Presented in person and online. Zoom details below.

Disgust, Pleasure and Aesthetic ‘Judgement’. Classical south Indian music/dance and postcolonial fractures of habitus, taste and affect. Chennai, India. 
I have been writing about the colonial, postcolonial and diasporic transformations in the ‘classical’ dance of Tamil Nadu - named Bharata Natyam – since the 1990s, initially as a Research Fellow of what is now the Gender Institute at ANU. My most recent paper (on which this presentation is based) is also on dance and will appear shortly in the Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance.  Meanwhile, I have extended my corpus to music. Specifically, I have addressed the attempts by the Madras Music Academy established in the 1920s, to make the standardisation of performance accord with musicological theory one of its markers of modernising distinction from traditional musicians who remained, in this view, practitioners lacking consistency and theory. 

What remains a consistent thread in my work is the attempt to not sacrifice the aesthetic continuities, specificities and deep resonances of Indian music and dance in favour of a socio-political analysis which comes far more readily to the highly politicised Left/feminist generation my work belongs to, both in India and in the west. The project of the experts in the Academy, for instance, when viewed through the lens of the actual music itself rather than through a theoretical lens of postcolonial critique, is one that has failed, and necessarily so, given the improvisational nature of performance as well as the resistance of ‘raga’ music to being reduced to a western rationally divided harmonic system that lends itself to notation. (The distance between the two is palpably audible to anyone familiar with ragas wherever the attempt at novelty consists of a guitar too hastily being thrown in for good measure, where it unrelentingly jars against both singer and older string instruments without frets or finger boards, such as the sarangi.) 

Yet social history remains all-important in understanding the classical arts. In very broad terms, the colonial period destroyed a broad habitus in which elite men both patronised, occasionally composed for and provided an audience of connoisseurship for the performances by courtesans they maintained.  The women were re-designated by British men with poor grasp of language let alone the interpretive poetics they were being treated to, as nothing more than common ‘nautch girls’ and prostitutes. It generated a stigma of shame that transformed the way the community was viewed henceforth and to this day. Elite castes that enjoyed political power were deprived of power. But enough men in some castes, such as the Tamil Brahmans, were able to transpose their traditional skills as intellectuals, scholars of Sanskrit and mathematics into western knowledge systems both academic and bureaucratic, becoming academics and teachers, law professionals and administrators. What was once an important fraction of the elite class expanded its sphere of authority and became largely urban. 

Tamil Brahmans also became central in both ‘reforming’ and maintaining the music and dance traditions that became designated as the ‘Carnatic’ or south Indian school of arts. Under their guidance, the canonical repertoire of concert- music and dance became entirely devotional. Dance items associated with the traditional dancers, many of them forms of sensual seduction, were dropped. The music canon draws largely on the compositions of three 18^th c Brahman male composers, often referred to as the Trimurti, or the sacred trinity of Carnatic music. All three composers came from the same part of Tamil Nadu, namely Thanjavur, where the river Kaveri’s fertile delta sustained courts and temples and a rich culture for the arts from the 11^th century on. The classical arts in Chennai is thus characterised by a remarkably homogenous caste habitus that has been stable through the twentieth century and into the present, annually replenished during the concert season by returning artists from the Tamil Brahman diaspora whose members usually quickly establish music associations wherever they go. Though local audiences in Chennai are visibly ageing and dwindling the rest of the year, the city maintains its status as arts capital for judging both dancers and musicians. The stability of a habitus should not be confused with lack of elasticity. It copes with training dance students from other regions as well as non-Indians. It includes a large community of critical scholars, including feminists and postcolonial critics. Some level of reappraisal of the women dancers they displaced has occurred by women dancers who are much quicker to discern and challenge the gender norms of the narratives they perform, with many seeking alternatives. In other words, this is a ‘modern’ habitus as well. Yet the caste character of the artistic community itself remains either unmarked – or, if named, as occurred with the Music Academy awards this year, it has been treated by many prominent and distinguished Carnatic musicians as an explosive challenge to the pure aesthetic enjoyment and spirituality that artists and audiences seek - and do find in particularly fine performances. The wider politics of a ‘Hindutva’ India finds fertile ground here. 

In this presentation I will take specific affects (rather than ‘affects’ in general) to provide connective tissue between habitus, social change and individual initiatives. In doing so I draw from archives as well as my embodied understanding of my shared Tamil Brahman habitus with those I describe. I draw also on the re-education I received in the caste nature of my own aesthetic tastes while doing ethnographic work which I consciously located in diverse Dalit communities in Tamil Nadu. 

Speaker: 
Kalpana Ram is currently Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Australian National University. She has taught courses on power and performance in India, social movements, feminism and phenomenology for many years at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research on the south Indian arts falls into two areas: the relationship between dance, music and nationalism as well as migration and gender in relation to dance. A much larger body of her work is based on research in fishing and agricultural Dalit groups in south India, addressing questions of the relationship between embodied experience and agency, particularly for women.

Zoom details: 
https://anu.zoom.us/j/87802807372?pwd=fbu3BD3PcmaIXpt3VU4srkznBENqkG.1
Meeting ID: 878 0280 7372
Password: 277792