Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian DanceLearn more at www.luminosoa.org. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance. |
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aesthetic Andhra Pradesh Arudra audience Baliakka bhakti Bhāmākalāpam performance Bharatanatyam brah brahmin families brahmin male body chapter Chennai Chinna Satyam's Bhāmākalāpam constructed artifice context costume critique dance form Delhi devadāsī dialogues discourse discussion donning the strī-vēṣam Ekalavya embodied enacting female dancers fieldwork Flueckiger gender and caste gender-variant guise hagiography hegemonic brahmin masculinity hegemonic masculinity heteronormative Hyderabad Indian dance interlocutors interview Jonnalagadda 1996b Kalakshetra Krishna Kuchipudi brahmin women Kuchipudi dance Kuchipudi performance Kuchipudi village Kutiyattam Lakshminarasamma Madhavi male dancers male performer male-identified māyā movements Mutyam Nagabhushana Sarma Naidu Narayana Rao norms onstage orchestra parody particularly Pasumarti practice of impersonation Putcha Rajyalakshmi Rattayya Sarma Ravi Shankar repertoire role Sangeet Natak Akademi Sanskrit Satyabhama scholars sexuality Siddhendra Kalakshetra Smarta Soneji South Asian South India sūtradhāra Swarajyalakshmi Tamil Telugu theatre tradition University Press urban and transnational Vaidiki Vedantam Satyanarayana Sarma Velcheru Narayana Rao Vempati Chinna Satyam Venku vēṣam vidūṣaka village brahmin woman