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  • Between History and Historiography:The Origins of Classical Kuchipudi Dance
  • Rumya S. Putcha (bio)

Names set up a field of power.

—Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Trouillot 1995, 115)

On March 31, 1958, a young woman from the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh1 named Maranganti Kanchanamala was scheduled to perform a dance recital at the first All-India Dance Seminar, held in India’s new capital, New Delhi. Upon arriving at the Seminar, however, she was informed by the organizers that her evening slot had been cancelled. Instead, she and her co-delegate from Andhra Pradesh, scholar and political figure, Vissa Appa Rao (1884–1966), were requested to present a lecture-demonstration as part of the daytime program.

This seemingly minor adjustment in scheduling initiated a series of events whose effects are still being felt today. According to contemporary sources such as newspaper articles and radio broadcasts, Kanchanamala and Appa Rao felt insulted and condescended to by the organizers at the 1958 Seminar, in particular, by chairpersons and important nationalist figures Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–1986) and V. Raghavan (1908–1979), first by being demoted to the daytime program and then by being treated with disrespect during their presentation.2 Over the years, the experiences of this delegation representing the state of Andhra Pradesh, also identified by their mother tongue, Telugu,3 have been paraphrased, glossed, and thus memorialized: The Telugu dance style, Kuchipudi, was (mis)categorized as unclassical or folk at the Seminar. By extension, Telugus were relegated to the margins of an incipient Indian modernity, in which classicism was increasingly defined as historicism, if not history itself. Put another way, if Kuchipudi was not considered classical, then the Telugu-speaking people were not considered representative citizens of the emerging Indian nation-state.

Kuchipudi as Dance | Kuchipudi as Place

In the twenty-first century, the term Kuchipudi refers to a style of dance: an aesthetic and a movement vocabulary that shares basic fundamentals with other South Indian genres such as [End Page 91] Bharatanatyam. As late as the 1960s, the Kuchipudi style was called “Kuchipudi Bharatanatyam,” as in, the Bharatanatyam from Kuchipudi. This is because, strictly speaking, Kuchipudi is a physical place: a village located along the Krishna River in South India, about 300 kilometers southeast of Hyderabad in central Andhra Pradesh. See Photo 1.


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Photo 1.

In the twentieth century, when regional and linguistically defined dance traditions4 began to circulate across India, Kuchipudi became widely visible as a Telugu dance style synonymous with the state of Andhra Pradesh. Since the time of the National Akademi Seminars in the late 1950s, the standard historical narrative about Kuchipudi circulated in Indian publications on dance and more recently, in Incredible !ndia5 tourism booklets, has been as follows:

A great devotee of [the Hindu deity] Vishnu, [an ascetic named] Siddendhra yogi had a dream in which he witnessed the enchanting vision of Lord Krishna with his two favourite consorts, Rukmini and Satyabhama. Overcome with joy and devotion, Siddendra yogi began a search for dancers and actors who would enact this play of his dream. He found suitable young men among the Brahmin families of Kuchelapuram. Since then, every Brahmin family of the village ritually offers at [End Page 92] least one male member to be trained as an actor-dancer. The name of the village changed to Kuchipudi as time passed and its dance-drama also acquired this name. Today it has retained the name and form with its earthy flavor and seductive body language.

(Mansingh 2007, 82)

I first embarked on my study of Kuchipudi dance with questions about the connections between Kuchipudi’s past and present, specifically, how women, such as Kanchanamala, came to perform a dance tradition mythically, if not historically practiced by men. In doing so, I joined a growing community of scholars who have asked similar questions about the reinvention of performing art forms in modern South Asia. In the wake of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s “invented traditions” (1992), the majority of these studies have borne the mark of influential postcolonial scholarship that views the processes of modernity through...

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