http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
devadāsīs, memory, and modernity in South India
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 a.
Introduction: On Historical, Social, and Aesthetic Borderlands -- 1. Producing Dance in Colonial Tanjore -- 2. Whatever Happened to the South Indian Nautch? Toward a Cultural History of Salon Dance in Madras -- 3. Subterfuges of "Respectable" Citizenship: Marriage and Masculinity in the Discourse of Devadasi Reform -- 4. Historical Traces and Unfinished Subjectivity: Remembering Devadasi Dance at Viralimalai -- 5. Performing Untenable Pasts: Aesthetics and Selfhood in Coastal Andhra Pradesh -- Coda: Gesturing to Devadasi Pasts in Today's Chennai.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Unfinished Gestures : Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c2011