Details

Subject(s)

• Devadasis—India, South [Browse]
• Devadasis—India, South—Social conditions [Browse]
• Dance—Social aspects—India, South [Browse]
• Prostitution—India, South [Browse]
• Social change—India, South [Browse]

Series

South Asia across the disciplines. [More in this series]

Summary note

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

Notes

Description based upon print version of record.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Source of description

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

Language note

English

Contents

• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 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 Devadāsī Reform
• 4. Historical Traces and Unfi nished Subjectivity: Remembering Devadāsī Dance at Viralimalai
• 5. Performing Untenable Pasts: Aesthetics and Selfhood in Coastal Andhra Pradesh
• Coda: Gesturing to Devada¯sı¯ Pasts in Today's Chennai
• Appendix 1: Selected Documents from the Files of Muthulakshmi Reddy
• Appendix 2: The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947
• Notes
• References
• Index

Show 12 more Contents items

ISBN

• 0-226-76811-2
• 1-283-32159-9
• 9786613321596

OCLC

763158993

Doi

• 10.7208/9780226768113

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