Writing Cultural History Through The Novel: Kalaimani's Tillana Mohanambal And The Traditions of South Indian Music and Dance: Talk by Indira Peterson
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Kalaimani's Thillana Mohanambal (TM) was one of the most popular Tamil novels of the 1950's, and was made into a popular film in 1968. TM's plot charts the course of love and artistic competition between 'Thillana' Mohanambal, a devadasi dancer from Tiruvarur, and nagasvaram player Sikkal Shanmugasundaram. However, Kalaimani's principal aim was to reconstruct for his readers the culture of sadir /china melam dance and the periya melam (nagasvaram) in late 19th- and early 20th-century Tamilnadu, and especially in the Kaveri delta. TM owed its popularity mainly to the author's success in evoking for mid-20th-century Tamil readers a past that epitomized for them the indigenous tradition of the performing arts. This talk shows how Kalaimani presents a historical vision of the South Indian performing arts that places the hereditary performer communities at the center, offers a reconstruction of the repertoire of these communities, and shows how the artists' art was accessible to and appreciated by a much wider public than the one created in the 20th century by the Madras-based, brahmin-dominated, academy-oriented project of the "classical" performing arts. I will also discuss with the help of video clips the differences between Kalaimani's novel and A.P.Nagarajan's film version. Indira Viswanathan Peterson is David B. Truman Professor of Asian Studies Mount Holyoke College, USA.
- What
- Meeting
- When
2006-01-14 from 16:00 to 18:00- Where
- CSCS
Created by ashishr
Last modified 2005-12-19 09:46 PM
Last modified 2005-12-19 09:46 PM