Illicit Worlds Of Indian Dance

Download or read book Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance written by Anna Morcom and published by Hurst & Company. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the 1930s no woman could perform in public and retain respectability in India. Professional female performers were courtesans and dancing girls who lived beyond the confines of marriage, but were often powerful figures in social and cultural life. Women's roles were often also taken by boys and men, some of whom were simply female impersonators, others transgender. Since the late nineteenth century the status, livelihood and identity of these performers have all diminished, with the result that many of them have become involved in sexual transactions and sexualised performances. Meanwhile, upper-class, upper-caste women have taken control of the classical performing arts and also entered the film industry, while a Bollywood dance and fitness craze has recently swept middle class India. In her historical on-the-ground study, Anna Morcom investigates the emergence of illicit worlds of dance in the shadow of India's official performing arts. She explores over a century of marginalisation of courtesans, dancing girls, bar girls and transgender performers, and de- scribes their lives as they struggle with stigmatisation, derision and loss of livelihood.

Download or read book Courtesans, Bar Girls & Dancing Boys written by Anna Morcom and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2014-02-07 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘This is a remarkable book, of great originality, rigour, and importance in the study of modern Indian popular culture. Combining extensive fieldwork, archival research, and astute interpretation, Morcom presents a rich exploration of the contradictory effects of modernity, nationalism, and bourgeois values on a diverse range of Indian dance traditions, old and new.’ — Peter Manuel, Professor, Graduate Center of the City University of New York ‘Anna Morcom’s extraordinarily compelling book represents one of the most significant interventions in the study of dance in contemporary South Asia. Masterfully bridging discourses on class, gender, globalisation, economics, morality, and aesthetics, it effectively foregrounds the forms of inequality and power at work in the production, consumption, and politicisation of dance in today’s India.’ — Davesh Soneji, McGill University, author of Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India ‘A hugely valuable addition to the literature on the performing arts in India, focusing as it does on communities of highly marginalised dancers who have received scant academic attention. Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance deals with a wide-ranging set of dance sectors including female hereditary performers, bar dancers, transgender erotic performers and kothi dancers, interpreting the author’s rich ethnographic detail through a variety of theoretical lenses. On all counts, a very welcome and timely scholarly contribution.’ — Prabha Kotiswaran, author of Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India ‘This fascinating investigation of the hidden hereditary communities of female and transgender dancers in contemporary India compels us to rethink our assumptions about Indian public culture, sexualities, and entertainment. Expertly moving between colonial and postcolonial discourses on these communities, Anna Morcom reveals the ways in which postcolonial nation-building in the name of progress and modernity has excluded a range of non-elite subjectivities and marginalised their role as carriers of embodied culture. Morcom’s book not only chronicles their complex relationships with mainstream society and legitimate performing arts (including Bollywood), their legal struggles, and their talents, but, in doing so, offers a compassionate and timely valourisation of these illicit and yet ever-present worlds.’ — Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Professor, King’s College London, and author of Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir Until the 1930s no woman could perform in public and retain respectability in India. Professional female performers were courtesans and dancing girls who lived beyond the confines of marriage, but were often powerful figures in social and cultural life. Women’s roles were often also taken by boys and men, some of whom were simply female impersonators, others transgender. Since the late nineteenth century the status, livelihood and identity of these performers have all diminished, with the result that many of them have become involved in sexual transactions and sexualised performances. Meanwhile, upper-class, upper-caste women have taken control of the classical performing arts and also entered the film industry, while a Bollywood dance and fitness craze has recently swept middle class India. In her historical and on-the-ground study, Anna Morcom investigates the emergence of illicit worlds of dance in the shadow of India’s official performing arts. She explores over a century of marginalisation of courtesans, dancing girls, bar girls and transgender performers, and describes their lives as they struggle with stigmatisation, derision and loss of livelihood.

Download or read book The Dancing Body written by Urmimala Sarkar Munsi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, with its focus on the dancing body, is the first of its kind within the larger context of dance in India. The Dancing Body is a body that exists, survives, inhabits and performs in multiple space and time, by moving, laboring, migrating and straddling across geographic, cultural and emotional borders, writing different cultural meanings at different moments of time. In India, discourses around the body in dance have long been trapped within hagiographic histories in and around dancers and their dance. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by patriarchy, class, caste and power. This book brings together emerging discourses around dance and the body that have become central in the Indian nation-state. Contemporary discourses around identity politics, moral policing, politics of exclusion, and neo-liberal dispossessions vis a vis sexual labour, means of survival, pleasure and agency of dancers have helped frame the focus around labour, leisure and livelihood concerning the everyday existence of the body in dance. This volume will be of great value to students, researchers and scholars in dance, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, with a particular interest in Asian and South Asian Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Download or read book Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities written by Sitara Thobani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities explores what happens when a national-cultural production is reproduced outside the immediate social, political and cultural context of its origin. Whereas most previous studies have analysed Indian classical dance in the context of Indian history and culture, this volume situates this dance practice in the longstanding trasnational linkages between India and the UK. What is the relation between the contemporary performance of Indian classical dance and the constitution of national, diasporic and multicultural identity? Where and how does Indian dance derive its productive power in the postcolonial moment? How do diasporic and nationalist representations of Indian culture intersect with depictions of British culture and politics? It is argued that classical Indian dance has become a key aspect of not only postcolonial South Asian diasporic identities, but also of British multicultural and transnational identity. Based on an extensive ethnographic study of performances of Indian classical dance in the UK, this book will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, sociology, South Asian studies, Postcolonial, Transnational and Cultural studies, and Theatre and Performance studies.

Download or read book Impersonations written by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.

Download or read book Ritual Soundings written by Sarah Weiss and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-03-16 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The women of communities in Hindu India and Christian Orthodox Finland alike offer lamentations and mockery during wedding rituals. Catholic women of southern Italy perform tarantella on pilgrimages while Muslim Berger girls recite poetry at Moroccan weddings. Around the world, women actively claim agency through performance during such ritual events. These moments, though brief, allow them a rare freedom to move beyond culturally determined boundaries. In Ritual Soundings, Sarah Weiss reads deeply into and across the ethnographic details of multiple studies while offering a robust framework for studying music and world religion. Her meta-ethnography reveals surprising patterns of similarity between unrelated cultures. Deftly blending ethnomusicology, the study of gender in religion, and sacred music studies, she invites ethnomusicologists back into comparative work, offering them encouragement to think across disciplinary boundaries. As Weiss delves into a number of less-studied rituals, she offers a forceful narrative of how women assert agency within institutional religious structures while remaining faithful to the local cultural practices the rituals represent.

Download or read book Ishtyle written by Kareem Khubchandani and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ishtyle follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of “ishtyle” to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves, ornamental inclusions in the racialized grammar of desire. Ishtyle allows us to reimagine a global class perpetually represented as docile and desexualized workers caught in the web of global capitalism. The book highlights a different kind of labor, the embodied work these men do to feel queer and sexy together. Engaging major themes in queer studies, Khubchandani explains how his interlocutors’ performances stage relationships between: colonial law and public sexuality; film divas and queer fans; and race, caste, and desire. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the unlikely site of nightlife can be a productive venue for the study of global politics and its institutional hierarchies.