By Donovan Roebert
As indicated in the title of this article, the 19th-century pictorial record for Andhra devadasis of the kalavantulu tradition is very sparse indeed. In addition, many pictorial items ascribed to this region turn out on closer inspection to be of dubious applicability or are inaptly categorized.
There are several reasons that may explain this dearth of material. 19th-century Andhra was ruled by a Muslim court, under a succession of nizams. The preference of the court, for religious as well as aesthetic reasons, was for Kathak dance performed by the tawa’if community, and this community, fostered by the courtesan Mah Laqa Bai, had been well-established by the early decades of that century. There is a splendid photograph by Lala Deen Dayal, which shows one such performer in the presence of the Sixth Nizam.
Western travellers visiting Hyderabad for ethnological purposes were always focused on the Nizam’s court, and all of their records, when they give accounts of festivities with dancing, refer to Muslim processions. When they are wanting to make records of South Indian dance or temple activities, they always refer the reader to one or another area in Tamilnadu, and their illustrations or photographs usually include such centres as Madras, Tanjore or Madurai.
The exception here is Capt. Allan Newton Scott, whose photographs from 1861 definitely depict a troupe of kalavantulu performers. I will give only one of his photographs here because I have dealt more thoroughly with his pictorial record in my earlier article, A.N Scott’s Photographs of a Kalavantulu Bhogam Melam: 1861.
Scott’s other photographs, though they do place undue emphasis on the showmanship of the acrobatic elements of the repertoire as it was then performed, also provide the only visual insight into the ‘look’ of a devadasi troupe at that time. The handful of photographs that he made of the dancers seem to indicate a tradition that is either marginalized or somewhat in decline.
The devadasi tradition in Andhra had, much before the 19th century, a great period of flowering under the Kakatiya dynasty, though it might have existed in a less developed form many centuries before these kings came to power in the region. What we see under their rule is a steadily increasing complex interrationship between the dance of the temples and that of the court, as well as a cumulative mystical identification with king and deity. The dance also spills out from temple and court into the public domain in the form of mandapa or processional performances. In this period, from the 12th to the 16th centuries, the place of the Andhra devadasi in religio-cultural and social life attains its zenith.
This is followed by a period of slow decline as Muslim and later British domination begin to impress themselves on the conditions of the religious and cultural environment. Though the devadasi system is still in place, its former grandeur and the numbers of practitioners gradually begin to wane.
By the early 19th century, at the time of the renewal of the devadasi and rajadasi repertoire by the Tanjore Quartet, the kalavantulu dancers seem to become increasingly bound to and influenced by currents of the margam crossing into Andhra from Tanjore, a hub of culture then at the height of its achievements in the fields of dance and music.
It is to this increasingly influential tradition that company paintings from the period refer, also when they make ostensible reference to Andhra.
This first of two company paintings from the 1820s depicts a group of devadasis in the very midst of a Shivaite procession. It has a descriptive caption in Telugu, which might associate it with Andhra, though this is not necessarily the case since Telugu was in use both as a spoken and literary language in Tamilnadu too.
The second painting, in this case of devadasis dancing in a wedding procession, is more definitely associated with Andhra by the curator at the British Museum, though no reasons are given for preferring Andhra over Tamilnadu. Indeed, when I referred both of these company paintings to an expert, I was assured that they in no way represent kalavantulu dancers, and to this opinion I naturally defer. Part of my point then, in presenting these two paintings, is to demonstrate how difficult is the task of assembling pictorial data for this aspect of the devadasi spectrum in South India.
Our next two ambiguous encounters with Andhra performers come in the form of two more company paintings tentatively dated from the 1830s to the mid-19th century:
In the first of these we are shown a ‘Teloogoo dancing girl’ accompanied by nattuvanar and cinnamelam musicians. Again we do not know whether the ‘Teloogoo’ tag refers us to Andhra as a location or only to the language spoken by the troupe. Again, too, we see the Maratha headgear worn by the males, which directs us to the tradition of the Tanjore Court of the time. The painting itself was produced in Tiruchirapalli, which further removes us from the kalavantulu terrain.
The second painting depicts a ‘minstrel of the Telugu nation’, and this may with more certainty locate these figures in Andhra. The woman beside the minstrel may or may not be an accompanying mimic (abhinaya-performing) dancer, who also happens to be the songster’s wife. Part of the difficulty in reading company paintings consists in the fact that they are so repetitively stylized as to become over-generalized.
Company paintings were ousted in the 1860s when photography and photographic illustrations became the dominant form of pictorial documentation. In the case of the Andhra devadasi, our next portrayal is an illustration based on an earlier photograph.
In the inscription on the illustration, Neuville states that his drawing was based on ‘a photograph from the album of M. Grandidier’. This is no doubt the case but, as I have argued in my earlier article on A.N. Scott’s kalavantulu photographs (see reference above), that photograph was probably originally taken by Scott himself, and would thus have formed part of the set of which figure 2 above is one example. What this implies is that Neuville’s illustration is probably one of the most accurate depictions of a margam posture in a performance by an Andhra devadasi.
The following drawing may or may not be based on Neuville’s 1863 copy of Scott’s photograph:
The illustration occurs in G.T. Bettany’s large and cumbrously titled work of 1892, but is not accompanied by any written account of the devadasi system or dance in Andhra, though there is the usual cautionary reference to the pernicious lifestyles of ‘women devoted to the temples’. By the year of publication of this work we are entering the decade in which the first efficient steps were being taken to abolish the kalavantulu practice.
By the 1890s the devadasi system in Andhra had already been extensively eroded by a variety of cultural, social and economic pressures. The dance that had traditionally thrived in a closely-linked temple and court symbiosis was being increasingly driven into the domain of upper-class entertainment in the homes of wealthy land-owning zamindars. The kind of dance performance depicted by Scott, Neuville and the unknown illustrator of Bettany’s work was probably most often seen in this sort of environment.
The ‘dancing’ or ‘nautch’ girl, whether in Andhra or elsewhere, had by that time been gradually glamourized in many pictorial quarters, perhaps largely for commercial reasons, into the type of the quasi-mystical and seductive femme fatale.
This picture takes us back some thirty years before the 1890s, and one can see from its depiction of kalavantulu dancers in the 1865 ‘Archaeological Survey of India’ collection the direction in which the trend in pictorial documentation of devadasis was then beginning to move. Many South Indian dancers, though pictured in costume and a rich array of traditional dance-ornamentation, are shown in a variety of recumbent poses which, rather than emphasizing their vocation as dancers, prefers to portray them in the intimate guise of the stereotypical courtesan.
Again, in the case of this photograph, we can’t be sure that these dancers were photographed in Hyderabad. The girls on the divan have been shown to have been superimposed on the orientalist architectural backdrop in a studio in Madras. It is therefore quite possible that the dancers themselves were photographed in a Madras studio too.
The photograph below departs from the widespread glamourizing trend, though it was probably made in the 1880s or 1890s, when that trend was at its height.
The photographer, N.V. Abbayeradjou (that is, Abbayi Raju), though he was based in Pondicherry, was likely originally to have come from Andhra Pradesh himself. In that case he would not have been mistaken as to the location at which this group of dancers and musicians was photographed.
It is a splendid portrayal of dancers, nattuvanar and musicians, and seems to indicate an organized group or ‘society’ of these performing artists, though I have been unable to find any record of the existence of such a guild.
What strikes one about this photograph in which fourteen young dancers are seen together is the fact that not one of them is positioned in a posture of dance. It is almost as though a sympathetic photographer was ironically insisting on the essential legitimacy of the vocation, and on its age-old innocence, by avoiding the depiction of the art it practised.
Notes:
- For a compact but detailed summary of the early history of Andhra devadasis see Rekha Pande & S. Jeevanandam, Devadasis, the Temple Dancing Girls in Medieval Deccan (12th – 18th Century), History and Archaeology (N.S.) vol.1, no.1, January 2013, pp. 81-104.
- For an account of late-19th-century dance in Andhra see Davesh Soneji, Living History, Performing Memory: Devadasi Women in Telugu-Speaking South India, Dance Research Journal, vol. 36, no.2, 2004, pp. 30-49.
- A detailed account of kalavantulu practice is found throughout Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India, University of Chicago Press, 2012. On the subject of the developing criminalization of the practice see esp. ch. 3, pp. 132-139.
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Aspects of Pictorial Indian Dance History 