This research looks at contemporary understandings of performance arts in India, specifically Karnatic Music and Bharatnatyam as ‘religious’ arts. Historically, music and dance were performed and patronized in royal courts and temples. In the early 20th century, increased nationalist activities led to various forms of self-scrutiny about what represented ‘true’ Indian culture. By appropriating colonial discourses based on the religious/secular dichotomy, Karnatic Music was carefully constructed to represent a ‘pure’ Indian, specifically ‘Hindu’ culture that was superior to the ‘materialistic’ Western culture. Importantly, the category called divine was re-constructed and distinguished from the erotic: the divine was represented as a category that was sacred whilst the erotic represented ‘sexual impropriety.’ In so doing, performance arts in the public sphere became explicitly gendered. Feminity and masculinity were re-defined: the female body was re-imagined as ‘sexual impropriety’ when in the public sphere, but when disembodied in the private sphere could be deified as a guardian of spirituality. Traditional performing communities were marginalized while the newly defined music and dance was appropriated by the Brahmin community, who assumed the role of guardians of the newly constructed Indian-Hindu identity, resulting in caste-based ‘ownership’ of performance arts. Mechanical reproduction of Karnatic Music has created a disconnect in contemporary Indian society, in which Karnatic Music is disembodied from its contexts in order to be commodified as an individual’s artistic expression of creativity. This move marks a shift from substantive economics (music was performed and experienced within a specific context, be it royal patronage or Indian nationalist movements) to formal economics (music as a performer’s creative property). I question the understanding of Karnatic Music as ‘religious’ music that is distinguished from the ‘secular’ and seek to understand the colonial patriarchal mystification of the female body in the private sphere by deconstructing the definition of the ‘divine.’ In doing so, I also question the contemporary understanding of Karnatic Music as an item of property that disembodies the music from its historical context.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 11, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-73).

ABSTRACT How can I as a Swedish dancer devoted to the Indian classical dance form, kathak, re root it into my own cultural sphere? And express topics beyond the Sub Indian continent without diluting the essence of the art form? I don’t want to create a new dance style.I don’t want to add anything. I want to explore and investigate how I within the tradition of kathak dance and Hindustani music can shuffle the classical format in order to create a longer narrative.  To create a dramaturgical nerve in the performance and take it further than the traditional short dances and compositions connected by being strung together on a basic rhythm. During this work I have followed different strands of evolution within me as a kathak dancers as well as personal experiences that has led up to this need of making it my kathak dance, rather than my Indian kathak dance. It’s also a close study of the relationship between a student and her master and how the master forces his student to mature to become her own master.  I want to use the kathak dance as an artistic expression to create performances based on topics interesting to me. I want to use the rhythmical patterns to enhance, elaborate and ornament the story told. How can I use the bols and sound from the kathak dance and Hindustani music? What happens if I instead of using bols create similar material but based on the Swedish language? The unexpected result of my research, the unexpected finding of what happened with me after I decided to drop India, and to focus my gaze to my own cultural space by being a native Swedish person living in Stockholm was that I lost my dance. I lost my geography.

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Cette thèse propose une étude sur l’Abhinayadarpaṇa, « le Miroir du Geste », de Nandikeśvara, traité sanskrit médiéval traitant de l’art de l’expression au moyen des gestes. Ce texte est aujourd’hui une référence théorique particulièrement populaire dans la pratique du bharatanāṭyam, la danse « classique » du Tamil-Nadu (Sud-Est de l’Inde), notamment depuis le tournant dit « revivaliste » dans les années 1930. Conjuguant les approches philologique et ethnographique, cette étude propose une analyse des différentes formes et modes d’appropriation de ce texte. L’étude et la traduction du texte sanskrit, l’analyse des phénomènes d’intertextualité avec d’autres traités sanskrits et des différentes « éditions-traductions » anglaises, ainsi que la présentation de l’usage actuel de ce texte par les praticiens de bharatanāṭyam (d’après les données d’un terrain d’un an à Chennai et à Pondichéry, trois séjours de 2013 à 2016) permettront, d’une part, d’appréhender le caractère polymorphe et dynamique de ce traité dont les formes reflètent les pratiques autant qu’elles les normalisent, et, d’autre part, de dégager une pratique du texte, de l’Inde ancienne à l’Inde actuelle, prenant la forme de commentaires discursifs et gestuels. / This study focuses on Nandikeśvara’s Abhinayadarpaṇa, « The Mirror of Gesture », a medieval Sanskrit treatise about the art of gestural expression. Today this text is a very popular theoretical reference in the bharatanāṭyam milieu, the classical dance of Tamil Nadu (South-East India), since the so-called 1930s revivalism. Through philological and ethnographic approaches, this study aims at analysing the various forms and ways of appropriation of this text. The study and translation of the Sanskrit text, the analysis of intertextuality with other Sanskrit treatises and of various English « edition-translations », and the study of the contemporary use of the text by bharatanāṭyam practitioners (using original data from one year of fieldwork in Chennai and Pondicherry, 2013 to 2016) will make it possible, on the one hand, to explore the polymorphic and dynamic aspects of this treatise, whose forms both reflect and normalise practices - and, on the other hand, to distinguish a text-practice, from Ancient India to the present day, which takes the shape of a discursive and gestural commentaries.

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