts through her performances, writings, lectures and other public engagements that are informed and enriched by her own genealogy of professional dance and music artists.
Ever since renowned musician T.M. Krishna was conferred the prestigious Sangita Kalanidhi by the Music Academy, a controversy has been raging in the Carnatic music world against the Magsaysay award winner, who has been actively advocating for inclusivity and diversity within the art form.
With a number of musicians, together with the Ranjani-Gayatri duo, announcing their decision to withdraw from the Academy’s 2024 conference in protest against Krishna presiding over it, Pillai categorically states that actual issues lie elsewhere.
Going beyond the mere moral posturing and virtue-signalling such controversies often trigger, Pillai talks to The Wire about choosing to tell the stories of entire communities being ostracised and criminalised for practising their art; being the rare voice fighting bias and stigma; and the pressing need for a nuanced understanding of the politics of culture in India today.
Edited excerpts from the interview follow.
Nrithya Pillai. Photo by arrangement.
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In the context of the debates between the Music Academy and the Ranjani-Gayatri duo, you have clarified your position that “the battle on Sangeeta Kalanidhi is not of relevance to me – the music academy institutionalized music and dance -this is institution that was the hot bed of brahminic cultural nationalism of the 1930s … [sic]”.
You call it an “intra brahmin conflict, a quest for power and space something that most of us will never have a stake in [sic]”.
Even as you state this, don’t you think this controversy has thrown up discussions about how the arts, particularly the performing arts, have served as a significant instrument for fostering Hindu majoritarianism and Brahminical cultural nationalism in India, an issue you have been vocal about?
To answer your question, while the current issue brings to light the nature of how “classical” has always had notions of exclusivism and Brahminism, it also forces most people to choose a side.
But here, both sides – the Music Academy siding with T.M. Krishna and Ranjani-Gayatri and their supporters on the other side – are all Brahmin and Brahminical in terms of “representation” and ideals.
When we keep strategising to address immediate issues, when we stand in support of T.M. Krishna in this case, we are simply sidestepping deeper issues of the complicated histories of appropriation that both parties are beneficiaries of. If anything, this just shows us the power of caste capital and Brahmin privilege.
In some ways, the cultural dimensions of earlier Indian nationalism always took Hindu majoritarianism for granted. The making of the “classical” traditions under the patronage of earlier nationalist politics and the Indian National Congress, in fact, shaped these “traditions” in the image of dominant-caste Hindus and thereby mainstream understandings.
Culture, and the performing arts in particular, was a space of exception for the “secular” and “democratic” values of Nehruvian nationalism. Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music as “ancient Hindu temple traditions” is not a narrative that comes up with today’s Hindu nationalism. It was invented under Nehruvian nationalism as “the classical” was invented.
Could you tell us how Bharatanatyam and other art forms were appropriated by the upper castes and how Sabhas act as exclusive spaces?
I come from the erased histories of Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music. I stand at the centre of a complex genealogy of professional dance and music artists.
On both the paternal and maternal sides of my family are a host of women dancers, dance-masters (nattuvanars), musicians and instrumentalists. They enjoyed courtly patronage until some generations ago.
By the late 19th century, performance was criminalised for women in our families and men were forced to teach dance to dominant caste women to make a living. That is how women like Rukmini Arundale came to learn Bharatanatyam.
By the 1930s, the Music Academy was the hotbed of Brahminical cultural nationalism. As women in the courtesan community were being criminalised and opportunities for performance dwindled, elite Brahmin cultural nationalists like E. Krishna Iyer (ironically called the “guardian angel of Bharatanatyam”), Rukmini Arundale, K. Subrahmanyam and V. Raghavan took up the cause of “saving” the art of these women.
They learnt the art from female dancers and their male dance-masters, many of whom were reluctant to engage in this project and in the process but for want of money.
There are still those who say that this project was benevolent and not a project of social engineering and appropriation. Let me take a quote from Professor Davesh Soneji’s work on Bharatanatyam. In 1948, E. Krishna Iyer wrote an essay titled ‘The Renaissance of Indian Dance and its Architects’. Here is what he had to say:
“…Bharata Natya was still in the hands of exponents of the old professional class, with all its possible and lurking dangers as pointed out by social reformers. The efforts of the present writer were turned towards steadily taking it out of their hands and introducing it among cultured, family women of respectable classes.”
But in the world of Indian dance, in which Brahmin power and Brahminical Hinduism are completely normalised and deeply consolidated, we have the mainstream refusal to acknowledge critical, evidence-based histories in order to uphold “anecdotal” histories.
Cultural nationalism made the arts into a vessel for Hindu cultural nationalism. The art form was given a Hindu past rooted in the Vedas and the Natyashastra.
In the case of Carnatic music, we have lost not only the subregional histories of Bahujan and even Dalit musicians, but also the more than 300-year-old traditions of Muslim and Christian performers, composers and musicologists.
Even today, the Music Academy upholds its Brahminism and is the single most important organisation that decides, controls and upholds the ideals of Brahminical virtuosity within the arts.
Caste resides in notions of beauty, virtuosity and meritocracy decided by such institutions. Here, the key point to understand is how someone like T.M. Krishna, a Brahmin himself, can continue to occupy space in both the regressive and progressive realms, accrue social and cultural capital and get an award from an institution like the Music Academy.
You talk about Brahminical patriarchy, Victorian morality and Indian nationalism driving the reform movement in Bharatanatyam, “criminalising the female dancer and the performance of dance”.
With an aggressive brand of Hindu nationalism increasingly dominating India’s political and educational realms, how do you aspire to build awareness of the hypocrisy and historical injustices done to the hereditary dancing communities?
The combined forces of Brahmanical patriarchy, the Victorian morality of the coloniser and the angst of the Indian nationalists enabled the criminalising of the sudra courtesan dancer, and thereafter, the grafting of their dance on to “respectable bodies” to create the ideal Indian Classical Dance.
We cannot forget that many hereditary practitioners were involved in the refashioning or reinvention process – it was a survival tactic for the Isai Vellalars [community].
We must also not forget that while this appropriation and reinvention were going on, hereditary practitioners continued to be musicians, dancers, theatre artistes and other kinds of performers – they were the first actresses of theatre and cinema until they were replaced by dominant-caste women.
There are appropriative aspects to many, if not all, the different arts that enjoy the “classical” status today.
Voices that speak truth to power from the marginalised caste locations have seldom had “political correctness”. My voice too is subject to tone-policing, gaslighting and de-legitimising – from both the political right and the left. The progressives invariably cannot deal with a critique of the social reform which, for them, is one of their “success stories”.
There is no place for a nuanced history accommodating dissent by hereditary practitioners, one that recognises that while the communities, particularly the women, were stigmatised, they had the economic and social agency that women of other castes lack even today.
There is no place to accommodate histories of penury within the community; forced domesticity; the sense of angst and loss for ancestral art; and the need for reparation.
Today, Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music serve as the perfect vehicles for Hindutva politics. The number of dance and music performances dedicated to the consecration of the Ayodhya temple makes this point clear.
In fact, there was a sequence of performances organised at the Music Academy with many senior dancers on January 22, the day the Ram temple was consecrated.
I dance in alternative progressive spaces where critical conversations can take place. When I dance, I bring histories of erasure. I present an alternative aesthetic that does not submit to notions of Brahminical virtuosity and beauty standards. I stand by the many marginalised people who are being violated, but I also remind the viewers that at the heart of Bharatanatyam is a social justice issue.
I present my performances and lectures as my piecing together of Bharatanatyam. I showcase different pieces, some relatively new and created post-reinvention by male family members for the new practitioners of Bharatanatyam who they trained, and some old that were performed during pre-reinvention times that I had to piece together.
This, I think, is a way of laying bare the rupture and the different kinds of erasure that Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music embody today. I am certain that engaging with me and my discourse can cause immense discomfort, but I deal with the discomfort of my caste identity, social stigma and inaccessibility within Bharatanatyam every day, and it is inevitable that it comes through in all my endeavours.
With the current dispensation using history as a tool for “othering” certain communities, your concerns over the shaping of the discourse on Bharatanatyam by rejecting hereditary dancing communities gains more relevance. What is the politics of culture, according to you?
I think the question of history is an important one, especially because all of the received histories of Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music in India have been written from a “top down” perspective – rarely, if ever, have we had mainstream histories written by Dalit-Bahujan scholars or practitioners.
This is so important in today’s context because Hindu majoritarian politics has enabled the writing of even more detrimental histories. The critical academic work being done largely by academics outside India is now safely peddled as “false history” or “lies spun by western academia” precisely because these histories have been questioning caste privilege and the dangers of Hindu nationalism for decades now.
We have had a similar kind of assertion from Brahmin women artists and academics after the T.M. Krishna issue. Avanthi Meduri is a former “foreign academic” who now is a “freelance consultant” in India whose initial scholarly work argued for cultural appropriation within Bharatanatyam.
But in her recent writings and videos, Meduri has made a ‘U’ turn and she calls these histories “false narratives” around the “lies” of “Brahmin appropriation” of the arts and “devadasi disenfranchisement”.
In her very identity – as a “classically trained” Brahmin dancer/former scholar with foreign academic credentials who proudly declares these arts as “Hindu” – the whole nexus of Brahmin caste and class-based power in the arts is laid bare. The language of decolonisation used by people espousing right-wing politics can be truly dangerous within the Indian arts.
She claims that in her next videos, she will provide a historical timeline to describe how T.M. Krishna and US academics collaborated with “hereditary practitioners” and created the fake history of Brahmin appropriation and “devadasi disenfranchisement”.
She writes: “They did this by focussing on Periyar social history and conflated this Dravidian social history with US race and EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity) issues in the period between 2013-2024”.
As a sudra woman artiste from the very community savarnas and Brahmins like Avanthi want to research and “own knowledge” about, I will persistently continue to call out this kind of upholding of casteist ahistoric narratives.
Also read: Madras Music Season, a Festival of Elite Castes Where Non-Brahmins Are Nearly Invisible
You have criticised the weaponisation of language and its use to reinscribe the stigma suffered by the hereditary performing communities. How receptive are the mainstream media and the cyber space to your concerns about the use of language and terminology such as devadasi?
The reimagined caste name and identity “icai vēḷāḷar” are both a direct result of the twin processes of social reform and criminalisation that occurred within former hereditary courtesan castes.
The sedimentation of this new caste identity not only further enabled the appropriation of art and culture that were part of exclusive performance traditions within these courtesan communities, but also strongly established caste endogamy and marriage as the way for a respectable future for women from these caste locations.
The stigmatising Sanskrit term ‘devadasi’ is a term inaccurately understood as a pan-Indian and transhistorical category. It became a part of the everyday administrative and cultural life of south India through the efforts of British ethnographers and administrators, as we see in the 1901 Madras census.
Much of this, of course, comes from Brahmin informants who were aiding these ethnographers. The use of the term and all of its attendant narratives have been internalised by men and women within the community, even those women who were fighting in public against the criminalisation of their communities, such as those in the Madras Devadasis Association in 1927.
From the standpoint of the Isai Vellalar women of today, the term and all its valences continue to have a psychosomatic effect. The term also leads to the epistemic violence of the conflation of different castes – it is used to reference Dalit castes such as yellama, matamma and jogatis – whose realities and lived experiences are very different from those of sudra formerly courtesan castes.
Whenever there is a controversy within the world of “classical”, the term devadasi and its attendant narratives come up. There are pieces written about the devadasi and sadir [the hereditary dance form], mentioning how it was a practice where prepubescent girls were sexually exploited and how they had the initials of their mothers because they “did not know their fathers”.
The personal lives of successful women artists from these caste locations are dissected using these terminologies, even though many of them never identified with these.
Even progressives like T.M. Krishna and many others use language that is stigmatising and casteist to refer to performing caste women from the past, and it is time to discard this language. It has been nearly a hundred years since women from families like mine stopped performing; occupying public space is impossible for many of us.
What are the alternative terms you suggest in this scenario?
I believe we need to try and make alternative phrases to replace harmful, stigma-inducing language – this will take empathetic reflection and effort. I prefer to use “sudra performing castes”, “hereditary dance practitioners”, “traditional performing communities”, “women performers of the caste-exclusive performative traditions of dance and music” and “hereditary courtesan castes”.
To reference their lifestyle, the terms “concubinage” and “non-conjugal sexual relationships” can be used. We should remember and acknowledge that the normative life of most women at this moment in history was one where child marriage, caste endogamy, sati and other violent and oppressive practices existed.
References like “pre-pubescent girls who were sexually exploited”, “sexual slavery” and “prostitution” are violent and intentionally harmful.
It is also ahistorical to uphold the binaries of “sadir” and “Bharatanatyam”. The term “Bharatanatyam” was used by hereditary dancers in the Thanjavur court before the reform and reinvention. The cultural nationalists consciously chose the most Sanskritic of names when the dance was refashioned as the “nation’s dance” to claim antiquity and to essentialise its Hindu-ness.
This binary also erases and diminishes the contributions of hereditary practitioners within present-day Bharatanatyam. It was, in fact, the nattuvanars and hereditary women who were forced to introduce puritanical aspects and accentuate the religious aspects of the art form.
Also read: T.M. Krishna, the ‘Richness’ of Carnatic Ragas and the Music Akka-Demy
Yours has been a constant, multipronged struggle against dominant narratives across the spectrum. Artistically, academically and aesthetically, this must both be a daunting and rewarding endeavour. How do you envisage the onward journey? Who are your allies?
For me, talking, writing and dancing alongside my articulation became a survival mechanism when I was in my early 20s. The system makes me realise many times that there is no space for a voice like mine – the radical politics of a modern progressive sudra woman from a formerly courtesan caste has no place in the progressive discourse on arts.
Many misrepresentations where people misspell my name, title my article “Why I call myself a Devadasi” when I constantly problematise the usage of the term even by others and many such events occur.
This happens to me far too often to think that it is not intended; it is systemic and intentional. Everything I do is erased, misrepresented and suppressed. I cannot think of any reason for this suppression but my caste location and the systemic oppression that dictate every facet of my life.
Despite all this, I continue to be my radical self – I have very few people who are part of my support system. Davesh Soneji has played an important part in my journey in understanding history. But I now have a bunch of young dancers, scholars, journalists, academics and performing artists who actively collaborate with me. They cut across caste lines, gender and sexual binaries, and nationalities.
We have an alliance called the Progressive Arts Alliance. We discuss issues around history, caste, gender, sexuality and many other challenges we face. My allies are all those who can imagine more equitable futures for hereditary practitioners and marginalised artists within the realm of performance arts and academia.
The aspersion that I am not for everyone dancing is constantly placed on me, as though I argue that only members of hereditary families should dance. This does not happen when other caste-privileged people like T.M. Krishna speak of the history using stigma-inducing language and narratives. This is again caste at play.
I teach many students, some are Brahmin. But unlike earlier generations from my family, I teach without hiding my personal sense of loss, my politics, my food and cultural habits, the received wisdom of dance histories in our families that continued despite the criminalisation.
I think it is an important way of reparation and reconciliation for those who have been erased from and dispossessed of Bharatanatyam. This is not, in any way, anti- democratic. In fact, it questions the hegemony of the Brahmins in these art forms.
Rasmi Binoy is a journalist and author based in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.
