Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the present lives of former Telugu-speaking courtesans. While "courtesan dance" is understood as aesthetically deprived by urban elites, the dance survives within their households and this mnemonic mode is central to self-understandings in the present.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I examine the persistent yet invisible performance practices of former courtesans (kalavantulu) in coastal Andhra who have witnessed drastic social and political transformations of their communities over the past eighty-five years or so. Narrations of selfhood and identity among these women emerge through encounters with their dance and music repertoire which they are careful to preserve "behind closed doors" in the relative privacy of their homes. These iterations of repertoire that take place with some regularity among kalavantula families are also the sites that produce personal and collective imaginations; identity and selfhood live through these mnemonic bodily practices. Outside the kalavantula community, "courtesan dance repertoire" is read as a vestige of feudal history, a sign of the "backward" and aesthetically unsophisticated past that cannot be accommodated by public taste. For some women in courtesan communities today, however, the repertoire is used as a mode of telling; it is mobilized to consolidate an otherwise untenable identity. Deliberations on lineage, the devalued nature of their cultural practices and their experiences of nonconjugal sexuality and institutionalized concubinage unfold through the performance of music and dance. If we are to envision feminist ethnography as a project of documenting shifting subjectivities that are affected and transformed by a range of diverse articulatory practices, then memory-work with kalavantulu presents a productive site for such a project.