Why Sadir?
AMRIT SRINIVASAN
‘As a first approximation, let us simply say the following: ‘modernity’ refers to modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence.’
– Antony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 1990.
THIS Eurocentric understanding of modernity inevitably linked its spread to the exercise of cultural domination over subject peoples in the period of colonial rule. Part of the complex process of modernization was the revival, restoration, and reinvention of tradition rather than its rejection by those in power. In India, for instance, the very notion of the ‘classical’ dance was a modern, constructed one, which made its appearance around the early 20th century.
Traditional forms of art like the Sadir or the devadasi’s dance were reshaped to suit new nationalist, elite, commercial interests. Temple dedication ceremonies, which initiated women into the devadasi way of life, were legally banned as immoral and against civilized society’s norms in 1947. The devadasi’s dance, however, was not banned but authorized afresh for a new class of performers. The changed context of performance endowed it with the ‘secular’ credentials of concert art, available now to anyone interested in learning it nationally or even internationally. The resultant huge revival of middle class interest in the ancient cultural form of the devadasi’s dance was possible only sans the dancer.
I have already critiqued the early 20th century reform and revival movements surrounding the devadasi and her dance as integrally linked to and motivated by the schizoid political discourse of Christian colonialism.
1 I would like now to argue more proactively for the Sadir dance as an enabling cultural mechanism for the political integration of the region. The devadasi as ‘God’s Wife’ stood at the heart of a local network of power and control, built up not through ordinary kinship or caste ties but through the ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’ function of an unusual sexual and householding ethic, authorized by the temple and society at large as necessary to the dance profession. Mark Granovetter’s classic work on the ‘strength of weak ties’ comes to mind with the Sadir managing to achieve an efficacious integration of local society, presumed paradoxically on the devadasi’s very liminality to its central tenet – the grhasta way of life for the sect’s men and women.2
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urocentric understandings of centralized modern government and state control in India have not given credence to the historical efficacy of regional cultural forms in building up a decentralized political framework for the nation. The direction of cultural legitimation and power in ‘free’ India has always been from centre to periphery. The recognition of a dance form as ‘classical’ needs central validation despite clear evidence of the regional rootedness of the art. Over time, even ‘classical’ dance scholarship has caved in to the nationalist bias, blinding us to the very real and diverse cultural influence of the regions.Indeed, the regional and the national are presumed to be mutually exclusive, with dance forms like the Sadir and now most recently the Sattriya, being seen as ‘rescued’ from temples and monasteries to make it on the secular, world stage. The simultaneous emergence of a very different kind of performer – feminine, educated, English speaking and middle class – as against the local devadasi of temple bhakti Hinduism or the male sattra monk of Assam, has clinched these popular class understandings. Unless we discipline ourselves to dissolve the conceptual framework of the nation, within which we are forced to operate when discussing ‘Indian’ dance, we will not be able to move away from these biased perceptions and recognize the larger truth that Indian classical culture was by definition regional in its location.
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istorically, the reform and revival movements surrounding the Sadir had fed into these dualist understandings. If the Crown government had caved into reformist pressures to ban the dance in temples and in elite homes on the basis of modern demands for greater public morality, feminine hygiene and women’s right to education, the notoriously anti-imperial, orientalist position of the Theosophists had been deeply implicated in the revival of Sadir as Bharata Natyam. For Rukmini Arundale, it was the dance freed of the dancer, which was worthy of being revived. The actual temple context of the dance, in all its variety and complexity of practice and precept was not of any interest to her. The revivalist intention was not merely museological or curatorial – preserving disappearing cultures. Rather, it was to gain control, to improve and work upon the Sadir by bringing it in line with the shastric Aryan strands of Indian/world culture, already the focus of intense international attention. An ancient Indian dance could then be shown to be comparable in excellence to the European ballet, once freed from the concrete excess of temple Hinduism.Anna Pavlova was prior to M.S. Pillai or Gowriammal in Rukmini Devi’s preceptorial genealogy. The cultural translation project under British rule, restricted thus far to individual literary, visual or spiritual representations of the Indian civilizational genius – the English rendering of Sakuntala, the painting exhibition of Raja Ravi Verma in The World’s Columbian Exhibition of Chicago 1893, or Vivekananda’s address to the World Parliament of Religions in the same city in 1895, are some well known examples – moved now into the domain of practice or the performing arts. Europe and British audiences were hungry for variety and Theosophy circles provided much of the eastern content, freed of its community baggage. Interestingly, in Victorian England and the Europe of the time, Indian/Oriental themes were picked up by the popular, more radical and vibrant influences operating in theatre, music and political life in general. But in India, these universalizing, decontextualizing tendencies within performance cultures worked in the opposite direction, rendering custom more orthodox than it actually was.
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atified now by text and often in a language – Sanskrit – which had already been introduced to Europe as a shared civilizational fountainhead, dance revival clearly turned its back on the popular, vernacular social and cultural practices within which it had been politically embedded. Theosophy, by propagating Aryan, Sanskritic elements within Indian culture as a nationalistic self-understanding, did disservice to the understanding of ‘classical’ art traditions and the role they played in building up local networks and political engagements. Kapila Vatsyayan has rightly cautioned against the equation of ‘classical’ with ‘shastriya’ or ‘shastric’ since the intention is often erroneous – that of bringing out the elite or sacerdotal character of Indian cultural forms.The Sadir reform and revival movements were both inherently modern seen through a Eurocentric lens. Each sought to separate out a feminine art from the way of life that went with it. The Theosophists were intent only on rescuing the dance while the reformers, under the influence of science and puritanism, were targeting the devadasi and insisting that religion be kept strictly separate from civil society and its ‘entertainments’. The modern state backed these sentiments even though it had nothing against dance or religion per se. Indeed, it is even today working legislatively to regularize and protect both ‘bar’ dancers and the performers of temple ritual – but as separate professions! What it will not permit is the coming together of art and religion in a single public function. And so, the devadasi was squeezed into the stereotype of the temple ‘prostitute’ and her dance into that of the Mughal, court based nautch, which was facing widespread mass protests as a ‘social evil’ all across the North starting from the end of the nineteenth century. Neither could do justice to the existential, non-dualistic truth of the devadasi and her dance under Tamil Bhakti Hinduism.
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can honestly confess today that it was my sense of shock at learning that the devadasi women I met in Tanjore district in the late seventies, had at some point of time in the past been referred to as ‘prostitutes’, that provided the initial impetus for my whole journey into researching the dance. As a northerner, I of course carried stereotypes about the ‘prostitute’ and the Bombay filmy mujra or nautch dancer in my mind, as quite distinct from the sphere of activity of the housewife or grhasta woman. But the women I encountered from the erstwhile devadasi community in no way fitted into these boxes. To my untutored eye, they neither looked nor spoke very differently from the respectable Brahmin women of the village. My perplexity increased when I learnt further that the ban on temple dedication and the dance performance in temples and peoples homes had led to some very real paradoxes in Hindu society which did not just reside in my head.Reformist action against the ‘impure’ devadasi, for instance, had got completely intermingled with the reform of the upper caste, virgin widow! In the aftermath of the anti-nautch movement, it had become, as much an act of chivalry and humanitarianism to marry a ‘reformed’ devadasi as to marry an upper caste widow. Significantly, under orthodox Hindu law, both acts were impermissible, if not incomprehensible. Marriage, whether to a man or a god, constituted sacramental entry into the sect, impossible for a woman to repeat in her lifetime. Indeed, in Tamil society only the devadasi and the Brahmin woman were eligible to undergo pre-pubertal initiation/marriage in the temple and in the parental home respectively. By publicly accepting these disenfranchised women as wives, eminent social reformers saved them from permanent social disability.
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uperficially, starkly contrasted in the reform and revival programmes, the upper caste wife and the devadasi actually demonstrated a parallelism, without which, if looked at dispassionately, the takeover of the dance in free India, predominantly by Brahmin women from the South, would not have been possible with such resounding success! There was an unexamined formal equity obtaining between the two models of feminine vocation – the domestic and the artistic, the implications of which for both men and women were competitively auspicious and inner-worldly, not puritanical. This very real equivalence yet difference was in evidence on the plane of institutionalized temple religion as well. In Tamil bhakti, theological doctrine, temple architecture and daily and calendrical ritual service presupposed the coexistence of two goddesses. One, the svakiyanayika (inner or domestic) and the other, the parakiyanayika (outer or public), in relation to the nayaka or hero-god.
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ictorian India, which spawned the Anti-nautch agitation against the devadasi in the 1890s, could not digest this cultural, conceptual equivalence between the sumangali or married woman and the nityasumangali or the devadasi. Victorian sensibilities of the time recognized feminine professionalism to be either cloistered and puritanical or perverse. The single woman – school governess, companion, actor – who typically left the profession once she got married, filled the space between ‘nun’ and ‘whore’. Indeed, she only worked in order to collect a dowry for herself in the absence of parental support. Willy-nilly, therefore, the only locus for auspicious sexuality ended up being the married household or ‘the parent’s bedroom’ encompassing in Michel Foucault’s words, both fertility and utility.3 To the modern mind, there could be no other legitimate space for women’s ‘fulfilment’ and so the devadasi was cast in the role of temple ‘prostitute’, needing to be reformed from her life of vice.But in regional Tamil understandings, being a private housewife or a professional god’s wife were both parallel and legitimate life-possibilities for sect women, even though the second was a more restricted and difficult path, offering in compensation the chance of an education, artistic accomplishment, wealth and fame. Indeed in speech, ritual correctness and etiquette, the successful devadasi could be said to have beaten the upper caste grhasta woman at her own game. It was this underlying context of competition, which led the famous traveller Sir Francis Buchanan to remark in the early nineteenth century, that Brahmin women were ‘beautiful but insipid’ in comparison to the dancing women, indirectly encouraging their husbands to ‘seek out’ the latter.
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oday, more than two hundred years later, we can safely say that it is the Brahmin woman who is now in the ascendant as regards English education, artistic training and the glamour and polish which makes for ‘star’ quality, whether on the dance floor or on celluloid. Bharata Natyam, the modern incarnation of the devadasi’s Sadir, is almost completely danced by Brahmin women from the South, whether at home or as part of the diaspora with a sprinkling of foreigners and a growing number of NRI’s from different communities. It is Brahmin women like Vyjanthimala, Jayalalitha, Hema Malini, Meenakshi Seshadri, Jaya Prada, Vidya Balan and Deepika Padukone who after independence became the political leaders and/or professionals of show biz permitted their star lifestyles – some of them as wives of rich, powerful, already-married men. The ex-devadasis and their offspring have overcompensated for the scandal of the anti-nautch agitation by becoming strictly private housewives or modern ‘working women’, having nothing to do with the performative arts.This well-nigh complete exchange of positions, between the Brahmin woman and the devadasi, demonstrates the vigorous legacy of feminine professionalism in the arts and indirectly justifies the larger theoretical claims made in this paper – for an indigenous ‘modernity’ of tradition. Most important in this regard is to note that the artistic division of labour in Sadir, between guru (or nattuvanar) and devadasi could not be reduced to the sexual division of labour between husband and wife, more typical to household modes of production in the arts. The customary connection made in the devadasi’s dance, between a performative style and a lifestyle, had an ethical, professional not natural impetus. Thus, even within the natural category of woman in the same household – the devadasi’s establishment – an ethical, not categorical rank difference was created between those who performed publicly and those who remained private – wife, sister or daughter to a man.
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learly, the community context did not provide a hostile environment to Sadir’s professional division of labour. Equally, as we have seen above, its regional context did not militate against its universalizability. Indeed the modern day Bharata Natyam as the Sadir’s clone, provides retrospective proof that in India the ‘classical’ and the regional interpenetrate one another. Historically, the necessity for the woman performer in Sadir was explicitly linked with the achievement of an aesthetic, not gendered function – the production of srngara rasa, through the kaisiki style of professional performance.The devadasi discipline – vrtti, sampradaya, parampara – was no mere aesthetic technique to be ‘applied’ to the self and the body. But embodied rather the ethical compulsions considered inevitable to the artistic life, whose implications for women, whether we approve of them or not, were universal in their possibilities. How to know and keep a man without the attendant conjugality, domestic servitude and loss of self; how to be a mother and yet a professional? How also to be a ‘star’ without condemning oneself to isolation, bereft of family or community support structures – all these are questions that are absolutely contemporary in their significance, being faced by the women dancing and performing even today, much after the devadasi.
The regional innovations of Tamil Bhakti Hinduism, both within religion and art, presented Sadir as an already ‘secular’ or inner-worldly professional tradition available to women. The rationalization of feminine and masculine functions from the ‘natural’ family context also helped in the professional organization of the Sadir. Without taking cognizance of these indigenous innovations, the vast global diffusion of Bharata Natyam in the absence of the devadasi and in comparison to other ‘classical’ dance forms of India, becomes impossible to explain in contemporary times.
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t the level of popularization of dance and its amateur spread in middle class society through a cultural pedagogy supervised by mothers, the classical form of Bharata Natyam is head and shoulders ahead of other forms. Why? This ‘popularity’ further, is not to be confused with the women’s dancing done anyway at festivals, marriages, ladies clubs and the like. Put another way, why did the northern tradition of Kathak not achieve the same level of popularization at home and in the diaspora even amongst Punjabis and Gujaratis, seen as ‘North Indians’? Certainly school ballets and festival performances of Krishna rasleela encouraged the diffusion of Kathak but it never reached the scale and intensity of Bharata Natyam. Why? Surely there was something intrinsically ‘modern’ in the Sadir that provided possibilities for such widespread diffusion later as Bharata Natyam?Sadir, its form, practice and development, I would like to argue here, had already been through an indigenous process of secularization before its ‘modern’ revival after independence as Bharata Natyam. Tamil temple bhakti’s strategy to quash the influence of the heresies in the South by winning over and seducing the public, ‘converting’ them through art and spectacle, clearly made a place for skilled women in its religious institutions. It is this secularization that permitted an ostensibly religious institution, the structural temple of South Indian Tamil bhakti, to take on the coordination of the woman dance artiste’s professional life – performance schedule, supporting ensemble, remuneration, perks, event management, security and support structure, performance sponsorship and advertisement. For women themselves, desirous of or thrown into religious life, music and dance based temple service with its mass, secular and lay or democratic appeal clearly provided an attractive alternative to the very oppressive forms of female vocational calling available then in the shape of the Jain or Buddhist nun.
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ith marriage, not sacrifice, as key bhakti temple religion innovations (extending even to the necessity for the agamic priest to be a married man!), the ascetic or the celibate consecrated life began to lose the social honour without which it could not sustain itself. The god and goddess now reached out to their devotees through festivals celebrating marriage and the daily and calendrical temple puja became theatrical in its performance repertoire, replete with domestic and sexual motifs, imagery and enactments between male and female deity. This led to the elevation of the auspicious married woman’s status in society, not the female ascetic’s. So much so that even the consecrated temple woman, the devadasi, was now seen as God’s wife, one who could never be widowed – nityasumangali.To clinch matters, in the agamic scheme of the sixteen offerings before the temple deity, only what was permissible and attractive to humans was offered to God. These secular influences on worship made offering food, clothing, music and dance mandatory in the temple calendar. The austerity of bodily training for female specialists was now brought more into line with art practice and not the mortification of the flesh which the heresies demanded, like shaving the hair, wearing monoschematic colours, eating in a begging bowl and the like. These latter symbols of spiritual achievement in the heresies were demoted and de-clawed by being deemed inauspicious and unlucky and reserved for the lay widowed woman.
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he spread of secular house holding, married values in the whole of society became evident with marriage as a samskara beginning to telescope all samskaras for an individual. Mangala became a cosmology, its ritual form duplicating itself to mark all honourable points in an individual’s life viz. attaining 60 years of age, winning a war, elevation to a sacred office, etc. Indeed the notion of mangala made unhappy Hindu marriage a cultural impossibility. This social elevation of marriage pointed to a secularized Hinduism and an already modernized faith of pre-colonial times. It is within this regional historical perspective that the Brahmin wife and devadasi’s positioning vis-à-vis the rest of the world, mentioned above, starts to attain significance. Equally, the ‘bridal, auspicious’ look of the Bharata Natyam dancer, cherished today in the potential search for brides amongst modern-day Indians, begins to disclose its formal, historical and not merely ornamental logic.In Tamil Nadu, it was the temple institution and its affiliated experts who modernized custom, secularized tradition, professionalized the arts and codified the performance of the day, not in a written but a presentational form free of any particular ‘caste’ embodiment? Otherwise, how would Rukmini Devi have danced it or Krishna Iyer for that matter after the devadasis stopped performing? At the same time, performance was kept close to a way of life that supported its continuity, quality and standardization. And hasn’t this quality deteriorated and become at risk today when we bring dance back into the amateur domains of the family with its sexual division of labour and support?
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lassical dance is kept alive today by the superhuman efforts of the individual dancers themselves or their mothers, patrons or husbands, who now run ragged getting good musicians yet ‘keeping them in their place’, packing halls with audiences through personal or state efforts, cajoling gurus monetarily to teach a special item or ‘number’ that will bring in the eyeballs too accustomed now to the sex and violence and melodrama of TV in their homes. It is surely significant that much before the contemporary feminist discourse on the legitimacy of ‘the item girl’ ‘sex work’, ‘single motherhood’, ‘bar dancing’ and ‘women headed households’, a regional South Indian woman’s dance form was allowed to flourish outside the family/household or royal court (which is only part of the king’s household) context on the one hand and the brothel or market on the other. The Sadir provides clear evidence of a secularized temple religion and the modernity of custom, within even the proscribed limits of the woman’s world.
Footnotes:
1. Amrit Srinivasan, ‘Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance’, Economic and Political Weekly 20(44), 2 November 1985, pp. 1869-1876. (Reprinted in Davesh Soneji (ed.), Bharatanatyam: A Reader. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2012).
2. Mark Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited’, Sociological Theory 1, pp. 201-233.
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Introduction. Vol I. Doubleday, London, 1990.
4. Francis Buchanan, A Journey from Madras Through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar. East India Company, London, 1807.