Staged revisions of gendered labor:Voices from Early Maratha Thanjavur

Abstract

Classical stage plays from South Asia prominently feature a linguistic division of labor, organized around class and gender. According to this division, most male characters ‘speak’ Sanskrit, and most female characters, as well as male characters from lower backgrounds, ‘speak’ Prakrit. As ‘classical’ stage plays, from Kalidāsa onwards, remained a stable point of reference in various contexts and languages for over a millennium, this meta-grammar of class and gender likely informed performative traditions across the subcontinent. This was certainly the case in early Maratha Thanjavur, where various performative genres were commissioned, authored, and performed. My paper considers the revision of divisions of linguistic labor in staged productions of markedly local genres at the court of Thanjavur, at the turn of the eighteenth century. I argue that the multilingual ethos most identified with King Śāhaji II (1684—1712) consciously revised the classical division of labor, forming alternative and subversive aesthetic realms. The artists who staged these realms had women, from courtesans to tribal fortunetellers, ‘speak’ in several languages, including Sanskrit. These compositions often display a crafted ‘randomness’ of language choice, fashioned as a novel and cosmopolitan world order. But are these alternative universes designed to exit the stage? I suggest that this crafted and subversive aesthetic ironically contrasts with social, gendered, and linguistic realities off-stage.