WHO ISN'T Against Casteism in Indian Performing Arts?

 

This essay responds to the global We Stand Against Casteism solidarity Statement that was published in pulseconnects on April 22, 2024. 

Three well-known dance academics, leading on the AHRC-funded South Asian Dance Equity (SADE) Dance Matters grant scheme, and including a fourth from UCLA, drafted the global solidarity Statement. Co-signed by over 40 influential academics, the Statement was based on my unscripted interview which was broadcast on the Byte Burst You Tube Channel on March 21, 2024. 

Although I am the subject of the Statement, it is unfortunate that I found out about the PULSE publication only after my return to UK in August 2024. I was reluctant to respond particularly after so long. But I feel obliged because SADE and the solidarity Statement are interlocked initiatives: the drafters of the Statement, except one, are the project leaders of SADE; and the caste supremacy and social justice narratives upheld in the one is iterated in other. Furthermore, both initiatives advance an erroneous history for Indian/British South Asian performing arts, premised on caste supremacy, which, I believe, could impact adversely on the minority British South Asian Dance sector in the UK. 

In the Interview with Sandhya Ravishankar, I spoke about the global history and modernity of bharatnatyam and Carnatic music by focusing on the modern guru-shishya structure that stands at the heart of all the classicised dance and music forms of India. I explained that Brahmin elites like Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1986), founder of the Kalakshetra institution, and five generations of Brahmin elites, after her, did not appropriate but forged deeply unequal inter-caste and inter-class guru-shishya collaborations with hereditary gurus and devadasi artists, generationally, from the 1930s, to the present. This is a well-known, well documented, century-long factual history of Indian performing arts. Every Brahmin, non-Brahmin, international student of bharatnatyam and Carnatic music will narrate her own bespoke guru-shishya story in uniquely individual ways.  

SADE academics dismissed my modern, multigenerational theorization of the guru-shishya structure as a specious intervention, maintaining that this was always already a cover for Brahmin upper-caste appropriation of hereditary arts. They contended that ‘dominant-caste’ people like me cannot decide what is appropriation because this is casteist, but somehow, they are entitled to do so despite their own caste status. I was labeled as an ‘elitist-casteist-gatekeeper’ by millennial generation dominant caste-elites who at present hold the keys to the gate.  

Instead of calling me in to discuss their strong disagreements, SADE academics called out my alleged casteism in the solidarity Statement, declaring that the academic community will strongly disagree with other dominant-caste elites ‘who may align with my viewpoints.’ This is academic intimidation deployed to silence critical dissent and create caste-based us/them divisions in the minority sphere of South Asian Dance in the UK.     

Since the solidarity Statement was disseminated widely in universities in India, US, and UK solely to advance SADE’s caste supremacy and social justice objectives, let me contextualise this creation story.  Briefly, the AHRC-funded SADE network was launched with the challenging title ‘South Asian Dance in Britain: Decentering India and Hinduism’ in January 2024. To examine systemic inequities within the British South Asian Dance sector, SADE academics segment the sector along five group formations comprising Hindu-India dominant-caste artists who are set off against caste-oppressed, LGBTQ1+, Tribal/Adivasi, and Disability artist communities.

In my role as EDI  (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) officer for UK DanceHE (Dance in Higher Education), I commend SADE’s worthy objectives to build a more equitable British South Asian Dance sector. But as an Indian and South Asian dance academic and historian, I am concerned about the retrospective re-framing of a British minority arts sector, inscribed in a British multicultural history going back to the 1970s, within a dominant-caste and caste-oppressed artist framework in 2024. This re-framing is historically inaccurate because caste orthodoxies were abrogated systemically in waves of successive modernization and encompassing a century-long history from the 1920s continuing into the present.    

I challenge the caste thematic because it has the potential to implode the British South Asian Dance sector, dividing it against itself and along caste lines, while also impacting adversely on the small pot of Arts Council funding currently available to the South Asian Dance sector. Since the stakes are high, I share my views on this important matter of caste in Indian and South Asian dance practice for your consideration. 

The essay has four sections. In the first, I describe how the caste supremacy and social justice narrative was created audaciously in the haze of the global pandemic by drawing willy-nilly on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: the Origins of Our Discontent (2020) and US academic scholarship on Indian performing arts. In the subsequent sections, I summarise what I said in the Interview, describe how this was caricatured and deployed to advance the overdetermined victimhood narrative of caste-oppressed artists, upheld in the solidarity Statement, and amplified in the SADE research project, inclusively. 

I develop my argument by drawing on my long-standing research conducted in the three countries of India, US and UK where I have lived and worked over the last two decades. In 2005, I took up the post of Reader at the University of Roehampton, London and served as convenor of the first South Asian Dance Masters in the UK. Working within the broad intellectual remit of the Leverhulme funded South Asian Dance in Britain (SADiB) research project, I developed the dance pedagogy by focusing on the global institutionalization of Indian forms as South Asian genres in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s; investigating  social inequalities along the vectors of contemporary versus community dance (Meduri 2004; 2008a; 2008b; 2009, 2010; 2012; 2014; 2018; 2020; 2022; 2024a, 2024b). 

I urge AHRC funders, SADE academics, South Asian artists, students, teachers, and stakeholders to read this essay ‘objectively’ if this is even possible today. I would be happy to engage with even those who disagree with my views because I believe that principled dissent is a moral obligation in education, creative practice, and dance matters. (Bill Taylor, Harvard Business Review, 2017) 

1. Isabel Wilkerson, SADE and Solidarity Statement  

SADE academics crafted their caste supremacy and social justice narratives by drawing uncritically on Isabel Wilkerson’s race/caste theories outlined in Caste: the Origins of Our Discontent (2020) and grafted these willy-nilly onto the South Asian Dance sector in the haze of the global pandemic in 2020. 

In her bestseller, Wilkerson equates race with caste and advances a transhistorical theory which claims that Indian casteism is the key to understanding worldwide racism. Renowned historian Sunil Khilnani explains that by comparing white supremacy in the US with the Indian caste system, Wilkerson collapsed a complex history. (New Yorker, Aug. 2017) 

Ignoring Khilnani’s critique, SADE academics used Wilkerson’s race/caste supremacist theories and integrated these with anti-caste academic scholarship articulated by well-known academic Davesh Soneji, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. They featured the amalgamated scholarship in the online Conversations Across Dance Studies: Decolonizing Dance Studies issue published by Dance Studies Association in 2020. In 2021, I raised my concerns about importing Wilkerson US race/caste theories into dance matters with the Board of Dance Studies Association, but nothing came of it. Enunciated in 2020, the anti-caste scholarship was consolidated with the formation of the SADE network in January 2024, and is iterated in the solidarity Statement as follows:  

‘Both Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music need to reckon with the caste supremacy that not only undergirds the history of these classicized art forms, but also the ways in which they propagate it in the present moment through exclusionary practices and aesthetic gatekeeping. We agree with those calling for Brahmanical dance and music institutions to examine ways in which they uphold casteism in their very structure, as one step towards caste justice in Indian performing arts. We must take an individual and collective stand against casteism, whenever and wherever we see it.’  

Who sees Brahmanical casteism in bharatanatyam and Carnatic music institutions in the UK? While there is Brahmin class dominance in the UK dance sector, I don’t believe that this aesthetic phenomenon can be recast within the parochial framework of caste; nor (mis)perceived as structural or systemic casteism for the following three reasons: 

Firstly, caste is a Portuguese word, rooted in an early attempt to describe South Asian social structures from the outside, and not some immutable Hindu essence associated with Brahmin Patriarchy and Hinduism. In its present form, it is a modern colonial construct and political legal classification that the British created to further imperial rule in India. (Akbar Dosanj, Open Democracy, Jan. 2014)  I have argued elsewhere that colonial (mis) classification of devadasis as a ‘hereditary Devadasi and Dancing Girl caste’ initiated their structural disenfranchisement in the long nineteenth and twentieth century (Meduri 1997; 2018; Spear 2004).

Secondly, caste orthodoxies were modernised through the mediation of the guru-shishya structure in the 1930s; and after caste-based discrimination was abolished legally with the constitution of the Indian Republic, and the formation of Indian national Academies in the 1950s.

Thirdly, caste ideologies were transformed after Indian dance forms were deployed to create what is known today as the British South Asian Dance sector in the UK in the 1980s and 1990. (Meduri 2008; 2008b; 2010; 2012; 2014; 2024).    

I strongly disagree with promoting a retrospective caste-based history for South Asian Dance because such narratives deny the century-long modernization of Indian performing arts and recast these within the framework of caste and identity politics. There is a name for this kind of political denialism: it is called ‘historical negationism’ and it has been wielded most often by the political right. (Whitmanwire, Nov. 2017) 

2a Creation of Brahmin Conspiracy Theory in US Academia 

In the Interview, I described how US academics weaponised the two terms ‘Brahmin appropriation’ and ‘devadasi disenfranchisement’ deploying them to create a Brahmin conspiracy theory for bharatanatyam and Carnatic music. 

In 2010, well-known academic Davesh Soneji synthesised prevailing US scholarship, including my research on bharatanatyam, detailed in my doctoral thesis in the Tisch School of Arts at New York University in 1996, and later adapted into a theatrical performance in 1997 (Meduri 1988; 1992; 1994; 1996; 1997). Soneji recast my subaltern, feminist, anticolonial, decolonial and postcolonial scholarship as a Brahmin conspiracy theory, and claimed reductively that Brahmin elitists E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi Arundale, ‘appropriated’ bharatanatyam unlawfully and willfully disenfranchised hereditary devadasi and Isai Vellalar communities during the national revival of Indian performing arts in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Soneji featured his scholarship in the Bharatanatyam Reader (2010), and in his acclaimed Unfinished Gestures (2012). He also created a social activism project around his scholarship by collaborating with two hereditary artists, Dr. Yashoda Thakore and Nrithya Pillai. This scholarship, at first confined within academia, was disseminated widely on social media platforms during the global lockdown in 2020.  

Since I was stranded in India, I organised a zoom conversation hoping to nuance the Brahmin appropriation narrative. Not only was my Talking Dannce series trolled viciously,  but I was dissed and cancelled by Soneji/Pillai networks as a Brahmin gatekeeper. (The Story of my Dance Video)

Soneji wrote an impressive and challenging book in 2012 that brilliantly advances a Brahmin conspiracy and anti-caste framework for Indian performing arts. He articulated a specific point of view in his book; he did not write the Bible. Because Sonjei’s text has since acquired the status of scripture, it would be worthwhile to remember Nigerian storyteller Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s views on the dangers of the single story and how these narratives are created through acts of forgetting, negation and cultural stereotyping.

2b. SADE academics are aware of my 2021 DSA (Dance Studies Association) correspondence, but they repress these facts strategically and allege falsely that I am a flip-flopper who made a U-turn to forge solidarities with mainstream Brahmin artists in the aftermath of eminent musician TM Krishna’s Sangeet Kalanidhi award in March 2024. Since this is a defamatory allegation, let me address the U-turn accusation in some detail. 

It is true that I mobilised the language of appropriation and disenfranchisement in my doctoral research in 1996, before they were weaponised by Soneji in 2010. I used the terms to create a subaltern standpoint theory and used this to articulate a transnational history for bharatanatyam, focused on the historic travel of Tanjore Balasaraswati (1918-1984), the foremother of twentieth century bharatanatyam, to the US in the 1960s (Meduri 1996). While I used the appropriation language roughly to historicise the twentieth century revival of bharatanatyam within an anticolonial Brahmin class and gender perspective, Soneji weaponised the terms within a Brahmin conspiracy and identity politics perspective. Whereas I focused on colonial archives, class and gender, Soneji dwelled on ethnography, caste, and sexuality. This, then, is the difference between Soneji and my similar but different use of appropriation terminology and our different methodological approaches to bharatanatyam’s complex history. 

Far from making a U-turn, I distanced myself collegially and in a principled way from Soneji’s caste and identity politics scholarship some twenty years ago. My 2001 essay in the Hindu, ‘Talibanization of Indian Performing Arts,’ initiated a series of nine subsequent pieces published in 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2018, 2022 and 2024. These and other essays nuanced the caste appropriation thesis, exploring the complex, multigenerational modernity and globality of bharatanatyam and Indian classical dance forms from diverse perspectives including colonial translation, decoloniality, postcoloniality, dance migration, gender, class, dance historiography and globalisation. 

3. Guru-Shishya as Multi-Generational Modern Structure  

In my Interview, I did not speak about Soneji’s scholarship nor its replication in UK academia but attempted to un-weaponise and disarm the two terms appropriation and disenfranchisement. I noted that Rukmini Devi Arundale and five generations of bharatanatyam students, after her, did not appropriate, but collaborated with hereditary dance masters and devadasi artists through the guru-shishya structure, that honoured the guru, and forged multigenerational inter-caste and inter-class relationships from the 1930s to the present. These were complex, unequal collaborations, but that does not make them appropriation as the term is now used: the ‘stealing’ or forceful taking of something from a subordinate group by a dominant group, without permission, consent, acknowledgment, understanding, or appreciation of its source.  

I drew attention to the guru-shishya structure because it is a paradoxical formation that destabilised power dynamics. Not only was the non-Brahmin Isai Vellalar nattuvanar idealised as guru, vadiyar and dance master generationally from the 1930s, but the singular aesthetic modernization of bharatanatyam was realised in the name of the hereditary Isai Vellalar guru! (Meduri 2004; 2005; 2008; 2010). 

While academics have dismissed the guru-shishya as an appropriative structure, it is, in fact, the foundational paradigm that facilitated the transformation of nineteenth century caste orthodoxies in the 1930s; created multigenerational Isai Vellalar patriarchies in the 1940s; and enabled the modernisation, nationalisation and globalisation of the classicised arts of India in the 1950s and over 100 years of living history. 

In the second half of the Interview, Ravishankar pressed me to speak about devadasi disenfranchisement especially after the passing of the 1947 Madras Devadasi Prevention of Dedication Act. I reiterated that devadasi disenfranchisement is a complex structural displacement that reverberated at many levels; a single-cause theory cannot explain this complex disenfranchisement. (Joe Boswell, aeon, 2016) 

Three colonial archives that I have described as the ‘Trinity of Dance Archives’ were involved in the disenfranchisement of historical devadasis in 1947. Any historical discussion should acknowledge the cumulative impact of this archival history on the lived realities of devadasi communities in the post 1947 period, continuing into the present (Meduri 1996; 1997; 2018; Spear 2004; 2013). I have always maintained that the 1947 Act should have been coupled with a system of financial subsidy to enable devadasis to continue as professional artists and dancers. I have always averred that this was a profoundly consequential oversight of the state. 

4a. Solidarity Statement and Caricature   

My frame of reference for the Interview was the current Global Majority dance practice and scholarship on bharatanatyam which is dominated by Brahmin elites. SADE academics twisted my Global Majority comment into an absurd claim that the Brahmin community constitutes 5% of India’s population, thereby misrepresenting my Interview to the point of caricature.  

SADE academics similarly caricatured what I said about devadasi disenfranchisement and alleged falsely that I dismissed the “embodied knowledge and lived experience of two ‘caste oppressed’ hereditary artists: Dr Yashoda Thakore and Nrithya Pillai.  

This is an outlandish allegation: I did not speak about the embodied knowledge of Pillai and Thakore because the Interview was not about them. But SADE academics invoke the embodied knowledge of the two hereditary artists rhetorically to weaponise victimhood and create their divisive dominant-caste versus caste-oppressed artist framework in the solidarity Statement.    

4b Weaponization of Victimhood  

On April 7, and exactly seventeen days after my Interview, Pillai voiced her prejudicial views in The Wire  online newspaper. She resorted to calling me names, bordering on libel, referenced her grievance narratives, and provided a spirited defense of her indebtedness to the scholarship of her mentor Professor Davesh Soneji. 

Pillai shared the Wire article with SADE academics, and they used the publication, along with my Interview as primary sources to draft their solidarity Statement. 

On April 8, 2024, the Statement was distributed widely on social media platforms; disseminated to universities worldwide and shared in performing arts institutions as well. The objective was to create maximum impact and garner signatures to advance SADE’s caste supremacy and social justice narratives in global academia. Soneji and Thakore are among the 40 academics who co-signed the Statement. 

Who has the power of aesthetic gatekeeping here? Why are academics invested in politicising Indian performing arts within the framework of caste supremacy from their privileged tenured positions in US and UK universities when they have no skin in the game? Do ‘criminalised caste-oppressed’ devadasi communities in India benefit from the oversimplified victimhood scholarship disseminated in global academia? 

I write this essay to implore SADE academics to recognise what postcolonial feminists of my generation referred to as the ‘politics of positionality,’ and mark their own privileged caste positionality in the creation of their caste supremacy scholarship for Indian performing arts.

I also urge dance academics to acknowledge the moral importance of principled dissent in education and arts practice and the productive role of dialogue over dismissal and cancellation. (Taylor, 2017)

Finally, I request dance academics to engage inclusively and explicitly with dissenting voices, and chart inclusive futures for global Indian performing arts scholarship and practice within and beyond global academia.        

 

Dr Avanthi Meduri 

Senior Fellow University of Roehampton London, Equality/Diversity/Inclusivity Officer UK Dance HE 

 

 

Select Bibliography 

 

Meduri, Avanthi. 1988. "Bharatha Natyam: What Are You?" Asian Theatre Journal 5 (1): 1-22.

Meduri, Avanthi. 1996. Nation, Woman, Representation: The Sutured History of the Devadasi and Her Dance, 1856-1960. Ph.D. dissertation, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Meduri, Avanthi. 2001. “Talibanization of the Performing Arts.” The Hindu [Chennai], (Dec.18).

Meduri, Avanthi. 2004a. ‘Bharatanatyam as a Global Dance: Some Issues in Teaching, Practice and Research’, Dance Research Journal, 36/2: 11-29.

Spear, Jeffrey L and Avanthi Meduri (2004b). “Knowing the Dancer: East Meets West,” Victorian Literature and Culture 32, 2: 435-448.

Meduri, Avanthi.  2005. “Introduction: A Critical Overview,” In Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1986): A Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts, edited by Avanthi Meduri, 3-29. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. 

Meduri, Avanthi. 2008. “The Transfiguration of Indian/Asian Dance in the UK: Bharatanatyam in Global Contexts,” Asian Theatre Journal, Vol 25, no. 2 (Fall): 298-329.

Meduri, Avanthi. 2018. ‘Interweaving Dance Archives,’ Devadasis, Bayaderes, and Nautch Girls of 1838’, in Movements of Interweaving, Dance and Corporeality, (eds). Gabrielle Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, and Holger Hartung, London. Routledge pp. 299-320. 

DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351128469 

Meduri, Avanthi. 2020. “British Multiculturalism and Interweaving Dance Hybridities,”  Performance Research 25(4):107-115. DOI:10.1080/13528165.2020.1842604

Meduri, Avanthi. 2024a.  Global Talking Dance Podcast: Spotify (May 2024). 

Meduri, Avanthi. 2024b. “Natyasastra, British Institutionalization of Indian Classical Dance in the ISTD and the Question of Dance Modernity (forthcoming, Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance)