There are millenniums of history suspended in the frigid air of a high school auditorium somewhere in the South Bay Area that might as well have been in Chennai, resting on the resounding hum of the mridangam being tuned. The dense velvet curtain is about to pull back to reveal the dimly lit stage adorned with fragrant floral offerings, ornate lamps, and miniature Hindu deities; the buzzing, Kancheevaram silk saree-rustling crowd reduces to an anticipatory silence as the violin pierces the air, the spotlight switches on, and a performance they have seen in some form countless times commences.
Even outside of Indian immigrant communities such as the one flourishing in the South Bay Area, where the Bharatanatyam arangetram and the Carnatic senior concert were a compulsory part of most of my friends’ upbringings, the complex and beautiful tradition of South Indian performing arts is ubiquitous today. They fill seats all over the world and draw global appreciation from critics and rasikas, or connoisseurs, alike. Since I have started to read more about the art forms I grew up with, I started to ask more questions: What does “classical” delineate, and who distinguishes high art from low? Who is allowed to call themselves a rasika? The popular narrative surrounding Carnatic music was constructed from just one perspective, and I argue that this is the narrative that was brought overseas to immigrant communities like the one in the Bay Area.
I grew up learning both Carnatic music and Bharatanatyam. My mother is a Bharatanatyam dancer, my stepmother is a Carnatic violinist, and an aunty I grew up with is a Carnatic musician and my teacher. I attended concerts and performances routinely with my family, and I traveled to India every few years to visit family and attend the Chennai Margazhi music season. For several of us who have grown up with upper-caste privilege, it was never questioned how classical music and dance came to be such an integral part our lives; it simply was. As I grew older, I started to become more familiar with the insidious nature of caste bigotry, and I reflected on where I could have turned a blind eye to casteist practices in my daily life, due to my privilege. I realized that most of the people I knew who received an education in the classical art forms I took for granted were from upper-caste families; in fact, a majority of the Indian families I knew in the Bay Area were from families with caste privilege.
The traditions of both music and dance have roots within non-Brahmin communities in India. The periya melam consisted of vidwans, or masters, of the nagaswaram, a wind instrument with an ebullient, buzzing sound. These musicians provided accompaniment for daily temple rituals, as well as a soundtrack for religious processions and domestic festivals such as marriages and births, and they are masters of the melodic improvisation that has become a defining characteristic of Carnatic music today. The chinna melam refers to the orchestra that accompanied temple dancers in acts of service to gods, and helped establish the complex relationship between music and dance.1 Music was centered around community practice and 1 tradition. Urbanization of the art form began through the trailing end of India’s colonial period, and as people flowed from Tamil Nadu villages into the metropolis of Chennai in the late 19th century, music followed suit from temples and courts into concert halls, effectively establishing Chennai as the epicenter of Carnatic music. The audience for classical music grew with the size of the middle class, and a discerning taste for Carnatic music became a symbol of status. It is within this period of reconstruction that the South Indian arts were systematized and aesthetic pursuits were re-situated in an intellectual context in a Brahmin-sponsored drive to tie arts to the Tamil identity. Known as the Tamil Isai Iyakkam, or Tamil Music Movement, the arts were presented as the “crystallization of passion and practice centered around language”2. The dissemination of music in cities made high caste wealthy patrons the primary consumers of music, which “not only created a genuine passion for the tradition but also fostered a sense of responsibility for it”3. With the guidance of its gatekeepers, the art form was deemed worthy of scholarly pursuit, and music education pervaded middle class, upper-caste households. Brahmins established themselves as the “preservers of tradition”, with the goal of sanctifying the past in a larger move to secure an Indian cultural identity, and thus the Brahmin-built construct of authenticity within Indian art was born. This new identity began to form from the subjective perspective of only one group of Indian citizens, excluding the other communities that have practiced and innovated South Indian art forms from accessing its further evolution.
In the eighties and nineties, there was a large rush of immigration from India to America, with highly educated students seeking higher pay and a chance at the “American Dream.” Many of them succeeded. A large percentage of these immigrants were upper-caste, like my own parents, as they were the ones who had access to the resources and education that would qualify them for H1-B visas. Insular communities began to form in places like the Bay Area, as immigrants gravitated towards people like themselves to seek comfort in unfamiliar territory. According to a September 2020 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “first-generation immigrants in particular tended to self-segregate, making their communities more and more homogenous in terms of religion and caste.” This homogenization of immigrant 4 communities provides the perfect breeding ground for the continuation of cultural ownership over the classical art forms of South India. The language around the “preservation of tradition” took on a new dimension in these immigrant communities, when their children’s cultural identities were at stake. But our education in the arts has continued to leave out the history of social erasure and cultural exclusion of non-Brahmin communities from the very art forms that they inherited. What began as an attempt to preserve tradition has created a divide in the Indian diaspora, where caste identity is still made salient by those it benefits.
The history and cultural division of the South Indian art forms inform and educate one another, and the term “classical” does not create an aesthetic demarcation, but rather a social one. The musical lineage is an amalgamation, but the caste system remains a stratification. As each generation becomes increasingly versed in the language of equality, it is important to reframe the ancient art form through a contemporary lens. In order to truly understand and appreciate the South Indian performing arts as they exist today, I endeavor to understand its complex relationship with religion and caste, and the implications of that relationship on how the arts are rendered and who is and isn’t allowed to practice them.
L’Armand, One Hundred Years of Music in Madras: A Case Study in Secondary Urbanization, p. 411 ↩︎
Subramanian, Contesting the Classical: The Tamil Isai Iyakkam and the Politics of Custodianship, p. 67 ↩︎
Subramanian, Contesting the Classical: The Tamil Isai Iyakkam and the Politics of Custodianship, p. 71 ↩︎
Samyuktha Sridhar 