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ABSTRACTS
SESSION X:
DANCE AND BODILY PERFORMANCE
Dancing Disjunctures: Memory, Embodiment,
and a Devadasi Community in Modern Tamilnadu
Davesh Soneji, McGill University
As early as the 1860s, vociferous social purity
movements focused on the extra-domestic sexuality of courtesans and
other female performers in South India had made a significant impact
on these communities. By the 1930s, dance performances by
devadasis in the temples and courts of Tamilnadu had become
merely perfunctory as far as temple administrators, priests,
zamindars, and audiences were concerned. Transmogrified by
colonial modernity and stigmatized through the discourse of “social
reform,” the performance culture and lifestyles of devadasis
in the Pudukkottai and Tanjavur districts had become irrevocably
divested of function or meaning. But R. Muttukkannammal, the last
dedicated devadasi of the Murukan temple at Viralimalai in
Pudukkottai district, still dances her repertoire in her home,
“behind closed doors,” in a complex process of embodying the past
through a performance of her own identity. In this paper, using
ethnographic data, archival material, and analyses of specific
genres within the dance repertoire, I illustrate the innovative and
strategic ways in which Muttukkannammal uses embodied performance to
both represent and remember her identity as a devadasi in the
volatile (and sometimes hostile) social conditions of modern
Tamilnadu. Today there is no audience for Muttukkannammal’s dance,
but according to her, this is not a criterion for performance.
Devadasi dance has moved from the realm of public spectacle into
the realm of nostalgia and memory, and its function has shifted from
aesthetic to mnemonic. This paper demonstrates how the embodied
present brings the past to life, and in this case, constructs a
representation that affirms self-worth and provisionally displaces
stigma.
Enacting
Body, Expressing Tradition: Movement of Identity in Mohiniattam
George Pati, Valparaiso University
 Mohiniattam, the
dance of the enchantress, is one of the magnificent dance forms of
Kerala, South India. Mohiniattam enacts the rich religious textual
tradition of Hinduism intertwined with folklore elements of Kerala
with its elegant repertoires. The various constructs of mudras (the
hand gestures) and body narrate stories of devotion and love present
in Hindu mythologies. Apart from visual representations of ancient
textual traditions, bodily expression and enactment of this
tradition transcends the cultural boundaries between the two major
south Indian sects, Vaishnava and Saiva, in Kerala. Therefore, this
dance performance embodies bodily movements and movement of identity
among its practitioners and audiences.
This paper,
divided into three sections, first attempts to understand the bodily
movements that exemplify bhakti, an expression of devotional
attitude in Hinduism, in MohiniattamÆs historical milieu; second,
draws parallels from similar enactments of textual traditions
through ritual and symbolic constructions of the body in the broader
performative traditions of Kerala; third, discusses the cultural
significance of this rich dance tradition of Kerala by taking into
consideration the dialectics of religious tradition versus modern
culture.
Controlling
the Body, Constructing the Self: Corporeality and Selfhood through
the Lens of Performance in South India
Harshita Mruthinti, Emory University
 Theories on constructing or deconstructing the self are the
focus of much debate for cultural anthropologists studying Hindu
religious traditions. While these theories highlight an
understanding the self through relational interactions, they fail to
consider the relationality implicit within Indian performance. The
primary objective of this paper is to fill this lacuna by examining
what performance, which requires the performer to relate to a
particular character, can teach us about the nature of the self
within an Indian Hindu worldview. Therefore, I will ask: does
performance demonstrate the existence of the self within the
performer, whose bodily and emotional states must encounter the
character of another? In this paper, I will examine three South
Indian performative contexts—guising in the Gangamma jatara,
possession in Tamil healing practices, and the classical Indian
dance tradition of Kuchipudi.
Furthermore, I will outline three categories of performative
selfhood: the first category is the bodied self, which is the
secular state of selfhood expressed through the physical body of the
performer. The second category is the embodied self, or the
emotional faculty residing within the corporeal form of the bodied
self. Finally, the third category is the de-embodied self,
or the self-conscious faculty that exists external to the
performer’s body, but has the ability to control both bodied and
embodied selves. I will suggest that these three categories
overturn the deconstruction of the self, by constructing the
possibility of a lingering self, which manages to influence
how the performer relates to the character being performed.
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