The Dancer's Voice

From Elsewhere

“…Elsewheres are everywhere in scholarship on South Asia today. To be sure, recent histories of migration have offered reorientations, centring South Asia instead of Europe as the centre from which elsewheres are measured (see e.g., Bose, 2021;Ramnath, forthcoming), while scholars of media and technology have listened more closely to how the acoustics of empire simultaneously built and transgressed boundaries between here and there in the regions known today as South Asia (Huacuja Alonso, 2022;Putcha, 2022). In much the same vein, recent scholarship on religion has brought into focus 'the in-between and the with-each-other' of South Asian elsewheres to make a case for affect's 'adeptness at resisting the partitioning of time, space, and bodies, as well as its capacity for suturing worlds' (Kasmani et al, 2020, p. 22; see also Thomas, 2018).…”

The Jaffna Tamil Diaspora: Gendered Identities, Cultural Labour, and Empowerment

“…However, current embodied manifestations of sexual longing in Bharatanatyam are imbued with shame: the dancer's eyes remain to depict sexual desire with eye isolation and an intense gaze towards the audience. Putcha (2022) argues that the embodiment of shame is "how and where Tamil dancers learn to feel as well as enact [limited] desire for pleasure." 203 Hence, the calculation of "shame plus modesty equals feminine desire" gives rise to an "affective triangle" of pleasure, shame and disgust.…”

“…fortifies the dancer's Tamil identity and enhances her beauty. Putcha (2022) argues that in a neoliberal economy, Bharatanatyam lends Tamil women representational power because the dance technique trains their bodies to look and feel Tamil. Thus, achieving the status of a skilled dancer is foundational to achieving marriage, and therefore the "promise of happiness."…”