Letting Go of the Devadasi

By Donovan Roebert

Over the past few years, as many know, I have been involved, from the sidelines, in the stringent tussle that is being played out between the supporters of what may broadly be called the ‘revivalist syndrome’ in the Sadir-Bharatanyam community, and the fighters for the socio-cultural rights of the hereditary artists and their art.

What I want to consider here, however, is the role of the image of the devadasi that has become inextricably intertwined with the unresolved problems of the hereditary system and art as they confront and challenge the dance oikumene today. And I intend to tackle this problem from the personal standpoint of one who has spent several years in an ever-intensifying search for what I have characterized for myself as the ‘face of the devadasi’.

Someone might immediately object that the devadasi has not only one but many faces, and this is so obvious as not to merit refuting. In particular, there is the face that shows itself embedded in a ritual religio-political system in which she plays her indispensable part. But this facial aspect and others on which I will not touch here are really only expressions that both subsume and necessitate the well-known face on which so much scholarly and popular assessments insist: the face of the unfailingly auspicious whose part is to deflect the inauspicious. Aware as I am that this is a very simple generalization of the devadasi’s meaning, I will nevertheless rest on it for the remainder of what I have set out here to say.

My own search for the devadasi has been coloured by this magical trope of auspiciousnes. In the dozens of pictorial data that I have excavated, and in the hundreds of articles I have perused in the process, I have not only sought but inevitably found sound evidence of her auspicious role and qualities within that field of ritual-aesthetic interrelationships to which she was centrally committed. Indeed, so potent was the irradiation of this auspicious essence that it was impossible for me not to fall under its spell, to feel that, somehow, her loss adds up a to general quantum of loss of auspiciousness throughout the human world.

In this way the devadasi became for me – throughout the process of unrelenting search – more than a dancer only. She became instead what she herself believed herself to be. If I had not been able to accept her on these terms, on the terms of her own expressed self-image, how could I ever have got to know her at all? And more than this, how could I have arrived at the strength of her mythical substance, a strength sufficient to dispel the power of the revivalist myth?

I state the case in this way because that is how the current difficulty has always revealed itself to me; not through the socio-political and politico-cultural discord and calculation playing itself out in the South Indian dance scene today, but as an unfolding struggle between two systems of dance mythologization. Experiencing the problem at this level does not of course mean that one swallows any myth whole, but there is a way of thoroughly understanding mythologies, and even of standing above them, that does not necessitate their being rejected.

This, I have always felt, has been the only way in which Indian dance could continue authentically to be itself, and not to decline into an aesthetic expression of mere technique and story-telling of the kind we expect (and appropriately appreciate) when we come to the western balletic tradition. If Indian dance ceases to be, in one form or another, a rasaic expression of ritual connection with some profoundly vital force that is neither art for art’s sake nor art for politics’ sake, nor even art for money’s sake, it will, for me, have lost the magic that sets it apart from western dance. It will be reduced to merely another kind among many of embodied kinaesthetics.

The revivalist myth succeeded in its aims not least because it understood this underpinning dynamic. It could not have succeeded so thoroughly and for so long if its agenda had been purely socio-political or socio-cultural. Undergirded as it was by the strong magic of orientalist religiosity in its many manifestations, of which Theosophy was perhaps the ruling spirit (but not the only one), it was able not only to fill the void left by the annihilation of the devadasi system in India, but also to export  its perceived quality of ritual inwardness attained and expressed through dance to the western world.

The question for me then becomes: what myth, if any, will survive the demythologization of the both the devadasi and her revivalist successors? It is obvious that there is no choice but to let go of the devadasi because the devadasi no longer exists, except in a hundred faded photographs, paintings, and statues. The same holds true for the glamorized memorials of the mythologized self-representations promoted by the revivalist economy – and these facts, I believe, constitute a large part of the reason why the struggle for relevance in the field of Indian dance today is becoming increasingly confined to the arena of economics and social justice politics, flavoured by all the favoured platitudes regarding standards of excellence in the art.

Neither the hereditary dancers nor those who have, through no fault of their own, been schooled in the usurpation of the prior mythology, have any longer any mythological leg to stand on. They stand, instead, in spite of their differences, on the same exposed and barren ground, which, if it has not yet fully done so, must eventually reveal them as artistic technicians vying for precedence in a globalized dance economy. The disappearance of the qualities of myth that previously made South Indian dance into a quickened cultural organism have turned it now into a set of organizations.

Whether a new, meaningful and organic inwardness can still arise, perhaps once the battle between the organizations has been settled one way or another, is yet to be seen. It is yet to be seen, in any case, whether today’s world is capable of agreeing at all on the existence of a positive myth. It may well be the case that the ritual aesthetic through which myth finds its liturgically structured expression has gone for good together with the devadasi, and that dance from now on will be only dance, even in its South Indian expressions.

End