Bharatanatyam, India’s quintessential “classical” art has, today, understandably become a vehicle for theatrical representations of Hindu mythology, Brahminic ethics and supremacy, and thus for majoritarian cultural politics.

I want to use this personal anecdote to highlight the ways in which my own subjectivity and selfhood as a hereditary Bahujan woman practitioner of Bharatanatyam are entangled with the past and with an enduring and dark politics of exclusion in the industry of so-called “classical” music and dance. This is a totalising appropriation in which young hereditary women’s self-representation and articulatory practices have become an ontological impossibility. And so, yet again, decades after the initial appropriation of Bharatanatyam by Brahmin cultural nationalists in the 1930s, hereditary women performers’ identities are ventriloquised through bodies and modes that simply replicate earlier modes of oppression. To be sure, each of these women has interacted with an older generation of hereditary women“devadasis”who become “treasure troves” of repertoire and technique, respected “gurus” who give over their art to these Brahmin women through problematic patron/client relationships. Brahmin women dancers regularly “dress-up” and actually take up any niche, precious space that was left for young women from the community to represent themselves through performance in the 21st century. Indeed, this speaks to a wider network of intra-Brahminic patronage and stewardship of the arts that is the core symptom of inequalities in the art world today. There were articles in praise of two Brahmin women dancers who claim to be performing, not the reinvented Bharatanatyam of the 1930s, but a newly unearthed “dance of the devadasis.” One of these women calls her dance “sadir,” uses hashtags like #IamADevadasi on social media, and makes apolitical arguments about dance history that sit very well with the Brahminic middle class. But perhaps what makes this incident even more incredulous is another point altogether, that has to do with mimesis and appropriation. In the days that followed, social media was abuzz with literally hundreds of comments in support of the view that caste politics is non-existent in the world of Indian dance. Indeed, very little airtime was given to me, and the presentation itself ended without much of anything being discussed about Bahujan women’s realities, and the discussion went on to the topic of male dancers and the economic capital that is required to start a semi-professional career in Indian dance today. I, for my part, talked about how important I felt it was to be given a chance to speak and not be spoken for by others. These are, of course, comments that those of us who have encountered caste politics and other contexts are all too familiar with. The discussion took the usual turns: arguments were made that caste is not an issue in modern India, that “only hard work counts” and caste identity does not define opportunity, only skills do, etc. First, I quickly realised that on a panel about caste, every presenter-except me-was a Brahmin woman, and there was a male Brahmin moderator. But, sure enough, the event generated one shock after another for me. As someone who has participated in Chennai’s Bharatanatyam scene from the margins for more than two decades, I must admit that I was truly dumbfounded when the word “caste” was even mentioned in a space like this. In December 2019, perhaps in the wake of the #MeToo debates in India, I was invited to participate on a panel entitled “Caste, Gender, Privilege, and their Roles in the Bharatanatyam Landscape” as part of the Natyakala Conference, a generally conservative annual event held at Chennai’s Sri Krishna Gana Sabha.

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