Description: 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 devadasis 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 devadasis 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.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: "This pioneering work reveals the complex cultural and social history of classical South Indian music and dance as they evolved over the last three centuries. By intense fieldwork with the last surviving artistes from the world of traditional temple and salon performance, and through painstaking study of the primary sources in Tamil and Telugu, Soneji reconstructs the heartbreaking story of the so-called devadasis, including their marginalization at the hands of a prudish colonial government and a puritanical, Anglicized elite. He has opened a window to a musical world of astonishing richness and expressive power and to an aesthetic sensibility that has largely disappeared, and he has explained the social and cultural processes that undermined that sensibility and, indeed, the entire cultural system in which it once flourished. Anyone who has discovered the great power of Karnatak music should read this book in order to understand how this refined tradition acquired its present public forms, and in order to get beyond the standard, highly distorted narrative of its origins. Soneji is the foremost historian of this musical world as it developed from late medieval to early modern modes of performance."--David Shulman, Hebrew University Jerusalem