Gender and The Politics of Voice: Colonial Modernity and Classical Music in South India

Gender and the Politics of Voice:
Colonial Modernity and Classical

Music in South India
Amanda Weidman
George Washington University
This article is concerned with a particular historical moment-the emergence

of upper-caste women as performers of classical music on the concert stage in
early-20th-century South India-and its implications for female musicians and
musical practice in general in the present. In engaging with this specific historical and ethnographic moment, I seek to address broader questions about the
relationship between voice, subjectivity, and agency and to ask how a consideration of music might enrich our thinking on these issues.
In the early 20th century, what is now known as South Indian classical
music, or Karnatic music, underwent a series of major shifts in performance
context and practice. Older temple- and court-based forms of patronage ceased
to be viable in the late colonial economy of South India, and toward the end of
the 19th century, musicians moved in large numbers to the colonial city of Madras (now Chennai). There, music organizations, concert halls, and academies
were established by an upper-caste, largely Brahmin elite that was interested in
what they termed the "revival" of Karnatic music and its transformation into
the "classical" music of South India. At the heart of the revival of Karnatic music was the notion that this music could take its place as a sign of tradition and
Indianness alongside the trappings of an emergent middle-class modernity.
Particular notions of female respectability and ideal womanhood were central
to the project of defining middle-class identity, modernity, and the aims of colonial nationalism.' Whereas devadasis, hereditary female musicians and dancers from a variety of non-Brahmin castes, came to be regarded as prostitutes
and their opportunities to perform were gradually diminished, upper-caste
women were encouraged to learn, and eventually perform, music and dance.
Indeed, for many Brahmin elites, the sign of the successful classicization of
music and dance in the 1920s to 1940s was the transformation of these into
"arts" fit for upper-caste, middle-class "family women."
Here, I am interested in the ways in which music became available to "respectable" women as a vocation and sometimes a career, as well as the particular
Cultural Anthropology 18(2):194-232. Copyright (C2003, Amefican Anthropological Association.
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kinds of performance practice, discourse about music, and notions of ideal

womanhood engendered by this newfound respectability. 2 How did classical
music help constitute a private or domestic sphere at the same time as it participated in the production of a new, urban, modern public sphere? How did the
literal domestication of music as a sign of bourgeois respectability-its connection to a discourse about family values-relate to music's progressive interiorization within the body? How did this interiorization, as well as the notion
of the "artist" that underlay the revival of Karnatic music as the "classical" music of South India, lead to the valorization of a particular kind of voice? In addressing these questions, I identify a certain politics of voice that emerged in
the moment that upper-caste women began to sing in public. It was not just that
a certain kind of voice came to be valued but that the voice itself, identified
with chaste womanly behavior, came to be privileged as Karnatic music's locus of authenticity.
I am thus concerned with the voice both at the level of musical sound and,
at a more metaphorical level, as a cultural construct with a particular history. In
much anthropological and feminist scholarship, the voice, although not always
explicitly thematized, has been identified as a vehicle of empowerment, selfrepresentation, self-expression, authentic knowledge, and agency. If here I offer a somewhat different history of the voice, it is not with the intention of deciding whether or not women gained agency when they began to sing in public
but rather to probe further the questions of how and where we locate agency.
How does a consideration of music complicate or problematize the linking of
voice and agency? What new forms of subjectivity are enabled by changing
conceptions of voice? 3
In a recent essay, historian and postcolonial theorist Mrinhalini Sinha is
critical of the project of "allowing women's voices to be heard" as an antidote
to male-dominated histories and historiography. The desire for a "pure" feminist consciousness, she writes, "serves, in the end, to remove the feminist subject from the history of her production within interconnected axes of gender,
race, class/caste, nation, or sexuality" (Sinha 1996:498). She suggests that we
look instead at the ways women "come into voice" and at the particular voices
women assume. Such an approach, she maintains, "would have to take into account both the historical context which made possible the identity of the Indian
woman and the particular strategies by which women learned to speak in the
voice of the Indian woman" (1996:479). She goes on to explore the emergence
of a middle-class Indian feminist "voice" in the late 1920s by studying the responses of four Indian women to the American writer Katherine Mayo's
Mother India (1927), which was intended as an expose of the degraded condition of women in India.
Sinha's approach is useful in that it shows the conscious construction of
voice, that is, the ways women learn to speak so that they will be heard in an
arena already overdetermined by colonialism and nationalist politics. It shifts
the focus away from the notion that the voice of the "Indian woman" was simply, naturally there, just waiting to be expressed, to the idea that such voices
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were assumed strategically-ventriloquized, as it were-at a particular historical moment. Sinha thus illuminates much about the politics of gender, caste,
race, and feminism at the time. However, she leaves the category of voice itself-the way it is constructed in our own academic practice-relatively untouched. Indeed, the sense in which she and her historical interlocutors use the
term voice is almost exclusively that of political self-representation, where
voice is essentially a metaphor for representation in writing and in a middleclass, English-speaking public milieu. Here, I would like to ask Sinha's question about how women come into voice in a more literal/musical sense. In doing so, we can, I suggest, begin to imagine the voice itself as having a history.
We can begin to think toward a critical anthropology of the voice, one that
might destabilize both the representational metaphor of "voice" and the musicological discourse within which the sound and performance of voice are so
often contained. 4
At the very moment when the "voices" of the women Sinha considers
were being heard, middle-class, upper-caste women were coming into voice in
South India in another, extremely important way, through the music now being
valorized as "classical." In the second and third decades of the 20th century, as
women like Sarojini Naidu and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau' were representing and
speaking for "Indian womanhood" in public political arenas, more and more
women were beginning to perform on South Indian concert stages, the one
public arena thought to be most diametrically opposed to political activity. 6 It
was those women whom Naidu and Rama Rau imagined as representative of
"Indian womanhood"-"those women who claimed 'traditional' ideals of Indian womanhood on behalf of the modernizing project of nationalism"-who
became singers on the classical stage (Sinha 1996:491). Their entry onto the
stage deeply affected notions of what music was, what made it "classical," and
ideas about the voice itself. As these women came into voice on the concert
stage, what came to be prized was a "natural" but curiously disembodied voice
and a set of ideas about music that continue to affect who makes music and the
ways music is performed and classified in contemporary South India.
Sinha's essay thus opens up two possible levels of engagement. At a theoretical level, she suggests that voices-here, the voice of the "Indian woman"are socially produced and that the link between voice and agency or selfexpression is complicated by questions of genre, audience, and historical location. More importantly, the voices that both Sinha and I consider are not those
of subalterns in a classic sense; the question is not so much one of recovery (or
its impossibility) but of how to interpret voices that are already audible, already public. What particular problems does this present? A more specifically
historical engagement leads us to ask what different kinds of public voices and
personae women could assume in South India in the 1920s and 1930s. How do
the instances of "coming to voice" that Sinha discusses relate to the coming to
voice of upper-caste, middle-class women on the concert stage? How do both
of these reflect on constructions of womanhood in colonial and postcolonial
South India?
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A Music Lesson
During my fieldwork in Madras in 1997-98, 1 spent the better part of
every day engaged in music lessons at the house of my teacher, the 65-yearold, never-married daughter of a famous violinist. Because she had few conventional household obligations, these music lessons usually turned into
whole-afternoon affairs. The conversations often moved from music to marriage, and she was decidedly ambiguous on this point. On the one hand, she attributed her failure to live up to her potential to the fact that she was a non7
Brahmin woman without even a husband to help her. Occasionally a visitor
would stop by, perhaps someone who had been a fan of her father's. On one
such occasion, the visitor was a lawyer who lived on the next block, who happened to be passing by as I approached the gate of my teacher's house. She
came out to greet me, and the lawyer stopped to introduce himself to her and to
say how much he had enjoyed her father's music. After a few words about the
greatness of her father, she moved on to her own story, speaking, as the presence of the lawyer seemed to call for, in English. She painted her life in terms
of sacrifice: "I sacrificed everything-marriage, children, money-for the sake
of music. I am a helpless lady," she told the lawyer, a perfect stranger, who was
listening seriously and compassionately. The idea of an unmarried woman who
has "devoted" herself to music has great appeal in South Indian classical music
circles, and my teacher was convinced that her "sacrifice" had brought her
closer to the divine. Telling of her sacrifices often brought tears to her eyes.
However, although she spoke wistfully about how other women musicians got
chances to perform because their husbands acted as managers, she believed
that music and marriage were basically incompatible.
She herself cultivated disorder both in her personal appearance and in her
household. The house, a large, old-style building with front arches, verandahs,
and a courtyard, had fallen into a state of decay in the years since her mother's
death in the mid-1980s, but signs of its former illustriousness were everywhere, piled in corners and festooned with cobwebs. Most fellow musicians
thought my teacher highly "eccentric," and a few speculated to me that she
might have psychological problems. She, meanwhile, admitted that her life and
personality were out of the ordinary but attributed this to the effects of "Ma8
dras politics," which had forced her to the margins of the music world. For
others-friends and family members-her eccentricity was thought to be explainable by the fact that she was a musician, a true "artist." Her cook, who had
worked in the house for more than 40 years, would roll her eyes at my teacher's
perversities, but when pressed, she claimed, "Avakitte kalai irukke" (There is
art in her).
One day in June 1998, she had decided to teach me the well-known kriti
"Rama, nannu brova ra" (Rama, come save me). 9 Fingering through a crumbling book of compositions her father had kept, she commented on the aptness
of the words to her own life, offering me a colloquial translation of mixed
Tamil and English: (Thyagaraja asks Rama) "Rama! enakku show, fraud, gossip,
putting soap, wrong ways-um teriyatu. Enkitte ni vara kutata?" (Rama, I don't
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know show, fraud, gossip, putting soap, or wrong ways. Why do you not come
to me?). Perhaps it was the quietness of the mid-afternoon lull or the physical
act of going through one of her father's old books that brought out a flood of
associations; in the words of the kriti lurked voices other than her own. The
first was that of an American student who had come to learn Karnatic music
from her father perhaps 35 years before. She remembered sitting in the corner
of the room while her father sang the words and the student repeated them in
flat, operatic syllables: "RAA MA NAA NU BRO VA RAA." In stark contrast
was the second voice: that of the celebrated vocalist M. S. Subbulakshmi
(often referred to simply as "M. S."),' who had made this composition famous.
My teacher recalled that M. S. used to sing this song with so much emotion that
there would be tears rolling down her cheeks. That, my teacher said, was because the song related to a period of M. S.'s life when she was unhappy.
It was astonishing to hear something unharmonious about the life of M. S.,
who has been celebrated almost universally as the "greatest female vocalist of
India," as the woman who broke the male stronghold of Karnatic music, as the
"only Karnatic musician with a national image" (Menon 1999:134). At one
point, T. T. Krishnamachari, one of the founders of the Madras music academy, called M. S.'s voice "the voice of the century" (Menon 1999:132). A recent Tamil biography of M. S. titled Icai ulakin Imayam (The Himalaya of the
music world) speaks of M. S.'s voice as the voice of god: "If music can be said
to have a form it is M. S. herself.... Her life is the history of music" (Sarathy
1997:5). The talented child of a devadasi mother from Madurai, M. S. married

a prominent Brahmin man of letters, T. Sadasivam, who brought her talents out
into the middle-class Brahmin music world of Madras. Her life seems to represent the success story that everyone wants to hear about. What discordant note
was there in the life of a woman who, coming from a devadasi background at a
time when devadasis were being disenfranchised, was able, by sheer force of
talent, to become universally accepted in the Karnatic music world?
I offer the following not as a truth about M. S.'s life but, rather, as a sample of discourse about her life, which has become the subject of so much talk
and speculation both inside and outside the Karnatic music world. What my
teacher said that afternoon was that M. S. sang that song with such emotion because of the difficulties of her marriage. She was mistrusted by her husband; he
accused her of infidelity. The present generation does not know about these
things. But although no one would mention it now, then (my teacher was referring to 40 years earlier) it was the talk of musicians and rasikas (connoisseurs).
Sadasivam had fallen in love with the idea of a woman vocalist, and he made
M. S. into the first really celebrated vocalist the Karnatic music world had
known. However, he became envious of her popularity, and paranoid that her
admirers might be lovers, he began to fear that she was a "characterless lady"
(my teacher's expression). After all, he was a Brahmin, and she was from the
caste of "characterless ladies" (i.e., devadasis). But how could he fear such a
thing about M. S.? He was the characterless one to even think such things. He
controlled M. S. so absolutely that if she sang something he did not like he
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would call out to chide her in public. How could an artist flourish with this
kind of husband? "I would rather stay in a hostel than be at the mercy of a husband like that," my teacher concluded.
This led her off into a more general discussion of the difference between
men and women. It was okay for a man to "wander" with ten women, but a
woman in this society could not do likewise, she said, as if to criticize the unfai-ness of society. Sensing a familiar sentiment, I was about to join in the critique when it took a sharp turn toward something else. That double standard,
she continued, was as it should be because there was an essential difference between men and women. Women were a special birth (vastianajanmam); there
was so much power, honor, and dignity (gauravam) in a woman's body that it
was important to control it; otherwise, it would be too dangerous." "Men?"
My teacher spat out the word, as if the very idea was a joke. "Who cares? Let
them go have ten wives; it doesn't make a difference."
This music lesson was, in fact, a lesson in the complex ways that classical
music is implicated in present-day discourses about marriage and womanhood."2 Most striking here is the way a remembrance of M. S. Subbulakshmi
provided the occasion for reasserting a particular notion of womanly virtue.
My teacher had used Thyagaraja's lyrics, presumably composed in an attitude
of humble devotion to Rama, to signify a specifically gendered position: that
of a virtuous woman rebuking society. Sung in her voice, the lyrics outlined
the ambiguity of her own position. As a woman who had remained unmarried
and "devoted herself to music," thereby embodying the nationalist ideal of a
woman who devotes herself to the preservation of Indian tradition, she invited
admiration; at the same time, her unmarried state and her lack of domesticity,
aroused accusations of "eccentricity" and suspicions of abnormality. Sung in
M. S.'s voice, the lyrics outlined the contradictions of M. S.'s position: As an
internationally known artist, she belonged to her public, to her audiences. Her
appearance in public, however, depended on her having a husband who acted
as her manager and on her enactment of virtuous womanhood on stage.
Also striking is the way the story about M. S. juxtaposes several conflicting ideals of marriage. My teacher was convinced that a "traditional" arranged
marriage had been impossible in her case because a traditional husband would
have expected a wife who would bear children and do housework and not pursue a career as a professional violinist. In M. S.'s case, a "traditional" marriage
would not have worked either; it was her "love marriage" (and all the implications of social mobility, companionship, and modernity that such a term carries) to Sadasivam that had enabled her to pursue a performing career by allowing her to appear in public as a "traditional" Brahmin woman. Finally, the
shadow of the devadasi, a woman outside the bonds of conventional marriage,
hung over the conversation, not in the sense of providing an indigenous version of liberated womanhood but as an almost unspeakable contrast against
which any female musician had to place herself. The sense of outrage that my
teacher expressed as to how Sadasivam could suspect M. S. of infidelity indicates the distance she placed between herself and those "characterless ladies."
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Eventually that afternoon we got back to the music "itself." But I was
astonished at the distance we had managed to cover, moving from music to
ideas of womanhood, to marriage, and finally to a discourse on the essential
difference between men and women. What history made possible such a chain
of associations?
Social Reform and the Emergence of "Art"
At the end of the 19th century, the devadasi system, a generalized term referring to a variety of economic, religious, and political ways in which women
were employed by temples, became the object of social reform. The campaign
to end the practice of dedicating girls to a life of service in temples as dancers
and musicians attained success in 1947, when the practice was legally abolished.'" The debates surrounding the issues of how devadasis were to be defined and whether or not their activities in the temples constituted prostitution,
as well as the controversy over the bill to outlaw their practices, had crucial effects on the idea of "art" and conceptions of women's relationship to it.
Kalpana Kannabiran traces the origins of the devadasi abolition movement in the Madras Presidency to the social reform movement started by Kandukuri Veeresalingam in what would later become Andhra Pradesh, in the
1830s. Focusing on women's emancipation, he was concerned with social hygiene: conjugality and sexual relationships, education, religious practices, as
well as government corruption (Kannabiran 1995:63). By the last decades of
the 19th century, not only such social reform movements but also colonial
ideas about prostitution combined to make the devadasi issue prominent in the
agenda for social reform. The Social Purity movement, begun in 1880 in Madras by Raghupati Venkataratnam Naidu, was influenced by the Purity Crusade in England and America. As Kannabiran writes, one of the crucial elements of the crusade was the broadening of the term prostitution not only to
refer to sexual intercourse for monetary gain but also to serve as a metaphor for
social depravity and moral corruption in general (I995:63).14
The development of a discourse about prostitution determined the way
"family women" were differentiated from devadasis. In a detailed essay on Anglo-Indian legal conceptions of dancing girls between 1800 and 1914, Kunal
Parker traces the process by which dancing girls came to be criminalized as
prostitutes. Crucial in this process was the representation of dancing girls as a
professional group, rather than as a caste, which might have its own laws concerning marriage and property inheritance. The representation of dancing girls
as a professional group characterized by the activities of dancing and prostitution brought them under the purview of Hindu law and allowed them to be seen
as a group that had fallen from caste because of their practice of prostitution
(Parker 1998:566). Ruling that their singing and dancing were merely "vestigial" and that their true source of income was from prostitution, the Madras
High Court denied dancing girls any status as artists (1998:607). Placing prostitution in opposition to legal Hindu marriage, Parker states, the legislation was
"directed explicitly towards the valorization of marriage, the construction of a
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Hindu community organized around marriage, and the sanitization of Hindu

religious practice" (1998:632).
The devadasi abolition movement came to a head under the leadership of
Muthulakshmi Reddy, a medical doctor, legislator, and member of the
Women's India Association, who herself was born of a devadasi mother. Beginning in the 1920s, Reddy launched a campaign against the practice of dedicating minor girls to temple deities. "I want the Honorable members of the
House to understand that these [devadasis] are neither descended from heaven
nor imported from foreign countries," Reddy began a speech to the Madras legislative assembly in 1927. "They . . . are our kith and kin." "At an age when
they cannot think and act for themselves," she continued, these girls were "sacrificed to a most blind and degrading custom." The crime of it was that the innocent girls, if only left alone, would become "virtuous and loyal wives, affectionate mothers, and useful citizens" (Reddy 1928-31:3). Here, Reddy implied
that girls who became devadasis were lost to society, that they were useless;
their "sacrifice" made them undependable subjects. In a series of appeals, each
with affecting signatures like "By a Woman" or "From One that Loves the
Children," Reddy drummed up support for her bill. "The dedication of a girl to
a life of vice is a heinous crime-is it not a worse form of Sati? A hygienic
mistake? A moral monstrosity?" (1928-31:5). Reddy was helped in her efforts
by caste associations of Icai Vellalars and Sengundars, castes from which
devadasis generally came; male members of these castes saw the abolition of
devadasis as a matter of retrieving the honor and dignity of their caste (Anandi
1991:741). In 1936, Ramamirtham Ammaiyar, a devadasi from the Icai Vellalar caste who had rebelled against the system, married a music teacher and after becoming a political activist, published a novel in Tamil, Tacikal mocavalai
allatu mati perra minor (The treacherous net of the devadasis, or a minor
grown wise).' 5 The novel, a mixture of autobiography and propaganda. follows
the lives of several devadasis who come to the realization that the system is exploiting them and who mobilize to effect legislation.' 6
Many devadasis opposed abolition, claiming that they were being unfairly
grouped together with common prostitutes. Others claimed that the men of the
Icai Vellalar caste were supporting the abolition because of ulterior motives;
they were jealous of the wealth and status that some devadasis had obtained
(Kannabiran 1995:67). The Madras Presidency Devadasi Association and the
Madras Rudrakannikai Sangam issued statements to counter the abolitionists
in the late 1920s. Bangalore Nagaratnammal, a prominent devadasi who led the
protest against the male and Brahmin domination of the Thyagaraja festival at
Tiruvaiyaru (and who later commissioned the building of the shrine where the
festival now takes place), spoke out against the legislation, claiming that not
only did it deny devadasis their right to own and inherit property, it denied
their status as artists (1995:67).
Indeed, perhaps most crucially, the campaign against the devadasi system
helped redefine the status of "art," particularly music and dance. If the official
debate about devadasis came, by the early decades of the 20th century, to center
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on devadasis' property rights and alleged prostitution, it was because the matter of their music and dance had been effectively removed from the discourse
on devadasis and relocated to a realm now self-consciously referred to as "art."
Separating the woman question from the question of what constituted art enabled art to have a trajectory separate from its practitioners' lives. It was precisely because revivalists like E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi considered
the music and dance of the devadasis to be part of an ancient tradition that extended far beyond the lives of specific devadasis that these could assume the
status of "art." In the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of the campaign to end the
devadasi system, both Brahmins and non-Brahmins involved with the Tamil
Renaissance began to speak about the "revival" of India's "classical" arts.
They used the English word "art" or the Tamil term kalai to signify a generalized concept of art, rather than a particular practice like music or painting. In
this discourse, the distinction between art and craft was essential. Where craft
implied hereditary practitioners who worked repetitively and unthinkingly, art
implied an individual artist, a subject who made choices, was original, and
somehow "expressed" herself through her art."7
In the early 1930s, a number of prominent members of the Congress Party
in Madras such as Krishna Iyer, Tirumalayya Naidu, and T. Prakasam defined
their position bluntly as "pro-art," maintaining that the extremity of Muthulakshmi Reddy's Anti-Nautch movement was killing the art of the devadasis."8 In
a pamphlet titled "Music and the Anti-Nautch Movement," written circa 1912,
Naidu, an advocate by profession, stated that the Anti-Nautch movement had
been negative in character, set up to demolish the "long-standing institution"
of the art of the devadasis (Sruti 1997:6). Krishna Iyer, advocate, freedom
fighter, and founding member of the Madras Music Academy, represented the
pro-art position most vociferously. He was born in 1897 in Kallidaikuricci,
known then for its lavish musical and dance events in connection with weddings. While completing his law degree at Madras Law College, Krishna Iyer
acted female roles in dramas and studied Karnatic music on the violin. He later
joined the Suguna Vilas Sabha, a prominent theatrical group in Madras, and received formal training in sadir (the former name of Bharata Natyam, or "Indian Dance"). Committed to reviving the dance, he was instrumental in starting
the Madras Music Academy and in bringing dancers, first from the devadasi
community and later Brahmins, to its stage. In a series of letters against Muthulakshmi Reddy's condemnation of all public performance of "nautch" published in the Madras Mail in 1932, Krishna Iyer mobilized public support for his
pro-art position (Sruti 1997:15-21).'9
But the idea was not necessarily to help the devadasis continue to practice
their arts; it was rather to rid music and dance of their impure associations. Music and dance had to be rescued from the hands of degenerate devadasis and
taken up by women from "respectable" (i.e., Brahmin) families. The most
prominent upholder of this idea was Rukmini Devi, one of the first Brahmin
women in the 20th century to perform South Indian dance and the founder of
Kalakshetra, one of the first institutions to teach dance and music in Madras.
GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA 203
As Matthew Allen has noted, Devi stated that her goal was to prove that "girls
from good families" could dance and that they no longer had to depend on traditional dance teachers (Allen 1997:64). Influenced by Theosophy and the idea
of the original devadasis as a "band of pure virgin devotees," Rukmini Devi reconceptualized the dance to stress its religious and spiritual aspects, presenting
the dancer as a chaste and holy woman. 20 Importantly, the shift from devadasis
to Brahmins involved not only a new kind of woman but also a new kind of artist, one who was an individual interpreter rather than merely a hereditary practitioner of the art. In an essay titled "The Creative Spirit," written in the early
1940s, Devi described the shift as an awakening from the merely physical level
of the "acrobat" to the "meaning" and "expression" conveyed by the slightest
movements of the dancer (Devi n.d. a: 14-15). "A tiny finger lifted with meaning," she concluded, "is far more thrilling than all the turns and gyrations and
tricks of the circus performer" (Devi n.d. a:15). Crucial to note here is the convergence of notions of chaste womanly behavior with notions of an art in
which the basic currencies are "meaning" and "expression."
Amrit Srinivasan notes that although the devadasi abolition legislation
was not officially passed until 1947, the combination of social reform and the
purification of music and dance as "classical" in the first three decades of the
20th century had already effectively prevented devadasis from continuing their
traditions. The bill, she writes, "seemed to have been pushed through not so
much to deal the death of the Tamil caste of professional dancers as to approve
and permit the birth of a new elite class of amateur performers" (Srinivasan
1985:1875). Brahmin women did not perform on stage in the 1920s and 1930s
for fear of being mistaken as devadasis (Bullard 1998:128). By the 1950s, after
the passage of the Devadasi Dedication Abolition Act, more and more Brahmins were taking up music and dance. Both arts became desirable talents for
women of marriageable age; part of being a woman from a good family came
to mean being the preserver of Indian culture (i.e., music and dance) within the
home. "In the face of overwhelming social pressures," writes Allen, "a significant number of women from the traditional dancing community [stopped dancing but] nevertheless continued in the profession of musical (most often vocal)
performance .. . however, in the 1990s, very few of the women descendants of
this community are going into musical performance" (Allen 1997:68). The entry of Brahmin women as singers onto the concert stage solidified the caste rift
that was occurring; many felt that female Brahmin singers in particular could
not sit next to Icai Vellalar accompanists on stage (Bullard 1998:128, 263).
The rise of Brahmin women as performing musicians thus served as a catalyst
to the Brahminizing of music as a profession. In the last 50 years, Karnatic music and Bharata Natyam have become almost exclusive markers of middleclass English-educated Brahmin identity.
The Voice of the Century
In 1933, Krishna Iyer wrote of the "sweetness of natural music, as found
in the voices of women, young boys, and singing birds" (Krishna Iyer 1933:xvi).
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If the listening public, or the "democracy," as he called them, seemed to be taking a new interest in such "sweet sounds," it was because Karnatic music had
lost its sweetness. "It is but natural," he wrote, "in the general dearth of good
and well-trained voices, and scared away by the excesses of dry acrobatics of
the musical experts," that the public should desire music that was pleasurable
to listen to. Women inherently possessed the raw material of music. In a sketch
of Saraswati Bai (1894- 1974), the first Brahmin woman to sing on the concert
stage, he wrote, "Women vocalists are found to possess certain desirable advantages over men. They have pleasant voices to begin with and none of the
contortions of the struggling male musicians. They do not fight with their accompanists, who usually follow them closely. They are free from acrobatics of
any kind and they seldom overdo anything" (1933:46). Krishna Iyer wrote of
the discrimination Saraswathi Bai faced from a Madras sabha2 ' where she had
been scheduled to give a kalakshepam performance. 2 2 "The music world then
[meaning around 1910] was not as liberal as it is now," he remarked (1933:49).
The boycott of Saraswati Bai's performance by her male accompanist at the
Madras sabha stands in contrast to the enthusiastic reception she had at a wedding performance several years later, where the audience was attracted by the
novelty of hearing a "lady bhagavatar." He describes the scene:
It was one of the marriage seasons at Kallidaikurichi-the Brahmin Chettinad of
the Tinnevelly District as it then was-notorious for the lavish expenditure of its
fortunes on spectacular marriages and choice musicians. A huge concourse of people were hovering in and about a pandal to hear the beginning of a Kalakshepam-the daring feat of a new fledged lady bhagavatar-and then to decide
whether to remain or disperse.... Scarcely did the frail form of a young girl of fifteen or sixteen years of age sound her jalar and go through her opening song when
the scattered crowds closed into the pandal to its full with barely standing space
for the musician herself. The organisers had no small difficulty in accommodating
the vast crowds that sat through the performance with eager interest.... Her performances invariably draw crowded houses and the ladies' section of the audience
is generally overfull. [1933:47]
What accounted for such excitement about a female musician? Although
Krishna Iyer suggested that women's music, without the competition and "acrobatics," had a more "natural" feel, he implied that another reason for women
vocalists' rising popularity was the explosion of gramophone recordings of
them in the early 20th century. Indeed, in the early years of recording in South
India, more records were made of female vocalists than male vocalists (Menon
1999:74). Gramophone records, made to be played in the home, necessarily
needed a different kind of appeal from concerts; the competition between musicians and the "acrobatics" that might make a concert exciting would be lost
on a gramophone record, where anything that did not go as planned might,
later, simply sound like a recording glitch.
Gramophone records also provided a solution to the problems faced by
women musicians from both the devadasi community and the Brahmin community. For devadasi women, there were few paying concert opportunities.
205
Gramophone companies, however, initially run not by Brahmins but by Americans and Europeans, actively recruited devadasi women for their first recordings. 23 Unlike All India Radio, which would start in the 1930s as a vehicle for
the nationalist project of making music respectable (thus denying broadcasting
opportunities to devadasi women), the gramophone companies were purely
capitalist enterprises. Between 1910 and 1930, their best-selling recordings in
South India were of Dhanakoti Ammal, Bangalore Nagaratnammal, Bangalore
Thayi, Coimbatore Thayi, M. Shanmughavadivu, Veena Dhanammal, and Madras
Lalithangi, all women from the devadasi community (Kinnear 1994; Menon
1999:74-75). The gramophone companies-HMV and Columbia Recordssought out novelty; records sold because they contained music that could not
be heard on the concert stage or was too new to have reached it yet. The gramophone companies found a ready source of novelty in girl singers, and by the
1920s, recordings of them were so common that G. Venkatachalam, a patron of
many artists and musicians at that time, referred to them with distaste as "baby
stunts."2 4 Of his first meeting with M. S. Subbulakshmi in 1929, he wrote:
She was 13 when I met her. Subbulakshmi came to Bangalore to record her songs
by His Master's Voice Company. "We are recording an extraordinarily talented
girl from Madras. Would you care to listen to her and tell us what you think of
her?" was the cordial invitation from my friend, the manager. My first reactions
were: "Ah! Another of those baby stunts!" I went, however, and met not a fake, but
a real girl genius. [Venkatachalam 1966:65]
The idea of novelty was intimately tied up with notions of the child prodigy. If
earlier discourse on Karnatic musicians stressed the importance of seasoned
experience and long years of discipleship, the figure of the prodigy stood in
stark contrast. The prodigy was independent of the traditional system of apprenticeship (gurukulavasam), in which the student lived in the guru's household. The figure of the prodigy represented the possibility of instant success
based on natural ability rather than prolonged training. However, prodigy
status also suggests a certain isolation, or protection, from the world, an incompleteness that was compensated for by a larger-than-life voice and a selfless devotion to music. It is no coincidence that in South India, the word prod-
igy was first used about women musicians and that the prodigy's first vehicle
was the gramophone. In South India, the disembodied female voice came to be
thought of as the essence of music itself.25
In the early 1930s, shortly after the "discovery" of M. S. Subbulakshmi,
Columbia Records "discovered" another girl genius, the 13-year old D. K. Pattammal (b. 1919). HMV and Columbia Records, as the official sponsors of M.
S. and D. K. P. respectively, flooded the market with records of these "girl ge-
niuses," each trying to outdo the other (Menon 1999:80-81). Many years later,
in a speech given at the Madras Music Academy, D. K. P. stated that her success, in the absence of a family connection to music, was due to the gramophone (Menon 1999:76). For a young girl coming from an orthodox Brahmin
family that forbade her from performing in public, the gramophone, as an interface
206
between private and public, provided a way to sing without being seen. 2 6 In the
1940s, in the midst of the last phase of the Indian nationalist movement, D. K.
P. became known for her concert renditions of the songs of the Tamil nationalist poet Subramania Bharatiyar such as "Vitutalai" (Freedom) and "Atuvome
pallup patuvome" (Let us dance and sing the pallu).2 7 But of the women musicians that the gramophone companies popularized, M. S. became by far the
most famous. What made hers "the voice of the century"?
M. S. was born in 1916 in Madurai to a veena player from the devadasi
community named Madurai Shanmughavadivu. 2 8 Shanmughavadivu was ambitious for her daughter and brought her to her own recording sessions in Madras, where she persuaded the HMV company to record the 13-year-old Subbulakshmi. The records sold well and M. S. began to get concert opportunities in
Madras. In the early 1930s, she and her mother moved from Madurai to Madras
for the sake of the daughter's career. Her concerts attracted the elite of Madras
at that time, a group of Brahmin or other high-caste men who considered themselves aestheticians, journalists, and freedom fighters. Among them were
Kalki Krishnamurthy, a journalist for the Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan, who
later started his own magazine called Kalki, in which he wrote a weekly column on music and dance; "Rasikamani" T. K. Chidambaranatha Mudaliar, aesthetician and man of letters; the film director K. Subramaniam, who became
known for his patriotic films; and the journalist and freedom fighter T. Sadasivam. Sadasivam, a widower with two daughters, ten years older than M. S.,
married her in 1940. He became not only her husband but also the manager of
her career, overseeing her acting in films such as Shakuntala and Meera and
coaching her in what to sing on the concert stage. 29 It is said that he would sit in
the front row of the audience during her concerts and plan every detail of her
concert programs (Sarathy 1997:169). As her public-relations man, Sadasivam
introduced her to Gandhi and Nehru and a host of other political figures. M. S.
became a larger-than-life presence not simply by her musical talent but by
Sadasivam's careful cultivation of her persona as a singer of pan-Indian and international appeal. If the nation had a voice, Sadasivam at least thought he
knew what it sounded like.3 "
Not only the gramophone but also the microphone shaped M. S.'s voice.
The beginning of her public singing career, it is important to note, coincided
with the establishment of large concert halls in Madras. Essential to these halls
was the microphone, which began to be used in South India in the 1930s. The
microphone allowed Karnatic vocalists and instrumentalists to concentrate less
on projecting volume and more on dynamic shifts and speed. It also allowed
those with softer voices (including many women) to sing to large audiences.
Many musicians have noted changes in vocal style in Karnatic music in the
20th century that might be attributed to the use of the microphone, particularly
the shift from an earlier, higher-pitched style, accompanied by more gesturing,
often referred to today as "shouting," to a lower-pitched, more introspective
style; the microphone provides a kind of physical ballast for a singer or violinist as well, a range within which he or she can physically move.3 ' M. S.'s voice
and career, notes Indira Menon, were products of the microphone: "The greatest gift to the world of this little instrument of the technological revolution is
M. S. Subbulakshmi. The innumerable nuances of her multi-faceted voice can
be captured by it.... She is truly the product of the modem age-of the sabha
culture, teeming audiences, and large halls where her voice can soar-thanks
to the mike" (Menon 1999:89).
What emerges in writings and talk about M. S.'s voice is a new discourse
about the "natural" voice; constantly remarked on are her genuineness on
32
stage, her complete emotional involvement as she sings. Considered less of
an "intellectual" musician than D. K. P. and M. L. Vasanthakumari, who are
often placed in the same category with her, and endowed with more conventional physical beauty, M. S. concentrated on conveying the emotion of bhakti
(intimate devotion to God or the divine), always paying great attention to the
pronunciation of lyrics and singing not only Karnatic compositions but also
Hindi bhajans (devotional songs) and Sanskrit chants. Only after D. K. P. released a record with a pallavi (improvisations performed on a single line of
texted melody), did M. S. begin to include these more "intellectual" items in
her concerts. "Natural" music, however, was the opposite of such intellectual
feats. Here, it is worth noting Venkatachalam's description of M. S.:
Her voice has the rich cadence of a mountain stream and the purity of a veena-note.
. . . She takes the highest notes with the effortlessness of a nightingale's flight to
its mate. This is an art by itself. And when you consider how even some of the great
vidwans and ustads [the Hindu and Muslim terms for artist, respectively] contort
their faces and make ridiculous caricatures of themselves in such attempts, it is

some consolation to see a natural face for once. Women (because of their innate
vanity, I suppose!) avoid that exhibition of agonized looks and tortured faces! Her
recitals have not the long drawn out boredom of the ordinary South Indian cutcheries [from Tamil kacceri, concert].... It is the art of music she wishes to display
and not its mathematics. [Venkatachalam 1966:66-67]
Such naturalness, Venkatachalam suggested, made women's music closer to

the universal language of "art." He was not the only one to go from a performance of M. S. to generalizations about "art." The letters of "Rasikamani" T. K.
Chidambaranatha Mudaliar from the 1940s are laden with references to M. S.'s
performances. After hearing a radio concert of M. S., he wrote that her rendition of a song had "melted the listeners. That is art, is it not? It must make our
feelings mingle with Truth [tattuvam], and make us into different beings [veru
vastuvaka akkivitaventum]" (Maharajan 1979:136). However, as Venkatachalam noted, "art" was also for more mundane purposes.
"What six singers would you select from India to represent this country in a World
Music Festival?" asked a well-known European impressario not long ago, and I
had no hesitation in suggesting Roshanara and Kesarbai for Hindustani music; M.
S. Subbulakshmi and D. K. Pattammal for the Carnatic; Kamala Jharia and Kananbala for popular songs [all women artists].
This list would, of course, amuse the orthodox and the music pundits. "What
about Faiyaz Khan and Omkarnath?" I can hear the Hindustaniwalas shout. "Why
208
not Aryakudi and Musiri?" will be the Tamils' cry. The film fans will plead for
Saigal and Kurshid [all male artists].
I am not unmindful of the merits of the above.... But I wouldn't risk them in a
World Jamboree. They will simply not be understood. Terrible is the ignorance of
the world to things Indian, and unbridgeable as yet is the gulf between the music
of the East and the West.... People of the world understand art and appreciate artistes.... And I claim, my six are artistes! [1966:68]
Two points compel our attention here. First, it is women vocalists, not men,
who are thought to represent not only India but "art" itself in the new global
market; Venkatachalam implied that although the male vocalists had a local
following, they would not be able to travel as representatives of "India." Second, "art"-here the "art of music"-is identified with a "naturalness" that is
gendered as female."
By the 1940s, the connection between women and music had ascended to
the level of an assumption. In a series of essays written in English, Rukmini
Devi elaborated on the special connection that existed naturally between
women and the fine arts.34 "The spirit of womanhood," she wrote in "Woman
as Artist," "is the spirit of the artist" (Devi n.d. c:5). Women possessed an "innate refinement" that made it incumbent on them to take up the revival of Indian art: "Innate as this refinement is, the study and practice of such arts as
dancing, music, and painting can distinctly help in its development.... With-
out the expression of the arts in life, in the very home itself, there can be no real
refinement and of course no real civilization" (Devi n.d. c:2-3). To be an artist
meant not necessarily producing music or art but being art itself: "It is necessary that in her walk, in her speech and her actions she should be the very embodiment of beauty and grace" (Devi n.d. c:7). In learning the arts, she wrote in
"Dance and Music," what was necessary was "rigorous work, the complete
subjugation of all other personal desires and pleasures, the abandonment of
one's being to the Cause" (Devi n.d. b:4). The success of the Indian nation, as
well as the Indian arts, depended on restoring woman from her degraded position to that of "a divine influence rising above the material aspect of things"
(Devi n.d. b:6). The comparison of this ideal woman with music is unmistakable. In an essay "Dance and Music," Rukmini Devi wrote that music, "the basic language of Gods," was what saved dance from being "mere physical acrobatics" (Devi n.d. b: 10- I1). It was the "universal language of the soul" (Devi
n.d. b: 12), the "saving grace of humanity" (Devi n.d. b: 16). In such a conception, the materiality of music is effaced; instead of being seen as inherently social, something that comes into being through performance and the mediation
of human actors, it is seen as a kind of pure voice from within."
Family Values
Notions of classical music and musicianship became conflated with notions of ideal womanhood in 20th-century South India through a particular
model of domesticity. The Tamil nationalist poet and essayist Subramania
Bharatiyar wrote in 1909 of the need for kutumpa strikal (family women) to
209
take up music. His essay "Cankita visayam" was concerned with the problem
of what he conceived of as a loss of musical sensibility among Tamils. The best
way of stemming this loss, he suggested, was to improve women's music in the
home-a kind of trickle-up approach. If family women could be given a proper
grasp and appreciation of music, the rest of society would improve. For
women, he stated, "have an especial connection to music" (Bharatiyar
1981:222); if you prohibited women from singing, you would find that you had
not only no music, but no life at all (1981:221). If they could just be taught to
sing correctly what they were already singing in the home as folk ditties and
lullabies, the connection would be realized. Bharatiyar offered several practical suggestions. First, women must acquire tala nanam (a rhythmic sense, lit.,
"knowledge of tala [time cycles]"). Some said that women innately lacked tala
sense, but Bharatiyar maintained that it was a matter of practice. To those who
objected on the grounds that family women were not dasis (devadasis) and did
not need to sing concerts, he responded that singing incorrectly, without regard
for the tala, sounded vulgar (viracam) to the ear (1981:221). For those women
who wanted to sing, Bharatiyar recommended that they hire a teacher to teach
them proper voice culture and stay away from nataka mettu (drama tunes),
cheap songs with koccai moli (slang), and, most of all, English and Parsi songs
(1981:227-228). For family women interested in learning an instrument,
Bharatiyar recommended the veena, with its calm, soft sound, as being particularly appropriate. "If more women played on the veena, there would be a
greater appreciation of aesthetic beauty and the niceties of life [racapayircci,
valkkai nayam]" (1981:224).
Through its literal domestication, then, music would produce domesticity;

classical music was seen as the soundtrack for the modern marriage and the
modern home. In 1894, a letter in the Mysore Heralddeclared that the publication of Karnatic music compositions in European notation, released a year earlier, "must be introduced to our girls." The writer remarked excitedly that with
such a system of notation, "songs could be mastered from mere books." The effect would be a double solution to the "anti-nautch girl question." It would
spare girls from respectable families from having to go to less respectable
types to learn music and would provide "respectable musicians who could socially mix and move with us, on social occasions like marriages and similar
gatherings where we have been [hearing] the prostitute's music." Meanwhile,
music would become the agent, or vehicle, of the kind of noncorporeal, spiritual love that should exist between a husband and wife: "There must be a unity
of feeling in all pursuits, emphatically so in a Hindu home where the tie is not
of the senses but of a sacred character, emblematical of the eternal wedding of
souls together in harmonious fusion." The lofty musical metaphor of harmony
was thus used to characterize marriage. At the same time, music domesticated
the private space of the home. The writer of the letter, as if to make things
clear, concluded that "music preparation for our future wives is to secure pleasant
households after the day's weary life-struggle is suspended" (Chinnaswamy
Mudaliar 1893-98:208-209).
210 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Essential to this domestication of private space was the domestication of

free time, particularly the time now possessed by the modern wife who had
been freed from menial tasks and chores. A 1930s advertisement for the South
India Music Emporium addressed young husbands as the ones responsible for
buying the trappings of domestic life (see Figure 1). Appearing in the concert
program of the Madras Music Academy, the ad counseled male concertgoers
on how to connect the bourgeois public sphere of the classical concert hall with
its domestic equivalent. "A modern wife has tons of unemployed leisure and a
wise husband must provide hobbies for her leisure being usefully employed,"
suggested the ad. "What better and more soul-satisfying hobby can there be
than violin playing. Give your wife a violin today and ensure eternal happiness
at home." For "modern wives" who found themselves with too much time on
their hands, music could serve as a spiritually uplifting domestic activity that
would convert free time into spiritual capital. If modernity produced an excess
of free time, music could expand as necessary to fill it; if this free time had revealed that the new Indian woman had a "soul," music could satisfy it. Music
became the bonding agent in a new type of ideal marriage; unlike caste or religion, it had the advantage of being able to appear as both voluntary and at the
same time deeply traditional, private as well as public. A photograph of M. S.
Subbulakshmi with her husband Sadasivam in a recent biography places them
within this type of ideal marriage through its caption: "Icaiyil inainta ullankal"
[Souls joined in music] (Sarathy 1997:43).
The private space of the home, however, was differentiated from the private space of the salon. In 1932, a letter to the Madras Mail responded to the
anti-nautch movement, particularly its opposition to public performances of
nautch, with this bit of reasoning: "If the dance is to be free from its less respectable associations, the encouragement of public display appears to be the
best way to do it. Private parties tend to encourage the notion of lack of respectability. Public functions, on the other hand, show the dance for what it is"
(Sruti 1997:5). The private space of the salon was seen as unseemly and deceptive, whereas the concert hall allowed room only for clear observation and not
illusion; hereafter, any identification with the performer would not be felt as
personal attraction but would be mediated by the language of "art." The concert hall, unlike a private salon, ensured that there was a respectable distance
maintained between the performer and the audience, not only physically but also
psychologically: in public, the performer performed for no one in particular.
Such a shift was accomplished not only by the rise of concert halls but also
through the music itself. The repertoire for the public concert-hall music featured the devotional compositions of the "trinity" (referring to the three composers Thyagaraja, Muthuswamy Dikshitar, and Syama Sastri, all Brahmins
active in the first half of the 19th century), which eschewed all reference to human patrons. Importantly, this type of spiritual devotion came to be thought of
not as an extra musical element, as the human love expressed in padams and
javalis (musical compositions for dance conveying the meanings of sensuous
love) was thought of, but as the essence of music itself.36
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How did such notions affect conventions of music performance and the
way music was thought of? Music's relationship to notions of public and private space was, I argue, determined by the kind of ideological and practical domestication of music that was taking place. By domestication, I do not mean
only that music was brought into the home but that its relationship to notions of
public and private changed. Part of the "respectability" that music gained in
the 1930s and 1940s consisted in its peculiar mediation between public and
private. Music brought women into the public sphere in a particular way, as the
voice of tradition. They were not perceived as innovators, much less as performers; rather, they were supposed to sing music as though it were a natural
property of their voice. To ease the problem of women appearing on the concert stage, they often appeared (and continue to appear) in duos; sisters performing together imparted a very different aura from a woman performing
solo. Many women who played accompanying instruments such as the violin
were allowed to accompany only their brothers or other family members on
stage, as if their entry into public could be thus controlled.
Meanwhile, in many upper-caste families, women became musicians because it was something they could do without formal school education or a profession that did not necessarily require them to be away from the house; it was
a vocation that could be learned and practiced in the home. Indeed, many of the
interviews with women musicians in a recent volume titled The Singer and the
Song (Lakshmi 2000) suggest a powerful sense of how music has been practiced as a means of compensation for the frustration of other social, familial,
and professional desires. 3 7 Some of the women interviewed speak of their devotion to music in particular as a kind of strategy for coping with the oppression of family obligations. Yet, for many women, a career as a professional
musician has allowed them to escape marriage entirely. In a society where remaining unmarried is, for a woman, practically unheard of, there is a disproportionately large number of unmarried women musicians "devoted to music."
If my teacher spoke wistfully about women musicians who had husbands to
help them, other female musicians often remarked to me that they did not understand why my teacher was unhappy and why she moped around and refused to
practice. "She has no obligations to a husband," said one. "She could be devoting
herself to her music."
The public face of such "devotion" is very different from its private enactment, however. One afternoon, my teacher, whose stories usually disrupted the
platitudes of the Karnatic music world, launched into a telling of how she became "devoted" to music. She was about seventeen years old, her sister thirteen
or so. There were brothers older and younger. She had been playing the violin
for years, sitting in the corner of the room and listening while her father's students came to learn. Her sister had not shown as much interest but was more
studious in school, so their parents decided to send the sister to a boarding
school to prepare her for college. My teacher, who had had only a tenth-standard education, felt slighted. Why should only her sister get the opportunity to
become educated, go to college, and eventually work outside the home?
213
How could they have been born of the same parents and be treated so unequally, one kept at home in the bonds of hereditary musicianship, the other
sent away to get a college education? She began to doubt if she was her father's
child after all. In anger and protest, she retreated to the upper verandah of the
house, refusing to eat, talk, or play the violin for two weeks. Her father, who
was almost blind and absorbed in his music anyway, did not notice until her
mother said something. Then he came up the stairs to where she was sitting.
She had expected harsh words, but, instead, as if reading her mind, her father
gently said, "So, you are doubting whether you are really my child or not?" But
instead of simply laying the doubt to rest, he said, "You play your violin. Listen to that sound. And you will know." From that moment, she said, her resentments had melted away and she became aware that musical ties were as strong
as ties of blood. Here, then, is another scenario of music restoring domestic
tranquility, but in the interest of a very different set of family values.
The Limits of Performance
In her essay on the agenda of the Madras Music Academy between 1930
and 1947, Lakshmi Subramanian states that the reorientation of music and
dance-performance style, repertoire, and the performers themselves-toward
an urban, largely Brahmin, middle class depended on emphasizing the "spirituality" of Karnatic music and Bharata Natyam, as opposed to their "sensual" aspects, which she and others have called a "sanitizing" project. On the dance
stage, this meant that "spiritual love" and "restrained devotion," rather than
38
"sensual experience" and "raw passion," were projected. On the music stage,
the sanitizing project produced a distinction between "classical" and "light
classical" music. The compositions of the "trinity" came to be considered the
central repertoire of Karnatic music, whereas padams and javalis (associated
with the devadasi tradition) were considered "light classical" (Subramanian
1999).39 The compositions of the trinity, which expressed spiritual devotion to
Rama, were seen as the appropriate subject matter for classical music. To be
properly Indian, Karnatic music could not just be a practical, intellectual, or
even musical exercise; the will of the musician had to be ensured as being in
the right spiritual place. This reorientation of Karnatic music toward the spiritual realm was accompanied by infrastructural changes as well: the establishment of concert halls, music sabhas, and music-teaching institutions. Such
institutions created a public sphere distinctly different from the temple and
courtly milieus in which Karnatic music had flourished in the 19th century.
A central effect of the shift from these settings to the public concert hall
was that music and dance were separated from each other, physically and conceptually. 4 0 Under the reforming eye of Rukmini Devi, musicians who had previously accompanied dancers by moving with or behind them on stage were
seated at the left end of the stage, presumably to give them more respect. However, musicians who performed for dance never got as much respect as concert
musicans; their music was seen as somehow not pure or "classical" enough
(Allen 1997:66). E. Krishna Iyer, in a sketch of the dancer Balasaraswati written
214
in 1933, wrote that the art of Bharata Natyam needed to be "overhauled if it

should have any real appeal in these days." Changing the character of the accompanying music could, he suggested, bring about the desired change in atmosphere. "If possible the vociferous clarionet will have to be substituted by
the flute or other more agreeable and indigenous instruments. The noise of the
jalar [small metal cymbals used to beat the tala] in the hands of the nattuvans
[musician who keeps the tala with a small set of cymbals] will have to be controlled and reduced considerably so as to allow the beautiful sound of the ankle
bells to be heard" (Krishna Iyer 1933:98). "Noise" implied a spectacle, an excess
of performance, and an unruly audience, whereas "beautiful sound" evoked the
image of a silent audience appreciating an aesthetic production.
Perhaps more importantly, dancers stopped singing; unlike traditional
devadasis, who sang as they danced, the Bharata Natyam dancers trained at
Rukmini Devi's Kalakshetra not only did not sing but did a minimum of abhinaya (facial gestures). Krishna Iyer suggested that the "low atmosphere" of
nautch performances was due to a kind of overperformance of abhinaya: "The
over-developed technique of the art, admirable as it is in much of the details of
abhinaya . .. has to be kept within limits and desirable proportions so as not to
obscure or interfere with the natural grace of movements and poses" (Krishna
lyer 1933:98). If respectable dancers no longer sang, it was, perhaps, because
the sound of their voice would add a kind of interiority to the performance, an
unseemly element. On the music stage, the reverse was true: respectable musicians did not dance as they sang. The association of dance with something improper in music can be seen in an article published in 1941 in the Tamil journal
Nattiyam titled "Abhinayam Vendam" (We do not want Abhinaya) (Durayappa
Bhagavatar 1941). The author, Gottuvadyam Durayappa Bhagavatar, turned
the meaning of the verb abinayi from a rather neutral idea of showing in gestures to the negative connotation of imitation, suggesting that many young musicians, instead of developing their own original style, were simply imitating
others. A term from dance became a metaphor for imitation, a kind of excess of
performance that would be unseemly on the music stage.
What were the implications of this separation for the performing subject?
For women musicians in particular, a convention of music performance developed in which the body was effaced; too much physical movement or "show"
on the stage was seen not only as extraneous to the music but as unseemly. In
1939, the violinist C. Subrahmanya Ayyar wrote that excessive gesturing by
singers had become so prevalent that there were special Tamil terms coined to
describe them: iyantiram araikkiratu(a phrase suggesting the motions of a machine hulling paddy) and mallayuttam (wrestling). "Sometime back," he noted
disapprovingly, "the Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan published photos of such
ugly poses of several vocalists, but the satire was lost on them; for they deemed
the photos as a matter of advertisement for their renown in music" (Subrahmanya
Ayyar 1939:45).
The ideal became a kind of performance of nonperformance; nothing visible was supposed to happen on the music stage. Until D. K. Pattammal began
singing ragam-tanam-pallavi on stage in the 1940s, and even after that,

women musicians had confined themselves to performing only compositions;
4
the only improvisation they did was a small raga alapana." Singing compositions was not really considered to be performance. Women's voices, it was
said, were not suited to the competitive type of music that men sang, where
they tried to upstage each other in improvisatory virtuosity. In the late 1930s, a
reviewer in the Tamil magazine Bharata mani wrote that "women's music
needs to have its own character; women's concerts should not just be a copy of
men's concerts. We do not need pallavis and elaborate raga alapana from
women. Padams and javalis are being forgotten as we speak. It would be good
for women to give importance to them" (Chennai c. 1938:372). Women's activity on the stage, suggested R. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar, a prominent male
musician of the 1940s to the 1970s, should be akin to housekeeping. "The
craze for sahitya neeraval and swara prastara [both terms name types of improvisation] as a prestige symbol detracts from the inherent charm of a lady's
voice. Lady musicians can resuscitate values ... if they concentrate on repertoire. Hundreds of classical compositions need to be revived. The Hindu
housewife has a reputation for keeping alive religious traditions" (quoted in
Menon 1999:102-103). By such logic, family values are indistinguishable
from the values of "classical" music.
The effacement of the female musician's body on the classical music
stage is accomplished not only by a lack of gesture but also by a kind of dress
code that ensures that all women musicians look the same. Unlike Western
concert black, which is supposed to make the musician's body symbolically invisible, Karnatic concert wear makes female musician's bodies visible as a certain type: a respectable family woman. Whereas men's appearances on the
Karnatic concert stage vary-they sometimes sport pants and western-style
button-down shirts, sometimes veshtis (cloth worn by men over the legs as a
long skirt) and silk jibbahs (tunics), and they wear hairstyles ranging from topknots to modern short haircuts-women's appearances have changed little
over the years. All wear a fairly lavish (but not too lavish) silk sari and have
their hair neatly and tightly pulled back in a plait or bun. Whereas male musicians who present an eccentric appearance are often thought of in a positive
sense as geniuses, female musicians whose appearance differs from the norm
provoke negative comments; their appearance is considered an extramusical
excess, an unseemly element. My violin teacher, whose unkempt appearance
was a source of anxiety to her family members, often received advice about
how she might improve her appearance so that she might be called for concerts
more often. She compared her own "fate" to that of a male flutist whom she
had accompanied many times when he was drunk and disheveled on stage; his
eccentricities, however, were universally hailed as a sign of his genius. Eccentric women, she remarked, were not likely to be taken as geniuses.
The association between female respectability and classical music is so
strong that metaphors of dress often motivate conversations about music. I
took lessons with a female vocalist in her fifties for several months in 1998.
Her persona in the Karnatic music world was one of intellectual musicianship
and a rigorous avoidance of "show" or "gimmicks" often associated with
younger male performers. In a sense, this "intellectual" image was the only one
available for a woman musician of her age, neither old enough to be a "pioneer" nor young enough to be a rising star who might attract younger, less serious audiences. On one occasion she remarked to me that if she had been born
some 20 years earlier, she would have been M. S. Subbulakshmi, as if M. S.
had simply occupied a slot that had become available in the public world of
Karnatic music in the 1930s. Although she does put emphasis on elements usually described as "intellectual," such as pallavi, and a ganam (heavy, weighty)
style of singing alapana, what is important is the way "intellectual," in critics'
and audience members' descriptions of her music, serves as a code word for a
female musician whose music is without "feminine" charm. By contrast, the
opposition between showiness and intellect is much less stark for male musicians, if it operates at all.
After our strictly timed hour lesson, she would, depending on her mood,
ask me personal questions. One day she asked me why I always showed up in a
sari whereas other young women my age were wearing salwar kameez (long
tunic with pants) or even jeans (the summary term for Western dress). I replied
that by wearing the sari I got more respect and was even, on some occasions,
able to pass as some kind of Indian. The conversation then turned to music. She
expressed her distaste for many current trends in Karnatic music performance,
so-called innovations. Traditional music and traditional dress were unassailable signs of Indianness; despite the fact that one was intangible and the other
quite literally material, they are often used as signs for and of each other. "You tie
a sari and you get respect," she said. "That is sangitam [lit., "classical music"].4 2
The metaphoric opposition between prostitution and chastity. between uncontrolled female sexuality and domestic womanhood, continues to determine
the definition and limits of performance in Karnatic music. 4 3 During the period
in 1998 when I had daily violin lessons with my teacher in Madras, I was always impatient to do swara kalpana, a type of improvisation that takes place
within the tala cycle after a composition. My teacher was generally uninterested in it. "It is not really music," she would say. "Just calculations." Raga
alapana (ragam) was the most important thing. She remembered as a young
woman also having a "craze" for swara kalpana. She asked a male musician she
accompanied at the time to teach her some of his kalpana tricks. He berated
her: "Paittiyam ponnu [crazy girl]! You play such beautiful ragam. Why do
you want to ruin it with this cheap stuff?" She had come to agree with him.
"All this is just kavareci [attraction, the same word as that used for sexual attraction], just feats with the tala, like a characterless woman. But ragam-that
is like your mother." Ragam, she explained, should be born within-first you
enjoy it inside yourself, and then it comes out for others. Swara kalpana, for
her, could not claim the same purity of origin: calculation (kanakku) the same
word as that used for accounting, gave it a businesslike connotation, as well as
a kind of external, unseemly quality.4 4 Here, to imitate certain vocalists doing
217
swara kalpana, she began to slap her leg loudly in mock tala-keeping and
barked out an unmelodic string of swaras (notes sung with their pitch names,
similar to solfege in Western art music). Then, to demonstrate raga alapana,
she assumed a posture of utter stillness, turned her palms upward, closed her
eyes, and began to hum. 4"
Such restrictions might seem antiquated today, yet they continue, perhaps
in subtler form, in present-day conventions of Karnatic music performance. In
1998 I attended a concert by the immensely popular young vocalist Sowmya,
accompanied by M. Narmada on the violin. Both women were dressed, as
usual, in appropriately beautiful silk saris. The concert was uneventful, like
any other concert. However, it is precisely the uneventfulness that is part of the
aesthetic production; nothing out of the ordinary is supposed to happen. During her raga alapana, Narmada played with closed eyes, face screwed up perhaps in concentration, perhaps to avoid the gaze of the audience. Meanwhile,
during the tradeoffs in swara kalpana, when the concert would presumably
reach a fever pitch of excitement, Sowmya, waiting for her turn to come
around, adjusted her sari, refolded the handkerchief in her lap, and checked her
watch, as if nothing exciting were happening. The more classical the music, the
less there is to watch on stage; the music, it seems, comes from a distant place,
a perhaps more "spiritual" realm.
On the Boundary of the Modern
In this article, I have been concerned with the place Karnatic music takes
in the imagination of middle-class modernity in 20th-century South India. I
have been particularly interested in the ways music allowed upper-caste women to
emerge into the public sphere, the kinds of personae and voices it allowed them
to create. As it came to be a respectable art for upper-caste women, classical
music took its part in a larger imagination of ideal womanhood that included
ideas of the artist (as opposed to the hereditary musician) and the natural voice
on one hand, and companionate marriage and domesticity, on the other. For
women musicians from non-Brahmin families, however, these ideals seem to
be much more difficult to achieve. Before concluding, I would like to dwell on
the contradiction that these women negotiate between the modern notion of
Karnatic music as a secular art music, presumably without specified gender
roles, and the nonbourgeois contexts in which they have become musicians.
In 1996 I sought out M. S. Ponnuthai, one of the first women to become a
professional nadaswaram player. Nadaswaram (also called nagaswaram), a
double-reed instrument, is associated almost exclusively with musicians from
the Icai Vellalar caste. Until the 1940s, when Ponnuthai began to play in public, the instrument had been exclusively played by men, as it was believed to be
too strenuous for women. Although much of its musical tradition is shared with
Karnatic music, it remains to this day on the fringes of what is approved as
"classical," having only marginal status as a concert hall instrument. Its traditional
role has been to provide music for auspicious occasions, such as temple rituals
and weddings.4 6
In her mid 60s at the time I met her in Madurai, Ponnuthai had had an illustrious career as a nadaswaram player for temple and political processions, as
well as on the concert stage; one of her distinctions was that she had made concert audiences appreciate the nadaswaram. As I made repeated visits to her
house, however, it became clear that she was uninterested in talking about her
life. My vain attempts to steer the conversation in that direction on several occasions ended in our watching a televised cricket game. On other occasions, instead of talking, she would play at great length, taking apparent delight in my
inability to keep up with her virtuosic playing as I struggled to accompany her
on the violin. I thought that these sessions would eventually lead her to feel
like talking, but on my last visit to her house I entered to find that she had invited her grown son to answer my questions instead. Although this was an
ironic comment on the ethnographic project of finding authentic voices, it revealed much about the politics of representation relating to the life of a woman
who had led a very public life and then retreated.
From Ponnuthai's son I learned that her father, a government servant with
progressive ideas, was inspired by the essays on women by Subramania Bharatiyar.4 7 He had decided that his daughter should take up the nadaswaram and
apparently groomed her for a public life. After her debut at age 13, he resigned
from his job in order to be her escort to performances and also took on the job
of collecting concert reviews and other press releases about her. Indeed, among
the many clippings her son showed me were reviews of her performances in
Ceylon, Singapore, and elsewhere, which her father had neatly preserved by
mounting on paper. Ponnuthai married a prominent citizen of Madurai who
served as a representative for the Congress party, and she herself served as the
head of the Madurai Icai Vellalar Sangam, an organization that saw to the welfare of nadaswaram musicians, from 1953 to 1963. In 1972, after her husband
died, she stopped playing in temples and gradually retreated from public view.
Among the clippings were several magazine articles written about her in the
early 1990s. I asked her which she thought was the best, and she pointed to a
cover story in Ananta Vikatan: "Madurai Ponnuthai-Oru Kannir Katai" [Madurai
Ponnuthai: A sad story] (Saupa 1990).
The article begins with the imagined scene of Ponnuthai's arangetram
(debut), panning through the astonished crowd listening on the banks of the
Vaigai River. After describing Ponnuthai's fame and success in hyperbolic
terms, it notes Ponnuthai's "sudden" disappearance from public life in 1972.
We wondered what had happened to her, and searched for her.... Some people
told us that she had passed away. We were surprised by that, since just last month
the Tamil Nadu government had announced that it was going to award her the title
of "Kalaimamani" [Great Jewel of the Arts]. We resumed our search with more urgency ... and finally found her living a life of misery in a small house in an outof-the-way part of Madurai.
The narrative then cuts, as if cinematically, to the scene at the house, where
Ponnuthai's "still majestic" look contrasts with the poverty of her circumstances.
219
She goes next door to fetch the nadaswaram in the only place it can be kept safe
from rats and returns wearing earrings. "I had more than a hundred pounds of
jewelry and gold medals," she laments. "Now it is all lost." Presumably
prompted by the writer, she describes her meteoric rise, against the odds, and
her ability to play for all-night temple functions even while pregnant. She describes how, after her marriage, her husband "never interfered" with her career
and how their large house, in the center of town, was always full of distinguished guests. Then the narrator's voice: "For a few moments, the great
nadaswaram artist was silent. Her eyes welled up with tears." Ponnuthai says,
"My husband died in 1972. With that, my musical life was finished." The reporter feigns an innocent question: "Why? Couldn't you continue playing?"
and the article moves to what is obviously the clincher. "Nadaswaram," Ponnuthai explains, "is an auspicious instrument. After my husband's death I became an inauspicious woman [amankalapen] and could no longer play in temples. People talked behind my back. I stopped playing for radio too. There was
no income, and I was too proud to ask for any help." The narrator comes in for
the fadeout: "Wiping the dust from the nadaswaram, she raised it to her lips.
What dignity! What majesty! From her unhesitating fingers a shower of music
poured forth" (Saupa 1990:10-14).
What politics of representation are at work here? The article is meant to
evoke sympathy, even outrage that society has allowed so distinguished a musician to sink into poverty and oblivion. It invites the reader-given this journal's readership, most likely a housewife reading in her leisure time-to witness the conflict between modernity, signified by Ponnuthai's emergence into
the public sphere, and the views of a tradition-bound society that still believes
that women become inauspicious when they are widowed. Modernity, here, is
articulated in the voice of the narrator, whose reportage is mixed with exclamations-"What dignity! What majesty!"-that indicate a subject able to appreciate good music no matter who or where it is coming from. By melodramatically
staging Ponnuthai's problem as a secret that must be revealed, the article assumes a "modern" reader who would be innocent of such problems; the unspoken comparison here is to the middle-class, Brahmin music world of Madras in
which it is a "modern" discourse on family values, not "traditional" religious
values, that both makes possible and sets limits on women's professional musicianship.
What is striking, then, is the discontinuity between Ponnuthai's status as
an "artist" and her status as a woman, but there is also the discontinuity between her career as a professional musician and those of other women in the
48
middle-class music world of Madras. In a conversation in 1997, Bhairavi, a
professional musician from an Icai Vellalar family, now in her early 30s, spoke
of a similar discontinuity. Although her great-grandparents had been musicians, neither her grandparents nor her parents had continued the tradition; she
had made a conscious decision to become a professional flutist. She had recently been married, but the match had taken a long time to make because she
was in an anomalous category; not only was she a professional musician, but
220
she played the flute, an instrument that has not been taken up by non-Brahmin
women since the beginning of the 20th century. 4 9 It is rare for women of her
caste these days to take up music at all, much less as a profession. She remarked to me that young musicians from Brahmin families are now increasingly engaging in love marriages, but this was not possible for her. Music, for
someone of her caste, did not provide the same kind of avenue toward bourgeois middle-class sensibility. For a husband and wife to have their "souls
joined in music" was not an option. Her husband, who was not a musician, was,
at the time of our conversation, having trouble finding employment, so Bhairavi was supporting the family by giving music lessons and had applied for
teaching positions in schools. "Would such an arrangement be acceptable?" I
asked. "That's how it used to be in our caste anyway," she replied. "The ladies
were all dancers and musicians and they supported the men." For her, the irony
was that the very transformations in the music world that had taken professionalism away from women musicians of her caste in the early 20th century in the
name of respectability now made it possible for her to become a professional
musician.
Conclusion
I have dwelt on the lives and commentary of these two women because
they occupy the fringes of a dominant discourse that links classical music,
ideal womanhood, and domesticity in a particular way. In doing so, they clarify
the contours of this discourse and the kinds of exclusions on which it is built.
For both Ponnuthai and Bhairavi, the dilemma has been how to create an identity for themselves as women musicians who are neither from the Brahmin,
middle-class music world of Madras, nor from conventional hereditary musical
families. For both, much of the discourse linking classical music, ideal womanhood, and the nationalist aspirations of an urban middle-class has been enabling. It has enabled Ponnuthai (through her father's desires) to take up the
nadaswaram and to travel widely, setting an example for many younger female
musicians who are aspiring to become professional. At the same time, it has
enabled Bhairavi to take up music as a career, something that the women in
generations preceding hers could not have respectably done. Much of the irony
of Bhairavi's comment comes from the realization that the profound discontinuity effected by the emergence of "classical" music in the 20th century made
possible a strange kind of continuity.
In the roughly one hundred years separating Bhairavi's life from the lives
of her female ancestors, tremendous changes have taken place in the way music has been conceptualized and practiced. These include physical changes,
like the building of concert halls and music schools, as well as the emergence
of gramophone recording and radio. My concern here has been the new kind of
discourse about music that this process has engendered. It is not only the fact
that music has become available to "respectable" women as a vocation and
sometimes a career but also the particular ways in which it became available
that are important. If, to return to an earlier moment in this article, my teacher
221
found the transition from music to the topic of marriage to the essential differ5
ence between women and men "quite natural,"" it is because this new 20thcentury discourse about music is connected, metaphorically and quite literally,
to a discourse about family values.
In the 1930s and 1940s, ideals of chaste womanly behavior-not drawing
attention to one's body or relying on physical charms-became a metaphor for
a new kind of "art" that privileged "meaning" and "naturalness" over "cleverness" and "acrobatics." In that sense, "classical" singing was refigured as a
natural expression of devotion. The "natural" voice and the chaste female body
were thus linked. By midcentury, when Tamil films began to feature female
dancing bodies that were, by these standards, decidedly immodest, their em5
bodied voices became another foil for the respectability of "classical" music. "
In the discourse that interiorized and domesticated Karnatic music, a new concept of performance emerged. In this conception, performance came to be associated with the artificial; good music was not something performed but
rather something simply expressed. The "voice of the century," then, referred
not only to M. S. Subbulakshmi's sound but to a particular kind of voice that
was imagined to come naturally from within, unmediated by performance of
any kind. Technological developments like the gramophone and microphone,
whose effects deserve to be more fully investigated, were instrumental in producing this voice as much as a nationalist discourse that linked the notion of an
"inner voice" with the inner sphere of the Indian nation.
In this article I have focused less on an "objective" description of M. S.'s
voice than on various discourses about her voice and persona in order to convey that her voice is as much a product of a particular historical and social moment as it is a vehicle of her individual expression. This is not to deny her
status as a creative artist and a powerful persona on stage but, rather, to suggest, as does Mrinalini Sinha, that "a focus on the voice or agency of women
themselves does not have to be opposed to an examination of the ideological
structures from which they emerged" (Sinha 1996:483). In exploring the creation of a voice in which women could speak as the "Indian woman" in the
1930s, Sinha moves beyond notions of pure feminist consciousness to show
how the creation of a voice is always a strategic maneuver within certain ideological structures. The creation of musical voices by women in the 1930s and
1940s was, I suggest, equally as strategic, even though these voices emerged in
a part of the public sphere seemingly far removed from political or even social
discourse. Indeed, I have suggested that it is useful to ask how the voices of
women like Sarojini Naidu and Dhanvanti Rama Rau, on the one hand, and
those of M. S. Subbulakshmi and D. K. Pattammal, on the other, may have
worked to shape each other. Sarojini Naidu's on-screen introduction to the
Hindi version of M. S.'s film Meera, in which she calls M. S. "the nightingale
of India," is a literal example of this. But beyond such literal connections, the
fact that these voices were heard side by side is important; their juxtaposition
defined the possibilities for "respectable" women's participation in the public
sphere, even as they defined the content of that "respectability."
222
In concluding, I would like to return to the two questions that motivate

this article. First: How does a consideration of music complicate or problematize the linking of voice and agency; what is the relationship between musical
voice and "voice" in the sense of having a say, of self-representation and selfexpression; and where in a musical voice do we locate "voice"? The equation
of the musical voice with "voice" underlies the notion of the "artist" as a creative individual in control of his or her medium, expressing his or her "self"
through art. Looking for a "voice" implies listening to the audible musical
voice for a will, or intention, behind it; in Western musicology, this has become the central work of interpretation. Because music is not literal, however,
this always involves a transposition, an interpretation made in a particular time
and place by the interpreter. Here, I have examined M. S.'s voice to seek not
the agency that lies behind it but in a sense the agency of her voice, its power to
produce a particular persona, to induce reactions and invite interpretations. It is
not agency in a classic, revolutionary sense but the power to affect and to produce effects in perhaps less direct ways that I am describing here.
Once the voice becomes recognizable as a cultural and historical object, it
is possible to ask what new forms of subjectivity are enabled by changing conceptions of voice. This is the second question that motivates this article. Here, I
have identified a politics of voice that came to operate in the 1930s, in which
the voice was imagined in a particular relation to the body, as something that
transcended the body. This relationship was articulated by Rukmini Devi,
among others, as the relationship between music and dance, where music was
supposed to raise dance above the physical, to make it more than the sum of its
gestures. In the process, music itself had to be purified, reconceived as an interiorized "inner voice." By a synechdochic chain of associations, this newly
conceived domain of interiority became connected with another domain newly
conceived as an essential part of bourgeois modernity: the middle-class home.
Domesticity and the interiorized voice revolved around the same figure, the
"respectable," chaste woman. Meanwhile, both the musical voice and the middle-class home constituted, and stood for, the inner sphere of the nation, a construct central to middle-class nationalism.
The interiorized conception of voice made possible both the subject position of the "artist" and that of the "respectable" woman, roles that were central
to the formation of new conceptions of public and private in colonial modernity. Both were revolutionary in the sense that they allowed what was seemingly private-the self, the virtues of domesticity-to be displayed in public.
In doing so, they defined the boundaries of public and private. And yet the role
of the artist, although liberating in some respects, does not offer up "agency" in
any classic liberatory sense. Although seemingly opposite, the roles of artist
and respectable woman reinforce each other; the "natural" voice of the artist
was-and still is-identified with the chaste body of the respectable woman.
To "come into voice" on the classical stage, then, involves engaging not just
the conventions of musical art but the conventions of female respectability.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This article is dedicated in gratitude to my music teacher in India (whose identity I have endeavored to keep confidential here) and the numerous female musicians who spoke with me in Madras and Madurai between 1995 and 1998. I
would like to thank Ann Anagnost and four anonymous readers for thoughtful readings
and questions that helped shape the final version. Any errors or misrepresentations are,
of course, solely my own.
1. The significance of the ideal of womanhood to the consolidation of a hegemonic
middle-class culture in India and the middle-class basis of the Indian nationalist movement have been examined by several scholars. Partha Chatterjee (1993), in his essay on
the nationalist resolution of the women's question in the 1870s, argues that the rearticulation of Indian womanhood was the foundation on which the notion of an "inner
sphere," representative of Indianness, was built. As Mrinalini Sinha restates the idea,
"The re-articulation of the Indian woman for the self-definition of the nationalist bourgeoisie provided the context for the 'modernizing' of certain indigenous modes of regulating women in orthodox Indian society" (Sinha 1996:482). Sumanta Banerjee (1989),
also in the context of 19th-century Bengal, argues that the creation of a new public space
for the respectable bhadramahila (educated middle-class woman) was predicated on
sharpening class differentiation, especially through the regulation of women's popular
culture and the juxtaposition of this new woman with women from lower socioeconomic
strata. More recently, Purnima Mankekar (1999) and Mary Hancock (1999) have explored middle-class constructions of womanhood in relation to nationalist discourses in
North and South India respectively.
2. The classical concert stage provided a public arena in which the image and sound
of Indian womanhood could be constructed and displayed beginning in the 1930s. Before that, as Kathryn Hansen has noted, the popular theater and early cinema "created a
public space in which societal attitudes towards women could be debated" (Hansen
1998:2291).
Through the institution of female impersonation, a publicly visible, respectable image of
'woman" was constructed, one that was of use to both men and women. This was a representation that, even attached to the material male body, bespoke modernity. As one response to
the British colonial discourse on Indian womanhood-the accusations against Indian men on
account of their backward, degraded females-the representation helped support men, dovetailing with the emerging counter-discourse of Indian masculinity. Moreover, women derived from
these enactments an image of how they should represent themselves in public. Female impersonators, by bringing into the public sphere the mannerisms, speech and distinctive appearance
of middle class women, defined the external equivalents of the new gendered code of conduct
for women. [1998:2296]
3. In asking this question, I find my concerns to be parallel to those of media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1990), who historicizes the voice by considering the conditions of
its production and dissemination. He traces the notion of an "inner voice," central to the
emergence of what he calls modern subjectivity, to certain practices of reading, writing,
and pedagogy. For Kittler, then, the inner voice (based on the aural memory of the
mother's voice, associated with new family organization and reading practices emerging
in Germany at the end of the 18th century) is radically historical, not a psychological
universal. Around 1900, when it became possible to record voices, Kittler argues, the
concept of the "inner voice," and its accompanying forms of subjectivity, is no longer
available in the same way.

4. Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones suggest a parallel set of concerns in the introduction to their volume Embodied Voices, in which they focus on the "literal, audible voice
as the site of women's silence and the instrument of their empowerment." In differentiating between the terms voice and vocality, they suggest a shift "from the phenomenological roots of voice to the conception of vocality as a cultural construct" and the
centrality of gender in shaping that construction. How, they ask, has the relationship
amongst gender, voice, and embodiment been constructed in Western culture (Dunn and
Jones 1995:1-4)'?
5. Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949), poet, nationalist, and advocate for women's rights,
came from a Telugu Brahmin background; Dhanvanthi Rama Rao, also from a Telugu
Brahmin background, was an active member of several All-India women's organizations
between 1920 and 1940.
6. In The Voice of Egypt, a biography of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, Virginia
Danielson writes of the juxtaposition of music and politics in the public sphere in 1930s
Egypt, when radio listeners would hear basically two things on the radio: news broadcasts and the singing of Umm Kulthum. She suggests that this juxtaposition created a
powerful context for the development of a nationalized musical tradition (Danielson
1997:77). Here, I am interested in the juxtaposition of different types of women 's voices
in the public sphere and the ways they may have mutually constructed each other.
7. She did not, however, identify with the Tamil Non-Brahmin movement, not being Tamil herself.
8. As Anna Tsing has written. "Eccentric subjects are multiply and complexly constructed according to their relationships to power and difference" (1993:232). My
teacher's "eccentricity" was constructed in relation to powerful discourses about "Indian womanhood," "art," and "caste."
9. A kriti is a compositional form in Karnatic music. This particular kriti is a composition by the composer Thyagaraja (1767- 1847), with words in Telugu.
10. M. S. was born in 1916.
11. The concept of dangerous female power that needs to be contained is prominent
in Hindu mythology and in religious rules regulating women's behavior.
12. Regula Qureshi meditates on this set of issues at length in her recent essay on
Begum Akhtar, the North Indian singer active from the 1930s to the 1970s, known for
her renditions of Urdu ghazals. In some ways, her life parallels that of M. S. Subbulakshmi. Born into a courtesan family near Lucknow, Akhtari Bai achieved fame as a courtesan singer while in her teens through gramophone recordings. In the 1940s, she
married one of her admirers and thus became Begum (Lady, Mrs.) Akhtar; on entering
the domestic life of a respectable wife she stopped singing for a number of years, to begin
again only in the 1950s. Qureshi explores the ironies and conflicts involved in the life of
a woman who transformed herself "from a hereditary professional singer to a respectably married lady who even gave up her singing career, only to emerge into the public
domain transformed into a national symbol iconic of the courtly musical culture which
had shaped her" (Qureshi 2001:97).
13. According to Kunal Parker, the term devadasi, which literally means "servant
of the god" in Sanskrit, began to be used in Anglo-Indian discourse only in the second
half of the 19th century. The colonial label "dancing girl" was used to refer to communities of women with and without temple affiliations in different parts of the Bombay and
Madras Presidencies (Parker 1998:567). The dance they performed was, in Tamil Nadu,
variously called Sadir, Nautch (a corruption of the Hindi term nach). or Karnatakam before the "revival" of the dance form in the 1940s as Bharata Natyam.

14. See Ramakrishna 1983 and Venkarataratnam 1901 for further elaboration.
15. See Anandi 1991 for a detailed discussion of the novel.
16. The abolitionist cause was also helped by American writers such as Katherine
Mayo, whose books Mother India (1927) and Slaves of the Gods (1929) specifically concerned the supposedly degraded state of devadasis.
17. The Tamil term kalai, which, according to the Cre-A Tamil dictionary has
meanings of both "art" and "workmanship," moved decidedly toward connotations of
high art (as opposed to craft) in this early-20th-century discourse. See, for instance, an
article in Triveni magazine from 1928 by C. Jinarajadasa: "In India, in all the arts and
crafts there is a great sense of beauty, but it is now traditional, i.e., the craftsman works
by rote, and does not sufficiently feel a true creative urge.... If only our artists will look
with the eyes of the West on Indian scenes . . . they will find plenty to inspire them"
(Jinarajadasa 1928:3-4). Oppositions between art and craft also come up in Rukmini
Devi's essay "The Creative Spirit" (Devi n.d. c).
18. Nautch was a term usedto refer to the devadasis' dance. See Sruti 1997:6-9, for
a more detailed account of the controversy about public performances of nautch. Muthulakshmi Reddy was particularly opposed to the staging of nautch performances at government functions or celebrations.
19. E. Krishna Iyer was behind the Madras Music Academy's 1932 resolution to
rename sadir "Bharata Natyam." The name "Bharata" gave the dance an image of national importance; at the same time, the use of the word "natya" suggested its origin in
the Sanskrit treatises on dance.
20. See Srinivasan 1985:1875 for a concise listing of some of the changes this involved; see also Allen 1997. The idea of devadasis as "pure virgin devotees" was Annie
Besant's phrase. "There was a band of pure virgin devotees attached to the ancient Hindu
temples.... In those days they were held in high esteem and were very well looked after.
... They would follow the procession of Gods dressed in the simplest sanyasi garbs and
singing pious hymns.... This is the history and origin of the devadasi class" (Besant,
quoted in Reddy 1928-31:5). For more on the Theosophical Society, its role in the revival of Bharata Natyam, and its naming of Rukmini Devi as the World Mother, see Allen
1997, Burton 1994, and Weidman n.d.
21. A sabha is an organization that arranges music and dance performances.
22. Harikatha kalakshepam is narrative storytelling, usually with religious
themes, in which the performer intersperses the narrative with songs.
23. In North India, as Regula Qureshi (2001) points out, recording provided an opportunity for courtesans to continue as singers and entertainers even as their opportunities for live performance diminished. Many courtesans became singers for films.
Interestingly, it was also through sound recordings that Begum Akhtar's reentry into
public as a singer after she had married and her persona had changed from courtesan to
respectable married woman was facilitated.
24. "Baby Kamala" was a dance prodigy of the time, credited for popularizing
Bharata Natyam among the Brahmin middle classes even more than Rukmini Devi. Baby
Kamala gave her first performance in 1941 at the age of seven; the appeal of the child
prodigy can be seen in the fact that she retained the title "Baby" well into her teens. In
1998, a writer in Sruti magazine wrote about her rise: "The timing was perfect. The conditions ideal. And her age was just right. She was still a child, a 'baby' and her innocence
and charm endeared her to one and all" (Allen 1997:80-81). The appeal of the prodigy
continues today, as is evidenced by titles such as "Veena Virtuoso 'Baby' Gayatri."

25. The idea of the prodigy suggests a preternatural ability or gift, that is, an element that goes beyond nature into the supernatural or artificial. Felicia Miller Frank, in
her exploration of the links between images of women, voice, and the artificial in 19thcentury French narrative, traces the emergence of a preoccupation with the artificial and
artifice within the Romantic valuation of nature. She suggests that the artificial woman
"enacts a metafiguration of the technologies of the mechanical reproduction of human
presence" (Frank 1995:119). My point, similar to hers, is that the notion of the prodigy
linked women with technologies of mechanical reproduction in the early 20th century.
26. Many Brahmin girls learning music, including D. K. P., faced the problem of
not being able to undergo gurukulavasam because this was considered improper for
them, especially if the guru was of a non-Brahmin caste. D. K. P. never had a guru in the
traditional sense but learned briefly from different teachers and from gramophone recordings (Menon 1999:99).
27. Pallu is a Tamil poetic narrative genre that has peasants and farmers as characters; the song identified liberation from British rule with the end of Brahmin oppression
of non-Brahmin castes.
28. M. S. Subbulakshmi's devadasi background has the status of a public secret in
the Karnatic music world; everyone seems to know about it, but it is never discussed publicly or written about. For example, Sarathy's 1997 biography of M. S. skirts the issue by
not saying anything about who her father was. He was a wealthy Brahmin patron of her
mother.
29. M. S. acted in four films: Seva Sadanam (1938), Shakuntala (1940), Savitri
(1941), and Meera (1945). Sadasivam was the producer or coproducer for all of them.
Seva Sadanam was a "social" film that critiqued Brabmin orthodoxy and the dowry system; Shakuntala and Savitri were based on mythological stories. Meera, M. S.'s most
popular role, was based on the life of Meera Bai, a high-born Rajput woman who lived
in the early 16th century, who declared herself to be Krishna's bride, and who renounced
her worldly existence to follow the life of a saint and mendicant. The film was so popular
in South India that it was later dubbed in Hindi. Sarojini Naidu gave an on-screen introduction to this version in which she described M. S. as the "nightingale of India" (Guy
1997:229). Naidu's introduction deftly combines praise of M. S.'s voice with the implication that a good voice transcends its body like a bird in flight; at the same time, it makes
M. S. represent "India."
30. Recent biographies play up M. S.'s personal humility, as opposed to the "grandeur" and "majesty" of her voice, noting that she knows "nothing but music." Consider
the following description: "As a celebrity she has moved with and played hostess to
world leaders with gentle charm and dignity. At home she is the traditional housewife,
stringing flower garlands for her puja (Hindu prayer ritual) room and decorating the
floor with her beautiful kolam (rice powder designs). It is on stage that she comes into
her own-sensuously captivating, with an occasional lift of the eyebrow and a bewitching smile, not for the audience, but for the Divine" (Menon 1999:141). Statements like
these reveal an insistence on separating M. S.'s stage persona from her everyday life.
Male musicians and their critics, on the other hand, rarely feel the need to make such a
separation.
31. On the effects of the microphone in western contexts, Simon Frith writes: "The
microphone made it possible for singers to make musical sounds-soft sounds, close
sounds-that had not really been heard before in terms of public performance.... The
microphone allowed us to hear people in ways that normally implied intimacy-the
whisper, the caress, the murmur" (Frith 1996:187). Later, he writes that the microphone

draws attention to the place of the voice in music as well, allowing it to dominate other
instruments, to be the "solo" in a way it could not have been before (1996:188).
32. The term natural, as in the idea of a "natural" voice, does not really have a
Tamil equivalent. Words like unmaiyana (true) and iyarkaiyana(natural) are possible
synonyms, but I have not heard them used about music. The association of naturalness
with transparency and the lack of a need for translation-and the positive valuation of
this "naturalness"-is, thus, connected to English. Similarly, the term intellectualis not
really covered by the Tamil idea of nanam (knowledge, wisdom). To say a musician has
nanam is to say he has an idea of how the music works, a Karnatic sensibility, but it does
not quite mean that he is "intellectual" in his approach to music.
33. The discourse linking idealized female musicality with notions of "naturalness," as opposed to artifice, intellectuality, and virtuoso display, pervades Western art
music. Richard Leppert (1993) and Judith Tick (1986) provide useful discussions of this
in English and American contexts respectively. Such distinctions have their origins in a
broader aesthetic discourse based on gendered notions of the beautiful and the sublime,
addressed by Paul Mattick Jr. (1995). These distinctions traveled to India as part of a colonial discourse about music but became specifically central to a nationalist discourse
that associated "natural" female musicality with the essence of the Indian nation.
34. These essays were all published as undated pamphlets by the Theosophical Society through the Vasantha Press in Madras in the 1940s. They are available in the Adyar
Library, Chennai (Madras).
35. "Good music," "harmony," and the concept of an "inner voice" were linked by
Mohandas Gandhi in a series of writings from the mid-1940s. For Gandhi (who was a
great admirer of M. S.), singing classical music was a metaphor for a moral life. "As I am
nearing the end of my earthly life," he wrote, "I can say that producing good music from
a cultivated voice can be achieved by many, but the art of producing that music from the
harmony of a pure life is achieved only rarely" (Gandhi 1958:327).
36. This distinction between extramusical elements and the "music itself' is crucial to the idea of secular art music, in which raga (melodic scale or mode) and tala are
the major "musical" elements and lyrics are to be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities
and "meaning" in an abstract sense but devalued if they convey sentiment or sensuality.
37. "I haven't gotten what I expected from my children. Now that they are grown,
I would just like to have my own flat. Preferably I would like to die while teaching a music lesson," says one (Lakshmi 2000:208).
38. Allen 1997, Meduri 1996, Srinivasan 1985, and O'Shea 1998 provide more detailed descriptions of the ways dance performance became "nationalized" and "sanitized." The conflict between earlier dance styles practiced by those from the devadasi
community and the reinvented Bharata Natyam popularized by Rukmini Devi was
framed by Devi as a conflict between expressing sringara (erotic sentiment) and expressing bhakti (devotion), two modes that she considered irreconcilable. Tanjore
Balasaraswati, who came from a family of devadasis and was a contemporary of Devi,
would insist that sringara and bhakti were one and the same (O'Shea 1998:46-49).
39. Robert Ollikkala (1999) provides a critique of the gendered distinction between "classical" and "light classical" music in the North Indian concert. " 'Light,' " he
writes, "consistently seems to imply 'lesser,' 'derivative,' 'secondary,' and 'feminine.'
It is no coincidence that 'light-classical' music, sung by women of assumed dubious virtue (within a role they have inherited in a male-dominated social structure) is considered
to be more emotional,. . . less technically demanding, less pure in terms of tala and raga"
(Ollikkala 1999:35). Ollikkala suggests that there are "universal implications to the term

'classical,' implications that include, but reach far beyond, the musical" (1999:36).
Vidya Rao (1999), herself a singer of thumri, one of the North Indian genres now labeled
"light classical," critiques this distinction in a somewhat different way, by embracing
thumri as what she calls the "feminine voice," a genre capable of subverting the conventions of Hindustani classical music, providing an alternative to the virtuosic display that
is part of "classical" genres like khayal.
40. Jennifer Post has written of the separation of dance from music in the Marathi
and Konkani region of Western India in the context of the late- 19th-century decline of
courtesan traditions there. Many women, she states, began to restrict their performances
to singing and avoided dance gestures, presumably in an effort to lend respectability to
their performances (Post 1987:104-105).
41. Ragam-tanam-pallavi is a highly intellectual type of improvisation, considered
for a long time to be suitable only for men. Raga alapanais an elaboration of a raga without the constraints of tala, or time cycles.
42. The slippage between music and clothing as symbols of tradition is apparent,
however, in an advertisement for Binny Silks on a billboard in Madras: a woman dressed
in a lavish, decorously draped silk sari sits with a veena, and the caption is "Traditional
beauty made to grace any occasion."
43. See Anandi 1997 and Lakshmi 1990 for discussions of the way this metaphoric
opposition has operated in Dravidian movement politics in Tamil Nadu. In discussing
the figure of Tamilttay, or Mother Tamil, Lakshmi states that the "yardstick [mother versus whore], deliberately nurtured and cultivated for the political advancement of a particular group of politicians . . . has now been turned into a 'truth' of culture, something
inherent, natural, and unalterable" (Lakshmi 1990:82).
44. The word kanakku also has caste associations in the music world. It is generally
thought that the mathematically-based, rhythmic aspects of Karnatic music, like swara
kalpana and pallavi, come from the non-Brahmin, Icai Vellalar (nadaswaram-playing)
tradition. Icai Vellalar (lit., "cultivator of music") is the name of the caste to which many
devadasis belonged. Tala itself was considered a kind of excess; a female musician in her
eighties told me that in her day, ladies were not only not supposed to do swara kalpana.
but even keeping the tala with one's hand was also considered improper.
45. Compare the interiorized conception of alapana, as elaborated above, with a
much more externalizing discourse about tala. When I learned rhythmic aspects and special tala exercises from C. S. Palaninathan, a mridangist in Madurai, he constantly told
me that in order to really get the rhythms right, I had to "make a sound"-in other words,
clap louder or slap my leg more vigorously. "Talam nalla potunke!" [Put the talam well!]
He might sit in a relaxed posture and teach me rhythmic sequences that he had internalized, but if in his recitation something went wrong, he would move from chair to floor,
straighten up, and slap his leg resoundingly, as if the correct version could be arrived at
from the outside in.
46. This is known as mangala icai (auspicious music). The category of auspiciousness applies also to women; devadasis were known as nitvasumangali(ever-auspicious
women) because, being married to god, they could never become widows. For an explanation of this, see Kersenboom-Story 1987.
47. The Tamil nationalist poet and essayist whose ideas on women and music are
cited above.
48. Her name has been changed to respect confidentiality.
49. See the dissertation by Beth Bullard (1998) on the South Indian flute and
women artists.

50. "Quite natural" was one of her stock English phrases.
51. Indeed, many successful classical musicians, including M. S. Subbulakshmi
and D. K. Pattammal, gained considerable fame through their acting or singing for films,
but for female musicians, the limits of their participation in the cinema world had to be
carefully defined. M. S. stopped acting in films after 1945 in order to devote herself to
classical performances. D. K. P. sang for, but did not act in, films, and only on the condition
that the songs were patriotic, not love songs (personal communication, June 2002).
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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
TITLE: Gender and the Politics of Voice: Colonial Modernity

and Classical Music in South India
SOURCE: Cult Anthropol 18 no2 My 2003
WN: 0312103648003
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Gender and the Politics of Voice:

Colonial Modernity and Classical

This article is concerned with a particular historical moment-the emergence

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

kinds of performance practice, discourse about music, and notions of ideal

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

1997:5). The talented child of a devadasi mother from Madurai, M. S. married

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

Hindu community organized around marriage, and the sanitization of Hindu

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA 203

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA 207

their faces and make ridiculous caricatures of themselves in such attempts, it is

Such naturalness, Venkatachalam suggested, made women's music closer to

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

Through its literal domestication, then, music would produce domesticity;

210 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Essential to this domestication of private space was the domestication of

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

A modern wife has tons of unemployed

What better and more Sole-satisfying

Genuine German & French Violins.

Violin Strings, Spool Wires (Silver-plated) for Veenas

THE SOUTH INDIA MUSIC EMPORIUM,

212 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

in 1933, wrote that the art of Bharata Natyam needed to be "overhauled if it

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA 215

singing ragam-tanam-pallavi on stage in the 1940s, and even after that,

216 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

218 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA

In concluding, I would like to return to the two questions that motivate

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA 223

224 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA 225

226 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA 227

228 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA 229

230 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF VOICE IN SOUTH INDIA 231

Mattick, Paul, Jr.

232 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

TITLE: Gender and the Politics of Voice: Colonial Modernity

Copyright 1982-2003 The H.W. Wilson Company.

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