Profiling or reinterpreting the quintessential devadasi—if there is such a prototype—has been a tragicomic trope of Indian classical dance trying to be modern using the past. The experienced Swapnasunadri has managed to take a few steps forward. In the early 1990s, when she watched Maddula Lakshmi Narayana, a descendant of the devadasi community perform, her impulse was to understand the craft than copy it. When patriarchy as morality used the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act, 1947 to abolish the tradition, many dancers lost livelihoods and the genre nearly vanished. Swapnasundari’s search for this lost dance language was not exacty original: she turned to devadasis’ descendants, documenting their memories and studying ancient manuscripts on temple rituals. But what was original became two new dance forms that she created: Agama Bharatam, a ritualistic temple dance, and Vilasini Natyam, performed for plilgrims’ entertainment. “Mine is a creative interpretation, visualisation, and representation of Telugu temple dance.” she says.
Now, ahead of her performance at the KNMA Dance Festival in Delhi on October 15, she is careful not to call this a revival. “There is no way to confirm if my interpretation is correct.” She has tried to go beyond the sexual exploitation cliche associated with devadasis. “It pains me they are labelled sex workers,” she says. Her work faced resistance from many in the wider dance fraternity. “I called it the dance of the devadasis, and the Kuchipudi fraternity asked why,” Swapnasundari recalls. “Clasical dance sanitised it, but the erotic is inherent in Indian traditions,” she points out. Vilasini Natyam and Agama Bharatam are yet to attract students in meaningful numbers. Yet the curious possibility of a derisively evolved art form surviving even after its practitioners are gone, and its vocabulary forgotten by inheritors unwilling to claim it, points to its endurance. The history of the devadasi tradition has long proved irresistible to dancers, scholars and cultural historians, many of whom have tried to recover, reinterpret or reconstruct an art that was disrupted when the institution itself was abolished. But over the years, while several dancers approached the legacy through an expected path, Swapnasundari took a difficult route of refusing to accept that what is lost cannot be brought back. Her work begins instead with a question: what might this vanished vocabulary have looked like, and how much of it can still be imagined from the fragments that remain? Only her performance can tell us that.
