The Dancer's Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India 9781478023760

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The Dancer ’s Voice

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The Dancer ’s Voice

Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India

Duke University Press Durham and London 2023

Rumya Sree Putcha

© 2023 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Courtney Leigh Richardson Typeset in Merope by Copperline Book Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Putcha, Rumya Sree, [date] author. Title: The dancer’s voice : performance and womanhood in transnational India / Rumya Sree Putcha. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022006094 (print) | lccn 2022006095 (ebook) isbn 9781478016496 (hardcover) isbn 9781478019138 (paperback) isbn 9781478023760 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Dance—Social aspects—India. | Feminism and dance—India. | Feminism—India. | Women dancers—India. | Women in the performing arts—India. | Women—India—Social conditions. | bisac: social science / Feminism & Feminist Theory | performing arts / Dance / Regional & Ethnic Classification: lcc gv1693 .p883 2022 (print) | lcc gv1693 (ebook) | ddc 792.8/0954—dc23/eng/20220527 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006094 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006095 Cover art: Vasanta Lakshmi Putcha, author’s mother, 1955, aged nine.

For my parents

The goal is to get into that state where the dancer and the dance become one. Where, if you’re sitting in the audience, you see through her, past her. Where she disappears, and all you can see is the dance. —Rama Vaidyanathan If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. —Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s”

Contents

Note on Transliteration and Language • ix Prologue • xi

Introduction • 1 1 Womanhood • 21 2 Caste • 43 3 Citizenship • 67 4 Silence • 89 Epilogue • 115 Acknowledgments • 123 Glossary • 129 Notes • 133 Filmography • 151 References • 163 Index • 181

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Note on Transliteration and Language

For Indian-­language words (Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, and Sanskrit), I have followed the Library of Congress system of transliteration and diacritics. For the sake of ease and clarity, I use diacritical markings only when I introduce a term. I have included all transliterations with diacritical markings in the glossary. Exceptions to this include proper names of individuals and places as well as titles of dances, musical pieces, literary works, and films, which are transliterated according to common practice.

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Prologue

It would not be an overstatement to say that this book is based on over thirty years of reflection, thought, and action. The questions that are posed and, in some cases, answered in the pages that follow began for me many, many years ago, in a Hindu temple in Pearland, Texas, on a sweltering October afternoon in 1986. On that day, with a great deal of sentimentality, my parents presented me to two south Indian immigrant women, one a Tamil karnāṭak singer and the other a Telugu bharatanatyam and kuchipudi dancer, to begin my training in music and dance.1 In a gendered act of religious identification, I was initiated into the Indian performance arts. I was shown how to hold my hands in mudras, turn my feet out and hit them on the hard, white linoleum, and sing a series of ascending notes: sa re ga ma pa da ni sa. The photo in figure P.1 shows me on that day in 1986, in a pose that repeats throughout family photo albums: dancing for the camera but looking at my mom or my guru, who are directing the picture, if not the performance itself. It’s striking to me now that there aren’t many pictures of the singing portion of my young life, considering each activity was designated an hour’s worth of lesson time each Saturday morning. It’s the dance photos that made their way into family stories and then affirmed my identification as an Indian woman in the United States. The costumes, the jewelry, the extra-­“Hindu-­ness” that a dancer performs all make for better photos, I suppose.2 In retrospect, it is clear that

Figure P.1. First dance lesson, October 1986.

dancing led to an acute sense of becoming an Indian woman in ways that singing simply did not for me. Looking back, I can pinpoint when I decided, definitively, that karnatak vocal music was not for me. I was eleven years old, and Disney’s Aladdin had just been released. Aladdin represented a turning point, inasmuch as I would spend the next decade of my life with the nickname Jasmine, inspired by the rebelprincess in the film. Her character played an important role in reflecting an exotic femininity for Indian women like me, all while conveying the message that daughters must marry—that was the ultimate goal. Jasmine’s influence on my life, however, while meaningful for the gender, sexual, and racial identity she reflected, was something far greater. In that film, though Jasmine’s body is othxii • Prologue

ered, her voice is not.3 It was a shock for me to hear her sing.4 It was an even greater shock to see my white friends accept and even admire Jasmine, even if she was a cartoon, because of her voice. In light of this revelation, in the sixth grade I quietly taught myself “A Whole New World,” the duet Jasmine sings with her love interest in the film, Aladdin. Though I was a violist in the orchestra, a kind junior high choir director, Ms. McLeod, indulged me one day after school when I wandered in from across the hall and let me sing it for her. Realizing I had vocal training (she admitted to me years later that she desperately needed more altos), she moved to the piano and led me through a few vocal exercises, taking me down to notes I knew how to access with my karnatic training, which relied on what singers refer to as “chest voice.” But she also vocalized me up to notes I had never touched in my karnatic training. As I climbed those scales, she pressed my abdomen with her hand, forcing me to brace my abdominal muscles—something I knew how to do from my dance training. In that moment I felt a sound ringing from my body I had never felt in my years of karnatic training. While karnatic music, as a seated practice, felt restricted, even disconnected from my body, this sound felt thrilling, powerful, and uncensored. As I discovered my racial difference through choral music in the suburbs of Houston, my dance training proceeded with its own juggernaut momentum. My mother and dance teacher had been laying plans for a grand debut solo performance in bharatanatyam, known as an arangetram, perhaps since before I was even able to walk.5 Their planning came to fruition on November 23, 1991, shortly after my tenth birthday, when after months of rehearsals three to four hours a day, I performed a two-­hour solo recital—a feat to demonstrate my endurance, mastery, and skill. The arangetram was an intense experience and one that reflects how much my bodily labor as a public performer mattered to my parents and my predominantly Telugu Brahmin community.6 I remember the way my ankle bells would cut into my feet and how my grandmother sewed blue velvet onto them so the abrasions wouldn’t get worse. My most vivid memory of the event is from the aftermath. While Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” played on the radio in the background, I was alone in my parents’ bedroom. Left to entertain myself, I opened a gift my mother’s boss had given me to mark the occasion: a black and gold box containing the most beautiful ruby earrings I had ever seen.7 At the same juncture in my life, as I learned how meaningful my dancerly abilities were to the Indian immigrant elders around me as well as their majority-­white employers and colleagues, I became more viscerally aware of the deep and abiding anti-­immigrant forms of racism that permeate US American Prologue • xiii

Figure P.2. Performing bharatanatyam at a nasa-jsc event, 1989.

life. Henna tattoos are common today, but in 1991, I faced constant ridicule and shame at the red stains on my hands from dance performances (see figure P.2). And so, I did everything in my power to hide my dance life during the day at school for fear of being bullied by students like the one who told me on a bus ride home that his uncle was a grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, and people like me were not welcome in their communities. Looking back now, it makes sense that I found some belonging and safety in choir. It was a group activity; I could be anonymous, doing something I already knew how to do. In other words, joining the choir was an excellent way to assimilate in my predominantly white Texas public school. But singing in a choir meant, more often than not, singing music rooted in the Christian faith. Though they eventually made their peace with it, for the decades to follow, up to and including my part-­time jobs as a professional soprano in church settings, my parents didn’t know what to make of my dual identity as a Hindu dancer and a Christian singer. xiv • Prologue

Paradoxes aside, my story is not unique. I grew up, like so many other Indian American women whose dominant-­caste families turned dance into a type of religious edification and finishing school, caught between two worlds, doing my best to accommodate the expectations of both.8 I became an expert in code switching. That is to say, I internalized the messages I received from Indian immigrants, other racial minorities, and white US Americans and learned the art of looking Indian and sounding white. In college at the University of Chicago in 2001, I met a professor who introduced me to the idea of subculture—a revelation to me at the time—which seemed to capture my experience growing up middle class, racialized as other, but not black, and among immigrants. His name was George Chauncey, and under his supervision I wrote an undergraduate thesis titled “Beyond the Stage: Culture, Identity, and Dance in Indian America.” In reconstructing the sequence of events that brought me to writing this prologue, I went looking for his comments on the thesis and found these words in the official feedback form from the Department of History: “You argue persuasively that parents use dance to instill in their daughters a deeper appreciation of Indian culture and, indeed, to encourage them to ‘embody’ some of its characteristic moral and bodily postures. Although the paper offers several interesting general characterizations of the history of this cultural practice, it would have been strengthened if you had explored the historical development of the practice more fully and in developing your own argument.” It has taken me years to produce an account that could begin to follow this advice. It is difficult to see oneself within a history as that history is unfolding, even more elusive to develop a vocabulary that somehow pushes the existing narrative to some new revelation that could adequately explain the very situation in which I found myself—the first generation born and raised in the United States to immigrants who had been allowed in only because of the struggles for racial justice and the shifting political landscape of the post–World War II era. It was only much, much later that I began to understand that the white violence I encountered as a model minority in the late twentieth century was nothing like that experienced by my parents, who were born into English-­educated Telugu Brahmin families at the same moment India gained independence from the British.9 I learned, through my parents’ silence about the racism they experienced as well as the caste privilege and antiblackness from which they benefited, that racial consciousness is not only about seeing yourself, like looking in a mirror, but also about seeing what others see when they look at you. This awareness of how racism and casteism intersect with the entrenched legacies of European colonialism in the US context became clearer for me when Prologue • xv

I was admitted to a doctoral program in 2004. Because the University of Chicago has a fairly tight-­knit humanities community, not long after I graduated, my bachelor’s thesis somehow found its way into the hands of a British anthropologist who studied Middle Eastern music. He told me about a discipline called ethnomusicology over coffee one day in his home. Sitting in his living room, surrounded by instruments and artwork from all over the world, I learned about a field dedicated to studying the expressive cultures of previously colonized, nonwhite, or non-­Western people—people like me. After completing an undergraduate degree in music, which focused exclusively on European art music, this information felt like magic. Yet, as I write these words today, almost a decade after completing my formal education, I am aware of the principled reasons why scholars like me part company with ethnomusicology—through attentiveness to what Deborah Wong (2001) once characterized as the “problem of listening,” a phrase emphasizing how majority scholars often fail to heed minoritized perspectives, even when other scholars take the time to formulate and transmit them. This book upbraids problematic listeners and is a product of my working through the historical, political, and at times deeply personal questions that animate research in the North American academy on Indian women’s lives and choices. Though I join a long list of scholars who have undertaken similar projects from various subject positions (see, e.g., Gaunt 2006; Jackson 2006; Loza 2006), I am increasingly aware of how empire, migration, and feminism inform my approach as a Telugu Brahmin woman and an Indian American, born and raised by immigrants in Texas, and positioned in a US university. In many ways, this book and its methods recall Salman Rushdie’s reflections on the incompleteness of postcolonial and immigrant subjectivity: “It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost” (1992, 11).10 Acknowledging the shifting power structures and broken mirrors that form the foundation of my work and access, this book engages with a specific feminist impulse—undertaking what Audre Lorde (1977) and Sylvia Wynter (2003) have variously described as “disruption” and “epistemic disobedience.” This book is being completed at a moment when I am able to recognize a winding road of liberation consciousness in retrospect, but am increasingly aware of how institutions of higher education have relegated such political projects within their ranks to the rhetoric of multiculturalism or diversity. This discourse tends to bracket radical work, especially that which resists and refuses the disciplining xvi • Prologue

and assimilating of disabled, racialized, or gendered difference as something done “out there” rather than “in here.” In the end, this book challenges the divisions of here and there, then and now, and body and voice in an attempt to gather together and make whole these various fragments of my scholarship, activism, and life.

Prologue • xvii

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Introduction

In 2013, a twenty-­three-­year-­old Indian American woman, Nina Davuluri, a classically trained south Indian dancer, was crowned Miss America.1 Davuluri’s family had immigrated from the Telugu-­speaking region of southeast India to the United States after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.2 Though she identified as a kuchipudi and bharatanatyam dancer throughout the pageant, Davuluri did not present a classical item during the talent portion of the event, but rather translated her dance skills into a high-­energy athletic performance, which combined movements and sounds that have entered the US multicultural landscape through Bollywood cinema.3 Her costume also departed from the conventions of classical dance and drew instead on fashion from popular Indian cinema and bridal wear. Despite her success during both the talent and interview portions—she was especially commended for her “articulateness”—for days after the event, social media platforms bore witness to displeasure that an Indian immigrant could reflect American beauty. On Twitter especially, users referred to Davuluri as “Miss Al-­Qaeda” or “Miss 7–11,” with one user observing, “Egypt dancing? This is America” (see Broderick 2013). From India, commentators noted the irony that a “dark-­skinned Kamma girl” could represent Indian beauty.4 A year earlier, a twenty-­three-­year-­old Indian woman was sexually assaulted in New Delhi. In the aftermath of the crime, debate, protest, and commentary

erupted across the world about India’s regressive attitudes toward women who dared venture out in public. For months, British, North American, and Indian media outlets as well as academic documentary filmmakers rehearsed the gory details of the attack, using a pseudonym, Nirbhaya (trans. fearless), in place of the victim’s real name, Jyoti Singh Pandey. The coverage of the crime could best be described as cinematic—highlighting not only the brutality of the assault and the fact that the assailants were members of a much-­maligned population of migrant laborers but also that it happened to a beautiful, yet-­to-­be-­married young woman, a call center employee who was on her way home after going out to see a movie with a friend. In India, activists demanded that the government acknowledge that crimes against women, especially rural and Dalit (oppressed caste) women, occurred at far higher rates with far less public outcry. They asked, “Why was this particular woman’s body worthier of national bereavement than others? Why would the media and the academy amplify her parents’ demands for justice, but not the voices of oppressed-­caste or transgender women?” This book is about how stories like Nina Davuluri’s and Jyoti Singh Pandey’s have come to characterize experiences of Indian womanhood around the world. I interrogate the media-­driven, narrating forces that position these two women as instructive examples of Indian womanhood—while simultaneously suggesting that they are exceptional characters—to uncover the complex and often contradictory ways Indian women exist in this world. Where Davuluri emerges as an aspirational example of Indian American womanhood when she dances to a Bollywood film song, appealing to the standard quotient of the white male gaze—beauty—Pandey appears as a cautionary tale of Indian womanhood and only in death, as nothing more than a victim. In both cases, in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, their hypervisible bodies, it became possible for many to speak on behalf of or in place of these women. In other words, the more visible each woman’s body became, the less her voice remained her own. Separating women’s voices from their bodies has been central to the practices of national citizenship since at least the early twentieth century. By national citizenship, I mean the relationship between an individual and a nation-­state. In this relationship, an individual—a citizen—has access to certain rights and privileges in exchange for their allegiance. While allegiance can denote private and emotional attachments, allegiance is often expressed in public, ritual acts; for example, when a person places their hand over their heart during the national anthem. Ritual expressions of allegiance, as both bodily and public acts, require one to understand citizenship and its practices as a performance. In this book, I explore how such performances shape the way women, specifically those who understand themselves as Indian women, experience citizenship as 2 • Introduction

a gendered and racialized practice. In other words, I demonstrate how citizenship for Indian women relies on their performance as both Indian and women. My argument rests on the premise that the public persona of the Indian dancer symbolically represents and reinforces how citizenship for women operates as a public act. Bringing together examples of Indian and Indian American dancers from the 1930s to the contemporary moment, I expose how the logics of citizenship have required and continue to require Indian women’s voices to be managed in public cultures. And I show how some women have subverted such regimes of control. For example, in an interview with English-­language media aired shortly after she was crowned, Davuluri was asked to respond to the racist backlash. Instead of capitulating to the anti-­immigrant sentiments that her fame and success had inspired, however, Davuluri redirected in her response, reminding her audience, “I have always viewed myself as first and foremost American” (see Morawetz 2013). In this book, I highlight how the dancer’s voice reveals quiet strategies of resistance and subversive acts of compliance. To better explain how such strategies both link and delink performance and subjectivity, and to reduce the potential risk of producing scholarship that speaks for or on behalf of others, I include my ethnographic voice, interrogating family memories and my own dance training alongside the archival and observational. Likewise, I bring together cinema dance and classical dance cultures, treating them as coconstituted. By widening my frame in these ways, I am better able to contextualize how a Telugu immigrant woman trained in bharatanatyam and kuchipudi danced to a Bollywood song to win a beauty pageant in the United States. I begin in the early era of Telugu sound film to uncover how the dancer’s voice has evolved, highlighting how a constellation of social forces such as anticolonialism, nationalism, and migration have at once amplified and ventriloquized her. In each chapter, I listen for how a dancer’s voice is managed, examining the slippage between her subjectivity and the role that she performs. For example, in chapter 1 I follow the voice of an early Telugu film dancer-­singer, Sundaramma, through the film archive, bringing cinematic historicity into conversation with the training offered in institutional kuchipudi dance centers. In subsequent chapters, I rely on a variety of cultural artifacts extending from the film archive, like radio cultures and songbooks, language politics, costuming and choreography, and advertising cultures, in each case offering ethnographic texture to the dancer’s performance by and through her voice. Relying on a reflexive, transnational feminist method, which recognizes the divergent ways bodies and voices are able to access citizenship, I examine the settings in which Indian women are or are not free to express their subjectiviIntroduction • 3

ties. This approach exposes the unstable distinction between women like Pandey and Davuluri, between victims and heroines, and illuminates how such binary constructions have affected the lived experiences of Indian women over the course of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. In particular, I focus on how performances of Indian womanhood—public expressions of citizenship— have relied upon, recycled, and, in some cases, subverted the victim-­heroine dynamic and in doing so have animated what it means to identify as an Indian woman. Performance As Nina Davuluri’s reliance on Bollywood performance demonstrates, South Asian publics and cinema are mutually constituted. Cinema and its logics of performance do not exist in a separate realm from everyday life. In fact, public representations of womanhood are deeply embedded in the lives of Indian women and their understandings of self. My intervention both builds upon and departs from a large body of feminist work that has examined gender as a woman’s problem, circumscribed and validated by positivist and legal categories of sexuality, criminality, and marriage. Much of this work has grappled with the disciplinary and evidentiary limitations imposed by colonial thought and its materialist, archival, and discursive impulses.5 It is primarily under the logics of colonial modernity, for example, that Indian women’s bodies became a metric for studying sexuality and, simultaneously, for exerting control over women’s lives.6 Through analysis, women’s bodies became and remain simultaneously silent and hypervisible, variously glossed in the discourse as prostitutes, public entertainers, devadāsīs, or courtesans. Research often positioned as postcolonial or subaltern has endeavored to recuperate and amplify the voices of Indian women, especially those women whose expressive cultural practices many scholars have regarded as representative of India beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth.7 In this way, Indian woman­hood has operated and continues to operate as an epistemological horizon, perceived in and through moments when body and voice are understood as distinct planes of subjectivity. In this book, I complicate the essentialized epistemologies that separate the noncitizen from the citizen, the public from the private, and the voice from the body.8 I use the term performance to capture the dynamic processes, complexity, and internal contradictions of cultural practices that pivot around the rituals of Indian womanhood. I trace how and why Indian womanhood is performed as citizenship, oscillating between India and the United States and between film, 4 • Introduction

archival, and ethnographic analysis, toggling between the past and the present to locate individual women and highlight how they express their unique subjectivities. This allows me to bring critical archival and ethnographic work conducted in India (Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore, New Delhi) as well as in the United States (Houston, San Francisco, Chicago) from 2004 to 2019 into conversation with my own migration and family history. By locating myself and my access in this way, I am able to engage with a more capacious understanding of what performance is and does. In so doing, I position myself alongside a number of both recent and well-­ rehearsed critiques emerging from South Asian performance studies and Asian American critical race and feminist studies (see, e.g., Gopinath 2005; Prasad 2017) to establish a simple truth: that “performance means never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nth time. Performance is ‘twice-­behaved behavior’” (Schechner [1985] 2011, 36–37). I focus on the deep and mutually constitutive connections between “twice-­behaved behavior,” public cultures, and citizenship for Indian women over the course of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. Specifically, I uncover how the figure of the Indian dancer has, on the one hand, produced twice-­behaved behavior for generations of women under the logics of cis-­heteropatriarchy and how, on the other, such behavior relies on racialized and dissociative understandings of the body and voice. A truism: Indian dancers—whether they are in India or not—are positioned as ambassadors for a cisgender and heterosexual Indian womanhood and are expected to speak English (see also Chandra 2012). This paradoxical yet stabilized understanding of what the Indian dancer means, in voice as well as in body, suggests that she, as a symbol, must be understood as a symptom of a much longer, if discontinuous, history of Indian womanhood extending before and after the colonial era, both in India and elsewhere (see also Srinivasan 2012, 8). I stumbled across the photo in figure I.1 in the summer of 2006. It was the summer of my comprehensive exams at the University of Chicago, and, on that day, I had decided to take a break and spend some time on the first floor of the Regenstein Library in the popular periodical section. As I walked past the newspapers and scanned for something that might count as light reading, I caught sight of a woman’s face, in the iconic makeup and temple jewelry of a south Indian classical dancer.9 The image captured a racialized logic I knew all too well—an Indian American woman whose identity was defined by the idea that while she looked like a timeless temple dancer, she was expected to be adept at Introduction • 5

Figure I.1. Time magazine cover, June 2006.

communicating in the languages of consumerism—English and modern technology (see also Radhakrishnan 2008, 7–8). The Indian dancer is a simultaneously sonic and visual figure.10 To perceive the dancer as an icon in sight or sound, or sight before or after sound, not only misrecognizes the complex negotiations dancers are required to make in relation to sound, but also suggests that they are nothing more than bodies reacting to that which is always already external to their performance. For example, the expectation implicit in figure I.1—that the dancer functions as a translator by way of her mediated voice—recalls a familiar, if facile, dichotomy for those who study postcolonial nationalism and its discourses of citizenship: looking traditional while sounding and in this case utilizing the modern (i.e., the headset). Departing from this binary, I offer, instead, a transnational feminist critique to expose a parallel, coconstituted politics of performance, which both reifies and fetishizes the dancer’s body and requires her voice to translate and assimilate. 6 • Introduction

Transnationalism Transnationalism captures the juxtaposed identifications of body and voice that the Indian dancer conveys. Specifically, transnationalism draws attention to the processes through which immigrant bodies and voices are differentiated. Such processes of differentiation reveal how dancers understand themselves as transnational citizens rather than diasporic subjects.11 Positioning myself alongside research that has theorized transnationalism as a way to understand how (im)migrants since at least the beginning of the twentieth century maintained connections to their national place of origin through social behaviors (Faist 2000; Vertovec 2001), I interrogate how the disjuncture between body and voice is normalized and reproduced. I argue that the logics of transnationalism encourage a sense of “both here and there,” which often can and does require the voice to assimilate in ways that are distinct from the body (Vertovec 2001, 575). In the US context, transnationalism celebrates and silences othered bodies through the policies of multiculturalism, which require the management of racial difference, particularly through language and speech (see also Rosa 2019). The social forces that sever and then reconnect an Indian woman’s voice to a body in the United States in the post–1965 Immigration Act era both demonstrate the limits of multiculturalism and reveal the corporeal and materialist logics of race and assimilation in transnational communities.12 The Indian dancer’s nonblack gendered identity combined with the expectation that she (like most Indians) speaks English aids in her assimilation and legibility in some spaces while it hinders it in others.13 In cases like mine, the racial identifications that extended from a choir membership in Houston, Texas, left few options except to identify as white.14 These sorts of identifications can and often did lead to broader social and political affinities. For example, because my social world at school was shaped by this activity, most of my friends belonged to white, conservative, and Christian households. As one may or may not expect in Texas, these young men and women listened to country music, almost exclusively. For example, the very first US American country song I learned word for word in seventh grade was Reba McEntire’s (1990) “Fancy,” a song about an impoverished white girl groomed into sex work by her own mother. We didn’t have money for food or rent to say the least we were hard pressed. And mama spent every last penny we had Introduction • 7

to buy me a dancing dress. Mama washed and combed and curled my hair and then she painted my eyes and lips. I remember the day my classmates taught me these lyrics. Looking around that sprawling, beautifully appointed suburban Houston home, I was bewildered at the idea that young well-­to-­do white women identified with this song—that they somehow aspired to a life of singing, dancing, and sex work. In the years since, this memory has led to reflection and consideration: what did my ability to join this group of young white women and sing along signal about my access and the uninterrogated task of assimilating in their world? And what might this line of inquiry expose about the dynamic and transnational formations of Indian womanhood that have simultaneously differentiated the dancer from and connected her to her voice? To answer these questions and more adequately explain how some Indian women identify themselves in the early twenty-­first century requires a political and methodological distinction between transnational immigrations and diasporic racial formations. I situate myself, for example, as an Indian and a South Asian, in terms of my racial identification in the United States, and a transnational immigrant inasmuch as my migration history is relatively uncomplicated, privileged, and recent. My parents’ immigration and thus my own relied upon well-­established forms of labor-­specific migration. These forms of migration to the United States, which are a direct result of the 1965 Immigration Act, welcomed immigrants as well as their families, particularly from dominant-­caste and Telugu-­speaking communities, to work in fields such as science and technology (see Roohi 2017, 2018; Quraishi 2020).15 It is primarily these post–1965 Act immigrant families who have reproduced India, and arguably the whole of South Asia, as Hindu-­centric in the United States. However, despite the common application of the qualifier diasporic to describe Indian communities anywhere outside India, Indian immigrant families in the United States rarely identify with definitions of Indian diaspora that acknowledge migration patterns rooted in imperial violence, racism, and caste discrimination (see also Gidla 2017; Subramanian 2019). This is because to do so would be to identify with Indians who were forced to leave India as indentured servants, Indians whose connection to the subcontinent was often severed by the dehumanizing conditions on plantations in the Indian Ocean (see Ahuja 2002; Anderson 2000; Bates 2017), the Caribbean (see Bahadur 2013), and the South Pacific (see Lal 1985) or in eastern regions of Africa, where their labor built the railroad between Kenya and Uganda (see Desai and Vahed 2010). These 8 • Introduction

were the diasporic Indians as well as Chinese who, in British colonies from 1834, and in the French and Dutch colonies who modeled their systems on the British into the twentieth century, replaced previously enslaved Africans on plantations under what Hugh Tinker once described as “a new system of slavery.”16 And as Gaiutra Bahadur has noted in her work, it was the system of “indenture . . . [that] distinguished Indian from Chinese women. The latter women were required to live on plantations, but weren’t bound by contract to work on them. Unexposed to the glare of sun and suitors in cane fields, most Chinese women led lives more protected and more restricted than their Indian counterparts did” (2013, 117). In other words, under empire, Indian women emerged as a different, more public category of a racialized womanhood (see also Datta 2021). As early as 1790, US immigration policy toward Indians followed racial and gender logics established by the British Empire.17 By the nineteenth century, immigrants from India to the United States were mostly men—British soldiers, servants, or sailors working for the East India trading company.18 In the twentieth century, this group consisted primarily of Sikh men originating from the region of Punjab and was concentrated on the Pacific Coast, where they worked as manual or “unskilled” laborers in lumber yards, agricultural development, or building the railroads.19 After decades of mounting anti-­immigrant sentiment, in 1917 the US government passed the first in a series of immigration acts to limit migration from a geographically defined region that came to be known as the Asiatic Barred Zone.20 Besides defining race by geography, this act included language around the kinds of labor or skills that would allow one entry to the United States. This law was the first to prohibit short-­term, manual, or “contract labor” and instead privileged those “professionals” with formal education or “skills” that were otherwise underrepresented: “That skilled labor, if otherwise admissible, may be imported if labor of like kind unemployed cannot be found in this country. . . . That the provisions of this law applicable to contract labor shall not be held to exclude professional actors, artists, lecturers, singers, nurses, ministers of any religious denomination, professors for colleges or seminaries, persons belonging to any recognized learned profession, or persons employed as domestic servants.” Beyond the careful parsing of which skills—artist and actor separate from singer—were considered desirable or not, this law also came to be known as the Literacy Act since it included language about literacy: “The following persons shall also be excluded from admission thereto: ‘All aliens over sixteen years of age, physically capable of reading, who cannot read the English language, or some other language or dialect, including Hebrew or Yiddish. . . . Each alien may designate the particular language or dialect in which he desires the examination to be made and shall be required to read the words Introduction • 9

printed on the slip in such language or dialect.’” This act set a precedent by naming literacy as well as artistic ability as desirable, that is, by creating a category of model immigrants through the law. Simultaneously, the act solidified a racial category of Asian in the United States that would endure through the subsequent immigration acts of 1924 and 1952.21 These categories shifted in 1965.22 The 1965 Immigration Act, which belonged to a larger body of civil rights legislation, went into effect in 1968 as the Cold War deepened and the space race gained momentum. This new act welcomed migrants to the United States who were “members of the professions, or who because of their exceptional ability in the sciences or the arts will substantially benefit prospectively the national economy, cultural interests, or welfare of the United States.” The act defined “profession” as including, but not “limited to, architects, engineers, lawyers, physicians, surgeons, and teachers in elementary or secondary schools, colleges, academies, or seminaries.”23 Put another way, the body of legislation on immigration that was passed over the course of the twentieth century in the United States linked artistry as well as literacy to skilled labor or profession—a shorthand for a formal education or white-­collar work—as requirements for immigrants from India and the area understood as Asia more generally.24 Thus, for the generation of Indians who migrated to the United States by way of the 1965 Act, migration was seen and described as an active choice of leaving India for the United States, equipped with specific skills and with a high likelihood that their families would be able to join them. In other words, celebratory representations of why Indians left India in the late twentieth century not only paper over the long legal history of anti-­Asian sentiment that preceded this era but also, as the Australian comedian Aamer Rahman (2013) astutely observed, completely ignore how colonialism instituted Eurocentric hegemonies, training “black and brown people to think that they [should] want to leave India and live where white people come from.”25 It is in this light that it becomes less precise to use diaspora to describe the varied forms of and reasons for Indian migration as well as gendered expressions of Indian culture in the United States since the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, I rely on transnational and gendered understandings of the Indian dancer and the immigrant communities in which she finds purchase to ask: For whom are such expressions useful or empowering? What do they accomplish? For example, in what spaces do stories like Davaluri’s or Pandey’s build bridges—what Inderpal Grewal (2005) terms “connectivities” between India and the United States—or lead to what Sara Ahmed (2004) has called “affective economies”?26 10 • Introduction

Caste and Race To answer these questions requires one to understand how culture industries, like dance, music, and cinema, have shaped and been shaped by two related but distinct discourses: caste and race. In Indian American immigrant communities, particularly those which have not only maintained connections to India but also established their own positionality in the United States through model minority mythologies, the mechanisms of white supremacy have engendered a complicated and often unproductive dialogue between anticaste and antiracist projects. It is in this context that oversimplified Asian American symbols like the Indian dancer appear in sharpest relief. For example, in cases like mine, partici­ pating in musical practices that extended from my voice (which alone does not betray my Indian body) and my ability to assimilate into white Texas culture exposes how the multicultural narrative, which is often inherently both dominant-­ caste and antiblack, finds purchase among Indian Americans. Framed this way, cultural forms, like dance, produce desirable and docile immigrants like Nina Davuluri, who enact model minority behaviors, like Indian dance, while echoing multicultural logics like “I’m American first” and so are not to be confused with those who aren’t willing to capitulate to the United States and its management of racial difference. Thinking of the Indian dancer in this way—as a racialized and casteist affective economy—allows for an examination of how identifications build within and upon each other and continue to rely on simultaneously fetishizing and silencing imperial capitalist flows and logics.27 To be sure, the choice to be or not to be a dancer is one that has preoccupied scholars of Indian public culture in a variety of ways for the past sixty years. Extending from this awareness, I ask, who chooses to participate in the capitalist reproduction of a dancerly Indian womanhood? What is the affection that drives this participation? Is it a choice? There are many interrogations of choice in the following pages, but none as poignant as the choice to be an Indian woman at her most iconic: a dancer. In asking how the doing of citizenship—performance—calls into existence the very communities in which it seeks inclusion, I consider the social and cultural force that transnationalism centrifuges. In this light, the narrative on who wants to and gets to dance is inextricably intertwined with broader conversations about caste/kinship, marriage, racial affinity, and class mobility beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing to the present. Following the 1965 Act, participation in dance not only offered and continues to offer status and mobility for Indian families in India and Introduction • 11

in the United States, but also facilitates what Aihwa Ong (1999) has described as “flexible citizenship.”28 The families for whom classical dance, distinct from music, becomes essential are those for whom a transnational citizenship is important for its material upper-­class-­and-­caste Hinduism. In other words, dance and its affective economies both provide examples of how “cultural logics inform and structure border crossings as well as state strategies” and draw attention to the ways transnationalism produces new hegemonies through circular forms of materialist cultural production (Ong 1999, 5). Embedded in this analysis is a critique of both race and caste formations in mobile transnational communities, that is, the predominantly Hindu immigrant communities for whom the Persons of Indian Origin and now Overseas Citizen of India visa categories have proven most useful (see Jain 2013). These are individuals whose immigration history makes it possible to conceive of themselves as hyphenated, transnational, or dual citizens—a distinction that indicates class and caste mobility by way of English-­language proficiency (see also Subramanian 2019, 251). These are the consumers and producers of what is, even by conservative estimates, a more than billion-­dollar arangetram market, which connects costume makers and musicians, among many other industries in India, to dancers and dance teachers across the world.29 Ultimately, the methods and means by which these industries have grown speaks to the power and reach of transnational networks, primarily those that increasingly rely on the racialized and materialist politics of the body. Feminist Praxis One feminist project could be to give the killjoy back her voice. Whilst hearing

feminists as killjoys might be a form of dismissal, there is an agency that this dismissal rather ironically reveals. —Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness

Praxis in this book is not simply practice, which in conventional understandings is separable from creation (poesis) and proceeds from theory. Rather, extending from Hannah Arendt’s formulations, praxis refers to action and agency, which both constitutes and is constituted by voice. Arendt’s conceptualization recognizes, in other words, that full citizenship requires both voice and body in public cultures (Arendt 1958, 24–25). The now well-­rehearsed critiques of capitalism and mass mediation have arguably privileged the power of the voice at the expense of the body.30 As much as the inverse framework—that of embodiment— has generated interventional potential, it is still incumbent upon feminist scholars to make a case for treating the body as worthy of examination without 12 • Introduction

separating or reifying the sound that it makes or to which it moves.31 This is my goal by adopting a praxical method: to anchor a space in which the voice includes rather than precludes the political potential of the body and to dislodge the enduring and reductive colonial logics that separate and differentiate music from dance.32 To be sure, a great deal of feminist scholarship on performance cultures hinges on the intellectual legacies that emerge from colonialism but devotes less attention to ways that gender relations are inseparable from power differentials based on race, nation, caste, and class, among other categories.33 As many black, transnational, and global South feminists have noted, gender cannot and must not be reduced to liberal and discursive formations of equality or inequality. To do so, after all, would not only mistake equality for equity but would also forget that the history of gender cannot be understood without a critical understanding of empire. However, a difficulty one encounters when advocating for a transition to a praxical method in the Euro-­American academy is that much of the scholarship on gender and expressive culture has relied on Judith Butler’s theories of performativity and embodiment.34 While important for understanding how gender is reiterated through performance cultures, Butler’s model does not adequately account for the divergent conditions that women navigate in transnational or postcolonial settings. In fact, Butler herself acknowledges the limitations of applying her theory outside of a white liberal feminist context when she notes, “We do not know our own modernity, the conditions of its own emergence and preservation . . . or rather, we are showing that what we call ‘modernity’ is a form of . . . cultural erasure. Most importantly, we see the violence done in the name of preserving western values” (2004, 230–31). To rely on a white liberal feminist and oversimplified “we” model to study the Indian dancer does not help one explain why some women, especially in India, are framed as victims, reinscribing cartographies of the third world or subaltern for simply daring to attend a movie, while others are cast as exceptional heroines for dancing to the very same movie songs on an international stage.35 To unsettle this widely accepted paradox, I rely on Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of a feminist killjoy to expose the heteropatriarchal discourses that simultaneously valorize Davuluri’s body and its public objectification while grieving Pandey’s. Within my own family history, for example, the dancer’s voice points not only to broader conversations on sovereignty and selfhood but also to considerations of class, caste, and the shift from feudal patronage to national-­classical cultural expressions.36 A family story I heard more times than I could count attempted to explain why my mother’s involvement with dance lasted only until Introduction • 13

Figure I.2. My mother (aged nine) in 1955 at her final dance performance.

the age of nine (see figure I.2). The explanation my elders usually provided was that dance cost too much for my maternal grandparents to reasonably afford. The costumes, the jewelry, the training that a dancer would need to perform— they were out of reach on my grandfather’s meager salary. Only wealthy families sent their daughters to dance classes. Though she repeatedly stated her wish to learn dance, it was cheaper to teach my mother how to sing, so that’s what they did instead. This overly simplified monetary explanation masks the emergence of an affective economy in India, through and by dance cultures and the bodies of young, wealthy, unmarried women, which is said to have existed separate from music cultures in the mid-­twentieth century. In my mother’s case, this was also a matter of respectability, and for a Brahmin family in the 1950s, the old adage held true: “If a girl danced on stage after a certain age, who would marry her?” The belief that a woman’s marriageability could be compromised if she engaged 14 • Introduction

in the dance world, but not if she sang, exposes an established construction of public cultures. This construction reveals uniquely gendered practices of citizenship, which I interrogate in chapter 3, through the memories of midcentury film dancer L. Vijayalakshmi and her natal family’s investment in her dance career. In turn, the fact that in the US context dance training is considered an essential component of an Indian woman’s marriageability suggests that it is not only money matters that shaped such decisions and discourses of gender. In the Indian context, my analysis of a body-­voice, dancer-­singer divide extends Neepa Majumdar’s historical work on women and stardom in Hindi-­ language cinema. Focusing on film reception (magazines, interviews, commentary), Majumdar (2009, 189) drew critical attention to how a “split” between body and voice shaped divergent “association[s] of certain moral and emotional traits” for playback singers, who provide the vocals, and dancer/actresses, respectively. Majumdar’s analysis revealed that Hindi cinema publics, or at least those represented in the written records she draws upon, experienced the body-­ voice divide as a productive, doubly formed way to connect with stars as both a body (dancer/actress) and a voice (playback singer). Importantly, this divide in Hindi film songs cultivated an “ideological investment in the split between the eroticized female body and the pure female voice” (Majumdar 2001, 175). For a variety of reasons, a voice-­body split in Telugu public cultures and, arguably, in south Indian public cultures more generally, resists easy comparison to its Hindi counterparts. First and perhaps most obviously, Telugu was and remains both a regional and subregional linguistic identity in statist formulations (see Srikanth 2013). Thus, expressions of Telugu culture are shaped by not only intranational but also intraregional politics of representation. In the Telugu context, these politics of representation circulate through performance cultures that extend to and from cinema. As I argue in chapters 1 and 2, the caste identity of Telugu singer-­dancer-­actresses throughout the early era of cinema shaped public perceptions of their performance in ways that endure until today. Second, Telugu stars like Bhanumati Ramakrishna (1924–2005) played an outsized role in shaping public taste habits around both music and dance in the midcentury. Bhanumati both provided her own vocals and directed and produced her own films.37 Indeed, the processes of dissociation and reassociation of voice and/or body for south Indian performers like Bhanumati destabilize facile understandings of national and linguistic citizenship. In the US context, my intervention builds upon Kyra Gaunt’s work, which emphasizes the interdependence of bodies, gender, race, and voice in public culture. Research like Gaunt’s (2006, 2) highlights “learned and oral-­kinetic practices that teach an embodied discourse of gender and racial roles” and thus Introduction • 15

offers the possibility to reorient participant-observation away from normative and ableist methods that privilege specific kinds of hearing over others (see also Robinson 2020). I respond to Gaunt’s appeal for a reflexive and “somatic historiography” to resist separating voice from body, gender from race, and feminism from place. To move toward a more robust engagement with the experiences of Indian womanhood across a variety of geographical and temporal locales, I draw inspiration from Indian feminist thinkers such as Susie Tharu (1996) and Sharmila Rege (1995), black feminist theory by bell hooks (1989, 1992) and Patricia Hill Collins (2000), and critical race theory by Richard Delgado (1984, 1992) and Anne Anlin Cheng (2019). In theorizing the relationship between body and voice for the Indian dancer, I offer a preliminary answer to Cheng’s query, “What does it mean to survive as someone too aestheticized to suffer injury, but so aestheticized that she invites injury?” (2019, xii). By foregrounding ethnography, I strive to confront the long, lingering shadows of positivism in research on performance (see also Ottenbeerg 1990). This approach acknowledges and transcends the deep and abiding colonial roots of archival epistemologies and the racialized distinction of ethnography like that presented in this work as “native” or “auto.”38 On Methodology Cinema must be understood as both ethnographic and archival evidence. For example, in chapter 2 I rely on critical historiography of film archives in order to unsettle sedimented ideas of India and Indian history (see especially Blouin and Rosenberg 2011; Stoler 2008; Trouillot 1995). Extending such critiques, I offer memory and family narratives—versions of what Saidiya Hartman (2019, xiii) has called “close narration” or what Hazel Carby (2019) has described as “imperial intimacies”—as both evidence and counterevidence to the historical. In other words, I do not present such narratives to suggest that they can stand in for the whole, but rather to draw attention to the way historical accounts often cannot reflect women’s varied experiences. By highlighting liminal characters whose lives did or do not mirror normative accounts of Indian womanhood, I complicate the narratives that shape notions of belonging and possibility. In this way, I also actively contest the category of autoethnography. I offer memories and family stories while moving back and forth between film spaces, dance studio spaces, and everyday spaces to highlight that my experiences as well as those of my interlocutors exist on a dynamic continuum even and especially as I write from the US American academy. To acknowledge that continuum 16 • Introduction

requires a recognition of shifting power structures that not only reflect and are reflected by mediated experiences but also refract across both time and space. Thus, one of the phenomena I explore through a self-­reflexive engagement in the film archive, as well as in the dance studio, is the expectation that my subjectivity requires segregation, framing, and recuperation as auto in order to be included and located within hegemonic and historical accounts. The logic that brackets my ethnography as distinct from those which emerge from Indians “in India” recalls Mary Douglas’s observations on the abominable—such attitudes require that my voice be “singled out and put into a very special kind of ritual frame that marks it off . . . [and] ensures that the categories which the normal avoidances sustain are not threatened or affected in any way” (2003, 204). This is the function of auto when applied to feminist or critical race ethnography— it implicitly marks some perspectives as impure or inaccurate and in doing so reinscribes logics of historicity and authenticity (see Chin 2016, 193–94). Following this recognition, I also resist the tendency of ethnography to turn the self into a field consequently vulnerable to mining and extraction. I accept and embrace that there are always chasms and incongruities between experience and representation, and so I create and hold space for those separations rather than force them to align or close.39 Embracing this space of neither-­here-­ nor-­there, but somehow both, I acknowledge that to exist in such spaces “is necessarily a praxical task. It is to enact a critique of racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression as a lived transformation of the social” (Lugones 2010, 746–47). Through this recognition it becomes possible to uncover the objectification and racialized dehumanization of women’s bodies and to resist viewing them as neat icons of complicated and often contradictory historical and geopolitical dynamics. Ultimately, this project uses a praxical method to challenge the reductive narratives that are used to describe Indian women and their experiences of belonging in this world. In this way, it becomes possible to bring Davuluri’s story and Pandey’s into conversation with each other without requiring them to collapse into one story. This method, which allows me to move across the distinct but related analytical planes of ethnographic and archival research, allows for a richer understanding of why and how over the course of my life I have understood my body as public but my voice as not. This understanding of the voice, distinct from the body, as deracinated, points to the necessity of a feminist, a critical race, and a critical caste method when examining identity formations, especially those that rely on bodily expressions. In this regard, my commitment to a transnational and ethnographic feminist method aligns with queer and liberationist work from, rather than about, Introduction • 17

the global South, especially at a time when women like Jyoti Singh Pandey are too easily portrayed as nothing more than victims.40 An important piece of this project includes a reflexivity that connects research with the institutional spaces where this research is housed, validated, and supported. I draw my inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s (2012) phenomenological work on the industrialization of diversity and inclusion initiatives in the academy and specifically her acknowledgment that the epistemological foundations upon which we live our institutional lives also shape the very disciplinary orientations by which such research becomes legible as scholarship. Ahmed makes a point that is critical to this project: that as scholars who work in institutional spaces that are themselves extensions of colonial enterprises, we are often complicit in perpetuating and in many cases fetishizing inequity in our forms of inquiry and knowledge production. Rather than knowingly support such enterprises, I foreground the memories and voices of women, dancers, singers, actresses—sometimes all of the above—whose intersections with society span a vast and at times incongruous expanse of what qualifies as an Indian womanhood. Chapter Overview Though this book is structured chronologically, the chapters do not need to be read in sequence. Each chapter stands alone, beginning with an ethnographic vignette. In every chapter, extending from and echoing family memories, I trace a narrative that allows me to destabilize conceptualizations of womanhood (chapter 1), caste (chapter 2), citizenship (chapter 3), and silence (chapter 4). In each chapter I rely upon the unevenness and the paradoxes of dance and dancers in Telugu cinema to draw our attention past the symbolic body of the public, performative Indian woman, to the spectrum of affective economies— what Ahmed (2004, 15) describes as a “stickiness” of symbols that elicit collective shame or pride (see also Sedgwick 2003). For example, in chapter 1, I examine the career of an early twentieth-­century actress, Sundaramma, whose performances of song and dance on-­screen have since come to typify expressions of caste and womanhood in Telugu public cultures. Applying self-­reflexive and critical methods of feminist praxis, I bring ethnographic research in the dance studio into conversation with film history and analysis to expose the way that courtesan identities are simultaneously embraced and disavowed by Brahmin dance cultures. In so doing, I interrogate settled notions of south Indian womanhood, and I argue that a mythical courtesan was called into existence through film cultures in the early twentieth century in order to provide a counterpoint against which a modern and national Brah18 • Introduction

minical womanhood could be articulated. To make this case, I bring together a constellation of events that participated in the construction of south Indian womanhood, especially the rise of sound film against the backdrop of growing anticolonial and nationalist sentiments in the early twentieth century. In chapter 2, I trace the public and performative expressions of Brahmin womanhood to cinema and radio publics as well as advertising cultures, which installed and equated notions of beauty, gender, and caste. Extending from research at the National Film Archives of India in Pune and drawing on material history and memory within my own family, I focus on the use of commercially available film songbooks as well as personal, handwritten song diaries in establishing both caste hierarchies and racialized understandings of feminine beauty. Throughout the chapter, I highlight the career of midcentury actress Bhanumati, who despite, or perhaps precisely because of, her alleged courtesan lineage emerged as a symbol of Brahmin womanhood in the post-­Independence era of Telugu cinema. Chapter 3 examines how social and identificatory processes that rely on language, like performance cultures, can and do destabilize the way one might experience citizenship and its forms of belonging. Focusing on the era in which India was divided into linguistic states (1956–76), I explore how the politics of language in Telugu culture industries are also reflected by and through gendered and caste-­based cultural expressions like dance. I complicate nationalist and regionalist narratives of linguistic identity, caste, and gender by widening the contextual frame to include a transnational analysis. By highlighting the way language and citizenship appear through the dancing body, I uncover the racialized and sexualized mechanisms by which the classical dancer became legible in film in this era, the same era during which dominant-­caste south Indians who had been educated in English-­medium schools were able to immigrate en masse to the United States under new immigration and civil rights laws. I focus on how the popularity of the racialized Indian dancer, often known as a vamp or club dancer in this era, overlapped with the processes by which institutional dance schools in south India produced noteworthy classically trained dancers. To better understand how and why the south Indian dancer—the Nina Davaluris of the world—became essential to expressions of a globally recognizable citizenship for Indian women, in the final section of this chapter I consider the platitudes and paradoxes of her characterization through the memories of a dancer who played her. Following the now-­iconic Indian classical dancer across various forms of public culture, in chapter 4 I take a closer look at the racialized logics that have crystallized around her, situating her as a global signpost for India in the twenty-­ Introduction • 19

first century. Focusing on the period from approximately 1990 to the present, I bring together ethnographic research in both India and the United States and excerpts from field notes, film and media analysis, and critical race and feminist critiques to examine the unstable and at times contradictory formations of womanhood that rely on transnational identifications of caste, gender, and race. Highlighting widely accepted narratives of Hindu heteropatriarchy, that Brahminical musical knowledge finds physical expression in the silent and compliant body of a performer, I challenge received notions of silence to unsettle sedimented concepts of gender in dance spaces and beyond. Thinking about dance as a space of political possibility, as not only a source of struggle and resistance but also where silence can be transformed into its own form of power, allows for a more robust feminist analysis of the Orientalized and fetishized Indian dancer. Ultimately, I interrogate how cinematic understandings of a normative womanhood have operated for generations of dominant-­caste Telugus and an overdetermined category of “south Indian” women. In the epilogue, I bring conversations on caste, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in South Asian studies into dialogue with perspectives on race and racialization in Indian American immigrant circles. Working thematically, but moving between the United States and India, this project traces how both performance and womanhood became political categories starting in the early twentieth century, and continuing into the twenty-­first, while listening carefully to how such transnational movement has been accomplished and normalized.

20 • Introduction

1

Womanhood

It was a story I never tired of hearing. I used to ask my grandmother to tell it again whenever I could catch her in a talkative mood. Her father, my great-­grandfather, was a classy guy. He had an illustrious legal career and a membership at the local gentleman’s club in Kakinada, a booming industrial town in colonial south India. At his wedding the bhōgam women came to fete the bride and groom.1 As one of the women danced and sang for the new couple, she interacted with the newlyweds, teasing the bride and poking fun at the groom, while the audience laughed along at the young couple’s embarrassment. When the lyrics turned to a description of the groom, one dancer took his hand in hers and pulled a diamond ring off his finger, twirling it in her hands and incorporating it into her performance. She gave it back, of course, at the end of the performance, but the young bride, only ten years of age, became jealous of this inter­action. To avoid controversy, the young groom gifted his new wife the ring, telling her to make something new of the five diamonds from the famous Golconda mines that were embedded in the band. She decided to split the diamonds up, wearing the largest center stone for years as a nose ring, in the end bequeathing it to her eldest surviving daughter. Her daughter kept the diamond for years, but never wore it, despite or maybe because of its colorful history. Decades after her mother had passed and the story of the bhogam woman seemed far, far away, she gifted that very same diamond to her granddaughter in the United States.

Years later, I finally had this stone set in a ring and proudly showed it off at a family event. I regaled my mother’s friends with the story of the bhogam woman and the diamond that she had once touched. I felt honored to be connected to such an inaccessible and revealing moment, and, as a dancer, to a sense of community, a history of what my body had been trained to mean, if in a different country and for a different audience. One auntie quickly thwarted such heady nostalgia, however, shushing me and nervously laughing away the idea that a Brahmin dancer-­daughter like me (or like her daughter) would have any connection to a bhogam woman, past or present. My mother’s friends suddenly looked very uncomfortable with my story, and the ring seemed to lose its appeal. One auntie had been holding my hand to admire the diamond, but now she dropped it, as if it was suddenly tainted or dirty somehow. I looked around, bewildered at the discomfort the story had sparked among my mother’s friends, women who had watched me dance my whole life and whose own daughters had danced with me for many of those years. I didn’t understand what I had said at the time, but I learned never to use the word bhogam around them again. ·

·

One might say that ethnography, the self-­reflexive kind, emerges, in part, in moments of discomfort. I was many months into my time as a nonresident Indian (nri) dancer-­ethnographer in Chennai when, one day, my guru, Raghu, felt at ease enough to speak to me about how he became a dancer. Though on most days he was famous among the students, primarily women, for being a little ornery, on that day he perked up when he realized I was interested in south Indian cinema. As we walked around the main building, under the shade of coral trees, I held my breath as this inscrutable man began to open up to me about his life. His usually gruff tone softened as he told me about his father, Vedantam Raghavaiah (1919–71). I had come to understand that though he ran rehearsals most days, my guru was basically hired help at the Kuchipudi Center (hereafter kc), but as he welcomed me into his dimly lit, cramped, one-­room flat behind the deserted dance school, he betrayed a fleeting sense of prestige—he was related to a celebrity!2 As he sifted through dusty shoeboxes of cassette tapes in that tiny room he called home, I could tell he was happy to have some company. I thought to myself, “How lonely it must be to live and teach in the waning glory days of the kc, as students are few and far between.” With what I could only imagine was now a limited audience, he was proud to tell me his father’s story. He cleared a space for me to have a seat on a small red chair, and he made sure to keep the door to his quarters open. I understood, of course. He and I were both 22 • Chapter 1

Figure 1.1. Still from Raitu Bidda (1939); Sundaramma (right), Vedantam Raghavaiah (center), Padmavati Devi (left).

aware of the unspoken judgment that would be levied against me if he was seen speaking to me, a woman, in his room. My guru found a recording that he wanted me to see, a documentary produced by the kc about his father’s career in the film industry. This was how his family moved to Madras, he told me, since his father was recruited by the director, Gudavalli Ramabrahmam (1902–46), to choreograph dance sequences in the 1939 Telugu-­language film Raitu Bidda (The farmer’s son). Raghu enjoyed playing the role of archivist for me as he provided a play-­by-­play, narrating his father’s life. A scene flashed on-­screen: a young girl singing and learning dance from an older Brahmin man, who was seated across from her in a chair (figure 1.1). There was also a woman playing a harmonium, seated on the floor. After a few seconds and an opening nṛṭṭa (footwork) sequence, the young dancer began performing abhinayam (facial expressions). The style of Telugu in the song was unfamiliar, and I asked Raghu what the lyrics meant—I couldn’t understand them. He ignored my question and started to fast-­forward past the scene, but as he did, I was intrigued by the representation of what has since become a standard guru-­śiṣya (teacher-­student) framework. Womanhood • 23

Though I was mildly aware that Raghu was uncomfortable watching this scene with me, I strayed from my obedient sishya position long enough to play ethnographer and asked him who the dancer was. It was clear from the scene that this girl was a trained singer as well as dancer. I asked him, Who was she? What was her name? What happened to her? In the moments after I asked these questions, Raghu’s demeanor shifted. His body language revealed I was no longer welcome in that space and in the company of his father’s memory. I knew then that I had pushed too far, especially when he switched to scolding me in Telugu. My nominal respectability as a foreign scholar evaporated in that instant. He stood up, disgusted at my questions, scoffing that the girl was not a dancer—she was just a bhogam ammayi (girl)—and turned off the screen. My transgression of the boundary between Brahmin dancer and North American ethnographer led to a reinforcement of whose performances of womanhood I should emulate and whose—the performance styles of bhogam— I shouldn’t. Raghu’s disgust at my interest in bhogam dancers while I was a student at the kc, much like that of my aunties in Houston, Texas, points to a simple truth—that I should be ashamed of wanting to know more about these women because such women are not respectable. Bhogam, however, is not simply a reference to dance or even womanhood. Bhogam refers to a community, today understood as members of a marginalized caste group. As Davesh Soneji (2012) has pointed out, the social category of bhogam derives from the Telugu word bhōja, which loosely translates to pleasure. In other words, bhogam women are understood as performers who provide pleasure and are, in many cases, nostalgically portrayed as precolonial examples of Telugu womanhood. Considering the historicity of bhogam in south India—after all, this was why he showed me the video in the first place—why did my guru dissuade me from learning more about this dancer and her dance? In this chapter, I explore how and why bhogam identities are tethered to Brahmin dance cultures. I rely on bell hooks’s (1992) methods of “oppositional gaze” to interrogate settled notions of south Indian womanhood. Specifically, I explore how the binary logics of casteism and anticasteism have at various moments in Indian history intersected with the rhetoric of patriarchy and nation and, in so doing, collapsed vast and complex subjectivities into reductive identities. Using a combination of praxical, ethnographic, and critical feminist methods, which allow me to toggle between the past and the present, between India and the United States, and between film analysis and the dance studio, I take a closer look at the cinematic historical bhogam, the mythical courtesan. I call her mythical, not only for her enchanted place in Indian aesthetics but also because she reveals ahistorical and instructive moments like those I encountered with 24 • Chapter 1

Raghu, specifically to echo an entrenched moral and cautionary tale. The mythical courtesan appears regressively and intermittently in the archive, if at all, yet she remains a touchstone for much of what today stands for Indian womanhood and its forms of citizenship. Relying on an oppositional gaze, I extend hooks’s claim that “identity is constituted not outside but within representation” to argue that the mythical courtesan was called into existence through film cultures in the early twentieth century in order to provide a counterpoint against which a modern and national Brahminical womanhood could be articulated (hooks 1992, 104).3 To make this case, I bring together a constellation of events that participated in the construction of south Indian womanhood, especially the rise of sound film against the backdrop of growing anticolonial and nationalist sentiments in the early twentieth century. Embracing the “disidentification” that this kind of gaze allows, I focus in particular on films that featured the actress to whom Raghu introduced me, Sundaramma (Muñoz 1999). In following Sundaramma’s career through film and connecting it to broader conversations happening about womanhood across India in the 1930s and 1940s, I trace the contours of what I see as an affective triangle between three mutually constituting emotional points of womanhood: pleasure, shame, and disgust.4 Unsettling “Women” A generation of scholarship in the North American academy has now searched for a recuperative space in which we can, on the one hand, temper our experience of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) once characterized as the racialized category of the “Third World Woman” as a disenfranchised or silenced body and, on the other, to see the ones who made it into our collective memories and histories as exceptional women (see O’Shea 2007). In India, feminist debates have focused more acutely on issues of caste and sexuality, examining the divergent experiences of women from differing backgrounds and the “impossibility” of subjecthood within casteist patriarchal orders (see Rege 1995; Tharu 1996). While in the North American context Indian womanhood has been expressed in contradistinction to and across binarized racial lines, in India, feminists have highlighted how “this difference was affirmed by constituting women as the spiritual bearer of the national self in the uncolonised domestic space. This spiritual quality of the ideal Indian woman was modelled on the canons of upper caste Hindu patriarchy and she was constructed as desiring only a reproductive role unlike her western or lower caste counterparts” (Anandhi 1998, 158). Womanhood • 25

In feminist scholarship, whether located in the North American or Indian academy, issues of caste and race converge, underscoring the importance of sexual control in expressions of womanhood, particularly those which are today understood as public and performative. Many of these studies have relied upon the themes of anticolonialism and nationalism to explain how and why the semantic function of the dancing woman was socially evacuated by dominant-­caste nationalists like Rukmini Arundale (1904–86), and subsequently repurposed as a nostalgic icon (see Meduri 1988). Before Arundale, reform, or nation entered the frame, however, a broad range of media technologies from photography to cinema and what Hari Krishnan has characterized in his work as the “intermedial” flows of popular culture animated social power and, importantly, a quotidian cultural value for the performance of womanhood (Krishnan 2019, 5). The mythical courtesan, a cinematic example of both a third world and unideal Indian womanhood, is a powerful trope within cultural nationalism and transnationalism because she provides a foil to categories of both race and caste (see figure 1.2). These women, who were villainized in public discourse like film cultures as well as in colonial narratives because they engaged in what are today understood as nonconjugal sexual behaviors, failed to complete the transition from colonial subject to national citizen. In turn, the relationship between marriage and nation for Indian womanhood became important—as heterosexuality became increasingly associated with citizenship, many and all other sexual orientations became socially stigmatized (see, e.g., Basu and Ramberg 2014). In colonial settings, the marginalization and shaming of nonconjugal sexuality engendered complex and far-­reaching consequences, which were further compounded under the influence of a nascent media technology.5 In other words, gender and media history must be examined together within the shifting and nationalist logics of the 1930s and 1940s, known more generally as the reform era. This era is named as such because a wide variety of nationalist discourses converged to generate support for reforming society, which translated to banning public forms of pleasure, including sex work. These discursive formations focused on reforming hereditary performance communities, a scapegoating rhetoric that began as early as the 1880s but was formalized into legal measures beginning in 1934, with the passage of the Bombay Devadasi Protection Act. I examine the impact of the legal interventions in south India in chapter 2, but for now, it is important to understand that by the late 1930s, public opinion was turning against hereditary performers, and media cultures, including film and advertising, played a crucial role in this process. 26 • Chapter 1

Figure 1.2. Still from Utsav (1984), starring Rekha in the role of a mythical courtesan, Vasantasena.

Pleasure and Disgust Social histories help contextualize why women’s sexuality, particularly the nonconjugal variety, came under intense scrutiny in the early twentieth century but do little to explain what happened to the women in films like Raitu Bidda and what their lives, especially in moments of patriarchy, caste, and power like those I witnessed with Raghu, had to do with mine. Women like Sundaramma, the singer-­dancer-­actress in Raitu Bidda, represent a brief window in time, before bhogam was fully maligned, but as its social capital was increasingly leveraged in service of conversations about civilization and the purported chivalry of nationalism. Davesh Soneji (2012) has written at length about the reform era in early twentieth-­century south Indian performance history, arguing that this history is accessible through the living memories of those who consider themselves real-­life descendants of women like Sundaramma. The legacy of these women remains obscured, but intact, despite popular misconceptions that these Womanhood • 27

Figure 1.3. Theatrical release advertisement for Umrao Jaan (2006), starring Bollywood icon and beauty pageant queen Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in the title role as a courtesan.

women were only and are now always mythical—a gloss for their supposed and somehow inexplicable social marginalization.6 Such specious historiography has dominated the discourse on performance cultures in twentieth-­century India and is registered in the dual romanticization and vilification of these communities. This dynamic relies on a fetishization of women’s bodies and traces an affective vector that connects pleasure and disgust (see Ahmed 2004, 82–100). The pleasure that the mythical courtesan engenders is a powerful tool, which has been sharpened to great use over the past century. One need only turn on the television, catch the latest blockbuster Hindi film, or simply glance up at a billboard in a metropolitan Indian setting to see evidence of this pleasure (see figure 1.3). The mythical courtesan is the primordial Indian woman.7 She is 28 • Chapter 1

beautiful because she is mythical; a woman because she is sexually objectified. Yet, as easily as she is put on a pedestal today, from the safe distance of a mediated image, beginning in early twentieth-­century India, she became a source of incredible social disgust. This disgust relied primarily on administrative policies that connected caste, identity, and sanitation.8 The collapsing of communal categories is something historians of sex work have critiqued as a product of colonial administrative policies. As Philippa Levine observed in her work on prostitution under the Raj, British officials organized communities into categories, typified by the kinds of labor they provided, and in turn instituted social hierarchies through colonial practices of data collection. These measures produced a lasting discourse of public health through the control of women’s sexual behavior. Colonial officials tried hard to manage and understand both the sex trade and what they understood as native sexuality by detailing every observable particular of women they regarded as prostitutes. In effect, they were making a sexual census, using much the same techniques and ideas that informed the new science of the census and social description. They counted, enumerated, and categorized, producing estimates of how many women worked in prostitution, of how many willingly registered as such, of how many presented symptoms of disease. They logged appearance, race and nationality, and religion. They measured attractiveness and they classified brothels by hygiene, clientele, and fees. British officials elusively sought knowledge of indigenous sexual conditions, but in the process actively created indigenous sexual identities. (Levine 2003, 201) To be sure, it was this very act of categorizing that made it possible to dehumanize the bhogam woman in the name of public health and progress while simultaneously celebrating her imminent demise and eradication as a symbol of the nation-­state and its success. However, as I examine in more detail in chapter 2, as real-­life courtesans became disgusting by virtue of their stereotyped social category, now simply glossed as low-­caste, and the attendant associations with uncleanliness—like sexually transmitted infection(s)—aspirational, fair-­ skinned, and English-­speaking Brahmin film actresses became increasingly visible in cinema and as media spokeswomen for health and beauty products, like Lux soap (figure 1.4; see Rajagopal 1999; Srivastava 2013).9

Womanhood • 29

Figure 1.4. Lux soap advertisement featuring actress Leela Chitnis, c. 1930.

Caste and Womanhood Throughout my training as a dancer in the United States, and later, during my ethnographic research in India, I have consistently faced roadblocks and silences around the history of the performance practices that qualify under the category of Indian classical dance. My search for answers has often been thwarted by nationalist histories that present Telugu Brahmin men’s history in India and my history in the United States as one and the same. Raghu’s reaction to my question about Sundaramma is a primary example. Moreover, his suggestion that she had been a courtesan “in real life” rather than an actress portraying one was meant to convince me that her performance style and her expressions of womanhood were of no concern to my training and research because, as the logic goes, film dance bears no relationship to classical dance. And yet, Sundaramma’s disappearance after the 1940s—when her Brahmin counterparts, like T. Suryakumari (1925–2005), Kanchanamala (1917–81), and Bhanumati, were 30 • Chapter 1

arguably defining south Indian womanhood through cinema and cosmetics advertisements—suggests that something shifted that allowed her existence to be erased while her social function was retrofitted for Brahmin women to occupy. Sundaramma’s disappearance is particularly puzzling since it is abundantly clear in all the films in which she appears that, unlike her Brahmin counterparts, Sundaramma was not only a trained singer but also a dancer who knew how to interpret and relay song meaning through body movements. In this early era of Indian cinema, particularly in the industries based in and around Madras (present-­day Chennai), the actors and actresses all provided vocals for their own characters, but not many had formal dance training unless they were members of hereditary performance communities. The practice of hiring playback singers did not emerge until the mid-­1950s, almost twenty years after sound technology was originally introduced in Telugu-­language films.10 Sundaramma’s singing, particularly in the scene Raghu tried to skip, reveals her training and its quality. Her vocal lines rely upon conventions of lyrical interpretation in music for dance. It would appear that even after she stopped performing on-­screen in the 1940s, she continued to sing playback into the early 1960s. Such details notwithstanding, anyone seeking to learn more about Sundaramma and her life would find few other illuminating archival records. In my research I have been unable to locate her name in any record label catalogs where hereditary performers often appeared in this era, such as Odeon or His Master’s Voice, nor does she appear on-­screen once we enter the era of playback singing. What is certain is that Sundaramma’s first appearance on-screen came as early as 1938, when she had a role as an actress, dancer, and singer in the film Mala Pilla (Low Caste Girl), produced and directed by Gudavalli Ramabrahmam. Film historians such as S. V. Srinivas (2013) have argued that Telugu cinema, beginning with films like Mala Pilla, was primarily a culture industry run by anticaste revolutionaries. These films, unlike the ones preceding them, did not simply reproduce mythological dramas on a screen. The production of these films was strategic and politically charged. Men like Ramabrahmam and Bommireddy Narsimha Reddy (1908–77) after him were from non-­Brahmin and non-landowning but still dominant-­caste backgrounds, and were well placed to comment on the sexual economies associated with these socially and economically visible groups. Over the course of twenty years (roughly 1938–59), these men were highly prolific. Combined, they released dozens of films, which took aim at powerful men through their associations with women. Sundaramma’s casting in a film as crucial to Telugu cultural history as Mala Pilla and then her Womanhood • 31

subsequent disappearance suggests a convergence between a variety of axes in the years leading up to Indian independence, spanning the social graphing of caste, class, gender, and performance. Mala Pilla Mala Pilla, a story about a Brahmin boy and an oppressed-­caste girl who fall in love, was released in 1938 by Sarathi Films Ltd. in Madras and was directed by Ramabrahmam, a vociferous critic of the caste system.11 Ramabrahmam’s films critiqued social hierarchies in general, and his approach complemented the mounting fervor surrounding Gandhian ideologies of reform and equality. The storyline in Mala Pilla, for example, characterizes the Brahmin caste as upholding caste apartheid and preventing intercaste marriage. As others have noted (e.g., Sarkar 2001; Sundar Rajan 2003), however, Gandhian social egalitarianism and its criticism of the caste system did as much to draw attention to the plight of oppressed-­caste communities as it did to embroil women’s bodies in narratives of development. Ramabrahmam’s films aligned with the various anticaste movements in the Madras Presidency in that they denounced feudalism and casteism but, in doing so, simultaneously undermined the social and economic existence of hereditary performance communities.12 Courtesans, as sexualized symbols of an unjust society, became a useful tool in vilifying dominant-­caste men. Indeed, in Mala Pilla and Raitu Bidda, the two films in which Sundaramma appears as a performer of dance and music, her character’s survival is calculated against that of society’s progress at large. Sundaramma’s role in Mala Pilla articulates the categories of caste as well as identifications of gender and sexuality in ways both implicit and explicit. First and foremost, she plays the supporting lead character and, in doing so, fulfills an important role as a conduit in the love story between the “low-­caste girl” (played by a Brahmin actress, Kanchanamala, who went on to have a noteworthy, though short, career) and a Brahmin boy. Throughout the film, Sundaramma is portrayed as a dancer as well as a singer, while Kanchanamala enacts the emotional outcomes of listening to and watching music and dance. For example, in an early scene Sundaramma dances and sings to Kanchanamala about how it feels to love. Sundaramma, in effect, plays a kind of matchmaker as Kanchanamala’s character meets and ultimately falls in love with the hero. This scene and Sundaramma’s role in it establishes an early example and prototype for the characters known in midcentury cinema cabaret scenes as vamps and, later, “item dancers.”13 As the stock supportive character, Sundaramma carries the weight of affective labor throughout the film. Her body is the only one that 32 • Chapter 1

moves to music. Kanchanamala, as the woman worthy of love and marriage, sings, but her body remains still. Raitu Bidda Raitu Bidda, Ramabrahmam’s subsequent film on social issues, critiqued the feudal or zamīndāri (landowning/tenant farming) system and Brahmin involvement in oppressing the peasant and farmer castes. In the film, Sundaramma’s character, Rajaratnam (trans.: the king’s diamond) portrays the daughter of a zamīndār’s assistant—a man whose immoral character is signaled by his evil moustache and scenes of him standing in front of European art of naked women, displayed above liquor. The protagonist in the film is a common farmer—a poor but honorable man whose daughter, Seeta (played by a young Suryakumari), is dressed in plain cotton, a stark contrast to Rajaratnam’s elaborately printed fabrics and jewelry. The scenes introducing these two young women follow in sequence. While Seeta appears on-­screen framed by her family, sitting on the floor at dinnertime, eating typical south Indian food, complete with perugu (plain yogurt), Rajaratnam is characterized as frivolous, self-­indulgent, and wealthy as she sings and dances around a well-­appointed sitting room. The opportunities for textual exegesis available in these scenes notwithstanding, Rajaratnam’s characterization in contrast with Suryakumari’s speaks to the many ways women’s subjectivities indexed pleasure or austerity, represented variously by performance, food, and fashion, and, in doing so, scaffolded broader identificatory processes in early twentieth-­century India. Food culture and fashion culture worked hand in hand in film, especially in the genre that came to be known as social drama, which relied upon a working conception of realism. In regionalist politics, food served a meto­nymic function to denote class and caste, in much the same way fashion, in the sartorial sense, could and did.14 This representational practice provided a useful visual tool in setting scenes and locating subjectivities. For as much as food like perugu could symbolize a caste-­specific Telugu pleasure, so too did the comportment of Seeta’s body as a singing, not dancing, body, in contrast to Rajaratnam’s, reveal the logics of early twentieth-­century social hierarchies and ideal types. In fact, Rajaratnam’s ability to sing and dance in a way that will earn her a film role is written into the very dialogue, a fascinating example of how the Telugu idiom of social drama films participated in public conversations on caste and gender. S. V. Srinivas has explained how this dynamic, which interpolated film culture into political debates happening on the ground, was also the very thing that made the Telugu industry successful. He argues that the early Telugu Womanhood • 33

film industry must be seen as part of a broader process by which local, agrarian economies evolved by articulating an aspirational and therefore deeply caste-­ conscious cultural identity. This evolution relied upon the transfer of social capital, like performance cultures, from the local zamindars to the peasant and agrarian castes. Importantly, in this era the zamindars were in many ways folded into the colonial authority. In other words, in Telugu cinema, antifeudal and anticaste politics coaligned with the anticolonial. As Srinivas has pointed out, the Telugu industry was originally financed by the zamindars even as these films, in their content, quickly turned to criticizing the very people whose financial resources made them possible. These early films were directed and produced not by landowning elites, but by still “forward-­caste” men who would go on to dominate the south Indian political landscape for the rest of the twentieth century.15 The characterization of zamindars and therefore courtesans as wanton and wasteful, but modern and conversant with British customs, coalesced with widespread critiques of social hierarchy, especially Brahminism, to produce a powerful brand of propaganda. In this regard, Srinivas’s argument presages the nationalist and dominant-­ caste potential of the mythical courtesan by inextricably linking her to the family unit as an unmarried but eligible young woman. The mythical courtesan, after all, is a daughter. In Raitu Bidda, as the counterpoint to Suryakumari’s modest household and her devout singerly daughterhood, Sundaramma is placed in the precarious position of being an economic savior for her family—a responsibility she resists throughout the film. Unlike Suryakumari’s character, whose musical moments picturize her Gandhian virtues and social utility, Sundaramma only ever sings and dances for herself. Furthermore, her performance skills become a tool for her family to maintain its economic power as part of the evolving zamindar system. At a time when social commentary by filmmakers could and did incite social movements, Raitu Bidda characterized women’s performance cultures as a symptom of everything that was unjust in India—the hedonism of local princes/zamindars, Brahmin hegemony, and of course the colonialism of the British Raj, but in doing so also demonized song and dance and the emotional autonomy that came with it. The scene Raghu had been uncomfortable screening with me is particularly telling in this regard. Sundaramma’s character, Rajaratnam, has been brought by her mother, who accompanies her on harmonium, to a Brahmin guru to improve her technique. Throughout the scene, the guru corrects her hand gestures, casting doubt on her knowledge of the song and its meaning. The movements that the guru corrects during the scene are not incorrect by any means but are not what, today, would qualify as standardized mudras. For example, to depict 34 • Chapter 1

Krishna, Rajaratnam uses the mudra simhamukha, and the guru corrects her, saying she is using the wrong gesture, and tells her to use mrigasirsha instead (figures 1.5 and 1.6). This moment is revealing because Rajaratnam really isn’t doing anything wrong. Mudras are, as any dancer will tell you, flexible. Dancers use them to represent both the physical and the metaphysical, but such representation is a matter of artistic interpretation. In the case of depicting Krishna, for example, dancers use a wide and vast variety of mudras to reference Krishna’s flute. Arguably, the filmmakers included that corrective moment to establish that the guru knew more about music and dance than the performer herself did. This interaction is striking, not only because it constitutes an attempt to make Rajaratnam question herself but also because the mudra that he deems wrong is actually more representative of what human hands look like when holding a flute. The dance Rajaratnam presents for the guru’s correction belongs to a repertoire that lives at the fringes of performance practices today. The song, “Innāḷḷa vale Kādammā, Muvva Gōpāludu,” is attributed to the seventeenth-­century śṛṅgāra poet Kshetreyya, and explores human emotions in explicitly erotic language. This poem has been translated by a number of historians of Telugu literature, though these translations differ in telling ways. It first appears in Telugu collections of Kshetreyya’s poetry in the early 1950s, but it is not translated. Most recently, in 2008, the poem was translated and published as part of a collected edition by a scholar based in India, Dr. Salva Krishnamurthy. Krishnamurthy’s translation is thorough; however, it is not complete. He avoids translating sexually charged lines. This omission, while not terribly surprising, is nonetheless revealing. Kshetreyya is rarely taught in dance studio settings, and for as many times as I have asked to learn a Kshetreyya padam, I have unequivocally been denied, most recently by my dance teacher here in the United States. She dismissed my request with the rationale, “You’re not old enough.” (I was thirty-­two at the time.) A student’s age, of course, is hardly the issue. Poetry such as Kshetreyya’s makes both teachers and their students (as well as the students’ parents) uncomfortable. It acknowledges sexuality in unapologetic ways and even references polyamory, which in modern interpretations can suggest adultery. The discomfort with songs like “Innāḷḷa” today, though attributable to the reform era, underscores cultures of shame, not only around sex and women’s bodies, but also more generally under the patriarchal and nationalist pedagogical systems, which dominate Indian performance practices today. So what did it accomplish to include this piece in the film Raitu Bidda? If one is willing to see films as social texts and, at this particular moment in time, as symptoms of emergent political formations, what does this scene tell us about the lives Womanhood • 35

Figure 1.5. Mudra simhamukha.

of women like Sundaramma in the 1930s? Like so many whose truth is lost to the archive, we may never really know more than we can guess about Sundaramma. In the end, this scene picturized what went on to become the standard narrative of the guru-­sishya dynamic in the twentieth century: that is, Brahmin men teaching young women about cultural history and fashioning the gendered body into a vessel through dance and music. Such pedagogy did not require knowledge or even skill, only authority, couched in the reverent tones of patriarchal casteism. In this particular scene, the guru’s authority is doubly achieved by denigrating the mother character through a combination of tactics. First and most obvious, she is caricatured as morally bankrupt through her encouragement of her daughter’s dance. This depiction is compounded by her speech style, which highlights her diction and command of formal Telugu. In a revealing exchange, 36 • Chapter 1

Figure 1.6. Mudra mrigasirsha.

when the guru tells Rajaratnam to use the mrigasirsha mudra, the mother, listed in the credits as Padmavati Devi, notices that her daughter is not holding her hand the same way as the guru and so interjects to call his attention to the mistake. It’s a powerful moment—the mother knows and can see the difference between one mudra and another, yet requires the guru to corroborate her assessment, capitulating to his authority while betraying her knowledge. In the process, however, the mother mispronounces the word mrigasirsha. Both dancer and guru spill into laughter at the mother’s foolishness. The mother’s role relies not only on her lack of gender and social status throughout the scene but also on her musical characterization as she provides accompaniment on a harmonium, an instrument that further indexes social positioning in India (see Paik 2017; Rahaim 2011). Womanhood • 37

Yet the scene described above captures a vivid example of the social capital women possessed at a pivotal moment in south India’s shifting cultural and economic landscape. As the scene ends, Rajaratnam’s mother ingratiates herself to the guru, bartering with him in a way, saying that however he can do it, she and her family will be indebted to him forever if he can just train her daughter well enough to get her into films. As viewers, even today, we are left to deduce that she needs him for her daughter’s training because he has knowledge, power, and possibly social connections that she does not. If one acknowledges, as Srinivas has argued, that films like Raitu Bidda provided fodder for antifeudal propaganda—propaganda that over the course of a century has cared for and fed a fetishization of women’s affective labor as a symbol of India’s past—then this scene carries an incredible message for what dance, music, and womanhood could mean for the new nation-­state. In that moment when her mother converts Rajaratnam’s body and voice into a kind of economic vehicle through the guru, a pact is forged between at least two of those characters. The mother’s (and by extension the family’s) survival and the guru’s Brahminical status coalesce on Sundaramma’s body. It is curious that, in that moment, the daughter, the dancer, the currency in this transaction, remains silent. Auntie’s Basement The pedagogical scene from Raitu Bidda endures in more ways than one. Unlike portrayals of musical training, tableaus of the dance studio tend to carry the implicit inclusion of a mother figure, the extension of the familial and the patriarchal, into the space of performance—a thread of intimacy connecting private to public. The tripartite dynamic of mother-­guru-­sishya is somewhat specific to south Indian expressive culture in transnational spaces and is particularly notable in North America, where it culminates in lavish debut dance events known as arangetrams or rangapravesams. The pedagogical space, the studio, is one many who are familiar with dance in South Asian American communities affectionately refer to as “auntie’s basement,” a shorthand for the social and kinship structures that define both woman­ hood and dancerhood in committedly Hindu and North American settings. The dance studio, regardless of whether it belongs to an auntie or is in her basement, is a predominantly homosocial space. The only time cisgendered men regularly participate is either in the role of the guru, though this is incredibly rare, especially in the United States, or as the father, armed with a video recording device.16 Such gendered understandings of the space where daughters become dancers speaks to unexamined economies of sexuality and intimacy, 38 • Chapter 1

inasmuch as these spaces are protected from the male gaze, though arguably engineered for it. Such spaces also fetishize feminine behavior and beauty, all in the name of a complex rendering of duty and success—often mistaken for what Sara Ahmed (2010) has diagnosed as a new patriarchal order parading under the “promise of happiness.” This success is variously understood but speaks to broader paradoxes applied to racialized and sexualized subjectivities. Daughterly duty in the dance studio extends to the inculcation of affect, specifically the ability to engender desire. But it ends at the moment when a dancer can or might want to feel desire for her own needs. The triangle of guru-­sishya-­mother is one many dancer-­daughters know well. It carries within its 180 degrees of intimacy an implicit knowledge that the dominant-­caste standardization of musical and physical tastes, such as those made visible when Sundaramma’s mudras are corrected, are performed first and foremost for those who need to see a dancer as a reflection of themselves. This is the ultimate success of affective labor: a somatic appetite that is whetted upon viewing another body moving to music in a way that you wish yours could. In Raitu Bidda, there’s never a question that it is the girl, Sundaramma, and not her mother who has the potential to succeed as a performer. In studio settings today, this implicit understanding of age equals beauty still holds true. Mothers don’t dance. Daughters do. This simple truism reveals the structures of expressive cultural systems, which rely on a logic wherein beauty, as a synonym for marriage potential, innocence, and daughterhood, emerges as the ultimate capital. In the United States, this capital is inextricably tied to forms of social mobility for the family unit as a whole, primarily through the translation of dancerhood into wifehood. The nexus of meaning between these two points on an otherwise linear trajectory from dancerhood to wifehood speaks to a constellation of caste, racial, and gender maxims. As a dance teacher once bemoaned to me, “You know how they send American [white] girls to piano or ballet lessons? That’s what dance is for Indian parents in the United States. But it’s so much more than just teaching them dance. I’m expected to teach them about history, culture, and religion. I’m expected to teach them how to be Indian! Dance classes have become a finishing school for Indian American girls! And arangetrams for too many are just debutante balls!”17 The fact that the pedagogy of dance cultures today doesn’t look too dissimilar from that scene in Raitu Bidda raises some interesting questions, though, which point to what dance and womanhood then, in a 1939 film, had to do with dance and womanhood now, as it did in that moment with Raghu. We can trace these patterns to the kinds of behavior Sundaramma and Padmavati Devi picturized in Raitu Bidda: mothers who don’t dance, but who encourage their daughters to, Womanhood • 39

and gurus who rely on mothers for their own social positioning. And finally, the daughters themselves, whose role in such a triangulation is the only one we are compelled to remember, or, in Sundaramma’s case, forget. The Uses of Shame Sundaramma’s disappearance as we enter the nation-­building era, particularly in light of the Raitu Bidda clip described above, is not that much of a mystery, though. In fact, most circulating versions of the films she sang or danced in, including the most readily available through the online archival project Indiancine .ma (https://indiancine.ma/), are missing scenes that feature her. The only circulating film in which her scenes are not cut out entirely is Mala Pilla. This makes sense, to a degree, since her role is crucial to the trajectory of the love story. In the case of Raitu Bidda, erasing a scene that featured Sundaramma also meant cutting out Raghavaiah. In other words, to expunge the courtesan from the archive also meant to delete her supposed guru. This coexistence, at least in the film archive, offers some possibilities for revisiting and perhaps revising histories about the men and women of early Telugu cinema. For example, I realized after that day with Raghu that his copy of the “Innāḷḷa” scene was actually a segment from a documentary that a singer and dancer had compiled in service of promoting the legacy of the dance school at which Raghu teaches in Chennai. This documentary, though commercially unavailable, has propagated a series of academic and historical inquiries by those interested in south Indian film history as well as dance history, including this one (see also Thota 2016). In hindsight, it makes perfect sense that Raghu felt a sense of shame in showing me that documentary; after all, his father’s history in films, at least to some, undermined his prestige as a dance guru and also implied some ugly truths about the men who wielded power over women and performers. If one follows Sundaramma through the films that she continued to sing in, it becomes clear that she must have worked closely with Raghu’s father, Raghavaiah, in some capacity. Up to and including the most recent film in which she sang, Raghavaiah is listed as the dance director in each case. In the years since Raghu introduced to me to her, I have followed her through YouTube comments, squinting at blurry copies of films to find her name, only to wonder if she was the only one who used what had to be a stage name (she was not). In the end, it was not her name, but her voice that allowed me to trace her trajectory in films, where she continued to sing up to the 1960s. Her voice is still distinct and recognizable almost a decade after Raitu Bidda, in a 1947 track that exists only peripherally in the archive. It is one of the many examples where her per40 • Chapter 1

formance was excised from the circulating information about the film. Despite Raghu’s insistence that Sundaramma was a nobody, in the 1947 film Gollabhama, where she sings in a nostalgic vocal tradition glossed today as rural, she is still clearly somebody who worked closely with his father.18 Her name and her body might have been purged from the official record, but her voice remains for the historical value it continues to carry. It was the style of her singing in a song titled “Vaddu Vadante,” an unornamented aesthetic that was quickly falling from favor in the reform era, that allowed me to hear and see her. Ultimately, it didn’t and doesn’t really matter whether Sundaramma was or wasn’t a courtesan in her off-­screen life. Her affective power, especially for men like Raghu, has been complete for decades, with or without any corroborating evidence of who she really was and what her life was really like. She represents a shameful life to be pitied, and thus her historical potential is sealed, contained by a century of building discomfort when it comes to admitting the caste history and sexual economy that lies at the heart of performance practices like the ones I was raised to uphold. Feminist and queer studies have taken the uneven historiography of women in South Asia to task (see, for example, Arondekar 2009; Mitra 2020). Within these critiques of heteropatriarchy, the totalizing hegemony of colonial epistemologies comes into ever sharper focus. Sundaramma’s audible invisibility functions as a powerful call to arms, in a quest to understand what kinds of womanhood are performed, for whom, and why. In her work, for example, Anjali Arondekar (2009) suggests that archival failures such as those surrounding Sundaramma’s biography, in the absence of positivist evidence, produce certain kinds of knowledge, too. After all, archival work on women in colonial India is generally a study in silences and omissions. What little we know about Sundaramma only further suggests that her role in performance history is defined by both the disembodiment of her voice and the many biographies written through her and by way of her.19 It is the very silence and lack of information around Sundaramma’s off-­screen life that has made it possible to cast her in the role that Raghu did that day. More to the point, her anonymity functions as a petri dish upon which cultures of shame can fester and grow. As I left Raghu’s flat that evening, I walked past a room that was lined with the pictures of all the most famous dancers who had trained at the kc, many of whom went on to achieve fame and success in films.20 Though generally acknowledged in hushed tones, women who translated dance training into cinematic success did so through a host of aspersions cast against their character. The social utility of shaming and thus silencing women in South Asian public cultures provides a crucial lynchpin between the discourses of pleasure and Womanhood • 41

disgust—a way the specter of the mythical courtesan can continue to haunt Indian women today. The rhetorical question in Telugu, “Siggu leyda?,” a version of “Shame on you!,” has served generations of parents when it comes to rearing children, but siggu does not translate to shame. It translates to shyness, or even modesty. The expression of pleasure as well as desire in present-­day performance cultures relies unequivocally on siggu. One need only pay attention during any dance performance wherein a young woman enacts sexual longing. Her eyes remain downcast; she is taught to express shame to depict desire. This is the essential sexual training for dancers of my generation. The elision of shame and silence is how and where south Indian dancers learn(ed) to feel as well as enact desire for pleasure. As an amalgam, this affect stands in for expressions of sexual agency and speaks to an internalized power dynamic that forecloses any chance of active and vocal consent. This is a fairly recent development, though—the fusion of shame and modesty. The calculation of shame plus modesty equals feminine desire stands in direct contrast to the aesthetic overreliance on textual authority within Indian expressive cultures. Dominant-­caste performance cultures in India have consistently pointed to their use of Sanskrit texts to establish legitimacy, and in doing so have remained within the regimes of value that colonialism gifted to nationalism (see, e.g., Raghavan 2004; Subrahmanyam 1979, 2003). For all the emphasis on the textual exegesis of affect, otherwise known as rasa theory, shame is not a rasa. Nor is modesty. There is no evidence of such self-­censoring in Sundaramma’s singing-­while-­dancing performance in Raitu Bidda.21 So when and why did the affective expression for desire—eyes downcast, body language closed and self-­doubting—become the standard? When and why did a woman’s desire for pleasure transition from an explicit affective economy into merely a form of cinematic historicism? Arguably, this transition is something that the much-­studied postreform era—the revival era—engendered and is a construction to which I turn my focus in chapter 2. A generation came of age in the wake of reformist agendas and set out to purge dance of eroticism, such as the kind Sundaramma expresses in her interpretation of “Innāḷḷa.” Put another way, reform and revival are polite terms that have masked the censorship and erasure of hereditary performance cultures and in the process collapsed identifications of caste and gender. After all, the volume of information now available to counter reductive histories about women and dance in south India does not seem to dissuade persons like Raghu or my aunties the day I showed them my grandmother’s diamond from simultaneously denigrating bhogam while declaring that such women no longer exist. 42 • Chapter 1

2

Caste

When the film Malleswari came out in 1951, she says she saw it at least three times. Maybe even four. It was that good. The costumes were pretty and the acting was moving, but mostly she went back to see it because she wanted to hear the songs again. She learned one song in particular, “Pilichina Biguvaṭarā,” as best she could so she could teach it to her daughter. Sitting in a theater ventilated by one unreliable ceiling fan in the coastal town of Kakinada, she studied the costumes, the delicate princess sleeves, the stylish contrast border on the skirt, making sure to replicate what she saw on the screen as she carefully stitched an outfit for her only surviving child, a daughter they named Venkata Lakshmi, but called Ammayi at home. She and my grandfather made sure to buy a copy of the songbook at the theater so they could learn the song and teach their young daughter the lyrics. They also procured a copy of the vinyl, though they had to borrow a gramophone. Recordings and the devices to play them were expensive in those days. Most people didn’t even own a radio—though, even if they did, many film songs were banned on the radio. The government wouldn’t allow such frivolity on the air in those early years of independence—only speeches by Gandhiji and religious songs. That’s why everyone bought the songbooks, she says. Sometimes she wouldn’t even go in to see a new movie. It was cheaper to just buy the songbook on her way home from purchasing vegetables at the market. Sitting in a living room in Houston, Texas, a lifetime later, she moves her hands lightly, holding her palms facing me to show me the dance she and my grandfather

Figure 2.1. Studio portrait of my mother performing “Pilichina Biguvaṭarā,” 1952.

taught my mother to “Pilichina Biguvaṭarā.” Nothing fancy, she reminds me. She herself never learned dance, after all. When she tells the story now, she remembers the gold ribbons on the bright red satin skirt: that was the fashion then, she tells me. She moves her fingers like a dancer would to show a wavy pattern. As she describes the pattern to me, she looks away and thinks hard, trying to remember whatever happened to that skirt. Maybe the termites got it, she jokes. They got everything else she left behind in Kakinada. పిలిచిన బిగువటరా! ఔరౌర! చెలువలు తామే వలచి వచ్చి న! భళిరా, రాజా! ఈ నయగారము, ఈ వయ్యా రము ఈ నవయౌవ్్వ న మానగ నినునే. గాలుల తేలెను గాఢపు మమతలు, 44 • Chapter 2

నీలపు మబ్బు ల నీడలు కలెను,

ಅಂదెల రవళుల సందడి మరిమరి ಅಂదగాడ యిటు తొొందరజేయగ.

Even when I call to you, you remain immovable! All the women are drawn to you and you don’t have to do a thing! Oh my dear, my king! Even when I call to you to gaze on this gleaming beauty and youthfulness, you remain rigid. The strong love floats in the air, the shadows of dark blue clouds draw closer, and the anklets, in the growing excitement in their heightened state, make ever more sound. —Lyrics of “Pilichina Biguvaṭarā,” from Malleswari While cleaning out a nightstand drawer in my parents’ home in Houston, Texas, after my mother’s passing, I find a small blue notebook that once belonged to her. The first page is proudly inscribed “Songs Note Book of Vasant Lakshmi, M.Sc.,” revealing that at some point in my mother’s young premarried life, living in the north Indian industrial town of Bilai, she decided to change her name. Though her given name was Venkata Lakshmi, it would appear she changed it to Vasant Lakshmi at some point in her late teens—a clever strategy to recast her provincial Telugu roots with a cosmopolitan identity. Indeed, her many identities—Telugu girl, educated woman, national citizen—are all documented in the pages of her song diary. The browning pages are carefully folded to demarcate sections: Hindi film songs, Telugu film songs, Bhajans (religious songs), and an Olivia Newton-­John ditty. Stuffed in the back, I discover a few thinning pieces of four-­folded construction paper. Upon further inspection, I realize they are versions of the film songbooks my grandmother mentioned, though these are in Hindi, not Telugu, yet another physical reminder of my mother’s many migrations and the way Hindi film music provided a soundtrack to her life. For all my family’s attachments to south India and the Telugu language, it was a romantic aspiration to Hindi as a national language that captured my mother’s imagination. This songbook told me a story of whom she wished to be clearer than anything else that remains of her. There is incredibly little from her youth that survived her movements across India and then the world. There were no pictures in that nightstand, no other mementos she had carried with her to the United States and kept so close to her for forty years. Just a small, blue notebook, full of girlish love and song lyrics, penned in her best hand. ·

· CASTE • 45

In culture industries of the independence era, cinema primary among them, discursive formations of identity depicted caste in highly aspirational tones. Or as M. S. S. Pandian once observed, “Here we have a description of what . . . [is] ‘Indian tradition.’ It includes, among other things, notions of pollution, Sandhyavandanam, Sraddhas . . . and the feeding of brahmins. In short, what gets encoded here as Indian culture is what is culture to the Brahmins/upper castes” (2002, 1736). Pandian’s point is well taken, but what has often been missing from this conversation is a recognition of how Brahmin womanhood participated in establishing caste hegemonies. If Brahmin men’s culture became encoded as Indian culture, what did that mean for Brahmin womanhood in the nationalist era? This chapter attempts to locate south Indian Brahmin womanhood and clarify how its expressions of both gender and caste became so tightly connected to music and dance, beginning in the 1940s.1 While some (see, e.g., Weidman 2006, 121) have suggested that the formulation of Brahmin womanhood can be traced to elite spaces like music academies in this era, I argue that it was a broader and more expansive cultural space that cultivated such attachments. To make this case, I trace the public and performative expressions of Brahmin womanhood to cinema and radio publics as well as advertising cultures, which installed and equated notions of beauty, gender, and caste.2 I focus on the use of print media, like songbooks, which featured photographs of singer-­actresses alongside film song lyrics, and its implication in establishing both caste hierarchies and racialized understandings of feminine beauty. Following the cinematic mythical courtesan into the Independence era, I highlight the mechanisms that erased women like Sundaramma and installed Brahmin women in her place. Echoing the critiques of domesticity, purity, and cultural imagery developed by black feminists like Hazel Carby (1987) and Patricia Hill Collins (2000), this chapter focuses on the fetishization of racialized beauty in the era in which India emerged as an independent nation-­state. I argue that the affective attachments that extended from cinema effectively disenfranchised marginalized caste and hereditary performers because such attachments encouraged socially and economically privileged women—often glossed as “fair” women— to take up dance and music in the name of nation (in the US context, see also Bern­stein 2012; Brown 2008). In turn, this new mechanism functioned to control womanhood and expressions of sexuality, cultivating as it did what Collins has theorized as a “controlling image.” A controlling image achieved a number of things in the newly independent Indian context, especially in relation to gendered forms of cultural expression. Such images, tied as they were to music, dance, and behaviors understood as essential to womanhood, promoted ste46 • Chapter 2

reotypes that were designed to index social hierarchies, to make “sexism and poverty appear to be natural, normal, and an inevitable part of everyday life” (Collins 2000, 68). This chapter extends formulations of the controlling image to the reconstructed mythical courtesan—the Brahmin beauty—and her circulation into the south Indian home. The controlling image, in and as an extension of film cultures, cultivated the fetishization of feminine beauty by installing music and/or dance training as rituals much like marriage. In turn, this construction ultimately equated performance training with both Brahmin womanhood and marriageability, an attitude that endures today. To better understand how caste has shaped south Indian womanhood, I begin with ethnography at the National Film Archives of India (nfai). I reflect on the way the personal and the political, the private and public, converge and diverge in a space that is defined as a national archive. Specifically, I join a larger conversation that has demonstrated how and why discourses of caste in Telugu-­ speaking communities during this era were and remain distinct and thus cannot be adequately explained through comparison to other linguistic or regional groups (see, e.g., Gundimeda 2016; Jangam 2015; Keiko 2008). Drawing on critical historiographical approaches to the archive, in this chapter I follow Ann Stoler’s advice—“to move away from treating the archives as an extractive exercise to an ethnographic one” (2008, 47). An ethnographic approach allows me to bring empirical, archival, and “authoritative history” into conversation with knowledge that exists primarily as memory (Blouin and Rosenberg 2011, 31).3 Extending the insight that national narratives often cannot and do not align with cultural memory, I contextualize the representations of and silences about womanhood and caste in film within a broader and contemporaneous discourse surrounding legal (heterosexual) marriage in midcentury south India. In the final section, I argue that these various streams of cinema, gender, and legal history coalesce and are expressed through performance cultures otherwise characterized as light classical. Locating Dance in the Archive The nfai, located in Pune, was founded in the years immediately following Indian independence. The idea to establish a national film archive emerged, at least in part, from a series of decisions that happened at the national, central government level in New Delhi. What today is known as the nfai was initially proposed by the Film Enquiry Committee (fec), a group that was formed in 1949 through the Films Division of India and the Indian Ministry of InformaCASTE • 47

tion and Broadcasting. The fec was charged with three objectives: to inquire into the possibility of manufacturing film stock and equipment in India, to inquire into the growth and organization of the film industry in order to indicate a future course of action, and to examine the measures needed to enable films in India to “develop into an effective instrument for the promotion of national culture, education and healthy entertainment” (Patil 1951, 1). In response to this charge and in their 1951 report, the fec proposed a central film library, intended for educational purposes. This idea, in concert with the growth of amateur film societies in colonial city centers like Madras and Calcutta, ultimately resulted in the creation of the nfai in 1964 (see also Kumar 2013a, 2013b). With this backstory in mind, I wanted to know if the Telugu films that featured dancing women were also films that had made it into the archive, so to speak. I was in search, at that point at least, of films from the early 1940s into the 1950s that I knew had featured choreography by Vedantam Raghavaiah or other Brahmin men and gurus like him who were located in Madras (see filmography). I was guided to the office of the head archivist to request a list of Telugu films. A quiet and gentle man introduced himself to me. He told me his name was Venkata. My ears immediately perked at the realization. Venkata— this man was Telugu! He smiled patiently at my exuberance, but I could tell he understood why I was so excited. There’s a special intimacy to meeting someone who speaks your mother tongue anywhere, but especially in a place like the nfai, which, like most government archives, felt avowedly Hindi-­privileging and generally biased against us “Madrasis” from the south. I excitedly rattled off my list of movies as Venkata Sir nodded yes or no to the films that were in screenable condition; he knew the Telugu film archive like the back of his hand. The screening room at the nfai housed an old, temperamental Windows computer in one corner and a loud, mounted fan in the other. Centered in the room was a Steenbeck 16 mm sound film viewer. I developed a routine during my time there: I would arrive around eleven a.m., with a thermos of hot, homemade filter coffee and two cups, and Venkata Sir would join me some afternoons when he was free as I would run the reels. One day, many weeks into our daily ritual of screenings and coffee, as I was moving quickly through the 1939 social drama Vande Mataram, and Venkata Sir sat next to me, he asked in passing why I wasn’t looking at famous films, like Swargaseema. Scanning my mind for a song-­ dance sequence from the film and drawing a blank, I asked him to explain why he thought that film was a good example. He looked surprised at my question. Swargaseema, he told me, was a very important Telugu film. It had won many awards and was the first Telugu film to be screened at an international film fes48 • Chapter 2

tival. He insisted that I watch it and left to go retrieve the film reels from the off-­site storage. After Venkata Sir left the room, I flipped back through my notes and startled when I realized how I knew the title—Vedantam Raghavaiah was listed as the main choregrapher for this film. In fact, beginning with Swargaseema, Raghavaiah and other Telugu Brahmin dance directors like Pasumarti Krishnamurthi (1927–2004) choreographed sequences that characterized performance economies in south India with an unmistakably shrewd agenda to simultaneously celebrate and vilify feminine beauty.4 It was during this period that the song and the vocals in particular were foregrounded and the dance operated more like accompaniment. Bhanumati Ramakrishna became a mascot for this style of choreography over the course of her career. Once one connects the dots between Raghavaiah’s choreography and Bhanumati’s best-­known roles, it becomes clear why Venkata Sir thought Swargaseema deserved a special place in south Indian film historiography. It was Bhanumati’s first screen appearance after she reentered the industry as a married Brahmin woman. From Bhogam to Bhanumati Bhanumati Ramakrishna (Paluvayi) was arguably the first siren of the south Indian, Madras-­based film industry (figure 2.2). However, it is but an open secret that Bhanumati was from a courtesan background and that her success was only possible because she was trained by her natal family in music and dance and then married into a Brahmin family.5 Unlike Sundaramma, whose caste identity remains an unanswerable question, or like the Brahmin actress–beauty queen Tangaturi Suryakumari, whose career was short-­lived in comparison, Bhanumati remains a household name in south India, not only for her aspirational beauty but for the fact that she was a tour de force as a public woman.6 Bhanumati, with her perfect middle-­parted hair, could sing, could act, was a celebrated writer, and eventually founded a film studio of her own and became a director. While Suryakumari, with her porcelain-­like fair skin and doe eyes, capitalized on her cinematic fame to launch a stage career in New York and London, Bhanumati went on to represent south India not only through her beauty but also as a talented singer.7 As her star rose, so too did the role and resonance of cinema in public life. Music, particularly song, mobilized through lps but elevated to a literary form through songbooks, provided the crucial means for film culture to infiltrate the home in a new way, without the increasingly disreputable bodies of real-­life courtesans. Emblazoned on the covers of these songbooks, the conCASTE • 49

Figure 2.2. Bhanumati Ramakrishna.

trolling image of Bhanumati’s Brahmin beauty facilitated the idolatry of music and, by association, dance. In the Telugu context, public culture was intimately tied to dominant-­caste industries (see Bhrugubanda 2018; Prasad 2014) and even more so to women’s roles in such industries (see Indraganti 2016). In the 1940s and 1950s, cinema provided a romantic and powerful medium through which audiences could experience pleasure now at a safe distance from the communities that had previously provided such labor. It was this very shift that led families like my mother’s to envision their daughter as a dancer and singer when she was young and before she was of marriageable age. Cinema and its utopic allure inspired families who had cultural capital to spare, whether this be through caste and/ or class, to emulate and aspire to the behavior they saw and heard on-­screen. In this light, expressions of south Indian womanhood must be understood as outgrowths of media industries, which were overwhelmingly run for and by dominant-­caste men. Indeed, the work of the controlling image is most visi50 • Chapter 2

ble when it establishes womanhood through an eroticized relationship to men’s power. In her work on television, Purnima Mankekar interrogates how this relationship is forged and suggests that media texts both introduce and establish the erotic as a primary function of public culture. The erotic, in her estimation, operationalizes “sexualized longings and pleasures constructed at the intersection of the psychic and the structural” (Mankekar 2012, 173). Mankekar makes a crucial point in her examination of how eroticism shapes womanhood, particularly through media consumption: “While doing fieldwork, I glimpsed just how deeply media texts were embedded in the subjectivities, imaginaries, and fantasies of my informants. I also learned that my informants inhabited these texts in profound and intimate ways” (174). In other words, the controlling image not only functioned as an aspirational device wherein women emulated what they saw on screen but also encouraged women to imagine themselves as part of a text—a narrative. In the case of Bhanumati’s affective power in the 1940s, this function engendered a controlling image around a very specific subjectivity and narrative: that of a potential and inevitable bride. In the face of growing disdain for actual courtesans, cinematic ones like Bhanumati—referenced in the popular press as “society ladies” rather than “lady artists”—produced an image to behold and admire (Indraganti 2016, 37). In this regard, songbooks arguably illustrate the birth of popular music as well as its advertising culture in south India. Telugu songbooks, from approximately 1933 until their eventual fade-­out with the rise of cassette technology, often featured photographs of a young woman’s face and/or body. Recasting courtesan culture, Bhanumati’s oft-­described Brahmin face, redirected the socialized somatic response to both women’s bodies and their performance for a new public (see figure 2.3). Her Brahmin status and her command over literary Telugu, a caste-­inflected dialect known as grandhikam, which experienced a renaissance in Telugu cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, elevated song and dance from its previous status as sexualized entertainment to a new social role—beauty.8 Within broader conversations about reconstructing Indian culture that were unfolding at institutional levels (see Bakhle 2005; Subramanian 2006), dance and music were cleaved from their courtesan connotations well enough to make it possible for women like Bhanumati to capitalize on their affective impact (see also Bullard 1998; Rege 1995). In turn, the notion that Bhanumati reflected an aspirational womanhood was introduced and affirmed not only through film but also through the circulation of her beauty through a variety of media, visual and sonic. Taken as a whole, Bhanumati’s star power cemented the idea that Telugu culture and south Indian identity more broadly in the early Independence era was defined in terms of class and caste and signaled by feminine beauty. CASTE • 51

Figure 2.3. Promotional advertisement for Vara Vikrayam (1939).

Viewing Sound Sound arrived in cinema on the subcontinent in 1931 and in Telugu cinema in 1933. Songbooks accompanied Telugu sound films almost immediately. The earliest example I have found is from a 1933 Telugu film, Savitri, released by one of the first sound film studios based in Calcutta: the East India Film company. Though these songbooks went on to be divided into two parts, usually titled kathā sangrahamu (synopsis) and pātalu (songs), in this early example, the songs, that is, the lyrics, are listed under the heading kīrthanālu. This heading is a reference to karnatic and religious song traditions, indicating that, early on, film songs, as a cultural category, fell under existing genre distinctions.9 Even in the earliest examples of the songbook practice, where the songs were titled kirthanalu, there was no indication of melody, which suggests a number of uses for these booklets. It would appear that the literary value of the lyrics was far more important than the song as a sung practice. The tune, after all, was not noted. Sargam musical notation, as a didactic practice, was slowly becoming commonplace in the early twentieth century, in part because of institutions 52 • Chapter 2

such as the Madras Music Academy, which were dedicated to the pedagogy of music and the construction of a classical practice. That said, even after the use of sargam notation became widespread, film songbooks, known in Telugu as pāta pustakālu, never included them. Both film and classical music, however, privileged written language styles over colloquial, spoken dialects.10 So, at the very least, the songbook practice suggests that the people who bought such souvenirs might have appreciated the literary, libretto-­esque function, though this is assuming a great deal about the social status of popular film music, even songs that are characterized as part of the golden age of Indian cinema. At the very most, these books seem to have played a role akin to a periodical, replete with stills from the films as well as advertisements for local businesses. Alongside the rise of radio publics, the circulation of film songbooks points to the ascendance of language as a site for community building, specifically through the way it communicated caste. Where, however, radio publics emerged in the era leading up to Independence, afterward, government officials like B. V. Keskar (1903–84) instituted policies and procedures banning Hindi film music from All-India Radio (air).11 Research on air by Isabel Huacuja Alonso connects the discourse on banning film music from the airwaves to a broader social stigma levied against film music in midcentury India: While some praised film music because it successfully combined Western and Indian styles of music, others accused film music directors of copying foreign melodies and producing vulgar, un-­Indian music. A reader named SG Bapat wrote to the Movie Times in 1952: “In pointing out the low moral tone of the industry, Dr. Keskar was merely calling a spade a spade. . . . The cheap, sexy, degrading and humiliating standards of our present day film have their genesis in this wolfish attitude.” Another reader named Firoze G from Bombay wrote to the same publication that year, protesting that “present day film songs are insane, frivolous, and nonsensical in the extreme.” (Huacuja Alonso 2012) An interesting by-­product of this ban was the rise of Radio Ceylon and its Wednesday evening show, sponsored by the toothpaste company Binaca. The show, known as Binaca Geetmala (Garland of songs), was hosted by Ameen Sayani and exclusively featured Hindi film songs. In their ethnographic study on Indian film, Eric Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy comment on the immense popularity of the Wednesday evening show, which found “clusters of people huddled around tea shops and other places with radios” (1963, 158). Sathya Saran, the longtime editor of the Indian women’s magazine Femina, remembers those nights well, “sitting glued to the radio with a large diary on my lap, writing down CASTE • 53

the name of songs, and their listings on the countdown show, as if it were completely necessary to my well-­being” (qtd. in Kaminsky and Long 2011, 578). Many young people, women in particular, tuned in and kept song diaries, like my own mother, who asked her Punjabi neighbor to turn up the volume so she could listen clandestinely through the window, since she herself did not own a radio.12 Amateur song diaries aside, most studies of film in the pre-­Independence era rely almost exclusively on print materials, such as the published songbook as well as film magazines. In Marathi films, for example, Rachel Ball-­Phillips has examined the sexualization of the dancing woman in midcentury cinema, citing the accompanying song booklet. Ball-­Phillips makes an important point: that songbooks and the images they featured forged a personal and possessable connection to the film. Moreover, these booklets “began to visually focus on . . . the sexuality of the [woman] dancer” (Ball-­Philips 2015, 157). In other words, songbooks produced a highly personal connection for consumers that connected song and images of desirable women. In his examination of the songbook phenomenon in Andhra, S. V. Srinivas (2013, 262) points to the rise of mythological films that placed a premium on language as a sign of caste status. Similar trends, which connected linguistic identity to gramophone cultures, flourished in Tamil-­speaking regions (see, e.g., Hughes 2002, 2007). In this light, the songbook practice must be understood as instrumental to the role film played in social constructivism across south India, especially the caste identity ascribed to the beautiful singing and dancing woman (see figure 2.4). On that day when Bhanumati’s career emerged as a flashpoint, Venkata Sir and I watched Swargaseema together. Swargaseema translates to “heavenly land” and is a loose interpretation of the Hollywood blockbuster Blood and Sand (1941) starring Rita Hayworth. A thinly veiled critique of hereditary performance communities, Swargaseema depicts the evolution of the rural bhogam dancer Subbi (portrayed by Bhanumati) into the urban seductress Sujatha Devi. The tragic hero Murthi (portrayed by the midcentury star Nagaiah), a married man and a composer by profession, stumbles upon a performance of Subbi’s and sees potential in her abilities but finds her music in need of refinement. In a rags-­to-­ riches sequence of events, Subbi learns how to speak what is described in the film itself as a more sophisticated, modern dialect of Telugu, and Murthi begins to compose music for her dance. In the process, he begins to adopt British colonial styles of clothing, as does Subbi, now known as Sujatha, who learns to play the guitar alongside the piano and other European instruments. As the relationship between composer and performer develops into a version of guru-­sishya, Murthi takes up drinking and leaves his devoted, veena-­playing, soft-­spoken wife, Kalyani (portrayed by B. Jayamma). 54 • Chapter 2

Figure 2.4. Promotional advertisement for Swargaseema (1945).

In the first song, when Subbi is a simple village girl, speaking colloquial Telugu, she performs a jāvali, “Manchidinamu Nēḍē.” The javali, as a genre, provides a useful and heuristic index in the film precisely because of its ambivalent positionality alongside definitively classical genres like the kirtanam.13 As Subbi becomes Sujatha, she learns how to speak and sing in a dialect full of poetic metaphors and figures of speech. In other words, Subbi’s transition to Sujatha, accomplished through sound as well as image, quite explicitly traces the movement of rural to urban by aligning language with class and caste. Back in the United States years after my time at the nfai, I screened Swargaseema one evening at home in Houston, with my father and grandmother in CASTE • 55

the other room, but within earshot. After Venkata Sir had alerted me to the significance of this film in the Telugu film archive, I had asked them about it, to no avail; neither could recall the film or the songs. This was curious to me since other films of the era, like Thyagayya (1946), were important to family memories and the stories my father, in particular, associated with Telugu cultural history.14 But as Sujatha’s first siren song, “Ōhō Pāvurama” (Oh, sweet dove), came on the screen, both wandered into the room, humming along. In other words, it was the songs sung by Bhanumati that had endured across both time and space. Despite its foreign recognition as an international film, which Venkata Sir had clearly wanted me to appreciate, it was Bhanumati’s voice that had stood the test of time for my family over seventy years later. Bhanumati’s acting and singing in “Ōhō Pāvurama” can arguably be read as a precursor to the 1960s vamp, a character I describe in greater detail in chapter 3. The scene itself is a dream sequence set in Murthi’s study. Sujatha appears in his mind’s eye while he composes a song, singing while holding a white dove, in Telugu, pāvura. She is framed by lighting techniques meant to highlight her silhouette, which also showcase her sari, a sheer nylon material that achieved some fashion cachet in the 1940s. Her acting relies heavily on conventions of seduction in dance, though she does not dance in any measurable way in this scene. For example, almost every shot captures her looking out of the corners of her eyes at Murthi, who sits at his desk, penning the song as he fantasizes about her singing it to him. The song, while playful and benign, is saturated with extramusical meaning since the pavura is a mythological bird, who is said to have carried messages between clandestine lovers. Throughout the scene, Bhanumati is the physical manifestation of Murthi’s music—she is both his muse and his music personified—a characterization that speaks volumes as to how musical sound fused with dancerly affect. The implication here is that when music is made material, it takes the form of a woman, and a seductive woman at that. This formulation underscores how musical sound necessitates women’s expressive bodies, but specifically bodies that, when allowed to express their own desires, present a very real and present danger to society, and to the institution of monogamous marriage in particular. Swargaseema was hardly Bhanumati’s first turn at portraying women’s roles and issues in contemporary society. Her career was defined by representations and commentaries on heteropatriarchal sexuality and expressions of south Indian womanhood, beginning with her first role as a child bride in the antidowry social drama Vara Vikrayam (East India Films, 1939). In this, her debut film, Bhanumati was cast in the role of a daughter, Kalindi, who dies by suicide because 56 • Chapter 2

her parents cannot afford a dowry. In 1940, in Malati Madhavam (Metro Politan), she played the lead role in another social drama as a young woman forced to marry a man she doesn’t love. Then, in two films released back-­to-­back, Bhanumati was cast as a woman who leaves her husband for being involved with a courtesan (Dharma Patni, Famous Films, 1941) and then as the courtesan herself (Bhaktimala, Bhaskar Films, 1941). In two mythological dramas known primarily for their music, Garuda Garuvabhangam (Pratibha Films, 1943) and Krishna Prema (Famous Star Combines, 1943), Bhanumati established herself as a highly talented singer, and the soundtracks for both of these films were popular and commercially successful. In Krishna Prema, Bhanumati performed alongside the most popular singer-­actresses of the day, T. Suryakumari and Shantakumari. These films collectively established a theme for Bhanumati’s career as well as Telugu cinema as a whole. Bhanumati’s contributions to early twentieth-­ century conversations on locating and normalizing gendered behavior have often been inextricably linked, in retrospect, to debates on what qualified as tradition in mid-­twentieth-­century south India: “In addition to conventional mythologicals, directors often cast her in comedies dealing with anxieties about traditional (sometimes rural) cultures assimilating aspects of Western modernity, a subject central to much popular reform literature: in Tehsildar she wears high heels and attends a British tea party and . . . the ‘feminist’ Grihapravesham opens with her playing badminton and confronting the misogynist hero” (Indiancine.ma 2016). Considering such framing of Bhanumati’s beauty, often signaled through fashion, what did and does it continue to mean for her to enact a modern womanhood, glossed here as “Western,” while simultaneously Brahmin, as a dancer-­actress while singing? After all, Bhanumati’s work was among the last before playback singing technology in the early 1950s engendered the specialization of actors and vocalists as separate departments of a film crew. Considering that she is celebrated for her multifaceted talent, including her photogenic face, “her incarnation of ‘tradition’ was exemplified and stressed by her music . . . [and] her music drew on C. Ramchandra, Arabian folk and even Pat Boone, but she is best remembered for her versions of Thyagaraja’s kirtis [sic] and Purandaradasa’s bhajans” (Indiancine.ma 2016). In many ways, Bhanumati’s cinematic work accomplished the lasting oxymoron of Telugu womanhood as a nostalgic yet invented practice. Everything that the dance revival now represents: Brahminical ideas of a monolithic Hindu past, chaste women performing under the tutelage of sagacious gurus; all of these stereotypes rely on the mechanisms of an ideological infrastructure that requires the past as a resource for a consolidation of identity and power. CASTE • 57

Law, Performance, and Marriage In the Euro-­American academic context, scholars like Benedict Anderson (1983), Jürgen Habermas (1989), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) have theorized the formation of affective national communities as a top-­down phenomenon. Arguably, it is this theorization that has precluded an awareness of the domestic social spaces that songbooks inhabited. By popularizing Thyagaraja kṛitis while wearing high heels, Bhanumati picturized a foreclosed sense of freedom for women by tethering modern expressions of womanhood to the fashion and beauty standards of Anglo-­Europeans. In the end, she was most effective because of how she sang. Her dance is, in most cases, remembered as secondary to her voice. It was through her renderings of songs that people could sing along to that she paved the way for a new type of public identity for women. Bhanumati’s early work, from the 1940s and 1950s, marked a watershed moment in the public conversation on womanhood, specifically in regard to what kinds of behavior, indexed by caste and gender, qualified for citizenship. One of the clearest signs of India’s nation building was the efflorescence of legislation specifically aimed at defining citizenship. The laws in question fell along a spectrum that stretched from women’s public performance all the way to the sexual desire such performances might elicit. Though the highly controversial Hindu Marriage Act was not instituted as law until 1955, the public conversation about women’s sexual behavior was already experiencing adjudication by the late 1800s. In the first half of the twentieth century, these conversations escalated at exactly the moment film cultures joined public discourse. As mentioned in chapter 1, an important law that tried to control sexual behavior and the associated economies in British India was titled “The Bombay Devadasis Protection Act, 1934.” This law and the language used to enact it reveal the interplay between discourses on public performance, sexuality, and marriage: 2. a) “devadasi” means any unmarried woman who is dedicated to any Hindu deity, idol, object of worship, temple or other religious institution. b) “temple” means a place by whatever designation known, dedicated to, or used by, the Hindu community, or any section thereof, as a place of religious worship; and c) “woman” means a female human being of any age 3. The performance of any ceremony [or act] intended to dedicate or having the effect of dedication a woman as a devadasi, whether such woman has or has not consented to the performance of such a cere58 • Chapter 2

mony is hereby declared unlawful and to be of no effect, any custom or rule of Hindu Law to the contrary notwithstanding 4. No marriage contracted by a woman shall be invalid and no issue of such marriage shall be illegitimate by reason of such woman being a devadasi, any custom or rule of Hindu Law to the contrary notwithstanding.15 As a caste category under colonialism, devadasis were legally understood as sex workers, and today they still have that social status. In early twentieth-­ century India, as long as performance could lead to sexual interaction, any woman (the act above makes that part clear) would be understood as a sex worker. As Philippa Levine observes, “From the 1850s, contagious diseases (cd) legislation was the primary, though not exclusive, means by which prostitution was controlled” (2003, 37). Prostitution or sex work, in colonial India, was often framed as synonymous with nonconjugal sex (see especially Mitra 2020). In other words, any public performer who was a woman could arguably be accused of prostitution. Here again, the rhetoric offers a patina of knowledge—for all the definitions offered in the Act of 1934, the two terms that remain unspecified are Hindu and marriage, a logic that points to the Hindu-­and heterocentricism of the colonial, civilizing project. The first independent Indian version of the 1934 Act, passed in 1947, just after Swargaseema was released—the Madras Devadasi (Prevention of Dedication) Act—describes marriage as a social, religious, and legal construct. The lasting outcome of the 1947 Act was simply that courtesans now could marry people and could not marry or be married to God (see also Parker 1998). This move was arguably an attempt to incentivize certain forms of moralized sexual behavior, such as monogamy or conjugal heterosexuality, while banning previous practices of nonconjugal sexuality and bigamy: 3. a) The dedication of a woman as a devadasi, whether before or after the commencement of this act and whether she has consented to such dedication or not, is hereby declared unlawful and void, and any woman so dedicated shall not thereby be deemed to have become incapable of entering into a valid marriage.16 The bill went on to live an ineffective life, but what becomes clear is the extent to which marriage—a ritual and legal act—was incentivized as a route for women to become citizens.17 What is often missing in this emphasis on marriage, however, is that legal definitions of marriage offered protection under the law if and only if the Brahminical ritual of saptapadi (seven steps) had been observed (see CASTE • 59

Nair 1996, 224). In other words, only Hindu and Brahminical rituals of marriage would lead to citizenship and the rights therein. Cinematic representations thus compounded the nationalist and legal rhetoric of Brahmin wifehood as the definitive expression of womanhood. Across south Indian cinema, caste identities became highly circumscribed through an oppositional comparison of the wife to the courtesan and specifically through performances of rituals that defined each version of womanhood. These women, performing as either wife or courtesan, entered the broader consciousness through film and its music. This is not to say that the much-­studied dance revival was not responsible for the disenfranchisement of hereditary communities, but rather that the recuperation of pleasure—the ability for some women to dance in public and be admired for it—occurred through the mediated images of aspirational singing and dancing women, like Bhanumati. Bhanumati made it acceptable, even inspirational, for women to dance and sing and feel and, most importantly, do so on a stage.18 Put another way, Bhanumati’s impact on discourses of citizenship and performance cannot be understood without accounting for the fact that she not only represented what became legible as Brahmin culture but also, by the time Swargaseema was released, was a married woman. Beauty and Bhanumati Within the 1950s mythological/period film genre, known in Telugu as paurāṇi– kam, Hindu wedding rituals operated as important plot points and also served to underscore caste identifications, suggesting the sedimenting of a number of public conversations.19 This practice extended to a subgenre of the mythological that has been variously categorized as folklore or historical in the 1950s (see Srinivas 2013, 176). Beginning with the film Malleswari, these films offer some clues as to what was at stake in Telugu-­speaking areas in the Independence era (see also Bhrugubanda 2018). After a decade of films that had commented on womanhood and caste in service of social movements, films like Malleswari, which were often based in pseudo-­religious fantasy themes, emerged with a potent commentary on womanhood and beauty, especially through the musical power of the soundtrack. In this regard, Srinivas has argued that these films highlighted the use of literary Telugu (grandhikam) in the lyrics as well as the dialogue: “mythologicals were meant to sound like grandhikam in the interest of creating a ‘Telugu atmosphere’ in a genre whose stories, as well as theatrical ancestry, were not merely pan-­Indian but also seen as inimical to regional and linguistic specificity. . . . The language . . . was meant to sound both timeless 60 • Chapter 2

and distinctive, facilitating the identification between the genre and classical Telugu” (Srinivas 2013, 267–68). These films thus served a dual purpose by positioning Telugu as protonational while simultaneously distinguishing Telugu from other linguistic groups. As Srinivas has pointed out, these films elevated the actors to a new role in public culture—“these stars were no longer the artists who played this or that conspicuous role: they made the roles conspicuous” (2013, 177, emphasis in original). Malleswari, an example of what M. Madhava Prasad has characterized in his work as a “brahmin mythological,” was directed by B. N. Reddy and released in 1951 by Vauhini Studios (Prasad 2014, 74).20 The film featured Bhanumati in the title role as a beautiful and talented young woman, Malleswari, who falls in love with a poor sculptor, Nagaraju (see figure 2.5). Nagaraju’s character was portrayed by the popular midcentury actor Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao (1923–96), better known as NTR. In the film, after the king sees Malleswari performing in the rain for Nagaraju, he sends for her to become a handmaiden in his court. According to the tradition, in the era in which the film is set—that of the Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646)—young, unmarried women were removed from their families and brought to court to serve the queen. In exchange, the king and queen offered large quantities of gold and jewelry to the parents. As a condition of their service, these women took a vow of chastity. Estranged from each other for many years, the lovers are reunited when Nagaraju is hired to construct a dancing hall for the queen’s court. Their love is discovered, and the couple is sentenced to death for disobeying the law. In the end, however, the king and queen pardon the couple, and they are allowed to marry. Malleswari is significant for a host of reasons, and it is generally regarded as the film for which Bhanumati’s music and dance are best remembered. The romanticization of Bhanumati’s servant-girl life raises some interesting questions as to what allowed dance and music to regain some measure of social status in the south Indian context, or at least enough for my maternal grandparents to want their daughter to learn the songs and dances. Arguably, films like Malleswari were not held to the same standards of realism through social commentary that social dramas had maintained for the previous decade. So, for a film like Malleswari, the burden of proof could lie elsewhere. If anything, this particular film renders the past a sort of magical alternative universe, where young women could sing and dance, but with a fairy tale happy ending. This radical shift away from the life trajectory that Swargaseema fictionalized for a performer or a wife is revealing, both for the way film cultures perceived and depicted women and for the way a newly independent, self-­governing society saw its past as a script for its future. CASTE • 61

Figure 2.5. Songbook cover for Malleswari (1951).

While the story line in Swargaseema in 1945 focused on the danger in Bhanumati’s beauty for those who beheld it, by 1951, in Malleswari, her beauty is used as a weapon against her and serves to victimize her. One way to explain the shift is to contextualize Malleswari within the broader body of work attributed to the director, B. N. Reddy (see also Indraganti 2016, 96–97). Reddy, a dominant-­caste, though non-­Brahmin, man famous for his totalizing oversight in the creation of a film, especially when it came to diction and the use of language in character roles, directed both of these films. Over the course of his career, Reddy was the man behind a number of films that critiqued social practices in south India, and did so by way of language habits, generally inflected by caste and the incorporation of English. Using language, both spoken and sung, Reddy, like 62 • Chapter 2

Figure 2.6. Still from Maya Bazaar (1957).

Ramabrahmam before him, highlighted caste and gender politics in his films through courtesan characters. His films reflected an anxiety around managing and protecting young (unmarried) women’s beauty—arguably a metaphor for the new nation—signaled through song and dance. Reddy’s work is undeniably significant among those who study caste and gender politics in south Indian cinema (see especially Srinivas 2013), but as a director, he is most broadly notable for his incorporation of Euro-­American aesthetic practices, particularly the cinematography of an Anglo-­Indian photojournalist and newsreel cameraman, Marcus Bartley (1917–93), who debuted in Swaragaseema.21 Bartley bridged a perceived gap between the aesthetics of Holly­wood and Indian cinema. Though well known for his work in the Telugu and Tamil cult hit Maya Bazaar (1957), Bartley is celebrated across industries (Hindi and Malayalam as well) for his ability with lighting. He was notably skilled at capturing low-­light settings in synchronic musical scenes that featured close-­ups of a woman’s face (figure 2.6). The lighting techniques for which Bartley gained accolades in Reddy’s films appear in black-­and-­white films across the world in the 1940s and 1950s. Broadly understood as an extension of German Expressionism and its use of lighting to achieve depth and contrast, Hollywood filmmakers like John Alton and Arthur Edeson used gauze filters and catch lights to great success, especially in close-­up shots.22 These techniques effectively increased brightness, softened lines, and made the eyes sparkle, ultimately highlighting the racialized beauty of a woman’s face: “Bartley’s camera expertly modulate[d] the gradual shifts in CASTE • 63

gesture, speech accent and make-­up as the village beauty is transformed into a ‘sexy’ star” (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999, 304). In other words, Reddy’s films and Bhanumati’s role in them not only reinvented Indian femininity through performance, but did so by highlighting her fair-­skinned beauty and equating it with an idealized and aspirational womanhood. Cinema thus fostered a number of affective attachments in the Independence era. Beauty and a gendered caste identity were rendered synonymous, and in the years since, global film and advertising technologies have reinforced this brand of racialized affect (see Jha 2016; Osuri 2008).23 In this regard, Reddy’s films served the dual purpose of portraying mytho-­religious characters in an aspirational and yet human way that, for a population that was used to the stage and for whom the screen produced a certain kind of altered reality, was totally believable. To be sure, Bartley’s debut as a cinematographer in Reddy’s Swargaseema and his subsequent influence over the aesthetics of film and the racialization of beauty did not occur in a purely visual vacuum. In her memories of seeing these early mythological films at the theater, for example, my grandmother remembered how many people fell to their knees in prayer when Krishna appeared on-­screen. In her words, “They believed he was there, in that room with them.” This was the power of early film technology in south India: it made a cinema hall an opportunity for darṣan (seeing God and being seen).24 Darshan in the cinema hall, however, extends beyond the viewing practices that Christopher Pinney (2004) described in his work on the lithograph and religion in India. While Pinney examined how still images offered darshan in exchange for being seen, in cinematic mediums darshan became increasingly intimate. Darshan in films was elevated not only to seeing and being seen but also to hearing and—for those who learned the songs and could sing along—being heard.25 Brahmin beauty emerged as a phenotype of citizenship precisely because it was not simply visual. Reddy’s Independence-­era films marked the debut of yet another star: Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao (1922–74), better known as Ghantasala. It is hard to overstate the influence Ghantasala has had on musical identity and notions of musical beauty in south India in general and for Telugu speakers across the world in particular. His career, like those of most Brahmin men of his generation, benefited from the explosion of media technology in the twentieth century. Ghantasala remains a household name in south India for the style of music—known as light classical or sometimes simply light music— he composed, sang, and popularized through radio and film over the course of his lifetime. The films that featured the new Brahmin beauty privileged the musical genre understood as light classical, which arrived as a stylistic distinction on AIR be64 • Chapter 2

ginning in the 1950s. These songs relied on smooth melodies and vocal styles as well as ragas that did not require great technical prowess. For example, many film songs tended toward Mohana rāgam, a simple pentatonic ragam with which most young singers begin their training. Of course, as these films and their songs circulated in amateur music-­making cultures, this approach to composing music for film makes ample sense. These songs and the genre(s) they went on to define, in contradistinction to classical, encouraged accessibility and fostered a sense of community, a possible explanation for why some film music was allowed on government-­run radio (see Huacuja Alonso 2022). Ghantasala’s fame and historicity, considering the contemporaneous bans against Hindi film music on AIR, reveal the evolution of a specifically south Indian cultural citizenship—one that associated musical beauty with women’s bodies as well as their dance. Though many have noted that Ghantasala was a talented singer who sang and composed music for films (see especially Indraganti 2016), it is important to remember that he was also trained in dance. By the time he reached his early twenties, Ghantasala was an educated Brahmin man enrolled at Maharaja College of Music and Dance in Vijayanagaram. The college, originally named Sri Vijayarama Gana Pathasala, was named for the king who founded it in 1919 and was considered the first of its kind in India. It was common in that era for men of his social station who went into films (like Vedantam Raghavaiah) to be trained in both music and dance in order to position themselves as reputable sangeetam masters to Brahmin families, like my own mother, who was Ghantasala’s student as a young girl in the 1950s. Ghantasala was one of many notable popular music figures who graduated from the Maharaja College and turned an academic diploma into a successful music career, specifically through film music understood as light classical.26 In other words, the institutionalization of music and dance in the transition years of Independence, as historians like Lakshmi Subramanian (2006) have noted, fed directly into social behaviors in urban areas in particular—the same behaviors that encouraged my maternal grandparents to enroll their only daughter in music lessons with a Brahmin man and a graduate of a music and dance college. After all, it would have been out of the question for her to learn from a hereditary practitioner. The idea that it was important to my mother’s parents that she not only learn how to sing but also know at least enough dance to pose for a photograph is telling. Stories like my mother’s point to the rise of cultural authoritarianism and the growth of Brahmin social networks in Telugu-­speaking areas. These networks connected public and private spaces, as well as industries like film, to cultural-­educational settings, which were all overwhelmingly operated by Brahmin and otherwise dominant-­caste men. Taken together, all of these CASTE • 65

culture industries fell under the same logic as broader governmental strategies. That is to say, the nationalist and legal measures of development merged with cultural projects to sanitize, preserve, and control. Within such identitarian logic, film cultures offered powerful platitudes. Cinema and its music ultimately rendered beauty, caste, and womanhood synonymous. Put another way, cinema, as a parallel process to statecraft, hoisted a kaleidoscope over a newly independent India. To peer through that lens, especially with Venkata Sir’s eyes, was to experience films that erased hereditary communities and instead cultivated controlling images of womanhood, not only for an international film audience but also for an upper-­class-­and-­caste populace. These films revealed the power of feminine beauty in installing a casteist patriarchy in a newly independent India. As the kaleidoscope shifted in the late 1950s, however, and the first generation born into a free and independent India came of age, it becomes important to understand why it was Hindi, not Telugu, songs that filled the pages of my mother’s little blue song diary.

66 • Chapter 2

3

Citizenship

The year was 1968. Just married, my parents were living the high life in Bangalore, India’s fastest-­developing industrial metropolis ( figure 3.1). They belonged to an optimistic group of young men and women, among the first graduating classes of the Indian Institutes, working for the newly independent Indian science and technology sector. At their wedding reception, hosted by Bharat Electronics (an aerospace and defense branch of the Indian government and my father’s employer at the time), my mother serenaded the audience with the latest hit song from the film Khandaan, “Tumhi Mere Mandir.” My father remembers that night proudly. His beautiful bride was the only one talented enough to sing, and in Hindi, too! She reminisced about that night once. Surrounded by engineers from around the country, it made sense to sing a Hindi song rather than a Telugu song, she told me. She teased my father about the fact that while she learned how to speak many languages to run their household when they moved from Andhra to Tamil Nadu to Karnataka, he never seemed to pick up more than a word or two. She laughed, remembering the uproar over the decision to replace English with Hindi, with many of her Tamil-­or Kannada-­ speaking friends, in places like Bangalore and Madras, feeling they were replacing one kind of colonialism with another. One of her favorite stories, one I heard many times, was that she never received a diploma for finishing high school in 1960 because the anti-­ English student protesters burned the ones printed in English, and then the anti-­Hindi faction burned the ones printed in Hindi.

Figure 3.1. Studio portrait of my parents, Bangalore, 1968.

In her case, the politics of language didn’t seem to tarnish her relationship to Hindi, especially the Hindi-­Urdu so common in 1960s film songs. My mother loved this language the way you love a dear old friend. This was something I came to understand about her connection to India as she raised me in the United States. She confided to me once during a rainy drive to dance class that before she married, she had daydreamed about giving her daughter an Urdu name, ‫( جھیل‬झील : lake), or better yet, if she had twin girls, ‫ جھیل‬and ‫( ج َھرنا‬झरना: waterfall). She laughed when I asked why she didn’t. Though she never explained, I have suspected that marrying into a conservative Telugu Brahmin family, she had to leave some of her adoration of Urdu and all things Hindustani behind. Despite growing up with Telugu culture at home, Hindi-­Urdu captured her modern feminist spirit, and she prided herself on her appreciation of film songs. These songs offered a kind of romantic hopefulness, she used to say, especially songs like “Tumhi Mere Mandir,” a kind of girlish optimism that she rolled her eyes at by the time I was old enough to sing along with her. The meaning of the song had changed over the years, I imagine, when she spoke of it to me after forty-­seven years of marriage, but 68 • Chapter 3

when I hear it now, I imagine a young woman, standing on the precipice of her country’s future, if not her own. तुम ही मेरे मंदिर

तुम ही मेरे मंदिर, तुम ही मेरी पूजा तुम ही देवता हो

कोई मेरी आँ खोों से देखे तो समझे कि तुम मेरे क्या हो

जिधर देखती हूूँ , उधर तुम ही तुम हो

ना जाने मगर, किन ख़यालोों मेें गुम हो मुझे देखकर तुम ज़रा मुस्कुरा दो

नहीीं तो मैैं समझूँगी मुझसे ख़फ़़ा हो

तुम ही मेरे माथे की बिं �दिया की झिलमिल तुम ही मेरे हाथोों के गजरोों की मंज़़िल.

You Are My Temple You are my temple, you are my prayer you are a god if someone was to see from my eyes they would understand what you are to me wherever I look, it is just you but you are lost in, who knows what thoughts look at me and smile a little otherwise I will think you are angry with me you are the twinkling of the dot on my forehead you are the destination for the flowers in my hand. ·

·

In India, the connection between language and identity is not only geographical but also biographical. In the discourse, this understanding of language does not necessarily negate the idea of a national identity, but does highlight and at times demarcate Hindi as the language of public culture—especially film and its songs—from the language of the home. In my mother’s case, Hindi film songs allowed her to locate herself in a broader public articulation of a pan-­Indian past, while Telugu culture functioned as an anchor of identity in her home and later, the mechanism by which she could raise her daughter in another country. This chapter extends from the recognition that my mother’s story is unique in some ways, yet quite common in others. Through a combination of historiography and Citizenship • 69

critical ethnography, I focus on how social processes that rely on language— like performance cultures—can and do destabilize the way one might experience citizenship and its forms of belonging.  Since 1953, beginning with the division of the Madras Presidency into separate Telugu-­and Tamil-­speaking states and, most recently, with the establishment of yet another state, Telangana, over a dozen cartographic, administrative, and highly contested distinctions have been made and remade to align geography with identity in India.1 During this era, citizenship practices, like language, also reaffirmed “state power . . . providing legitimacy to its actions and its claims to representation” (Roy 2010, 10). Thus, “changes in citizenship practices”—like which language is spoken by whom and where—“are imbricated in the politics of place-­making, [revealing] deep cartographic anxieties associated with the delineation of the national-­space, the assertion of specific ethno-­spaces, and the exclusive membership that modern states prescribe” (10). As Sumathi Ramaswamy notes about her own experience growing up in a Tamil family with a spatialized understanding of language and identity: English [was] the principal language of all my formal schooling . . . and Hindi . . . for the consumption of movies and songs. . . . While I may appear as some kind of exotic polyglot creature to those who have grown up in environments that are predominantly monolingual, my (multi) linguistic experience, I would insist, is something that many who live in the subcontinent . . . would readily recognize as their own. In turn, my polyglot habits echo a deeper history of multilingualism on the subcontinent produced by the displacement and resettlement of populations in areas where their languages were confined to the home and the family; and they are a consequence of a national education policy which, however haphazardly implemented, ideally expects every Indian citizen to formally study at least three languages: her “mother tongue” (or “regional language”), Hindi, and English. (Ramaswamy 1997, xx) By this logic, citizenship is not only tied to the use of language but is also a subjective experience, gendered by the idea of a “mother tongue.” Moreover, for Indian women who subscribe to the logic that motherhood is the fulfillment of wifehood, citizenship is multiformed across both space and, I would argue, time (see Visweswaran 1990, 66–67). Following this recognition of how practices of citizenship, like language, structure experiences of belonging, this chapter focuses on the era during which India was divided into linguistic states (1956–76). In particular, I explore how, during this era, the politics of language in Telugu culture industries were 70 • Chapter 3

also reflected by and through gendered and caste-­based cultural expressions, like dance. I complicate nationalist and regionalist narratives of linguistic identity, caste, and gender by widening the contextual frame to include a transnational analysis. After all, this was the same era during which Indians who had been educated in English-­medium schools were able to immigrate en masse to the United States under new immigration and civil rights laws. These immigration laws, which favored immigrants who could speak, read, and write in English, converged with Telugu identity politics in complicated ways that have since shaped the larger history of Indian dance, especially the style known today as kuchipudi. By centering the stories of women like my mother who came of age in a new nation and a new Telugu state and then emigrated during this era, I examine how language participates in gendered identity formations. I argue that through a critical approach to language, we can understand how citizenship operates for Indian women as a multiplied and unstable experience, a version of Aihwa Ong’s theory of “flexible citizenship,” which requires shifting roles and strategies (Ong 1999; see also Rosa 2019). In making this argument, and tying it to women’s expressions of subjectivity in an era when dominant-­caste Indian immigrants entered the US racial landscape, I rely on the work of bell hooks, by which I am able to explain the complex role language plays in articulating and disarticulating relationships to different forms of power: I have been working to change the way I speak and write, to incorporate in the manner of telling a sense of place, of not just who I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me. . . . I refer to that personal struggle to name that location from which I come to voice— that space of my theorising. Often when the radical voice speaks . . . we are speaking to those who dominate. Their presence changes the nature and direction of our words. Language is also a place of struggle. (hooks 1989, 16) Since language is also a place of struggle, it only follows that language practices reveal a manner of identification for performers, especially for women who are encouraged to learn how to dance in their “mother tongues” before dancing “in” other languages. To better understand how linguistic identity and therefore citizenship are translated and performed through dance, in this chapter I first explain how language shapes genre understandings in performance cultures. Then I connect conversations about genre, specifically the much-­debated distinction between bharatanatyam and kuchipudi, understood to reflect Tamil and Telugu identities, respectively, to characterizations of women as vamps. I argue Citizenship • 71

that the distinction between these two genres, both in film and elsewhere, reveals how women’s bodies were implicated in constructions of citizenship in India and later in the United States. Relying in particular on memory work—a method by which we can separate a “useless” nostalgia from a “politicization of memory” in the face of erasure—I examine how women’s bodies, especially when dancing, were used to signal citizenship (hooks 1989, 17). I argue that south Indian examples of the dancer reveal a process by which culture industries remembered dancing women’s bodies and then installed them as essential to the project of statecraft. This remembrance helps explain why so many dancers, trained in institutional settings in Madras, began their careers in Telugu or Tamil cinema and then went on to Hindi-­language cinema, while the inverse rarely occurred.2 I focus on how the popularity of the racialized, light-­skinned, Eurasian or Anglo-­Indian dancer, often known as a vamp or club dancer in this era, overlapped with the processes by which institutional dance schools in the south produced noteworthy classically trained dancers like Vyjanthimala Bali (b. 1936) and Hema Malini (b. 1948).3 Ultimately, in this chapter I examine how the south Indian, classically trained dancer became synonymous with the cinematic vamp in the period immediately following Indian independence. By focusing on the way language and citizenship appear through a woman’s dancing body, I uncover the racialized and sexualized mechanisms by which the classical dancer became legible in film. To explain how and why the south Indian vamp became essential to expressions of a globally recognizable citizenship for Indian women, in the final section of this chapter I consider the platitudes and paradoxes of her characterization through the memories of a dancer who played her. Performing in Mother Tongues A number of anthropological studies (see, e.g., Mitchell 2009; Ramaswamy 1997) have examined the rise of linguistic identity in areas previously known as the Madras Presidency. These studies establish that beginning in the late nineteenth century, language became a site for cultural and political identity formation in powerful and unprecedented ways. By the time India achieved independence, “culture became nature” (Ramaswamy 1997, 15). This discourse, in turn, required a broader conversation about how language could or should be represented as culture. Early to mid-­twentieth-­century sources suggest that the dance styles or genres variously classified as southern or eastern were already closely associated with a specific linguistic identity (i.e., Tamil or Bengali) before the subcontinent was reorganized into states (see, e.g., Publications Division 1955). By the late 72 • Chapter 3

1950s, the process of associating genres of performance with specific linguistic groups as well as their caste identifications became a matter of governmental policy.4 For example, during the seminars organized by the national government in the late 1950s, dance styles were first organized by linguistic group and caste and then designated by the Brahmin men and women running the seminar as either classical or folk. While dance forms like bharatanatyam were designated as representative of Tamil culture, others, like kuchipudi, were excluded from the canon, especially for expressing women’s subjectivities too plainly (see Putcha 2013). It was during these government seminars that the nationalist project to treat music and dance as mutually exclusive performance cultures, with independent historiographies and gendered legacies, became a matter of public policy. It is within this broader political context, where dance forms representing certain linguistic groups were identified as classical and subsequently relocated to state-­sponsored institutional settings, that film dance and women who danced in film emerged as powerful reference points within evolving citizenship practices. Today, any taxonomy of Indian dance and music will imply, if not wholly accept, the aesthetic polarization between film and classical performance as discrete genres living in distinct cultural realms. However, this was not always the case. The hierarchies between film dance and classical dance as well as between the different genres of classical dance have been—and remain— fluid and shifting, something I have learned through my own training. For example, by the time I began formal training in the United States in 1986, bharatanatyam was well established as the classical dance of south India, if not India as a whole. Kuchipudi, in contrast, was not as well known in or outside of India. A common explanation I heard for why most young dancers began their training with bharatanatyam was that it, in comparison to kuchipudi, possessed a well-­articulated training system (also known as aḍavu sampradāyam). Additionally, unlike bharatanatyam, kuchipudi required the ability to express sexual desire—something that could only be taught once a dancer was “more mature.” In other words, bharatanatyam’s classicism was not only located in its codified pedagogical structure but also defined by how it managed and defined age-­ appropriate sexual expression in dance. My story as a dancer begins with the aesthetic and sexualized contrast between bharatanatyam and kuchipudi and therefore between Tamil and Telugu culture. When my parents sought to enroll me in kuchipudi to begin my dance training in 1986, they were advised that I was too young and that I should begin my training in bharatanatyam instead. It was explained to them by a variety of dance teachers based in Madras (today Chennai) that bharatanatyam training Citizenship • 73

would prepare my body, that it would lay the primary foundation upon which I could later add other dance styles, like kuchipudi. After six years of training in bharatanatyam and around my eleventh birthday, my training switched to kuchipudi. Early in this transition, as I learned how kuchipudi movements differed from bharatanatyam, I came to understand the subtle distinctions between these styles that amounted to enormous meaning for the adults around me. The most basic and perhaps obvious difference: in bharatanatyam music, the lyrics are often (though not exclusively) in Tamil; kuchipudi lyrics are, with rare exception, always in Telugu. For as important as lyrical expression is to Indian dance and for how much Telugu speakers felt their identity was marginalized by Tamilians, this difference was also an important one for me as a young person. It was hard enough to express emotions that seemed foreign without the added challenge of needing to memorize lyrical meaning in a language I didn’t speak (since my family spoke Telugu, not Tamil, at home). There were also far less obvious differences that extended from these linguistic markers, which I learned as I transitioned from one style to the other. While the torso is often kept rigid in bharatanatyam, it is expected to be flexible and pliable in kuchipudi. In other words, in terms of body work, one learns very quickly that kuchipudi requires far more core strength, control, and agility. Simply put, it was necessary for me to be physically stronger (and at a young age, coordinated) to perform kuchipudi well. But a stronger body also meant more control and range of motion. In my experience, this translated to “bend more”—a phrase dancers come to know well when being asked to express more femininity and more grace. As my training switched from one style to another, I realized that it was less physically taxing to perform bharatanatyam now that my training consisted mostly of kuchipudi technique. Though the physical shift from one style to the other was certainly challenging, the most elusive transition between bharatanatyam and kuchipudi for me was related to the way the music is included in the physical expressions of the dancer. While in bharatanatyam one is never to lip-­synch to the lyrics, in kuchipudi one is expected to. Considering I had been scolded for years when I did accidentally sing along, this transition was a welcome one—I no longer had to remember to keep my lips still as I danced. The idea that some dance styles require a more natural affect, like lip-­synching, while others, particularly those understood as classical, require a more formal body language is an idea I learned through a constellation of experiences over my young life. By the time I reached adulthood, I had come to understand that the way dance teachers trained me to express what appeared natural was often in tension with the classical and, in many cases, also functioned as a synonym 74 • Chapter 3

for feminine. This tension appeared through the way I was asked to portray grace as well as emotional content. Moreover, in my training, comparisons to film dance—which was positioned as the least classical—offered the most powerful and useful heuristic device to teach young dancers which aesthetic they should cultivate and which they should avoid. The implication here was always the same: film dancers were not respectable women, and their dance was too sexual.5 The two worlds, classical dance and film dance, must be kept separate.6 However, this comparison and the way it set up film dance in opposition to classical dance was not without its own paradoxes, since some gurus who disowned students for dancing in films are said to have worked in films themselves. Over the course of my life, particularly in kuchipudi spaces, any questions about the movement of dancers and musicians between the film industry and institutional dance settings, and the relative cultural capital between the two, were usually brushed aside, if acknowledged at all. The only deliberate mention I have been able to procure, in an official biography, includes a retrospective on a Brahmin kuchipudi guru’s arrival in Madras and subsequent employment in the film industry in conflicted, shameful tones: The second phase of his life, between 1952 and 1962, is a decade of ups and downs. He was torn between the extremes of making a living on the one hand and on the other, keeping the fire burning towards the realization of his ideal of giving to the style a local habitation and a name. He was young, tall, handsome, personable, and talented and the film glamour was too much to resist and there was also money in it. Not with a view to amassing wealth, but just to keep his body and soul together under the hard conditions he was passing through, he had to succumb to it, knowing fully well all its implications and all that had happened to those who had gone there before him. (Andavilli and Surya Rao 1994, 9) Time and again, any Brahmin guru’s involvement in the film industry was glossed as a transition phase, generally laced with a mea culpa (such as the one above). Film work was to be viewed as a purely financial move, one any guru succumbed to only temporarily before he could then pursue a higher, more noble cause (see also Krishnan 2019, 161–69). Over coffee after an otherwise unremarkable day in Hyderabad, a dance historian, Prof. Nagabhusan Sarma, went so far as to describe the era during which Brahmin gurus worked in film as the “dark period” in their lives. “The men who did this work, they don’t like to talk about their involvement in the films, which is very unfortunate, because kuchipudi was originally recognized as a dance form of the Telugu people, not clasCitizenship • 75

sical necessarily, but as a dance form itself through the focus it got in the films. The men who danced and choreographed for these films are partly responsible for this because they evoked an interest by elitist Telugu audiences in Telugu dance” (Sarma, pers. comm., May 4, 2009). These sorts of comments underscored the elisions and occlusions I had noted in official historiography when it came to acknowledging an undeniable truth: that the dancers and choreographers who worked in south Indian films turned dance and music into a way of signposting both language and citizenship. However, participating in the film world connoted behavior so inappropriate that even a Brahmin guru, with his social status to protect him, felt it necessary to purge film work from his record. Comments on a Brahmin guru’s time in the film industry, couched in narratives of his bachelorhood and starving-­artist phase, speak to a simple truism: that respectability was not to be found in the glitz and glamour of cinema, but rather in the austerity and purity of an academy.7 My whole life, I had been trained by and through my gurus’ disdain for film dance, and even today most historical accounts of dance in India segregate the dancers and choreographers who work in films into a separate category from the institutionalized, overwhelmingly Brahmin world of classical dance. However, expanding our lens to view the development of the dance aesthetics across the broader landscape of Indian culture industries allows us to see that by the 1970s, cinema dancers were, more often than not, trained in government-­ funded dance academies before they entered the film industry. In other words, despite the disdain toward film dance that was integral to my own training, in the early years after Indian independence, Brahmin classical dance academies were also training grounds for film dancers. The quote above indicates that a number of Telugu gurus clearly worked on-­set, in many cases with women who were often their own students, and so their subsequent repudiation of film dance sheds important light on the ongoing conversation about the interdependence of institutions like film studios, dance academies, and dominant-­caste public spaces known as sabhas (public assembly spaces). While hereditary communities experienced extreme policing and the loss of livelihoods, Brahmin women studied dance in an academy and performed courtesan repertoire on a sabha stage and even on-­screen.8 Considering the co-­occurrence of films, which featured what would go on to be recognized in sight as well as sound as classical performance, and the founding and proliferation of academies as well as sabhas (newly constructed leisure spaces Lakshmi Subramanian [2018] describes as “mansions for music”), the reformulation of song and dance for a south Indian citizenry was arguably happening simultaneously on screens and stages. 76 • Chapter 3

Figure 3.2. Still from Devadasu (1953). Dancer: Lalitha.

Guru-­Sishya on the Silver Screen A well-­known Brahmin kuchipudi guru based in Chennai, Vempati Chinna Satyam (1921–2012), choreographed a handful of sequences in the 1950s and 1960s, most successfully for a film in which he is listed as the primary choreographer. The film, Devadasu, a Telugu adaptation of the popular Bengali novel Devdas, was released in 1953 by Vinoda Pictures and marked Vedantam Raghavaiah directorial debut.9 The plot features a love triangle between the Anglophile Brahmin man Devdas Mukherjee, his childhood love Parvati, and the courtesan Chandramukhi. In the Telugu version, the scene that introduces Chandramukhi takes place in her salon as she performs a Kshetreyya padam, “Intha Thelisiundi” (Even knowing this much), for her patrons (figure 3.2). The playback singing for this scene and the soundtrack featured R. Balasaraswati, whose established talent on air as a light classical singer made her an obvious choice. After all, by the 1960s, the air designation of light classical was synonymous both with film and playback music and with the dance that accompanied it on-­screen. Light classical, as a stylistic parameter, played an important role in making otherwise esoteric idioms more accessible to the public. At the same time, it also ensured that film music remained palatable, through the taste habits of ragam (mode) and swara-­sthānam (intonation) to those who considered themselves rasikas (aficionados). Citizenship • 77

In the salon scene, known in Telugu as mejuvāṇi, the musicians are arranged in a semicircle, with Chandramukhi dancing in the center. In this, the first south Indian adaptation of the Bengali classic, Raghavaiah cast the eldest sister, Lalitha, of the famous dancing trio the Travancore sisters. Though well known as film dancers, these sisters, Lalitha (1930–82), Padmini (1932–2006), and Ragini (1937–76), are remarkably absent from historical accounts of dance in twentieth-­century India. Together, these three women, who had all received dance training under Thiruvidaimarudur Mahalingam Pillai (1917–2002), the nationalist figurehead Perumanoor Gopinath Pillai, better known as Guru Gopinath (1908–87), and further mentoring from the Orientalist icon Uday Shankar (1900–1977), performed dance numbers in dozens of south Indian films. The impact of their performances in film challenges the standard narrative on the importance of Brahmin gurus, including Rukmini Arundale, and the reinvention of dance publics that is said to have occurred at dance academies (see also Krishnan 2019, 157). With accompaniment from harmonium, violin, sarod, veena, and naṭṭuvangam, the performance vocabulary demonstrated in the salon scene follows formal characteristics and stylistic features readily identifiable as karnatic music and bharatanatyam dance. The rising tensions between Tamil and Telugu speakers in the 1950s over the division of the Madras Presidency into separate linguistic states certainly contributed to the processes of differentiation that ensued between kuchipudi and bharatanatyam. However, by the time Devadasu was released, the names and movement vocabularies of bharatanatyam and kuchipudi were not yet mutually exclusive. Though choreographed by kuchipudi gurus, dance in films such as Devadasu drew exclusively from the bharatanatyam idiom. One could argue that this was a calculated move, to frame bharatanatyam movements as connected to a dance style that stemmed from courtesan culture. Released in 1959, Jayabheri provides a revealing example of how Telugu films set in fantasy or mythological time mobilized the idea that valuable forms of culture were not associated with courtesan women but rather with Brahmin men. The film offers a critique of caste discrimination but refers to caste identity specifically in relation to gendered performance cultures. Set in the 1600s, somewhere in the rural dominions of the Vijayanagara Empire, a talented Brahmin singer, Sastry, falls in love with a woman, Manjulavani, a dancer. Her caste status is communicated through the characterization of her family as inarticulate folk who can only dance, while the Brahmin man is knowledgeable about the pronunciation of lyrics and can sing. Though she belongs to a dance entertainment troupe and is from a different caste community, Sastry goes against his family’s wishes and marries her. He is subsequently ostracized from the 78 • Chapter 3

Brahmin community and begins touring as the singer in Manjulavani’s troupe, performing what is described in the film as bhāgavatam (drama based on religious themes) and nāṭakam (drama with either secular or religious themes). Over the course of the film, this troupe’s performances are juxtaposed and contrasted with courtesan traditions. The comparison of the courtesans with the troupe is not subtle—the scenes that offer contrast follow each other in sequence. The performances by the troupe are portrayed as deeply religious and readily accepted by the crowds. The courtesan dancers are caricatured as chaotic and disorganized. The courtesan dancers present a modified, bawdy parody of the kuchipudi mainstay Bhāmākalāpam (see Kamath 2019). This performance enrages the villagers and leads to a riot. The troupe led by Sastry, on the other hand, presents a refined natakam, set to technically complex music (understood today as kaĉēri style or concert classical), based on religious themes from the Mahabharata. At the end of the show, Sastry discovers that the rāja (king) himself is in attendance and has been impressed by this rural, yet professional dance-­drama. In recognition of the quality of their art, the king invites them to entertain in his court. It is the vocal music that impresses the king, a message made abundantly clear during a scene in which Sastry performs a complex, highly embellished passage of swaras (notes), in a defined and esoteric ragam. Sastry performs while seated in what is now a standard classical concert formation, sealing the message that when culture is found in the rough and polished, it is only a voice, and a man’s voice at that, which emerges as the diamond. After the king invites Sastry’s troupe to the court, however, the royal courtesan, referenced in the film as the rājanarthaki (king’s dancer), expresses her displeasure at being replaced by such low-­class, rural performers. She states that Sastry, as a Brahmin, has greater vijñānam (knowledge) about the arts than she, so she sets out to seduce him in order to convince him to sing for her dance. Her reasoning is that if she can demonstrate that her dance can find expression in his music, then his art would no longer be revered as purer than hers.10 He refuses to sing for her, so she sings for herself as she performs a padam with musical icon M. L. Vasantakumari (1928–90) providing playback vocals. In the seduction scene, through a series of close-­up shots, the rajanarthaki presents Sastry with alcohol as the tempo switches to a syncopated beat, and the ragam shifts. This musical device is a hallmark of courtesan repertoire, which usually increased in tempo and pitch toward the conclusion of a song to create a euphoric and climactic state for both dancer and audience (see Soneji 2012, 110). Ultimately, as she concludes her dance with a tīrmānam or triple cadence, signaling the end of her performance, we see Sastry’s arm drop an empty glass. The scene ends with Sastry, drunk and disoriented, stumbling to the rajanarthaki’s bed. Citizenship • 79

Both the dancer and the playback singer featured in this scene trace their lineage to hereditary performance communities. It is important to note that while both were born into families where women both danced and sang, by this era women either danced or sang. In other words, by at least 1959, a woman’s body had effectively been split into two: a disembodied voice and a dancing, sexualized body. The rajanarthaki in Jayabheri was portrayed by Rajasulochana (1935–2013), who, like many others in this era, translated classical dance training under noteworthy gurus into a successful career as a vamp, then ultimately as an actress, in films.11 Beginning in the 1950s, dance sequences were increasingly performed by women like Rajasulochana—women with years of formal training who danced in south Indian films and went on to achieve stardom as vamps, especially as this role became increasingly rebranded as “item dancer.” Many of these women eventually found success as heroines in Hindi cinema. And many were discovered on the stages of sabhas by film dance directors like Vempati Chinna Satyam’s cousin and predecessor in the film industry, Vempati Satyanarayana Satyam (1922–82), better known as Pedda Satyam. Pedda Satyam, a remarkable and understudied figure in south Indian performance history, arguably redefined dance as an athletic practice. Additionally, under Satyam’s direction, for the first time, many film dance sequences featured a solo dancing man, usually in a religious-­mythological role such as Shiva or Venkateswara.12 Pedda Satyam’s choreography beginning in the 1960s marks a departure from the aesthetic popularized by Raghavaiah. While Raghavaiah’s choreography had drawn connections between dance, caste, and sexuality, Pedda Satyam’s choreography, through kuchipudi movement vocabularies, introduced a new phenotype of Indian dance, highlighting religiosity through bodily athleticism set to virtuosic musical passages. These films featured mytho-­religious couples such as Shiva and Parvati dancing together. In such scenes, the woman’s dance is expunged of the lyricism found in Jayabheri, and there are few lingering close-­up shots of her face. The handmaidens in Parvati’s celestial court also perform in a similar style, that is to say, an aesthetic that focused on the coordinated and athleticized movements of their dancing bodies. In other words, Pedda Satyam’s choreography avoided portraying a dancer as an autonomous agent, thus neutralizing her sexual power. When a woman performed in the scenes he choreographed, she was presented either with other women, with her husband, or with her guru, and always within a strictly defined heteropatriarchal social and religious framework. It is in Pedda Satyam’s choreography in particular that we begin to witness a shift in Telugu cinema away from a marked reliance on bharatanatyam and an increased usage of what are today representative kuchipudi movements, which 80 • Chapter 3

highlighted an exceptionally acrobatic and athletic body. This shift was also accompanied by a musical change wherein the music to which dancers danced aligned with broader imperatives of musical classicism: an emphasis on swaram (tune) and nritta (virtuosic footwork) rather than sāhityam (lyrics) and nāṭya (theatricality), and adherence to one ragam and one tālam throughout. This aesthetic transition in Telugu films reinforced the emergent political idea that Telugu identity was distinct within and beyond south India. Put another way, the idea that Telugu identity was distinct was directly tied to the argument that kuchipudi was more classical because it was associated with Brahmin men—for this is how the athleticism was coded—than bharatanatyam. More importantly, the representation of kuchipudi as deeply religious and therefore athletic, as well as its framing as a communal or conjugal practice, resituated the vamp as a figure not necessarily distinct from the heroine.13 Pedda Satyam is credited with discovering some of the most successful dancers for a generation. Most, if not all, of these women came from Tamil Brahmin families in the Madras area, began their careers in the sabha, then worked broadly in films across a number of languages (Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi) at the height of their careers, and subsequently retired after they married. Lakshmanan Vijayalakshmi (b. 1943), better known as L. Vijaya­ lakshmi, is an iconic example of this trend, so for this reason, she and her story occupy my attention for the remainder of this chapter. L. Vijayalakshmi Vijji, as she prefers to be addressed, is an accountant now, living in Davis, California, with her husband. A newspaper article alerted me to her North American domicile and, after a handful of cheerful phone calls and emails, we made plans to meet at her home. I pulled up to her beautifully manicured lawn on a sunny summer afternoon in August. Vijji answered the door, dressed in an ornate chiffon sari, in a color often described as sea-­foam. After a brief introduction to her husband, who made us tea and disappeared into an upstairs office, we settled into her living room for a conversation about her life as a daughter, a wife, and a dancer. As we sat together on her living room sofa, I glanced around the room at the black-­and-­white photos decorating the walls. “My husband framed all these for me,” she explained. One frame in particular caught my eye. Centered on the longest wall in a prime location, it held a series of headshots. “Lux soaps,” she said. “Like most actresses, I did some ads for beauty products while I was in films, too.” The Lux photos followed the same aesthetic as the previous generations Citizenship • 81

Figure 3.3. Lux soap India advertisement, 1961. Model: L. Vijayalakshmi.

of south Indian dancer-­actress endorsements (see chapters 1 and 2), focusing on her face and highlighting her dancerly side-­eyed glances, embellished with dark and thick eyeliner (see figure 3.3). On either side of that series of headshots were striking full-­length shots of Vijji in a sheer, bejeweled costume from her role as Urvashi in the mythological Telugu film Sree Krishna Tulabharam (1966). I was immediately curious about this costume and its departure from the standard sari style. Perhaps sensing this, Vijji interjected as I pulled the scene up on YouTube, “That was the new style of costume that directors favored after Vyjayanthimala’s performance in the Hindi film Amrapali [1966; see figures 3.4–3.5]. The music was influenced by it, too. Hear that sitar? It was just a big mix of everything, kathak, bharatanatyam, kuchipudi, all of it.” Sitting in silence as the clip played on, she added, “That scene was one of my favorites. I remember it so well. . . . It was probably one of my last before I was married and left India.” We watched the scene together, and while I sat in stunned silence at Vijji’s athleticism, she directed my attention away from her dance and to the hero’s (NTR’s) reaction to it. “Watch his face here, as he watches me. . . .” And I did watch as NTR’s character, Krishna, realizes he is being drawn toward the courtesan and away from his wife, Satyabhama, played by Jamuna (b. 1936). As he catches and corrects his behavior, his wife isn’t watching the dance at all, but has her eyes closed, swaying side to side. She is moved by the music and, in that moment, allows her body to express her emotion. As the goddess-­heroine, her role is to be the devout, composed wife in contrast to the tempting and impas82 • Chapter 3

Figure 3.4. Vyjayanthimala in Amrapali (1966).

Figure 3.5. L. Vijayalakshmi in Sree Krishna Tulabharam (1966).

sioned dancer. Yet, in that moment, she crosses that line ever so slightly and dances to the music herself. Only once she opens her eyes and sees her husband watching her does she stop moving, casting her eyes down in shame as the performance continues. Beauty and Shame Lila Abu-­Lughod’s (1986) work introduced the dichotomy of honor and shame, which has shaped numerous studies on gender and social behavior, especially in areas understood as postcolonial. In most cases, this binary explains how and why women in patriarchal societies both police themselves (and other women) and in doing so enable and perpetuate structures of heterosexual control and violence. In South Asian expressive cultures it has become somewhat of a truism that musical skill in performance amounts to honor in ways that dance often amounts to beauty as well as shame. Vijji herself noted the dichotomy in film, acknowledging that “goodie-­goodies like Jamuna would never dance” but would only play the role of heroine, generally the protagonist’s wife. As I watched a filmic representation of this very dynamic in Sree Krishna Tulabharam, it was apparent that whatever lack of status Vijji might have felt at playing the object of sexual desire in scenes such as these did not translate to shame on-­ screen. Her comments on the relative moral high ground afforded to actresses (rather than item dancers) indicated she understood the social and cultural positions inherent in the performances on-­screen. Skirting the issue ever so slightly as afternoon faded into evening and we became more comfortable with each other, I asked her about the costumes as I helped her set the table for dinner, about how she felt wearing something so far removed from what was understood as a dance costume, especially something so physically revealing. Standing up a bit straighter as she handed me a plate, she replied, “My father was a man ahead of his time, I think. He just made sure it was my choice. If I was okay with it, he was okay with it.” Vijji’s family identified as Tamil Brahmin, though her father had been stationed in Pune before launching his daughter’s dance career in Madras. Her trajectory in films and her apparent autonomy and agency in the process, after her successes onstage, underscore the social and affective mobility available to women who came from Tamil Brahmin backgrounds. I noted to her that I could not think of any Telugu Brahmin women whose path mirrored hers, and she couldn’t either. I also mentioned, at one point, that it was significant to many scholars of dance, myself included, that film dancers who were not from Brahmin families—like Vyjayanthimala—were born into hereditary performance families. Their moth84 • Chapter 3

ers were courtesans. Without missing a beat, Vijji corrected me: “But it wasn’t the training they received from their mothers or grandmothers that earned them prestige or film roles. These women trained rigorously in Madras, for years, in many different styles of music and dance in various languages, and that has nothing to do with whether or not they could trace their lineage to courtesan communities. They trained with big-­name gurus, at big-­name schools, and that is why they were successful.” Vijji’s rebuttal to my suggestion, in its sidestepping of the intersection of caste, language, and social power, corroborates a larger point. A partial explanation for why hereditary dancers faded from public view is that those who replaced them increasingly emerged from Brahmin institutional settings where dance was positioned as an athleticized bodily practice that required agility and physical strength. At a time when the mission across Indian performance culture could be reduced to a platitude, as Matthew Harp Allen highlights in his 2008 article “Standardize, Classicize, and Nationalize,” it is hardly surprising that most successful dancers emerged from settings that attempted to formulate a singular classical pedagogy for performance cultures. Part of this mission required formalizing, for example, how a song was understood by its lyrical or melodic organization as well as its adherence to the definitive version of a particular ragam or talam. After all, before this era, there were many permutations and combinations of any given ragam, and none was more correct than any other. As I replayed the scene from Sree Krishna Tulabharam on my laptop that night, alone in Vijji’s quiet and well-­appointed guest room, I marveled at the intense physicality in the dances for which she is best known. She leaps and bounds all over the frame, departing from the formal characteristics of a south Indian dance vocabulary. Though the vocals are provided by the light-­classical karnatic star P. Susheela, during a technical passage, in a spectacular feat of vocal athleticism, one can hear idiomatic phrases recognizable as kathak, not bharatanatyam or kuchipudi. These technical passages, known as jathis, function as a measuring stick to judge a dancer for her stamina—a phrase dancers know as endurance and anaerobic ability. And here, an unspoken fact remained—an elusive ethnographic moment which revealed that over and above her performance training or her family’s Tamil Brahmin social power, Vijji capitalized on what is understood today as a fitness-­conscious, ableist, Indian beauty: the very kind Nina Davuluri reflected as Miss America. In establishing her physical abilities as social capital, Vijji and others like her also redefined women’s bodily expression, in particular, as citizenship.14 Vijji’s house and her husband’s decoration of it paid tribute to her physique. His choice of which pictures to hang reflected the idea that it was the beauty of Citizenship • 85

her athletic body, not simply her face as had been the case for Bhanumati, that catapulted her into stardom. It was the movement of her body that positioned her in contrast to the nonmoving body of the heroine. Vijji’s own acknowledgment of the heroine’s “goodie-­goodie” status suggests that she recognized and accepted that she played the foil to such characters. But herein lies the enduring paradox in Indian expressive cultures: the worshiping of women’s dancing bodies while villainizing their transgressive potential. In the end, the lesson of Vijji’s story is this: she clearly understood the implications of her performances in films. She understood the social capital that she was both risking and gaining by playing the much-­maligned vamp on-­screen. She knew that she was participating in a heterosexist system in which her dance was coded as a moral arbiter that would inevitably cast aspersions on her character. She knew all this. She did it anyway. “Rooms of Gold” I was surprised to learn that during her time working in south Indian cinema, Vijji was able to maintain a stage career in Madras, performing under the direction of her guru, Vazhuvoor Ramaiah Pillai (1910–91), at sabhas.15 In a fascinating revelation, she also described to me how she branched out into a modified form of salon dance contemporaneous with her film and stage career, where she would perform at weddings or events at the homes of wealthy families— a version of feudal patronage in many ways. She described these events over coffee one morning. As we sat together in her sunny California kitchen, Vijji recalled the opulence of the homes to which she was invited. “I remember rooms of gold. . . . They were so wealthy they had entire rooms of gold. . . . That’s how I remember them.” She went on to describe a cinemaesque scene, replete with wealthy dominant-­caste, but not Brahmin, men who paid hefty sums to decorate their homes with her dance, and purdah-­like conditions, where their wives and daughters watched her from around corners, too shy to speak to her, but whispering to each other of her celebrity film star status. Vijji attributes the resurgence of salon traditions, like the one she described to me, to the popularity of classical dance numbers in midcentury cinema, particularly the era of Telugu and Tamil mythological and fantasy cinema in which she was active, from approximately 1953 to 1968.16 These films dramatized episodes from religious epics (e.g., the Mahabharata) or folklore, offering an exclusively Hindu reading of India’s past. In the post-­Independence moment, such readings recuperated the public social status of the mythical courtesan. Vijji noted the dynamic in her own performance history, observing that she began 86 • Chapter 3

receiving invitations to perform in private settings, reminiscent of feudal patronage systems, after the commercial success of Telugu mythological films like Nartanasala (1963) and Pandava Vanavasam (1965). Significantly, the dance numbers from these mythological films characterized the courtesan as an ahistorical fantasy figure, one to be admired and emulated. Films such as Nartanasala and Pandava Vanavasam relied upon mytho-­ historical understandings of performance culture and, in their representations, privileged a set of aesthetic standards, not only for the dancer but also for the music to which she danced. Vijji recalls that one song in particular emerged as the most requested during her private performances. The song, “Salalita Rāga Sudhārasasāram,” is credited to a popular midcentury Telugu Brahmin lyricist, Samudrula, but the lyrics and the melodic material were usually attributed to two separate individuals. These roles were exclusively filled by dominant-­ caste men in this era. The credits list sangeetam, that is, music, as composed by a Brahmin man, Susarla Dakshinamurthy (1921–2012). Susarla’s trajectory from recording artist on His Master’s Voice in the late 1920s to director of south Indian music at air (New Delhi) in the 1930s and 1940s to music director in 1960s Telugu cinema speaks to the significant cross-­pollination between these various forms of media and their respective representations of classical music. Susarla’s musical idiom in songs like “Salalita” relied upon judicious and discrete interpretations of ragam, talam, and song structure. “Salalita,” for example, follows a modified kirtanam structure, with alternating sections of pallavi, charanam, and swaram. That Susarla’s oeuvre of film music relied upon principles of melodic organization that are today understood as classical by Telugu speakers is only further underscored by the vocal performance of the song by a young M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016), a Telugu Brahmin singer who, today, is synonymous with elite karnatic music and whose status as a composer has in many ways eclipsed his performance career. Without exception, every karnatic vocal music persona who has come to define the genre, from M. S. Subbalakshmi (1916–2004), who can also trace her lineage to hereditary performance communities, to M. Balamuralikrishna, spent some time in the industry as a playback singer or actor up to the late 1960s. In other words, the development of cinema and radio music was, in many ways, coterminous with the trajectory of institutional aesthetics in music and dance, and generally required Telugu speakers to relocate to Madras in order to succeed. By 1969, however, as Telugu cinema production shifted from Madras to the new capital of Andhra Pradesh, Hyderabad, film music, kaceri music, and dance music had all become mutually exclusive in terms of ornamentation, language, and affect. Citizenship • 87

Vijji left cinema and India in 1969, the same year the Telugu film industry began shifting its production base from Madras to Hyderabad. Like my parents, she was part of a mass migration of dominant-­caste Telugu and Tamil men and women who left India in this era. In the years to follow, culture industries associated with a specific region and its mother tongue would increasingly feature mutually exclusive musicians, musical styles, dancers, and gendered movement vocabularies. This mutual exclusivity, which I focus on in chapter 4, reveals broader discourses on womanhood, performance, and citizenship under the logics of migration and transnationalism.

88 • Chapter 3

4

Silence

Houston, 2008 This paṭṭu sari is like a dance costume, but more uncomfortable. Everyone seems very tense. The lights that are pointed at us as we sit on the wedding maṇdapam remind me of the spotlights on a stage. Hot and blinding. The nādaswaram starts playing faster and louder; the thavil also speeds up.1 The sound is suddenly deafening; I realize an important moment is upon us in the wedding ceremony—the sindhoor dānam.2 I’m excited, almost seduced for a moment by the significance of it all as I see the red powder poured into his hands. It’s redder than kum-­kum. Brighter, finer, and more vivid than the powder I have known. How many times have I performed this moment as a dancer? How many times has the adrenaline rush buoyed me to the end of an exhausting performance? Too many to count. All those years seem to have led me to this day. The romance of all that practiced wifehood feels so heady that for a moment, I think, this is why weddings are so important. They make a lifetime of dance and rehearsal a lived reality. Suddenly, everything is red. There’s red powder in my eyes, in my mouth, in my nose—I can’t breathe. I can’t speak. I turn around and hear a series of gasps as everyone scrambles to save my face, to wipe away sindhoor that is now everywhere. I feel anger boiling to the surface, but I stay silent, my eyes watering, and finish the ceremony. It’s like a dance performance, I tell myself, gritting my teeth. The show must go on.

·

·

In 1988, south Indian film director K. Viswanath (b. 1930) released a film titled Swarnakamalam (Golden lotus). Viswanath cast the beautiful and talented dancer-­actress Bhanupriya (b. 1967) as Meenakshi, the daughter of a Brahmin dancer. A product of her father’s training, Meenakshi is a gifted performer but has no interest in leading the life of a classical dancer, which she sees as a dying, anachronistic profession. A modern woman, she would rather capitalize on the opportunities available to her as India entered the global economy. Her love interest in the film, Chandrasekhar, holds Meenakshi’s father in great esteem as a symbol of Telugu religious and cultural heritage. Throughout the film, this love interest acts as her conscience and her musical inspiration. His music finds expression in her body. Her body needs his voice, and his voice needs her body. By the end of the film, however, Meenakshi accepts an invitation from an Anglo-­American woman to move to the United States, become a professional dancer, and live beyond the shadow of her father’s legacy. As she prepares to board a plane and leave India for a new life in the United States, she realizes she is afraid of what she will lose by starting over there—that is, everything she has ever known, especially her identity as a daughter and a dancer. Rather than moving to the United States, she decides at the last second to stay in India, marry Chandrasekhar, and uphold her family’s tradition by becoming a dancer-­teacher, like her father before her. I was seven years old when Swarnakamalam was released and two years into my own initiation into the Indian performance arts. Swarnakamalam’s dramatization of gendered cultural transmission, symbolized by religion, dance, and marriage, resonated deeply with my parents, who, like many upwardly mobile and Brahmin south Indians, in the wake of the 1965 Immigration Act, had left India for the United States. I came to know the film well: anytime I didn’t want to practice dance, my family, which included my maternal grandparents and older brother, would make me watch it. This is because, in many ways, Swarnakamalam offered me a path to follow, as an immigrant and a Brahmin Telugu woman. Films like Swarnakamalam, which connect dance and daughterhood to homeland and homeland to identity, are de rigueur in the Indian film industry more broadly because they capitalize on a stabilized understanding of the social and cultural formations that inscribe religious identity on a woman’s body.3 Following the now-­iconic Indian classical dancer across various forms of public culture, in this chapter I take a closer look at the aesthetic logics that have crystallized around her, situating her as a global signpost for India in the twenty-­first century. Focusing on the period from approximately 1990 to the present, I bring together 90 • Chapter 4

ethnography in both India and the United States, film and media analysis, and critical race and feminist critiques in order to highlight the unstable and at times contradictory formations of womanhood that rely on transnational identifications of caste, gender, and race. Highlighting widely accepted narratives of Hindu heteropatriarchy memorialized in films like Swarnakamalam—that Brahminical musical knowledge finds physical expression through a woman’s body—I recall bell hooks’s feminist intervention of “talking back” to forces of power, especially those which tend to interpret women’s silence as racial assimilation and gendered violence (1989; see also Das 2007; Jangbar 2021). Thinking about the dancing body this way, as both a source of struggle and resistance and a space where silence can be transformed into its own form of power, allows for a more robust feminist analysis of the Orientalized and fetishized Indian dancer. Dance and the Promise of Happiness Even when women’s voices are carefully controlled, their bodies are doing discursive and political work. This work is particularly potent in settings where the abled, healthy body becomes a metonym for discourses of nation, development, and progress, as has long been the case in India. To be sure, it is by now an axiom among those who study cultural movements in India that the dancer, as an essentialized woman, exposes the gendered imperatives of Hindu nationalism that we could not otherwise see or hear (see also Ramaswamy 2010). Functionally and representatively, the dancer is India. Through a combination of visual cues in figures 4.1 and 4.2, for example, she presents an exoticized and othered beauty by way of her jewelry, clothing, body language, and of course, her bindi. These cues are then superimposed on an advertisement for a commercial airline—twa in this case—in order to link a US-­based company with Orientalist evocations of tourism, leisure travel, and India. In the advertisements, these visual gestures to a flattened idea of India are further emphasized by the placement of a bronze Nataraja statue alongside the dancer. In the dominant Euro-­American racial imagination and over the last half-­century as Indians have emerged as a model minority group in the United States, the Nataraja statue has solidified into a shorthand for Hinduism and, therefore, India.4 In this way, such representations of dancers have not only animated and mobilized Orientalist symbolism, but also slowly but steadily scaffolded Hindu hegemony in the decades since Indian independence in 1947. This scaffolding is at least in part responsible for the way India, especially its southern cultures from where the bronze Nataraja is said to have emerged, has come to stand for the whole of South Asia in the US racial imagination.5 Silence • 91

Figure 4.1. Trans World Airlines advertisement (1960s) featuring an Indian classical dancer as a symbol of Indian tourism.

For the purposes of this chapter, it is important to understand that Indian model minority narratives, which are overrepresented by dominant-­caste Hindu immigrants in the US context, build upon a longer history of conflict in South Asia. This history is, simply put, a result of British administrative policies that culminated in the division of the subcontinent into independent nation-­states defined by their religious identifications, with a focus on Muslim and Hindu populations. Through this reductive logic, India was established as a nation-­ state for Hindus.6 And so, in each and every instance where the south Indian dancer has been sourced to represent a Hindu India, and sometimes all of South Asia, her gendered dancing body exposes the soft power of a Hindu nation-­state 92 • Chapter 4

Figure 4.2. Trans World Airlines advertisement (1960s) featuring an Indian classical dancer as a symbol of Indian tourism.

and imaginations of a Hindu past, present, and future.7 Today, whether or not she is understood as from the stereotyped south, the Indian dancer is saturated with erotic and racial meaning in the highly mediated spaces in which she circulates, from dominant-­caste industries like cinema and satellite television (see, e.g., Mankekar 1999) to visual cultures and cosmopolitan standards of beauty that continue to center and cater to the white, Euro-­American gaze.8 Within this broader transnational frame and especially in the contemporary US context, it is but a truism that performance training is integral to an upbringing that produces a highly marriageable young woman.9 Such training embeds ideologies of caste and heterosexuality within identifications of race Silence • 93

as well as gender. Today, these ideologies are further complicated by neoliberal logics that encourage women to believe that in order to have access to representational power, they must associate themselves with the cultural legibility that has accrued to the figure of the Indian dancer. As I have learned over decades in North American Indian dance spaces, this rhetoric is no longer even specific to young women and girls, but also leads even adult women to take up Indian classical dance as a manner of producing a racial identity and performing a sense of belonging. Within these spaces, one discovers a narrative of returning to India in order to train their bodies to look and feel Indian. However, this narrative, and the gendered discourse of aspirational belonging that it reveals, points to a broader affective economy that Sara Ahmed identifies in her work as a “promise of happiness”: “One of the primary happiness indicators is marriage. Marriage would be defined as ‘the best of all possible worlds’ as it maximizes happiness. The argument is simple: if you are married, then we can predict that you are more likely to be happier than if you are not married. The finding is also a recommendation: get married and you will be happier! If we have a duty to promote what causes happiness, then happiness itself becomes a duty” (2010, 6–7).10 In the spaces where women learn to become Indian dancers, dance training is an index of marriageability, and thus achieving the status of a skilled dancer is foundational to achieving the promise of happiness. However, as Srimati Basu and Lucinda Ramberg observe, “the efficiency of marriage as a unit makes systematic privileges within it invisible; we may only be able to discern these at points of fracture such as divorce, which reveals that not only does ‘gender structured marriage involve women in a cycle of socially caused and distinctly asymmetric vulnerability,’ but that women ‘are made vulnerable by marriage itself ’” (2014, 12). Put another way, a desire for happiness is what brings many women to dance. This is because they believe that, for example, learning how to make their fingers look like a delicate mudra, even when holding a spoon, will lead to a happy life. Part of this happy life involves finding a spouse who desires a dancer as a wife. That is, while dancers are conditioned from a young age to instinctually perform and covet wifehood, today this training also indoctrinates women to readily accept the Brahminical and heteropatriarchal order that marriage reproduces. Without a doubt, heteronormative marriage or wifehood were and still are goals for the vast majority of the women with whom I have danced over the past thirty years, in India as well as the United States, even as they often simultaneously acknowledge that marriage will not make them happy. Or, as one fellow dancer once exclaimed in exasperation, “I know 90 percent of marriages are 94 • Chapter 4

unhappy, but we do it anyway!” The promise of happiness and the unhappiness that it in turn requires one to endure explains this “anyway” attitude. In the dance studio, this attitude underscores the daily experiences of patriarchal order. The promise of happiness has shaped the life cycles of generations of dancers and in so doing has inscribed marriage, gender normativity, and silence as compliance into the logics of social belonging and behavior. Silence in the Studio As I’m leaving class today with my new dance friend Priya and we’re walking to get an auto, she tells me that I shouldn’t get too close to Master.11 That it looks bad for me to be talking to the gurus too much. She says that I may not have noticed, but everyone was watching when I was asking questions, and that the politics are just so bad, I have to be careful about getting too close. I’m guessing she’s saying this ( for my own good, of course—she’s a sweet kid) because people who talk too much seem like they are kissing up, and then things get complicated and problems begin when everyone starts to assume you’re sleeping with the teacher, and then the dance school expects more money from you. She apparently had some sort of bad experience with one of the teachers sexually harassing her. Now that I know about her family situation and that she is an only child, it all makes sense why she would be so cautious.—Excerpt from field notes One of the more prominent kuchipudi training centers in Chennai where I conducted fieldwork, the Kuchipudi Center (kc), was founded with explicitly Hindu nationalist goals: a commitment to spreading the message that kuchipudi was only and always Hindu and Brahminical, and such history was best articulated by and through gender-­normative femininity. Kuchipudi historians’ commitment to Brahminical propaganda has endured for generations now and has been especially effective transnationally and through heritage tourism campaigns. Importantly, more so than any other dance style that is nominally understood as classical, kuchipudi, as an idiom, was developed by and through film cultures (see chapter 3). The most commercially successful south Indian films over the course of the twentieth century featured kuchipudi choreographers and choreography almost without exception (see, for example, Sankarabharanam). Furthermore, by the late twentieth century, the films that traveled the farthest were those which spoke to the mass exodus of dominant-­caste Telugu speakers in the post-­1965 era and featured kuchipudi in name as well as movement vocabulary. These films, like Swarnakamalam, relied on a nostalgia for a more hierarchical and more fundamentalist society, and in many cases named dance schools like the kc in the film itself. Silence • 95

Though some have noted the Islamophobic and patriarchal aspects of Hindu nationalism that are valorized through film cultures (see, e.g., Kumar H.M. 2013), relatively little has been said about the misogynistic dynamics that circulate under the banner of classical dance, which Priya’s comments to me underscored so clearly. What is otherwise known as participant-observation in my case exposed certain racialized, gendered, and transnational dynamics. These dynamics would have remained invisible were it not for the fact that though I am a product of the North American academy, I read as an Indian woman in the dance studio, which was at least in part why Priya warned me the way she did. It was only after a white, US American friend of mine, Erin, came to visit me and joined me one day at the kc that I could see how my positionality, vis-­à-­vis hers, shaped my time in the studio. Class and rehearsals begin, and I’m startled and amused by how Master takes to Erin and, by extension of his obsession with her, how he really drills me today. He basically gives me his undivided attention. We alternate between dance and talk. His English isn’t great, so he keeps yelling at me to translate. He makes a huge fuss about my form, especially my aramanḍi, today.12 He tells me to sit and sit and sit to such a point that I’m on my toes. Now, he doesn’t call this by its true name, so I’m pretty confused when he tells me to keep sitting even though my heels have come up. We work through some adavus (basic steps), and I’m totally exhausted. He seems to enjoy Erin’s audience, and he indulges in a bit of a soliloquy for her sake, comparing the East and West. He rattles on about the Vedas and Bharata and generally the history and belief-­based systems of the East (specifically India, of course) in comparison to the rational-­empirical inquiry-­driven West. To drive this point home, he gives her, through me, an example. He’s holding his stick that he uses to conduct class and puts it behind his back. He says that in India he could keep the stick behind his back and tell someone (a student?) that the stick is there, and if he is a person of greater knowledge, then he would never have to show the stick to prove its existence. In America, he would need to show the stick to prove it was really there. It’s bizarre. It’s like he’s insulting the West (represented by Erin) in this moment but uses me as a tool to accomplish that insult. Lesson learned: don’t bring any more of my white friends along unless I want all kinds of uncomfortable attention.—Excerpt from field notes I had been a student and a kuchipudi dancer familiar with studio spaces for over twenty-­five years when the interactions with both Priya and Erin took place. In that time, I had been taught a few important things about how institutional dance spaces operate. In India, when the gurus were men, these men were generally to be feared or, at the very least, regarded warily. In both India and the 96 • Chapter 4

US, however, white-­identified women, either as students or as observers, were rare and coveted. Their value in the studio and in spaces that extended from it revealed a racialized commentary on womanhood and whose bodies carried the most value in dance spaces. In the studio to which I belonged in Texas, I learned that certain bodies were particularly meaningful for the audience when they appeared dancing onstage. When I was around ten years of age, for example, a young white woman in her twenties named Carmen was also in dance class with me. When Carmen performed at our local temple, the audience swooned over her performance, even as I listened to my senior dancers comment on the problems they saw with her technique and form. Throughout my years as a dancer in the United States, I noted that it meant a lot to the adults around me when a white person took an interest in our dance events. Despite knowing very little about either the dance or its craft, these white persons were asked to perform in our shows or requested to serve as guests of honor. I often asked my elders why, though I rarely received a response in return. I learned at a young age, however, that having such persons present and involved in our dance meant a great deal to the adults around me. Much later, during my fieldwork in Chennai, the importance of white involvement and endorsement collided with a transnational awareness of how caste as well as race and gender compound bodily meaning, value, and agency in classical dance spaces. In the studio space, in both India and the United States, networks and hierarchies of power converged and diverged around issues of nationality, wealth, and racialized beauty. For example, in the US context, the involvement of white women in the studio space I belonged to in Houston usually extended from the Orientalist idea that Indian classical dance is the ballet of India, which led women who already had dance training in ballet, tap, or jazz to seek out additional movement styles. However, in Chennai, white women who sought out dance training were usually tourists, often from Europe, who came to Chennai in search of an authentic guru and spiritual experience. During my time in Chennai, I met one tourist-­dancer, Nina, who had built a bond with the teachers at the kc and had, with their blessings, started her own dance school in Ukraine. She had spent years coming to the source, so to speak, in order to successfully establish herself as an expert in her home country.13 Talking Back in the Studio The contrast between the way Nina was treated and the way nri (nonresident Indian) dancers were treated in the studio revealed the operationalizing of racial and gender categories. Moreover, such categories complicated the warnings Silence • 97

Priya had shared with me about how to stay safe in the studio space. While Nina, as an outsider or non-­Indian, was treated much like my friend Erin—like an honored guest—at the kc, I observed varying degrees of mistreatment levied at the Indian American dancers but not at the Indian dancers, ranging from verbal abuse and body shaming to silent treatment and hostility. Interestingly, though, it was always made abundantly clear that US-­based students were essential to the financial health of a dance institution like the kc. It is common knowledge, for example, that many nri dancers (all from the United States, without exception) study at the kc, access costume makers as well as music accompaniment, and perform in productions through a sort of pay-­to-­play system. As many students know, there are often wealthy nri patrons behind the scenes who usually supply funding and visa sponsorship for tours in the United States. My own experience at the kc during my fieldwork, despite my research status at that point, was marked by a combination of gatekeeping, patriarchy, and payment. A telling example occurred on my very first day. As a Telugu Brahmin woman, I spoke the language and could assimilate easily. Yet the very things that granted me access to what was happening in the studio also limited my mobility in other ways. For example, I was informed I could not enroll myself—I required the permission and blessings of either a parent, an older brother, or a husband to enroll in classes. To be fair, this was as much a condition of the dance school as it was one of my natal family. This is because dance studios like the kc have a reputation. Many Telugu families are at least vaguely familiar with the concern that their daughter is going to be sexually harassed and/or assaulted if she is left alone with her dance guru. The kc has experienced many scandals over the years, and in each case it is the dancer who is blamed for “allowing” such sexual harassment or assault to occur. Leaving aside the absurdity of holding young women and girls responsible for the sexual predation of their adult gurus for the moment, it suffices to say, I was equal parts wary and aghast that I required my father’s presence to conduct my research. My father, who was visiting India and Chennai at the time, was ready and willing to do his duty, but, as is often the case, as a dad, he had very little experience with what happens behind the scenes in dance schools. Mothers are generally the emissaries in such settings, despite patriarchy’s stranglehold otherwise, but also because of it. My father and I arrived together, ready to formally pay our respects and request my admission to the school as a sishya (student). As is customary, I had brought thāmbūlam (a ceremonial offering) and was to be formally presented to the guru. I brought a shirt for the guru and fabric for a blouse for his wife, two bananas, and one orange, and sandwiched the auspicious amount, 98 • Chapter 4

Rs. 1,116, between the fruit and clothes. After handing the gift over, I touched my new teacher’s feet as an act of obeisance. The surreptitious gifting of money within the practice of thambulam is consistent across nominally Hindu settings. The same practice is observed, for example, when one seeks the blessings of a priest. The exchange of currency, though ostensibly meant to curry favor or luck in a temple setting, takes on a very different meaning at an institution like the kc. The exchange of money and financial support in general is something that flies under the radar in the transnational classical dance scene. During my time in Chennai, it became clear that the impact of nri wealth is particularly important to any understanding of how power operates for women who consider themselves dancers. Dancers are paying for their class time, and this can mean more than simply dance training. It can mean being cast in a new production or being asked to help with choreography, and it can also mean the permission to talk back—to have a voice—in class. For some, this ability to speak and to have agency also extends to the right to an independent artistic life. Access to recorded music is carefully controlled and guarded. Only some students are allowed to bring a device to rehearsal and record the music. These recordings allow dancers not only to practice on their own but also, in some cases, to perform without their guru. A dancer’s freedom and ability to grow as an artist and to develop their own artistry thus depends on access to music. This access, in turn, must be granted by or purchased from the guru. During my time in Chennai, conversations about the kinds of access that were or were not available to dancers from India or from elsewhere often boiled down to who could afford such access, and what other kinds of capital could and would be accumulated in the process. In the US context, this logic presented itself clearly to me throughout my training, since every summer my guru invited artists from India to workshop us on how to look more Indian. The training we, US-­based young dancers, received during such summers was intense and often a test of physical and athletic ability in ways I did not experience during the rest of the year. The takeaway message for those of us who survived long eight-­hour days in the studio was that dancers in India were more athletic, their bodies better and more rigorously trained. We were encouraged to practice even more in order to look more like the dancers from India. The implication was simple— those who could perform most like the dancers from India would be cast in primary roles in the final production for the summer. This would mean more visibility and, ultimately, more marriage prospects. In 2006, in response to such discourses of relative value between Indian dancers from India and those from the United States, an organization named Silence • 99

Yuva Bharati was founded in the Bay Area with the explicit aim of promoting US-­based Indian classical dancers. The impetus for the founding of such an organization, as described to me, was to fight the perception that dancers from India were better dancers. As one founding member explained, “Our daughters train long and hard here, but they will never be recruited to perform for high-­ profile events. Those engagements only go to dancers from India. We are trying to create a space that supports dancers trained in the States and stop making them feel like their art is only valued second to the dancers from India.” It is important to note that over the decade and a half of programming this organization has presented, the fare has been consistent and homogenous. The only styles of dance presented are those understood as Hindu, Brahminical, and classical. The overwhelming majority of dancers are young women.14 The musical accompaniment is rarely provided live; rather, it is usually prerecorded. Sound and the Dancer’s Body I performed for Yuva Bharati in 2006, accompanied by music that had been recorded during a live performance. As one might expect of such a recording, captured though it was through microphones during a performance with a live orchestra, one can hear feet hitting the stage as well as ankle bells or gajjelu, something that gives away that the recording was created with a dancer while she was dancing rather than in a studio without a dancer. Arguably, dancing with a track that amplifies footwork offers an added sense of connection to the music for a dancer. For example, memories of the performance that produced the track, embedded within somatic and auditory memory, can create ever more layers to the way a performance unfolds and produces meaning. During the reception after my performance that day, however, I was peppered with questions about the music to which I had performed. Without exception, every comment I received expressed distaste for the musical accompaniment. The primary complaint was that the sounds of the ankle bells in the track disrupted the “cleanliness” of the music, a word that points to entrenched and conditioned ideas of what an audience wants to hear when they watch a dancer dance. Audiences want to hear music and see dance. To hear the bells and the sound of feet through the audio tainted the experience of the performance because it did not abide by what has become a now-­accepted divide between dancer and orchestra. What I learned that day corroborated something I had known on some level my whole life as a dancer. The dancer is meant to be a silent body—the dancer should not be audible within the sonic material to which she dances. 100 • Chapter 4

In India, I often came across related comments about the musical accompaniment that prescribed certain expectations of how music should sound when accompanying dance. One conversation between a guru at the kc and a senior student, for example, differentiated between the vocal style appropriate for a kaceri (music concert) and for a dance performance. The distinction, in this case, was inherent in the emphasis the vocalist placed on virtuosic ornamentation (gamakas) or, alternatively, on the text. The senior student demonstrated for me how one should sing for dance, with a smooth vocal line and limited ornaments, in contrast with kaceri or classical karnatic concert style, which she caricatured by pulling at the skin by her voice box and shaking it. Excessive ornamentation undermined the dancer’s efficacy onstage in communicating with the audience. The voice should be present, but not intrusive, she explained. Too much ornamentation might be fine in a music concert where the focus is meant to be placed on the singer, but was inappropriate for dance. In an interview with Pemmaraju Surya Rao, a lead vocalist for the kc in the 1960s, he described the direction he received from dance gurus when accompanying a performance in exactly the same terms. In his time, he told me, he was criticized for sounding too kaceri, but he was hired because he had musical credentials as a classically trained karnatic singer (Pemmaraju, pers. comm., April 14, 2009). Taken together, comments on the cleanliness of sound belong within a much broader discourse on when and where the sonic reveals agency, the recognition that the voice is part of the body, and the uneasy marriage of classical dance and classical music. Even in the United States, as I learned with Yuva Bharati, dance audiences recoil from musical accompaniment that doesn’t allow the dancer’s body to remain invisible in the sound. Yet, as most dancers know, hitting the feet hard enough on the floor to be heard is an essential component of good technique. It is a mark of a strong and capable body for a dancer’s feet to be audible in the studio setting, though for women this strength is required to be packaged and conveyed differently. Onstage, however, the dancer needs to be inconsequential within the sonic frame so that she can be slotted in or erased completely without disrupting the sound of the dance in any way. Bodies, Shame, and Silence I observed how such balancing acts between the materiality of the body and the aesthetics of performance worked across transnational borders in Chennai. The Season in Chennai occurs in December, and over the years I have participated as a US-­based dancer, I have also had a chance to see how the kc levied its wealth and resources to put its best foot forward during the most prestigious perforSilence • 101

Figure 4.3. Tham-that-thadin-ha. Dancer: Yashoda Thakore.

mance time slots on the most hallowed stages, like that of the Madras Music Academy.15 During rehearsals, I observed the interactions between the wealthy nris and the dancers from India who didn’t live in Chennai but who converged upon the stern concrete rehearsal space over the course of the week leading up to the performance. During these rehearsals, the white dancers like Nina were notably absent. I was awestruck by the contrast between the two sets of dancers. The dancers from India were lithe: their bodies strong, silent, and pliable in ways the nri dancers were not. I caught myself idealizing the Indian bodies and their aesthetic appeal in a way that reminded me of why Yuva Bharati existed in the first place. My eyes were drawn to one dancer and the way she executed one particu102 • Chapter 4

Figure 4.4. Tham-that-thadin-ha. Dancer: Yashoda Thakore.

lar movement (see figures 4.3–4.4), one that was the cause of much consternation among dancers in my home studio in Houston, Texas. The adavu or step is colloquially known as sit-­stretch, but its official name or naḍaka in the kc vernacular is tham-­that-­tha-­din-­ha.16 Sonically, this movement occurs in triple time, and for dancers it is a test of the ability to perform a syncopated rhythm. Physically, this movement, as a sequence in the kc training regimen, is a test of athletic strength. Only the strongest-­bodied dancers can execute the entire sequence, in which there are multiple renditions of this movement with differing hand gestures. This series of adavus tests core and quadricep strength in a way that dancers know well but for which we never explicitly train. Silence • 103

That day, as I watched a group of dancers from the United States rehearse alongside a group of dancers from the subcontinent, I could see the difference between the two sets of bodies. There was a fluidity and ease to the way the Indian women executed this movement, especially in comparison to the way the men did. The women’s syncopation was less apparent, the triple time less pronounced in their articulation of the movement. I realized in that moment that the nri women looked more like the Indian men. Their torsos were straighter and the labor of their legs was apparent. Like the men, the nri dancers seemed to relish the friction of the syncopation, and their expression of the movement highlighted their enjoyment of the rhythmic device. Our guru, who was leading the rehearsal, could see the difference too and began correcting the nri dancers, telling them they looked “like men” in their expression of this particular adavu. He mocked them as he looked to the other India-­based dancers for support in treating these young women as though their inability to affect a specific femininity was a sign of some great failing. I felt especially for the young dancers in this group, particularly the youngest, who was no more than fourteen. I had gotten to know this young woman well, and I knew that she was not only a dancer but also a competitive tennis player in the United States. Her athleticism betrayed her dancerly role in that space and unapologetically demonstrated the sheer muscle strength of her legs. She was a dancer, to be sure, but she was also an athlete: her body was powerful, and it showed. She looked so confused and hurt in that moment when our guru scolded her—she was executing the movement perfectly, and she was too young to understand that it was her gender expression that had come under fire, not her ability as a dancer. Only men’s bodies are entitled to demonstrate rhythm and power at the kc; this was something I came to understand well. Despite performing the exact same movements to the exact same tempo, women at the kc are expected to hide or otherwise silence the labor taking place by and through their bodies. This silencing process is often glossed as lāsyam or grace, something that is never required of a man’s body executing the same movements.17 The softening of the body’s athletic output is most visible in the initiation of motion and the seamlessness between the start and end of movement phrases. This silencing extends in ways both subtle and explicit and often leads to body shaming and other forms of abuse against women, like the commentary I heard that day. In the studio, it usually results in telling nri women that they do not dance like Indian women, that they are not Indian enough, that their femininity is somehow lacking. Over the course of my life, especially during my time in Chennai, I came to understand which parts of my body needed to be leveraged more or 104 • Chapter 4

Figure 4.5. M. V. N. Murthy and Priya Sunderesan.

less to mark my gendered Indian identity and, in turn, how this gender work translated to heteronormative affect. In Chennai, the part of the body that indexed gender and sexuality most acutely was my hips. The positioning of one’s hips demonstrated gender, and the movement of the hips did the work of eliciting sexuality. Men are not expected to exaggerate their hips, but in a performance at an annual heritage tourism festival, sponsored by the US-­based organization Silicon Andhra, I observed a guru of mine dancing with a woman in unison. During this performance, as in many others where a man and a woman dance together (see figure 4.5), the man’s body position mirrors the woman’s. I didn’t think much of their synchronicity at the time. If anything, such an aesthetic was to be expected. A symptom of larger heteronormative trends, women’s body comportment is the default setting in nominally Hindu dance styles, especially kuchipudi. After the event concluded, however, as I congratulated my guru on a successful performance, he asked me quietly, betraying a Silence • 105

sense of shame and self-­consciousness, “Do I look too much like a woman when I dance?” Shocked at the vulnerability of his question at the time, I did what I thought would seem most supportive and batted away his concern. I quickly and overzealously reassured him that his masculinity remained fully intact and that he needn’t worry; his dance was graceful and beautiful and that was what made him a man. Yet that exchange undeniably raised questions about what kinds of work gender is doing in spaces that are so fully saturated with heteronormativity. His concern was particularly paradoxical since the style he was presenting, kuchipudi, is best known for its tradition of strī veṣam or the impersonation of a woman (see Kamath 2019). The practice of impersonation is central to narratives of kuchipudi’s contribution to Indian cultural memory and relies on a maxim: Brahmin men dictate how women’s bodies should look and act. In the process, cisgender comportment becomes codified.18 In the United States, I learned how to affect Indian womanhood from Indian immigrant women. These women, however, had learned from men in India who built their artistic careers seducing audiences as women. The kc maintains this kyriarchal pedagogy, particularly in the affecting of cisgender heterosexuality and highlighting bodies at the expense of voices. These structures of oppression, especially the aestheticized practices by which silent and compliant behavior translates into desirable dancerly affect, reveal a great deal about what kinds of work gender performance does on-­and offstage. Ugly Women: Connecting Caste and Race in Transnational India The regimes of silence that are cultivated in the dance studio coalesce around what is glossed as feminine beauty and its production in and as sexuality. In the dance studio setting, beauty functions on a variety of levels, most notably in setting up aspirational types. Beauty in these settings is reflected and measured not only in physical attributes but also in behavior and comportment. To understand what defines such behavior in discrete terms, one must parse the semantics of what makes a dancer look and act appropriately Indian, which in turn becomes a euphemism for beautiful. In Chennai, for example, I noted the ways dancers strove for a look that captured this not-­quite-­sexual-­but-­definitely-­desirable standard. Dancers grew their hair long and adopted middle parts, and wore very specific earrings that indexed a south Indian (as opposed to north Indian) identity. They lined their eyes with thick black eyeliner and pinned their blouses and saris in ways that allowed them to move without ever showing any skin. And most importantly, they 106 • Chapter 4

wore bindis to mark a Hindu identity. I observed these small measures of fitting in alongside scores of far more sinister comments about weight, skin tone, and eye shape. These negative connotations were made explicit at times but operated implicitly on many levels, especially in the access some dancers received in the studio and, in contrast, the way others were completely ignored. Eurocentric and racialized beauty standards lie at the heart of these social dynamics and are responsible for discourses of ugliness, compliance, and ableism (see, e.g., Ford 2015; Nguyen 2011). However, the social conditioning of identifying certain features as beautiful and desirable under the logics of white supremacy, colonialism, and now ethnonationalism is only further compounded by the ways such beauty is also imbued with a necessary morality in order to be deemed beautiful. Beautiful Indian women are fair-­skinned and thin, and ugly women are not, but beautiful women are also silent and compliant, and ugly women are not. In performance cultures such as dance, ugliness is not only represented by physicality; it is also underscored by the performance of ugliness through excess, loudness, and deviant sexuality. The affirmation of beauty through discourses of ugliness is fundamental to the way identity politics and social power operate in public cultures. This is because in enacting the wrong way to objectify oneself, heuristically, dancers are able to know what behavior will present as less desirable. The character Soorpanaka (see figure 4.6), for example, is the sister of the rakshasa or demon Ravana, the main villain in the Hindu epic the Ramayana. While Rama (the hero), his brother Lakshmana, and his wife, Sita, are living in the forest, Soorpanaka sees Rama and falls in love with him. Soorpanaka is brazen, and she expresses her sexual desire explicitly. She is pitted against Sita, the ideal and docile wife in mainstream versions of the Ramayana. The racialized portrayal of beauty vis-­à-­vis the Soorpanaka-­Sita dialectic shows up in a variety of didactic cultural forms like classical dance as well as visual industries and commercial film (see, e.g., Austin 2014). In dance spaces, the representation of Soorpanaka relies on body language and facial expressions that are understood to express disgust (i.e., opening the eyes to make them seem to bulge, sticking out the tongue) but also are generally represented as masculine behavior (e.g., holding a wide stance, placing the hands on hips rather than the waist, or moving the body stiffly). So, to depict Soorpanaka in dance means to look disgusting and ugly but also overlaps with body language that misgenders a woman—a woman who is generally understood to be of a different caste and race than the heroes of the Ramayana. The characterization of Soorpanaka as an ugly and racialized woman is consistent across performance cultures and, more often than not, relies on tropes Silence • 107

Figure 4.6. Artistic representation of Soorpanaka (bottom left) and Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana.

of womanhood that were created and deployed to exclude. For example, in the second installment of a Hindi-­language film produced by psr Pictures based on the Ramayana, Shri Ram Vanvas (1977), Soorpanaka appears as an emotionally transparent and lustful woman. Her dialogue is laced with poor grammar in order to characterize her as developmentally inferior and from an oppressed-­ caste background. Her body language is exaggerated and masculinized. Soorpanaka offers to dance and sing for Rama, but when he seems disinterested, she turns her affection to his brother Lakshmana. In her attempt to seduce Lakshmana, she performs a snake dance, a genre that has been much maligned and stereotyped in Orientalist representations of deviant sexuality in India.19 In this regard, notions of beauty, both physical and behavioral, often collapse and blur the distinction between caste and race, rendering them somewhat synonymous. Extending from and contributing to performance and visual art cultures, the cosmetics industry has remained at the center of such valuations with products like Hindustan Unilever’s Fair & Lovely as a particularly noteworthy 108 • Chapter 4

Figure 4.7. Fair & Lovely display in an international grocery store in San Antonio, Texas.

and well-­studied example. The endurance and success of this product attest to the foothold that aspirational whiteness or fairness continues to maintain as a standard of beauty and desirability in India. Vaseline, Dove, and Nivea have all launched equivalent products in the past decade. One study observed that “advertisements in all the countries in which Fair & Lovely is sold show product users getting better jobs, getting married or having a brighter future (and being noticeably happier) as a result of their lighter skin,” while another noted that “Hindustan Unilever Limited [HUL], Unilever’s Indian subsidiary, claims Fair & Lovely is doing good by fulfilling a social need. hul research says that ninety percent of Indian women want to use whiteners because it is aspirational, like losing weight. A fair skin is like education, regarded as a social and economic step up” (Karnani 2011, 101; see also Eagle and Dahl 2015). To be sure, the imagery on the Fair & Lovely box (see figure 4.7), which includes a graphic reminiscent of a dna double helix, certainly suggests that consumers can change their appearance on a fundamental and perhaps even genetic level. Fair & Lovely, much like Lux soap, has consistently featured prominent dancer-­actresses in their advertising campaigns. The connections between dance training, the beauty industry, and racialized media erotics are Silence • 109

striking in these campaigns, beginning with television commercials in the 1990s. One of the earliest Fair & Lovely television commercials, aired on the state-­run channel Doordharsan, featured model-­turned-­actress Juhi Chawla (b. 1967) with sitar music playing in the background. Throughout the montage, as Chawla applies the cream to become “fair and lovely,” she does not speak. However, a man’s voice-­over, as the ad ends, says, “Meri Sheela, kitna gori, kitna pyari,” which translates to “My Sheela, how white, how lovely.” Chawla ushered in a phase of affective attachments to dancing women in popular media beginning in the early 1980s, which endures in present-­day media. Unlike the previous generation of actresses who began their careers in dance or music and then ascended to the silver screen, Chawla was among the first to achieve initial success as a model (see also Ganti 2016). In fact, she set a trend that Bollywood actresses like Aishwarya Rai Bachchan (b. 1973) and Sushmita Sen (b. 1975) and many, many others have followed, parlaying beauty pageant–dancing queen into screen siren and international cosmetics brand ambassador. The construction of racism, beauty, and silent but desirable women is not subtle in Fair & Lovely advertisements. Vanita Reddy, among others (see Parameswaran 2011), has noted the neoliberal rationale of skin-­whitening products, observing that the advertisements for skin lightening creams construct white skin as a quality inherent to (rather than an aspiration that lies outside of ) all Indian women, regardless of skin color, class, or caste (Reddy 2016, 14).20 This attempt at self-­improvement has endured for generations as a variety of whitening treatments have entered the market. These products and their marketing strategies are embedded in exactly the kinds of arguments made for dance training: that such products and their consumption can and do cultivate what Anne Anlin Cheng identifies as the essential “aesthetic objectness” of a broader Asiatic womanhood—a compliant, curated, and therefore desirable body (Cheng 2019, 65). Beauty by Night There were other social scenes I observed in south India, especially in Chennai, that provided useful parallels to understand what I had studied in the dance studio setting. For example, nightclubs in Chennai are primarily located within what are colloquially named “five stars”—a moniker for lavish upscale hotels that serve a tiny sliver of Indian society, the wealthiest of the wealthy. These hotels are also particularly popular with international travelers, especially those who can afford the exorbitant prices (rates start at Rs. 10,000 a night). The club where I conducted my fieldwork was located in the Park Hotel on Anna Salai 110 • Chapter 4

Road in Thygaraja Nagar. It was a small and dark space called Pasha and was housed separately from the main hotel, which also offered a bar service adjacent to the lobby area. The scene at Pasha was a study in India’s relationship with the postliberalization brand of wealth. The kind of clientele these venues served was obvious as soon as you arrived. The valets knew most the clients by name, and I learned very quickly that this crowd was known first and foremost by the kind of car they drove. The nicer cars were parked in such a way as to advertise who was already in the club. I often heard my companions exclaim with excitement, “Oy, Vishal is here tonight,” as we pulled up and saw the line of luxury and import cars parked facing the road, as if we were at a car show. This was a community, a very small and highly privileged community with clear social markers. The group of people who served as my unofficial hosts on such nights offered a revealing lens through which one can view the nexus of social-­economic-­sexual behavior in urban south India. The dance studio felt like an alternative reality during the hours I spent at Pasha. My body was held to different, yet related, standards at Pasha—standards that revealed the myriad ways a woman’s body is sexualized and socialized in everyday, urban south India today. Much like in the dance studio, the movement of a woman’s hips to music revealed sexuality in coded but widely accepted ways (see also Shresthova 2011). I learned very quickly, for example, that the torso must be held still so as not to attract unwanted attention. As one companion, Megha, explained to me one of the first times I joined them at Pasha, “If you move like that, you’ll get a lot of people staring. That’s fine if you want that, but if you don’t want that, keep your arms down and close to your body and don’t swivel your hips that much.” This warning resonated since I had received similar technical feedback from my fellow dance students at the kc. In other words, all of these women were articulating how they negotiated dancing in heteropatriarchal social spaces in ways that allowed them to blend in and to avoid expressing anything that might read as loud behavior. However, one night after the club had been unceremoniously shut down by the police, we migrated over to a friend’s flat to carry on our dance party.21 While in the space of the club I had observed women dancing in controlled and measured ways in a group while their counterparts mostly watched protectively from the sidelines, in the private space of a residential living room, the women sat and cheered while the men danced with each other. Their dance was powerful, with force into and off the ground. They moved in sync, almost as though they knew a choreography, but I realized quickly they were improvising within a discrete set of movements. I watched their shiny, black, formal shoes hit the Silence • 111

concrete floor as they broke into a wide stance and syncopated, rhythmic movement. I observed the other women, some of whom were married to these men, watch the exuberant dancing with a mix of pride and humor. The men carried on for a few more songs, impressing us with their skill, but only to Tamil film songs, never to the Bollywood hits the women danced to in the club. Seeing my friends dance with abandon and with each other to a Tamil sleeper hit, “Yammadi Aathadi,” was unlike any kind of sociability I had yet to observe.22 My observation was only further underscored by the fact that when men danced, their hips were free. Their bodies were free. Their dance was free. So why had I never seen them dance this way at the club? The fact that these men only danced when we were in a more private space and to Tamil songs, not Hindi, ultimately brought me back to my guru’s question about masculinity and whether he, as a Telugu man dancing in a public space where women’s bodies move and communicate social meaning, could maintain his patriarchal identity and power. What did this mean for men and the disconnect between men’s bodies and voices? Though outside the scope of this particular project, I have come to understand that for all the ways womanhood requires silence for women, patriarchy requires something related of cisgender men, trans, and queer subjects too.23 As a way to bring my own web of cogitation on dance, citizenship, and womanhood to a close, I returned to what, in many ways, started it. So, I watched Swarnakamalam again, this time as a grown woman, an academic who has slowly disaggregated a lifetime of dance training from its ethnographic potential, and the heuristics of film viewing from the nostalgia and desire it used to (and sometimes still does) evoke. At the end of the film, before Meenakshi decides to forgo a life abroad with all the chances and risks it offers, she reads a letter that Chandrasekhar has written her. In it, he exhorts her to “be happy.” All he asks is that if she ever thinks of him when she dances, that she remembers who she really is. The message, that happiness is achievable but at odds with an intact sense of self, while somehow romantic at an earlier time in my life, now speaks only to a deep and abiding sense of pressure that many women—not only dancers—experience under the reductive and intractable identity politics of transnationalism. We are offered two options, to assimilate or to abdicate, both of which require us to understand an identification and its expression through performance as something forced upon us. 112 • Chapter 4

Sara Ahmed once observed that happiness is used to justify oppression and that, over the past century, feminist work has primarily attempted to disabuse us of the idea that working toward happiness actually leads to happiness. If being a happy Indian woman means training one’s body and emotions to look and feel and uphold Hindu heteropatriarchy, what kinds of feminist interventions are available to us? I am reminded of and indebted here to Saba Mahmood’s (2005) work, which has demonstrated that women can and do find personal and political ways to resist, even under difficult conditions. And so I have come to understand the dominant-­caste south Indian dancer as an athlete of sorts, despite or perhaps precisely because of the structures of racialized silence that she represents. Whereas the division of body from voice engendered new aesthetics of athleticism, the separation of emotion from body reveals a new phase in the politics of citizenship. The dancer’s bodily labor and athleticism as symbols of India’s righteous might must be understood within the context of ethnonationalist imperatives—the very same imperatives that legitimated the Indian government’s illegal annexation (August 5, 2019) of the erstwhile sovereign region of Jammu and Kashmir.24 How else to explain the insistence on a dancer’s strength and stamina while requiring women to mask such abilities? And what does this mean for Indian women whose bodies can’t participate in ableist formulations of citizenship or womanhood? Ultimately, the standard framings of the dancer’s athletic body as a desirable, sexualized icon can and do lead to new forms of Orientalist violence—this is unequivocally true—yet for the women with whom I have danced over the years, both in India and in the United States, understanding oneself as a performer provides the possibility of feeling powerful. In the end, I have come to believe that a sense of ownership and trust in the power of one’s body offers a path, a fork in the road perhaps, for women to experience a sense of freedom, even as it forecloses other possibilities of womanhood.

Silence • 113

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Epilogue Women’s bodies keep the tempo of social movements. —Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage

In the summer of 2016, Sakshi Malik (b. 1992), an Indian woman from a small town outside New Delhi, won an Olympic medal in the 58 kilogram category of freestyle wrestling. Malik was the first women’s freestyle wrestler and only the fourth Indian woman ever to bring home a medal for India. The same year, a Telugu woman from Hyderabad, Pusarala Venkata Sindhu (b. 1995), also won an Olympic bronze medal in women’s singles badminton. Sindhu’s medal was the second bronze medal for India in women’s singles badminton.1 In headlines across the country and world, however, it was only Malik who was dubbed “India’s daughter.” Arguably, “India’s daughter” as both a phrase and identity formation reveals the latest iteration of the dancer’s voice, especially when she appears as an exceptional body within global capitalist logics.2 This headline (see figure E.1) has been cited numerous times since it first emerged as an epithet with any meaning in the aftermath of the 2012 high-­profile rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in New Delhi. The metonymic value of the phrase captures the mediated and gendered connotations of what it means to perform an Indian identity today, particularly as Hindu India comes to stand in for South Asia more generally in global economic formations. What did it mean that in the context of the 2016 Olympics the phrase was only applied to Malik, whose success as a wrestler could be traced to her family, specifically her grandfather, and, more generally, to hered-

Figure E.1. Headline for Sakshi Malik winning a gold medal at the Rio Olympics.

itary traditions of men’s wrestling in north India?3 What new kinds of silence does the now-­athleticized Indian body produce for women? Indeed, in response to the coverage, one sports commentator pondered, “If a female athlete needs to accomplish extraordinary tasks to be acknowledged as ‘India’s daughter,’ then what status does she enjoy before that?” As a way to close this intellectual journey and offer a preliminary answer to this question, I will briefly explore a few recent examples of “India’s daughter,” interrogating how and why she appears as an exceptional body in transnational formations of Indian womanhood. Deepika Padukone Born in Copenhagen in 1986, Deepika Padukone was raised in Bangalore. Her career started in modeling, but only after she had spent much of her adolescence as a competitive athlete—a badminton player—like her father before her. Her transition into full-­time modeling began with a sexually suggestive ad for Liril soap, featuring a drenched and barely clothed Padukone framed by a group of young boys. Like a number of model-­turned-­actresses, Padukone’s ascent to transnational Bollywood fame has been engineered by a careful celebration of her posh international identifications and sealed with the legibility of her last 116 • Epilogue

name, which remains firmly associated with Indian ethnicity and nationality. Padukone’s success offers context to the sonic logics that place a premium on the ability to appear to speak Hindi, at least well enough for the dubbing track to sync to the visuals, that is. In 2016 Padukone was featured in an advertisement for the international athletic brand Nike. The ad, which was shared widely on social media platforms by Indian women for its girl power message, also revealed a widely accepted truth about which kinds of women get to celebrate the use of their bodies (and in contrast, which ones don’t). Ostensibly, the ad targeted a fast-­growing demographic of upwardly mobile, cisgender women, on the eve of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil. The tactics of the advertisement aligned with popular media in general, inasmuch as it featured hip-­hop music and midriff-­baring women dancing in formation. The music for the ad, however, pointed to some new extensions of the cultural formations that disembody music from dance while simultaneously allowing for the trafficking of women’s bodies in transnational South Asian popular culture. Using a visual montage of colonial sports from cricket to badminton, sonically, the track offered little that might locate it in South Asia. The soundtrack featured US-­based rapper and hip-­hop artist Gizzle and was produced by Genera8ion (known for working with M.I.A.). The dance choreography was provided by Filipino hip-­hop dancer Ruel Dausan Vardindani and Bollywood dancer Indiana Mehta. In a series of shots, the group of athletes featured in the advertisement move in formations reminiscent of those popularized by US-­based hip-­hop icon Beyoncé Knowles and choreographed by JaQuel Knight. In other words, this track drew on sonic and dance themes associated with US expressions of blackness, which are increasingly common in popular music in India today. Within the broader contexts of South Asian racial formation in the post–September 11 moment, the interpolation of Indian women into categories of sonic, affective, and political blackness suggests some newly complicated intersectional formulations of sexuality, race, gender, and the silent—now framed as athletic—body. The primary protagonist of the ad, Deepika, stands out for a variety of reasons. The lighting and makeup used in the scenes that feature her functionally lighten her skin tone while leaving the rest of the women dark. Those familiar with Indian media aesthetics have noted that the lighting of Indian television, print, and internet advertisements has moved in a “whitening” direction for generations (see Glenn 2008). Considering this trend, what does Deepika’s exceptionalism signpost in this ad? What does it mean for her whitened body to be celebrated for its athletic extraordinariness even as the women whose bodies and actual athletic abilities represent India remain ordinary? Epilogue • 117

Figure E.2. Priyanka Chopra Jonas as an nfl singer-dancerspokeswoman.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas Moving to the US context, what connections can be drawn between Padukone’s transnational trajectory from model to actress to US-­based athletic brand spokesperson and that of model-­actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas (b. 1982)? A beauty queen–actress turned recording artist and now restaurateur who was able to capitalize on her relatively unaccented English to launch a career in the United States, Chopra Jonas was featured as the face of the National Football League (nfl) and as the protagonist for a network television series in which she played an fbi agent (see figures E.2–E.3). Chopra Jonas’s successful transition to an American girl-­next-­door persona —through antiterrorist law enforcement and football, no less—offers a glimpse 118 • Epilogue

Figure E.3. Priyanka Chopra Jonas as fbi agent Alex Parrish.

into the broader sexual, racial, and gender dynamics for Indian womanhood transnationally. Her performance on Thursday Night Football to a dance track she recorded in collaboration with hip-­hop and rap artist will.i.am., “In My City,” was released as a single in 2012. Though she has never been considered a singer in India, she considers herself one in the United States: “Having grown up in both New York and Boston, two major [rival] football cities and coincidentally the two teams playing the night of my big debut, it’s nothing short of surreal to be with the nfl as the opening act for Thursday Night Football. ‘In My City’ was my first single, it has a very special place in my heart, and I am beyond excited to bring the amazing energy of the track to the nfl’s passionate fans.”4 Chopra Jonas’s career offers context to larger conversations about South Asian womanhood in US media (see most recently the career of Lilly Singh). For example, her crossover status suggests new imaginations through the racialization of her body—a complex construction that assimilates brown women into white-­centered North American definitions of beauty—and extends to her accented, but English-­speaking voice. This formation reinscribes reductive and binarized understandings of gender and, in many cases, works to emasculate South Asian American men by portraying them as intelligent and therefore unathletic.5 In other words, South Asian American women can move into and out of mediated spaces as long as they look, act, and sound white—a recognition Epilogue • 119

that athletic bodies are folded into racialized value systems. Through conceptualizing the gendered, migrant, and expressive body within the framework of transnationalism and its global flows, it thus becomes possible to see the recent formulations of athletic, that is, healthy and ableist bodies, as an extension of entrenched racialized and sexualized logics. Put another way, the promise of happiness is today most visible as the promise of health and wellness—a rhetoric that exposes contemporary neoliberal imperatives. In this light it becomes possible to extend the chronological trajectory I have traced in this book to both Chopra Jonas’s white-­assimilationist success as well as the capitalist juggernaut that is the commercial yoga industry across the world. This newest iteration of a transnational Indian womanhood, now fully whitewashed in body and voice, signals a key moment in twenty-­first-­ century gendered Orientalism, especially through burgeoning wellness and tourism industries, in which it finds purchase (see figure E.4). To be sure, the kinds of methods and interdisciplinary strategies I have offered in this book have brought me to a new horizon—an opportunity to think about broken mirrors in the contemporary moment. In many ways, the narrative I have traced in this book is a circular story for generations of Indian immigrant women—an unstable and shifting set of identity signposts, which constantly reflect and refract white supremacy, antiblackness, and immigrant assimilation. Though the fragments can never be made whole, there is power and possibility in the process by which one gathers the pieces. Indeed, as I bring this project to a close, I am reminded of one of the first fragments that set me on this path. Today, almost thirty years after she entered the US American racial vernacular, Princess Jasmine has come to mean something else. In an image created by London-­based artist Schaya Sri, Jasmine’s hypersexualized appearance from Aladdin (1992) has been reimagined: Sri has domesticated her with the iconography of multiculturalism and as a south Indian classical dancer (see figure E.5). Whereas in the original film Jasmine’s body and voice were differently racialized as Middle Eastern and white, respectively, this new image collapses India and the Middle East. It comes from a series of images that depicts each Disney princess as an Indian classical dancer and that indexes the mechanisms of transnationalism I have explored in this book, melding gendered Orientalist imagery with celebratory multiculturalism. Jasmine’s jewelry, her body language, even the bells on her ankles point to something else now—a reflection, perhaps, of how some Indian women are seen, but also of how they see themselves. In reading through the comments on social media spaces such as Instagram and Facebook where the image was first shared, it is clear that many young South Asian American women identify with this image. 120 • Epilogue

Figure E.4. E-visa advertisement for Incredible !ndia yoga tourism in Dallas–Ft. Worth International Airport, 2018.

Figure E.5. Princess Jasmine as an Indian classical dancer. Schaya Sri, 2019.

Commenters shared joy and pride in seeing themselves in Sri’s artwork, and more than one noted, “It’s me!” or “I have a picture of myself in this pose!” Others shared the image with their friends, sisters, and daughters: “Look, it’s you!” or “She looks like you!” This is how the dancer endures for a new generation, as a feminist icon, as a transnational tale, and as a powerful performance of self. In the end, stories like mine and those yet to come reflect that the struggle for subjecthood remains embedded in performance, whether that be everyday, staged, or representational.

122 • Epilogue

Acknowledgments

When I was a graduate student, the acknowledgments section was my favorite part of a book because it was a moment to really connect with the author and learn about what had brought them to the threshold I find myself at now—looking back on an intellectual trajectory that has traversed many seasons of my life. In my case, this journey has spanned my entire life, and so there are many people to acknowledge and to memorialize for the role they have played in shaping the work in these pages. To begin at the beginning, I am grateful for the guidance and influence of my two childhood gurus, Rathna Kumar and Anuradha Subramanian. Rathna Auntie has remained a constant in my life in ways that have indelibly shaped who I am and how I experience the world. Over the course of my research, I have had the good fortune to train under as well as befriend a number of dancers, in the United States as well as in India. In Chennai, I am thankful for the time I spent training with Vempati Ravi Shankar. In Hyderabad, as serendipity would have it, I was introduced to Vempati Ravi Shankar’s sister Bali, whose talent has forever changed the way I think about what it means to be a dancer. I want to thank Kamala Rajupet of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who, unbeknownst to her, made a childhood dream come true one rainy week in May 2011. And I am grateful for L. Vijayalakshmi or Vijjiakka for opening up her home and her dance history to me.

Besides the teachers who shaped my study of dance, countless individuals and institutions along the way have made my research logistically possible. My early fieldwork as a doctoral student was funded by generous support from the US Department of Education Fulbright-­Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program. In Houston, Raju Vanguri and the Vanguri Foundation helped me lay the groundwork for my research in critical Telugu studies. In New Delhi, the Indiresans provided me with a sense of security and home away from home, while the staff at the aiis in Gurgaon made it easy to look forward to long days of archival work. Utpola Borah and Umashankar at the arce deserve special thanks for providing such quality company and homemade filter coffee during otherwise solitary days. In Vijayawada, Jandhyala Shankar and his wife, Kameshwari, provided comfort as well as transportation support, which made what would have been an impossible schedule enjoyable. In Pune, the staff at the National Film Archives, especially Venkata Sir, became friends and colleagues I could trust. Navid Ibrahim will always hold a special place in my heart for his incredible generosity and friendship, which, in a very real sense, made it possible to hear my own voice and follow my instincts to a healthier future. My teachers, mentors, and classmates during my formal education at the University of Chicago were instrumental in preparing me for the challenges posed by my research. I am particularly grateful for my mentors in South Asian studies, Steven Collins, Davesh Soneji, and Tarini Bedi, who treated me like their own during my years as a graduate student in the Music Department. I am privileged to have shared intellectual space with Kaley Mason, Jayson Beaster-­ Jones, Jaime Jones, Ameera Nimjee, Rasika Ajotikar, Lily Wohl, and Michael Figueroa because of my graduate training in ethnomusicology. Though we only met by accident one fateful night at the Flamingo, Maria Welch has become a place I can call home, and I am grateful for her friendship and her wisdom. Stephen Gabel, Larry Zbikowski, and Tiffany Trent transcended the role of teachers somewhere along the way to become the finest friends I feel honored to call my own. At Earlham College, Aletha Stahl and James Logan became mentors and now comrades in more ways than one. I met and was influenced by an incredible community at Earlham, especially Julia Logan and Kumar Jensen, and both my work and my politics are a product of the two years I spent there as a visiting assistant professor. Because my work lives at the crossroads of many disciplines, I have wandered at times a circuitous path, but it has brought me into conversation with so many generous thinkers. This work benefited enormously from the insight of three anonymous readers. In feminist and queer studies circles, Sonja Thomas, Vanita Reddy, Sarah Pinto, Steven Moon, and Kareem Khubchandani offered 124 • Acknowledgments

critical feedback when this project was in its early stages. In film and media studies, Usha Iyer, Uma Bhrugubanda, Anupama Kapse, Tejaswini Ganti, Costas Nakassis, and Cassidy (Minai) Behling have all offered feedback and resources over the years. I would not have survived the final stages of edits, especially of chapter 2, without Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Samhita Sunya, and Isabel Huacuja Alonso. I am grateful for the kindness and support offered by Shreena Gandhi, Jyoti Puri, Sneha Annavarapu, Srimati Basu, Gautham Reddy, Aparajita De, Priya Srinivasan, Liz Bucar, Gayatri Sethi, and Harshita Kamath. For Yashoda Thakore and Neilesh Bose, “thank you” is simply not enough for all the years they have remained by my side and encouraged me to keep going. Seeta Chaganti, Stephanie Evans, Marie Carvalho, Aaron Fox, Katherine Lee, Shzr Ee Tan, and Hyun Kyong Chang have all stepped in to provide care and camaraderie when I needed it most, and I am grateful for their belief in me as well as this project. Jeff Roy, Pavithra Prasad, and Lalita du Perron have provided a soft place to land and have loved me every step and misstep of the way. This work has benefited from their intellectual companionship, queer community, and steadfast belief that a better world, if not a kinder academy, is possible. During my time in Texas from 2014 to 2019, I had the good fortune of finding several kindred spirits who have remained present in my life in more ways than one. This book would not be what it is without Fadeke Castor, who encouraged me to submit to Duke University Press. I am grateful to my brilliant and fiercely feminist therapist, Iris Carrillo, and wish there were more mental health care providers like her in this world. There are simply not enough words to express my gratitude to Harris Berger and Shona Jackson, both of whom have consistently modeled for me the kind of scholar and the kind of mentor I strive to be. At the University of Georgia, I have been privileged to call Josie Leimbach, Lynae Sowinski, Sara Emery, Maggie Snyder, Michael Heald, Emily Gertsch, Emily Koh, Jennifer LaRue, and Rielle Navitski friends and colleagues. My students, especially Roberto Ortiz, Lee Thomas Richardson, Urooj Ali, Aleeza Rasheed, Suvitha Viswanathan, Areeb Gul, and Alina Ahmed, have been brilliant interlocutors. I am especially grateful for the generous mentorship and support of Kecia Thomas, Kelly Happe, Patricia Richards, Susan Thomas, and Juanita Johnson-­ Bailey and the affirming environment they have fostered for junior faculty at the Institute for Women’s Studies. Though she only recently learned of my rather silly nickname for her, I am forever indebted to Elizabeth Ault, aka Glinda, not only for her editorial stewardship but also for her intellect and deeply feminist ethics. Because of her and the conversations she helped me join, I have come to understand how generative and clarifying the peer review process can be. Though the academy remains Acknowledgments • 125

a complicated place, to say the very least, it is encouraging to know that there are spaces like dup and people like her, and like Ben Kossak and Liz Smith, in this world. I am grateful for the chance she provided to be in community with my senior colleagues, especially the ever-­generous and brilliant Elizabeth Chin, aka Glinda 2. Over the last few years, my two Glindas have pushed me to grow into my own ideas and provided constructive feedback every step of the way. This project became a book because of them, and no “thank you” will ever be enough for what their support and kindness has meant to me. Two mentors deserve special mention here. Kirsten Pai Buick responded to me, a junior colleague she had never met, on a public social media post in 2019. At the time, I was rather desperately in search of feminist-­of-­color mentorship, and she responded to my many and at times redundant questions with generosity and patience. She has since become the person I turn to for all things large and small in this academic journey. Because of her, I have gained confidence in my own knowledge, and because of her I have learned what it means to live and write in my truth; to, as she would say, remember that I am “my mother’s daughter.” If I said any of this to her, she would simply respond to me or any mentee by saying, “Thank you for letting me help you,” but I hope she reads these words and understands that mentors like her are rare gems. I count myself incredibly lucky to have found her. There are some mentors whose commitment to their mentees seems unbelievable when you read about it in an acknowledgments section. That person in my case is Travis A. Jackson. I realize that any set of words I might arrange to describe what he has done for me over these last ten years might read as hyperbolic, but they are not. Travis planted the seeds that grew into the ideas found throughout this book during the question-­and-­answer session of my dissertation defense on September 1, 2011. He shined a bright, if uncomfortable, light on positionality, on what it means to consider oneself an ethnographer, and the questions he posed that day have shaped my intellectual journey in ways I probably cannot fully understand just yet. It is not an exaggeration to say Travis has read every word of this book more than once and debated every claim, not to mention grammatical rule, with me more than twice. He has believed in me, challenged me, and supported me, but perhaps more importantly, he has consistently reminded me to embrace the process—to recognize, honor, and fully experience the journey. He has demonstrated for me what it means to lead an academic life of integrity. This book is a testament to his investment in my growth and well-­being. I hope he is proud of me. Because this book is a sustained meditation on my family’s migration history, it is both obvious yet difficult to express how much I owe both my immedi126 • Acknowledgments

ate and extended family for their support. In so many ways, my relationship to performance and to dance is a product of my family’s own negotiation with the shifting landscapes in which they found themselves, British colonial subjects, Andhrites, then immigrants, and finally naturalized citizens of the United States of America. My family—especially my parents, Mallik and Vasanta Lakshmi Putcha; my maternal grandparents, Narsimham and Sreehari Ambatipudi; and my older brother, Girish—all shaped me into the thinker I am today. My mother, in particular, gave this project countless hours of her time and energy, screening films, correcting translations, and debating ideas with me into the wee hours of the night. This research truly would not have been possible without her. My extended family, especially my aunts and uncles, Kanth and Suneetha Duvvury, Uma Ambatipudi, Nata Duvvury, Bala Chavali, Kumari Susarla, Sujatha Sarma, and Prasad Vepa, have all been interlocutors and cothinkers along the way, double-­checking translations, fielding an onslaught of YouTube links, and just generally being there for me throughout it all. I began writing this book in May 2015, months after I secured my first permanent (nonadjunct) position. My mother passed away suddenly from a catastrophic brain aneurysm while she was driving to work on a beautiful fall day in September 2015. It would not be an overstatement to say that this book is a product of my grief and my unfinished conversations with her. In more ways than one, it has allowed me to get to know her in ways I had not yet been able, to listen for the quiet truths that shape women’s lives and possibilities. The original dancer’s voice for me, after all, was hers. I grew up dancing to her voice, as she often sang for me to be able to practice. My senses of being and of knowing in this world are a product of her indefatigable mission—that my life could and would be better, freer, and fuller than the one she was allowed to live. She was not allowed to dance, so the story goes, so I did. She was not allowed to feel the feeling of her body moving to music, so I must. We are all made by our mothers, but in my case this statement is insufficient. My mother’s brand of feminism, the kind where women’s creativity and pleasure is first and foremost, their own, has remained a guiding light for me, especially in her absence. I am grateful to be her daughter. In the years since the apocalyptic experience of losing her, I have healed and grown. The people who made this possible helped bring this project to completion and so deserve special mention here. My father, Mallik Putcha, whose role behind the scenes was often unheard and unacknowledged, has become a new kind of feminist interlocutor in my life. I am indebted to him and his narrations of dance history that have shaped the scholarship in these pages. I am grateful that I got a chance to hear the dancer’s voice through his recollections and for his belief in and support of me and my work. Thank you, Nanna. Acknowledgments • 127

Mark Watson came into my life when I least expected it and has stood by my side through the many (many) lives this project has lived. This book and my journey more generally are evidence not only of his love for me, but of a commitment to the idea that feminism starts at home. Because of him and the way he has loved me, I have been able to see more clearly, think more deeply, and live more bravely. And finally, a note of gratitude for the rest of the squad: Abigail the Snail (2003–18), Harriett the Fluff, and Woody the Tiny Horse have all played an important part in keeping me grounded. I am grateful for their companionship.

128 • Acknowledgments

Glossary

abhinayam—Facial expressions. aḍavu—Basic step. ammayi—Colloquial term in Telugu for girl. anupallavi—Second section in many karnāṭak song forms. arangetram—Translates to “ascending the stage.” Marks the debut performance of a young dancer. See also rangapraveṣam. ardhamandala/aramanḍi—Half-­sitting position. bhāgavatam—Theatrical, staged production. Usually based on themes from the epics. bhōgam—A reference to a courtesan woman in south India. Etymologically traced to the courtly culture of bhōja or enjoyment under the Nayaka kings of Tanjavur (r. 1532–1676). Brahmin—In the caste hierarchy, the highest caste. Often historicized as priests or scholars. burra katha—Oral storytelling tradition common in Telugu-­speaking regions.

charanam—Final section in many karnāṭak song forms. Dalit—Refers to oppressed caste communities in South Asia. darṣan—Seeing and being seen by a Hindu deity; a reference to prayer. devadāsī—A servant of god. A reference to a social group of courtesan women in south India who dance and sing primarily in temples. gajjelu—Ankle bells used by dancers; also known as gungaroos. gamaka—Melodic ornament. grandhikam—Formal, written style of Telugu, often used to denote Brahmin speech. guru—Teacher. harijan—Reference to oppressed caste communities. jathi—A technical section in a dance that focuses on footwork and virtuosity. jāvali—Song tradition similar to the padam associated with courtesan performance practices. kaĉēri—Classical music concert. karnāṭak—Codified system of music associated with the southern regions of India. kathak—Dance style associated with northern Indian court cultures. kīrtanam—A bipartite song form in south Indian classical (karnāṭak) music. The formal sections, in order, are pallavi and charanam. Plural, kīrthanālu. kṛiti—A tripartite song form in south Indian classical (karnāṭak) music. The formal sections, in order, are pallavi, anupallavi, and charanam. kum-­k um—Dyed, dried, ground turmeric; used in Hindu rituals, also known as vermilion or sindhoor. lāsya narthaki—Graceful dancing woman. A reference to courtesan and, in some cases, temple dance. maṇdapam—A decorated proscenium used as a stage for Hindu wedding ceremonies. 130 • Glossary

mejuvāṇi—Performed for a host. A courtesan salon performance. mrigasirsha—A mudra, often used to denote a flute. mudra—Hand gesture. naḍaka—Equivalent to bols and solkaṭṭu but a phrase more commonly used in kuchipudi practice. nādaswaram—Double-­reed wind instrument. nāmakaranam—A naming ceremony common in Hindu communities. nāṭakam—A drama, play, or theatrical presentation. naṭṭuvangam—Refers to both the hand cymbals (tālālu) and the direction provided during a dance performance by the guru or dance master. nāṭya—Drama. As a technique in dance, incorporates hand gestures but relies generally on first-­person narration. nāyika—A feminine character or heroine in dance. nṛṭṭa—Technical or abstract dance, that is, footwork. padam—Song/poetry common in south India. pallavi—First section in many karnāṭak song forms. paṭṭu—A high-­quality silk prized in south India. pāvura—A mythological bird who is said to have carried messages between lovers. perugu—plain yogurt. purdah—A religious and social practice of women’s seclusion. rāgam—Mode or set of pitches in Indian classical music systems. rāja—King. rājanarthaki—King’s court dancer. rangapraveṣam—Translates to “ascending the stage.” Marks the debut performance of a young dancer. See also arangetram. rasa—Literally, juice; mood in dance and music.

Glossary • 131

rasikas—Dance and music connoisseurs, particularly in Chennai. sabha—Public assembly space. Often a reference to a performance hall for music and dance in Chennai. sāhityam—Literature, poetry, lyrics. sampradāya—Performance practice. sargam—South Asian music notation system. siggu—Shame/modesty. simhamukha—Literally, lion face; a common mudra. sindhoor dānam—The giving of sindhoor (vermilion); the mark of a married Hindu woman. śiṣya—Student. Also appears as sishya. śṛṅgāra—One of the nine (nava) rasas that depicts romantic, erotic, sensual emotions. Generally expressed for a hero (nāyaka) by a heroine (nāyika). strī veṣam—Woman impersonation or woman disguise. swara-­s thānam—Literally, pitch standing. Refers to standardized taste habits in intonation. tālam—Tempo or beat. Also used to refer to many aspects of musical time, such as rhythm and meter. thāmbūlam—Ceremonial offering. thavil—Double-­barrel drum. tīrmānam—Also known as muktaimpu, a cadential pattern in Karnatic music. In Adi talam (8-­beat cycle) solkaṭṭu, ta-­din-­gin-­a-­thom repeated thrice. upanayanam—Rite-­of-­passage ritual for young Brahmin men. vijñānam—Knowledge. zamīndār—Feudal landowner during colonial era.

132 • Glossary

Notes

Prologue 1 I use the term south Indian in this book to refer to the immigrant community of primarily Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada speakers in which I was raised in Houston, Texas. This distinction is also used in India to refer to those regions that previously belonged to the Madras Presidency. Today, these languages are associated with separate administrative regions in India: Tamil Nadu, United Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka, respectively. I use the term Indian throughout this book to denote an ethnic-­national identification that correlates to the nation-­state known since 1947 as the Republic of India. I use South Asian as a more general geopolitical and racial distinction, encompassing as it does areas known today as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. 2 I use Hindu throughout this book to refer to the ethnic identity that the term signposts in the twenty-­first century. For further context on the collapsing of many streams of faith and thought under the politicized and now ethnic category of Hindu beginning in the nineteenth century, see Doniger (2009), Figueira (2002), and Omvedt (2006). 3 The career of Margaret Nixon McEathron (1930–2016), better known as Marni Nixon, deserves special mention here. Nixon provided the singing voice, separate from the speaking voice, for a number of women characters, in many cases offering her white voice to a nonwhite on-­screen body (see Baron, Fleegler, and Lerner 2021; Smith 2003). 4 Jasmine stands apart from her counterparts in the 1980s and 1990s for a number of reasons, but primarily because she is the only princess who only sings with her

prince. Every other princess during this period sang at least one solo, which leads Liske Potgieter and Zelda Potgieter to call her the “silent princess” (2016, 63). Jasmine’s songs were voiced by a Filipina singer and actress, Maria Lea Carmen Imutan Salonga (b. 1971), while her speaking voice was provided by a white actress, Linda Larkin (b. 1970). Salonga also provided singing vocals for the other 1990s Asian Disney princess, Fa Mulan (1998). Besides her work in Disney films, Salonga is known for her musical theater and Broadway work, especially her success playing the lead role in Miss Saigon. She is also known as “the first Asian” to win a Tony award. 5 The arangetram (also known as rangapraveṣam) translates to “ascending the stage,” and in hereditary performance cultures, particularly in Tamil-­and Telugu-­speaking regions, it refers to the solo debut public performance of a newly minted performer. Generally speaking, these events marked the end of many years of training and apprenticeship. In US settings today, this event has become akin to a debutante ball or a bat mitzvah, on average costing around $50,000 usd. The summer months of June through September are known in South Asian communities as the arangetram season, with well-­known gurus conducting one each weekend. Orchestras will often be flown in from India and remain for the entire season. In California, these events are often preceded by arangetram camps, where all the dancers slated to give these performances attend expensive retreats to foster a sense of focus and camaraderie. 6 In the caste system, Brahmin is considered the highest caste. 7 My parents were both employed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center (nasa-­j sc), or contractors of nasa-­j sc, for their entire professional careers. My mother was the first Indian immigrant woman to reach the rank of gs-­15 (General Service) at nasa-­j sc, the highest rank in the US civil service. Though outside the scope of this project, there is a rich critical race and feminist history to be told about Indian immigrants in the space program, particularly in the 1980s to early 2000s before the Space Transportation System shuttle program was canceled. For recent research on South Asian immigration to Houston during the Cold War, see Quraishi (2020). 8 The term dominant caste refers to a caste that holds economic or political power and occupies a fairly high position in a social hierarchy. In this book I use the term dominant caste to denote the groups, like Brahmins, who have historically been categorized as forward, as numerically majoritarian, or who do not otherwise fall under scheduled caste or affirmative action categories in India (see Srinivas 1987). 9 Model minority is a reference to antiblack racial formations in the US context and characterizes Asian Americans as a monolithic group whose members are perceived to achieve a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average. 10 It might seem odd to cite someone as prominent in the critical feminist discourse as Salman Rushdie, especially in a book that claims to be committed to feminist praxis. To any reader who might find my invocation of his work troublesome, I want to acknowledge that I am aware of the negative aspects of his way of moving through the world and am also aware of how aptly his phrase captures what I am 134 • Notes to prologue

describing. Please let this note attest to the fact that I am not excusing his behavior, nor am I asking people to forget it. Introduction 1 To be eligible to compete in the Miss America beauty pageant, a woman must be unmarried, have never been pregnant, and be between the ages of seventeen and twenty-­five. Indian classical dance refers to those dance styles which have been recognized by the Government of India as classical (see Putcha 2011). In the US context, Indian classical dance refers to the dance style generally understood to be from Tamil Nadu known as bharatanatyam. 2 The Hart-­Cellar Act or Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 phased out the national origins quota system that had been in place since 1921. Whereas previous to the act, immigration to the United States from anywhere besides the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany was severely limited, this legislation instituted a preference system that focused on immigrants’ skills and family relationships with citizens or residents. Numerical restrictions on visas from any country across the globe were set at 170,000 per year, not including immediate relatives of US citizens, nor special immigrants (including those born in independent nations in the Western Hemisphere, former citizens, ministers, or employees of the US government abroad). 3 For her dance style, Davuluri has credited US-­based Bollywood choreographer Nakul Dev Mahajan. Bollywood refers to the Hindi-­language film industry located in Bombay, today known as Mumbai. 4 In Telugu-­speaking communities, Kamma and Reddy are designated as forward or dominant castes. Both of these groups, descending as they do from landowning castes, have significant control in economic sectors such as film and entertainment industries in contemporary south India (see Srinivas 2013). 5 See, e.g., Mani (1986) and Spivak (1985). For an important reorientation to the archive, see Arondekar (2009). 6 The overwhelming majority of feminist scholarship on the collusion between colonial administrators and Indian nationalists has focused on eastern regions of India, specifically the colonial state of Bengal (see, e.g., Chatterjee 1993; Sarkar 2001; Tambe 2000). For further analysis of caste from a feminist perspective, see Chakravarti (2003); Rao (2018). Two scholarly volumes that have explored this topic take a broader view (see Sangari and Vaid 1989; Sundar Rajan 1999). More recently, Durba Mitra (2020) examined the creation, theorization, and application of the concept of deviant female sexuality in colonial Bengal. Mitra’s work offers important insight into why a gendered and heteronormative understanding of Indian sexuality became central to modern social thought. 7 The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak looms large here. Her provocation “Can the Subaltern Speak” (Spivak 1988) captured a zeitgeist in Indian feminism as scholars recovered and reclaimed Indian womanhood and subjectivity as important sites of inquiry. For example, in history, see Sinha (1996, 2006) and ChakraNotes to introduction • 135

8

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varti (1998); in literary studies, see Sunder Rajan (2003) and Tharu and Lalita (1991); in sociology, see Puri (1999); in film/media studies, see Mankekar (1999) and Mehta (2011); in queer/diasporic studies see Gopinath (2005); and in dance and music studies, see Babiracki (2008), Chakravorty (2008), Meduri (1996), and O’Shea (2007). Recent work on Bollywood cinema and dance by Usha Iyer (2020) breaks new and important ground, reorienting our understanding of women who danced in Hindi films as musicians, creators, and choreographers. I understand this critique as anticolonial, by which I both highlight and simultaneously turn away from the (ongoing) coloniality of gender, particularly in public cultures. In this way, I am also drawing on transnational and performance studies analysis of citizenship and resistance (see especially Castor 2017; Jackson 2012; Srinivasan 2012; Taylor 2016), though I am aware of and indebted to theorizations that differentiate the subject from citizen in the postcolonial context (Chatterjee 1993). Put another way, rather than situating this project around, before, or after colonialism, or situating performances of gender or womanhood within colonial logics of time, or by way of the distinctions that have been drawn between subject and citizen, I emphasize the ongoing praxical nature of this sort of work (see also Gopal 2019). Classical dance forms like kuchipudi and bharatanatyam, as well as other styles across the subcontinent, feature what is known as temple jewelry. This style of jewelry relies on gold filigree work with red and green stones and pearl detailing. Though primarily situated in and concerned with Euro-­American or colonial settings, a growing field of scholars has offered tools for understanding how perceptions of the voice index processes of social or cultural identification (e.g., Bauman and Briggs 2003; Connor 2000; Dolar 2006; Ochoa Gautier 2014). More recently, scholars in the US academy have grappled with the enduring ontological divide in European philosophy between body and mind, also sometimes understood through related sensory categories, that is, the sonic and the visual (e.g., Eidsheim 2015, 2019; Meizel 2020; Sterne 2003). Some of these scholars have engaged with the hermeneutical approach developed by the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005), who has argued that the sensory experience of hearing the human voice not only precedes sight but also produces and upholds hierarchies of gender, identity, and social power. For a critical race and sonic approach to the visual, particularly the photographic medium, see Campt (2017). For theorizations of voice in the northern Indian context, see Rahaim (2012) and Roy (2019). For theorizations of voice and language specific to Tamil-­speaking regions of India, see Weidman (2006, 2021). Though I rely primarily on transnationalism to theorize the differentiation of Indian women’s bodies and voices, I am aware of related and overlapping conceptualizations such as diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and globalization, to name but a few. Whereas diaspora is generally used to capture the migratory experiences of those dispersed from, outside of, and in many cases at a loss for a homeland (see, e.g., Safran 1991), globalization, modernity, and cosmopolitanism generally describe the social, economic, or cultural processes by which people, practices, or goods both

136 • Notes to introduction

12

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disperse and circulate and, by doing so, create new communities (see, e.g., Appiah 2007; Gilroy 1993; Kearney 1995). Discursive formations on how and why people and goods travel also overlap and intersect with theories of deregulation and neoliberalism (see, e.g., Brown 2019; Harvey 2007). For an alternate theorization of globalization that predates and decenters Euro-­American hegemony, see Abu-­Lughod (1989). In India, globalization also often refers to the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 (see Nayar 2010). For how transnationalism has shaped theories of Indian identity among Hindi speakers and on the US West Coast, see also Mankekar (2015). In terms of transnational dance cultures, I learned at a young age, for example, that telling someone that I was an Indian dancer was usually followed with, “Oh, like belly-­dancing?” These responses bear witness to the limitations of multicultural initiatives, today sometimes packaged as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and their tendency to collapse categories for the sake of cultural competency. To this point, according to the organization South Asian Americans Leading Together, hate crimes against South Asians—Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs alike—spiked after the events of September 11, 2001. Though I wasn’t following the statistics in 2001, I knew the fear of backlash to be true as I watched my parents place American flags on our home and cars after a Sikh man was murdered by a white nationalist around the corner from where we lived in Houston, Texas. Since 9/11, anti-­immigrant rhetoric has found new purchase under the openly racist immigration policies of the Trump administration, particularly its infamous “Muslim ban” and, more recently, the hypersurveillance and incarceration of Latin American and Central American refugees across the US-­Mexico border. As Margaret Gibson (1988, 103) observed in her study of Indian immigrants in California, the goal of looking and sounding American, or “fitting in,” featured prominently and pointed clearly to the ways Indian parents sought to guarantee success for their children. See also Renato Rosaldo’s (1994) work on Latino communities in southern California. The category of non-­Hispanic white was introduced in the 2000 US Census. Additionally, Indians have been categorized under the white racial category at times over the course of the twentieth century (see also Bald 2013; Sen 2018). I was not the only Indian immigrant in my choir; however, I was the only non-­Christian. My fellow Indian choirmate was Malayali and identified as Mar Thoma Syrian Christian (see Thomas 2018). In the time since the 1965 Act, US immigration and labor policies have continued to favor dominant-­caste Indians from south India. According to data collected by the US Census Bureau and compiled by the Center for Immigration Studies, Telugu is the most spoken Indian language after Hindi in the United States and is also the fastest-­growing language group (see Ziegler and Camarota 2019). For research on the racialization of Indian-­Americans in the late twentieth century, see Bhatia (2007); Koshy (1998). Recent research on migration and indentured labor transcends the Atlantic-­ centered analysis Tinker (1974) famously described as “a new system of slavery” Notes to introduction • 137

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(see Bates and Carter 2018; Bose 2021; Hurgobin and Basu 2015; Kumar 2017; Yang 2003). The first US law to articulate the relationship between immigration and citizenship was the Naturalization Act of 1790. The opening line of the act mobilized racial categories in moral terms, stating that only “free white persons of good character” were eligible to apply for citizenship. The Page Act of 1875, also known as the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1875, was the very first legislative action to bar immigration based on race, region, or gender. The Page Act set a series of gendered and sexualized racializations into motion, especially the assumption that “Oriental,” specifically Chinese, women would engage in prostitution if allowed into the country (see Abrams 2005; Chambers-­ Letson 2016). Some scholars have noted that the overrepresentation of Sikh men in the British military and in the East India Company in the latter half of the nineteenth century could be attributed in part to the annexation of the Punjab region by the British Raj in 1849. The subsequent land reform measures under British administrative authorities effectively pauperized the region, leading young men to migrate or seek economic opportunity elsewhere (see Tatla 1995, 69). The language in the 1917 law defined the Barred Zone as follows: “persons who are natives of islands not possessed by the United States adjacent to the Continent of Asia, situate south of the twentieth parallel latitude north, west of the one hundred and sixtieth meridian of longitude east from Greenwich, and north of the tenth parallel of latitude south, or who are natives of any country, province, or dependency situate on the Continent of Asia west of the one hundred and tenth meridian of longitude east from Greenwich and east of the fiftieth meridian of longitude east from Greenwich and south of the fiftieth parallel of latitude north, except that portion of said territory situate between the fiftieth and the sixty-­fourth meridians of longitude east from Greenwich and the twenty-­fourth and thirty-­eighth parallels of latitude north, and no alien now in any way excluded from, or prevented from entering, the United States shall be admitted to the United States.” See An Act to Regulate the Immigration of Aliens to, and the Residence of Aliens in, the United States, Public Law 64–301, U.S. Statutes at Large 39 (1917): 874–98. The first Indian, Bhicaji Framji Balsara (1872–1962), was granted naturalized US citizenship in 1909 by identifying as Parsi and therefore white (see Jamal and Naber 2008). The landmark case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1924) offers a useful example of how shifting racial logics, defined in terms of proximity to whiteness, have shaped the categories of Indian and Asian, respectively. For additional context, see Coulson (2017); Lee (2015). In 1962, the UK closed its borders in response to backlash to an influx of South Asians, while in the same era the United States and Canada both revised their respective immigration policies (see Naujoks 2009). An Act to Amend the Immigration and Nationality Act, and for Other Purposes, Public Law 89–236, U.S. Statutes at Large 79 (1965): 911–22. It is worth noting that Pakistan was defined as part of the Middle East in this act.

138 • Notes to introduction

24 The 1965 Act remains the primary foundation for existing laws, though a major amendment was passed in 1990 under President George H. W. Bush (see Leiden and Neal 1990). For further context on Asian “high-­skilled” immigration since 1990, see Saxenian (2000). For an account of how North American immigration policy both shaped and was shaped by South Asian labor history, see Sohi (2014). 25 The United States, Canada, and Australia all passed immigration laws banning nonwhite immigration from former British colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those who migrated out of India did so to the UK as domestic “unskilled” labor or seamen before the dismantling of the British Empire (see Visram 2015), or to Australia and the United States after the UK began to limit immigration from former colonies starting with the Commonwealth Act of 1962 (see Karatani 2003; Maclean 2020). As one set of borders closed, another opened. For example, both Canada and Australia passed legislation closing their borders to nonwhite immigration in the early 1900s as white settlers attempted to redefine immigrant, and therefore who could be considered a citizen, along racial lines. 26 Ahmed (2004) defines an affective economy as that which allows for “me” to become “we” through emotion. I rely on Ahmed’s (2004, 2010) definition of affect and how it organizes (imagined) communities. Ahmed defines affect as emotion and orientation, both of which must be understood as cultural practices rather than simply psychological states. 27 This critique is informed by debates in South Asian studies, especially those which have been animated by a desire to differentiate postcolonial theory from subaltern studies (see, e.g., Chibber 2013). My approach acknowledges the long-­standing debate among those who remain variously committed to postcolonial theory or subaltern studies as to how capitalism has shaped South Asian economies via colonialism, and how today such economies do or don’t differ from their European counterparts (see Gopal 2007). 28 In theorizing performance as a practice of citizenship, I am indebted to and inspired by N. Fadeke Castor’s conceptualization of a spiritual citizenship, which she defines as the “power of the sacred to inform new ways of belonging to community, the nation, and the transnational” (2017, 5). 29 The arangetram is but one example. Weddings, thread ceremonies (upanayanam), name ceremonies (nāmakaranam), and even funerals all fall under a similar logic of conspicuous and performative religious identification. For an analysis of consumerism within transnational citizenship practices, see Grewal (2005) and Mankekar (2015). 30 Postcolonial scholars have been committed to examining the shifting power of the technologically reproduced human voice in the rise of the nation-­state as a political concept (see Danielson 1997; Huacuja Alonso 2018; McDonald 2013). Much of this work has examined attendant discourses of nostalgia, which follow in the wake of nationalist-­modernist projects (see Hancock 2008). Scholars of film music in south India have explored the relationship between gender, vocal performance, playback singing, and sound technology (see especially Weidman 2021). Notes to introduction • 139

31 Scholars of blackface minstrelsy and its legacies in US entertainment and popular culture have consistently pointed out that the racialization of the body relies on the disembodiment/dissociation of the mind/voice from the body (see Nowatzki 2010; Sammond 2015; Weheliye 2014). See also work in US dance studies (e.g., Jackson 2011) and in film studies (e.g., Maurice 2002, 2013). For more recent extensions of this theory in understanding the controversy surrounding the simultaneous dehumanization and politicization of professional black athletes in the United States, see Bryant (2018). 32 See also Nikita Dhawan (2014) for a postcolonial critique of Enlightenment thought and its forms of rationality. 33 In their collected edition, for example, music scholars Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond (2000) draw exclusively from global North feminist perspectives, while in her retrospective on feminism in the field, Ellen Koskoff (2014) examines her own career in the US academy. In explicating a liberal feminist outlook, Koskoff defines the distinction between gender and feminism discretely, describing “the study of gender [as] the lens through which I most clearly see inequality, but feminism [as] how I enact the knowledge I have gained in this work to resist and dismantle it” (2014, 7, emphasis in original). 34 Butler’s (1997) theory of performativity—the idea that gender identity is socially constructed and affirmed through speech and other repetitive forms of communication—draws in part on John L. Austin’s (1963) theory of “performative utterances.” Performance, as an event that involves both performer and audience, is not and should not be synonymous with performativity. Performativity refers specifically to performers’ actions, which not only represent an idea or identity but also actualize it. 35 Geographical markers such as third world or subaltern draw attention to the use of geopolitical demarcations as a shorthand for the lasting legacies of European imperialism, “whereby the global north holds the key to . . . liberalization . . . while the global south bears the brunt of its weaponization” (Puar 2017, 80). 36 Scholarship on Indian music has examined the shift from feudal patronage systems to capitalist cultural production (see, e.g., Qureshi 2001). 37 Bhanumati was both her first name and her stage name. 38 Kirin Narayan (1993) challenged anthropologists to consider issues of positionality that shaped conceptions of ethnography in “How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” Narayan’s body of work over the past two decades (e.g., 2007, 2008), especially the way she blends memory and family narrative with ethnography, is instructive for my own. See also Abu-­Lughod (1990) and Visweswaran (1994). More recently, see Paik (2014). 39 This method has been called many things by scholars working to disrupt colonial forms of knowledge production. In performance studies, José Esteban Muñoz has theorized a subversive “disidentification,” which “is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (1999, 4). 140 • Notes to introduction

In US feminist and Chicana studies, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) described this method as living at the “borderland,” and in postcolonial studies Homi Bhabha (1992) and Veena Das (2007) variously theorize a “witnessing” or being “interstitial”—an out-­ of-­body feeling or “unhomeliness”—a sense of existing neither here nor there. See also Chawla and Atay (2018) for further analysis of autoethnography and decolonial praxis. 40 I am indebted here to the work of Lila Abu-­Lughod (2002) as well as M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who theorized a critical transnational feminist praxis that reveals a “politics of location” (2010, 26). 1. Womanhood

1

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An early version of this chapter was previously published as “The Mythical Courtesan: Womanhood and Dance in Transnational India,” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 20, no. 1 (2021): 127–50. I thank the editors for their feedback and advice. Bhogam women were public, performing women who sang and danced in feudal and colonial patronage systems and who are today understood as belonging to a marginalized caste community (see Kannabiran 1995, ws-­62). For more context, see also the foundational work of Amrit Srinivasan (1984, 1985). To protect the privacy of the individuals associated with the dance school, I use pseudonyms. For further context on ethics and self-­reflexive ethnographic methods, see Madison (2005). hooks’s theorization of an “oppositional gaze” in film and media builds upon the work of Stuart Hall (see especially Hall 1973, 1989). Though I focus on south Indian examples in this chapter, see also the film dance careers of Anna Marie Gueizelor, stage name Azurie (1907–98), and Sitara Devi (1920–2014) in Iyer (2020). Historians of media technology have documented how, by the 1940s, radio broadcasting emerged in India as a populist tool (see, e.g., Huacuja Alonso 2022; Lelyveld 1994; Sen 2014). On coastal Telugu communities, see the work of Yashoda Thakore (2022). Despite the consistent Hindu-­izing of terms like devadasi or nāyika, the on-­screen courtesan in Hindi-­language cinema tends to be othered as a Muslim woman (see Dwyer 2004). See Veena Oldenburg’s (1984) work on colonial Lucknow as well as Philippa Levine’s (2003) research on the legal history of prostitution under the British Empire. For further analysis of the evolution of public entertainment and sex work, see Kole (2009). For a critical history of Lux soaps, see McClintock (2001) and Sivulka (1998). See Hughes (2007, 2010) and Baskaran (1991) for perspective on Tamil film music. In Gandhian terms, those marked as oppressed-­caste, Dalit, or untouchables were also named harijan or “children of god.” During this era there were significant feminist and anticaste movements led by Tamil and oppressed-­caste revolutionaries like Periyar E. Ramaswamy (1879–1973). Notes to chapter 1 • 141

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17 18 19 20 21

These movements, which were influential in Tamil-­speaking communities, called for an abolition of religion and an independent state for those who considered themselves southern “Dravidians” (as opposed to Indo-­Aryans; see Geetha 1998). However, Tamil caste politics cannot and should not be understood as synonymous with Telugu, for these are distinct communities. For a critical history on caste politics in Telugu communities during this era, particularly the communities to which film directors like Ramabrahamam belonged, see Jangam (2005). See Shresthova (2008) for an etymology and analysis of the vamp character. See, for example, the scene from Maya Bazaar (1957), “Vivaha Bojanumbu,” which highlights the vegetarian food cultures associated with weddings, celebration, and pleasure. For additional perspective on the politics of food and caste in India, see Sathyamala (2018). Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao (1923–96), better known as NTR, for example. Forward caste is a distinction for those groups who do not qualify for affirmative action measures in India. An important by-­product of such homosociality emerges in queer communities, what Kareem Khubchandani once described as “protogay boys.” In Khubchandani (2016), a young Indian man who wasn’t allowed to learn classical dance turns to informal pedagogies of Bollywood dance instead, even while he had to drive his sister to and from classical dance classes. Piano and ballet pedagogy have served similar purposes in North American and European communities, especially as an expression of middle-­class status and a means of teaching young girls how to perform civility (see, e.g., Solie 2004). In Telugu, this vocal tradition is known as burra katha. Malhotra and Lambert-­Hurley (2015) rectifies the dearth of scholarship on autobiography and gender in South Asia. For example, Chandrakala (1949–99) and Hema Malini (b. 1948). To this point, Thakore’s work with women who can trace their training to the prereform period corroborates a chronological triangulation of shameful pleasure as originating at some point after, if not through, the rise of film cultures, at least in south India. 2. Caste

1 South India in this chapter is a reference to the geographical region known as the Madras Presidency and administrated by the British Raj. Though a variety of languages are understood as south Indian (e.g., Kannada, Tulu, Malayalam, Oriya), in this chapter I am focusing on the eastern and coastal areas, particularly where Telugu and Tamil films were produced. For a critical perspective of gender and caste in Malayali cinema, see Mini (2020). 2 Hari Krishnan (2019, 13) calls this body of material popular culture “cinema ephemera.” 3 See also Pierre Nora’s differentiation of the “site of memory” from the “embodiment of memory” (1989, 7). In this way, the archive is also a version of what Bene142 • Notes to chapter 1

4 5 6

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dict Anderson (1983, 163–86) theorized as a “census, map, [and] museum.” I see the nfai as a prime example of a transition from individual memory to empirical, situated knowledge. See, for example, Thyagayya (1946) and Yogi Vemana (1947). Telugu writer R. M. Umamaheshwar Rao has suggested that Bhanumati’s maiden name is Chittajallu. See also the career of Anjali Devi (1927–2014), who hailed from a family of hereditary artists in coastal Andhra, and successfully founded a film studio in Madras with her husband–music director. T. Suryakumari, along with dancer Indrani Rehman (1930–99), was a contestant in the first Miss India beauty pageant, held in Bombay in 1952. See also the career of Malayalam actress Miss Kumari (see Mini 2020). See also Reddy (2020) on the consolidation of a grandhikam register in the early twentieth century. An Egyptian musician, Umm Kulthūm, accomplished a similar star status by positioning herself as an expert in Quranic pronunciation (see Danielson 1997). Studies on other regional contexts corroborate this point, highlighting the emergence of elite listening practices through gramophone records. Songbooks were cheaper and more popular among those who could not afford a gramophone (see Das Gupta 2005, 467; Sachdeva Jha 2009, 283). Grandhikam relies upon a very specific understanding of Telugu history as tied to Sanskrit traditions, and thus to an idea of Andhra culture as bearing more of a relationship to the aesthetic legacies found in texts such as the Natyasastra (see, e.g., Mitchell 2009, 119–20). Cricket commentaries also were banned (see Huacuja Alonso 2018; Kasbekar 2006). Isabel Huacuja Alonso underscores the widespread social practice of the song diary, noting that most of her informants kept detailed entries on the music they heard on the Radio Ceylon Geetmala show (see Huacuja Alonso 2015, 172). Soneji historicizes the javali as a “transitional” genre that traversed a variety of signposts in early modern India, situated “at the furthest edges of courtly dance practices, and at the cusp of India’s emergent entertainment industry in the early twentieth century” (2010, 88). My father’s memories around Thyagayya deserve special mention here: “My fourth uncle took me and my mom along with his family to a theater in Mylapore (in Madras). I still recall the scene that Thyagayya Garu was overjoyed by retrieving Sri Rama Vigrahams from the flooding of the Kaveri River. That’s the first movie I saw. That’s when we took Meenakshi Atta [his older sister] to Madras after her wedding in October 1947.” For further analysis of the Madras-­based film studios during the 1940s and 1950s, see Pillai (2015). For further analysis of the Tamil film industry, see Baskaran (2009). The Bombay Devadasis Protection Act, 1934, accessed September 25, 2020, http:// bombayhighcourt.nic.in/libweb/acts/1934.10.pdf. The [Tamil Nadu] Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act, 1947, LatestLaws.com, accessed September 25, 2020, https://www.latestlaws.com/wp-­content/uploads Notes to chapter 2 • 143

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21 22 23

24 25 26

/2015/11/Tamil-­Nadu-­Devadasis-­Prevention-­of-­Dedication-­Act-­1947.pdf. See also Soneji (2012, 154–58). In south India, within the logics of nation building, marriage was primarily framed as a woman’s issue and described as a civilizational endeavor (see, e.g., Sreenivas 2008). Cultural anthropologists, especially those working from a feminist perspective, have parsed how the nation was both implicitly and explicitly feminized and critiqued the gendering of public discourse that both supported and encouraged the imagining of India as religious and heteronormative through the figure of Bharat Mata (see, e.g., Ramaswamy 2010; Sinha 2006). For further analysis of marriage and the couple form in Hindi language cinema, see Gopal (2011). See Kristen Rudisill (2007) on caste and performance in Tamil Nadu. It is important to note that south India was in many ways operating under a different kind of nationalism altogether. While many, like Partha Chatterjee (1989) and Tanika Sarkar (2001), who have written on gender and society during the transition from colony to nation-­state have suggested that it was under the conditions of anticolonial nationalism that marriage truly came into focus as a social discourse, one could reasonably argue that the south Indian cases, in Madras, cannot only be explained by examining what was happening in Calcutta or Bombay. On this matter, Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul note that “studies of colonial relations in . . . Bengal have become hegemonic in that they provide much of the theoretical framework for such discussion” (1994, 5). The screenplay for Malleswari, written by Devulapalli Krishnasastri (1897–1980), was adapted from a play, Rayalavari Karunakruthyamu (The kind deeds of the royalty) by Buchibabu, and from a short story, “The Emperor and the Slave Girl” by Devan Sharar. It is worth noting that the only full-­length monograph on Telugu cinema (in English) in the nfai holdings is about Reddy’s work (see Guy 1985). See Alton’s memoirs, Painting with Light (1949). Kodak, for example, relied on Shirley cards, which demonstrated how film stocks were manufactured to capture white skin and associate it in the cultural imagination with feminine beauty (see also Dyer 1997; Seshadri-­Crooks 2000). For a history of racial science and photography, see Morris-­Reich (2016). Polaroid has also come under scrutiny for the role of its photographic technology in South African apartheid and the police state (see Smith 2013). Uma Bhrugubanda (2011) has referred to this phenomenon as the “citizen-­ devotee.” See also the work of Sara Dickey (1995) on film cultures in Tamil Nadu. In his work on television, Rajagopal (2001) calls this interplay between audience and screen being “touched” by an image. See Huacuja Alonso (2018) for how radio achieved similar affective communities. An equally famous film singer, P. Susheela (b. 1935), also counts herself among the alumni of Maharaja College (see Indraganti 2016).

144 • Notes to chapter 2

3. Citizenship 1 In the case of Telugu speakers, on February 20, 2014, the Parliament of India passed a bill to establish Telangana as the twenty-­ninth and newest state in the Republic of India. This was the second time Telugu speakers had experienced the remapping of their homeland. On December 19, 1952, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru announced the formation of a Telugu state. A new administrative region, known as Andhra, would be formed and would consist of the Telugu-­speaking districts of the erstwhile Madras State. However, this new Telugu state would not include the economic city center, Madras. Four years later, Andhra was redrawn to include the northwest Telugu-­speaking regions from the occupied and forcibly annexed state of Hyderabad, and the name of the state was changed to Andhra Pradesh. The word pradesh loosely translates as “abode” or “homeland.” Beginning with Andhra in 1956, India was divided into administrative territories that were named after the language spoken in the area, for example, Assam (Assamese), Gujarat (Gujarati), Maharashtra (Marathi), Manipur (Manipuri), Orissa (Oriya), Punjab (Punjabi), Rajasthan (Rajasthani), Tamil Nadu (Tamil), and West Bengal (Bengali). Like Andhra, a few others, such as Karnataka (Kannada) and Kerala (Malayalam), followed historical names for the geographical region rather than language. For further context on caste and the Tamil separatist movements, see Irschick (1969). For a more detailed account of how Hyderabad, today known as the Telangana region, was forcibly annexed, see Ali (1962), Hyder and Hyder (2012), and Noorani (2014). 2 For more context on Hindi-­language cinema and dance, see Iyer (2020), Gangoli (2005), and Nijhawan (2009). 3 Numerous studies on Hindi-­language films have examined the racialized and sexualized dichotomy of the vamp-­heroine (see, e.g., Gangoli 2005; Iyer 2020; Mazumdar 2007). 4 As early as 1953, under a resolution of the (then) Ministry of Education, the government of India instituted a national academy for music, dance, and drama known as the Sangeet Natak Akademi (sna). Besides the sna, the newly independent Indian government formed two other academies, the Sahitya Akademi (Literature) and the Lalit Kala Akademi (Fine Arts including Visual Arts), to “promote the cultural unity of the country” (sna 1958, 1–2). The first All-­India Dance Seminar (1958) was the last of four seminars arranged by the Ministry of Culture under this new tripartite Akademi scheme. All four seminars, film (1955), drama (1956), music (1957), and dance, hosted by the sna, were organized to bring together the knowledgeable and the elite in each field as an attempt at “stock-­taking” (sna 1958, 2). 5 My dance teacher in the United States, Rathna Kumar (b. 1946), has often spoken fondly of the time she spent working in film, always noting that by the time she became a successful classical dancer, it was tacitly implied that she would not work in films again. 6 Studies on post-­Independence Indian affective economies have consistently noted the construction of the modern classical arts in juxtaposition to lowbrow, that is, sexually explicit, forms, both through and in film. In the early twentieth century, Notes to chapter 3 • 145

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after all, “cinema . . . was treated . . . as being on the side of the low culture . . . because [it] drew its performing artistes from the despised universe of low culture, i.e. company drama” (Pandian 1996, 951). As the movement to legitimize local identities gained momentum, however, the characterization of music and dance in regional cinema relied heavily upon such stereotypes—a defining example of what Pandian describes as the “recuperation of the dichotomy of high and low culture within the cinematic medium itself ” (950). For example, though I had heard that a few dance gurus had choreographed dance sequences in south Indian films over the years, I was nonetheless shocked the day my guru in Chennai pulled me aside after class to show me film scenes that featured his father, Vedantam Raghaviah (see chapter 1). In this era, the sabha operated as an important liminal space, connecting cinema cultures to the stage, and functioned as a newly constructed, sanctified space where courtesan repertoire could and would be recuperated even as what qualified as a dance—now distinct from music—found a new audience (see Subramanian 2018). Written in 1901 by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and published in 1917, Devdas has been adapted for film both in India and in Pakistan more than a dozen times in at least five South Asian languages. Among the most famous are the 1935 and 1955 adaptations in Hindi. A recent Bollywood adaptation in 2002, starring screen icons Shah Rukh Khan (b. 1965) and Aishwarya Rai (Bachchan), was, at the time of its release, the most expensive Bollywood film ever produced. The protagonist-­antagonist relationship between a Brahmin man and a courtesan dancer was a common theme in a number of other films in this era, another notable example being Vipranarayana (1954), which starred Bhanumati. Nijhawan (2009) and Iyer (2020) both refer to the ubiquity of the vamp in Hindi-­ language cinema as a reflection of cultural anxiety about women’s sexuality. The performance sequences from two Hindu mythology-­based films choreographed by Pedda Satyam, Sree Venkateswara Mahatyam (1960) and Sitarama Kalyanam (1961), emphasize tempo and athleticism and de-­emphasize facial expressions and lyrical interpretation. The same fusion of vamp-­heroine occurred much later (c. 1990) in Hindu-­language cinema (see Iyer 2020). Some have noted the social impact of the beauty and wellness industries in India in parallel with the growth and commercialization of cinema (see Parmeswaran and Cardoza 2009). More recent feminist approaches have unpacked the materialist desires that fuel the affective power figures like Vijji harness (see Ghosh 2011; Mehta 2011). In her work on beauty and racial identity in transnational settings, Vanita Reddy (2016, 4–5) suggests that it is the very act of desiring to be like, if not to be, the aspirational cinematic woman that produces and perpetuates gendered sexual capital. Vazhuvoor Ramaiah Pillai trained a generation of young dancing women who went into cinema, including Kamala Laxman (b. 1934; also known as Baby Kamala) and Vyjanthimala Bali, among many others (see Krishnan 2019). His student K. J. Sarasa (1934–2012) was my guru’s guru.

146 • Notes to chapter 3

16 See also Majumdar (2009), which traces the early twentieth-­century genealogy of the actress-star in Hindi cinema. 4. Silence

1 2 3 4 5 6

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An early version of this chapter was previously published as “The Modern Courtesan: Gender, Religion, and Dance in Transnational India,” Feminist Review 126, no. 1 (2020): 54–73. I thank the editors for their feedback and advice. Mandapam, stage; nadaswaram, double-­reed wind instrument; thavil, double-­barrel drum. The giving of sindhoor, vermilion. Signifies a married Hindu woman. For example, the serial Nupur follows the career of a modern Indian dancer played by Hema Malini. For further film studies analysis, see, for example, Gopal and Moorti (2008) and Virdi (2003). For an account of how the Nataraja bronze statue became synonymous with Brahmin women and nationalist dance cultures in Tamil Nadu, see Allen (1997). This slippage has become ever more obvious since the 2020 election of Kamala Harris to the position of vice president. Partition refers to the British administrative decision to divide the region of subcontinental South Asia, from the Hindu Kush mountain range to the eastern border with China, into Muslim and Hindu areas, exclusively. There are a number of critical histories that clarify how and why the decision was made along religious lines and the consequences of this decision (see, e.g., Butalia 2000; Pandey 2007). The Indian classical dancer, particularly the bharatanatyam dancer, has operated as a transnational, Orientalist, and diplomatic tool in a variety of settings, from unesco heritage events in Paris beginning in the 1950s, to programming at world music festivals arranged through foreign embassies, to cultural programming at the 2002 and 2012 Olympics. For broader analysis of gender, nationalist, and transnationalist formulations, see Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem (1999). For South Asian film studies approaches to the processes and products of transnationalism, see Desai (2004). For more context and background on how Orientalism was established as a Eurocentric representational practice, see Said (1978). While many have debated the ideology of race in South Asia with a particular investment in separating categories of race from color and perhaps both from caste, recent work has further complicated and interrogated these categories (see, e.g., Prasad and Raghavan 2020). Women with dance and music training are broadly understood as more marketable on the marriage market (see Massey and Massey 1996, 76). Ahmed’s formulation also intersects with Lauren Berlant’s (2011) theorization of “cruel optimism.” In the Indian context, see also the theorizations of gender and sexuality in Nair and John (1998) and Sundar Rajan (1993). Master is a term used to address a guru or teacher. Auto is short for auto rickshaw.

Notes to chapter 4 • 147

12 Aramandi is loosely understood as a half-­sitting baseline posture in most south Indian classical dance forms. 13 Arguably this trend has since evolved and dovetailed with yoga tourism in India (see Putcha 2020). 14 See Yuva Bharati (http://www.yuvabharati.org/home/index.php). The amount of nri wealth that is funneled into representing India in the United States through Indian dance is on the ascent, especially in places like the San Francisco Bay Area. See, for example, Silicon Andhra, a 501(c)(3) organization that supports dance teachers from India to travel to the United States and train young women. This organization recently expanded into a degree-­granting institution (see https://www .siliconandhra.org/en/). 15 The Season, also referred to as the Music Season, takes place every December in Chennai and lasts about six weeks. During this period international tourism increases, with many visiting to attend the music and dance performances held at local art houses known as sabhas. See the website for the most recent schedule: Chennai December Season (http://www.chennaidecemberseason.com). 16 There is an equivalent to this adavu in bharatanatyam, though it is executed differently, with a twist. 17 The inverse of lasyam in dance vernacular is tandavam, which loosely translates as vigor. 18 This legacy, known as strī veṣam, connects across performance idioms and, as many scholars of theater and dance have noted (see Hansen 1998, 1999), is a symptom of hyperpatriarchy, Brahminism, and homo/transphobia under the logics of Hindu nationalism. In Marathi contexts, see the career of Bal Gandharva (Bakhle 2005, 90). 19 The half sari, midriff-­baring costume that Soorpanaka wears in this scene has solidified in the costume vernacular of South Asian cinema as the marker for a woman’s sexuality-­in-­excess. Additionally, the snake dance that most bharatanatyam dancers learn early in their formal training appears across a spectrum of dance cultures, especially fetishized representations of courtesans/vamps in cinema. The music for a snake dance consists mostly of rhythmic devices and instrumentation that stand decidedly outside of the aesthetics of classical music (see Khubchanani 2016; Nijhawan 2014). 20 Aihwa Ong describes this mechanism under neoliberalism as a form of “moral agency” (2006, 32). 21 During my fieldwork, social spaces like Pasha, which serve alcohol, often experienced police raids (see also Khubchandani 2020). 22 The dance was based on a rural style known in Tamil as kuthu. 23 A large body of literature on club culture emerging from queer studies delves into these matters (see, e.g., Buckland 2002; Muñoz 1999; Thornton 1995). I am particularly indebted to the work and insight of Kareem Khubchandani in this regard (see especially Khubchandani 2020). See also Jyoti Puri’s (2016) work on sexuality and the state in contemporary India.

148 • Notes to chapter 4

24 This move, which many see as the latest example of Hindu nationalist violence, led politicians like Vikram Saini to rejoice in televised footage: “Our men can marry fair-­skinned Kashmiri girls and buy land in Kashmir now” (see Kaul 2018). Epilogue 1 Saina Nehwal (b. 1990) won a bronze medal in women’s singles badminton at the 2012 Olympic Games held in London. 2 See the documentary The World before Her (dir. Nisha Pahuja, 2012), which juxtaposes India’s daughter in beauty pageants and in Hindutva training camps. 3 See also the Hindi film Dangal (dir. Nitesh Tiwari, 2016), which fictionalizes the life of Mahavir Singh Phogat, the Indian Olympics wrestling coach who went against tradition and trained his daughters to become wrestlers. Phogat is now a prominent member of the right-­wing Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party. For more information on traditions of men’s wrestling in north India, see Alter (1992). See also Baas (2020) on masculinity and gym culture in contemporary India. 4 This quote is an excerpt from an nfl press release announcing Chopra’s contract as spokesperson. The press release also included this description of Chopra, provided by her management team: “In 2011, Priyanka began her foray into the music world when she signed a global recording deal with Interscope Records / Desi Hits / 2101 Records. She immediately began work on her first US studio album, which is produced by RedOne. America got their first taste of Priyanka with her single ‘In My City,’ featuring will.i.am, which was the premiere song for the nfl Network’s Thursday Night Football series in 2012. Her recently released debut single, ‘Exotic,’ featuring Pitbull is the first single from her upcoming album, and her second single is expected to drop in November 2013. Priyanka has also descended on the Hollywood acting scene, lending her voice to Disney’s Planes, which hit theaters in August.” 5 A number of South Asian comedians have drawn attention to these racial formations in the US media landscape. For example, Hari Kondabolu’s documentary The Problem with Apu (2017) voiced criticism of representations of South Asians, especially men. In the documentary, Kondabolu examines the characterization of a familiar popular culture icon, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian immigrant featured on the animated sitcom The Simpsons. Kondabolu explores his encounters with negative stereotypes, racial microaggressions, and hate speech against people of South Asian descent, which he argues was normalized through the character Apu. Kondabolu, like many post-­1965 South Asian immigrants, grew up watching The Simpsons and cites it as a major influence on his comedy and social legibility. Initially, he appreciated Apu because the character was the only well-­ known representation of his family’s culture in the United States. Apu offered a touchstone for those who had to explain that Native Americans were not in fact South Asians and vice versa. As Kondabolu once explained in an interview with

Notes to epilogue • 149

the bbc (Blauvelt 2017), “Apu was the only Indian we had on tv at all, so I was happy for any representation as a kid.” As he grew older, however, Kondabolu became more critical of Apu, saying, “He’s funny, but that doesn’t mean this representation is accurate or right or righteous. It gets to the insidiousness of racism, though, because you don’t even notice it when it’s right in front of you.”

150 • Notes to epilogue

filmography

Year 1938

Title Mala Pilla

Director Gudavalli Ramabrahmam



Dance Choreographer N. Cheman Lal

Dancer Sundaramma

Year 1939

Title Raitu Bidda

Director Gudavalli Ramabrahmam



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Sundaramma

Year 1939

Title Vande Mataram

Director B. N. Reddy

Year 1939

Title Vara Vikrayam

Director Chittajallu Pullaiah

Year 1940

Title Malati Madhavam

Director Chittajallu Pullaiah

Year 1941

Title Bhaktimala

Director Haribai Desai



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Bhanumati

Year 1941

Title Dharma Patni

Director P. Pullaiah

Year 1942

Title Sri Seeta Rama Jananam

Director Ghantasala Balaramaiah



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Saudamini

Year 1943

Title Garuda Garvabhangam

Director Ghantasala Balaramaiah



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Year 1943

Title Krishna Prema

Director H. V. Babu



Dancer Bhanumati

Year 1943

Title Panthulamma

Director Gudavalli Ramabrahmam



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Year 1945

Title Swargaseema

Director B. N. Reddy



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Bhanumati

Year 1946

Title Thyagayya

Director Chittor V. Nagaiah



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Saritha Devi

152 • FILMOGRAPHY

Year 1947

Title Gollabhama

Director Chittajallu Pullaiah



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Anjali Devi

Year Title 1947 Palnati Yudham

Director L. V. Prasad, Gudavalli Ramabrahmam



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer T. Rajabala

Year 1947

Title Yogi Vemana

Director Kadri Venkata Reddy



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer M. V. Rajamma

Year 1949

Title Gunasundari Katha

Director Kadri Venkata Reddy



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer Malathi and Shanta Kumari

Year 1949

Title Laila Majnu

Director P. S. Ramakrishna Rao



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Lalitha and Padmini

Year 1949

Title Raksharekha

Director R. Padmanabhan



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Bhanumati and Anjali Devi

Year 1950

Title Shavukaru

Director L. V. Prasad



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer T. Kanakam

FILMOGRAPHY • 153

Year 1951

Title Malleswari

Director B. N. Reddy



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer Bhanumati

Year 1951

Title Mayalamari

Director P. Sridhar



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Anjali Devi

Year 1953

Title Devadasu

Director Vedantam Raghavaiah



Dance Choreographer Vempati Chinna Satyam

Dancer Lalitha

Year 1953

Title Kanna Talli

Director K. S. Prakash Rao



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer Rajasulochana

Year 1954

Title Peddamanushulu

Director Kadri Venkata Reddy



Dance Choreographer V. J. Sharma

Year 1954

Title Vipranarayana

Director P. S. Ramakrishna Rao



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer Bhanumati

Year 1955

Title Ardhangi

Director P. Pullaiah



Dance Choreographer Vempati Chinna Satyam

Dancer Savitri

154 • FILMOGRAPHY

Year 1956

Title Charana Dasi

Director T. Prakash Rao



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Ragini and Ambika Sukumaran

Year 1957

Title Maya Bazaar

Director Kadri Venkata Reddy



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer Savitri

Year 1957

Title Panduranga Mahatyam

Director Kamalakara Kameshwara Rao



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Anjali Devi

Year 1957

Title Sarangadhara

Director V. S. Raghavan



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer Rajasulochana

Year 1957

Title Bhagya Rekha

Director B. N. Reddy



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer E. V. Saroja

Year 1957

Title Suvarna Sundari

Director Vedantam Raghavaiah



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Anjali Devi

Year 1957

Title Vinayaka Chaviti

Director Samudrala Raghavacharya



Dance Choreographer Vempati Chinna Satyam

FILMOGRAPHY • 155

Year 1958

Title Appu Chesi Pappu Koodu

Director L. V. Prasad



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer E. V. Saroja

Year 1959

Title Jayabheri

Director P. Pullaiah



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Anjali Devi and Rajasulochana

Year 1960

Title Runanu Bandham

Director Vedantam Raghavaiah



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Anjali Devi

Year 1960

Title Sri Venkateswara Mahatyam

Director P. Pullaiah



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Savitri

Year 1961

Title Jagadeka Veeruni Katha

Director Kadri Venkata Reddy

Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer L. Vijayalakshmi and “Gemini” Chandra

Year 1961

Title Sitarama Kalyanam

Director Taraka Rama Rao Nandamuri



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Kusulakumari

Year 1962

Title Dakshayagnam

Director Kadaru Nagabhushanam



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer Ambika Sukumaran

156 • FILMOGRAPHY

Year 1963

Title Chaduvukunna Ammayilu

Director Adurthi Subba Rao



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer E. V. Saroja

Year 1963

Title Lavakusha

Director C. S. R. Rao and Chittajalu Pullayya



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Anjali Devi and Sukumari

Year 1963

Title Nartanasala

Director Kamalakara Kameshwara Rao



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer L. Vijayalakshmi

Year 1963

Title Sri Krishnarjuna Yudham

Director Kadri Venkata Reddy



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer B. Saroja Devi

Year 1964

Title Babruvahana

Director Samudrala Raghavacharya

Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer L. Vijayalakshmi and Rajasulochana

Year 1964

Title Poojaphalam

Director B. N. Reddy



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer L. Vijayalakshmi

Year 1965

Title Pandava Vanavasam

Director Kamalakara Kameshwara Rao



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer Hema Malini

FILMOGRAPHY • 157

Year 1966

Title Amrapali

Director Lekh Tandon



Dance Choreographer Gopi Krishna

Dancer Vyjayanthimala

Year 1966

Title Sree Krishna Tulabharam

Director Kamalakara Kameshwara Rao



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer L. Vijayalakshmi

Year 1967

Title Bhakta Prahalada

Director Chitrapu Narayana Rao



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer L. Vijayalakshmi

Year 1967

Title Eka Veera

Director C. S. R. Rao



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Rajasulochana

Year 1967

Title Rahasyam

Director Vedantam Raghavaiah



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam and Vedantam Raghavaiah

Dancer Krishna Kumari and B. Saroja Devi

Year 1967

Title Director Sakshi Bapu



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Dancer Vijaya Nirmala and Vijaya Lalitha

Year 1967

Title Sri Krishnavataram

Director Kamalakara Kameshwara Rao



Dance Choreographer Vempati Chinna Satyam

Dancer L. Vijayalakshmi and Sukanya

158 • FILMOGRAPHY

Year 1971

Title Choti Bahu

Director K. B. Tilak



Dance Choreographer Vempati Pedda Satyam

Dancer Jayshree T.

Year 1971

Title Sree Krishna Vijayam

Director Kamalakara Kameshwara Rao



Dance Choreographer Vempati Chinna Satyam

Dancer Hema Malini

Year 1973

Title Director Andala Ramudu Bapu



Dance Choreographer Pasumarti Krishnamurthi

Year 1975

Title Director Rama Anjaneya Yuddam Bapu



Dance Choreographer Vempati Chinna Satyam

Dancer Halam

Year 1976

Title America Ammayi

Director Singeetham Srinivasa Rao



Dance Choreographer Vempati Chinna Satyam

Dancer Annick Chaymotty

Year 1977

Title Shri Ram Vanvas

Director Kamalakara Kameshwara Rao



Dance Choreographer V. Seshu Parupalli

Dancer Kalpana

Year 1979

Title Sankarabharanam

Director K. Viswanath



Dance Choreographer V. Seshu Parupalli

Dancer Manju Bhargavi

Dancer Kanakadurga

FILMOGRAPHY • 159

Year 1980

Title Saptapadi

Director K. Viswanath



Dance Choreographer V. Seshu Parupalli

Dancer Sabita Bhamidipati

Year 1981

Title Premamandiram

Director Narayana Rao Dasari



Dance Choreographer Saleem and Surekha

Dancer Jaya Prada

Year 1982

Title Director Krishna Avataram Bapu



Dance Choreographer Vempati Chinna Satyam

Dancer Sridevi and Vijayashanthi

Year 1982

Title Subhalekha

Director K. Viswanath



Dance Choreographer V. Seshu Parupalli

Dancer Tulasi

Year 1983

Title Director Ananada Bhairavi Jandhyala



Dance Choreographer V. Seshu Parupalli

Dancer Malavika Sarkar

Year 1983

Title Sagara Sangamam

Director K. Viswanath



Dance Choreographer V. Seshu Parupalli

Dancer S. P. Sailaja and Maju Bhargavi

Year 1984

Title Utsav

Director Girish Karnad



Dance Choreographer Suresh Bhatt

Dancer Rekha

160 • FILMOGRAPHY

Year 1986

Title Director Alapana Vamsi



Dance Choreographer S. P. Anand

Dancer Bhanupriya

Year 1987

Title Sruti Layalu

Director K. Viswanath



Dance Choreographer V. Seshu Parupalli

Dancer Sumalatha

Year 1988

Title Swarnakamalam

Director K. Viswanath



Dance Choreographer V. Seshu Parupalli

Dancer Bhanupriya

Year 2004

Title Swarabhishekam

Director K. Viswanath



Dance Choreographer L. Bhashan

Dancer Laya

Year 2006

Title Umrao Jaan

Director J. P. Dutta



Dance Choreographer Vaibhavi Merchant

Dancer Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

Year 2010

Title Subhapradam

Director K. Viswanath



Dance Choreographer Vedantam Venkatachalapathy (Venku)

Dancer Vedantam Venkatachalapathy (Venku)

Note: In some cases, only the choreographer is listed in the credits, so I have had to reconstruct some of the dancer details using alternate sources.

FILMOGRAPHY • 161

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Index

abhinayam, 23, 129 Abu-­Lughod, Lila, 84, 141n40 aḍavu, 73, 96, 103 – 4, 129 affective economies, 10 – 11, 14, 42, 145n6 affective labor, 39 affective national communities, formation of, 58 Ahmed, Sara, 10, 12 – 13, 18, 39, 94, 113, 139n26 air (All-­India Radio), 53, 77, 87 Aladdin, xii – xiii, 120 Allen, Matthew Harp, 85 All-­India Radio (air), 53, 77, 87 Alonso, Isabel Huacuja, 53, 143n12 ammayi, 24, 129 Amrapali, 82 – 83 Anderson, Benedict, 58 anti-­Asian sentiment, 10 anticasteism, 24 anticolonialism, 3, 26, 136n8 anti-­immigrant racism, xiii – xv, 3 anti-­immigrant sentiment, 9 – 10 anupallavi, 129

Apu Nahasapeemapetilon (fictional character), 149n5 arangetram, xiii, 12, 38 – 39, 129, 134n5, 139n29 arangetram market, 12 archives, of Indian films, 47 – 48 ardhamandala/aramanḍi, 129 Arendt, Hannah, 12 Arondekar, Anjali, 41 Arundale, Rukmini, 26, 78 Asian, as racial category, 10 Asian American critical race and feminist studies, 5 Asiatic Barred Zone, 9 auntie’s basement, as South Asian American pedagogical space, 38 Austin, John L., 140n34 autoethnography, 16 – 17 Bahadur, Gaiutra, 9 Balamuralikrishna, M., 87 Balasaraswati, R., 77 Ball-­Phillips, Rachel, 54

Balsara, Bhicaji Framji, 138n21 Barnouw, Eric, 53 Bartley, Marcus, 63 – 64 Basu, Srimati, 94 bhāgavatam, 78 – 79, 129 Bhanumati Ramakrishna, 15, 19, 85 – 86; Brahmin caste of, 49 – 51, 60; citizenship, performance and, 60; courtesan background of, 49 – 51; feminine beauty and, 51, 57, 60 – 66; in Krishna Prema, 57; in Malati Madhavam, 57; in Malleswari, 61 – 62; in Swargaseema, 54 – 56, 61 – 62; Telugu womanhood and, 57 – 58; in Vara Vikrayam, 56 – 57; voice of, 56 – 58 bharatanatyam, xiii – xiv, 135n1, 148n19; kuchipudi and, xi, 1, 3, 71 – 74, 78, 80 – 81 bhōgam, 21 – 22, 42, 54, 129, 141n1; dehumanization of, 29; as mythical courtesan, 24 – 25; in Raitu Bidda, 24, 27 Binaca Geetmala, 53 – 54 bindis, 106 – 7 black feminists, 16, 46 Blood and Sand, 54 body: emotion and, 113; fetishization of, 28; healthy, 91; hips, in demonstrating gender and sexuality, 105; men, at kc, athleticism and, 104; racialization of, 119, 140n31; shame, silence and, 101 – 6. See also gendered body; voice and body Bollywood cinema, 1 – 3, 116 – 17 Bombay Devadasi Protection Act of 1934, 26, 58 – 59 Brahmin beauty, 64 – 65 Brahmin caste, 129, 134n6, 134n8; of Bhanumati, 49 – 51, 60; in Mala Pilla, 32; in Raitu Bidda, 33 Brahmin dance cultures, 18, 76, 85, 95 Brahmin dancer, 22, 24, 57 Brahmin film actresses, 29 – 31 Brahmin gurus, 34, 48, 75 – 76, 78 Brahminical marriage rituals, 60 Brahminical musical knowledge, 20, 91 Brahmin men: kuchipudi and, 81; media technology and, 64; music and dance training for, 65; songs composed by, 87; on woman’s body, 36, 106

182 • Index

Brahmin men’s culture, Indian culture and, 46 Brahmin womanhood, 18 – 19, 25, 30 – 31, 46 – 47, 60 British colonial administration: on devadāsī caste category, 58 – 59; partition of India by, 147n6; on sex work, 29, 59 British colonies, 8 – 9 burra katha, 129, 142n18 Bush, George H. W., 139n24 Butler, Judith, 13, 140n34 Carby, Hazel, 16, 46 caste: class and, 51, 55; devadāsī, as category under colonialism, 58 – 59; gender and, 19 – 20, 32 – 33, 42, 46, 62 – 63, 70 – 71; gender, linguistic identity, and, 71; gender, race, and, 93 – 94; heterosexuality and, 93 – 94; in Indian cinema, 46, 66; language, social power, and, 85; in Mala Pilla, 32; race and, 11 – 12, 20, 26, 93 – 94, 106 – 10; sexuality and, 25, 32, 80; sex work and, 29; system, Gandhi’s criticism of, 32; in Telugu cinema, 33 – 34, 47, 50, 60; womanhood and, 18, 30 – 32. See also bhōgam; Brahmin caste; Dalit caste caste identity: gendered performance cultures and, 78; in south Indian cinema, 60; of Telugu singer-­dancer-­actresses, 15 casteism, xv – xvi, 24, 36 Castor, N. Fadeke, 139n28 charanam, 87, 130 Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra, 77, 146n9 Chauncey, George, xv Chawla, Juhi, 110 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 16, 110 Chinese women, 9 Chitnis, Leela, 30 Chopra Jonas, Priyanka, 118 – 20, 149n4 cis-­heteropatriarchy, 5 citizenship: Arendt, on voice and body in public cultures and, 12; flexible, 11 – 12, 71; as gendered and racialized practice, 2 – 3; heterosexuality and, 26; Indian womanhood and, 25 – 26; Indian

womanhood performed as, 4 – 6, 11; Indian women and, 2 – 3, 19, 72, 85; India’s nation building and, 58; language and, 9 – 10, 19, 70 – 71, 76; marriage and, 59 – 60; performance and, 4, 58, 60; postcolonial nationalism and, 6; south Indian, 65, 76; transnational, 7, 12; transnational feminist method on, 3; women’s bodies, in constructions of, 71 – 72 civil rights legislation, 10 class, caste and, 51, 55 Cold War, 10 Collins, Patricia Hill, 16, 46 colonial India, 41, 59 colonialism, 10, 13, 18, 107, 136n10; nationalism, 42; zamīndār and, 34 Cooper, Brittney, 115 cosmetics advertisements, 108 – 10 country music, 7 – 8 courtesan, 79; Bhanumati as, 49 – 51; mythical, 24 – 30, 34, 41 – 42, 86 – 87. See also bhōgam critical ethnography, historiography and, 69 – 70 critical historiography, 47 critical race theory, 16 – 17, 20 Dakshinamurthy, Susarla, 87 Dalit caste, 2, 130, 141n11 dance, promise of happiness and, 91 – 95 dance forms, linguistic groups and, 72 – 74 dance training, 65, 74 – 75, 84 – 85, 94 – 95 Dangal, 149n3 darṣan, 64, 130 Davuluri, Nina, 1 – 4, 11, 13, 17, 19, 85 Delgado, Richard, 16 devadāsī, 4, 58 – 59, 130 Devadasu, 77 – 78 Devdas (Chattopadhyay), 77, 146n9 Devi, Anjali, 143n6 Devi, Padmavati, 36 – 37, 39 diaspora, 136n10 diasporic Indian communities, 8 Douglas, Mary, 17 Duran Duran, xiii

East India Company, 9, 138n19 embodiment, 12 – 13 English language, 70 – 71 enslaved Africans, 8 – 9 equity, gender and, 13 eroticism, 50 – 51 ethnography, 3; autoethnography, 16 – 17; critical, 69 – 70; critical historiography and, 47; in India and US, 90 – 91; self-­ reflexive, 17 – 18, 22 ethnonationalism, 107, 113 Euro-­American gaze, 93 Fair & Lovely advertisements, 108 – 10 “Fancy,” 7 – 8 fec (Film Enquiry Committee), 47 – 48 Femina, 53 – 54 feminine beauty, 19; Bhanumati and, 51, 57, 60 – 66; in Chennai nightclub scene, 110 – 12; Davuluri and, 85; discourses of ugliness and, 107; in Euro-­American gaze, 93; fetishization of, 47; lighting techniques of Bartley and, 63 – 64; racialized, 46, 97, 107 – 10; sexuality and, 106 – 7; shame and, 84 – 86; song, dance, and, 63 femininity: dance training and, 74 – 75, 95; heteronormativity and, 105 – 6; of Indian dancers, athleticism and, 104 feminism: Asian American studies, 5; critical race theory and, 16, 20; on gender and women, 4; happiness and, 113; queer studies and, 41; transnational method, 3 – 4, 6, 17 – 18; white liberal, 13 feminist ethnography, 17 – 18 feminist killjoy, 12 – 13 feminist praxis, 12 – 16, 18, 134n10 feminists: black, 16, 46; Indian, 16, 25 – 26, 135n7; on Indian womanhood, 25, 135n7; North American, 25 – 26; talking back to forces of power, 91; on voice and body, 12 – 13 film dance, classical dance and, 73, 75 – 76 Film Enquiry Committee (fec), 47 – 48 Films Division of India, 47 – 48 flexible citizenship, 11 – 12, 71

Index • 183

gajjelu, 100, 130 gamaka, 101, 130 Gandhi, Mahatma, 32 Garuda Garuvabhangam, 57 Gaunt, Kyra, 15 – 16 gender: behavior, tradition, and, 57; caste and, 19 – 20, 32 – 33, 42, 46, 62 – 63, 70 – 71; caste, linguistic identity, and, 71; caste, race, and, 93 – 94; equity and, 13; heteronormative affect and, 104 – 5; Indian dancer and, 38 – 39, 91 – 93, 104 – 6; marriage, vulnerability, and, 94; performance and, 47, 105 – 6, 140n34; in performance cultures, 13; race and, 93 – 94, 96 – 97; sexuality and, 105; social status and, 37; women and, 4 gendered body: athletic, 115 – 17, 119 – 20; Brahmin men on, 36, 106; in constructions of citizenship, 71 – 72; dancing, 72; hips of, 105; of Indian women, 4, 85 – 86, 90, 115 – 17, 120; musical sound and, 56; sexuality and, 35 – 36, 38 – 39, 105, 111 gendered performance cultures, 78 gender oppression, 17 German Expressionism, 63 Gibson, Margaret, 137n13 Gollabhama, 41 grandhikam, 51, 60 – 61, 130, 143n8, 143n10 Grewal, Inderpal, 10 guru, 34, 48, 75 – 76, 78, 130 guru-­sishya dynamic, 23, 36, 38 – 39, 54, 77 – 81 Habermas, Jürgen, 58 harijan, 130, 141n11 Hartman, Saidiya, 16 Hayworth, Rita, 54 hereditary performance communities and cultures, 26, 31 – 32, 42, 54, 80, 84 – 85, 87, 134n5 heteronormativity, 94 – 95, 104 – 6 heteropatriarchy: cis-­heteropatriarchy, 5; colonial epistemologies in, 41; feminist killjoy conceptualization and, 13; Hindu, 20, 91, 113; marriage and, 94 – 95; sexuality, expressions of south Indian womanhood, and, 56

184 • Index

heterosexism, 86 heterosexuality, 26, 84, 93 – 94 Hindi cinema, 15, 28, 72, 80, 108 Hindi film songs, 53, 66 – 69 Hindi language, 45, 66 – 69, 117 Hindi-­Urdu language, in film songs, 68 Hindu heteropatriarchy, 20, 91, 113 Hindu identity, bindis as marks of, 106 – 7 Hindu immigrants, 12, 92 Hindu India, Indian dancer representing, 92 – 93 Hindu Marriage Act, 58 – 59 Hindu marriage rituals, 60 Hindu nationalism, 91, 95 – 96 Hindu patriarchy, 25 Hobsbawm, Eric, 58 Hollywood, 63 honor and shame dichotomy, 84 hooks, bell, 16, 24 – 25, 71, 91 Immigration Act of 1917, 9 – 10, 138n20 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 1, 7 – 8, 10 – 12, 90, 135n2, 137n15, 139n24 immigration laws, banning nonwhite immigration, in Canada and Australia, 139n25 Incredible !ndia advertisement, 121 indentured servants, 8 – 9 India: Hindu, south Indian dancer and, 92 – 93; Indian dancer as representation of, 91 – 93; linguistic states in, 70 – 73; nation building, citizenship, and, 58; Pandey attack in, 102; partition of, 147n6; reform era, 26 – 27, 35; transnational, caste and race in, 106 – 10; US and, 4 – 5, 20, 24, 30, 71 – 73, 90 – 91, 96 – 100. See also south India Indian Americans, 2, 11 Indian cinema: archives of, 47 – 48; beauty, caste, and womanhood in, 66; Bhanumati in, 49 – 51; Brahmin womanhood in, 60; caste in, 46, 66; caste and gender politics in, 62 – 63; early era of, 31; film music, 53 – 54, 65 – 66, 77 – 78; golden age, songs of, 53; Hollywood cinema and, 63; Independence era, 46, 64, 66; Indian womanhood in, 46 – 47, 66; Marathi films,

54. See also south Indian cinema; Telugu cinema Indian classical dance: category of, 30; dancers as transnational, 147n7; film dance and, 73, 75 – 76; misogyny and, 96; Orientalism and, 97; temple jewelry in, 5, 136n9 Indian dancers: athleticism of, 80 – 81, 85 – 86, 104, 113; author’s mother as, 13 – 14; beauty and, 51, 106 – 7; beauty, shame, and, 84 – 86; Bhanumati, 49 – 51; bodies of, 72, 74, 97; bodies of, sound and, 100 – 101; Brahmin, 22, 24, 57; classical, 19 – 20; daughters as, 39 – 40; in depiction of Krishna, 34 – 35; feminist analysis of, 20, 91; in feminist praxis, 13; gender and, 38 – 39, 91 – 93, 104 – 6; Indian womanhood and, 5 – 6, 8, 11, 38; in Mala Pilla, 32 – 33; marriageability of, 14 – 15, 99; musical accompaniment for, 101; nonblack gendered identity of, 7; nri, 97 – 99, 102, 104; Orientalized and fetishized, 20, 91; public persona of, 3; racialized, 19; as racialized and casteist affective economy, 11; in Raitu Bidda, 38 – 40, 42; as representation of India, 91 – 93; siggu and, 42; south, 1, 19, 42, 81 – 82, 92 – 93, 113; in Swargaseema, 54 – 55; in Telugu cinema, 48 – 49, 75 – 78; training for, 84 – 85, 94; transnational and gendered understandings of, 10; US-­based, 99 – 100, 104; voice of, 3, 13 – 15, 58; voice and body of, 7, 15 – 16, 113. See also bhōgam; kuchipudi; specific topics Indian dance spaces and studios: beauty and sexuality in, 106 – 7; kc, 22 – 23, 95 – 99, 101 – 4, 106, 111; North American, 94, 96 – 99; nri dancers in, 97 – 99; sexual harassment, abuse, and assault in, 98, 104; silence in, 95 – 97, 101 – 6; talking back in, 97 – 100; Telugu women in, 98; white women in, 96 – 97 Indian diaspora, 8 – 10 Indian feminists, 16, 25 – 26, 135n7 Indian immigrant families, in US, 8 Indian immigrants, to US, xiii – xv, 8, 10, 90; Hindu, 92; Telugu speakers, 19

Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 47 – 48 Indian womanhood, 106; Bhanumati and, 64; Brahmin, 18 – 19, 25, 30 – 31, 46 – 47, 60; citizenship and, 25 – 26; citizenship, performance, and, 4 – 6, 11; feminists on, 25, 135n7; Indian and black feminists on, 16; in Indian cinema, 46 – 47, 66; Indian dancer and, 5 – 6, 8, 11, 38; mythical courtesan and, 26, 30; narratives of, 2, 16; in North American context, 25; performance of, 4 – 6, 11, 60; racialized, 9; south, 18 – 20, 24 – 25, 30 – 31, 49 – 51, 56; Telugu, 24, 57 – 58; Telugu cinema and, 20, 50 – 51; ugly women and, 106 – 10 Indian women: in America, xiii – xv, 15; on Binaca Geetmala, 53 – 54; bodies of, 4, 85 – 86, 115 – 17, 120; bodies of, fetishization of, 28; bodies of, religious identity and, 90; bodies and voices of, 2, 7, 91; citizenship and, 2 – 3, 19, 72, 85; ideal, in Hindu patriarchy, 25; indentured servants, 9; marriage, vulnerability, and, 94; mythical courtesan and, 28 – 29; nonconjugal sexuality of, 26 – 27; nri dancers and, 104; performance, marriage, and, 58 – 59; representational power of, Indian dancer and, 94; research on, in North American academy, xvi; sexual behavior of, 58; singing and, xi – xiii; subjectivities of, 3; Telugu Brahmin, 84, 90, 98; in Telugu cinema, 31 – 32 “Innāḷḷavale Kādammā, Muvva Gōpāludu,” 35, 40, 42 Islamophobia, of Hindu nationalism, 96 Jasmine (fictional character), xii – xiii, 120, 122, 133n4 jathi, 85, 130 jāvali, 55, 130, 143n13 Jayabheri, 78 – 80 Jayamma, B., 54 kaĉēri, 79, 87, 101, 130 Kanchanamala, 32 – 33

Index • 185

karnāṭak music and singing, xi – xiii, 85, 87, 101, 130 kathak, 82, 85, 130 kathā sangrahamu, 52 kc (Kuchipudi Center), 22 – 23, 95 – 99, 101 – 4, 106, 111 Khandaan, 67 Khubchandani, Kareem, 142n16 kīrtanam, 52, 55, 87, 130 Kondabolu, Hari, 149n5 Krishnamurthi, Pasumarti, 49 Krishnamurthy, Salva, 35 Krishna Prema, 57 Krishnaswamy, S., 53 kṛiti, 58, 130 Kshetreyya, 35 kuchipudi: bharatanatyam and, xi, 1, 3, 71 – 74, 78, 80 – 81; Brahmin men and, 81; film dance and, 75; heteronormativity, gendered body, and, 105; Hindu nationalism and, 95; in Jayabheri, 79; Satyam, V. C., as choreographer of, 77; in south Indian cinema, 95; strī veṣam tradition of, 106; studio, silence in, 95 – 97; Telugu and, 74 – 76; in Telugu cinema, 80 – 81 Kuchipudi Center (kc), 22 – 23, 95 – 99, 101 – 4, 106, 111 Ku Klux Klan, xiv Kulthūm, Umm, 143n8 Kumar, Rathna, 145n5 kum-­kum, 89, 130 Lakshmana (mythical character), 107 – 8 Lalitha, 77 language: caste, gender, and, 62 – 63; caste, social power, and, 85; citizenship and, 9 – 10, 19, 70 – 71, 76; culture and, 72; identity and, 69 – 70; Immigration Act of 1917 on, 9 – 10; mother tongue, 70 – 76; performance cultures and, 19, 69 – 70; as place of struggle, 71; power and, 71 lāsya narthaki, 130 Levine, Philippa, 29, 59 lighting techniques, of Bartley, 63 linguistic groups, dance forms and, 72 – 74

186 • Index

linguistic identity, 15, 19, 54, 71 – 72 linguistic states, in India, 70 – 73 lip-­synching, 74 literacy and language, Immigration Act of 1917 on, 9 – 10 Lorde, Audre, xvi Lux soap advertisements, 29 – 30, 81 – 82, 109 Madras, 32, 70, 72 – 74, 78, 87 – 88, 133n1, 142n1 Madras Devadasi Act of 1947, 59 Madras Music Academy, 102 Mahabharata, 79, 86 Maharaja College of Music and Dance, 65 Mahmood, Saba, 113 Majumdar, Neepa, 15 Mala Pilla, 31 – 33, 40 Malati Madhavam, 57 male gaze, 38 – 39 Malik, Sakshi, 115 – 16 Malleswari, 43 – 45, 60 – 62, 144n20 “Manchidinamu Nēḍē,” 55 maṇdapam, 89, 130 Mankekar, Purnima, 51 Marathi films, 54 marriage: Brahmin womanhood and, 47; citizenship and, 59 – 60; Hindu rituals, 60; performance, law, and, 58 – 60; as “promise of happiness,” 94 – 95; in south India, 144n17 Maya Bazaar, 63, 142n14 McEathron, Margaret Nixon, 133n3 McEntire, Reba, 7 – 8 mejuvāṇi, 78, 131 memory work, 72 misogyny, classical dance and, 96 Miss America pageant, 1, 3, 135n1 model immigrants, 10 model minority, 11, 134n9 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 25 mother tongue, 70 – 76 mrigasirsha, 33 – 34, 36 – 37, 131 mudra, xi; mrigasirsha, 33 – 34, 36 – 37, 131; in Raitu Bidda, 34 – 37, 39; simhamukha, 33 – 34, 36, 132

multiculturalism: Indian Americans and, 11; transnationalism and, 7, 120 Muñoz, José Esteban, 140n39 Murthy, M. V. N., 105 mythical courtesan, 24 – 30, 34, 41 – 42, 86 – 87 naḍaka, 103, 131 nādaswaram, 89, 131 Nagaiah, 54 nāmakaranam, 131, 139n29 Narayan, Kirin, 140n38 Nartanasala, 86 – 87 nāṭakam, 78 – 79, 131 Nataraja statue, 91 – 92 National Film Archives of India (nfai), 19, 47 – 48, 55 National Football League (nfl), 118, 149n4 nationalism, 3, 26 – 27, 66, 71, 73; colonialism and, 42; ethnonationalism, 107, 113; Hindu, 91, 95 – 96; postcolonial, 6; in south India, 144n19 naṭṭuvangam, 78, 131 Naturalization Act of 1790, 138n17 nāṭya, 131 nāyika, 131 – 32, 141 neoliberalism, 94, 110 nfai (National Film Archives of India), 19, 47 – 48, 55 nfl (National Football League), 118, 149n4 nonconjugal sexuality, 26 – 27 nonresident Indians (nris), 22, 97 – 99, 102, 104 nṛṭṭa, 23, 131 “Ōhō Pāvurama,” 56 Ong, Aihwa, 11 – 12, 71 oppositional gaze, 24 – 25 “Ordinary World,” xiii Oriental Exclusion Act of 1875, 138n18 Orientalism, 20, 91, 97, 108, 113, 120 padam, 35, 77, 79, 131 Padukone, Deepika, 116 – 18 pallavi, 87, 130 – 31 Pandava Vanavasam, 86 – 87

Pandey, Jyoti Singh, 1 – 2, 4, 13, 17 – 18, 102, 115 Pandian, M. S. S., 46 Pasha nightclub, 110 – 12 pātalu, 52 pāta pustakālu, 53 patriarchal casteism, 36 patriarchy, 25, 39, 84, 96, 112 paṭṭu, 89, 131 paurāṇikam, 60, 86 – 87 pāvura, 56, 131 performance: cinema and, 4; citizenship and, 4, 58, 60; cultures, feminist scholarship on, 13; gender and, 47, 105 – 6, 140n34; of Indian womanhood, 4 – 6, 11, 60; law, marriage, and, 58 – 60; in mother tongues, 72 – 76; sexuality and, 58; sex work and, 59; womanhood and, 20, 41 performance cultures, 13; classical pedagogy for, 85; dominant-­caste, 42; gendered, caste identity and, 78; genre in, 71; hereditary, 42, 134n5; language and, 19, 69 – 70; mythical courtesans and, 28; mytho-­historical understandings of, 87; nationalism and, 73 performativity, embodiment and, 13 perugu, 33, 131 Phogat, Mahavir Singh, 149n3 “Pilichina Biguvaṭarā,” 43 – 45 Pillai, Perumanoor Gopinath, 78 Pillai, Thiruvidaimarudur Mahalingam, 78 Pillai, Vazhuvoor Ramaiah, 86, 146n15 Pinney, Christopher, 64 playback singers, 31 pleasure and disgust, mythical courtesan and, 27 – 29, 41 – 42 postcolonial and immigrant subjectivity, xvi postcolonial and subaltern research, on Indian women, 4 postcolonialism, 84, 139n27, 139n30 postcolonial nationalism, citizenship and, 6 Prasad, M. Madhava, 61 problem of listening, xvi Problem with Apu, The, 149n5 prostitution, public performance and, 59 purdah, 86, 131

Index • 187

queer studies, 41 race: caste and, 11 – 12, 20, 26, 93 – 94, 106 – 10; gender and, 93 – 94, 96 – 97; womanhood, Indian dance studios, and, 96 – 97 racial categories, 10, 12 racial identifications, 7 – 8 racialization: of beauty, 64; of body, 119, 140n31 racialized and sexualized subjectivities, 39 racialized beauty, 46, 97, 107 – 10 racialized categories, 25 racism: anti-­immigrant, xiii – xv, 3; casteism and, xv – xvi; Davuluri on, 3; in Fair & Lovely advertisements, 110; of Trump, 137n12 Radio Ceylon, 53 rāgam, 65, 85, 87, 131 Raghavaiah, Vedantam, 22 – 23, 40 – 41, 48 – 49, 77, 80 Raghu, 22 – 25, 30 – 31, 34, 39 – 42 Rahman, Aamer, 10 Rai Bachchan, Aishwarya, 28, 110 Raitu Bidda, 24; in antifeudal propaganda, 38; Indian dancer in, 38 – 40, 42; mudras in, 34 – 37, 39; pedagogical scene of, 38 – 40; Sundaramma in, 23, 27, 30 – 40, 42; uses of shame in, 40 – 42; zamīndār in, 33 – 34 rāja, 79, 131 rājanarthaki, 79 – 80, 131 Rajasulochana, 79 Ramabrahmam, Gudavalli, 23, 31 – 33, 62 – 63 Ramaswamy, Periyar E., 141n12 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 70 Ramayana, 107 – 8 Ramberg, Lucinda, 94 rangapraveṣam, 38, 131, 134n5 Ranger, Terence, 58 Rao, Ghantasala Venkateswara, 64 Rao, Nandamuri Taraka Rama, 61 Rao, Pemmaraju Surya, 101 rasa, 42, 131 rasikas, 77, 131 Reddy, Bommireddy Narsimha, 31, 61 – 64 Reddy, Vanita, 110

188 • Index

Rege, Sharmila, 16 Rekha, 27 Rushdie, Salman, xvi, 134n10 sabha, 76, 80 – 81, 86, 132, 146n8 sāhityam, 81, 132 “Salalita Rāga Sudhārasasāram,” 87 Salonga, Maria Lea Carmen Imutan, 133n4 sampradāya, 73, 132 saptapadi, 59 – 60 Saran, Sathya, 53 – 54 sargam, 52 – 53, 132 Sarma, Nagabhusan, 75 Satyam, Pedda, 80 – 81 Satyam, Vempati Chinna, 77, 80 Savitri, 52 Sayani, Ameen, 53 Season in Chennai, the, 101 – 2, 148n15 Sen, Sushmita, 110 September 11, 2001, 137n12 sexism, 46 – 47 sexuality: caste and, 25, 32, 80; dance and, 73, 80; feminine beauty and, 106 – 7; gender and, hips demonstrating, 105; gendered body and, 35 – 36, 38 – 39, 105, 111; heteropatriarchal, 56; of “Innalavade Kadamma, Muvva Gopaludu,” 35; nonconjugal, 26 – 27; performance, marriage, and, 58 – 59 sex work, 7 – 8, 29, 59 shame: beauty and, 84 – 86; silence and, 41 – 42, 101 – 6; uses of, in Raitu Bidda, 40 – 42 Shankar, Uday, 78 Shantakumari, 57 Shri Ram Vanvas, 108 siggu, 42, 132 silence, shame and, 41 – 42, 101 – 6 Silicon Andhra, 105 simhamukha, 33 – 34, 36, 132 Simpsons, The (tv show), 149n5 sindhoor dānam, 89, 132 Sindhu, Pusarala Venkata, 115 śiṣya, 132; guru-­sishya dynamic, 23, 36, 38 – 39, 54, 77 – 81 “skilled labor” and “profession,” 9 – 10

slavery, 8 – 9 somatic historiography, 16 Soneji, Davesh, 24, 27, 143n13 Soorpanaka (mythical character), 107 – 8 sound: body of dancer and, 100 – 101; in Telugu cinema, 3, 31, 52, 56 South Asian American women, 119 – 20 South Asian expressive cultures, 84 South Asian performance studies, 5 South Asian public cultures, shaming and silencing of women in, 41 – 42 South Asian womanhood, in US media, 119 south India: citizenship in, 65, 76; gendered behavior and tradition in, 57; Ghantasala and, 64; marriage in, 144n17; nationalism in, 144n19; nightclubs in, 110 – 12; Telugu identity and, 81 south Indian cinema: caste identities in, 60; dance as athletic practice in, 80; darshan in, 64; Indian dancers in, 76; kuchipudi in, 95. See also Telugu cinema south Indian dancer, 1, 19, 42, 81 – 82, 92 – 93, 113 south Indian immigrants, to US, 19 south Indian performance history, 27, 80 south Indian public cultures, 15 south Indian womanhood, 18 – 20, 24 – 25, 30 – 31, 49 – 51, 56 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 135n7 Sree Krishna Tulabharam, 82 – 85 Sri, Schaya, 120, 122 Srinivas, S. V., 31, 33 – 34, 54, 60 – 61 śṛṅgāra, 35, 132 Stoler, Ann, 47 strī veṣam, 106, 132, 148n18 Subbalakshmi, M. S., 87 Subramanian, Lakshmi, 65, 76 Sundaramma, 3, 18, 49; disappearance, after 1940s, 30 – 32, 40 – 41; in Gollabhama, 41; Indian womanhood and, 25; in Mala Pilla, 31 – 33, 40; mythical courtesan and, 30; in Raitu Bidda, 23, 27, 30 – 40, 42; voice of, 31, 40 – 41 Sunderesan, Priya, 105 Suryakumari, Tangaturi, 33 – 34, 49, 57 Susheela, P., 85

swara-­sthānam, 77, 132 Swargaseema, 48 – 49, 54 – 56, 59 – 64 Swarnakamalam, 90 – 91, 95, 112 tālam, 85, 87, 132 talking back, 91, 97 – 100 Tamil Brahmin families, 81, 84 – 85 Tamil cinema, 72 Tamil culture, bharatanatyam in, 73 Tamil film songs, 112 Tamil identities, 71 Tamil language: bharatanatyam and, 74; Telugu language and, 74, 78 Tamil-­speaking regions, of India, 54, 70, 134n5 Telangana, 70, 145n1 Telugu Brahmin community, xiii, xv Telugu Brahmin dance directors, 49 Telugu Brahmin men’s history, 30 Telugu Brahmin women, 84, 90, 98 Telugu cinema: anticaste revolutionaries in, 31; caste in, 33 – 34, 47, 50, 60; dance and athleticism in, 80 – 81; grandhikam in, 51; Indian dance in, 48 – 49, 75 – 78; Indian womanhood and, 20, 50 – 51; Indian women in, 31 – 32; kuchipudi in, 80 – 81; literary Telugu in, 60 – 61; paurāṇikam, 60, 86 – 87; post-­Independence era, 19; production, shifting from Madras to Hyderabad, 87 – 88; songbooks, 52 – 53; songs from, 45, 56; sound in, 3, 31, 52, 56; south Indian womanhood in, 50 – 51; Tamil cinema and, 72; themes of, Bhanumati and, 57 Telugu culture: kuchipudi in, 75 – 76; language politics in, 70 – 71 Telugu identities, 71, 81 Telugu language, 23 – 24, 45, 65; kuchipudi and, 74 – 76; literary, 60 – 61; Tamil language and, 74, 78 Telugu literature, 35 Telugu public cultures, 15, 18, 50 Telugu songbooks, 49 – 53, 58, 62 Telugu-­speaking regions, of India, 1, 60, 65, 134n5, 145n1 Telugu womanhood, 24, 57 – 58

Index • 189

Thakore, Yashoda, 102 – 3 thāmbūlam, 98 – 99, 132 tham-­that-­tha-­din-­ha, 102 – 3 Tharu, Susie, 16 thavil, 89, 132 “Third World Woman,” 25 Thursday Night Football, 119 Thyagayya, 56, 143n14 Time magazine cover, June 2006, 5 – 6 Tinker, Hugh, 8 – 9 tīrmānam, 79, 132 transnational citizenship, 7, 12 transnational connectivities, 10 transnational feminist method, 3 – 4, 6, 17 – 18 transnational India, caste and race in, 106 – 10 transnationalism, 8 – 10, 12, 97, 112, 122, 136n11, 137n12; multiculturalism and, 7, 120 transnational South Asian popular culture, 117 Trans World Airlines (twa) advertisements, Indian dancer in, 91 – 93 Trump, Donald J., 137n12 “Tumhi Mere Mandir,” 67 – 69 twa (Trans World Airlines) advertisements, Indian dancer in, 91 – 93 Umrao Jaan, 28 United States (US): anti-­immigrant sentiment in, immigration acts and, 9 – 10; Hindu immigrants to, 92; India and, 4 – 5, 20, 24, 30, 71 – 73, 90 – 91, 96 – 100; Indian dancers based in, 99 – 100, 104; Indian immigrant families in, 8; Indian immigrants to, xiii – xv, 8, 10, 19, 90, 92; racial identifications in, 7 – 8 United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1924), 138n21 University of Chicago, xv – xvi, 5

190 • Index

upanayanam, 132, 139n29 Urdu language, 68 Utsav, 27 “Vaddu Vadante,” 41 vamps, 32, 71 – 72, 80 – 81, 86, 148n19 Vande Mataram, 48 Varavikrayam, 52, 56 – 57 Vasantakumari, M. L., 79 Venkata Sir, 48 – 49, 54, 56, 66 Vijayalakshmi, L., 15, 81 – 88 vijñānam, 79, 132 Viswanath, K., 90 voice: of Bhanumati, 56 – 58; perception of, colonialism and, 136n10; praxis and, 12 – 13; of Sundaramma, 31, 40 – 41 voice and body: capitalism and, 12; feminists on, 12 – 13; of Indian dancer, 7, 15 – 16, 113; of Indian women, 2, 7, 91; racialization of, 140n31; of Telugu men, 112 white male gaze, 2 white supremacy, 107, 120 white women, 7 – 8, 96 – 97 “Whole New World, A,” xiii womanhood: Asiatic, aesthetic objectness of, 110; caste and, 18, 30 – 32; eroticized relationship to power, 50 – 51; patriarchy, men and, 112; performance and, 20, 41; public representations of, 4; race and, Indian dance studios and, 96 – 97; South Asian, 119. See also Indian womanhood Wong, Deborah, xvi Wynter, Sylvia, xvi “Yammadi Aathadi,” 112 Yuva Bharati, 99 – 102 zamīndār, 33 – 34, 132