Unfinished Gestures Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India

Name: Unfinished Gestures Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India
Price: 34.79 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780226768106

ISBN-10: 0226768104

ISBN-13: 9780226768106

Edition: 2011

Authors: Davesh Soneji

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Description:

Unfinished Gesturespresents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India who are generally called devadasis, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in devadasicommunities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Adroitly combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, Davesh Soneji provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and…

Book details

Copyright year: 2011
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 1/15/2012
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 312
Size: 5.98" wide x 9.02" long x 0.71" tall
Weight: 0.990
Language: English

Davesh Soneji is associate professor of South Asian religions at McGill University. He is coeditor of Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India and editor of Bharatanatyam: A Reader.



Acknowledgments


Introduction: On Historical, Social, and Aesthetic Borderlands



Producing Dance in Colonial Tanjore



Whatever Happened to the South Indian Nautch? Toward a Cultural History of Salon Dance in Madras



Subterfuges of "Respectable" Citizenship: Marriage and Masculinity in the Discourse of Devadasi Reform



Historical Traces and Unfinished Subjectivity: Remembering Devadasi Dance at Viralimalai



Performing Untenable Pasts: Aesthetics and Selfhood in Coastal Andhra Pradesh


Coda: Gesturing to Devadasi Pasts in Today's Chennai



Selected Documents from the Files of Muthulakshmi Reddy



The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947


Notes


References


Index