Ephemera and Embodied Desire: Recovering the Mohamāna Varṇam Dance-Drama of the Tañjāvūr Marāṭhās through Oral Records and Lost Feminine Poetics

Abstract

This paper addresses ephemera (Rickards, 2000) in orally-transmitted Cārṇāṭic dance-dramas of the Tañjāvūr Marāṭhā court (1674–1855), focusing on the dissemination and reconstruction of the Mohamāna Varṇam, a dance-drama once rife with divine and śṛṅgāra (eroritc)conceits. While the text of the dance (padārtha) survives, the performative nuances, gestures, and exploratory elements (sañcāri) have been lost to sociocultural forces, particularly the prohibition of female dancers who embodied these erotic sañcāris.

Building on studies of the Tañjāvūr Marāṭhā court’s literary cultures (Peterson, 2011) and South Asian aesthetics (ECSAS, 2023; Hanes, 2020) this study counters archival amnesia through first-hand primary records of oral history, textual reconstruction, and literary analysis. The dancer-researcher records primary evidence – acts of deliberate textual omission of female poetics in the Mohamāna Varṇam by a male descendant of the Tañjāvūr Quartet, the varṇam’s first composers. Supported by devadāsīs’ testimonies, the paper retrieves lost elements of the varṇam.

Analysing the dṛśya-kāvya (visual poetry) aesthetic and theatricality of the varṇam, the paper revives it as a more complete literary work compared to its current fragmented, amnesiac status. Positioning contemporary performative amnesia with historical, oral, and archival testimonies, the study reveals how interdisciplinary methods can recover performative and literary completeness of Cārṇāṭic dance-dramas.