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Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (South Asia Across the Disciplines) by Davesh Soneji is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (South Asia Across the Disciplines) about?

__Unfinished Gestures__ presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India who are generally called__devadasis__, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in__devadasis__communities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Adroitly combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, Davesh Soneji provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and the political efficacy of social reform in their communities.Poignantly narrating the history of these women, Soneji argues for the recognition of aesthetics and performance as a key form of subaltern self-presentation and self-consciousness. Ranging over courtly and private salon performances of music and dance by __devadasi__s in the nineteenth century, the political mobilization of__devadasis__identity in the twentieth century, and the post-reform lives of women in these communiti

Who reads Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (South Asia Across the Disciplines)?

Author

Davesh Soneji

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published

2011

Language

EN

ISBN

9780226768090

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Anthropology, Science, Sociology