A01=Davesh Soneji
aesthetics
andhra pradesh
anthropology
Author_Davesh Soneji
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHTB
citizenship
class
colonialism
courtesan
criminalization
dance
demi monde
devadasis
education
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
escort
ethnography
femininity
folklore
gender
history
india
laws
madras
marginalization
marriage
masculinity
memory
modernity
muthulakshmi reddy
nautch
nonfiction
performance
prostitution
reform
religion
respectability
salon
selfhood
sex work
sexuality
stigma
subjectivity
tanjore
tradition
viralimalai
women
Product details
- ISBN 9780226768090
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jan 2012
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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"Unfinished Gestures" presents 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 devadasi communities 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 the political efficacy of social reform in their communities. Poignantly narrating the history of these women, Soneji argues for the recognition of aesthetics and performance as a key form of subaltern self-presentation and self-consciousness.
Ranging over courtly and private salon performances of music and dance by devadasis in the nineteenth century, the political mobilization of devadasi identity in the twentieth century, and the post-reform lives of women in these communities today, "Unfinished Gestures" charts the historical fissures that lie beneath cultural modernity in South India.
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.
