Bharatnatyam history: How stigmatised devadasis weathered social ostracism and moral outrage

The literacy of the dancing woman was aimed at acquiring a specific set of arts-related skills. Skills of elegant refinement, yes, but nevertheless skills suitable to feudal times and places. Wood’s famous “Despatch” of 1854 outlined the East India Company’s vision of literacy for a colonial India. When Sir Wood, the viscount of Halifax, called for female schooling, he certainly was not thinking of the “otherly” education of the dancing woman.

As early as the 1820s, even before Wood’s ultimately enduring plans for primary, secondary and collegiate instruction were implemented, precocious steps towards girls’ schools had been taken in the Madras Presidency. Such schools, though typified as secular, were destined for Christian and/or “caste” girls, i.e. Hindus from Brahmin, royal and merchant families. We can assume that the children of dancing women were not welcome, no matter how sophisticated their mothers may have been. Nor would many dancing women have entertained the idea of sending their offspring to such schools. Even as late as 1904, in the little kingdom of Pudukkottai, the college admission of the future pioneer of women’s rights and anti-dance legislation, Muthulakshmi Reddy, was opposed on the grounds that she was from the caste of dancing women.

The missionaries, in...

Read more