Unfinished gestures
Subtitle: devadāsīs, memory, and modernity in South India
By: Davesh Soneji
Series: South Asia across the disciplines; South Asia across the disciplines
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 313
ISBN-13: 9780226768090; 9780226768106
Subjects: Social conditions; Dance; Devadāsīs; Prostitution; Social change
Description: 'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: On historical, social, and aesthetic borderlands; title: Producing dance in colonial Tanjore; title: Whatever happened to the South Indian nautch?: toward a cultural history of  salon dance in Madras; title: Subterfuges of  "respectable" citizenship: marriage and masculinity in the discourse of devadāsā reform; title: Historical traces and unfinished subjectivity: remembering devadāsā dance at Viralimalai; title: Performing untenable pasts: aesthetics and selfhood in coastal Andhra Pradesh; title: Coda: gesturing to devadāsā pasts in today's Chennai.