Bharatanatyam, from temple to stage

The dance that most of the world calls bharatanatyam had no settled name until the 1930s. The women who performed it called it sadir, or dasiattam, and they performed it as part of an office: they were attached to a temple, they held rights that came with that attachment, and the dancing was one of the duties those rights paid for. Everything the modern form is famous for — the costume, the two-hour running order, the soloist on a raised stage under lights, the audience that has bought a ticket — was assembled in the ninety years since that office was legislated out of existence.

This is the cleanest case in the pillar, because unlike most claims about invented tradition it has a statute number and a date. Madras Act XXXI of 1947 made the dedication of a girl to a temple void, and penalised anyone who performed the ceremony. The intention was protective: the reform campaign, led from the 1920s by Muthulakshmi Reddy, documented child dedication, concubinage and the collapse of the temple economy into something closer to bonded service. The effect, though, was not to reform the institution but to delete its legal basis.

What was actually being abolished

A devadasi household in the Thanjavur country was not a family of entertainers waiting for an audience. It held temple office, and the office came with emoluments: a share of temple revenue, ritual fees, and in many cases inam land — revenue-free grants recorded in the village accounts. The dance was performed inside a liturgical calendar, on specified days, by specified people, and it was paid for out of those endowments.

So the 1947 Act did two things at once, and only one of them was intended. It ended a set of abuses that the reform literature documents in detail. It also severed the dancers from the property and the appointments that had made the practice survivable, and the inam tenures were resumed by the state in the decades that followed. A hereditary profession lost both its patrons and its title deeds in the same generation.

The revival chose a format

The people who rebuilt the dance after 1947 were, almost without exception, not from the households that had practised it. They were urban, often Brahmin, often connected to the Theosophical Society at Adyar, and they were working with a repertoire they had learned from teachers who were. Rukmini Devi Arundale's debut in 1935 and the founding of Kalakshetra in 1936 are the conventional markers, because an institution is what makes a form teachable to outsiders at scale.

What they built was a concert format. The pieces existed — the varnam, the padam, the tillana were all nineteenth-century or older, arranged into a running order by the Tanjore Quartet at the court of Serfoji II — but the frame around them was new. A fixed two-hour programme. A stage with a front. Lighting that made the face the centre of attention rather than the floor pattern. A printed programme with a syllabus behind it. And a name in Sanskrit, which the practitioners themselves had not used.

Each of those decisions took something out. All-night performance went, which removed the long-form improvisation that only an all-night audience can sit through. The ritual calendar went, which removed the reason certain pieces were performed on certain days. The hereditary teacher-student relation went, which changed what counted as authority — from belonging to a lineage to passing an examination.

What the stage changed in the body

A proscenium is not a neutral container. It puts the audience on one side only, so the dancer must face front rather than move around a courtyard. It fixes the distance, so gestures enlarge. It lights the face, so expression migrates there. The modern costume — the fan of pleats at the front, the jewellery designed to catch a spotlight — is a solution to a specific sightline that did not exist in 1900.

None of this is decay. It is a form doing what forms do: adapting to the room it is performed in, and then teaching the adaptation as though it were the original. The technical standard of the current generation is probably higher than at any earlier point, because there is now a syllabus, an examination system, a video archive and a professional class of teachers. What is not higher is the variety of contexts in which the dancing happens.

Reading it as labour history

Treat the pillar's question — court, temple or market — as a question about who pays, and this case answers itself three times over. In 1900 the answer was temple endowment. In 1950 it was the state and the urban middle class, buying culture as national heritage. Today it is largely the household: the teaching fees, the arangetram, the travel. The debut recital that once certified a professional's entry into paid temple service now certifies a family's investment in a daughter's accomplishment, and it is budgeted like a wedding.

That last shift is the one worth carrying into the rest of this pillar. The dance did not survive because it was ancient. It survived because at each collapse someone rebuilt the funding around it, and the rebuilding left marks on the form that are now indistinguishable from tradition.

This is entry 01 of Arts & Performance in About India. The next entry goes south to Kerala, where the same question — who pays, and what did the paying change — is answered by four hours of makeup applied before the audience arrives.