Gender, caste, and feminist praxis in transnational South India

ABSTRACT

In the past 70 years, certain kinds of Indian dance have been read as classical or aspirational, especially when performed by or associated with Hindu/high-caste people and in cosmopolitan spaces like Chennai or San Francisco. Inversely, certain dancers and dance techniques associated with those who stand apart from caste or religious status are dismissed as poor in quality, and not worthy of emulation. In this article, I examine how such logic operates through South Indian (Telugu) cinema, tourism, and transnational capitalist flows, and how it relies upon reductive and exclusionary notions of gender, caste, identity, and affect. In doing so, I consider how the same media, which validates and fetishizes certain gendered notions of the body, simultaneously offers new possibilities for challenging casteist and misogynistic hegemonies. Relying on queer and critical transnational feminist theory, in this article I explore how the fetishization of the low-caste courtesan dancer – a symbol for generations of South Indian expressive culture – has ultimately produced a site of resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• gender and sexuality studies
• critical caste studies
• queer theory
• transnational feminist critique
• dance and yoga studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As of 2014 Hyderabad is the capital of Telangana, the newest state in India.

2. Non-Resident Indian.

3. In her work, Diana Taylor (2003) examines the kinds of social dynamics that create a distinction between the archive and the repertoire.

4. ‘Affective economies’ is a phrase coined by Sara Ahmed in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), which explains how the circulation of emotions in capitalist systems create a sense of ‘I’ or ‘we.’

5. See Edensor 1998 as well as Henderson and Weisgrau 2007 for discussion of tourism and place-making. See also Putcha 2015 for further analysis of Kuchipudi village as a tourist destination.

6. In his work, Davesh Soneji (2012) refers to this as ‘unfinished’ citizenship.

7. See discussion on caste and dialect in Srinivas (2013) p. 262.

8. See S.V. Srinivas’s (2013) work on the Telugu film industry, which traces the rise of caste-conscious production. See also, Uma Bhrugubanda’s research (2011; 2016) on the implication of devotional practices in film.

9. Translation: teacher, usually understood as male and in South India, high caste.

10. Meduri (2008) attributes this sort of allegorical framing to nationalist figures like Rukmini Arundale, who was among the first to position herself as a dancer-historian, especially with her using of temple iconography. See also Brughubanda 2011 and Srinivas 2013.

11. 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 U.S. citizens, nor ‘special immigrants’ (including those born in ‘independent’ nations in the Western hemisphere; former citizens; ministers; employees of the U.S. government abroad). The Act, in many ways, paved the way for globalization and has thus had lasting influences both in America and across the world in the post-World War II era.

12. The U.S.A.-based organization, Silicon Andhra, a reference to the large Telugu population in the San Francisco area, is today undoubtedly the world’s largest and most gregarious patron of Kuchipudi dance. As of 2017, the organization runs its own online university called University of Silicon Andhra (https://www.universityofsiliconandhra.org) that offers, among other things, a Masters degree in Kuchipudi dance, and organizes Guinness book-breaking performances, conferences and dance festivals, both in the USA and in India, in acts that are framed and read as global (Hindu) philanthropy. The organization’s Chairman and CEO, Anand Kuchibhotla (also known simply as Kuchipudi Anand), is a Silicon Valley multi-millionaire entrepreneur who is using his status to take charge of the future of Telugu heritage through Kuchipudi dance, and has recently been appointed Chairman of a 100-million rupee project called Kuchipudi Natyaramam cosponsored by the Andhra Pradesh State Government.

13. See mission statement at http://siliconandhra.org/jayahokuchipudi/silicon-andhra/.

14. Vempati Chinna Satyam (1929–2012) founded the KAA and oversaw its reformulation of the Kuchipudi style. See Putcha 2011 for further discussion.

15. Villages were often organized geographically by profession or caste. The inequities of the caste system continue in many ways in places like Kuchipudi village, where the Brahmin quarter contains all the most fertile land. For further discussion in Andhra, see, for example, Kumar 1965; Subba Rao 1989.

16. Seizer is referring to Bertolt Brecht’s ([1957] 1964) theatrical models for activist art – what he termed ‘the alienation effect’ – to capture the interaction between audience and performer wherein the ‘audience judges a performance within a shared context of known style and standard of common behavior’ (267).

17. The difference between dance as art (or religion) and dance as entertainment forms a foundational premise in many sociological or anthropological studies of the performing arts in South Asia. See, for example P. Sambamoorthy’s (1952) taxonomy, which takes such separation of art and entertainment as a given in his seminal three-volume Dictionary of South Indian Music and Musicians.

18. Originally coined by Laura Mulvey (1975) based on the psychoanalytical work of Jacques Lacan, but developed for postcolonial and feminist purposes by Edward Said (1978) and bell hooks (2003).

19. See Seizer (2005) for an analysis of stock characters, such as the buffoon, in South Indian theater.

20. Venku’s popularity and success with stri vesam landed him a cameo in K. Viswanath’s 2010 film, Subhapradam.

21. Sangeet Natak Akademi is the performing arts branch of the Indian Government, under the Ministry of Culture.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rumya S. Putcha

Rumya S. Putcha is an assistant professor in the Department of Performance Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program as well as the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University (College Station, U.S.A.). Her first book, Mythical Courtesan | Modern Wife: Feminist Praxis in Transnational South Asia, examines the relationship between epistemologies of music and dance, gender and sexuality, and racial formation in transnational South Asian media economies. As an Indian classical dancer trained in both the Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi styles, she has conducted many years of ethnographic research on dance in India as well as the United States.